What I find morally reprehensible is paywalling research that was taxpayer funded - I didn't know about this approach, so thank you several times over for mentioning it!
For example, telling time in Norwegian took me viewing time differently. English tends to place importance on the last whole hour that passed: Half past six, six thirty-five, six twenty. It isn't until we approach the next whole hour that we give it any credit: Quarter 'til seven.
Norwegian, on the other hand, seems to focus more on the "now" and the future, orientated around the nearest 15-minute mark and the next whole hour, only focusing on the hour that has passed for the first 15 minute. it is quite possible I've flubbed on the exact phrasing: While my Norwegian is on the upper end of adequate and passed the state tests, I am still far from truly fluent
6:20? Ten 'til half seven.
6:30? Half seven.
6:35? Five over half seven.
This is the same in my language where one might say "quarter of the ninth". The idea is that [00:00,01:00) is the first hour so [08:00,09:00) is the ninth hour.
Actually "viertel vor neun" means 8:45 (literall "quater before nine"), while "viertel neun" means 8:15.
Use seems to be different by region. I once met somebody from western germany who was late by half an hour as he was not familiar with the "viertel neun" semantics. He claimed that only eastern germans would use that term.
I grew up being taught how to say "half past or ten to" in school, but I think people stopped doing it when digital clocks became cheap and ubiquitous (in the 90s).
> The first thing I learned in the US: nobody says half past or ten to or any of those things.
I hear people say those all the time. Somewhat less with people under 30 or so.
> They only make sense on analog round clocks.
Actually, 10 minutes til <hour> makes perfect sense as a description of time independent of any mechanism of displaying the time.
It's not a natural way to read a digital clock, but not all discussion of time proceeds from reading clocks. Also, analog round wall clocks (and watches, and digital faces for smart watches that simulate them) still exist, and aren't that uncommon, taken together.
Yes we do. What we don't do is the German- we don't say "halb sechs" (half to six, 5:30). We would say "half past five".
Many people are used to telling precise time from being insanely overworked all the time, so you need to say it is precisely 5:33 because 5:27 is a world of difference.
FWIW I once missed a flight because I remembered that my flight was at "half past" and there was a flight to the same destination at 6:25am and at 6:30am. At the same terminal. On different gates.
Didn't even keep reading the board after I spotted the 6:25 flight. It was the wrong one.
I think that's beside the point though. I think the point being presented is more: if you are visualizing what time it is in your head, what is the visual representation of time that you have, as presented by your language? In english, if it's 4:23, I feel as though I'm "in" the 4:00 hour, 23 minutes past it. 4:45? Well then I feel like I'm still "in" the 4:00 hour but now 45 minutes into it. Even 4:59 still feels like the 4:00 hour!
The very construct of how a different language presents that time may cause that perception to differ. At least that's how I think of it.
Dunno why you're being downvoted. American here and I honestly can't remember the last time I've heard "half past" or "quarter til", and I don't think I've ever said it. It's essentially always "five thirty" or "six forty five".
It's probably mostly a British thing. We use it a lot in Australia too - 'twenty to four' 'half past nine' - probably a little less common than saying it like 'six thirty' or 'two twenty-five' though.
In English we have expressions like "a quarter till five" too. But usually, everything up to and including the half-hour is reckoned in terms of the past whole hour.
To make it slightly more ambiguous you could say "quarter till", but I suppose to know that you'd have to know basically know that the next hour is 5 in your example, although a scenario could exist where you know how much time till the next hour but not what the current time is.
> Half past six, six thirty-five, six twenty. It isn't until we approach the next whole hour that we give it any credit: Quarter 'til seven.
It's sometime amusing to use the "half past" or "quarter to" form but not with whole hours. E.g., if someone asks the time at 6:35, you say "quarter to 6:50" or "half past 6:05". It can perplex people. (Best to only do this with people who already know you are a twit...).
Why is the new generation not using exact time like 6:45 5:30 etc? It is very confusing for non english speaker.Because we have to convert half to 30 and past to past and hour. Hmmm.... in recent trip two times is missed correct time and asked 6:45 or 7:15 tell me exact time. Is it very difficult for the people who are used say in work like half past seven to say 7:30 ?
Even more confusing is when people don't give an indication of which side of the hour they're talking about. I grew up speaking Canadian English, and was completely lost when I asked a Brit for the time and was told "Quarter four".
