Does time work differently in different languages? - Hopi Time 

My language don't have tense (Indonesian, Sundanese, Malay, Javanese)

@@ff_crafter yeah but javanese and sundanese have 3 kinds of speech styles and learn all of that 3 styles gave me headache.b

Screaming Weevil r/technically the truth

my language has 4 times, past, future, present, and command (ציווי) command is for when you wanna give someone urgent orders

Ahhhh clever lol

As a person who lives in Peru, I've been told said metaphor has a cultural aspect to it as well: Just as Aymara women tend to carry their chidren on their backs, the future is difficult to see or predict but its weight (impact?) in your life is important.

Yes, it's all about Filosofy

Yes, the metaphor most languages use is one of movement. You walk with your eyes forward, so the direction of temporal movement (towards the future) is "forward". However the metaphor of being able to see the past while the future is unknown also makes perfect sense.

Author Terry Prachette in his humorous fantasy series Disc World has trolls view us walking backwards in time with the same reasoning. (You can see the past, but not the future).

The past is history. The future is a mystery. Right now is a gift, that is why it is called "The Present."

Doc! You built a _time machine_... out of a *Language?!*

He could throw in STNG while he's at it.

christosvoskresye Worf was wrong!

I was just thinking of this! Though when walking or driving, the future is in front. To walk in heavy traffic is like trying to predict the future. Would someone experiencing time in reverse look out the back window or the front window of the car he is driving forward?

We are going back to the future... We will go... We will be going...

Down is the direction things go with time. Things fall down toward a center of gravity, wind blows downwind, so I find it quite natural that the future is down in time, and the past is up. You are right though about the top of a stack being the youngest layer, and the bottom the oldest. Blogs also sort posts this way, even though it goes against the direction text within a post is read (with the top of a paragraph being the more towards the past, and the bottom closer to the future), for the benefit of readers who are more interested in recent developments that the history. With email clients, it is a matter of preference if you want the latest on top or bottom.

Very well noted. Geologists too :)

The deeper your layers of paper, the more your life is like an archaeologist

Yeah, the fossil record is pretty much a pile of paper.

You then have astronomers who have the rather paradoxical statement of forwards being backwards (Actually outwards being backwards but still)

Alexander Waters in terry Pratchett 's Discworld series Trolls thinks exactly like that, i wonder if he knew about this language or just had the idea out of the blue

Eisenwulf666 Exactly what I was thinking of! "The long-off days of far ahead"

In classic Greek the same applied: www.thelivingtheory.com/blog/backing-into-the-future-the-simple-reason-ancient-greeks-valued-the-present-more-than-us

That makes sense. However, for me its the opposite. I look forward, to move forward. And I move forward in time because I can do stuff in the future. I can not change the past which I am not looking at.

It's all a matter of which metaphor sounds most poetic to you (or, rather, your distant ancestors who were speaking the precursor to your language).

I find it more logical, you can "see" the past but you cant "see" the future. Therefore your eyes is facing the past and you have your back to the future.

@@yocko5771 Nah. It's a reference to a Movie Series called Back to the Future. Idk if you missed the joke or you just want to add info.

lucmedina ... wow. Quite so. Be-fore & fore-ward. After & after-wards.

Wow you just blew my mind

Also English has vertical dimension of time. Things are over afterwards .

Somebody get a rope~

In English we look back on our lives and look forward to the future. Guess we have some of both ways of referring to time and space.

Was really looking for a comment about "Arrival". This movie is based on the Sapir-Whorf theory and even mentions it. I'm really surprised that he didn't mention it in the video, it was out more than half a year before this video.

Well. While living in Italy I was exposed to a lot of linguistic diversity. Primarily, Standard Italian vs. Venetian. One can eventually notice these differences. You can study Italian linguistics :P

Linguista in erba Saame

+Arturo Cervallos Soto _Non è la stessa cosa..._ ("It's not the same.")

