Left and right

In English-speaking countries, and throughout many parts of Europe, there is a simple way to distinguish left from right on products that require it— L means left, R means right. Simple.

But in Turkey, the word for left is sol and the word for right is sağ. S and S. So I always wondered how they marked it when necessary.

Well, today I learned one way they do it (though perhaps not the only way). I purchased a new bottle of contact lens cleaning solution, and it was one of those that has the free lens case inside. My old lens case says L and R on the caps. The new one, however, just has different coloured caps and has nothing printed on either one. Ah.

Although it seems like it would be a great idea to erase the international problem altogether and use colour-coding instead, I’m not sure how well it works in practice. For one thing, you have to remember which colour you decided was left and which one right. That might be easy enough if you use the case everyday, but if you sometimes wear your glasses several days in a row, it would be pretty easy to forget which lens cap was which. I’d probably resort to a sharpie marker and mark one of the caps with an L. I guess Turks would have to write the entire word sol, unless they have some other clever way of indicating it.

The other issue is, whatever system you choose for remembering only works if you’re the only one who needs to understand it. What if you’re a Turkish company shipping out a self-assembly product for a Turkish market, and it’s important that every end user can easily identify the left parts from the right parts? How do you mark those? You can’t just expect everyone to know that the one with the blue sticker on it is the left one. My guess would be you’d just have to mark them with the full words, providing there’s enough room to do that.

Can any of my Turkish readers shed some light on this, or does anyone else come from a place where the words for “left” and “right” share the same initial letter?