June 13, 2006

• I sort of like it. The future is that which we cannot see, while the past is laid out before us. Which one is in front? I wonder if they think we're walking backwards, ass-first into the future...
• Interesting! Does that mean we figuratively turn our backs on the past, and they turn theirs on the future? I did a little googling, but found nothing that made clear what the real effects of their orientation were, compared to ours.
• They're Discworld trolls! /Pratchett fan Actually in Chinese, many chronological terms imply that the past is before us, and the future behind us: 前天：the day before yesterday. The word 前 means "before" or "in front". eg. 前面 literally means "in front of one's face". 后天: the day after tomorrow. The word 后 means "after" or "behind". eg. 后面　means "behind one's face". 明天：tomorrow. The word 明 means "bright", or "visible". When we move dates forward, it is always earlier; when we move dates backward, it is always later. But does that neccessarily imply that the Chinese also see time backwards?
• Hmm...perhaps the third term isn't so good an example.
• MonkeyFilter: ass-first into the future...
• Alnedra, I was getting confused about that. The weird thing is, as far as I can tell, the Chinese is not consistent. For example, although 以后 is in the future, 前途 also refers to the future. This might not be a great example, I know I've seen a clearer case where in Chinese the future was in front of you. But is there any explanation? Or any indication that the Chinese actually think of the future as being behind them, and find it weird and counterintuitive that English speakers get it backwards?
• flongj, I don't believe that the Chinese look at time backwards, exactly. I'm just raising some examples of how the Chinese language can be perceived to look at time backwards. As you have mentioned, and my third example also shows, some terms put the future in the front, while other terms put the the future at the back. I wonder if this backwards/forwards thing can be traced to how Confucian society always looks to the past to define the future, that what was right before is also right now.
• Interesting one, petes. If I go to the track I need only look back to see which horse will come in first at the end of the next race. Which is less clear than seeing/knowing what's in plain sight before my face: the chestnut mare I bet on last year - she was nosed out, took second place.
• I also thought it was interesting that events were only related in the structure of "I was there" or "I wasn't there". That kind of language structure would totally fubar teh Intarwebs. Or at least force a battle of the bulge. Type. Of thing. Perhaps it's not "moving towards" the past but only being aware of what events were in the past. Future events being open to all manner of crazy shit, for example. In the Internet age of "no actual documents", that mindset of "these things are known / these events were witnessed" is particularly interesting. But, I confess, I still can't wrap my little drummer brain around it too well.
• Alnedra, I wonder if the case in Chinese could be understood as a metaphor of "time marching towards you". This could explain 后天, for example, as the day behind tomorrow if we think of days marching past you in single-file. But then we could still account for other expressions where the future seems to be in front (of which I still haven't come up with more persuasive examples) as being relative to a speaker marching forwards in static time. In both cases, the future would still be situated "in front" of the humans. As the article points out, there is precedent for this kind of thing in English, as in their "Wednesday's meeting was moved forward two days" example...whether that means Monday or Friday depends on whether the speaker is thinking of moving forward in a static landscape of time (Friday), or time moving past a static speaker (Monday). If anyone's interested, the actual journal article (PDF!!) can be found on one of the author's webpages. Haven't read through much of it, but it seems...much better than the guy's writings on mathematics. :P
• Heh...just noticed the itsy-bitsy link to the corresponding metafilter thread. Via languagehat, in particular: here's a blog entry dispelling some of the sensationalism.
• A similar phenomenon in Chinese that I've found interesting is the pair of phrases for "last week" and "next week", 上星期 and 下星期, respectively. So 上 has meanings of "above" as well as "previous", while 下 has "under" as well as "next". This invokes images of descending into the future, rising to the past. It's probably just me, but it's a little strange, since I have stronger associations with ascension/looking upwards into the future (climbing ladders, mountains). But there are many examples of descending/looking down into the future (climbing down a mountain/valley, going down into the water, falling rain). In the end the symbolic importance of these phrases in Chinese is likely no greater than that of "push back", and "push forward" in English. I can't be sure though, since I am neither a linguist nor Chinese.
• Always intriguing to consider how language itself could shape an individual's mental landscape/mindscape ... the direction of time is clearly more arbitrary than most of us had supposed. What if the past lay to one side and the future on the other? Or the past lay underfoot and the future overhead? Or vice versa? And what would it be like if we thought in any of those ways? How would it affect us? O where are Mr Lewis Carroll and Mr Frank Baum when we need them?
