Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the bilingual turn in the study of language and cognition
- 2 Material worlds
- 3 Multidimensional worlds
- 4 Dynamic worlds
- 5 Narrative worlds
- 6 Discursive worlds
- 7 Emotional worlds
- 8 The bilingual mind and what it tells us about language and cognition
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
3 - Multidimensional worlds
Number, time, and space as linguistic systems of symbolic relationships
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the bilingual turn in the study of language and cognition
- 2 Material worlds
- 3 Multidimensional worlds
- 4 Dynamic worlds
- 5 Narrative worlds
- 6 Discursive worlds
- 7 Emotional worlds
- 8 The bilingual mind and what it tells us about language and cognition
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
Numbers were a mystery to me. I was so far behind. It was only in Nairobi, at age ten, that I figured out anything at all about the way time is calculated: minutes, hours, years. In Saudi Arabia the calendar had been Islamic, based on lunar months; Ethiopia maintained an ancient solar calendar. The year was written 1399 in Saudi Arabia, 1972 in Ethiopia, and 1980 in Kenya and everywhere else. In Ethiopia we even had a different clock: sunrise was called one o’clock and noon was called six. (Even within Kenya, people used two systems for telling time, the British and the Swahili). The months, the days – everything was conceived differently. Only in Juja Road Primary School did I begin to figure out what people meant when they referred to precise dates and times.
Ali, 2007: 63Born in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007) grew up with a grandmother who “never learned to tell time at all. All her life, noon was when shadows were short, and your age was measured by rainy seasons. She got by perfectly well with her system” (p. 63). Ali’s (2007) poignant memoir Infidel: My Life traces the transformation of a girl from Mogadishu into a member of the Dutch Parliament, a writer, a political activist, and a spokesperson for the rights of women against militant Islam. Her transition from the world of shadows and rainy seasons to the world we live in, where every second is measured and imbued with significance, is only a small part of the overall account but I find it very touching. It reminds me of my own significantly less dramatic yet still destabilizing transition from the metric system and the Celsius scale to the ever-confusing inches, miles, pounds, gallons, and degrees in Fahrenheit. Today, I know exactly how many pounds I need to lose but I still don’t automatically convert miles into mental distances nor do I use the weather forecast to decide if I should put my coat on to go out. Instead of letting Fahrenheit degrees speak to me, I still look out the window.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Bilingual MindAnd What it Tells Us about Language and Thought, pp. 84 - 125Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014