Look Out, It’s Behind You!

There’s a great piece in today’s Grau­niad, on the rela­tion­ship between lan­guage, metaphor and our con­cep­tion of time.

It turns out that some cul­tures, includ­ing the Aymara, an Amerindian people who live in the Andes of North­ern Chile, use the reverse of our Eng­lish tem­po­ral metaphors.

…the researcher asks a woman to explain the ori­gins of her cul­ture. She starts by describ­ing her parents’ gen­er­a­tion, then her grandparents’, and so on, extend­ing her arm fur­ther and fur­ther in front of her as she does so. Then she switches to talk about how the values of those ear­lier gen­er­a­tions have been handed back to her (her hand grad­u­ally returns to her body from out front), and how she will in turn pass them on to her chil­dren (she thumbs over her shoulder).

This makes sense, per­haps more so than the pre­vail­ing ten­dency to look for­ward to the future. If we are using our­selves as a marker to rep­re­sent the present, then the future is indeed behind us, in the sense that we cannot see it, while the past stretches out in front of us, with recent events right before our eyes, and the dis­tant past, all misty, on the horizon.

Rafael Núñez, the cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist study­ing the Aymara, sus­pects that their ‘reverse’ metaphors are the result of a gram­mat­i­cal peculiarity.

Núñez thinks that the reason the Aymara think they way they do might be con­nected with the impor­tance they accord vision. Every lan­guage has a system of mark­ers which forces the speaker to pay atten­tion to some aspects of the infor­ma­tion being con­veyed and not others. French empha­sises the gender of an object (sa voiture , son livre), Eng­lish the gender of the sub­ject (his car, her book). Aymara marks whether the speaker saw the action happen or not: “Yesterday my mother cooked pota­toes (but I did not see her do it).”

Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. Too fas­ci­nat­ing, in fact - I’ve wasted way too much, erm, time, won­der­ing whether time is an onto­log­i­cal entity or con­cep­tual frame­work, whether it’s an a priori deal, Kant-​style, or part of a weird four dimen­sional block of post-​Einstein space­time, or even a load of bol­locks, as sug­gested by J.M.E. McTag­gart, who came up with a rather lovely lot of non­sense that, roughly, dis­misses time in the same way that Zeno of Elea was uncer­tain of motion. And now this? I’ll be sit­ting here watch­ing my brain ooze out of my ears for the next wee while, then. (Unless the Submit Response philosopher-​in-​chief, Leon, clears it all up in the comments.)

Posted at 4pm on 24/02/05 by Jack Mottram to the language category.
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Tags: language, philosophy