which seems to start with different characters anyway

Remember that Arabic is right-to-left—both words start with ي (yeh).

which seems to start with different characters anyway

It doesn’t - Arabic is written right-to-left, both words start with ⟨ي⟩ (it looks like ⟨ﻳ⟩ there).

It’s yasar and yamin and yes, they both start with the same letter but alternatively you can use chamal ( north) for left. It’s archaic and rarely if ever used in modern days but it fix this problem that isn’t one in the first place because you can print the whole word since their shape alone allow for an easy and fast identification, use the left right symbols with a tilted tail or just use L&R for arabic nations with English as the main foreign language and G&D for the ones where it’s french.

Levantine Arabic says shamal شمال but that’s might be too slangy for labelling.

Ah the dangers of Google translate and synonyms. You got the wrong definition for right when translating to Irish, the one you have means correct, deis is the word for right (direction). Clé is left, the h appears in certain contexts for grammatical reasons.

There’s also Filipino:

• left - kaliwa
• right - kanan

also we use L and R for things because we speak English too.

Chinese is also not right - 正确的 (zhèngquè de) means “proper”

Left and Right as the sides are 左 (zuǒ) and 右 (yòu) - you can also add 邊 (biān) to each which means “side” to be more explicit, but they are also used separately in many contexts where the left/right meaning is needed.

The Chinese characters for 左 and 右 actually originated as pictograms of the left and right hand in the early forms of Chinese writing, but later forms both contain general “hand” component (𠂇) with components 工 and 口 added for differentiation

Last time I checked V and H were different letters.

Though Malaysian headphones are usually labelled L and R too