In old-ish French (spoken by my grandparents' generation in some parts of Belgium), you can still hear "la demie de 2 heures" and "le quart de 7 heures", which directly translate to "the half of 2 hours" and "the quarter of 7 hours". They in fact mean 1:30 and 6:45! (am or pm depending on the context).
Also in current Dutch, at least as spoken in Belgium aka Flamish, we say "half twee" which means "half two" and refers to 1:30.
It's not uncommon in some areas of the UK to swallow the "to", basically poor diction, which to the untrained ear it would sound as "quart'a four". It doesn't happen with "past", but then people often miss off the hour and just say "quarter past".
In Russian as I was taught in high-school they refer to the coming hour, like "15 minutes of 3" is 02h15.
> Why is the new generation not using exact time like 6:45 5:30 etc? It is very confusing for non english speaker
I completely understand why it is confusing. It isn't limited to younger folks, however. The reason for this is simply because exact time often doesn't matter.
I don't know if you can do it in Norwegian, but in colloquial Polish it's possible to specify how much time will pass until the next full hour without specifying what hour it is.
So, it's possible to say, for instance: „Jest dwadzieścia po” [It is twenty past X] or „Jest za dziesięć wpół do” [It is ten till half X], regarding your first example.
I know it is possible in English, and one assumes the other know the whole hour one is referring to. I'm not sure about Norwegian - that bit isn't something that has cropped up in my personal vocabulary yet. :)
Interesting. Never really noticed any effects of that, however. On the other hand, in Russian there is no distinct time metaphor - it can be a short pause, it can be a small break.
That was an interesting read. But now my vision’s gone all pink because of the bright green background—looking at the world through rose-coloured lenses, I suppose.
This is the premise of the movie indeed, language shape your perception of everything around you. If you missed it, you absolutely need to see it. It's the best SF movie of the decade.
As a multi(poly?)lingual person I had never consciously thought of this but after going over every language I know I can see, I perceive time in distance, volume as well as sizes.
Interestingly a couple of languages I know depict time in distance as well as sizes depending on the context.
"Monolingual" is the standard term in linguistics. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone using the term "unilingual". (I get that you want to mix Latin with Latin, but that's not how language works — especially not when it's borrowed into a language. I notice you also pluralize "monoglots" in English rather than Greek...)
Furthermore, the distinction in linguistics between "-glot" and "-lingual" is that "-lingual" is used in reference to native language(s) whereas "-glot" is used about the languages a person is able to speak at a given level without them necessarily being native languages.
So — to a linguist at least — you can be a monolingual polyglot if you have one native language but e.g. conversational knowledge of 4 other languages.
Do you "perceive time" or do you "express time". As a multilingual person myself. I don't "think in a language". I "think" in something innate which can't be described as any language I know. The thoughts are formed instantly and then I simply express them in the language the other party will understand. Almost automatically.
I don't have to work to "translate" between these innate collections of ideas to spoken language, it happens automatically.
Some people tell me their inner thoughts are in a certain language, but that's not the case for me.
So I would like a clarification. Do you "think in a language"?
I do think in a language but that changes based on situations too. For abstract thoughts I think in English, for planning thoughts I think in another language, etc. It is not a conscious choice, my brain somehow picks a language for thought
At first glance, his is too naive a conclusion. This isn't simply language-specific, it is further locale-specific in addition to simply the language, here's why:
Ahorita in Spanish (USA) means something else from Spanish (Nicaragua) for example. If a Greyhound bus driver were to use that word to indicate the bus is departing "Ahorita", I would assume that to mean the next 10-15 minutes whereas in Nicaragua, I would have no idea if it means 10 minutes, 30 minutes or even 60 minutes, so my follow-up question would be, "Do you mean 15 minutes or less?" To me, this is more a cultural thing, not a linguistic thing since in fact the language in use is the same, i.e. Spanish. As another example, "later" (EN-US) is not the same as in EN-IN.
Or maybe I'm missing the point of the research entirely ...
Funny, in Mexico we use a lot "Ahorita" too, which it's just the diminutive for "Ahora" ("Right Now" in English). The word is very ambiguous here, it can mean "Right now" or "In a few minutes/hours/days" or if used sarcastically "Never".
Edit: ohh my gosh I just remembered another case where it's used for past events:
No, you're talking about dialects. Both instances being Spanish-speaking, they're (according to this research) going to think of "how much time something takes" in a volumetric fashion, whereas English speakers tend to think of that more linearly.
