How Language Influences the Way We Visualize Time
Dr. Erica Brozovsky of the PBS series Otherwords explains how the visualization of time depends on the language being spoken.
Many, perhaps most linguists would agree that at some level our language does impact the way we think about things and therefore the way we talk about them. And one thing we talk about a lot is time. …Now whether or not we understand time fundamentally differently is unclear, but we sure do talk about it differently.
She notes that for most native English speakers, time moves horizontally from left to right much in the same way we write, while speakers of Arabic and Hebrew view time from right to left, the Vietnamese language views time passing as the individual stands still, and Mandarin once viewed time vertically.
If you speak Arabic or Hebrew, your timeline might be right to left. And in both languages, when you reference the past, you talk about what is before you,…And the words for the future to what is behind. …In Vietnamese, a person is stationary and the future moves toward the person from behind, passes the person, and then becomes the past in front. …But verticality is not the standard when it comes to time in English. It is, however, in Mandarin. It was traditionally written vertically, right to left, though nowadays it’s typically horizontal, left to right .