I can imagine Italian linguistics books would be weighty volumes what with hand gestures having to be included in the discussion. /jk.

Seeing your profile picture now, after 5 years, I imagine you had quite the journey, eh?

That's how it also was in Europe, until they changed from sun-dials to mechanical clocks

The Aymara concept also exist in my native language of English: In front of/facing = Fore Before= Before Behind= Aft After= After REPLY

Yes, as in "She enters before me" means that in the past (and in front of me) she entered, while "She enters after me" means that in the future (and behind me) she entered.

googolplexbyte Very interesting indeed !

It's odd that linguists would treat this as special. It must be true of many languages.

Another example is ante, which means "in front of" or "before" like in anterior, and post which means "behind" or "in the future" like posterior or post-war.

Jan Ivar Korsbakken You spoke out what I was about to comment. 谢谢你 :3

Jan Ivar Korsbakken 上下 concept is often explained by how the Chinese [and all the people] read texts and orientate in a text. 上 - what is written above => written BEFORE, 下 - what is written below => LATER. Even in speech they say 上述 UP-TELL - "afore-mentioned" and ...如下 HOW-DOWN "as follows". As we see, English also has these concepts but they are used only in (meta)texts, as they are in any written language tradition.

I just realised mandarin uses the aymara system as well! see the "front" is before and "back" is after. "exam's front"(考试之前) means before the exam.!

NativLang is actually correct in this case, but I consider this usage (up/down) archaic. The book zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8A%E4%B8%8B%E4%BA%94%E5%8D%83%E5%B9%B4 上下五千年 is one example of this (relatively archaic) usage.

On archaic usage of 上下, there's also 上午/中午/下午, fixed expressions for morning, noon, and afternoon, which mean 'up/above noon', 'middle noon', and 'down/below noon'. It's a lot more interesting once you start digging into dialectal variation on how different Chinese languages call these time slots, however. Mornings are also called 早上 'early up', 上半天 'up half day', 前半天 'front half day', etc. Perhaps most interesting is that mornings are called 下早 'down early' in Taiwanese Hokkien, pronounced e-tsái-á. How this exception came to be I'm not too sure.

I've been studying Japanese for years, and it that always somehow *made sense* to me. I pretty much just accepted it as obvious without a second thought. Now that I think about it, it's pretty amazing... and a bit unsettling that I didn't notice at all.

前 後was borrowed from Chinese..

The characters are certainly derived from Chinese characters, but the readings indicate that the words are native Japanese, and not borrowed from (but maybe influenced by) Chinese.

Well if you happen to know some Chinese, 之前 means "before (this)" and 之后 means "after (this)". It is also used this way in the classical Chinese literature.

This happens in English too; for both future events and distant objects "forward" often means towards the speaker while "back" means away, as though these things and events are facing us.

He did hear about the Aymara.

RIP Terry. One of my favorites.

I'm just going through the whole Discworld series (about halfway through) and was going to comment on the same thing.

MrAlvarogame yep

Hello Friedrich!

MrAlvarogame I love unbridled joy at learning. Your enthusiasm is contagious.

Whoa, Indonesian here, and we do tell time just like that. Do any other Nordic countries have the same system to tell time? Actually we do both interchangeably, to tell 6.30 we could say either just "Enam tiga puluh" (six thirty) OR 'Setengah tujuh' (literally half seven). Now imagine if I have to learn Finnish in a class that uses English as the language of instruction. I have to convert that twice...

german does it too.

German does it to, and depending on the region, 6.45 is either quarter to seven or three-quarters seven. 6.15 is either quarter after six or quarter 7. The latter way of telling time is not easy to learn for people who haven't grown up with it. The concept is basically that you say how much of this hour has passed. So at 6.15 a quarter of the seventh hour has passed.

In British English, half seven is 7:30.

I'm American, so: "Half seven? You mean 3:30?"

