# Languages have (no) tenses or lack one of them



## dihydrogen monoxide

Are there languages without tenses or lacking certain tense ie. (future, past...)?


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## Fred_C

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Are there languages without tenses or lacking certain tense ie. (future, past...)?


 Yes.
For example, English lacks the imperfect.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Good example, but I was refering to more simple basic tenses as present,future,past.


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## Fred_C

Japanese lacks the future tense.


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## james.

I guess it depends on your definition of a tense. My basic understanding is that in earlier IE languages, a greater number of tenses/temporal relationships were expressed through affixes to verb stems. Modern Spanish does this far more than English, for example, which tends to express these things through periphrastic constructions, with auxiliary verbs. While English speakers maintain the ability to express a wide variety of temporal relationships in ways we would consider tenses, the language has, in a sense, lost the true, inflectional tenses of its linguistic forebears.


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## palomnik

Difficult question.  It depends, I guess, on what you mean by "tense."  Arguably, several languages have no tenses at all - just aspect.  That group arguably includes languages like Japanese, Chinese and Classical Arabic.


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## Athaulf

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Are there languages without tenses or lacking certain tense ie. (future, past...)?



English arguably has no future tense.


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## Banbha

Well Irish only has 5 tenses really (Past, Habitual Past, Present, Future, Conditional)
Anything else like continuous or the imperative are not tenses just single words. So I think that's very few tenses in comparison to many other European languages. And Irish also only has 11 irregular verbs (English has over 300 supposedly) So if you learn the 11, your sorted, everything else follows the rules


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Banbha said:


> Well Irish only has 5 tenses really (Past, Habitual Past, Present, Future, Conditional)
> Anything else like continuous or the imperative are not tenses just single words. So I think that's very few tenses in comparison to many other European languages. And Irish also only has 11 irregular verbs (English has over 300 supposedly) So if you learn the 11, your sorted, everything else follows the rules


 
Can the same be said for Scottic Gaelic?


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## Banbha

Yea, Scots Gaelic has 5 tenses too. It also only has the same 11 irregular verbs. As well as that, the verbs rarely decline in Irish and the Scots Gaelic verbs never do.

E.g.

Irish - Scots Gaelic - English

Mé = Mi  = I
Tú =  Thu = you
Sé =  É = he
Sí =  Í = she
Sinn = Sinn  = we
Sibh = Sibh = you (plural)
Siad = Iad = they


English - Irish - Scots Gaelic

I am  -  Tá mé  -  Tha mi
You are  -  Tá tú  -  Tha thu
He is  -  Tá sé  -  Tha e
She is  -  Tá sí  -  Tha i
We are  -  Táimid  -  Tha sinn
You are  -  Tá sibh  -  Tha sibh
They are  -  Tá siad  -  Tha iad

 
 Hope that's somewhat useful to you


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## sokol

Austrian dialects (= dialects of the German language) have even less tenses than Irish and Gaelic:

- past tense (it is the German Perfekt = equal to English 'I have been')
- plu'perferct (very rarely used and an extension of German Perfekt = equal to a hypothetical English 'it has been rained' or German 'es hat geregnet gehabt')
- present tense
- and a future tense that is used more like a conditional and not quite like a 'real' future tense

Present tense _very often_ is used in the sense of a future tense, especially if you are talking about the near future. Only if you're talking about a 'further' future then there's real use for future tense, but then this already begins to drift off into conjunctivistic meaning.

So it would be three and a half tenses, or at most four tenses in these dialects. There's also a conjunctive and imperative, but these are modi, not tenses.

But there do exist languages who have an even more reduced system of tenses - from some American Indian languages it is said that they have, supposedly, no real 'concept' of time in language.
(Sorry, can't remember which ones or where to find information about them; this is a topic coming up in linguistic discourse from time to time. Sapir and Whorf many times come up in such discussions, so your best bet would be a Google-search with 'Sapir Whorf Indian' as keywords.)


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## dihydrogen monoxide

So do these Indians express time in some different manner?


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## sokol

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> So do these Indians express time in some different manner?



Sorry, I only know the rumours about them - no hard facts. (You'll just have to browse google a little bit and hope to make a lucky find; I'll try to remember where and when this might have been written, probably I can come up with something later.)

As far as I can remember it's approximately like that: what comes first (in the sentence) happens first - or did happen first.

(Another key word that might help could be pidgin & creole.)


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## palomnik

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> So do these Indians express time in some different manner?


 
There is a whole body of literature on Quechua, the major language spoken in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, claiming that in that language time is not structured the same as it is in most languages, but "backward" somehow.  Most of what I've read on the subject is a bit spurious and new-agey, though.  You can probably search the net and find some information on it.

Yucatec Maya really uses aspect rather than tense, i.e., whether an action is completed or not in terms of the narration is the only thing that's important.  

As for other Native American languages I can't say.


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## ticado

Many languages do not have tenses because a 'tense' is an Indo-european concept. They just work in a different manner. 

We have to remember that most of the scientific production on linguistics, including its core concepts, was designed to explain only one family of languages. Most linguistis just try to match these ideas where it's just impossible.

We should stop trying to analyze all languages according to Indo-european. I have had contact with many Brazilian language families and they are just totally different from everything we learn at university, such as Maxakalí, Krenak and others. They even defy apparently basic categories such as verb, adjective and noun.


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## Athaulf

ticado said:


> Many languages do not have tenses because a 'tense' is an Indo-european concept. They just work in a different manner.
> 
> We have to remember that most of the scientific production on linguistics, including its core concepts, was designed to explain only one family of languages.



I would actually say that the problem is deeper and older: systematic study of grammar was invented to analyze and describe classical Latin and Greek. Subsequently, grammarians have always had the tendency to shoehorn the description of any language into categories that are appropriate for these classical languages, but not even for most of the modern Indo-European ones, let alone others. 



> Most linguistis just try to match these ideas where it's just impossible.


 
Linguists not so much as grammarians, who often lack an adequate background in linguistics.


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## HistofEng

'Tense' in the sense of clitics does not exist in Haitian-Creole, just aspect and mood I guess.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

HistofEng said:


> 'Tense' in the sense of clitics does not exist in Haitian-Creole, just aspect and mood I guess.


 
This Haitian-Creole is based on which languages and does it have a name or is it just called Haitian-Creole because many creoles are named.


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## HistofEng

Well Haitians themselves call it _Kreyól ...._but I've heard a lot of people who know about the language but don't speak it call it Haitian.

It's lexically based on French, and has the most speakers of all known creole languages (9+ million speakers)

All "tenses" or "moods" are made by putting different auxiliaries in front of the verb they modify.


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## Outsider

HistofEng said:


> 'Tense' in the sense of clitics does not exist in Haitian-Creole, just aspect and mood I guess.


What do you mean by "in the sense of clitics"?


