[lojban] Historian: what's up with directional words?

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

The direction words (pritu, zunle, trixe, etc) are phrased very
strangely:

zunle = x1 is to the left/left-hand side of x2 which faces/in-frame-of-reference x3.

What does "which faces" mean?  It seems to imply that x2 must have a
natural facing/front, which is bad.  Why do we even care about
facing in this contexnt?

{mlana} additionally bothers me because you can't say *which* side
something is on with {mlana}, and additionally discussing facing
seems even more bizarre, but at least it gets its own place:

x1 is to the side of/lateral to x2 and facing x3 from point of view/in-frame-of-reference x4

which is an improvement.

Just wondering what the plan was here.

-Robin

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