Back for the Future, Forward for the Past: Tense and Time in Modern Hebrew (Essay‪)‬

In this paper, we will claim that the metaphoric structuring of time in Modern Hebrew is a remnant of the way time was metaphorically structured in the Ancient Near East in general, and in Ugaritic in particular. While this is not an especially revolutionary insight, a closer look at the implications of this generalization allows us to 1) understand why the Hebrew lexical item for "east/past" (q-d-m) is assigned the semantic field of "myth"; 2) suggest that elements in language are attenuated throughout history much the same way that nuclear matter is, namely, these elements have half-lives that are continually diluted, but (nearly) always traceable; 3) temper G. Zuckermann's generalization that Modern Hebrew (a.k.a., "Israeli") is only superficially related to ancient (Biblical) Hebrew. Late in the twentieth century, cognitive linguists realized that to truly understand the way time is conveyed in language, one needs to correlate language with cognitive faculties in general, and with body experience in particular. As a rule, cultures use spatial metaphors for time. (1) These can be (and are) varied within one culture, and vary from one culture to the next. In English, "time goes past us from front to back" (2) and this accounts for expressions like "as we move forward (to the future)." (3) Modern Hebrew, awash as it is with cultural references from English, also shares this metaphor. That is why the Israeli political party formed by Tsipi Livni is called [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (kadima, forward). The party that "goes forward" wants to be seen as the party of the future.