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## sokol

HistofEng said:


> All "tenses" or "moods" are made by putting different auxiliaries in front of the verb they modify.



If the concept is one of tense then it wouldn't matter how the tense is marked, so the fact that auxiliaries are put in front of the verb does not help to decide wether Haitian Creole has tenses or not.

So most important would be: do these "tenses" mark only an aspect (action completed, action durative, action beginning, action iterative) then they wouldn't be tense markers - but aspect markers. Probably you could give an example, that would help.


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## Outsider

sokol said:


> If the concept is one of tense then it wouldn't matter how the tense is marked, so the fact that auxiliaries are put in front of the verb does not help to decide wether Haitian Creole has tenses or not.


If you discard morphology, then I'm sure that every language can express any tense/aspect/mood you can think of in some way.


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## sokol

Outsider said:


> If you discard morphology, then I'm sure that every language can express any tense/aspect/mood you can think of in some way.



Surely, yes - my mother tongue has no aspect like Slavic languages, but the same concepts as in Slavic also can be expressed, with different means of course.

Nevertheless the existense of a category like "aspect" or "tense" (a regular category with - mostly - regular principles of construction) is something different; to express aspect in German I will have to use different verbs in combination with different particles, or in some cases I will have to use a different sentence structure.


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## Outsider

sokol said:


> Nevertheless the existense of a category like "aspect" or "tense" (a regular category with - mostly - regular principles of construction) is something different; to express aspect in German I will have to use different verbs in combination with different particles, or in some cases I will have to use a different sentence structure.


Why should that matter? You can still express it...


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## HistofEng

Outsider said:


> What do you mean by "in the sense of clitics"?



Oh, I'm sorry. I was thinking of clitics briefly before I wrote that. I meant that there is no systematic inflection/conjugation in Haitian-Creole and hence no tense.

Except in very rare cases where a verb will be inflected because of its phonological environment. 

you give....... Ou bai.   
you give me.. Ou bó'm. (where the 'ó' is pronounced in a similar way to the 'u' in 'bum')


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## HistofEng

sokol said:


> If the concept is one of tense then it wouldn't matter how the tense is marked, so the fact that auxiliaries are put in front of the verb does not help to decide wether Haitian Creole has tenses or not.
> 
> So most important would be: do these "tenses" mark only an aspect (action completed, action durative, action beginning, action iterative) then they wouldn't be tense markers - but aspect markers. Probably you could give an example, that would help.




Ahh, I see, ok.

I would align my thinking along Outsider's, I guess. Kreyól does indeed have ways of referencing the time in which an action takes place, which is the point of tense. 

It's just that there are some linguists that say that tenses are those in which the verb is inflected/conjugated to reference temporal relationships. I don't agree with that assessment (and I don't know how widespread this belief is in the field), but this is what I've gathered from my limited ling reading. Many grammarians don't consider English's future with "will" a tense. Am I correct?

Examples:

In Kreyól simple past is frequently not distingushible from simple present because context is usually sufficient (using adjectives)..but there is a "past intensifier", _*te*,_ that is very frequently used to either remove ambiguity or to describe an action "more in the past" (or sometimes 'past before past'). 
So...

Mwen gade ---- I look/looked
Mwen te gade - I looked/had looked

Future is very distinctly marked by the particles '*a[v]*' or '*ap*' 


_M'a gade_ ---I will look (indefinite future)
_M'ap gade --_I will look (definite future)   


If it wasn't for these very distinct future markers, I would be somewhat inclined to say that Haitian-Creole didn't have tenses.


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## berndf

HistofEng said:


> In Kreyól simple past is frequently not distingushible from simple present because context is usually sufficient (using adjectives)..but there is a "past intensifier", _*te*,_ that is very frequently used to either remove ambiguity or to describe an action "more in the past" (or sometimes 'past before past').


 
_Te_ is derived from French _été_, right?


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## Nikola

French derived Creoles have tenses they are like English in that they use separate auxiliaries not suffixes. 
    te - simple past
    tap - past progressive 
    ap - present progressive 
    pral - near or definite future 
    ta - conditional future
Other French Creoles use ca for present tenses.


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## Wacky...

There is another language I speak, though not fluently, which is the mother tongue of my father.
Well, I can't say that they lack the future tense but simply, the future tense and the present are just the same.
In fact, a verb in this language doesn't change at all when used in the future tense, in the present tense, as infinitive, or as imperative. It's only the context that tells us.
Yes, it may cause ambiguity but as far as I remember, I never got confused with it.


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## HistofEng

berndf said:


> _Te_ is derived from French _été_, right?




Probably. It's either _été _or _était.

_And _gade _derives from _regarder_.


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## HistofEng

Nikola said:


> French derived Creoles have tenses they are like English in that they use separate auxiliaries not suffixes.
> te - simple past
> tap - past progressive
> ap - present progressive
> pral - near or definite future
> ta - conditional future
> Other French Creoles use ca for present tenses.



Well, first, grammarians and linguists use tense to reference temporal relationships, so:

_ap_ - progressive marker ---> is aspect 
_ta - _conditional marker ---> is mood, I think

and, second, some require that verbs are inflected for it to be a true tense, this is what I want to confirm. I distinctly rememeber reading that there are grammarians that don't consider the _[subject] will [verb]_ constuction to be a true tense in English.


Also could you give examples of _'sa_' being used for present tense in other creoles, I never knew that and am very curious as to how it's used.


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## Nikola

HistofEng said:


> Well, first, grammarians and linguists use tense to reference temporal relationships, so:
> 
> _ap_ - progressive marker ---> is aspect
> _ta - _conditional marker ---> is mood, I think
> 
> and, second, some require that verbs are inflected for it to be a true tense, this is what I want to confirm. I distinctly rememeber reading that there are grammarians that don't consider the _[subject] will [verb]_ constuction to be a true tense in English.
> 
> 
> Also could you give examples of _'sa_' being used for present tense in other creoles, I never knew that and am very curious as to how it's used.


It is ca or ka not sa. Yes mood and aspect are sometimes differentiated from tense however some consider them as tenses. We can see that there is a temporal relation in Creole even if we omit some of the forms.


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## sokol

Outsider said:


> Why should that matter? You can still express it...



Yes of course, but the grammatical category 'tense' (past tense for example) would not be represented with a single feature or fixed combination of features like a paradigm of endings.
Also if tense were not expressed with such a regular feature - as may be the case for some AmerIndian languages, I'm not the expert here - then tense could, in a very extreme case, depend only on context, that is only context could decide if an event happened in the past, happens just now or is about to happen.
Of course I do not know if such a language exists, but hypothetically - if it would exist, this language really would be radically different to what most of us are used to.
(For example it would be rather difficult to translate any book into such a language - it would be difficult to set the timescale in an unambigous way. Probably it would be necessary to completely re-write the text rather than translate sentence by sentence because - for example - flash-back probably could be very difficult, if not impossible, to use in such a hypothetical language.)

