The use of anatomical terms in the codification of the parts of objects and the spatial relations between them is a very recurrent phenomenon in the languages of the world, perhaps universal (think, for example, in Italian, of expressions such as ‘bottleneck’ or ‘behind the mountain’). It is surprisingly pervasive in many non-Indo-European languages, for example in Australian, Austronesian and American-Indian, where anatomical roots are not only used very extensively to deny the partonomic relations of any inanimate object (human artifact or ‘natural’ entity), but are also systematically repeated (grammatized) as functional elements to express spatial relations.