Being multilingual alters your experience of time (2018)

Being multilingual alters your experience of time (2018)
weforum.org

It's the same in Danish, but if you have a meeting at 1pm and you want to change it to 2pm (moving it further in to the future, or further "front time", forward in time) you are moving the meeting back.

Introductions to linguistics are littered with poorly translated examples and misunderstood grammar points from languages that aren't even particularly exotic (like Japanese and Chinese). So maybe Aymara, just like Danish, have some back-looking phrases that refers to the future, but I am not convinced that people who speak Aymara, would put the Delorean in reverse, when aiming for the future.

> But Spanish and Greek speakers see it as quantity, as volume taking up space.

Author doesn't even try to explain which linguistic property causes this.

Could 'back' just mean 'further away'? If you move a box further down a storage room, you also move it 'further back', don't you?

If you bring something back, you move it from where you are to where it belongs. "Back up!" means "move away!".

Your back is not just behind you but further away from your front.

I imagine this is a case of reporter not understanding the research. This is clearly about linguistic relativism. There's a clear difference between how languages like Mandarin and English talk about time but the difference within indoeuropean languages is much smaller. I buy into Mandarin vs English shifting how one thinks about time (this isn't a new concept) but any secondary language changing how one views time (in a significant way) I'm skeptical. English and Spanish (which were used as examples) speak about time almost the same way. And if you're going to talk about Mandarin, there are much better examples than that they use a vertical axis instead of a horizonal (which doesn't mean they use both.)