I'd imagine you can potentially get that by connections with strength, weakness, dexterity, etc.

I'm not sure I understand you... But the parent's comment is quite interesting, how could the system end up with a correct left/right understanding or our world, instead of a mirror world? Without experiencing the outside world, it seems impossible!

I guess there might be the occasional reference to the heart being on the left, or to most people being right handed. So among human languages it would eventually learn. But it wouldn't work as Star Trek's "universal translator": aliens wouldn't share these traits with us. I suppose we could get lucky and find an alien textbook describing CP violations.

The remark is that the two words, while apparently interchangeable, in actual use are not. One is often used with positive meaning related to dexterity and so on. Also, they have different political meanings. So they are not at all symmetric in actual use, much like every other word pair

Not all of those differences are cross-cultural.

They definitely work in a lot of languages.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/derecho#Spanish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/direito https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/diritto https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinister#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dexter#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/laevus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BB%CE%B1%CE%B9%CF%8C%CF%8... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/recht#German

and many languages related to these. Some Slavic languages have a close cognate between words meaning 'right (direction)' and words meaning 'right (correct)', although I didn't immediately find examples in current use on Wiktionary where the two forms are identical. A "dated" example is Polish

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prawy#Polish

Edit: a Finnish friend pointed out that this works in Finnish, which is European but not related to any of the other languages above.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oikea#Finnish

I don't know if these linguistic phenomena definitely occur in non-European languages, but I think that many people in the Middle East, many parts of Africa, and South Asia consider the left hand unlucky or impure not only because it's weaker in most people but also because it's conventionally used when going to the toilet. It would be a little surprising to me if that attitude didn't show up in languages from those places too.

Edit: it looks like it works in Arabic too

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B4%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84#Arab... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A3%D9%8A%D8%B3%D8%B1#Arab... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A3%D9%8A%D9%85%D9%86#Arab...

This is a good point. Still, for instance, the binomial left/right to indicate political position is common across many languages

Excellent example!