The research suggests that the language you're using in a given context may control how you see that notion, in that context.
As being bilingual in Italian and English, this seems … contrived to me. I don't believe I perceive time any differently when I speak one language or the other: I simply learned the idiomatic way to say it in that language. Same thing with using different prepositions: just because I use a different preposition in one language doesn't change the way I perceive the reality or relations of that situation.
Yeah, I really don't get how these people got "they have a different experience of time" from this result. It's more a matter of "the language you happen to be using at any given time controls which 'concept' of its passage feels more natural," isn't it?
There aren't much differences from each other so its probably so minimal that you might not be able to notice it. So it makes sense that you'd write your comment.
I took an intro linguistics class that focused a lot (like, weirdly more than I expected) on linguistic relativity, or the idea that the language you use affects your perception of reality.
It's one of the things I'm really hoping neuroscience can answer better before I die, because honestly the class gave me the impression that the entire field is incredibly contrived stuff like this.
My suspicion is that there's significant truth to it, but we still have such an awful understanding of cognition that almost all testable hypotheses we can imagine re: linguistic relativity are hopelessly naive. The only one that seemed really well founded to me was that Russian speakers distinguish shades of blue better because they have separate "light blue" and "dark blue" colors.
I think about it from the perspective of computing, when you learn jargon, are you just learning an idiom, or are you learning the model through which you will think? It's definitely the latter to some extent.
In my family, we have the eternal 'coming in five minutes', which is never five minutes, but which may be anywhere from 12 minutes to never. Essentially it's a way of putting a future task on a queue which will be checked at an indeterminate time in the future. This doesn't exactly reflect a precise parsing of the phrase, which might be tempting for a linguist, but I do think that the way you express yourself in language and the way that language is understood by others affects the way you think and behave. The eternal five minutes definitely has a habit of making us late.
Huh, that is interesting. Another example of that from Italian is that word for cranberry and blueberry are the same word. I had never thought of them being particularly similar but many Italians I asked said they're so similar that they don't even distinguish them in their head.
If my wife tells me she ordered pizza for dinner, that use of language lets me "see" an hour into the future when a delivery person will arrive with a couple flat boxes and a plastic bag holding a soda bottle.
Central to the premise of the movie is that in the movie-universe, time is not linear but a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff; you just need to learn Heptapod in order to Sapir-Whorf your way into realizing it.
Time probably is linear for us in the real world, or else can only be perceived as linear by us wholly corporeal beings. Unless Roger Penrose is right and we have wibbly-wobbly, quantum-wantum stuff going on in our brains, which I doubt.
And other times you can "see" w/o finding anything.
In Brazil, when you were supposed to meet a friend at a certain time and they aren't there, you call/text them and ask where they are. They'll usually say: "já estou saindo" (I'm leaving already [from their house]), but according to the cultural norms, this actually often means "I haven't left yet and I'm getting ready, or thinking about getting ready".
Likewise, if you're out and about, and pass by some acquaintances, you make quick chit-chat to be nice and then make plans to get together next weekend. Both parties generally know this will not happen, and it's only being said for appearances.
This leads to a joke I like to imagine where situation 2 leads to situation 1. That is, "let's meet up next weekend!" and the response, "Ok, I'm leaving my house already". Everyone knows it's BS but they say it anyways.
Haven't watched the movie but I'm vaguely familiar with the plot and I'm a linguist (who did a lot of cognitive linguistics during my time at the university). The movie is based around the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis[0] (aka. linguistic determinism) which has been disproven time and time again. However, there seems to be at least some truth to the weaker version (aka. linguistic relativity) but it's still hotly debated to what extent and in which areas.
The [0] study itself said in its introduction "Whereas previous neuroimaging studies have revealed differential activation patterns during reading processes [...], the question remains whether these differences are derived from culture characteristics rather than ethnic or hereditary factors (1, 9)." but does not give any information about the races the two studied groups.
The Chinese speaker group is most likely made exclusively of Han people while the English one may be racially more diverse but probably mostly non East-Asian people. So basically it compares groups that have an average IQ difference of at least 5 points and that may explain the math advantage of Chinese "speaker".
To avoid that issue this kind of study should use groups of people of some A origin rise in A and B language environment (like Asian Born Chinese speaking exclusively English vs Chinese speaker from China).