(And from what I gather from the discussion on Haitian Creole this seems to be just like tenses, although expressed through other means than in French.)


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## HistofEng

Nikola said:


> *It is ca or ka not sa. *Yes mood and aspect are sometimes differentiated from tense however some consider them as tenses. We can see that there is a temporal relation in Creole even if we omit some of the forms.



Is _ca_ pronounced as "sa" or "ka"?

Also, do you mind giving some examples of its use?


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## Athaulf

sokol said:


> Also if tense were not expressed with such a regular feature - as may be the case for some AmerIndian languages, I'm not the expert here - then tense could, in a very extreme case, depend only on context, that is only context could decide if an event happened in the past, happens just now or is about to happen.
> Of course I do not know if such a language exists, but hypothetically - if it would exist, this language really would be radically different to what most of us are used to.



I think you're overstating things a bit here. In many vanilla IE languages, for example, the present tense can denote events in either past, present, or future, depending purely on the context. Even in English, the simple present tense is often referred to as "nonpast" in linguistic literature, since it often has all sorts of future meanings (and sometimes even past ones, though not as frequently -- for example, it can be used for lively narration of personally experienced past events). 



sokol said:


> (For example it would be rather difficult to translate any book into such a language - it would be difficult to set the timescale in an unambigous way. Probably it would be necessary to completely re-write the text rather than translate sentence by sentence because - for example - flash-back probably could be very difficult, if not impossible, to use in such a hypothetical language.)



Why? Even in a language completely devoid of tense, there would have to exist words such as adjectives and adverbs denoting temporal relationships. I don't think any human language lacks those (claims to the contrary such as Everett's Piraha studies sound very unconvincing to me).

This is not to say that there couldn't exist parts of books that would be impossible to translate, but that could happen only if it was critical to avoid divulging extra information in order to avoid a spoiler. But we already have similar problems with our plain boring IE languages -- it's often impossible to translate sentences, say, from English to Spanish, let alone Croatian without giving extra information about the gender of the speaker or other persons being talked about. I suppose this might occasionally give a huge headache to translators if the reader should be surprised by the eventual revelation of a mysterious character's gender.


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## HistofEng

Nikola and Sokol, what I wanted to bring up was something I just found on Wikipedia (Wikipedia is definitely not the best source, I'll try research more later when I leave work)_

Going even further, there's an ongoing dispute among modern English grammarians (see English grammar) regarding whether _ _tense can only refer to inflected_ _forms. In_ _Germanic languages there are very few tenses (often only two) formed strictly by inflection, and one school contends that all complex or periphrastic time-formations are aspects rather than tenses._

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense

I'm not sure I agree with this restrictive definition of tense, but this was the definition I was going by when I said that Haitian-Creole (and many other languages, I'm sure) doesn't have tense.


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## Outsider

I don't know how accurate this is, but according to Wikipedia in Tupi (an indigenous language of South America) verbs are not conjugated for tense, but nouns are. For instance:



> _Pindorama_ = _pindoba_ + _rama_ (palm tree + future aspect) = where there will be palm trees (this was the name by which some of the coast tribes called their homeland).


I also remember reading that in Japanese verbs are uninflected (at least for person, number, tense and mood), but adjectives "conjugate".

P.S. Needless to say, "not inflecting words for X" does not equal "not being able to express X". From the point of view of a foreigner learning a language, though, it can be useful to count how many different forms words of a given category have. When learning English, you need to memorise 5 different forms for most verbs (infinitive, 3rd. person present, past, -_ing_ form and -_ed_ form). A Portuguese verb has about 50 different forms.

Of course, learning to inflect words in a language is far from being enough to become proficient in it. Syntax and lexis are also important -- perhaps more important. We've talked about this before.


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## Nikola

HistofEng said:


> Is _ca_ pronounced as "sa" or "ka"?
> 
> Also, do you mind giving some examples of its use?


Some examples: Lapli ka tonbé. Ou ka edé nou. li ka palé twop.


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## HistofEng

Nikola said:


> Some examples: Lapli ka tonbé. Ou ka edé nou. li ka palé twop.



Interesting, Thank you. Oddly enough, '_ka_' in Haitian-Creole is an auxiliary to express "to be able to", or "can".

Could you tell us how this is expressed in the creole language you have given us an example of? (Also which creole language is this?)

Thanks again.


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## Nikola

HistofEng said:


> Interesting, Thank you. Oddly enough, '_ka_' in Haitian-Creole is an auxiliary to express "to be able to", or "can".
> 
> Could you tell us how this is expressed in the creole language you have given us an example of? (Also which creole language is this?)
> 
> Thanks again.


Salut HistoEng,
Capab or kapab=Fr capable. This is Eastern Caribbean islands of France and former British. On ile de la Reunion ka of the Eastern Caribbean = sava.


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## sokol

Athaulf said:


> I think you're overstating things a bit here. In many vanilla IE languages, for example, the present tense can denote events in either past, present, or future, depending purely on the context.


This of course also is true for my mother tongue where I can easily express present tense, past tense and future tense with grammatical present tense.



Athaulf said:


> Why? Even in a language completely devoid of tense, there would have to exist words such as adjectives and adverbs denoting temporal relationships. I don't think any human language lacks those (claims to the contrary such as Everett's Piraha studies sound very unconvincing to me).


Ah yes, _Piraha _was that language where some linguist claimed ... thanks for mentioning, but - well, I'll leave it here, I already once fell into that pitfall. 

I don't want to make an argument out of this really, or more precisely - it is difficult to argue about something you think might be possible because if you don't know how such a language does work in _real life_ then how to tell?
Anyway, expressing temporal relationships with adjectives and adverbs or any particle - or even with word sentence structure only ('what is mentioned first did happen first'-principle or something similar to that) - still is a different _means _of expressing tense.
Very different, I would say, compared to what we are used to (with a given set of tenses - even though in many cases we use present tense for past and even more often future, or that we use future tense often like a conditional, and so on).

And the best example I could give was the one of translation: if I translate English into German I substitute future tense with future tense, present tense with present tense, and so on (it becomes much more complex with past tense and the progressive forms, of course ... and in some cases I probably would translate English future tense into German present tense, and so on).

Still more complicated is translation from any Slavic language into German or English - because of the Slavic aspect which in many cases demands the use of different verbs for a Slavic verb according to its aspect.

And if there wouldn't be any tense with a fixed paradigm like what we know from IE languages it would be still more complicated to translate - it would be possible of course, but I could imagine huge problems of keeping up the suspense of a thriller with translating sentence by sentence: I think one would have to re-write the whole thing in order to keep the thriller thrilling.

Some translational theories claim that "everything can be translated" - I on the contrary think that "everything can be translated, but no translation is completely equal to the original".
(Where in some cases translation is easier and "more equal" than in other ones - take translation from one Slavic language to another one, or from any Slavic language to any Romance language.)

