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Backs to the future with the Aymara of the Andes
Public release from eurekalert.org
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.
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
See the full text of this article at: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/uoc--btt060906.php
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FSI French Courses Now Available By Download! Another Language Associates course, FSI French, is now available in a downloadable version! The Language Associates Digital Editions are the popular FSI courses in full digital format - all course material is included, but all audio is in MP3 format and all reading material is in PDF format. These courses are considered by many to be the best and most complete language courses available. Get the benefits of full FSI courses with increased portability and substantial savings! Please note that Digital Edition courses require a computer capable of playing MP3s and displaying PDF files. Digital Edition downloads are currently available for French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Spanish, Arabic, and Iraqi. Download and save! We are introducing our downloads at less than half the price of the hardcopy courses. Why? Well, when you buy in downloadable format, we save, so you save! No printing, reproduction, packaging, handling, and shipping costs for us means big savings for you. Check out our Digital Editions Download Store! Newsletter Special! This is a special introductory offer only for our newsletter subscribers - the best price ever on FSI French 1 Digital Edition downloads - $45 for one week only! This offer is the only place you can get this price and it will not last! See our Newsletter Specials for this incredible offer. |  |
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Last month's quiz: There are more Spanish speakers in California than any other state. That's an easy one, but how about some others? Some answers may surprise you! Where do more people speak Spanish - New Mexico or New Jersey? New Jersey. How about Arizona or Illinois? Illinois. Where do more people speak French - Louisiana or New York? Louisiana, but not by much. Where do more people speak Italian - Rhode Island or Texas? Rhode Island. Which is spoken more in Alaska - Russian or Tagalog? Tagalog. This month's winner is Alan Myers. Congratulations and thanks to all who entered! This month's quiz: What do the following languages have in common? Armenian, Celtic, and Greek Tagalog, Chamorro, and Javanese Ainu and Korean The answers and the winner will be in our next newsletter. Winner will receive their choice of one Talk Now or World Talk language CD-ROM! No purchase necessary to enter. E-mail your entry to:
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