Otherwords

- Is it possible that we all, humans and aliens alike, experience time differently?

This is a linguistic show, not a physics show, so we're not talking about time and the effects of speed and gra on the relative movement of time But like physics, linguistic too has a theory of relativity and it was on full display in the movie "Arrival".

Linguist, Dr.

Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, deciphers the language of the alien heptapods.

By learning the looping written built of ink blot logograms, Dr.

Banks begins to experience time the way the aliens do, non-linearly all at once.

The hotly contested Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, proposes that the language you speak affects how you think and your perception of the world So if your language has no past, present, or future, like Heptapod B, you just might learn to see time that way, at least in the world of a Hollywood blockbuster.

In the real world, whether you intuitively think of the future as up, down, ahead left, right, or even east, west does depend on what language you But does that mean you'r limited to understanding things in one way, that your language d whether time can only be linear or cyclical, or a Jeremy Bearimy?

Is time a social construct?

I'm Dr.

Erica Brozovsky and this is "Other Words."

(uncanny, funky music) - [Announcer] "Other Words."

- Linguists have been arguing about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for decades.

The strong theory, called linguistic determinism, claims that your nativ language limits and determines your worldview in how you think.

Essentially, it states that if your language lacks vocabulary or grammar to communicate a concept, then you are unable to even conceptualize it.

Whorf studied Hopi, a Uto-Azteca spoken by a people indigenous to what is now the Southwestern United States.

He argued that Hopi didn't have the words or grammar to refer to what we call time and as such had "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equa out of a future, through the present, into a past."

And he used this time premise to support his theory.

Many thought it meant that the H he had no concept of time.

To be sure, they definitely do as made abundantly clear in the 600 page tome "Hopi Time" that linguist Ekkehart Malotki published in 1983.

The plot of "Arrival" is grounde in linguistic determinism.

In the film, learning Heptapod B completely rewired Banks' brain and therefore worldview such that it changed her perception of time.

She even had memories of the fut Again, that's Hollywood.

In the real world, linguistic de has been discredited by numerous and largely abandoned.

The weak theory of linguistic re views your native tongue not as but as a lens through which you see the world, theorizing that your language in your perception and understandin Now how much it influences or if the influence is statistically significant is inconclusive.

But many, perhaps most linguists would agree that at som level our language does impact the way we think about things and therefore the way we talk ab and one thing we talk about a lo The word for time is one of, if not the most commonly used noun in a language.

This is true of time, tiempo, zaman or vakit, shijan, zeit or Mal, (speaks in Russian) and more.

Now, whether or not we understan fundamentally differently is unc but we sure do talk about it dif Think for a moment about how you or spatially construct time.

I think of a history book timeli where the past is on the left and we move towards the right as time progresses, and I gesture left for th past and right for the future.

I might talk about movin forward in time into the future and backward to the past.

We're not even gonna start on "Back to the Future."

(car engine zooms) We have phrases like, "You have your whole life ahead of you," or, "the past is behind us."

In Swedish, the literal translation of the word for future, framtid, is front ti This makes sense to English spea because we imagine the future is something ahead of us that we walk towards, but maybe we're just used to the idea because that's the way our language describes it.

But could there be other ways to describe the direction of tim If you're a native English or Swedish speaker, you probably gesture and imagine time similarly to the way that I do.

But what about if your native language reads right to left?

(uncanny music If you speak Arabic or Hebrew, your timeline might be right to And in both languages when you reference the past, you talk about what is before yo (speaks in foreign language) and the words for the future to what is behind.

For the Aymara people, indigenous to the Andes of South the future is also behind.

The Aymara word nayra means I, and can be used to refer to things both physically in front of you, like your eyes, and events that happened in the Nayra mara means last year.

Qhipa refers to back or behind.

It is temporally progressive.

Qhipa mara is next year and qhipuru is a future day.

And the language and gestures al The Aymara indicate forward to discuss the past and behind to discuss the future In Vietnamese, gesturing forward to refer to the past is also common, which aligns with the word for before, literally meaning in front of, and after literally meaning behi And unlike in Aymara where time is stationary and a person moves backwards towards the future, in Vietnamese, a person is stati and the future moves toward the person from behind, passes the person and then becomes the past in front.

Simple, right?

Here's an example If we are moving on th timeline, we're getting closer to the holidays or the deadline, which is a fixed point.

But if we are stationary and time is moving, the holidays or deadline are creeping up on us.

So the past and future can be left or right, right or left, front and back, or back in front.

But what about on the vertical a We don't really speak much about time vertically in English.

This is the here and now.

And I guess traditions can be ha to the next generation.

And perhaps you can move meeting up, which means earlier, as opposed to back, which means But verticality is not the stand when it comes to time in English It is, however, in Mandarin.

It was traditionally written vertically right to left, though nowadays is typically horizontal, left to right.

And in Mandarin the past is up, and the future is down, xia.

And let me tell you, I mix it up all the time.

Next week, (speaks in foreign la Last week, (speaks in foreign la Upstairs, (speaks in foreign lan Downstairs, (speaks in foreign l Did I mess them up?

(speaks in foreign language), yes.

Will I probably do it again?

(speaks in foreign language) als But if I were a native speaker, it would be instinctual.

In Malagasy spoken in Madagascar the past is in front, taloha, and the future behind, aoriana.

But you can also speak of time v ambony, up; ambany, down.

Up in context of next and down for last or past, though apparently sometimes this can be reversed with up being passed and down be when you're thinking about time on a calendar.

There's always exceptions.

And for the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea, time flows uphill.

In their mountainous region, the past is downhill, potentially because their ancestors climbed up from the lowlands.

And the future is uphill to the source of their river.

Facing uphill and talking about they would gesture backwards.

But turn around, and now the past is in front.

However, when inside a home, the Yupno gesture towards the door for the past and away for the future no matter if the house faces uphill or down.

Kuuk Thaayorre, a common languag by the Thaayorre people of Austr represents time based on cardinal directions, with the past in the east where the sun rises and the future in the west where the sun sets.

So in referring to the past, it depends on which direction you're facing as to how you'll p And speakers always know which direction they're facing, unlike most other cultures or la that don't prioritize cardinal d I think that's east.

All this to say that there's no one right way to conceptualize time.

Your future could go in any dire And we know all this because linguists and anthropologists have conducted numerous cross-cultural studies, Spanish and Swedish speakers measuring time passed in different dimensions, Hebrew and English speakers organizing pictures right to left or left to right, Dutch speakers judging temporal phrases written normally, rotated or mirror image, Mandarin and English bilingual showing aptitude for time both horizontally and v and dozens of others.

And the results, some replicable, others not yet, do show that participants had a slight bias for the way of conceptualizing t that their native language showe and that it might take slightly more mental energy to think of time in a different So while we can fairly easily learn to conceptualize time differently than is mos common in our primary language, the weak version of a Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, linguistic relativity, just may have legs to stand on.

Either way, our differing time perspectives highlight the variability across that make learning about other languages so fascinating.

(bell ringing) Oops.

Looks like our time is up.