Interesting. This appears to bolster the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[1] which has been the subject of a fair degree of criticism[2], particularly from Steven Pinker.
Idk, I do have different personalities in my two native languages, so I suppose the different mental makeup could affect things.
But I'm not sure how much of this hypothetical difference is due to cultural differences assimilated into each part of my mind through differences in exposure via the two languages, vs the languages themselves. A worthwhile distinction imo.
I am confused by what the article says. At least in Spain we don't use volumetric relative measures for time (big/small) but linear ("corto"/"largo", short/long). This is particularly true when for the examples in the article ("duración" duration: "larga duración" o "corta duración"; "wedding", a "big wedding" is a wedding with a lot of people, a "long wedding" is a wedding that takes a lot of time). The only case that might be different is that in Spanish it is common to use "mucho/poco" (a lot, little) as an adverb with "durar" ("to last") as in "sth lasts a lot" as opposed "sth lasts long" or "cuanto dura?" ("how much it lasts/takes?")
As other pointed out, the "now" that blends into the future is maybe a more interesting feature of how time is understood in Spanish vs other languages.
It is probably something to do with cultural habits in different geographic areas, not necessarily language. I moved from an English speaking region (Ontario, Canada) to another English speaking region (British Columbia, Canada) 5,000 km away. In BC people seem to measure distance using time but in Ontario they use distance. In Ontario they will say that a town is 150 km away but in BC they say that a town is 45 minutes away. Possibly this has to do with the mountainous terrain of BC which restricts your travel routes and speed, while Ontario is relatively flat, allows many different routes between point A and B, and you can speed without dying.
On the other hand, I also speak Russian, and switch between Russian and English several times per day. When I speak/think in Russian I tend to not worry about the time order of things that I speak about because Russian has few verb tenses and makes it easy to function in an eternal now where actions are either ongoing or completed. Good for getting an overall perspective on things.
Albertan here; we're flat and our roads are straight, but we also measure distances by travel time, whether in the city ("I live 20 minutes from the mall") or across the province ("Calgary is three hours from Edmonton").
I suspect that it's a western thing more than a terrain thing. I wonder if that applies to the western USA as well?
Another interesting thing that I've noticed is that Europeans and North Americans have a very different concept of historical time and relative distance. To me, a building that has stood for 100 years is OLD, and 200km (Somewhere that's "about an hour and a half to two hours away") is a day trip that's nothing out of the ordinary. When I was in the UK, I noticed that people held the opposite view - 100 years ago was just yesterday, relatively speaking, while traveling 200km for a day trip was inconceivable.
as a european, in canada and the US I was constantly confused by directions. america uses street names and cardinal directions (turn north on I-??? then west on ...). europeans think in terms of sequences of towns (to get to munich I must drive on the autobahn via Stuttgart, Ulm, Augsburg).
I once travelled from toronto to chicago by car and decided to write down my own directions from google maps because I felt the ones provided were useless. Boy, was I lost when I didnt see a roadsign for windsor/detroit.
Here's a thought: the reason for the difference is due to how New World cities were artificially made rectangular whereas the Old World cities have a concentric circles growing out feel to them.
Go on Google Maps and look at a city like Montreal and you'll see that the streets are very rectangular.
Look at a city like Paris and you'll see a spiderweb instead of rectangles.
In the UK Google Maps does road numbers wrong. So A4042 should be "ay four o four two" but Maps says the less efficient "ay four thousand and forty-two" (it's also wrong, it's a code not a number; like calling 0b20 "twenty").
Another aspect may be the influence of the States in Western Canada. Time is understandable to both Canadians/foreigners. Kilometres, not necessarily.
In Ireland, we went metric in the 1980s, but people still measured distances in miles until the road signs went fully metric about 15 years ago. Now (older) people measure distances in time, because they can't remember the distance in miles and can't grep kms.
I'm from Boston, and I think it's most common to ask in distance, and answer in time. "How far is it?" "20 minutes." I'm a map geek and often answer in distance, which often prompts, "And about how far is that? Like 20 minutes?"
Yeah, my comment was also in the line of wondering if there are any other Spanish speaking communities where the big/small for time actually exists or if it was common in latin America or so...
W.r.t language, culture and thought an interesting experience for me has been to learn German (been living in Berlin for 5 years). Germans have this reputation for being "rational", "organized", etc and while like any stereotype that is only true in a very limited way, the language shows a lot of this.
