 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today we're going to look at the direction of time and see if the word arrow can point the way. Time flies like an arrow. We all know that's not literally true, but it's easily understood by any English speaker. It's a way of talking about an abstract, time, in terms of something more concrete, space. Why do we push meetings back or look forward to tomorrow, fall behind schedule, wait a long time, and take a short break? These ways of understanding the world, known as spatiotemporal metaphors, are introduced to us so early that they seem completely natural and objective truths, but in fact, they're different from culture to culture, and looking at them closely can open up all sorts of fascinating avenues to explore. The phrase time's arrow was coined by English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Sir Arthur Eddington in 1928 to describe the asymmetry of time, always flowing from past to future. A similar phrase, arrow of time, had already been used in 1917 colloquially to refer to the ever-flowing nature of time. Eddington had noted that at the microscopic level, processes could be time-symmetric, operating in either direction without breaking any physical laws, but at the macroscopic level, things operated in one direction only, toward the future. For Eddington, this was the result of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. The total entropy of a closed system never decreases over time, or to put it another way, a closed system always moves from order to disorder. Why this asymmetry exists, and why it doesn't on the microscopic level, is still an unsolved question in physics. This arrow of time can be seen in many areas of science, including psychology. We perceive time in only one direction. We know the past, not the future. So the cognitive arrow of time and the language we use to describe it points in one direction. However, as we'll see, that direction is variable. And since we're using an arrow, something that points direction in space, as a metaphor to describe which way time points, we should first have a look at the word arrow, and the arrow as a physical object, and see how it became a symbol, and eventually a metaphor used in both thought and language to construct our understanding of time. The word arrow comes from the Old English Forms Arch and Arwa, which may have been influenced in form by Old Norse, which go back to Proto-Germanic Arquo and Proto-Indo-European Arcoo. The curious thing about the root arcoo is that it seems to have meant bow and or arrow. In the Germanic languages, like English, it produced words with a sense arrow, but in Latin it produced arcus, meaning bow, which came down through French into English, giving us archer and archery, but also arch and arch, because of the bow-like shape these words describe. The word bow, on the other hand, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root baug to bend because of its curved shape. The Latin word for arrow is sagita, of unknown origin, possibly from a pre-Latin Mediterranean language, from which we get the word Sagittarius, the zodiac constellation representing a centaur with a bow and arrow, but we'll come back to this word, astrology, and other forms of predicting the future. The bow and arrow is a very ancient technology. The earliest archaeological evidence of the arrow, which may or may not have been shot from a bow, was found in the Sabudu Cave located in what is now South Africa, in which were also found a number of other technological firsts, such as the earliest bed, the earliest needle, and the earliest compound glue. This arrow dates to about 64,000 years ago, but the earliest conclusive evidence of an arrow meant to be shot from a bow, shown by the groove in its base, dates to about 10,000 years ago. The technology spread worldwide, except perhaps Australia, and was widely used for both hunting and warfare. In terms of archery in warfare in the Western tradition, it can be found in Greek mythology. Heracles and Odysseus are both associated with the bow, and it appears in Homeric battles. But by the later classical period, when formation fighting was predominant, archery in warfare fell out of use in many Greek cities, and was even associated with foreignness. For instance, the Persians used archers. Initially, archery wasn't really a part of Roman warfare either, but later in the history of the Empire, the Romans gradually used auxiliary archers drawn from the parts of the Empire that did have a history in archery in warfare. And it could be said that one of the factors of the collapse of the Western Empire was the threat posed by the devastatingly effective mounted archers of the Huns. During the European Middle Ages, archers became important on the battlefield, but there was a class distinction. The nobility were knights, heavily armored mounted cavalry, because maintaining the equipment for this, including the horse, was very expensive, and all the famous stories of chivalry involved the noble classes of knights. Whereas the archers were of the lower classes, Robin Hood and his gang were outlaws, so their weapon was appropriately the bow and arrow. But eventually, archers won the day, being the decisive factors in battles between the English