Linguistics

In Aymara, the past is ahead of you and the future is behind

Speakers of Aymara, spoken in the Andes, point forward when talking about the past and gesture backward for the future, the reverse of the near-universal metaphor of an approaching future. Researchers studying spontaneous speech and gesture together found the reversal was consistent and largely unconscious, tied to grammar that treats the known past as 'seen' and therefore in front.

Rafael E. Nunez, Eve Sweetser, With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time — Cognitive Science, Vol. 30, 2006

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