A NativLang video about the heptapods in Arrival would be amazing

Gyurto Design or even better. "Stories of your life" by Ted Chiang. The story arrival was biased on. He goes into more detail about how ones perception could be altered by language. And is only about 60 pages long Fun fact, the movie "lucy" was also biased on one of his other short stories, about a man who became exponentially smarter, except his ending was just a tad better than (spoilers) "I am become internet!"

As you mentioned Lucy what if the languages can make your logic simpler or something. You see complex things more easily. Like when they say you think more logically in a second language that you have learned I know why is this but what if it has something to do with the languages?

I'm not sure, but colour recognition is probably affected by language. Russians seporate reds and pinks into three main catagories and not two, so can more easily differentiate between those colours. Similarly, some african tribes link green and blue into the same catagory, and so have real difficulty destingushing greens and blues, but they have more catagories for green and can very easily destinguish greens that those speaking english can not. There was a bbc documentary focusing on this a year or two back. "Do you see what I see?" I think it was called.

I didn't like the movie exactly because of that. The idea that language dictates reality seems innocent, but the context that came to mind it to me isn't a neat concept but a token reason based in bias. Sentiments like "Of course the Hopi lived in a postindustrial society and are naturally poor today, they didn't even understand a clock, how could they ever compete with Europeans!" Is sorta like other statements and ideas that misconstrue differences and quirks in culture for different levels of humanity, like the idea that people of African descent can't process information as good as Europeans, or plan for the future.

oooh... yes. Never crossed my mind

Well if you do, make sure you click the bell icon to be notified of all new videos. ;)

Yes

Wow, thank you!

Lieutenant Worf, without h.

YoTambienSoyLinlinao Imagine Worf as a linguist

Redgrave192 Different spelling! Lt Cdr Worf is a character from ST:TNG & ST:DS9. Colonel Worv was a Klingon lawyer in a Trek movie.

I missed Pirahã too! It has a lot of linguistic weirdness.

I was wondering if someone would mention Piraha. I did my anthro 101 project on their number system (or lack thereof). It's fascinating how differently they think in terms of concepts whose extent and ubiquity we take for granted.

Piraha has been shown to have recursion in numerous linguistics studies.

Jimmy McGee so far as I've learned, they seem to think similarly to English. Of course, they've been influenced by outside Latin-based languages in the past.

Evrey Traditional japanese goes up to down and right to left.

Evrey That hypothesis implies a testable prediction - what direction is the arrow of time in languages that write from right to left like Arabic or Hebrew?

I don't know, never learned Arabic or Hebrew. But it could be interesting to find out how many languages have the arrow of time follow their writing direction. I do not expect that to be anything near even just 2/3, though.

Yes, I noticed too. A commenter up here, Hoopoe of Hope, native Arabic speaker, confirms this: he says that he views the past as being on the left and the future as being on the left. It may be something worth looking into, if it is at all common among a significative majority of languages. +Xoreign mentions Japanese, which would seem to be an exception to this hypothesis, but I beg to differ. Mae: before/in front of Ato: after/behind This seems to point to a horizontal arrow of time, compared to a traditional writing which is top-down. However, let's not forget that the Japanese writing system is not entirely native, that is, it was mostly imported from Chinese, a different language. So in case of incongruences, we should also look at whether or not the writing system is native of that language or has been imported or derived from another.

@@FaoladhTV another commentator said that he's a native Arab speaker and they make timelines right to left.

Well, some experiment, aprticularly the ones made by Choi et Bowerman, shows that at least in some sense language influences also how we think about a thing in a small scale when we are using it or processing it. For example Spanish and English speakers focused the atention more in different things (type of motion for english speakers, direction in spanish ones) when they had to narrate a story. Funny thing bilingual speakers, focused their atention more in one thing or the other depending on what language they had to tell the story. But when they had a visual representation on hte story they did remember the same. Of course that is far from the Sapir hypothesis, but hey, it's something.