and the French, such as the Battle of Cressy and the Battle of Agincourt, made famous by Shakespeare's Henry V, with the English longbow marking the beginning of the end of the Age of Chivalry. Of course, archery too became obsolete as firearms were developed, and this is only the briefest of historical accounts of the bow and arrow, which could also have included, for instance, archery in Asia or in the Americas or anywhere else in the world. And there are places named Arrow, companies named Arrow, and vehicles named Arrow, such as the Ship Arrow, which was detained in 1856, sparking the Arrow War between Britain and China, better known as the Second Opium War, and the Avro Arrow Fighter Jet Prototype, which was designed by a Canadian company in the 1950s, but ordered destroyed by the Canadian government in favour of US-designed fighters amid much controversy and even conspiracy theories. But we're going to leave these aside and take aim at the Arrow as a symbol, specifically a typographical symbol. As a symbol, the arrow shape mimicked the shape of a real arrow, a shaft with a triangular arrowhead at one end and the fletching, the feathery stabilizing fins, at the other, but gradually over time the shape became abstracted and streamlined. There were, of course, precursors to the arrow symbol that served the same role of pointing to something, such as the picture of a footprint next to a woman's face carved into the pavement in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus in the 1st century CE. Follow the direction of the footprint and you'll find the local brothel. Moving on from feet, if fingers are more your thing, medieval manuscripts are the place to look. The image of a pointing finger, called the Manicule from Latin Manus, hand, was frequently used in manuscripts to mark or divide sections in the text, a practice that dates back to the 12th century. Similarly, the Portuguese cartographer Pedro Reinal seems to have established the use of the Fleur-de-Lis on the compass rows pointing the cardinal directions, north, south, east and west. But the arrow as a typographical symbol really only dates back to the 18th century. For instance, in 1737 the French engineer and pioneer of hydraulics, Bernal Thore de Bellidor, published a treatise called Hydraulic Architecture, which included technical diagrams with arrows to indicate the flow of water in the machines. Interestingly, one of Bellidor's other claims to fame was that he worked for a while on calculating the arc, that is, the curvature of the earth. And the word arc, as we've seen, is related to arrow. Similarly, the German illustrator and engraver Friedrich Bernard Werner began to use arrows to indicate the direction of the flow of rivers in his maps and illustrations. And over time, as the arrow symbol became more abstracted, it could be put to more and more uses. In the 19th century, English cartographer Emile Reich used triangular arrowheads along curved lines to show the movement of troops on maps of battles that accompanied John Richard Green's A Short History of the English People. And in the 20th century, arrows began to be used in logic and mathematical notation, such as German mathematician David Hilbert's 1922 introduction of the arrow to indicate logical implication. And a decade later, Ulbrecht Becker's use of the double-headed arrow to indicate logical equivalents. And in 1976, mathematician Donald Knuth introduced up arrow notation for indicating very large numbers. And in linguistics, angle brackets, or the greater than and less than symbols, can be used as arrows to indicate etymological relationships, indicating that a word or sound developed into another over time. And of course, in this very video, I've used the famed red arrow in the thumbnail, which popular YouTube belief has will increase the views of the video. We'll see if it works. So ultimately, the arrow can be used as a symbol to indicate or point to something to show direction or to represent some other type of relationship that, at least metaphorically, has some sense of directionality to it. So let's pause for a moment and consider the words symbol and metaphor. Symbol comes through Latin from Greek symbolon, sign or token. The word originally came to English with a religious context, meaning creed or religious belief, as the creed was a mark that distinguished Christians from pagans, only gaining its modern senses of something that stands for something else in the late 16th century and of a written character in the beginning of the 17th. The Greek word is made up of two elements, syn, together, and bole, a throwing, from the verb balane, to throw. So a symbol is literally a throwing of things together, which thus came to mean a comparison, and therefore, a sign of whether something is genuine or an outward sign. The idea of comparison is even more evident in the related word parable, which comes from Greek parabolae, juxtaposition, or comparison, literally a throwing beside. And fittingly for our purposes, Greek balane is related to the Greek word belos, which means arrow, and from Greek belos, we get the English word belomancy, which is a form of divination or fortune telling using arrows. This was a common practice in a number of ancient civilizations, including