Observer wrote:How grammar affects association of events and time perception. When shown three images of a man in three stages of kicking a soccer ball (about to, doing so, having done so), Indonesian speakers, whose language doesn't mandatorily mark tense, described all three using the same words. Later on, when asked to recall the content of the photos, they couldn't remember them being any different. English speakers, whose language necessarily tenses verbs, described the three photos as being different, and could readily recall the differences between them later.
So apparently English speakers see "up" as being yesterday. I, being a Swedish speaker, see "up" as tomorrow.
If I stop posting out of the blue it probably is because my computer and the board won't cooperate and let me log in.!
Shrdlu, according to the results of the experiment, English speakers tend to associate the leftward direction with the past and rightward with the future. Chinese tend to associate upward with the past and downward with the future.
From the link:
"English speakers tend to see time on a horizontal plane: The best years are ahead; he puts his past behind him. Speakers of Mandarin tend to see new events emerging like a spring of water, with the past above and the future below."
Observer wrote:How grammar affects association of events and time perception. When shown three images of a man in three stages of kicking a soccer ball (about to, doing so, having done so), Indonesian speakers, whose language doesn't mandatorily mark tense, described all three using the same words. Later on, when asked to recall the content of the photos, they couldn't remember them being any different. English speakers, whose language necessarily tenses verbs, described the three photos as being different, and could readily recall the differences between them later.
So apparently English speakers see "up" as being yesterday. I, being a Swedish speaker, see "up" as tomorrow.
Yeah, this is just a tagline. We don't see "up" as either really.
Observer wrote:Shrdlu, according to the results of the experiment, English speakers tend to associate the leftward direction with the past and rightward with the future. Chinese tend to associate upward with the past and downward with the future.
From the link:
"English speakers tend to see time on a horizontal plane: The best years are ahead; he puts his past behind him. Speakers of Mandarin tend to see new events emerging like a spring of water, with the past above and the future below."
I think the left-to-right thing may come from writing (I remembering hearing from somebody that in the Arab world, "before-after" commercials generally have the "before" part to the right, but I got it from an unreliable source), but the link talks about some horizontal understanding of time (ahead is not necessarily to the right, but perhaps is more towards the front?).
I'm not sure if the comparison totally holds though. In English you often use "before/last" and "next", while the idea of things going downwards in order is a lot more pervasive in Chinese.
In Chinese you do say "the month below" (下月 xià yuè) for "the next month", for example, I don't think "the month ahead", "the month to the right" are things people normally say in English. Or "the client ahead"/"the client to the right" for "the next client", while in Chinese you can perfectly say "the client below" (下一位顧客 xià yī wèi gùkè).
"The month ahead" has a different connotation, possibly one of apprehension. Like you might hear about people being worried about the month ahead, with all its trials and tribulations. It emphasises the length and importance of the period of time in question.
"the month to the right" is plain ungrammatical.
As for "next client", I'm going to go off on a tangent a bit here but I hear a lot of shop assistants in Scotland, when calling someone to the till to be served, asking "who's first, please?" rather than the more 'standard' "who's next, please?" You get both, really... I didn't notice that some people ask "who's first?" until I was about 15, anyway.
She is purdy, but also has some awfully gaudy rings.
So apparently English speakers see "up" as being yesterday. I, being a Swedish speaker, see "up" as tomorrow.
No, read that part again.
I remember there was a thread here once about the phrase "the days before" and/or "the days in front of". Here we see the conflict of interpretations between the temporal and the spatial.
I'm not sure if the comparison totally holds though. In English you often use "before/last" and "next", while the idea of things going downwards in order is a lot more pervasive in Chinese.
Couldn't this be influenced by writing also? Chinese was historically written from top to bottom. I'm not sure how popular/used it is nowadays though.
while in Chinese you can perfectly say "the client below" (下一位顧客 xià yī wèi gùkè).
That makes me think of stacking people. I don't think people like being stacked; they'd rather be queued.
* * *
Thank you for the links. I will try to find time to read them all, but honestly, that may not happen until Christmas break comes around.
Shrdlu wrote:So apparently English speakers see "up" as being yesterday. I, being a Swedish speaker, see "up" as tomorrow.
"Up" in a temporal sense seems to be very ambiguous in English. My semantics professor surveyed our class about the meaning of "The exam is scheduled for October 27, but I now have a conflict that day and so the exam will move up a week". We were split almost exactly 50-50 as to whether the exam would be on October 20th or November 3rd.
Kuku-kuku kaki kakak kakekku kaku kaku.
'the toenails of my grandfather's elder brother are stiff'
Matt wrote:"Up" in a temporal sense seems to be very ambiguous in English. My semantics professor surveyed our class about the meaning of "The exam is scheduled for October 27, but I now have a conflict that day and so the exam will move up a week". We were split almost exactly 50-50 as to whether the exam would be on October 20th or November 3rd.
Yeah, I think it means "closer" but it's weird. That context suggests the opposite.
Matt wrote:"Up" in a temporal sense seems to be very ambiguous in English. My semantics professor surveyed our class about the meaning of "The exam is scheduled for October 27, but I now have a conflict that day and so the exam will move up a week". We were split almost exactly 50-50 as to whether the exam would be on October 20th or November 3rd.
