Inaccurate Americanisms perplex me. Middle East is the middle of what? The East? The middle of the Eastern Hemisphere would be in Bangladesh, near the western border of Myanmar, the current name of the nation where I was born.
I discuss this in more detail in my videoed lectures, which were on iTunes U until iTunes U was discontinued a few years back. If you have a copy of my lectures, please let me know.
Another East/West division is the use of -teens. East Asians say nine, ten, oneteen, twoteen, threeteen.
The ancient Sumerians, the "black-headed ones," lived in the southern part of what is now Iraq. The heartland of Sumer lay between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, in what the Greeks later called Mesopotamia.
Sumerian language, language isolate and the oldest written language in existence. First attested about 3100 bce in southern Mesopotamia, it flourished during the 3rd millennium bce.
Sanskrit
arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism.
Language and mathmatics seems to have a true mid-East great divide. The language and maths that went east from the Asian subcontinent did not suffer from the lack of intuition that language and maths did when they went West. For example, Eastern languages call 1/5 'five parts of one', which is more intuitive. Children grasp five parts of one, or oneteen, twoteen, threeteen much more easily.
Another big divider is rice cultivation. Wet and dry rice cultivation historically divided along the same true mid-East divide, the 90 E longitude. East of 90 E, wet rice was widely cultivated. West of 90 E, dry rice flourished. This is significant because wet rice requires considerably more labour. One must tend wet rice fields almost every day, a few days off a year is the best holiday for which a wet rice farmer can hope. Dry rice, as well as all the other dry grains such as wheat, barley, corn, etc., require considerably less labour. Dry grain labourers can easily spend weeks or months away from their labour.
The next time you wonder why those Asian kids setting next to your child at school are doing so much better than your kid, remind yourself, they have had millennia to prepare.
