Hashimi wrote:Jaleel10 wrote:Anybody know the reason why?
Maybe because more than 90% of these Indo-European peoples were right-handed, so they considered things on the right as the "right" things!
As far as I know, Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish don't subsume lexically the ideas of "right (location/direction)" with "(legal) entitlement" as in the original Indo-European examples. In other words, you don't use the same term to mean the non-left side/direction and the privilege to do something. The common thread here is that the respective terms referring to a legal or more abstract concept are borrowings rather than semantic extensions of the existing lexemes meaning "straight", "right" or "correct".
오른쪽 [oreunjjok] "the right(-side)" (< 오른 "right" + 쪽 "side")
권리 [gwolli] "right, privilege" (borrowed from Sinitic cf. 權利 [quánlì] "power and wealth; entitlement" (Mandarin))
баруун [baruun] "the right" (i.e. opposite of left) (coincidence or not, this recalls Korean 바르다 [bareuda] "to be straight" and 바른 [bareun] "correct" (earlier: "right-hand"))
эрх [erkh] "authority; right; will" (borrowed from Turkic cf. Turkish erk "power"; Uzbek erk "choice; freedom")
sağ "right (side); health" (< Proto-Turkic *sạg "healthy")
hak "right, privilege" (borrowed from Arabic cf. حَقّ [ḥaqq] "truth; reality; (legal) rights")
Furthermore, the Arabic term has cognates in other Semitic languages of similar meaning. That is to say they are distinct from those reflexes of the root meaning "opposite of left". For that we'd see reflexes of Proto Afro-Asiatic *yamin "right hand")