Before and after: Spatial and temporal position

[tungemål]

Ok, this is a little philosophical. Bear with me.

This just occured to me:
Have you ever considered how we use words for time, that are derived from words for physical position? That is not really surprising at all. But I realized something while struggling with Japanese. In Japanese the characters that mean "in front of", also mean "earlier" in time. This was counter-intuitive to me because when I imagine time, I see a timeline and my perception is that events in the past are "behind" events in the future. So I was struggling to reconcile this.

Then I realized that it is exactly the same in Germanic languages (spatial to temporal):
English: fore, before -> before
German: vor -> vor, vorher
Norwegian: for, foran, framfor -> før

I didn't realize this before because the Norwegian word is slightly changed for time-positions ("før"), but even so clearly derived from "for".

The interesting thing to me is that this way of describing time doesn't make sense to me. "After" should mean the past, and "fore" should mean the future, but it is in fact opposite.

So here are two questions:
- Is this also counter-intuitive to you?
- Do you know any language where time is described in an other way than this?

[nooj]

Aymara speakers point to the front when they speak of the past, and point to the back when they speak of the future.

The researchers of the paper 'With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time' suggest that this can be motivated cognitively because to speakers, the past is visible, in the sense that what happened is at least theoretically knowable, whereas what is invisible (the future), is akin to what happens behind us, which is also invisible (to the speaker).

This is reflected not only in the gestural language, but the spoken language of Aymara as well:

nayra mara
eye/sight/front year
last year

qhipa uru-na
back/behind day-on
on the next, future day

[tungemål]

Interesting.
But this is exactly like in English, right? "Before" can mean "in front", but can also mean "in the past". Do the researchers imply that the Aymara thinking is different from English?

[Speakeasy]

A few years ago, I watched a documentary which presented some of Daniel Everett’s experiences as a Christian missionary amongst the Pirahã people including his observations of their language and the subsequent controversy which some of these provoked amongst many academics. If I recall correctly, he contended that, amongst other linguistic oddities, the Pirahã people have no notion of, and therefore no linguistic description of, the past or the future; that is, they simply live in the present. Here are two links:
The Amazon’s Pirahã People’s Secret to Happiness: Never Talk of Past or Future – Indian Country Today
Pirahã language - Wikipedia