Being multilingual alters your experience of time (2018)
weforum.org
weforum.org
It's the same in Danish, but if you have a meeting at 1pm and you want to change it to 2pm (moving it further in to the future, or further "front time", forward in time) you are moving the meeting back.
Introductions to linguistics are littered with poorly translated examples and misunderstood grammar points from languages that aren't even particularly exotic (like Japanese and Chinese). So maybe Aymara, just like Danish, have some back-looking phrases that refers to the future, but I am not convinced that people who speak Aymara, would put the Delorean in reverse, when aiming for the future.
> But Spanish and Greek speakers see it as quantity, as volume taking up space.
Author doesn't even try to explain which linguistic property causes this.
Could 'back' just mean 'further away'? If you move a box further down a storage room, you also move it 'further back', don't you?
If you bring something back, you move it from where you are to where it belongs. "Back up!" means "move away!".
Your back is not just behind you but further away from your front.
Not sure if it has much to do with time per se.
I.E. the verb "to order", in spanish it is used more frequently to express the action to put things in their intended configuration ("to order the kitchen"). But in our formerly military controlled LATAM societies there's an extra meaning:
"to establish and enforce/assert a NEW set of rules"
So we use "to order" as a non-official synonym of those verbs (enforce/assert) plus the notion of NEW rules:
"Something different that what we were doing till now it is going to be implemented somehow".
This particular phrase is borrowed from military jargon, as a reference to one's back/behind.
For example, in aviation, round clock references are used for shorthand to describe angular directions, with center-you, 9-left,12-ahead,3-right, and 6-behind.
Clarity and brevity make this analogy an excellent communication device.
Military pilots learn to watch their-"six".
At the same time, hearing pilots talk about Romeo Papa makes a side observer wonder how this could be related to Shakespear...if at all.
I'm also a bit skeptical of the conclusions drawn from these turns of phases. It seems a single language can have multiple inconsistent spatial metaphors in play at the same time. So I think it is a bit overblown to say a language "wires the brain" to think of time in a particular way.
From there, not every speaker uses every aspect of any language, people pick and choose the metaphors that makes sense for them, or create and share new ones wholepiece.
It reminds me of how tv broadcast handles late night time, and exposed me as a kid to lenient dates. It actualy had a long lasting impact I think.
In Sweden that is most certainly to move the meeting forward (literally): “flytta fram mötet”.
Moving it ”back” to the future makes no sense...
If time is a horizontal line, and you are at 'now' and the meeting is at '1pm', if you imagine the meeting as something which is facing you, then moving it back would push it further into the future and forward would bring it closer to the present. We also usually change the verb to make the metaphor clearer, the meeting was brought forward or pushed back.
Unrelated to time, another subtle difference which I think depends on how we imagine things spatially in different languages is 'coming' Vs 'going'. In English if you're at the park and I'm leaving my home to meet you the natural phrasing is to say that I'm "coming" (with the point of reference being you/the park), but in Spanish I'm "going", with the point of reference being me/my home.
http://www3.sprakochfolkminnen.se/sprakladan/ShowSearch.aspx...
https://www.facebook.com/Spraketip1/posts/10158189290675512/
The description makes it sound as if 上/下 [shàng/xià] (up/down) were the dominant terms to express time in Mandarin (as exemplified by 上个星期/下个星期 [shàng gè xīng qī/xià gè xīng qī] (previous week/next week)). However, there are at least two other metaphors.
One is 去/来 [qù/lái] (go/come), e.g. in 去年/来年 [qù nián/lái nián] (previous year/next year) or 过去/未来 [guò qù/wèi lái] (past/future).
The other is 前/后 [qián/hòu] (front/back) e.g. in 以前/以后 [yǐ qián/yǐ hòu] (before/after) or 前天/后天 [qián tiān/hòu tiān] (the day before yesterday/the day after tomorrow).
Now if you wanted to use one of those combinations to describe the age of two persons, you'd use 前辈/后辈 [qián bèi/hòu bèi] (elder generation/younger generation). That's not only not vertical, it also orders them by time of birth and not by age.
So I don't think you can use linguistic phenomena to explain why Chinese-English bilinguals would put a young Chinese person above an older Chinese person, if the effect is even real at all. (There were only 32 participants in the experiment.)
Yet an Arabic speaker, when saying 'bukra', in fact may imply some indefinite point in future, quite possible not at all.
Just as being on-time or late may practically mean different allowances in different cultures.
Sure, there're other more precise expressions, perhaps being bilingual would expand one's perception of time-referencing.
In Italian it is almost the same for "domani", with a lot of nuances depending on the context.
Only as an example, in Italian "Domani puoi sempre fare questo" which would translate literally to (and is probably perceived by a foreigner as) "Tomorrow you can always do this" actually means "In the future (indefinite, or "any time") you can still do this" (usually meaning reverting a present decision).
I thought chinese writing was traditionally done from the top downwards ie. vertically. If so, the effect quoted might well be attributable more to that.
In English one spends time, for example, much like one spends money. I love that as a metaphor but in Spanish you don't spend time, you pass time.
Does that reflect some transactional nature of English compared to Spanish, or nothing significant at all? Probably the latter, but I'll admit to enjoying these nuances.
Along the same line, in English one pays attention where in Spanish one lends it. Does the Spanish language bake in that exchanges should be fairly reciprocal? No idea, but fun to think about.
British English uses both 'spend' and 'pass'. In particular hobbies (leisure activities) are known as passtimes.
"How do you pass your time?" is not a common expression though but the concept is available, and used sometimes.
People also say things like "what do you do with your [spare] time?".
Minor nit - it's "pastime" (although it does come from "passe tyme" and "passe-temps")
For a few years I was also a language teacher and this article explains one of the things students have problems understanding.
I think that's what the entire article is about. Like, the whole point of it.
It seems that the effect is heightened when the languages are in different families, or at least have different grammatical structures.
In some other articles on the subject, I've read on effects based on whether a language uses grammatical gender or not. For example children assigning voices to the Sun and Moon in English vs Spanish - in Spanish the voice given would almost always follow the grammatical gender, in English it would be randomly selected.
Not exactly mind blowing, but measurable.
Learning languages with different "grammar" allows one to think about the same problem in different parallel ways. For example by being exposed to a functional language one is able to approach a particular task from a different angle even if doing OOP.
The same way people were able to reason using distance or volume when estimating time in the article.
The difficult part I suppose is figuring out which paradigm is most appropriate for the given situation.
Personally, I think of the past being on the left, and the future being on the right. (Thai is written from left to right, like English.)
I imagine this is a case of reporter not understanding the research. This is clearly about linguistic relativism. There's a clear difference between how languages like Mandarin and English talk about time but the difference within indoeuropean languages is much smaller. I buy into Mandarin vs English shifting how one thinks about time (this isn't a new concept) but any secondary language changing how one views time (in a significant way) I'm skeptical. English and Spanish (which were used as examples) speak about time almost the same way. And if you're going to talk about Mandarin, there are much better examples than that they use a vertical axis instead of a horizonal (which doesn't mean they use both.)
It is actually surprising that researchers asked same group of people both questions. Shouldn't they had randomly separated their subjects into "Jet Li" and "Bradd Pitt" groups and asked each group only one question, so that subjects do not realize what is the purpose of the experiment?