[MD] Aymara - already posted perhaps?

[Carl Thames]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael R. Brown" <mrb at fuguewriter.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2012 8:22 PM
Subject: [MD] Aymara - already posted perhaps?


> Tell an old Aymara speaker to "face the past!" and you just might get a 
> blank stare in return – because he or she already does.
>
> New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous 
> Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.
>
> Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a 
> spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation 
> and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past 
> behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other 
> way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.
>
> - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060613185239.htm

Their way of referring to time doesn't mean a reversal of the norm, just 
that they use a different concept in regards to expressing time.  They still 
think of it the same way, in that what has already happened is clear to 
them, while the future is unknown.  That doesn't mean they live in the past, 
just that they know about it.  The author was fairly confusing, but I had 
the reaction of, "they point backward to the future because they can't see 
it" before I got to that part of the article.  It also depicts a fairly lax 
attitude toward planning....