In other news, I am somewhat baffled by this story, which says that future = forward and past = back has been claimed to be a cognitive universal, but that one (and only one) language, Aymara has been found to show that this is not the case:
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.Well, perhaps Nunez and Sweetser have been misrepresented in the story (which is not at all unlikely). Or maybe the cognitive science people haven’t been looking very hard (I confess I am not up to speed on the cog sci literature, because I am not only a Bad Linguist, but also an Awful Person). But I have to point out that Makassarese and the other South Sulawesi languages also refer to the past as in front of ego and so forth — minggu ri olo <week PREP front> ‘last week’, minggu ri boko <week PREP back> ‘next week’. And while I haven’t really looked into this, I get the impression that this is not that unusual in Austronesian languages. I’ve been told that Sasak does it the same way, for instance, and there are traces of a past = front viewpoint in Malay as well.
1 comment:
You're right! I was surprised to read that article. I'm Makassarese, but never have thought that the concepts 'allo riboko' and 'allo riolo' as something strange, even if my generation of the family has preferred much more using Malay/Indonesian than Makassarese, which uses the time and space concept similar to 'the rest of the world'. Because, as those authors of the article written English should know, BEFORE English adopted the Latin/French 'in front of', it used the word 'before' more commonly as in "Stand before me!" for "Stand in front of me!". If one is standing in line, one could refer to the person who stands behind him as "the person after me", which is also logically correct. So, it's nothing that out of the ordinary, I think. But if the article is saying that Sulawesi is special, then I would agree!=)
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