Time, a concept so fundamental yet so elusive, often slips through our fingers like grains of sand. The feeling that “How Time Flies” is a universal sentiment, yet the very way we perceive and conceptualize time can be profoundly shaped by our culture and language. Consider an encounter high in the Altiplano, where an old Aymara man, shielding his eyes from the intense sunlight, speaks not of the Incas when referring to his ancestors, but to his great-great-grandfather. With a gesture sweeping forward, he places his lineage not behind him in the past, but in front, towards the future. The Incas, he clarifies, existed even further ahead, his hand extending further towards the horizon.
This seemingly inverted perception of time is not an isolated anomaly. In another instance, a researcher interviews an Aymara woman about her cultural origins. As she recounts generations – parents, grandparents, and beyond – her arm stretches further and further into the space in front of her, mapping the past ahead. Then, describing the inheritance of values from these preceding generations, her hand retracts, drawing the past towards her. Finally, gesturing over her shoulder, she indicates how these values will be passed onto her children – the future, relegated to what lies behind.
These individuals are members of the Aymara, an Amerindian group inhabiting the lofty Andean valleys of northern Chile. Rafael Núñez, a cognitive scientist from the University of California, San Diego, is the researcher who documented these observations. His work delves into the fascinating realm of how we develop abstract concepts, specifically time. Núñez’s research suggests compelling evidence: the Aymara people possess a sense of time’s passage that mirrors our own, yet with a crucial inversion – for them, the past is in front, and the future lies behind.
This groundbreaking research, conducted with linguist Eve Sweetser, is poised to be published, sparking considerable discussion about whether this unique temporal conception extends to other cultures. George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, posits this as a strong possibility, emphasizing the untapped linguistic diversity of our world. “There are 6,000 languages,” he notes, “and most of them have never been written down.” Núñez and Sweetser’s work throws into sharp relief the inherently metaphorical and somewhat illusory nature of time itself.
Einstein’s theories have already revealed time as a slippery notion. To grapple with it, languages universally resort to metaphor, and with remarkable consistency, this metaphor is space. When an English speaker says, “We are approaching the deadline,” they are spatializing imminence as physical nearness. The listener grasps the meaning instantly, despite the deadline being an abstract concept, not a physical entity. Núñez emphasizes, “There is no ultimate truth that you could discover that is outside that metaphor.”
If temporal landmarks are mental constructs, where does our sense of time originate? And why do we experience time as motion so vividly? Indo-European languages, including English, alongside languages as diverse as Hebrew, Polynesian, Japanese, and Bantu, orient speakers towards the future. Time is perceived as flowing from ahead, through the present, and into the past behind. The Aymara also experience time as motion, but their orientation is reversed: they face the past, their backs turned to the future.
The Aymara word for past, nayra, literally translates to eye, sight, or front. Conversely, q”ipa, denoting the future, means behind or the back. This linguistic peculiarity was noted as far back as the 16th century by Jesuit missionaries venturing into the Andes. Linguistic anthropologists have since pondered its significance. In 1975, Andrew Miracle and Juan de Dios Yapita Moya, researchers at the University of Florida, observed that q”ipüru, the Aymara word for tomorrow, combines q”ipa and uru (day), literally meaning “some day behind one’s back.”
Over time, whispers of similar temporal orientations in other languages have emerged. Agathe Thornton, an expert in Maori oral tradition, reported in the 1980s that Maori speakers use “front-type” words for earlier events. Malagasy also employs “in front of” to signify “earlier than.” It appeared the Aymara weren’t alone in their temporal perspective, until Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson cautioned against hasty generalizations in 1980.
Lakoff and Johnson highlighted that languages can employ multiple metaphors for time, even within a single language. English speakers, for instance, oscillate between reference frames when ordering events, a point Núñez illustrates with a simple question: “If a meeting scheduled for Wednesday is moved forward two days, what day will it fall on?” Núñez notes, “More or less 50% of the people will say Friday, and 50% will say Monday.” This ambiguity arises from the word “moved,” which can imply moving forward in time (later) or forward towards the speaker (earlier).
