Aymara's time metaphor reversed?

[jess tauber]

With regard to comments about the etymology of English 'be'- it should be noted that in terms of the sound symbolism of initial obstruents in IE roots there is a distinct preference for labials here to correlate with notions of expansion, growth (literally or abstractly) from overfulness, unfinished potential, extra or easy resources, etc. My cup runneth over. This in opposition to initial velars, which are much more more often about exhaustion or difficult recovery/extraction of same- dryness, hollow lifeless shells, etc.

The overall framework mentioned in previous posts is to a degree applicable here (from a number of angles)- but I wonder now about the religious context- the spiritual versus the material (with spirit filling to a large measure the folk definition of 'energy', power, motive drive, etc.). I already divided the movement realm into horizontal and vertical dimensions- how does one deal with the dead material versus the living spiritual ideal? Are they also orthogonal to each other? As for absolutes- some cultures put heaven up above, others down below. What is the basis? How might it affect language? Creator God versus Transformer Trickster?  Organizer versus Chaos incarnated?

We see in other areas division of labor without absolutes (for instance movement of the head and neck for agreement versus disagreement versus ambigous response). Do such things have a tendency to 'line up' as in morphosyntactic typological facts, or are we dealing merely with a big kluge of arbitrary facts? And when mismatch exists between otherwise expected correlatable dimensions, might it have a historical explanation as we often see in language typology? And just how much of this larger sociocultural frame influences language itself rather than the other way round?

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net