Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time which are open to interpretation. But getting scientific results isn’t easy….
Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.
This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left.
Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia (“down”) when talking about future events, so that “next week” literally becomes “down week”. As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom….
Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. “With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind,” explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. “This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes.”….
In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means “front time”. But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina, the word for future means “behind time”. They reason that, because we can’t see the future, it must be to our rear.
In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures. Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday “front day” and the day after tomorrow “back day”.
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