Directional Terms in Idu, a Language of Northeast India

<p>The Idu language is spoken in the extreme northeast of Arunachal Pradesh. Its traditional terrain stretched between the Tibetan Plateau and the plains of the Brahmaputra, unusually incorporating a wide variety of ecozones. The Idu traditionally lived in highly dispersed settlements. As a consequence, orientation was determined more by up versus down as well as by the sides of the many rivers which cross their area. The paper describes the lexicon of Idu in describing directions.&nbsp; There is probably no distinct morphosyntactic category of directional. The paper illustrates each term with example sentence contexts and represents visually directional oppositions as they appear to speakers.</p>