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

This paper points out that Modern Hebrew has metaphoric structuring for time in which the past is seen as something "in front of" the speaker, while the future is "behind" the speaker. It traces this metaphor from Biblical Hebrew to the Rabbinic Hebrew of Talmudic time and suggests that the theory of lexemic morphology can explain why these particular morphemes persist over time. Finally, it suggests an analogy with atomic half-lives: the further away, geographically and temporally, a linguistic item is from its source, the smaller the trace of the original item.