A scientific study that documents the linguistic practices of the people of the Amazonian northeast has discovered an unusual method used to communicate the human concept of “time”. The research, carried out by Simeon Floyd, from the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics from The Netherlands, have been published in March in the journal Language.
 
The article examines how the Nheengatú (language of the Tupi-Guarani family, which was the most extended one on the coast of Brazil prior to the contact with Europeans) includes not only aural components but also visual components to express the time of the day, although this language does not count on any numeric system –neither written or spoken system- to express the time.
 
Speakers of Nheengatú talk about the time of the day pointing to where the sun is usually positioned in the sky in that particular moment. For them, the fact of pointing in this way to the sky is the same as saying “nine o’clock”, for example.
 
This practice is interesting, informs Tendencias 21, because many linguists have assumed that the speakers of audible languages do not develop a visual language. However, the phenomenon observed in the Nheengatú speakers shows that this is not always the case.
 
When human beings conceive grammar they think in categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs; categories that people communicate through vocalization.
 
The study with the speakers of Nheengatú reveals that this is not always the case, and that in some languages is not possible to communicate some of this concepts combining systematically speech and signs.