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Artigo publicado em <span style="font-style: italic;">PhysOrg.com</span> (<a href="http://www.physorg.com/news69338070.html"><font size="2">http://www.physorg.com/news69338070.html</font></a>)<br><br>-------------------------------
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<div><h1 class="title"><span name="NoAdsTag"><font face="Arial" size="3">Backs to the
Future</font></span></h1>
<h1 class="title"><span name="NoAdsTag"><font face="Arial" size="1">(June 12,
2006)</font></span></h1></div><font face="Arial" size="2">
</font><div><font face="Arial" size="2"><strong>New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's
indigenous Aymara people indicates they have a concept of time opposite to all
the world's studied cultures -- so that the past is ahead of them and the future
behind. <br></strong><br>Tell an old Aymara speaker to "face the past!" and you
just might get a blank stare in return – because he or she already does.
<br><br>New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous
Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time. <br><br>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. <br><br>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.
<br><br>"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. <br><br>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 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. <br><br>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. <br><br>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. <br><br>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. <br><br>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.
<br><br>The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara
language recruits "nayra," the 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." <br><br>But,
according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably tell the whole
story. <br><br>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. <br><br>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? Roughly half of polled
English speakers will pick the former and the other half the latter. And that
depends, it turns out, on whether they're picturing themselves as being in
motion relative to time or time itself as moving. Both of these ideas are
perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical too, as illustrated by "We're
coming to the end of the year" vs. "The end of the year is approaching."
<br><br>Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the
elderly who didn't command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space
behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their
shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past
– by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now
or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient
times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only
exactly in reverse. <br><br>"These findings suggest that cognition of such
everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon," Nunez
said. "That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as
though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way
we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc.
Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn't have had the
means to create and bring forth these concepts. <br><br>"But the Aymara
counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the
same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a
basic concept that is utterly different," he said. <br><br>Why, however, is not
entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara
place a great deal of significance on whether an event or action has been seen
or not seen by the speaker. <br><br>A "simple" unqualified statement like "In
1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" is not possible in Aymara – the sentence
would necessarily also have to specify whether the speaker had personally
witnessed this or was reporting hearsay. <br><br>In a culture that privileges a
distinction between seen/unseen – and known/unknown – to such an extent as to
weave "evidential" requirements inextricably into its language, it makes sense
to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, in your field of view,
and the unknown and unknowable future behind your back. <br><br>Though that may
be an initial explanation – and in line with the observation, the researchers
write, that "often elderly Aymara speakers simply refused to talk about the
future on the grounds that little or nothing sensible could be said about it" –
it is not sufficient, because other cultures also make use of similar evidential
systems and yet still have a future ahead. <br><br>The consequences, on the
other hand, may have been profound. This cultural, cognitive-linguistic
difference could have contributed, Nunez said, to the conquistadors' disdain of
the Aymara as shiftless – uninterested in progress or going "forward."
<br><br>Now, while the future of the Aymara language itself is not in jeopardy –
it numbers some two to three million contemporary speakers – its particular way
of thinking about time seems, at least in Northern Chile, to be on the way out.
<br><br>The study's younger subjects, Aymara fluent in Spanish, tended to
gesture in the common fashion. It appears they have reoriented their thinking.
Now along with the rest of the globe, their backs are to the past, and they are
facing the future. <br><br>Source: University of California, San Diego<br><br></font></div>
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