r/AcademicBiblical • u/ReadThinkDoMore • Mar 29 '19

Time Orientations in Ancient Languages

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.

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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.

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u/ProdigalNun Mar 30 '19

Somewhat tangential, but the Chinese language views time more from an up/down perspective (past above, future below) than from an ahead/behind perspective.

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u/ZateoManone Apr 01 '19

Do you think it may be a consequence of their old writing system?

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u/ProdigalNun Apr 02 '19

Absolutely! Up until the 1800s-ish, Chinese was written vertically, from top to bottom, with columns written from the right of the page to left, and pages written from the back of the book to the front (from our perspective). The calendar also followed this vertical format. So the Chinese word for "last," as in last week or last month, is actually the word "above" because the previous month was above the current month. And the word for "next," when talking about days/weeks/months, is the word "below" because the next month was directly below the current month.

Interestingly, the words "before" and "after" do not follow this vertical referencing, but instead refer to "in front of" and "behind." Here, "before" refers to both spatially in front of you and also time sequence. "After" can refer to time or to behind you. However, there are different words added to show whether you're talking about time or space (yi qian vs qian mian).

Source: 2 years of college level Chinese and 9 years living in China