Perhaps it is some sort of "feedback loop". Different societies think differently and shape their languages accordingly. However, as these different societies come in contact with each other, discover each other's way of thinking, and one of them becomes dominant in some way, they find it hard to move away from their own, shall we say, "thought matrix", because it's what their language is based on. Even Saussure teaches us that the way we split up and categorise and analyse reality is a part of our langue. However, I would not go as far as agreeing with the Sapir hypothesis, because I'm pretty sure that, if you look closely enough, you will find ways of expressing time in just about any language. Maybe they will be radically different and more complex than ours, but they will be there. After all, the difference between the future being "up" or "right" or "left" is fairly superficial.

Well Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has three varieties or flavours. The strong Sapir-Whorf hypotesis, which is the original proposed by Whorf (Sapir only made a pasing quote in a book), the soft,, that language influences tought and the light one, that language has connections for how we thought. The strong one is discardedalmost without a doubt, the debate is in what extent the light one or the soft one are true and if always or only in certain specific conditions.

Language is cultural form among many other cultural forms. The Ancient Greeks knew of the concept of zero yet never employed; so it's not just languages it is also mathematics-- all symbol forms are being shaped by that particular cultural world. As Oswald Spengler would point out it ends up shaping the destiny of an entire people.

Gonna tentatively stem from MordredMS up there... Not that I think it's entirely best described as a "feedback loop" exactly, but societies last a lot longer than individuals. In that sense, so do languages, but they change over time... From a starting point "birth" of a language, the concepts of the people using it set the structure and conventional concepts. And these can be radically different from one "society" to another. (See Asian v Western Europe for example)... In either case, the concepts and conventions work just fine for ranking and filing and categorizing the world and even the universe around the people... until it doesn't so much anymore. Then there's struggle and debate... Then there's some "break through", and a new concept is born and spread, people work out the kinks and bugs, and it's adapted to the linguistics of all involved. For some more isolated societies, their own "break throughs" are easier to dismiss as "anecdotal" but they didn't just come out of a vacuum. The concepts that really govern how a people recognize time and its motion, spacial sense, or lack thereof are more cultural than linguistic. Yet, as they find reasons to alter those views and concepts, so the language will also adapt to allow for it... I can't speak to it's absolute authenticity, but Nat. Geo. had a documentary a few years back about a people in South America. They were among the last "tribes" with limited contact with outsiders, and they seemed to struggle immensely with the exercise of organizing pictures in a row to tell a story. (Forgive me on this one, but it was a few years back that I saw it...) There were other signs as well that while they could organize tasks and tell when it was morning or nightfall, they just didn't seem to conceive of a deep past (more than a couple days) or the future... So maybe the concepts of time being cultural, only come together for language and expression as they become really useful to acknowledge or understand. :o)

Guy Mika I second this! a video about the Uralic languages would be nice to service as well.

LangFocus made a video about it

mlovecraftr Langfocus ≠ NativLang

Learning about Languages is good from good teachers. Listen to BOTH! I subscribe to both these guys. stfu.

and Welsh, and the 2 Albanian languages

But what do you say at night?

Giovanni Lido probably those phrases but references to the moon and stars. but im no psycholinguist or an expert on han.

If you're talking about Chinese, at night is 晚上, literally "on the night," which also works for "in the evening." You could also use 夜里 or 夜间 (literally night place, night among) earlier/early and later in Chinese you can use 早点 (morning dot) or 晚点(evening dot), respectively. Do keep in mind that Chinese characters have a lot of different possible translations given the situation and context.

So what do people think when their language is written right to left then left to right on the next line?

James Driscoll That’s an interesting question. I could imagine that it might lead to a more “flexible” visualisation of the future appearing either to the right or the left, but you’d have to actually study time-related expressions and metaphors in the ancient languages which used this system to see whether there’s any correlation. Of course there are also other factors in the way we see time, like the direction the sun moves.

@@jamesdriscoll9405 I'm pretty sure there's an initial direction which was left to right in the example that I know so possibly it would stay the same.