And I think you will agree that translation is the easier the more similar both languages are grammatically; so logically in case of a language which would express tense completely different from IE ones it has to be more difficult to translate IE into this language, and vice versa. Or don't you think so?


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## HistofEng

Nikola said:


> Salut HistoEng,
> Capab or kapab=Fr capable. This is Eastern Caribbean islands of France and former British. On ile de la Reunion ka of the Eastern Caribbean = sava.




So let me see if I have this straight:

'_I can eat_' would be something like "_mwen sava manje_" ---on Ile de la Reunion. 
'_I can eat_' would be "_mwen ka manje_" ----in the Eastern Caribbean (like in Haiti).


'_I eat_' would be _'mwen ka manje_' ----??? (where?)


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## Nikola

HistofEng said:


> So let me see if I have this straight:
> 
> '_I can eat_' would be something like "_mwen sava manje_" ---on Ile de la Reunion.
> '_I can eat_' would be "_mwen ka manje_" ----in the Eastern Caribbean (like in Haiti).
> 
> 
> '_I eat_' would be _'mwen ka manje_' ----??? (where?)


I guesss I am not clear Haiti ka =kapab Eastern Caribbean = English can.. Reunnais sava=Haiti ap or pral.

_mwen ka manje_" ----in the Eastern Caribbean = Haiti m'ap manje.


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## HistofEng

Nikola said:


> I guesss I am not clear Haiti ka =kapab Eastern Caribbean = English can.. Reunnais sava=Haiti ap or pral.
> 
> _mwen ka manje_" ----in the Eastern Caribbean = Haiti m'ap manje.



Ahh, I see. I got confused because the full '_kapab_' is used in Kreyol as well, just very infrequently.

'_M'ap manje_' is the present progressive...is '_ka_' the present progressive too, or just the present?


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## J.F. de TROYES

palomnik said:


> Difficult question.  It depends, I guess, on what you mean by "tense."  Arguably, several languages have no tenses at all - just aspect.  That group arguably includes languages like Japanese, Chinese and Classical Arabic.



It's quite uncertain for semitic languages, Classical Arabic included. See this
thread and Clevermizo's other posts on the same topic.It seems to be that verbs have always essentially expressed tenses , even though a notion of aspect may be sometimes appear, chiefly due to the meaning of the verb in the same way as many I.E. languages do.


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## berndf

Yes, as far as records go back, the conjugated forms of Semitic seemed always to have been both, tempus (past vs. future) and aspect (static vs. dynamic). The Hebrew Torah has a special form of the future used as a narrative form (i.e. past and dynamic) which suggest that at least here the aspect outweighed the tempus meaning. But which of the meanings is original or if they were mixed from the beginning cannot be reconstructed from currently known records.


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## J.F. de TROYES

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Good example, but I was refering to more simple basic tenses as present,future,past.



Arabic has only two *basic *verbs : present and past. Future is expressed  with a prefix "sa" in Modern Standard Arabic or "Ha" in  many dialects,  but is it so different as languages using an auxiliary like English ? Other Arabic tenses are expressed by using the auxiliary "to be" as well: imperfect, pluperfect.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Sorry for the missing link about Semitic langages :

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=753318


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## berndf

That is interesting. I don't speak Arabic. In Hebrew it is definitely past and future. The missing present is expressed by the active participle with an implied copula. I always thought Arabic did the same.


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## sokol

J.F. de TROYES said:


> Sorry for the missing link about Semitic langages :
> 
> http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=753318



I do not speak nor understand a single word of Arabic - I can't even read it -, but if I look at elroy's comments in post 2 I really think that Arabic has a future tense.
In my opinion it is of no concern at all if a tense is expressed through a suffix or through root inflection or through a prefix or even a preposition: any of these can constitute a regular principle of forming a future tense.

Therefore I would agree with what you have said already: that the prefix "sa" or "ha" is comparable to a future tense using auxiliary verbs only - as it is the case in English, or German (and other languages).


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## J.F. de TROYES

palomnik said:


> There is a whole body of literature on Quechua, the major language spoken in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, claiming that in that language time is not structured the same as it is in most languages, but "backward" somehow.  Most of what I've read on the subject is a bit spurious and new-agey, though.  You can probably search the net and find some information on it.
> 
> Yucatec Maya really uses aspect rather than tense, i.e., whether an action is completed or not in terms of the narration is the only thing that's important.
> 
> As for other Native American languages I can't say.



Quechua can express temporal references with a rather wide range of tenses by using suffixes inserted between the stem and the personal suffix. For example the present ( habitual action ) without suffix, the future with *" -nqa-"*, the perfect ( equivalent to the English preterite) with " *-rqa- "*. The suffix *" -sha- "* may be added to any tense in order to turn it into a progressive form.
*
 " puri-nku "                                   *They walk*
" puri-sha-nku"                   *  They are walking*
" puri-nqa-nku "                      *They will walk*
" puri-rqa-nku "*                     They walked

Adding other suffixes is always possible to express various notions some of which are not "grammatized" in many languages : the usually called " narrative past" "sqa " suffix ) is used to note that the subject has not experienced directly what happened because he was not born or to mean that he was unconscious , being too young or asleep or even drunk. That's the way used by Quechua to express what is generally called a mood, the same as for tenses.

I think also that in Yucatan Maya verbs are not based more on aspects than tenses ( or moods ). These notions are not strictly separated in the same way as in many languages with conjugations. What is more specific to Mayan languages is that forms depend on whether they are transitive or intransitive :

I am eating :             *Tan* in han*al*
I am eating bread:     *Tan* in han*tic* uah

The root is " han" , "in"  the1st.person ,  "tan with the suffix " -al " ( without object ) or " -t-ic " ( with object ) the tense.

Forms which express a tense have the same structure as others pointing out an aspect or a mood . Here are just some examples amongst others :

*Past
 Transitive 

**Tu* bet*ah* u col         He made his garden
                                                                                     " bet ' is the root
                                                                                     " tu  + -ah "  tense  ( null suffix in ) the 3rd person )

*Intransitive

*Hok*i              *                    He came out
                                                                                     "hok" is the root ( null suffix in this tense
                                                                                     " -i "   the 3rd person ending suffix for these intransitive forms.


*Immediate Present*

*Transitive 

* *Tan* u bet*ic *u col               He is making his garden

* Intransitive  

Tan* u hok*ol                    *                  He is coming out


*Perfective * ( Past action and continuing purpose )

*   Tr. *      U bet*mah* u col      He made his garden and is still using it

* Intr. *     Hok*aan *                 He came out and is staying out

*
" Obligated future "*

*Tr. * *  Yan *u bet*ic* u col              He has to make his garden

*         Intr.* *  Yan *hok*ol                  *                 He has to come out


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## J.F. de TROYES

berndf said:


> That is interesting. I don't speak Arabic. In Hebrew it is definitely past and future. The missing present is expressed by the active participle with an implied copula. I always thought Arabic did the same.



