October 27, 2005 11:36pm

Hey, was in the developmental seminar class and we talked about sociocultural theories today. Some studies said, people using different languages would think differently. I don't know, really.

Then, my instructor said, there's a culture that they don't have the term "future" and maybe they don't have the concept of "future."

Then I said, I don't have tenses in Chinese but still, I have the idea of past, present and future. Just that Chinese expresses the meanings of time in sentence structures and terms such as before and after to denote past, present and future.

Well, after the class, I was thinking why would we say 之前 (of front) to mean before and 之後 (of back) to mean after? And why 前日 (the day in front) to mean the day before yesterday and 後日 (the day in the back) to mean the day after tomorrow?

I mean, hey, this front and back thing depends on where you're looking at. And if the front is in the past and the back is in the future, we're looking back! Not that we turn our heads to look back but we're actually facing the past when we say "the day before" is "the day in front!"

This is really awkward. Why do we look backward instead of to look ahead when we think of time? All we can do is to walk in the direction of time. We simply can't go back. So why do we walk facing the past and not the future?