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by rvense 792 days ago
There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world. My own first language, Danish, has about 6 million native speakers, and it is something like the 50th most spoken language in the world. The world is a big place.

Did you know that there are languages where you can't form a sentence without describing what direction something happens in? Like you can't just "see the house", you're either doing it up or down the mountain. And you know how in English you can't really say anything without saying if it's going on now or happened in the past. Other languages don't really care about that at all, you can speak all day with specifying if it "is" or "was".
1 comments
TeaBrain 791 days ago
I'm not familiar with Danish, so this background of yours may be influencing your comment, but I'm not sure what you think you are referring to with your last two sentences on the temporal aspect of English. With the romance languages the tense is often explicitly built into the conjugation of verbs. Korean and Hindi also have conjugation systems to specify the tense. English does not have a similar system, so auxiliary verbs are relied on. Romance languages and others that have explicit tense conjugation systems are still specifying whether something "is" or "was", but through conjugation, rather than purely auxiliary verbs. Of note though, is that in Japanese, base words do not change conjugation between tenses, but are modified with a auxiliary verb system, where the tense is specified with auxiliary verbs, as with English.
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rvense 791 days ago
If we described tense as something like the grammaticalization of the temporal relationship between the state of affairs described in the utterance and the time of the utterance itself, then it is my understanding that this isn't really a meaningful category in e.g. Sino-Tibetan or Austronesian languages. You can specify "today" or "tomorrow", but most sentences will be ambigous as far as time goes.

(I'm also slightly confused by your suggestion that English does not have tense outside of auxilliary verbs? "He goes" vs. "He went"?)

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