Monday 30 May 2011

Amondawa Time

Several sources report on Professor Chris Sinha's paper, When Time is not Space: The social and linguistic construction of time intervals
and temporal event relations in an Amazonian culture.
, which discusses the nature of the time as space metaphor in the Amondawa Language:

Notable points:
  • Both Metro and PressTV report the discovery of this tribe, rather than the analysis that they lack an abstract concept of time. This is contrary to The Sun's report that they were "first contacted by the outside world in 1986".
  • PressTV independently refer to the Amondawa as a "Primitive Tribe"
  • The Sun points out that "They have learned Portuguese and there are fears their own language is dying."
  • Metro link this story to the story of the last two Ayapeneco Speakers
  • The BBC Article also includes the views of Pierre Pica, (mentioned on this blog recently, regarding Mundurucu perceptions of Geometry)
  • The BBC Article mentions that although they don't map events in time to passage through space, "When the Amondawa learn Portuguese ... they have no problem acquiring and using these mappings from the language."

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