[Lexicog] Back to the Future

[John Roberts]

Hi Fritz,

I am not Ron Moe, but I thought you (and other lexicographers) might be interested in the short piece on time orientation below which I recently added to my teachings on tense, aspect and mood. I gleaned this information form the internet, other lists and my wife. I have heard that many African languages have a 'back to the future' time orientation too. It would be nice to have some concrete examples like those illustrated below. [Apologies if some of the unicode characters do not come out right.]

John Roberts

Time Orientation

In a language like English the perception is that speakers face forward to the future with respect to the time line and the past is behind them.  For example, English speakers would typically say they are looking forward to future events and back to past events. Some headline examples: Australians are looking forward to a solar future and Look back at the past week, with our weekly round up of Yorkshire Dales News.



But in other languages the temporal orientation is the opposite way around. The Aymara language spoken in the Peruvian Andes uses *nayra*, the basic word for ‘eye,’ ‘front’ or ‘sight,’ to mean ‘past’ and uses *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.’



In Cantonese the word *hāu* ‘after, back’ is used to relate to the future and the word *chĭn* ‘before, front’ is used to relate to the past. E.g *hāu gōh lăi-bāi* back CL week ‘next week’ and *chĭn gōh lăi-bāi* front CL week. Mandarin talks about the future as down and the past as up.  For example, *shang ge xingqi* (‘up week’ = last week) vs. *xia ge xingqi* (‘down week’ = next week). Korean and Cambodian are also reported to have a ‘back to the future’ time orientation.



Hebrew and Aramaic also have this perspective, to some extent. Observe, for instance, Biblical Hebrew *yemei qedem*, days of old/of long past; the word *qedem* incorporates the root *q-d-m*, meaning basically ‘to be in front of.’ And every beginning Hebrew student will know of the prepositions אחר and אחרי, which have a spatial meaning, ‘behind,’ and a temporal meaning, ‘after, afterwards, in the future.’



In Aramaic, the situation is similar. Something that happened ‘previously’ or ‘a long time ago’ is said to have occurred *(min) le-qadmin*, using the cognate root *q-d-m* mentioned above; the preposition *qodam* "before, in front of" is well-known. In early Aramaic, the root אחר is also used to denote both ‘behind’ and ‘futurity,’ but its use fades in later dialects in favor of the neologism *bathar* ‘after’ (from b + athar, ‘in place of’).

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