Interesting. Could you please give an example with the transliteration ?
Thanks a lot.


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## berndf

J.F. de TROYES said:


> Interesting. Could you please give an example with the transliteration ?
> Thanks a lot.


 
Sure. Take the Hebrew verb _'aMaR_ (' represents the consonant aleph, the glottal stop, lower case characters represent vowels which are not written) = _to say_.

Past:
_I said = 'aMaR-Ti_ (- indicates separation between stem and suffix)
_thou (m) saidst = 'aMaR-Ta_
_thou (f) saidst = 'aMaR-T_
_he = said 'aMaR_
_she = said 'aMR-aH_

Future:
_i will say = 'oMaR_
_thou (m) wilt say = To-'MaR_
_thou (f) wilt say = To-'MR-iY_
_he will say = Yo-'MaR_
_she will say = To-'MaR_

Present is not conjugated but declined because it is formally an adjective with implied copula (_am/art/is_):
_I (m) say = 'ani 'OMeR_ (in older texts the O is sometimes not spelled)
_thou (m) sayest = 'aTaH 'OMeR_
_he says = HU' 'OMeR_
and
_I (f) say = 'ani 'OMeReT_
_thou (f) sayest = 'aT 'OMeReT_
_she says = HI' 'OMeReT_

There is a special form of the future (not used in modern Hebrew) which is used as a narrative tense and which always takes the prefix _Wa-_ (_and_). In this for the dynamic aspect of the future takes precedence over the tense meaning. "And God said" is "Wa-YoMeR 'eloHIM" which literally means "And God will say".


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## J.F. de TROYES

Yes, unlike Arabic the Hebrew verb has a "real" future with specific forms ; as for the present it seems to be built on the same structure as "I (am) saying",  without copula . In Arabic  it's also possible with some verbs to oppose the present action to the usual present : " huwa d'aahib" ( he is going) ( d'= th(e) aa= long,written a ) where "huwa" is the pronoun and "d'aahib" the present participle.


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## berndf

I heard that before which made me erroneously believe Arabic had the same tenses as Hebrew.


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## wbhindyou

Vietnamese words (not just verbs) are immutable and so the language has no tenses, in the inflected sense at least. The default is to use no tense marker words whatever, and let the context explain things. 

Thus:

"Toi di cho mua gao" (lit. I go market buy rice)

can mean:

"I will go to the market to buy rice" or "I went to the market and bought rice"

To define the time or completeness of an action, various methods are used (but only if necessary):

"Toi di cho mua gao *moi ve*". (lit. "I go market buy rice newly return"), hence the action is fixed in the past ("I have been to the market to buy rice and just returned").

"Toi di cho mua gao *roi *gap ban". (lit. "I go market buy rice already meet friend"), again completion is implied ("I went to the market, and once finished, I met a friend")

"Toi di cho mua gao *thi bi om*". (lit. "I go market buy rice then suffer sickness"), which imparts a progressive notion ("I went to the market and then began to feel ill").

The context is often given by a time-specific preamble:

"*Hom qua*, toi di cho" (lit. Yesterday I go market)
"*Sang mai*, to di cho" (lit. Tomorrow morning, I go market)

There are specific tense markers, but they are sparingly used in everyday speech: "se" (will) "da" (did), "dang" (currently), sap (will shortly), chua (not yet).

Who needs tenses?

The same approach holds for other monosyllabic, tonal Asian languages like Chinese and Thai.


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## bboris

First of all, since this is my first post I`d like to greet all of you language freaks like myself , and please forgive me on my not perfect English. I just wanted to reply on Quechua and its time structure, since I dont know all the linguistic terms I`ll try to write it in everyday language. I think it explains pretty good, nature of Quechua. 

In the Quechua language, the past is in front of us, because we`ve already lived it, we see it clearly. The future is behind us because it hasn`t happened yet.   It’s something like sitting on a train facing backwards - you can see what’s passed by in front of you, but what’s still ahead of the train is behind you.


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## Frank06

Hi,

First of all: welcome!


bboris said:


> I just wanted to reply on Quechua and its time structure, since I dont know all the linguistic terms I`ll try to write it in everyday language. I think it explains pretty good, nature of Quechua.
> In the Quechua language, the past is in front of us, because we`ve already lived it, we see it clearly. The future is behind us because it hasn`t happened yet.   It’s something like sitting on a train facing backwards - you can see what’s passed by in front of you, but what’s still ahead of the train is behind you.


Okay, but whatever the "time structure" used by the speakers, and however the Quechua train moves on the tracks of time: what does this story tell us about the use of *tenses* in Quechua?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## bboris

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> First of all: welcome!
> 
> Okay, but whatever the "time structure" used by the speakers, and however the Quechua train moves on the tracks of time: what does this story tell us about the use of *tenses* in Quechua?
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank



My bad, I should have quoted previous post on page one. I know this is little bit offtopic, I`m no expert on Quechua all I wanted was to say how their concept of tenses is way different than in IE languages, and that we need to see bigger picture here instead of trying to compare it with our languages. Quechua puts little importance on tenses: there is no present and the past tense is rarely used. Rather Quechua relies on describing the orientation of processes through space. For this, Quechua uses a set of suffixes to express the orientation and place of agents in space. All types of rapports between individuals can be expressed by situating them in a specific conception of space.


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## dinji

berndf said:


> Yes, as far as records go back, the conjugated forms of Semitic seemed always to have been both, tempus (past vs. future) and aspect (static vs. dynamic). The Hebrew Torah has a special form of the future used as a narrative form (i.e. past and dynamic) which suggest that at least here the aspect outweighed the tempus meaning. But which of the meanings is original or if they were mixed from the beginning cannot be reconstructed from currently known records.


 


berndf said:


> There is a special form of the future (not used in modern Hebrew) which is used as a narrative tense and which always takes the prefix _Wa-_ (_and_). In this for the dynamic aspect of the future takes precedence over the tense meaning. "And God said" is "Wa-YoMeR 'eloHIM" which literally means "And God will say".


 
There is a very interesting, and in my view a more profound and precise description of what berndf is trying to describe above, on this blog of Ola Wikander. Especially informative it is on the semitic origins of these "quasi-tenses":

http://necrolinguist.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-love-hebrew-consecutive-tenses.html

http://necrolinguist.blogspot.com/2009/02/hebrew-consecutives-part-2.html

I recommend this blog to anyone interested in ancient Middle-Eastern and South Asian languages.




berndf said:


> That is interesting. I don't speak Arabic. In Hebrew it is definitely past and future. The missing present is expressed by the active participle with an implied copula. I always thought Arabic did the same.


