A rare language offers clues about how we understand our world
If you were to walk into your home or your office right now, which way would be uphill?
It might seem like an odd question since the most of the spaces we spend our time in have flat, relatively even floors.
But for the 8,000 speakers of a Papua New Guinean language called Yupno, the answer is obvious: Uphill is away from the door - even if the entrance is physically higher than the rest of the room (say, at the top of a ramp).
Researchers from the University of California-San Diego and the University of Chicago recently released a study documenting how speakers of Yupno talk about the space around them. Their findings offer clues about how we all make sense of our physical environment and demonstrate that English is itself bizarre in ways we rarely stop to notice.
Mapping the home
Outdoors, in the steep Yupno Valley, people use the slope of the surrounding hills as a reference, study author Kensy Cooperrider, a cognitive scientist at the University of Chicago, explained. A friend visiting from another village further up the mountain doesn't just come - they come downhill.
According to National Geographic, who where we first saw the story, the team was studying how the Yupno talk about time when they noticed that the up-or-down gestures their interviewees were making didn't necessarily match the physical environment's up-or-down.
The language also uses the idea of uphill/downhill with more than just action verbs. Cooperrider said that if you ask someone to hand you a fruit from the tree, they'll say something like "Hand me that uphill-fruit."
Cooperrider and his team wanted to know if this system also translated into indoor spaces, which are flat-floored and windowless.
They found that Yupno speakers conceptually map the hilly landscape even inside their homes, which traditionally share the same layout.
Yupno talk about moving from the door to the back of the building as moving uphill. You also move uphill if you move away from the center of the hut, occupied by a fireplace running lengthwise, toward the walls.
Almost every language uses some sort of conceptual map to talk about contrasts in space. In English, we tend to think about directional contrasts in relation to our bodies.
"Imagine you go inside a house and someone tells you, 'let's go to the back room,'" Cooperrider explained, in an email to Tech Insider. "What is that work 'back' doing there? What, if anything, does it have to do with the original meaning of back, as in the back of the body?"
Nothing - not really. We're mapping our bodies onto the house.
Other languages use right and left, cardinal directions, or fixed environmental features like landward and seaward.
It's rare, however, that speakers will readjust the map even if it contradicts what may seem like a fixed outside point (for example, the shore).
Space = time
The way we talk about the space around us is a key example of how languages that evolve separately find creative, totally different ways to serve similar functions.
"Humans are incredibly inventive when it comes to when it comes to how we use our most tried-and-true spatial concepts," Kensy explained. "We don't just use them in their most literal, pure senses - we stretch them to mean all kinds of things."
He listed a few other examples in English: We travel "up north" or "down south" and refer to "the head" of the bed and "the foot" of the mountain.
Languages also often use spatial terms to describe abstract concepts. We tell recent graduates that their futures are "ahead" of them, while our pasts are "behind" us. Neither of these are literally true, but it's an essential metaphor. Our culture discusses the passing of time, which is difficult to grasp, by using terms that describe something much more concrete.
Cooperrider and his colleagues published a paper about similar conceptual extension in Yupno in 2009. Yupno speakers conceive of the future as "uphill" and the past as"downhill." That means a speaker talking about the future may gesture forward or backwards depending on where she is in relation to the uphill slope.
His team, Cooperrider added, is interested "how language, culture, and cognition are deeply intertwined," particularly among little-studied indigenous languages.
Of course, if we want to learn more about this complex interplay, we'll have to act fast. Some rare languages are on the verge of disappearing forever. When they do, we'll also lose the chance to discover more about how humans make sense of the world and what we all have in common - no matter how differently it seems we express ourselves.
"One's own metaphors always seem so obvious, so mundane," Cooperrider said. "Of course, the Yupno would likely think that their use of uphill and downhill indoors is pretty mundane, too."