In particular, I find this in the grammar structure, where depending on tense, nesting of verbs, etc. the verb always has to go on a very specific position (often at the end). As a foreigner I often struggle with this, because it forces you to build the whole sentence in your head before you start speaking. You can not add stuff "on the way" because then you would have needed to put the verb in a different position. Of course my language is not very good, but I noticed that even native speakers make very small pauses between sentences. Likewise, as a listener, you should really not interrupt, often because vital information (e.g the verb) comes often at the end. This is also very ingrained in the culture (German kids are really told that its a total no-no to interrupt someone). In general, due to all this, I feel that discussions in German at least feel very rational and ideas are often eloquently and effectively conveyed.
In contrast, the Spanish grammar is completely flexible and words can be reordered very flexibly to convey different emphasis and subtle differences in subtext. One can add nested sentences forever in and endless ramble and often authors in both sides of the Atlantic use this with a great poetic effect. On the other hand, this means that arguments can be often expressed in much more chaotic manner, thinking along the way and just adding stuff as it comes to your mind. I am from the south of Spain, where people also add funny metaphors, remarks and comparisons all the time. Listeners will unapologetically interrupt you when they see fit, turning the discussion into a verbal war full of hyperbole and humor, that is a lyrical as it is not rational.
I'm Mexican and everything you said about Spanish Spanish seems to me to also hold for Mexican Spanish. I wouldn't be surprised if someone Swedes showed up now saying the article is also wrong about Swedish. :)
I would suggest that the study reinforces that bilingual & polyglots naturalise other ways of thinking, or contexts for thinking, and that is for the brain, what habitualised exercise is for the body.
I don't know what the standards of research in experimental psychology are, but this term project paper ended up a bit contrived. We took some superficial vocabulary characteristics of two languages (of which native speakers probably aren't even mindful) and somehow managed to distort this into a relativistic theory of language-based time perception that manages to prove that bilingual speakers have Neo-like abilities to transcend time, almost moving into 'What the bleep do we know' territory.
I wonder if these differences are inherent in languages or if its just how each language is popularly used, and that say, Italian and English could both be used to mean , exactly, the same things, but to say the same thing in English speaking it in Italian it would be, while correct Italian, sound really weird to Italian speakers who are both, FUCKING RETARDED, and only used to hearing pop Italian.
This reminded me of an interesting example of "a difference experience of time". There is a tribe in South America, whose language use describes the future as being "behind" them. When they talk about their ancestors they gesture waving behind their back, and for their descendants (children, grandchildren), they gesture in front of them. To me, that's a clear example of how language can shape people's experience of time. (And also makes me think about "spatial metaphors" to describe time, which is what a clock is essentially..)
If I paraphrase the results of the research: Researcher finds that bilingual folks express numbers in different ways depending on the language they use. So they experience numbers differently.
The jump to the conclusion is certain far-fetched, and it's a question of habit, practice and context rather than "experiencing" anything differently.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadIf you feel that this is morally reprehensible, you might also be able to find it from your nearest university library.
For example, telling time in Norwegian took me viewing time differently. English tends to place importance on the last whole hour that passed: Half past six, six thirty-five, six twenty. It isn't until we approach the next whole hour that we give it any credit: Quarter 'til seven.
Norwegian, on the other hand, seems to focus more on the "now" and the future, orientated around the nearest 15-minute mark and the next whole hour, only focusing on the hour that has passed for the first 15 minute. it is quite possible I've flubbed on the exact phrasing: While my Norwegian is on the upper end of adequate and passed the state tests, I am still far from truly fluent
6:20? Ten 'til half seven. 6:30? Half seven. 6:35? Five over half seven.
Use seems to be different by region. I once met somebody from western germany who was late by half an hour as he was not familiar with the "viertel neun" semantics. He claimed that only eastern germans would use that term.
What people say is stuff like "six twenty", "four fiftyfive" etc
I hear people say those all the time. Somewhat less with people under 30 or so.
> They only make sense on analog round clocks.
Actually, 10 minutes til <hour> makes perfect sense as a description of time independent of any mechanism of displaying the time.
It's not a natural way to read a digital clock, but not all discussion of time proceeds from reading clocks. Also, analog round wall clocks (and watches, and digital faces for smart watches that simulate them) still exist, and aren't that uncommon, taken together.
Many people are used to telling precise time from being insanely overworked all the time, so you need to say it is precisely 5:33 because 5:27 is a world of difference.
