Aymara's time metaphor reversed? Yahgan says....

[D.L.Everett]

Very often when we theorize about the significance of this or that  
aspect of a given language, from time words to color words to  
phonological structure, etc. we ironically fail to address the  
problem linguistically, at least in the traditional sense of this  
term. Linguists look at components of languages and study their  
distribution within a given system, looking for contrast,  
complementation, and structure. They come to understand individual  
units of a given language by analyzing the components of those units  
(what they are or what they are composed of), what those units  
contrast with (that is, what they are not), and how those units  
interconnect with other units in the language or grammar to form the  
system as a whole, i.e. the entire grammar and cultural context of  
which they are a part. These latter three perspectives are what Pike  
called the 'particle, wave, and field' perspectives of language.

Outside the context of 'thick' ethnographies and grammars, it becomes  
difficult to understand different meanings of items, much less to  
compare them or contrast them with their supposed counterparts in  
other languages. This is a rather well-known problem from, for  
example, color terms, where so-called 'color terms' in several  
languages are not in fact best understood as color, certainly not in  
the English sense.

Years ago (about 1984 or 1985) I was interviewed in the NY Times  
about a story it was running on Aymara, where it had been claimed  
that Aymara was the first truly logical language and that computer  
programmers could actually use Aymara as an ideal programming  
language. (Anyone who subscribes to the web version of the NY Times,  
Times Select, can find that article in a couple of seconds.)

I don't find claims that Aymara think backwards about time much  
different than the claim that their language is 'truly logical'.

Ellen's comments below are right on, because the 'eye of the  
beholder' is really the eye of the native speaker whose system we are  
trying to understand. And we cannot understand these things without  
detailed ethnogrammatical studies that use, among other methods,  
standard distributional argumentation of traditional linguistics, the  
one thing linguistics is truly good at perhaps, to show the particle,  
wave, and field perspectives of the unit in question in the larger  
ethnocultural context of the language in question. Jess Tauber's  
remarks on Yaghan seem to recognize this as well, when he says "A  
question arises for me about whether such oppositions as in 'push  
forward' and 'push back' depend on a larger framework against which  
they are interpreted", but nothing in what follows that nice opening  
remark gives me an understanding of the ethnolinguistic  
distributional arguments used to establish this apart from 'force  
dynamics'.

Dan


On 15 Jun 2006, at 06:25, Ellen F.Prince wrote:

> And Catalan uses the verb for 'go' as its past tense auxiliary.
>
> Iconicity is in the eye of the beholder...
>
> Ellen Prince
>