fromWired 11.06:
…Differences in culture and language create their own problems. In English, we find it natural to think of the “front” of a tree as oriented toward the speaker, and so we say “The car is in front of the tree” to mean that the car is between ourselves and the tree. In many African languages, the front, or face, of the tree is oriented in the same direction as the face of the person looking at the tree. So, for exactly the same position of the car they would say “The car is behind the tree.” This makes communicating with humans tricky. …
Are there intercultural differences? Is people perceiving space and geographical information in a different way?