Let me continue riffing on some of the ideas I shared in “Time, Time and Time.”
Point 2: The way time is expressed in language affects how we understand time
At the forum, the moderator asked the guests a question: What work about time travel has left the deepest impression on you?
My answer was Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, because most science-fiction works about time travel build their imaginings on physics, while Story of Your Life is very unusual: it is based on psycholinguistics.
One key premise in the story is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: our thinking is shaped by language—you speak a certain kind of language, and you become a certain kind of person. From there, the story imagines that the way time is expressed in language affects how we understand time. The aliens in the story use a language capable of expressing the meanings of past, present, and future simultaneously. And once their language transcends time’s linear structure, their thoughts and brains transcend that linear structure as well, allowing them to perceive the past, present, and future all at once.
Actually, the phenomenon that the way time is expressed in language affects how we understand time really does exist in the real world.
I mentioned a study by the Yale economist Keith Chen. Chen proposed that grammatical tense can have a profound effect on our perception of time. Chinese is a tenseless language. We say “It is raining now” and “It may rain tomorrow”; we use certain time words to indicate when something happens, but the verb “rain” itself does not change tense. English, by contrast, is a “strong-tense” language, strictly distinguishing the past, present, and future forms of a verb.
Chen estimated that tense emphasizes the difference between the present and the future, making people who use tense feel that the future is more distant. They tend to believe that their future selves have little connection with their present selves, so their present selves do not need to worry too much about the future.
When a language has no tense, however, people feel that the difference between the present and the future is less pronounced. They tend to bind their present and future selves more tightly together, and make more plans for their future selves.
The survey data were just as Chen predicted: countries that use “strong-tense” languages, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, had the lowest savings rates and retirement savings rates, and the highest smoking rates and rates of risky sexual behavior. Countries with tenseless languages, such as China, had the highest savings rates and retirement savings rates, and the lowest smoking rates and rates of risky sexual behavior. Countries that use “weak-tense” languages, such as Germany, fell neatly between the two.
And that is how language shapes the way we perceive time.
Note
- This article in the “Psychology: New Knowledge Mini-Lesson” series was a short popular-science essay/casual piece written at the time to accompany content related to Zhichao Wei: Psychology: New Knowledge Course. It was published on the now-closed platform Fanfan, and the original link no longer exists.
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