the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Arabs, and the Scythians, and could be performed in a number of ways, such as tying possible answers to a given question to arrows and seeing which one flew the farthest. And this of course brings us back to fortune telling again and that astrological symbol Sagittarius. So let's take a quick look at the word fortune as all our arrows converge on target. Fortune comes from Latin fortuna, meaning chance, fate, good luck, which was also personified as fortuna, the goddess of fate, with her wheel of fortune. The word fortuna is derived from another Latin word, force, meaning chance or luck, which seems to come from the Proto-Indo-European root bear, to carry, a root which also gives us the English verb to bear and the Latin verb ferre, to carry. So how then did a root meaning to carry produce a word meaning chance or fate? Well, if this etymology is correct, it would be from the notion of that which is brought. So then fortune would literally mean what fate brings. And interestingly, that same Proto-Indo-European root also came into Greek as ferrine, to carry or bear, which when combined with meta, meaning over or across, leads to the verb metaferrine to transfer or carry over, especially in the rhetorical sense of transferring a word to a new sense and the now metaphora, transference. So in a sense, the word metaphor is a metaphor from physically carrying something across to metaphorically carrying over a meaning. And a metaphor is another type of comparison, like a symbol. So finally, let's now return to the spatiotemporal metaphors I mentioned in the beginning and see how languages talk about time by comparing it to space. Because the important thing to realize here is that metaphor is not just a literary technique, but is in fact, a way of thinking. This was an idea most famously pioneered by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By. We use metaphor to map understanding from one concrete domain of experience onto another more abstract domain. It's how we get around the problem of thinking about and speaking about abstractions. For instance, we borrow from the concrete experience of space to think about and speak about time. What's particularly interesting about this is that different cultures and languages use different spatial metaphors to think and talk about time. A fact that in recent years has been explored by cognitive scientists and linguists such as Leroboroditsky. And as it turns out, that arrow of time can be pointed in a number of different directions. For instance, if you were given a set of pictures that showed different temporal states and were told to put them in order, if you're an English speaker, you'll probably line them up in front of you from left to right. But if you're an Arabic speaker, you'll probably lay them out right to left. So in this case, it seems that writing direction influences the direction of that arrow of time. And this seems to hold true for many other languages as well. These metaphors may even begin before literacy, given that even pre-literate children are aware that the story in a picture book progresses left to right as they are read to, but they don't necessarily map onto other types of temporal thinking or the language we use to describe them. For instance, we would never say that Friday is to the left of Saturday. Instead, in that sort of situation, in English, we use a front-back metaphor when speaking of time. The past lies behind us and the future lies ahead. We think back on our past and look forward to the future. Friday is before Saturday. But the arrow can also point vertically as Boroditsky found. In Mandarin, the past can be viewed as up and the future as down. So for instance, the up month is last month and the down month is next month. And when given the same task of ordering pictures, Mandarin speakers were much more likely to arrange them in a vertical column in front of them. Now, all of these left, right, front, back, and up-down arrangements are relative to the body of the person using the metaphor. So in English, when we talk about the future being ahead of us and the past behind, we're using the sagittal plane from that Latin word sagita, meaning arrow. But there are, in fact, other ways of arranging that arrow without reference to the body as Lira Boroditsky and Alice Gaby discovered. In the languages of Porm Parau Australia, such as Cooctiore, body-relative spatial words aren't used, but instead the cardinal directions, north, south, east, west. So you wouldn't, for instance, refer to your right leg but your north leg. People who speak these languages have to always remain oriented in absolute space in order to use their language. And what's more, this carries over into their temporal reasoning as well. When given that same task with the pictures, they would always arrange them east to west, mirroring the course of the sun in the sky. So a row running left to right if they were facing north or a column top to bottom if facing east. And there seemed to be a variety of other shapes and spatial arrangements for time as well, such as concentric, near and far, up and down hill, and so forth. Now in English, as we've seen, we're accustomed to talking about time in the sagittal axis, back to front relative