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I thought chinese writing was traditionally done from the top downwards ie. vertically. If so, the effect quoted might well be attributable more to that.
Willing to bet that none of these experiments will replicate if conducted on a larger sample.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, but it’s not because they “experience time” differently, it’s because they express time differently.
Is it possible to know how another person experiences time? Or anything, for that matter?
I think that's what the entire article is about. Like, the whole point of it.
> For example, in Swedish, the word for future is framtid which literally means “front time”. 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 t…
In Sweden that is most certainly to move the meeting forward (literally): “flytta fram mötet”.
Moving it ”back” to the future makes no sense...
> For example, in Swedish, the word for future is framtid which literally means “front time”. 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 t…
> 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. In Sweden that is most certainly to move the meeting forward (literally): “flytta fram mötet”. Moving it ”back” to the future makes no sense...
If time is a horizontal line, and you are at 'now' and the meeting is at '1pm', if you imagine the meeting as something which is facing you, then moving it back would push it further into the future and forward would bring it closer to the present. We also usually change the verb to make the metaphor clearer, the meeting was brought forward or pushed back.
Unrelated to time, another subtle difference which I think depends on how we imagine things spatially in different languages is 'coming' Vs 'going'. In English if you're at the park and I'm leaving my home to meet you the natural phrasing is to say that I'm "coming" (with the point of reference being you/the park), but in Spanish I'm "going", with the point of reference being me/my home.
I am multilingual and i can confirm this is not accurate.
It seems that the effect is heightened when the languages are in different families, or at least have different grammatical structures.
In some other articles on the subject, I've read on effects based on whether a language uses grammatical gender or not. For example children assigning voices to the Sun and Moon in English vs Spanish - in Spanish the voice given would almost always follow the grammatical gender, in English it would be randomly selected.
Not exactly mind blowing, but measurable.
In English one spends time, for example, much like one spends money. I love that as a metaphor but in Spanish you don't spend time, you pass time.
Does that reflect some transactional nature of English compared to Spanish, or nothing significant at all? Probably the latter, but I'll admit to enjoying these nuances.
Along the same line, in English one pays attention where in Spanish one lends it. Does the Spanish language bake in that exchanges should be fairly reciprocal? No idea, but fun to think about.
There are subtle differences everywhere which could have real framing effects or make no difference at all except to the expression itself. In English one spends time, for example, much like one spends money. I love that as a metaphor but in Spanish you don't spend time, you pass time. Does that reflect some transactional nature of English compared to Spanish, or nothing significant at all? Probably the latter, but I…
British English uses both 'spend' and 'pass'. In particular hobbies (leisure activities) are known as passtimes.
"How do you pass your time?" is not a common expression though but the concept is available, and used sometimes.
People also say things like "what do you do with your [spare] time?".
> For example, in Swedish, the word for future is framtid which literally means “front time”. 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 t…
In English the term "before" literally means "in front of". So if you say "the time before today" you are (according to the same logic) actually referring to the past being in front of the present. I'm also a bit skeptical of the conclusions drawn from these turns of phases. It seems a single language can have multiple inconsistent spatial metaphors in play at the same time. So I think it is a bit overblown to say a…
The description makes it sound as if 上/下 [shàng/xià] (up/down) were the dominant terms to express time in Mandarin (as exemplified by 上个星期/下个星期 [shàng gè xīng qī/xià gè xīng qī] (previous week/next week)). However, there are at least two other metaphors.
One is 去/来 [qù/lái] (go/come), e.g. in 去年/来年 [qù nián/lái nián] (previous year/next year) or 过去/未来 [guò qù/wèi lái] (past/future).
The other is 前/后 [qián/hòu] (front/back) e.g. in 以前/以后 [yǐ qián/yǐ hòu] (before/after) or 前天/后天 [qián tiān/hòu tiān] (the day before yesterday/the day after tomorrow).
Now if you wanted to use one of those combinations to describe the age of two persons, you'd use 前辈/后辈 [qián bèi/hòu bèi] (elder generation/younger generation). That's not only not vertical, it also orders them by time of birth and not by age.
So I don't think you can use linguistic phenomena to explain why Chinese-English bilinguals would put a young Chinese person above an older Chinese person, if the effect is even real at all. (There were only 32 participants in the experiment.)