Another reason I love linguistics: there’s active debate
And that debate is accessible, even to non-linguists.
The internet was a-buzz recently with reports of the Aymara people, and their weird time-space paradigm (the report claims that they see the “future” as “behind” and the “past” as “in front”).
Linguists generally follow the maxim people who say that some language is unique for this or that attribute are mostly wrong. In that vain (and in fact, this is where that quote comes from), the Language Log posted some doubts about that claim, including submissions by Language Log readers saying that their native language works in the same way as Aymara.
But at Language Log no expense or trouble is too great when it comes to informing you, the linguistically alert public; we are prepared to go out and get top experts to disagree with us, so they did. Russell Lee-Goldman had this to say (from this post at Language Log)
Christmas follows Thanksgiving.
Before (’in front of’) July.
hou4 tian1 [Chinese for ‘day after tomorrow’ lit. ‘behind day’]
But these have points in time situated in relation to other points in time (the time-moving-in-a-queue with respect to observer metaphor). Thus later events are behind earlier events. They are not situated with respect to the speaker. They could be moving towards the speaker, or not — gestural data indicates that some English speakers conceptualize the line as moving from left to right.
But the Aymara system is ego-centered. The past is actually in front of them. They gesture in front of themselves when talking about the past, and behind themselves when talking about the future.
And of course, the post concludes by opening the floor for further debate 
Posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 11:52 am. Categories: Linguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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