Yes, the material re time, especially, fascinates me. When you say you would "speak it as a Chinese speaker would", do you mean that you would use a phrase translating literally as "up month" for the concept which English has as "next month"? (The idea of the future as above does turn up very slightly in English, in the idea of something 'impending' ie hanging above, which raises whole new notions of the future as something which looms over and then falls on us. :D ) As for me, if I were asked to indicate the future in spatial terms as described in the article I would probably look forward, horizontally, as at something coming towards me, but if I were asked to do it on a piece of paper, I think I would have the past on the left and the future on the right, as in English-language writing.
As well as the spatial representation of time, I wonder about a more general implication - if the strongly tense-marked nature of English verbs cramps (so to speak) English speakers' ideas of time and of the present's relation to the past and the future, or maybe better to say 'cramps the conception of how the verb-action has effect'. And conversely, is there a freedom in time-thinking, or a sense that the past is still strongly connected to the present in languages which don't mark the same way? (Can I ask how it works in Cantonese?)
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When you say you would "speak it as a Chinese speaker would", do you mean that you would use a phrase translating literally as "up month" for the concept which English has as "next month"? (The idea of the future as above does turn up very slightly in English, in the idea of something 'impending' ie hanging above, which raises whole new notions of the future as something which looms over and then falls on us. :D ) As for me, if I were asked to indicate the future in spatial terms as described in the article I would probably look forward, horizontally, as at something coming towards me, but if I were asked to do it on a piece of paper, I think I would have the past on the left and the future on the right, as in English-language writing.
As well as the spatial representation of time, I wonder about a more general implication - if the strongly tense-marked nature of English verbs cramps (so to speak) English speakers' ideas of time and of the present's relation to the past and the future, or maybe better to say 'cramps the conception of how the verb-action has effect'. And conversely, is there a freedom in time-thinking, or a sense that the past is still strongly connected to the present in languages which don't mark the same way? (Can I ask how it works in Cantonese?)