Backs To The Future: Aymara Language And Gesture Point To Mirror-Image View Of Time

New analysis of the language and gesture Rosetta stone
of South America's indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.Appearing in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, the study is coauthored, with Berkeley linguistics professor Eve Sweetser, by Rafael Nunez, associate professor of cognitive science and director of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model, said Nunez.The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the Rosetta Stone Spanish
19th century it was dubbed the language of Adam. More recently, Umberto Eco has praised its capacity for neologisms, and there have even been contemporary attempts to harness the so-called Andean logic which adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or yes/no to computer applications.Yet, Nunez said, no one had previously detailed the Aymara's radically different metaphoric mapping of time a super-fundamental concept, which, unlike the idea of democracy, say, does not rely on formal schooling and isn't an obvious product of culture.Nunez had his first inkling of differences between thinking in Aymara and Spanish, when he went hitchhiking in the Andes as undergraduate in the early 1980s. More than a decade later, he returned to gather data.For the study, Nunez collected about 20 hours of conversations with 30 ethnic Aymara adults from Northern Chile. The volunteer subjects ranged from a monolingual speaker of Aymara to monolingual speakers of Spanish, with a majority (like the population at large) being bilinguals whose skills covered a range of proficiencies and included the Spanish/Aymara creole called Castellano Andino.The videotaped interviews were designed to include natural discussions of past and future events. These discussions, it was hoped, would elicit both the linguistic expressions for past and future and the subconscious gesturing that accompanies much of human speech and often acts out the metaphors being used.The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits nayra, the Rosetta Stone Spanish (Latin America) Levev 1-5
basic word for eye, front or sight, to mean past and recruits qhipa, the basic word for back or behind, to mean future. So, for example, the expression nayra mara which translates in meaning to last year can be literally glossed as front year.But, according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably tell the whole story.Take an exotic language like English: You can use the word ahead to signify an earlier point in time, saying We are at 20 minutes ahead of 1 p.m. to mean It's now 12:40 p.m. Based on this evidence alone, a Martian linguist could then justifiably decide that English speakers, much like the Aymara, put the past in front.There are also in English ambiguous expressions like Wednesday's meeting was moved forward two days. Does that mean the new meeting time falls on Friday or Monday?