Didn't even keep reading the board after I spotted the 6:25 flight. It was the wrong one.
The very construct of how a different language presents that time may cause that perception to differ. At least that's how I think of it.
It's sometime amusing to use the "half past" or "quarter to" form but not with whole hours. E.g., if someone asks the time at 6:35, you say "quarter to 6:50" or "half past 6:05". It can perplex people. (Best to only do this with people who already know you are a twit...).
Is that 3:45, 4:15, or .25*4=1?
Also in current Dutch, at least as spoken in Belgium aka Flamish, we say "half twee" which means "half two" and refers to 1:30.
In Russian as I was taught in high-school they refer to the coming hour, like "15 minutes of 3" is 02h15.
New generation? My grandparents said things like "half past" and "quarter till" and they were born 100+ years ago.
I completely understand why it is confusing. It isn't limited to younger folks, however. The reason for this is simply because exact time often doesn't matter.
So, it's possible to say, for instance: „Jest dwadzieścia po” [It is twenty past X] or „Jest za dziesięć wpół do” [It is ten till half X], regarding your first example.
http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/entish.htm
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
Interestingly a couple of languages I know depict time in distance as well as sizes depending on the context.
Except when they say (yuck!!) "monolingual" -- a horrible neologism that of course isn't.
Furthermore, the distinction in linguistics between "-glot" and "-lingual" is that "-lingual" is used in reference to native language(s) whereas "-glot" is used about the languages a person is able to speak at a given level without them necessarily being native languages.
So — to a linguist at least — you can be a monolingual polyglot if you have one native language but e.g. conversational knowledge of 4 other languages.
I don't have to work to "translate" between these innate collections of ideas to spoken language, it happens automatically.
Some people tell me their inner thoughts are in a certain language, but that's not the case for me.
So I would like a clarification. Do you "think in a language"?
Ahorita in Spanish (USA) means something else from Spanish (Nicaragua) for example. If a Greyhound bus driver were to use that word to indicate the bus is departing "Ahorita", I would assume that to mean the next 10-15 minutes whereas in Nicaragua, I would have no idea if it means 10 minutes, 30 minutes or even 60 minutes, so my follow-up question would be, "Do you mean 15 minutes or less?" To me, this is more a cultural thing, not a linguistic thing since in fact the language in use is the same, i.e. Spanish. As another example, "later" (EN-US) is not the same as in EN-IN.
Or maybe I'm missing the point of the research entirely ...
Edit: ohh my gosh I just remembered another case where it's used for past events:
- Perdí mis llaves (I lost my keys)
- ¿Cuándo? (When?)
- Ahorita (Just a few seconds/minutes ago)
Same in english, no?
Or "shortly". Heard that one a lot. We'll be departing shortly. Which could be 2 minutes or 15 minutes, or something in between.
The research suggests that the language you're using in a given context may control how you see that notion, in that context.
It's one of the things I'm really hoping neuroscience can answer better before I die, because honestly the class gave me the impression that the entire field is incredibly contrived stuff like this.
My suspicion is that there's significant truth to it, but we still have such an awful understanding of cognition that almost all testable hypotheses we can imagine re: linguistic relativity are hopelessly naive. The only one that seemed really well founded to me was that Russian speakers distinguish shades of blue better because they have separate "light blue" and "dark blue" colors.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11759-russian-speaker...
In my family, we have the eternal 'coming in five minutes', which is never five minutes, but which may be anywhere from 12 minutes to never. Essentially it's a way of putting a future task on a queue which will be checked at an indeterminate time in the future. This doesn't exactly reflect a precise parsing of the phrase, which might be tempting for a linguist, but I do think that the way you express yourself in language and the way that language is understood by others affects the way you think and behave. The eternal five minutes definitely has a habit of making us late.
I wonder if there's any truth in what it suggests, or if its just scifi mumbo jumbo.
[1] "see" the future.
Nothing "mumbo jumbo" about it.
Time probably is linear for us in the real world, or else can only be perceived as linear by us wholly corporeal beings. Unless Roger Penrose is right and we have wibbly-wobbly, quantum-wantum stuff going on in our brains, which I doubt.
In Brazil, when you were supposed to meet a friend at a certain time and they aren't there, you call/text them and ask where they are. They'll usually say: "já estou saindo" (I'm leaving already [from their house]), but according to the cultural norms, this actually often means "I haven't left yet and I'm getting ready, or thinking about getting ready".
