{"id":7237,"date":"2012-06-30T17:06:40","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T17:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=7237"},"modified":"2012-06-30T17:06:40","modified_gmt":"2012-06-30T17:06:40","slug":"the-future-is-behind-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=7237","title":{"rendered":"The future is behind you"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to an interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/ngm.nationalgeographic.com\/2012\/07\/vanishing-languages\/rymer-text\">article<\/a> I came across today, in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/writing\/tuvan.php\">Tuvan (\u0422\u044b\u0432\u0430 \u0434\u044b\u043b)<\/a>, a Turkic language spoken in the Republic of Tuva in southern Siberia, the future is behind you and the past is in front of you. Which makes sense as you can &#8216;see&#8217; the past, or at least remember it, but you can&#8217;t see the future.<\/p>\n<p>In Chinese languages time is described as flowing vertically in some contexts, so the past is above you and the future below you. In Mandarin, for example, last week is \u4e0a\u500b\u6708 [\u4e0a\u4e2a\u6708] (sh\u00e0ng g\u00e8 yu\u00e8) and next month is \u4e0b\u500b\u6708 [\u4e0b\u4e2a\u6708] (xi\u00e0 g\u00e8 yu\u00e8), or &#8216;up\/above month&#8217; and &#8216;down\/below month&#8217;. <\/p>\n<p>Do any other languages describe the past as being in front of or above you and the future as being behind or below you? Or are there other was to describe the flow of time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to an interesting article I came across today, in Tuvan (\u0422\u044b\u0432\u0430 \u0434\u044b\u043b), a Turkic language spoken in the Republic of Tuva in southern Siberia, the future is behind you and the past is in front of you. Which makes sense as you can &#8216;see&#8217; the past, or at least remember it, but you can&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,117,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese","category-grammar","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}