Yeah, I think it means "closer" but it's weird. That context suggests the opposite.
To me, "the exam will move up a week" says that it will be closer (October 20th). Otherwise, it would "move out a week" (November 3rd).
[quote="Xephyr"]Kitties: little happy factories.[/quote]
I used to find the walking-forwards-through-time metaphor, due no doubt to a plethora of phrases like putting the past behind us and looking forward to a better day. Then I read somewhere that speakers of some language—I'm pretty sure it was Japanese—considered themselves to be moving backwards through time, and now it seems a much better analogy, and I think about especially when I ride the train to and from school whenever I'm facing the opposite direction the train is travelling. I don't know what the future will be like, and can only predict it, just as I can't see what's coming up behind me as the train moves on it's way, but can take a guess based on what I do see. I remember what I did yesterday in the same way that I can look out the window and see the houses, stores, cars, whatnot that I passed a second, ten seconds, a minute ago. But just like memory fades, and we remember only the more impressing events from our youth, it's harder and harder to see things as they fade into the distance, until you can only see vague outlines of smaller objects and the towering images of large buildings or high landscapes. The past in our line of sight, but fading away; the future behind us, unknown, only imagined, and each of us carried back, with or against our will, by the constant flow of time.
Now, I don't know if it's really the Japanese who think like that, or, even if they do, if idioms in the language are encoded accordingly, but whatever the case may be it's a damn good analogy.
Sevly wrote:Then I read somewhere that speakers of some language—I'm pretty sure it was Japanese—considered themselves to be moving backwards through time
That would be a very exotic language named English: the thing before me, the year before last, the after (rear) section of the boat, the day after tomorrow.
Eddy wrote:Sounds like an oddly specific word for a reindeer.
There's that language (whose name escapes me right now) which has a specific term for a sexually mature cow who hasn't had a calf yet.
I raise you !Xóõ ǂúũ sàʻã 'The place on the surface of an ostrich egg where a hole has been drilled through'
I see your !Xóõ, ignore the fact that using two words is cheating, and raise you a word which means "to mispronounce words by substituting dental or alveolar sibilants for interdentals".
That's right, it's English "lisp".
Example inspired by Central Alaskan Yup'ik pikagte-, "to mispronounce words by substituting the front velars for the back velars".
[i]Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.[/i]
—Stephen R. Anderson
[i]Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjóðanna.[/i]
—Séra Tómas Sæmundsson
Sevly wrote:Then I read somewhere that speakers of some language—I'm pretty sure it was Japanese—considered themselves to be moving backwards through time
Echobeats wrote:I see your !Xóõ, ignore the fact that using two words is cheating, and raise you a word which means "to mispronounce words by substituting dental or alveolar sibilants for interdentals".
That's right, it's English "lisp".
Example inspired by Central Alaskan Yup'ik pikagte-, "to mispronounce words by substituting the front velars for the back velars".
Heh, Spanish sesear "to pronounce (historically "mispronounce", heh) the voiceless dental fricative phoneme and the voiceless dental/alveolar fricative one the same, as a voiceless alveolar fricative" (variation: cecear, as a dental one). Or 16th/17th century Spanish çeçear "to pronounce the voiceless lamino-alveolar fricative phoneme and the voiceless apico-alveolar fricative phoneme the same, as a voiceless lamino-alveolar one".
Sevly wrote:Then I read somewhere that speakers of some language—I'm pretty sure it was Japanese—considered themselves to be moving backwards through time
That would be a very exotic language named English: the thing before me, the year before last, the after (rear) section of the boat, the day after tomorrow.
Japanese does it too, of course.
I think that shows the reserve of what you're trying to: in English, the past is treated as behind you, not in front of you which is what was asked for.
Sevly wrote:Then I read somewhere that speakers of some language—I'm pretty sure it was Japanese—considered themselves to be moving backwards through time
That would be a very exotic language named English: the thing before me, the year before last, the after (rear) section of the boat, the day after tomorrow.
Japanese does it too, of course.
I think that shows the reserve of what you're trying to: in English, the past is treated as behind you, not in front of you which is what was asked for.
Who taught you that before means behind? You might want to correct their misapprehension.
Article on Aymara from Wikipedia wrote:...Aymara is, with Quechua, one of very few languages where speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Their argument is situated mainly within the framework of conceptual metaphor, which recognizes in general two subtypes of the metaphor "the passage of time is motion": one is "time passing is motion over a landscape" (or "moving-ego"), and the other is "time passing is a moving object" ("moving-events"). The latter metaphor does not explicitly involve the individual/speaker; events are in a queue, with prior events towards the front of the line. The individual may be facing the queue, or it may be moving from left to right in front of him/her... Parallel Aymara examples describe future days as qhipa uru, literally 'back days', and these are sometimes accompanied by gestures to behind the speaker. The same applies to Quechua speakers, whose expression qhipa p'unchaw corresponds directly to Aymara qhipa uru. Possibly, the metaphor is that the past is visible to us (in front of our eyes), while the future is not.
"Very few" isn't quite accurate, because the Chinese and their cultural sphere have that "past is in front, future behind" metaphor too. (They also use it in conjunction with a "falling through time" metaphor.)
(And no, you're right: it is cool, no matter how common.)
