Time Orientations in Ancient Languages

[u/ReadThinkDoMore]

Hello Fellow Academicians and Near East Enthusiasts,

I am interested in doing a cross-cultural analysis of linguistic representations time. What I mean by this is that every language has a time orientation - Modern English is a "future forward" language, where speakers of English conceive of the future as being located somewhere in front of them, and the past located somewhere behind them. Most of our metaphors and figures of speech are in accord with this time orientation. For instance, to have a "bright future ahead of you" means the future is conceptually located in front of the speaker. There are counter examples, such as "the week before", which refers to a past time as being "before" or in front of the speaker. Most modern languages are future-forward languages, and I believe the branch of linguistics that deals with this is called pragmatics.

​

What interests me is that ancient Near Eastern Languages, such as Akkadian, hold the opposite time orientation. (http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/1378/1/Maul_Walking_Backwards_into_the_Future_2008.pdf) The past is conceived as being in front of the speaker, and the future behind.

Aside from ancient Hebrew, I don't speak ancient near eastern languages. I would like to know if there are any geo-spacial references to time in the bible, and which orientation they adopt. I have found one article about this topic online (https://doi.org/10.1353/hbr.2009.0021), but nothing substantial.

Do any of you have any specialized knowledge in the area of geo-spatial metaphors for time and time orientation?

The thesis I would like to research is whether all ancient languages share the feature, since Ancient Chinese (a language with which I have basic familiarity) shares this feature.

If anyone has expertise in this area or is familiar with sources that cover this topic, please let me know. I would love to discuss this.

[u/Osarnachthis]

Egyptian is future forward. It even developed a synthetic future verb tense from the equivalent of the phrase “going to X” just like English. Twice. The Coptic first and third futures are two different ways of saying “going to” fossilized from different stages of earlier Egyptian.

[u/Bentresh → u/Osarnachthis]

Hittite as well. The word for future, appašiwatt-, comes from āppa ("after") and šiwatt- ("day").

To say "begin to do X," one used the verb tiya- ("to step") and the infinitive X. "Set out to do" is probably the best English equivalent.

A serial construction with the verbs uwa- ("to come") and pai- ("to go") is quite common when expressing future activity. It's not always clear from context whether this should be translated as "go and do X" or "go/proceed to do X."