The split in responses stems from differing reference points. Half interpret “forward” relative to themselves, where time advances towards them, making “forward” future-oriented, hence Friday. The other half adopt a temporal frame independent of ego, like “Monday follows Sunday.” Here, time is a landscape or conveyor belt viewed externally. Moving the meeting forward on this temporal conveyor belt shifts it to Monday.
Context dictates which metaphor is appropriate, but ambiguity persists in some situations, as Núñez’s experiment demonstrates. He and Ben Motz even influenced participants towards the Monday response by pre-exposing them to moving cubes on a screen – a motion scene detached from the observer’s perspective.
Regarding the Aymara, Núñez approached cautiously. “The question that has never been asked of Aymara is, when they use these two words, nayra and q”ipa, are they using them with reference to themselves, or to another time?” If referring to an external timeline, their usage might not differ significantly from English speakers opting for Monday. However, if self-referential, it would signify a fundamental conceptual divergence.
To discern the Aymara’s frame of reference, Núñez studied their gestures alongside speech. Gestures often embody the metaphors used in language, like palms raised and balanced to express choice.
Braving the high altitude of 4,000 meters, Núñez interviewed 27 Aymara adults, some monolingual, others bilingual in Aymara and Spanish. Conversations spanned from reminiscing about the past to discussing future community events, totaling 20 hours of videotaped interactions analyzed for word-gesture synchronicity. The findings revealed that the Aymara indeed use two temporal frames.
For vast time spans, gestures indicated a left-to-right conception, external to themselves. However, for shorter durations, like generations, the axis shifted to front-back, with themselves as the origin point. The gestures of the old man and woman discussing their ancestors confirmed their perception of the past as being in front.
Núñez proposes that the Aymara’s unique perspective may be linked to their emphasis on visual experience. Languages often compel speakers to prioritize certain information aspects. French highlights object gender, English subject gender. Aymara, crucially, marks whether the speaker witnessed an event: “Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it).”
Omitting these evidential markers is considered boastful or dishonest. Miracle and Yapita noted Aymara skepticism towards written texts lacking eyewitness accounts: “‘Columbus discovered America’ – was the author actually there?” In a language valuing eyewitness testimony, metaphorically facing the seen – the past – becomes logical, as Lakoff suggests.
“This Aymara finding is big news,” states Vyvyan Evans, a theoretical cognitive linguist at the University of Sussex. “It is the first really well-documented example of the future and past being structured in a totally different way.”
Evans’s research had already predicted such divergent temporal views. The universal temporal experience lies in our shared brain mechanisms for processing change, motion, duration, simultaneity, and repetition. Languages express these basic temporal components through culturally shaped metaphors. English allows “buying time,” an idiom absent in Aymara. These differing metaphorical landscapes subtly steer languages towards unique perspectives on time.
Linguistic proximity often correlates with metaphorical similarity. The Aymara’s relative isolation has preserved their distinct temporal conception, making their language the most striking example of temporal divergence discovered so far. The extent to which this notion of time permeates other aspects of Aymara thought, or conversely, how our future-facing view shapes our thinking, remains an open question. Lakoff suggests, “It may not affect everything, but it may affect a lot of important things. For instance, you’re probably not going to get the same metaphors for progress.”
Miracle and Yapita, in their 1975 paper, noted the Aymara’s “great patience,” their willingness to wait half a day for market transportation. English-speaking cultures prioritize planning and react with frustration when plans are disrupted. Marta Hardman, an anthropologist with 50 years of Aymara study, suggests that if the future is unseen, planning may seem less relevant.
Hardman, who mentored Miracle and Yapita, was struck by the egalitarianism she observed among the Peruvian Aymara in the 1950s. Emphasis was placed on origins – community, ancestors, maternal lineage. Women held higher respect than in her own culture. “I was suddenly treated as a full person,” she recounts.
Reflecting after five decades, Hardman questions whether her own culture, not the Aymara, is out of sync. English culture encourages ignoring the past, she observes. “We pretend it’s not there, yet we’re lugging it with us as we go.” Perhaps, in our headlong rush towards the future, we lose sight of the rich tapestry of time that lies, not behind us, but all around us, constantly shaping our present. And as we ponder these different perceptions, the idiom “how time flies” takes on a new layer of meaning, reminding us that the subjective experience of time is indeed a fascinating and culturally nuanced phenomenon.