Likewise, if you're out and about, and pass by some acquaintances, you make quick chit-chat to be nice and then make plans to get together next weekend. Both parties generally know this will not happen, and it's only being said for appearances.
This leads to a joke I like to imagine where situation 2 leads to situation 1. That is, "let's meet up next weekend!" and the response, "Ok, I'm leaving my house already". Everyone knows it's BS but they say it anyways.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Mother tongue may determine maths skills [0]
Does the Language I Speak Influence the Way I Think? [1]
[0]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9422-mother-tongue-ma...
[1]: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/does-language-i-spe...
The Chinese speaker group is most likely made exclusively of Han people while the English one may be racially more diverse but probably mostly non East-Asian people. So basically it compares groups that have an average IQ difference of at least 5 points and that may explain the math advantage of Chinese "speaker".
To avoid that issue this kind of study should use groups of people of some A origin rise in A and B language environment (like Asian Born Chinese speaking exclusively English vs Chinese speaker from China).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
[2] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-criticisms-of-Whorfs...
But I'm not sure how much of this hypothetical difference is due to cultural differences assimilated into each part of my mind through differences in exposure via the two languages, vs the languages themselves. A worthwhile distinction imo.
As other pointed out, the "now" that blends into the future is maybe a more interesting feature of how time is understood in Spanish vs other languages.
On the other hand, I also speak Russian, and switch between Russian and English several times per day. When I speak/think in Russian I tend to not worry about the time order of things that I speak about because Russian has few verb tenses and makes it easy to function in an eternal now where actions are either ongoing or completed. Good for getting an overall perspective on things.
I suspect that it's a western thing more than a terrain thing. I wonder if that applies to the western USA as well?
Another interesting thing that I've noticed is that Europeans and North Americans have a very different concept of historical time and relative distance. To me, a building that has stood for 100 years is OLD, and 200km (Somewhere that's "about an hour and a half to two hours away") is a day trip that's nothing out of the ordinary. When I was in the UK, I noticed that people held the opposite view - 100 years ago was just yesterday, relatively speaking, while traveling 200km for a day trip was inconceivable.
I once travelled from toronto to chicago by car and decided to write down my own directions from google maps because I felt the ones provided were useless. Boy, was I lost when I didnt see a roadsign for windsor/detroit.
Go on Google Maps and look at a city like Montreal and you'll see that the streets are very rectangular.
Look at a city like Paris and you'll see a spiderweb instead of rectangles.
It throws me much more than it should.
In Ireland, we went metric in the 1980s, but people still measured distances in miles until the road signs went fully metric about 15 years ago. Now (older) people measure distances in time, because they can't remember the distance in miles and can't grep kms.
W.r.t language, culture and thought an interesting experience for me has been to learn German (been living in Berlin for 5 years). Germans have this reputation for being "rational", "organized", etc and while like any stereotype that is only true in a very limited way, the language shows a lot of this.
In particular, I find this in the grammar structure, where depending on tense, nesting of verbs, etc. the verb always has to go on a very specific position (often at the end). As a foreigner I often struggle with this, because it forces you to build the whole sentence in your head before you start speaking. You can not add stuff "on the way" because then you would have needed to put the verb in a different position. Of course my language is not very good, but I noticed that even native speakers make very small pauses between sentences. Likewise, as a listener, you should really not interrupt, often because vital information (e.g the verb) comes often at the end. This is also very ingrained in the culture (German kids are really told that its a total no-no to interrupt someone). In general, due to all this, I feel that discussions in German at least feel very rational and ideas are often eloquently and effectively conveyed.
In contrast, the Spanish grammar is completely flexible and words can be reordered very flexibly to convey different emphasis and subtle differences in subtext. One can add nested sentences forever in and endless ramble and often authors in both sides of the Atlantic use this with a great poetic effect. On the other hand, this means that arguments can be often expressed in much more chaotic manner, thinking along the way and just adding stuff as it comes to your mind. I am from the south of Spain, where people also add funny metaphors, remarks and comparisons all the time. Listeners will unapologetically interrupt you when they see fit, turning the discussion into a verbal war full of hyperbole and humor, that is a lyrical as it is not rational.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-unders...
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.a...
6 min TED talk that covers some of the ideas in the book https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healt...
The jump to the conclusion is certain far-fetched, and it's a question of habit, practice and context rather than "experiencing" anything differently.