In Quechua, a language of South America, the future is behind us and the past in front of us. And it makes perfect sense: we can see (remember) the past, but not the future. Having a long life behind you means you’re young, while in English it would mean you’re old.
How we break up semantic space — the (imaginary) space of all things that could or do exist, everything that could be done — is absolutely fascinating. Different languages use different categories, metaphors and expressions. If you’re monolingual, or even if you know many languages, but from the same language family and/or roughly the same culture, it might not even occur to you that people could think and speak differently about this. But they do.
Originally, I was going to insert here a rant about navigation schemes on blogs. On some blogs, “next” means “posts from later in time” (“next up on Showtime”) and “previous” means “posts from earlier in time” (“what happened in the previous installment”), and on others, “next” means “the next page of posts you haven’t read” and “previous” means “the previous page of posts you read”. On some, the past is placed to the left and the future to the right, and on others, vice versa. I was going to talk about how this reflects two different metaphors, one of moving through a stack of pages and the other of moving through time, and I was going to tell you how I made my own blog navigation less ambiguous. But instead of all that (which, I realize, I covered in less than one paragraph just now), I found a fun categorization scheme from Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a taxonomy of animals, and apparently kind of influential — granted, having a Wikipedia page isn’t saying much these days. Anyway, these are the different kinds of animals that exist:
- those that belong to the Emperor,
- embalmed ones,
- those that are trained,
- suckling pigs,
- mermaids,
- fabulous ones,
- stray dogs,
- those included in the present classification,
- those that tremble as if they were mad,
- innumerable ones,
- those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
- others,
- those that have just broken a flower vase,
- those that from a long way off look like flies.
The list was taken from here. Borges attributes the taxonomy to an ancient Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, but he was very fond of quasi-scholarly citations, so it’s probably just something he made up. Regardless of origin, I think it’s delightful. It reminds me a bit of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things; while I haven’t read the book, which is about categorization, the title is supposedly a grammatical gender in the aboriginal Dyirbal language.
