Reading 11

“In the Aymara language, the future is behind us and the past is in front of us. So, for example, the phrase nayra mara is composed of the word for ‘front’ (which also can refer to ‘eye’ or ‘sight’) and the word for ‘year,’ which means ‘last year.’ Nayra pacha literally means ‘front time’ but refers to a ‘past time.’ To say ‘from now on,’ one says akata qhiparu, literally, ‘this from behind towards,’ and to refer to a ‘future day’ one says qhipüru, literally, ‘behind day.’

“This conceptual metaphor is not restricted to Aymara speakers’ choice of words. When referring to an event in the future, an Aymara speaker might point their thumb over their shoulder. This effect even persists when native Aymara speakers talk in a second language like Andean Spanish.

“Almost all languages represent the future as ahead of us because when we walk or run, we both travel through time and travel forward through space. In the Aymara language, the more important feature of time is what we know and what we don’t. We can see the present and the past; they are laid out before us. We can therefore have direct knowledge of them in a way we can’t know the future—anything we know or believe about the future is based on inference from what we have experienced in the present or the past. The implicit philosophy is that, when making plans for the future, we should take much the same attitude as if we were walking backwards into unknown terrain.”

- William MacAskill, What We Owe The Future (2022)