 


J.F. de TROYES said:


> Yes, unlike Arabic the Hebrew verb has a "real" future with specific forms ; as for the present it seems to be built on the same structure as "I (am) saying", without copula . In Arabic it's also possible with some verbs to oppose the present action to the usual present : " huwa d'aahib" ( he is going) ( d'= th(e) aa= long,written a ) where "huwa" is the pronoun and "d'aahib" the present participle.


 
In classical Hebrew the use of this construction (active participle with an implied copula) is very limited as a substitute for a proper present. The "tense" described in this thread as "future" also functioned as a present depending on aspects etc. I also refer to the links in my posting above.



Finnish is poor in tenses. It has a past and a present, but no future.

As for historical analysis, the present tense has forms only for the first and second person. Third person forms were originally participles with implied copula "He ('they') tulevat ('come')" still includes the participle marker "-va-" followed by a plural marker of nouns "-t". The singular "hän tulee" < "hän tulevi" < *hän tuleva.

The historical difference is still analysable synchronically from the fact that 3rd person forms in present tense lack a marker of person and consequently takes an obligatory personal pronoun, unlike 1st and 2nd person and past tense forms.

Thus only the past tense is a completely declined "tense" in Finnish. I understand Proto-Uralic and Proto-Finno-Ugric was eqally poor in tenses.


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## effeundici

Italian has two very well defined future tenses but by reading this thread I've realized that in spoken language, actually future actions are often expressed by using the present tense.

Tomorrow I'll go to the market
Formal: Domani andrò (future) al mercato
Colloquial : Domani vado (present) al mercato

I'll give it to you after you arrive (is this correct?)
Formal: Te lo darò (future) quando sarai arrivato (anterior future)
Colloquial :Te lo do (present) quando arrivi (present)

Conclusion: it's very easy speaking without a future tense.

Is it the same in the other Romance languages?


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## TitTornade

It is exactly the same in French... We still use future tenses in spoken language but often use present to express future actions.

I use your examples :
Tomorrow I'll go to the market
Formal: demain j'irai (future) au marché
Colloquial : demain je vais (present) au marché

I'll give it to you after you arrive (is this correct?)
Formal: je te le donnerai (future) quand tu seras arrivé (anterior future)
Colloquial : je te le donne (present) quand tu arrives (present)
or mixed : je te le donne (present) quand tu arriveras (future)

Else we can also express future with "aller + Vb", that is similar to the English "to be going to + Vb"
Next summer, I'll go to Berlin :
_l'été prochain, j'irai à Berlin _(future)
_l'été prochain, je vais à Berlin _(present)
_l'été prochain, je vais aller à Berlin _(aller + Vb)


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## javier8907

It's the same in Spanish. But it only works for the near future, and sometimes adverbs are needed for the future interpretation to be possible. Would you say in Italian "_Quando sia maggiore, io sono/divento astronauta._" -or the equivalent in proper Italian, just in case? I certainly would not in Spanish. Anyway, I think I'll learn Vietnamese when I grow up, it doesn't look hard to manage with the syntax -once you've learned to pronounce.

I thought I could be no use for this interesting thread, but now I realize I can say something about Basque, although I'm not a native speaker myself.

Basque has typically two tenses: present and past. Tenses can be marked either by conjugated forms -few verbs have them, and most are falling or have fallen into oblivion- or using an auxiliary verb after the infinitive or a participle.

There are four moods: indicative, subjunctive, conditional and imperative. Imperative is not interesting, as there are many ways of constructing it -e.g the bare infinitive- but the meaning doesn't change. Indicative and conditional have present and past, while subjunctive and imperative have only one tense each.

However, the auxiliary verbs in these forms can be combined with the infinitive and three participles, one of which is not used in some dialects, where they use the infinitive instead. Mostly, the verb forms used are combinations of the two indicatives with the infinitive and two participles.

Infinitive makes perfective aspect -all the combinations produce past- present participle makes progressive aspect and future participle makes the future and a 'fake' conditional with the past tense. Examples:

Joan naiz - I have gone
Joan nintzen - I went
Joaten naiz - I go (usually)
Joaten nintzen - I used to go
Joango naiz - I will go
Joango nintzen - I would go

Funnily, "naiz" and "nintzen", present and past indicative for the auxiliary for verbs with no object, mean "I am" and "I was", this is, this auxiliary is actually the verb "to be". The other auxiliaries are the verb "to have" (verbs with direct object) and two others, which grammarians consider separate verbs, although they have no meaning on their own except as forms of "to be" and "to have" comprising an indirect object, logically, for verbs with an indirect object only and verbs with both of them, respectively. Every information about persons is included in this auxiliary verb, so if you say "I bought my mum some chocolates" (Nire amari bonboi batzuk erosi nizkion ni), the auxiliary verb (nizkion) contains information about the tense (past), the subject (I), the direct object (plural) and the indirect object (third person singular), so if I only keep the verb ("erosi nizkion") I will retain this much information: I bought them to him/her.

'Synthetic' forms, which do exist for the verb "to go" do not distinguish aspect, so "noa", I go, at first sight means "I am going just as I speak" -'momentual' aspect, as opposed to progressive- but depending on the context it can mean "I am going in a minute", "tomorrow I am going"... Verbs lacking synthetic forms get this aspect by a periphrase: infinitive + ari + izan, example: erosten ari naiz - I am buying.

There is a curious thing: sometimes the auxiliary can be omitted and one can stick to the aspect, for example:

-*Hi, ze?* (Hey) you, what (are you doing)?
-*Belarra mozten.* (I'm) cutting the grass.

-*Jacinto ez dago.* Jacinto is not (here).
-*Lasai, etorriko*. Don't worry -literally "calm"-, (he) will come.

This example might be a bit wrong, or not very natural but I'm pretty sure I've heard something like that.

Or for example, playing a card game, people will say "*eduki*", meaning "(I) call (the bet)", and nothing else.

There must be more examples and much better, but I can't think of them, and I can't invent them either.


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## bboris

javier8907 said:


> There is a curious thing: sometimes the auxiliary can be omitted and one can stick to the aspect, for example:
> 
> -*Hi, ze?* (Hey) you, what (are you doing)?
> -*Belarra mozten.* (I'm) cutting the grass.
> 
> -*Jacinto ez dago.* Jacinto is not (here).
> -*Lasai, etorriko*. Don't worry -literally "calm"-, (he) will come.
> 
> This example might be a bit wrong, or not very natural but I'm pretty sure I've heard something like that.
> 
> Or for example, playing a card game, people will say "*eduki*", meaning "(I) call (the bet)", and nothing else.
> 
> There must be more examples and much better, but I can't think of them, and I can't invent them either.



