There is a group of native south americans who don’t speak of the past being behind them. Rather, they say that the past is in front, and it is the future that is behind them…
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.
Read the whole article: Backs to the Future
This makes me wonder if our own ideals about some very profound suppositions should be reconsidered. So much of what we are is contained within how we say and think of things. I think that a universal language would not lend well to the survival of the human race.