to our bodies, with the future in front of us and the past behind. But this also isn't the only direction that arrow can point. There are some languages that locate the past in front and the future behind, due to the fact that we know what has already happened but can't see the future. This has long been suggested of ancient Greek with the word episo, meaning backward in reference to space, but in the future in reference to time. A similar claim has been made of the Madagascar language, Malagasy, according to even Dahl, and other languages as well. While there has been criticism of some of these claims, Nunes and Sweetser very convincingly demonstrated that this is the case in the South American language, Imara. The nice thing about their research is that they not only draw on the linguistic evidence of this metaphor, but gestural evidence as well. And there is one last issue relating to our spatiotemporal arrangements, how movement is used to think about the passage of time. One can think either of time moving as if you are watching a river flow toward you, as in the holidays are approaching, or ego moving, as if you yourself are moving along a path, as in we're rapidly coming to the end of the year. In English, both of these metaphors are available, though this isn't necessarily true in all languages. And it turns out you draw on spatial reasoning actively so that if you're already predisposed to thinking of yourself moving in space, by say going on a journey, you are more likely to think of yourself moving through time. This sort of thing can affect how we interpret ambiguous phrases, such as the sentence, let's move Wednesday's meeting back two days. Does this mean the meeting is now on Monday or Friday? It depends on whether you're thinking from a time moving perspective or an ego moving perspective. And as a final treat, I'll give you a very brief sampling of my own ongoing research on spatiotemporal metaphor in old English. The full story is much more complex than this, but for now I'll just focus on a few words meaning past, present and future, specifically forth you written unwired and tow-ired. Let's start with the word tow-ired, which in terms of physical space can mean facing, approaching or towards, forwards, but when referring to time means future. So the tow-ired teed is future time or in grammatical terms, the future tense, though as we know, English doesn't really have one of those. The word is made up of the elements tow, which means more or less what two does today and wired, which means something like turned to ward, coming ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root weird to turn. We still have that element in modern English words like northward and of course the word toward itself. The word and where it means physically present or opposite facing, and in reference to time means the present. Literally, it breaks down to the elements and or on meaning against opposite and that same wired meaning turned. And finally, forth you written is the past participle of the verb forth you we-tan to go forward or depart, with you we-tan on its own meaning depart. That prefix forth means basically what you would expect from modern English, forth or forward. So the directionality of forth you written is perhaps the opposite of what we might expect for a word referring to the past. Forth on its own can be used in temporal senses as well, referring in those cases to a future time, much like we would say henceforth in modern English or in compounds such as forthwired, literally forth turned used to mean onward in time, henceforth or in the future. And forth you shan, literally forth creation used to mean future state or condition. Putting it all together then, the future to-ward is approaching or turned toward time. The present and word is physically present or turned against time. And the past forth you we-tan is the departing time. And what this suggests is that the metaphor being used in these words at least is one of arriving, being present and departing. There are of course a number of other spatial words used metaphorically to refer to time in Old English, but this gives us an idea of what is going on with some of the main ones. What's important to note here is that the basic words used to refer to the three times in Old English are different from those in modern English, which are borrowed from French, ultimately from Latin, and are thus not native Germanic words. So this raises some questions. Do spatio-temporal metaphors change over time as language changes? And if so, how and why? Well, I don't know the answer to those questions yet, but as time goes by along that forward pointing arrow, I hope to learn more and I'll report back. So, when you think about the future, where is it? And are you moving toward it or is it moving toward you? Let me know in the comments and tell me what language or languages you speak and how they handle time. Thanks for watching. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe and click the little bell to be notified of every new episode. And check out our Patreon where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I'm at alliterative on Twitter and you can visit our website alliterative.net for more language and connections in our podcast, blog, and more.