It`s perfect example, it is same way or similar way in Serbian. I think it is characteristic of languages that can express person and number and time in a verb as a single verb.
I hope I said it right. Like *doće *(he will come) and for example *doćemo *(we will come). 
*Da li ćeš doći na zabavu večeras? *(Will you come to the party tonight)
*Doću. *(I will come)


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## Chaska Ñawi

bboris said:


> My bad, I should have quoted previous post on page one. I know this is little bit offtopic, I`m no expert on Quechua all I wanted was to say how their concept of tenses is way different than in IE languages, and that we need to see bigger picture here instead of trying to compare it with our languages. Quechua puts little importance on tenses: there is no present and the past tense is rarely used. Rather Quechua relies on describing the orientation of processes through space. For this, Quechua uses a set of suffixes to express the orientation and place of agents in space. All types of rapports between individuals can be expressed by situating them in a specific conception of space.



I'm afraid that I don't follow this.  Quechua has a whole set (and subset) of present tenses.  They may be used to indicate actions in the past or future (an equivalent example in English might be, "Tomorrow I'm going to the store"), but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.  As for the comment that the past tense is rarely used, it appeared quite frequently in conversations in my neighbourhood.  It appears in many song lyrics as well.


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## bboris

Chaska Ñawi said:


> I'm afraid that I don't follow this.  Quechua has a whole set (and subset) subset of present tenses.  They may be used to indicate actions in the past or future (an equivalent example in English might be, "Tomorrow I'm going to the store"), but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.  As for the comment that the past tense is rarely used, it appeared quite frequently in conversations in my neighbourhood.  It appears in many song lyrics as well.


I said I`m no expert in Quechua and I dont speak one bit of it, this is just something i found out from reading about it from linguistic researches. Sorry if I was wrong.


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## javier8907

For some reason, I can't find the editting button in my other message, even though I've made sure I am logged in. So I'll have to make some corrections in another post.

I forgot Basque language has also a potential mood, which produces the meaning "I can do something" or "I could do something". This mood has also present and past.

As for the subjunctive, I could also think about the hypothetical tense (If I were...), when in fact there is also present and past. These two can be used very to express finality, which can also be done by declining/adding a postposition -the name is irrelevant, and grammarians don't agree here- to a verb noun. For example:

Asko ikasiko dut aprobatu dezadan = Asko ikasiko dut aprobatzeko. (I'll study a lot so that I pass - I'll study a lot so as to pass).

I know this is a bit off-topic, as it is not directly related to the question, but I don't like giving inaccurate information.


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## federicoft

javier8907 said:


> It's the same in Spanish. But it only works for the near future, and sometimes adverbs are needed for the future interpretation to be possible. Would you say in Italian "_Quando sia maggiore, io sono/divento astronauta._" -or the equivalent in proper Italian, just in case? I certainly would not in Spanish



Yes you are totally right, you can use present just for the near future (that would be "_quando sarò grande, voglio fare l'astronauta_").
On the other hand it's very common to use the future tense to express a doubt or an assumption, even at the present.


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## effeundici

federicoft said:


> Yes you are totally right, you can use present just for the near future (that would be "_quando sarò grande, voglio fare l'astronauta_").
> On the other hand it's very common to use the future tense to express a doubt or an assumption, even at the present.


 
Hi fede, nice to see you in this corner of the forum.

Actually I think you're partially right. Going down to a very colloquial speech we could say as well:

_quando vado in pensione, mi sveglio tutte le mattine alle 9.00_
_when I retire, I'll wake up every morning at 9.00_

_quando mi laureo, faccio festa tutta la notte_
_when I get my university degree, I'll celebrate all night long_

Honestly, I say everyday sentences like that! But only when speaking very colloquially. Perhaps it's used only in my region.


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## federicoft

I agree, but there's still some psychological closeness with those events (you long to retire/get degree etc.). I wouldn't use it talking about a remotely distant future, or another phase of your life.


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## Agnès10

sokol said:


> Yes of course, but the grammatical category 'tense' (past tense for example) would not be represented with a single feature or fixed combination of features like a paradigm of endings.
> Also if tense were not expressed with such a regular feature - as may be the case for some AmerIndian languages, I'm not the expert here - then tense could, in a very extreme case, depend only on context, that is only context could decide if an event happened in the past, happens just now or is about to happen.
> Of course I do not know if such a language exists, but hypothetically - if it would exist, this language really would be radically different to what most of us are used to.
> (For example it would be rather difficult to translate any book into such a language - it would be difficult to set the timescale in an unambigous way. Probably it would be necessary to completely re-write the text rather than translate sentence by sentence because - for example - flash-back probably could be very difficult, if not impossible, to use in such a hypothetical language.)
> 
> (And from what I gather from the discussion on Haitian Creole this seems to be just like tenses, although expressed through other means than in French.)



You could argue that you describe here something very close to Chinese, in which words never change. There are aspects particles, indicating whether the action is ongoing, finished, or going to happen, but nothing else. Time is usually indicated by a date at the beginning of the text, and once the temporality of the text is established, time relations within the text follow quite logically. This is noticeable when translating from Chinese into a tense-based language such as French. Combined with aspect particles, relations of conditions or succession of events  help defining the tenses that should be used in French translation. Of course, it still leaves a good margin of interpretation. The clarity of the translation depends a lot on the nature of the original text - information, litterature, sciences... But in translation into French, you end up with the whole range of French tenses.


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## MarX

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Are there languages without tenses or lacking certain tense ie. (future, past...)?


*Indonesian/Malay is one of them.*


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## Mauricet

MarX, the verb itself is invariable, but you have tool-words that work as auxiliaries to indicate tense, don't you ? As in _akan hujan_ "it will rain", _sudah hujan_ "it rained", _apa hujan ? -- belum !_ "is it raining ? -- not yet !". These are tenses, aren't they ? Time is not left to context only. So Malay/Indonesian cannot be said to have no tenses, just to use invariable words, an interesting feature indeed ...


----------



## MarX

Mauricet said:


> MarX, the verb itself is invariable, but you have tool-words that work as auxiliaries to indicate tense, don't you ? As in _akan hujan_ "it will rain", _sudah hujan_ "it rained", _apa hujan ? -- belum !_ "is it raining ? -- not yet !". These are tenses, aren't they ? Time is not left to context only. So Malay/Indonesian cannot be said to have no tenses, just to use invariable words, an interesting feature indeed ...


I don't know what you mean with tense.

Let's take _tiba_ (arrive)

1) Dia tiba kemarin = *She arrive yesterday
2) Dia tiba besok = *She arrive tomorrow
3) Dia baru tiba = *She just arrive
4) Dia tiba nanti = *She arrive later
5) Dia tiba tadi = *She arrive earlier
6) Dia belum tiba = *She not yet arrive

In English 1, 3, 5, & 6, the past tense verb is obligatory, and 2 & 4 require _will_ or _is going to_ or some other tense modification. Whereas in Indonesian all have the same form, and the surrounding words are just adverbs of time.

