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When I was a kid in Minnesota we needed to learn port/starboard and the colors red/green. A trick that helped me remember is that "LEFT", "PORT", and "RED" are all the shorter words and "RIGHT", "STARBOARD", and "GREEN" are the longer words in the respective pairs. FWIW.
There's kind of a fun brain teaser related to this. Imagine you're speaking to an entirely alien species in another dimension. And you're trying to describe "left" to them. It's impossible. I say it's a brain teaser only because this sounds highly improbable at first. Forwards and backwards can be described, and even up/down if we assume basic fundamental rules remain the same. Yet left and right? It seems impossible…
BTW, If you really must explain it without just saying it is arbitrary, you can talk about clockwise vs. counterclockwise... which came from sundials, which came from the direction our shadows move as the sun moves. In a similar vein, Left goes against the shadows, Right follows the shadows.
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If you're inside a ship, it's often hard to say what way around you are: "left" and "right" have utility for the perspective of a person onboard. Port and starboard are the onboard equivalent of North/South/East/West when walking on land, especially if you're inside a building with no windows for external reference. This is unlike for a doctor, where it's obvious which side is which: you can see the patient.
It just seems like an old convention that has stuck, seem'm much simpler to anyone not familiar with ships to say 'ships left' or 'ships right' than to have new words. We don't do this with cars. You have a left rear door, not a port rear door.
Related: Why is it called a "poop deck"? https://emmacruises.com/poop-decks-what-are-they-and-why-are...
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One interesting thing about middle ages technologies, like boats, is that the words in the different romance languages for things invented in this era are very different from each other. For example, in Spanish boat words like port and starboard are totally different[1]. Other examples of middle ages words that are very different: windmill = molino, wheelbarrow = carretilla. Words that refer to older things have more…
In Spain a computer is an ordenador. Spaniards hate anglicisms. Car is coche, not carro, email is correo electronico, zipper is cremallera. Lots of others.
you mean unlike French?
When I was a kid in Minnesota we needed to learn port/starboard and the colors red/green. A trick that helped me remember is that "LEFT", "PORT", and "RED" are all the shorter words and "RIGHT", "STARBOARD", and "GREEN" are the longer words in the respective pairs. FWIW.
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And it was put at the front of the boat because that was downwind of everything else on a wind powered boat.
I'm not sure that is true, sure the tacking angle of old boat was nowhere close to modern boats, but I would be surprised if they couldnt sail up wind.
[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/56264/when-did-h...
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And it was put at the front of the boat because that was downwind of everything else on a wind powered boat.
I'm not sure that is true, sure the tacking angle of old boat was nowhere close to modern boats, but I would be surprised if they couldnt sail up wind.
30 degrees should be enough to prevent toxic hazards. Sitting on the head on a tilting ship, during upwind sailing, is prone to other hazards though.
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There are surely more than one, but this happens only close to the sea and the general flow of the river is still into the sea.
The Hudson River is tidal up past Poughkeepsie.
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Molino is mulino in Italian. Ancient Greek and Latin had similar words starting with mol-. Given the importance of that technology I'm not surprised that the word didn't change much. English' mill is also close to the romance languages. [1] Port and starboard used to be "babordo" and "tribordo" in Italian but they were replaced by "sinistra" (the very word used to say "left") and "dritta". [1] https://en.wiktionary.o…
Babord is port in Norwegian. But starboard is styrbord which makes a lot of sense because the steering board, or oar, is on the steersman's right side.