English Time

Our conception of the world is a set of models created by our minds with the intention of explaining
the universe that surrounds us. In order to communicate, we have created conventional structures
that assign symbols to these models and accordingly we developed the abstract thinking and then
the rhetorical speech. These conventional structures that we often call languages allow us to
perpetuate our models and are the framework of our thinking.
Throughout history, the work of philosophers, scientists and artists has been to create new models,
to develop those which already existed and to integrate them to the imaginary using the language.
Languages have been developed by different people, in different places at different times; therefore,
they describe reality in different ways.
Using dictionaries of different languages that have been created in different moments of
history can be a very good way to analyze the world picture of the people who wrote them, and so,
to discern the world picture of those who spoke that language.
Taking for example a noun that represents one of the most important models, time.
If we look up the word “time” in the dictionary of the English language written by Samuel Johnson
in 1755, we will find:
time  n.S. [tima,Saxon ;tym,Erse]
1.The measure of duration .
This consideration of duration, as set out by certain periods, and marked by certain
measures or epochs, is that, I think, which most properly we call time.
Locke  (An essay concerning human understanding, 1690)
Dr. Samuel Johnson defines time as a measurable physic quantity but he neither talks about its
nature nor about its characteristics. The paradigm of absolute time had not been broken yet, and
time was a perception of human beings that can be measurable.
Traveling 250 years to the future, we find the definition of the noun time in the Oxford
dictionary:
time[mass noun]
1.The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future
regarded as a whole:
travel through space and time
In this definition we find the progressive nature of time and its existence as a part of the universe
instead of a propriety of it, it is seen a persistent place in which we travel each instant to the future.
If we compare the idea that was assigned to the word “time” in 1755 to the modern conception of it,
we discover that humanity (or at least English people) changed of paradigm, from one where the
time was a measure to another where it is a part of the universe.
Now, we are going to compare the English vision of time to the French vision. According to the
dictionary of the French academy time is:
temps[subs.masculin]
1.Milieu indéfini et homogène dans lequel se situent les êtres et les choses et qui est c7aractérisé
par sa double nature, à la fois continuité et succession.
In French, time is a continuous progressive and homogeneous environment where beings and
things exist. This model of time is significantly different from the English one. In English time is
seen as an independent part of the universe, and in French it is the environment that permeates it.
This kind of differences in the ideas assigned to the same word in two different languages is one of
the factors that mark the disparity in the thinking of people of different nations and times.
 Languages are more than groups of signs of assigned sounds are meanings; languages carry
history and culture. One example of this is the way that English has French influence; there was a
time when French was the official language in the English court. On the one hand, his was the
language of the aristocracy, the ones that were rich and ate properly. On the other hand, there were
the lower classes, the farmers who took care of the aristocracy’s cattle without getting a taste of it.
This is why some words for cooked meat, such as pork or beef have French origins and words like
pig and cow have Dutch and English origins; people worked in English but ate and enjoyed in
French. Time has carried history and ideas into language. When we learn one language, not only do
we learn how to communicate with the people that speak it, but we also learn to think in that
language, to use this new framework to generate new ideas and to perceive the world in a different
way; and this is where the pleasure of learning languages lies.