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According to [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%89%8D#Chinese),
the etymology for the kanji 前 means "[walking] forward":

> Originally 歬, an ideogrammic compound (會意): 止 (“foot”) + 舟 (“boat”) – a foot
> on a boat **moving forward**. Alternatively, 舟 represents a shoe (cf.
> Shuowen 履: 舟象履形) — a foot with a shoe on to **walk forward**.

Now consider the sentence

> これは11年 **前** の新聞だ。

which means

> This is a newspaper from 11 years ago.

What's strange about this to me (as a native English speaker) is that the 11
years of past time are placed _forward_. In English, I believe we typically
think of "years ago" as happening "behind" (後) us, no? Yet here "forward" (前)
is being used.

**Question:** Is my understanding correct? Do native Japanese think of past
time as happening "in front" of them (前)?

Or do Japanese think of time just as native English speakers do, and I'm
fundamentally confused about something :-)
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time
Do Japanese think of historical time as happening "in front" (前) of them?
Those expressions do seem like they expand a spatial meaning onto a temporal
meaning, but I would suggest a spatial meaning different from what you seem to
be getting at.

I don't believe most people put themselves at the center and imagine what they
would have _ahead of_ and _behind of_ themselves, when thinking about this まえ
and あと. Instead, I believe it's more like the front of a queue vs the back of
a queue. You might or might not be in the queue, you might be looking at an
entirely different direction, not towards the first nor towards the last in
the queue - the point of view doesn't change front vs back here.

To expand on it, think of time as a series of events written (and going to be
written) in a book. You have the concept of "front" and "back" of a book in
English (as in "front matter"). This vaguely reminds me of the Japanese (or
rather, Chinese) terms 前半 and 後半. Same goes with other Japanese expressions
like まえのほう, あとのほう, in non-kanji words. It looks like English only deals with
the extremities with this "front" and "back", though, where Japanese and
Chinese deal with a broader range of related concepts.

Expressions like 11年 _前_ can be understood as going _towards the front_ by 11
years in the Book of Time, so to speak.

What I wrote above is exclusively about how today's Japanese speaking (non-
expert) people might think. For etymological explanations, I defer to others.
This link might help: [Why does 前 mean "past" in terms of time, but "forward"
in terms of
direction?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/58462/why-
does-%E5%89%8D-mean-past-in-terms-of-time-but-forward-in-terms-of-direction)
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As others have pointed out, Japanese is actually arguably no different than
English in this regard. English speakers commonly use the word "before" to
mean both "physically in front of" and "earlier in time" too.

I'm not an expert, but I believe this arises out of thinking of time as an
ordered series of events, and when ordering things things closer to the
beginning are considered to be "before" things that are later in the order.
This is also reflected by things like talking about moving something "up" or
"down" in a list, etc.

This may be related to physical orientation by the fact that if you have
multiple people, for example, in a queue, or marching in a line from one place
to another, the "first person in line" is also considered to be the person in
front of the line.

Another way to think about this is that if you have a line of people heading
towards some destination, the person in front will arrive at that destination
first, and therefore their arrival will happen "before" everyone else's in
time as well (or for people in a queue, the people at the front will be able
to perform their transactions earlier in time than the ones in the back of the
queue, etc).

But I don't think that Japanese speakers think of time fundamentally
differently than English speakers do in this regard. They use 前 in exactly the
same way and for exactly the same reasons that English speakers use
"before"...
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