When someone tells us to order something chronologically, we understand it as placing the situations that happend a long time ago on the left side and the actions that were made recently on the right side. Do you agree?
But does the word 'chronologically' mean the same for everyone?
Let's come back for a minute to the person that I mentioned last time: Benjamin Lee Whorf. This American linguist worked on the perception of time by speakers of Hopi language (used by inhabitants of Arizona in USA). In his book about this subject, he showed that they don't have any words, expressions or grammatical forms that refer precisely to what we call 'time', 'present', 'future'... For Hopi speakers, time is experienced (and expressed in language) totally differently.
(I need to add that this idea and the results of Whorf's research were widely critisised. As I have written before, I only present different experiments and studies - chosen subjecitively).
Time understood as a line that comes from the left to the right is the most common pattern for european languages speakers. But there are others.
When you tell a speaker of Mandarin to do the same thing - to order a few situations chronologically - they will place the earliest situation on the top and the latest at the bottom. Therefore, time is perceived more vertically in this culture. On the other hand, an Arabic speaker will do it the other way around than an English or French speaker. We could duplicate the examples and present many other variants of time perception.
As you can see, other cultures may understand the idea of time differently than ours. And it is impossible (or extremely difficult) to change the pattern that we learned in the proces of mother tongue acquisition. And this is the point. Even if it's not possible to entirely understand the difference, it is crucial to know that it exists.
But does the word 'chronologically' mean the same for everyone?
Let's come back for a minute to the person that I mentioned last time: Benjamin Lee Whorf. This American linguist worked on the perception of time by speakers of Hopi language (used by inhabitants of Arizona in USA). In his book about this subject, he showed that they don't have any words, expressions or grammatical forms that refer precisely to what we call 'time', 'present', 'future'... For Hopi speakers, time is experienced (and expressed in language) totally differently.
(I need to add that this idea and the results of Whorf's research were widely critisised. As I have written before, I only present different experiments and studies - chosen subjecitively).
Time understood as a line that comes from the left to the right is the most common pattern for european languages speakers. But there are others.
When you tell a speaker of Mandarin to do the same thing - to order a few situations chronologically - they will place the earliest situation on the top and the latest at the bottom. Therefore, time is perceived more vertically in this culture. On the other hand, an Arabic speaker will do it the other way around than an English or French speaker. We could duplicate the examples and present many other variants of time perception.
As you can see, other cultures may understand the idea of time differently than ours. And it is impossible (or extremely difficult) to change the pattern that we learned in the proces of mother tongue acquisition. And this is the point. Even if it's not possible to entirely understand the difference, it is crucial to know that it exists.
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