Take the Piraha stuff with a grain of salt, it's highly, highly disputed, mostly becasue there was only one source Everett, and one others very few linguists started studying the language, they came to different conclusions.

Indeed they are! I bet to them we appear to be miles ahead!

Much, much more exaggerated version of the theory but ya. Most linguists discredit the idea that languages literally effect thinking in a major sense. They're more interested in the correlation between language and thinking.

He has a new video on language evolution which I'm about to watch. My personal take is that historically, languages very quickly separate into dialects in separate locations due to geographical isolation, political/economic autonomy and other factors. That's why in countries with the oldest civilisations like Italy, India and China you have a dizzying array of dialects that can differ from each other far more than Spanish and Portuguese even between geographically close towns. The longer the separation, the bigger the divergence. It's only natural that Portuguese and Spanish should have diverged from each other. As an English speaker, it seems to me that phonologically, the European variants of Spanish and Portuguese have diverged from each other even more than the American variants which perhaps preserved some of their archaic sounds. This trend has obviously been reversing in modern times.

I only speak a little Spanish and no Portuguese, so I'm not exactly qualified to judge the situation, but I was under the impression that Spanish and Portuguese sound a little different (Portuguese is mumblier and has softer, "mushier" sounds), but have really similar Grammar and that their words are still similar...?

that's exactly it. I think the most striking difference is that Portuguese, like French, differentiates between open, closed and nasal vowels, while Spanish doesn't. But we do understand each other fairly well.

Hope I manage to explain clear enough, and so: Agreed! It is all relative in the ears of the listener I guess; But.. Irish and Swedish !?! Curious as to how you got to that pairing.. Irish speaker here, so might I suggest northern Irish (Gaeilge Uladh ) as sounding similar to ScotsGaeilge (Scottish Gaelic), but to us in these isles, it seems Swedish is similar to Norwegian more like (..I think..??) Totally agree on what you say about how things totally don't sound similar (eg, Chinese/Korean), once your ear knows the difference. Just adding my two cents in, to support that perspective by saying about how the *listener* determines what they believe they hear. Another example: In the years that I was speaking a lot of Gaeilge Uladh, my boyfriend also happened to come from that part of the country (Northern Ireland). I couldn't help noticing that when on the phone, when speaking in English, 97% of callers iif they didn't know me especially, would try to place which part of Ireland I was from (or where my accent was from). Out of those, 15% insisted I was from "the north" somewhere; it was really interesting to hear where other Irish folks felt I had to be from, based on the way I spoke English (if I spoke Irish it would be a dead giveaway). Out of those who did not jump on that bandwagon however, 3%, Breakdown as follows: 1% had no sense of tonal processing/orientation, and didn't register any noticeable inflection from any region at all. 1% was born outside of Ireland and lived there long enough that their aural orientation was not tuned to the local intonation anymore.. 1% had spent a lot of time abroad and thus heard the other contributing influences to the way I spoke English by then! eg, We both lived on Turtle island in the past, and she insisted that she couldn't hear any Irish inflection in my speaking at all at all at all. Which was notable ONLY as compared with 97% of people insisting I was Irish-born and bred (I'm not) 🙂

Luis Peixoto From my understanding, Galicia was the only kingdom of Spain nor to be conquered by the moors. So, Gallego was the court language of Spain before the Reconquest of Spain under king Fernando and Queen Isabel. On gaining the throne, King Fernando changed the court language to Castilian which is the official Spanish of Spain. Gallego and Portuguese retain the older forms of Medieval Spanish.

@googleplexbyte That’s, what I thought about the origins of those parallels; and the British should definitely have their fair share of experience of standing in lines.

LOUDMOUTHTYRONE Conlangs?

do you-o speak-o el spanglish-o?

NativLang, if you do make a video like this, I have made my own conlang you can use.

+M45t3r_M1nd Me too, but everyone wants their conlang to appear somewhere, so he would just use the really well-known ones obviously.

Esperanto!