Time and space

Humans don’t have a well-developed sense of time but their sense for space is rather good. Therefore they often use spatial terms or representations in order to express time. Take an old-fashioned analogue clock, for example. One hand moves around in order to indicate the hours, and the further it has turned around the later it is. In the same way the other hand indicates the minutes. Or when I want to make a walk of an hour, I know that I am halfway not because of an inner clock, but because I have reached a certain point and I know that it’s about 3 km from my house. I can check it by looking at my watch. But that’s about lived time. How do we represent past and future if we actually have only spatial terms in order to represent time?
Let’s first see how we refer to space. There are three ways to do so. One way is to take yourself as the centre of the world, so as your “frame of reference”. John sits left of you and so you sit right of John. It depends on whose frame of reference you take: yours or John’s. This is called a relative frame of reference. However, a frame of reference can also be intrinsic. Then the object you see, talk about, etc. is the centre of the frame of reference. Terms like above/below or on/under are intrinsic, for instance: The cup is on the table, even if you are looking down on the table, so that the cup is under you. Moreover, a frame of reference can be absolute. Examples are the geographic coordinate system (latitude and longitude) and the cardinal points of a compass (north, south, east, and west).
Suppose you are a native speaker of English and you take part in an investigation. You sit at a table, the sun in your face, and the investigator asks you to arrange sets of cards depicting a temporal sequence in order of time from earliest to latest. For example, a card with a photo of a crocodile egg might be followed by a photo of a crocodile hatching, followed by a juvenile crocodile, followed by a mature crocodile. So you do, and you arrange the cards with the “youngest” image (say the crocodile egg) on the left, then the youngest image that remains (say the crocodile hatching) etc. and the oldest image to the right (say the crocodile dying). Then a native speaker of Kuuk Thaayorre, a language spoken by the Thaayorre who live on the northern shore of Australia, takes your place. He gets the same cards and arranges them in exactly the same way as you did. Next the investigator asks you to sit down at the opposite side of the table and to arrange the cards again. Again you put the card with the youngest image left ending with oldest image on the right side. Then your place is taken by the Kuuk Thaayorre speaker. However, now this person arranges the cards with the oldest image on the left side and the youngest image on the right side. Why this difference?
Several explanations are possible for this difference in arranging between the speakers of English and the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, but most likely is that the language used in daily life is the main cause. The cultural background might also have an impact, but Thaayorre people in northern Australia who spoke only English (and no Kuuk Thaayorre) arranged the cards in the same way as the other English speakers did, so as you did. Let’s look at the language. I mentioned three ways to describe space: by relative, intrinsic terms or absolute terms. Now it is so that English speakers predominantly use the relative and intrinsic terms for describing their worlds. Although absolute terms are not absent in English, in daily life they are not much used. Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, however, have at their disposal dozens of absolute terms plus a few intrinsic terms, but relative terms are absent. Speakers of both languages use spatial terms in order to describe time. The first choice for English speakers then is to use relative spatial terms for arranging time events. Of course, they could arrange things also from right to left, but probably because English is written from left to right, English speakers are used to arrange things that way. Kuuk Thaayorre speakers have no relative spatial terms at their disposal. However, they are used to employ the terms for the cardinal directions (which are absolute terms) for arranging things. Apparently for them the obvious way to arrange things (anyway, if it is on a time scale) is from east to west. That’s what they did. In the first session, they faced south and so they arranged the cards in the same way as the English speakers did, for east-west happened to be left-right. However, in the second session, when all test persons faced north, east-west had become what is right-left for an English speaker. So now the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers arranged the cards right-left. That it was the language that made this shift (“shift” from the viewpoint of English speakers!) is shown by the monolingual English speaking Thaayorre who arranged the cards just the way all other English speakers did.
The upshot is that the language you use, especially your native language, influences the way you see and interpret the world. But be careful: Studies have shown that language does not determine your world view. Other factors have also an impact. Such an influence can be the way speakers of other languages look at the world. We can learn a lot of other language speakers, like go west if you want to look to the future. 

Source
- Alice Gaby, “The Thaayorre think of Time Like They Talk of Space”, on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428806/