Classical Greek and time = space

[jal]

On Twitter I was caught mansplaining a woman that claimed that classical Greek has a "past in front" metaphore for time (as opposed to the "future in front" in most languages) to which I replied that I found that difficult to believe (it turned out she studied classic Greek). The reason for the latter is that I've always read that until the discovery of Aymara and such languages, which have "past in front", linguists thought that "future in front" was a human universal (since then, there's been languages discovered that have "past is east" or "past is downhill"). However, if classical Greek had a clear "past in front", I would've expected linguists to question the universal of "future in front" much earlier, or not come up with this as a universal at all, hence the mansplaining. However, she (the woman making the initial claim) couldn't recall where she got the information from, and a quick Google didn't turn up anything but some popsci nonsense without any citations, and one line in a linguistic PDF about the time as space methaphore, as a footnote burried in some other stuff saying "It has been claimed that in Classical Greek the past was in front and the future behind, which, however, no longer applies to Modern Greek."

So, my question is: has any of you ever come across the claim that classical Greek has "past in front", and if so, is there any decent linguistic evidence for it? Or perhaps a rebuttal? Because for all I know it could also have been claimed and spread as a kind of meme, without scientific back-up.


JAL

[bradrn]

I managed to track the claim down to the original Linguist List post: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/piperm ... 02137.html. The relevant section is:

3. The Classical Greeks also thought of the future being in back,
i.e. not to be seen from the present:

>In Ancient Greek, opisthe ("behind") also meant "in the future".
Somehow this seems stranger than its correlate, the word prosthe ("in
front, before"), meaning "in the past, before".

The concept is also in the myths:

>In the myth
>of Orpheus, O goes into the underworld to bring back Euridice, which
for a living person, of course, means going into the future. His
undoing is that, as he is leading her out of the underworld, he looks
*back* at her.

Apparently Prof. Peter M. Smith has published in "l'Annee
Philologique" on this, but I have not checked yet.

[jal]

Thanks! Would "ancient Greek" here be the same as "classical Greek"? Or are we talking even older Greek than classical? Also, it looks like a casual observation, as if it's somewhat common knowledge. But there's so little to find elsewhere... Weirdness...


JAL

[Zju]

Isn't English kinda the same in this regard, though? E.g.:
He stood before his house.
He stood before he lied down.

[hwhatting]

The concept is also in the myths:

>In the myth
>of Orpheus, O goes into the underworld to bring back Euridice, which
for a living person, of course, means going into the future. His
undoing is that, as he is leading her out of the underworld, he looks
*back* at her.

The equation of the underworld with "future" doesn't make sense at all. In Greek myth it's a location that you can enter and (rarely) leave, contemporaneous with the world of the living. The "back" is purely spatial - O leads E out of the underworld, i.e. she walks behind him, and he turns around to look at her. There is no basis to derive "ancient Greeks thought of the future as behind them" from this. (I'm not sufficiently qualified to comment on the rest of the argument.)

[bradrn]

The concept is also in the myths:

>In the myth
>of Orpheus, O goes into the underworld to bring back Euridice, which
for a living person, of course, means going into the future. His
undoing is that, as he is leading her out of the underworld, he looks
*back* at her.

The equation of the underworld with "future" doesn't make sense at all. In Greek myth it's a location that you can enter and (rarely) leave, contemporaneous with the world of the living. The "back" is purely spatial - O leads E out of the underworld, i.e. she walks behind him, and he turns around to look at her. There is no basis to derive "ancient Greeks thought of the future as behind them" from this. (I'm not sufficiently qualified to comment on the rest of the argument.)

I tend to agree — it’s not my argument, it’s from the linked post jal was looking for.

[hwhatting]

I tend to agree — it’s not my argument, it’s from the linked post jal was looking for.

Yes, I understood that. Sorry if my way of quoting made it look as if this was your opinion.

[Kuchigakatai]

Isn't English kinda the same in this regard, though? E.g.:
He stood before his house.
He stood before he lied down.

Yeah, I've never managed to quite understand what is so surprising about Aymara. As you say, isn't English "before" an example of this too? Not to mention Latin ante 'in front of' ~ antequam 'before [somebody does something]', post 'after [something], behind' ~ postquam 'after [somebody does something]'.

(Not to deny the existence of ante(ā) 'before, beforehand' (the standalone adverb), post(eā) 'after, afterwards', though.)

EDIT: Wait, aren't we confused about something here?

[jal]

EDIT: Wait, aren't we confused about something here?

I think so, yes. "He stood in front of his house" is purely spatial, the house has a front side, and that's where the "he" is. "He stood before he lied down" is non-spatial and temporal: there are two actions, one, the standing, happening earlier than the second one, the lying down. That's perfectly aligned with a "future in front" metaphore: if the future is in front, the future's future is even more in front, that is, further away. Since the lying is further away into the future than the standing, the standing is before the lying.

Of course, this example is complicated by the fact it is already in the past tense, both the standing and lying are in the past, but the frame of reference is that of the "he" character, so even though the lying down is closer to us, since it has already happened, we still use "before". At least in English, the order of events is what makes us use a certain adverb, not the absolute time:

• He stood before he lied down;
• He is standing before he will lie down;
• He will stand before he will lie down.

So it's important to look at the frame of reference in these cases. Regardless, "ahead" is always the future, "behind" is the past. Things that are behind us no longer bother us, things ahead of us haven't happened yet. In Aymara, that is supposedly reversed: what's ahead has already happened, and what's behind is in the future.

