| Past Forward
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| Date and Time |
- | Jun. 14th, 2006, 08:40 am | |
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| New analysis of the language and gesture 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.
full article | |
Time is subjective. |
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| Comments: |
For some reason that link doesn't work for me from Livejournal. Instead of the article, I get a help page. I just did a "keyword" search for "Amayra" and got the article. What's weird was that the article was, in fact, on that same web address that you linked.
Anyway, great article! Thanks for sharing it.
Apparently, I added an extraneous "s" to the end of the URL. Thanks for pointing out the error, it is corrected now. | |
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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