Once we begin studying a language, we quickly discover ourselves training how one can ask for the time. This will really feel like a pointless train right this moment, when every look at our telephone tells us the hour and minute with precision, however it may be justified as a sensible method of getting the language’s numbers down in a well-known context. But not each tradition’s method of time-telling is equally acquainted: in Tanzania, for instance, so close to the equator that “the solar rises across the identical time each morning, six within the native time zone,” and “everybody’s up and beginning their day at seven. With such a dependable commonplace time-keeper, that winds up being 1:00 Swahili time.”
“Swahili time” is simply one of many ideas launched by Youtuber Joshua Rudder, creator of the channel Nativlang, in the video above.
He additionally touches on the medieval six-hour clocks of Italy; the Thai time-tellers who “depend the hours from one to 6, 4 instances a day”; the traditional Egyptian technique of letting the size of hours themselves develop and contract with the quantity of daylight; the Nahua division of dividing the “daylight day” into 4 elements and the night time into seven; the bewilderingly many Hindustani items of time, from the aayan, ruthu, and masa to the lava, renu, and truti, by which level you get right down to “divisions of microseconds.”
To a natively English-speaking Westerner, few of those methods could really feel significantly intuitive. However most of us, from whichever tradition we could hail, will see a sure sense within the Japanese method of permitting late nights to “stretch to 25 o’clock, twenty-nine o’clock, all the way in which as much as thirty. Possibly you are feeling like for those who’re up previous midnight, it’s not tomorrow but, probably not, and also you haven’t even gone to mattress.” Therefore this prolonged clock, whose final six hours “overlap with what could have been the technical begin of your twenty-four hour day whenever you get up tomorrow” — however, optimistically, don’t overlap onto any early-morning language courses.
Associated content material:
How Clocks Modified Humanity Ceaselessly, Making Us Masters and Slaves of Time
Why Time Appears to Pace Up as We Get Older: What the Analysis Says
The Rarest Sounds Throughout All Human Languages: Be taught What They Are, and How you can Say Them
Was There a First Human Language?: Theories from the Enlightenment By Noam Chomsky
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embrace the Substack publication Books on Cities, the ebook The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