• "So the notion that Aymara is entirely unique among languages and cultures is almost certainly false, perhaps hugely false. If the newspapers have whipped that up by overstating, then the authors of the paper in Cognitive Science (which I have not yet seen) are not to be blamed. But if they say Aymara is one of a kind, it looks like that's not true. Before making a claim in print about an unprecedented feature in a human language, scholars should try to make sure that the claim can withstand, say, a week on the LINGUIST List and a week on Language Log with no one writing in to contradict." So spaketh the 'Hat.
• Languagehat hasn't been here for some time: does anyone know if there's a reason for this? Or is this just the usual drift?
• His profile page indicates he's not visited since the 2nd of February. Impossible to tell when his last post was made. Pony request: tracicle, in future would it be possible to have the threads listed on a monkey's profile page link to the thread itself instead of or in addition to the external URL? (A lot of these, I note, are outdated and therefore utterly useless anyway, once the link goes phutt.)
• bees - from Mr. Hat's website: "12/30/04: I dislike what was done to littlegett, and since the thread is closed, I'm going to say so here. He has a personal site, like a zillion other people, and he didn't ask anyone to come along and make public fun of it; furthermore, when he was made fun of, he was pretty damn tolerant and jovial at first. After he was baited, he started getting nasty: what a surprise! And what fun it is to bait people until they turn nasty! Yes, the internet is a public place, but so is the sidewalk, and you probably wouldn't walk up to somebody having a conversation on the sidewalk, stick a microphone in his face, amplify what he says for the multitudes, and make public fun of it. You wouldn't do that because he might punch you. On the internet, he can't punch you, he can only make futile threats. Oh the cowardice! Excuse me, I meant comedy. Oh the comedy! This place has been disappointing me lately. (I know, I know, I can get my money back at the door.)" He apparently lurked for a while after posting that, but did reappear once more when we pissed him off over something or other. Don't remember the thread. Sad.
• website = MoFi profile.
• I disregard what it says on his profile page, since he was here, to the best of my recollection, for most if not all of last year. Anyway, whatever did we do to piss him off? I must have missed this.
• This post is what seems to have got him going originally. Littlegett, the owner of the site linked to on the front page, chimes in down thread. Maybe it just built up from there. Mr. Hat didn't explain further, as far as I know. On the other hand,I guess he just could have been really busy. Or bored with us.
• In view of the fact he was still posting at least as recently as November 16, 2005, almost a full year later, I find it impossible to believe the littlegett thread is any more than, at most, a straw in the wind, path. Taking anything anyone posts seriously in the late December to early January period needs to be tempered with awareness of how many of the posters are three sheets to the wind when they hit the keyboard. Not that this excuses either rudeness or dogpiling. But I'm sure languagehat is aware of this.
• Yeah, I wish the 'hat was around more too. Speaking of, who's in charge of winding wendell up? It's been awhile since he's offended our verbal senses.
• This is the last post of languagehat's that I remember, and he was being a condescending dick. If he comes back, I hope he changes his attitude.
• Wow i missed all of that. Fortunately, I am aware that you people don't exist without me. Therefore, that must be some . . . ghost thread!
• *eyes as big as millstones* Well, thank you, rocket88. Think I couldn't have read the upper part of this thread, as I have no recollection of this lively exchange. (Had minor surgery earlier that day, and I daresay was groggier than I thought.) Probably unwarranted speculation: chimera's link indicates MeFi was having a smilar discussion, too, on the 28th, so I have to wonder if possibly languagehat got MoFi and MeFi mixed up. His comment seems overheated - doesn't seem too pertinent to what was going on in this thread. But if that were the case why didn't he say so? Or am I missing something else? And all this reminds me, too: I do miss bernockle's droll humour!
• And if this thread hasn't been facing our past, I will eat nothing but banana peels for the rest of the month.
• Our time is past, bees.
• Yeah, littlegett was long before 'hat left us. He contributed for a long time after, oftenest to play with us in eeked threads, which he dearly loved to do here. Then came that weird random day when he ran in swinging into that thread linked above, Chyren called him on his bullshit, and he never came back, to my knowledge. Which sucks, and I have absolutely no idea how someone with thick enough skin to survive MeTa just fine should go poof so easily over here, but whattyagonnado. He's demonstrated a short temper in the past, but it seemed a bit over the top. *pours out patois on the ground for missing homie*
• The Hat retired, and also he moved not so long ago - major life changes. They can throw people for a loop. But so can just about anything, depending which way the wind blows. Stress happens. bernockle got married. He said. Then, presumably, had someone to play with that wasn't us. But what do we know? ... might all be hearsay. /faces the past lying ahead of us, blind to the future at our backs, oh yeah