The Language(s) of Time

Time flies; it passes; it marches on. Time can be hard, ripe, rough or sharp. It can be saved, spent, managed.I make dinner reservations ahead of time, and push back deadlines. I look forward to Christmas in New York. My teenaged years are over (woohoo!).‘Time’ is the most common noun in English, and all of the various ways I talk about time feel…right. But other languages have different (and to me, peculiar) ways of describing the concept. In Indonesian, for example, verbs don’t have tenses: ‘I sit’ equals ‘I sat’ equals ‘I am going to sit’. In Aymara, a language spoken in the Andean highlands in South America, the past is said to be in front of you, and the future behind you. Mandarin speakers use vertical metaphors: earlier events are ‘up’ (shàng) whereas later events are ‘down’ (xià).Do these sorts of linguistic variations reflect differences in the way we think?Read more at...The Last Word on Nothing, November 2010.