Now, there's been a claim that Ancient/Classical Greek had that same approach as the Aymara, but I'm very skeptical for various reasons, but I don't speak Classical Greek nor have I studied it. So that's why I asked my initial question. It seems that it's indeed "been claimed", but by whom and what their scolarly merits are isn't clear at all.


JAL

[zompist]

"He stood in front of his house" is purely spatial, the house has a front side, and that's where the "he" is. "He stood before he lied down" is non-spatial and temporal: there are two actions, one, the standing, happening earlier than the second one, the lying down. That's perfectly aligned with a "future in front" metaphore: if the future is in front, the future's future is even more in front, that is, further away. Since the lying is further away into the future than the standing, the standing is before the lying.

Mmmmaybe. I don't think this matches how we think about moving in time, but it may show that we have multiple metaphors or viewpoints about time.

Picture a turtle and a rabbit racing, and ourselves watching them from behind:

___ ⚇ ______ == ᴒ ________ == ɣ ________

By your logic, the turtle is closer to us, so we should say it's running "before the rabbit". We don't usually use "before" in a race context, but we can— e.g. "the rabbit is just before the turtle." (Normally we'd use "behind/ahead" in describing races.)

If the rabbit wins, it got to the finish line "before the rabbit". So in a race, at least, being "before" is being farther along in the race. Maybe this is extended to time sequence in general? ("X happened before Y")

On the other hand, we can have multiple metaphors. This one is TIME IS A RACE or TIME IS A RIVER. But there's also what we might call TIME IS A VISTA. Here there is no implied movement, we look "ahead" at the future and "behind" at the past. Your idea would fit in here: lunch is "before" dinner because it appears in the vista in front of dinner, which is farther away in the picture.

But lunch was "before" dinner yesterday too, which means it was farther away from us— behind lunch in the past vista. That conflicts with your idea, but maybe we over-generalize from talking about the future.

Or maybe Zju is right, and for time sequences we happily reverse the flow of time! Nothing says our metaphors have to be consistent.

(BTW, my diagram illustrates yet another metaphor: TIME FLOWS TO THE RIGHT. Presumably this is natural if you write left-to-right; it's also how Western comics work. I was going to use emoji animals, but it turns out the convention for emoji is that animals face left, which would have looked wrong!)

(Also BTW: my metaphor names are not Lakoff & Johnson's, because I seem to have misplaced their book...)

[bradrn]

EDIT: Wait, aren't we confused about something here?

I think so, yes. "He stood in front of his house" is purely spatial, the house has a front side, and that's where the "he" is. "He stood before he lied down" is non-spatial and temporal: there are two actions, one, the standing, happening earlier than the second one, the lying down. That's perfectly aligned with a "future in front" metaphore: if the future is in front, the future's future is even more in front, that is, further away. Since the lying is further away into the future than the standing, the standing is before the lying.

This misses the fact that ‘before’ is etymologically a spatial pronoun. (And still is occasionally: the armies assembled before the city.)

[jal]

Mmmmaybe. I don't think this matches how we think about moving in time, but it may show that we have multiple metaphors or viewpoints about time.

This is an interesting article, but googling a bit there's of course more information to be found. The article describes to viewpoints: an internal one (time is behind and in front of us) and an external one (events move in file).

By your logic, the turtle is closer to us, so we should say it's running "before the rabbit".

I'd say that watching a rabbit and a turtle running, we're talking purely spatialy, not temporaly? Which is by itself interesting, as the rabbit is behind the turtle spatially, but the turtle is behind the rabbit as well. I think here the viewpoint is again important.

We don't usually use "before" in a race context, but we can— e.g. "the rabbit is just before the turtle." (Normally we'd use "behind/ahead" in describing races.)

English has a lot of words for spatial relations, including a bunch of near-synonyms (like "before", which has gotten a more temporal meaning, but originally was spatial as well) and "in front"). But that shouldn't distract us from this discussion.

If the rabbit wins, it got to the finish line "before the rabbit". So in a race, at least, being "before" is being farther along in the race. Maybe this is extended to time sequence in general? ("X happened before Y")

That's clearly the "external viewpoint" the article describes. Viewing time as a file of events, the event of the rabbit crossing the line is ahead of the event of the turtle crossing it.

On the other hand, we can have multiple metaphors. This one is TIME IS A RACE or TIME IS A RIVER. But there's also what we might call TIME IS A VISTA. Here there is no implied movement, we look "ahead" at the future and "behind" at the past.

That's the "internal viewpoint" described.

But lunch was "before" dinner yesterday too, which means it was farther away from us— behind lunch in the past vista. That conflicts with your idea, but maybe we over-generalize from talking about the future.

It conflicts with the first paragraph of what you wrote, but is exactly what I tried to clarify in the second ("Of course, this example is complicated by the fact it is already in the past tense, both the standing and lying are in the past, but the frame of reference is that of the "he" character, so even though the lying down is closer to us, since it has already happened, we still use "before". At least in English, the order of events is what makes us use a certain adverb, not the absolute time").

BTW, my diagram illustrates yet another metaphor: TIME FLOWS TO THE RIGHT. Presumably this is natural if you write left-to-right

The article also mentions this, including the fact that Hebrew speakers reverse the order.


JAL

[jal]

This misses the fact that ‘before’ is etymologically a spatial pronoun. (And still is occasionally: the armies assembled before the city.)

It is, I've never claimed otherwise. But sunchronically, I think they don't compare quite well.


JAL