Re: where do so many tenses come from?

In article <RGpWf.19154$dy4.1364@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "John
Atkinson" <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"erilar" <erilarloFRY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote-

hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Herman Rubin) wrote:

Lee Sau Dan <danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Aren't you aware of tense-less languages?

There are languages that do not use time-limiting verbs. It's too
many years since I studied some of these differences to remember
examples other than Hopi, but there are others.

Could you tell us more about Hopi verbs? If Hopi's like other
Uto-Aztecan
languages, verbs are marked for valence, mode, progressive, causative,
desiderative, and a few other things, but not for tense. However, Mithun
says "simple [verb] stems are translated as present or recent past",
which
would seem to indicate that if any other time is involved, it must be
specified somehow. Is this so?

I am dredging up memories from almost half a century ago, but as I
recall, what we Indo-European speakers would see as a verb in Hopi
expresses relative validity of statement, as in speaker
sees/experiences, reports on something happening elsewhere/elsewhen,
someone else does the same and speaker reports on that, someone else
reports what yet another sees/experience and speaker reports on that.
Time is reported on in some what other than built into the "verb" and is
not obligatory. I hope this makes sense.

Not all societies have been as time-obsessed as ours.

No doubt this is true. Likewise, it's true that some languages require
the
obligatory specification of more different times ("tenses", as I
understand
the term) than others. (Most languages, like English, have 2 or 3
"tenses",
maximum is about 8, and many, like Chinese, don't have obligatory
specification of tense at all.)

It has been a LONG time since I was seriously studying synchronic
linguistics; most of my later study was historical.

But, as several people here have pointed out, there appears to be NO
correlation between how time-obsessed a society is, and how many "tenses"
its language has.

Oh, I confess to being facetious with the "time-obsessed" comment 8-)
However, time IS built into all the modern versions of Indo-European
languages, again as far as I recall from long-ago studies.

I would be curious to learn how time is treated in agglutinative
languages.

--
Mary Loomer Oliver (aka Erilar),
philologist, biblioholic medievalist

http://www.airstreamcomm.net/~erilarlo


.

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