1052: Perception of Past and Future in Aymara Oct 26, 2017

There is really nothing present in languages that can be said to be universal. Many ideas, even incredibly general ones like, to paraphrase, "a language will have nouns and verbs" or "a language will have sounds" are based on logical assumptions about the way people think but are then disproven by the existence a feature of even a single language, an idea which will be discussed more in the future. Furthermore, to continue the idea from yesterday about the relationship between motion and time, it is quite common to have words, including English prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and some verbs that relate to both forward movement or position and the future, or oppositely backwards movement and the past. Perhaps the clearest examples of this would be the fairly common phrases "look forward to [some future event]" or "put the past behind you". This exists—in some form or another—across numerous languages, but there is one that is quite famous for exhibiting this trend oppositely; in Aymara, a language with many similarities to Quechua, the past is related to forward motion or things otherwise in front of someone, and the opposite is true for the future. Until fairly recently, studies of Aymara were poor or would often view the language through a culturally Spanish lens, but the generally ascribed cultural reason for this is that the future is unknown, and unseeable: therefore as if it were behind someone.