Dia tiba kapan?
could mean:
When did she arrive?
When does she arrive?
When is she going to arrive?

It seems that compared to English or most European languages, akan, sudah, belum correspond to adverbs of time instead of tense.


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## Mauricet

Of course it depends on the definition of tense. But if you agree that _She will arrive_ is future tense and _She did not arrive yet_ is past tense, why should _Dia akan tiba_ or _Dia belum tiba_ be conceived differently ? Using adverbs of time replaces tense also in spoken French _Elle arrive demain_ (= _Dia tiba besok_) as well as in your examples with _kemarin, nanti, tadi_, but _akan, sudah, belum_ and some other tool words are not just adverbs (they cannot be placed after the verb, or at the beginning of the phrase, as adverbs usually can) but auxiliaries, as far as Denys Lombard's "Introduction à l'indonésien" has it right.

"Les auxiliaires de temps et d'aspect constituent l'un des chapitres les moins étudiés de la grammaire indonésienne, bien qu'ils soient d'une extrême fréquence et que leur rôle soit évidemment essentiel. Il faudra bien un jour consacrer une étude particulière au jeu subtil de ces mots-outils qui correspond grosso modo à celui de nos conjugaisons." (D Lombard, op. cit. p. 137)


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## sokol

Mauricet said:


> Of course it depends on the definition of tense. But if you agree that _She will arrive_ is future tense and _She did not arrive yet_ is past tense, why should _Dia akan tiba_ or _Dia belum tiba_ be conceived differently ? Using adverbs of time replaces tense also in spoken French _Elle arrive demain_ (= _Dia tiba besok_) as well as in your examples with _kemarin, nanti, tadi_, but _akan, sudah, belum_ and some other tool words are not just adverbs (they cannot be placed after the verb, or at the beginning of the phrase, as adverbs usually can) but auxiliaries, as far as Denys Lombard's "Introduction à l'indonésien" has it right.


Truth to tell, I agree with Marx.

While it is true that adverbs of times are extensively used also in "Western" languages to indicate time (and while in Romance, English, German, Slavic and other languages present tense may also indicate past tense or future tense, depending on context), we still differentiate between those adverbs of time and conjugated times.

And French makes use of both - conjugated times and adverbs of time; while Indonesian, it seems, only uses the latter. Indonesian still is able to express time nevertheless, but depending on context the frame of reference concerning time may be ambiguous.

Well, time also might be ambiguous in German, and French I'm sure, in some cases - German "ich gehe einkaufen" without any context may mean:
- I am going shopping right now.
- I will go shopping soon.
- I will go shopping tomorrow.
- I was going shopping then.
But usually, when no context is given, you would use "ich gehe einkaufen" as simple present tense - the others you can only use in formal present tense meaning (near) future or even past tense *only if *appropriate (linguistic or extra-linguistic) context is provided.

Contrasting with this, you have to formulate tenses in Indonesian in a way which *can *be ambiguous without context (which seems to depend on the adverb used, if I have understood this correctly), and there is no "default" interpretation of such constructions as "present tense" or "past tense" like there is in German or French. Right?


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## Alexandre8

Fred_C said:


> Yes.
> For example, English lacks the imperfect.


 
No we don't

compare and contrast

I played (perfect)
I had played (pluperfect)
I was playing (imperfect)

 lol


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## ninjalj

federicoft said:
			
		

> Yes you are totally right, you can use present just for the near future (that would be "_quando sarò grande, voglio fare l'astronauta_").
> On the other hand it's very common to use the future tense to express a doubt or an assumption, even at the present.





			
				federicoft said:
			
		

> I agree, but there's still some psychological closeness with those events (you long to retire/get degree etc.). I wouldn't use it talking about a remotely distant future, or another phase of your life.



I think this has more to do with "odds" of action happening than with "nearness" of action in time. For example, in Spanish you could say:

_Lo haré _(future)_ mañana.

_But if you want to assure that you will do it with a 100% probability you could say:_
Lo hago _(present) _mañana.
_
The last one has an "and I mean it" connotation, at least in my part of the world. This is probably because the future is uncertain while the present is a certain thing.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Chaska Ñawi said:


> Quechua has a whole set (and subset) of present tenses. They may be used to indicate actions in the past or future (an equivalent example in English might be, "Tomorrow I'm going to the store"), but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. As for the comment that the past tense is rarely used, it appeared quite frequently in conversations in my neighbourhood. It appears in many song lyrics as well.


 
What do you mean by saying "  Quechua has a whole set (and subset) of present tenses. " ? 
I appreciate your comments on tenses in Quechua and I just wish to elaborate some points related to this thread. As undoubtedly you are much more proficient than me who just has a smattering of Quechua, please correct me if I make some mistakes.

The main point  is  that tenses in Quechua , i.e. the lingistic means expressing temporality, are similar to those of old Greek, Latin or Romance languages as to their formation and meaning :
hamu*n *= he comes  (habitual present or unmarked form) 
hamu*sha*n = he is coming
hamu*rqa*n = he came ( preterite )
hamu*sqa* =  he is said to have come (perfect)
hamu*nqa* = he will come
ham*unman *= he might /would/could come (This kind of form is rather a mood than a tense in any language wher  optatives or conditionals are used).

So persons and tenses are recognised and distinguished through endings made up of a suffix ( tense) plus an inflection (person marker) or a specific morphem gathering both notions.
 The difference with the I.E. languages is that tenses are entirely regular ; moreover, when several verbs are used in a story, only the first has the useful suffix(es) ,then they can be dropped and verbs are reduced to the unmarked form. Only the perfect has no equivalent in I.E. languages , though it is among other uses the past narrative tense as the French "passé simple".

Actually many verbal forms are more complex than the previous ones, because various other suffixes can be added, indicating notions as ability, progressivity, aspects and so on. The wide range of suffixes, added to names as well, is a key feature of Quechua, but I think it's off topic.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Agnès10 said:


> You could argue that you describe here something very close to Chinese, in which words never change. There are aspects particles, indicating whether the action is ongoing, finished, or going to happen, but nothing else. .


 
 You are quite right and "aspect particle" is the phrase used by Chinese grammarians themselves for this category of words ( dòng tài  zhù cí ). But what particle indicating an action going to happen do you think of ?


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## Agnès10

J.F. de TROYES said:


> You are quite right and "aspect particle" is the phrase used by Chinese grammarians themselves for this category of words ( dòng tài  zhù cí ). But what particle indicating an action going to happen do you think of ?



Well spotted, I wrote to fast:  there is no such thing in Chinese as an aspect particle indicating that an action is going to take place. There is an adverb, jiang1 (将, about to) that plays this role. Other words can have a similar effect, like hui4 (会）in the sense of "to be sure". Other than that, as I was saying, it is usually the indication of the time of the action (tomorrow, in two months") that indicates the future sense.


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