[B-Greek] Are there any aspect only language?
Curtis Hinson
curtis at curtishinson.com
Wed Sep 20 11:50:02 EDT 2006
Your thought doesn't hold up anthropologically speaking. Westerners
especially after the invention of the mechanical clock think in terms of
linear precise time, but that doesn't mean everyone does.
Time is experienced and thought of differently by differently cultures.
No language is counter-intuitive to its natives anymore than a culture
is counter-intuitive to its members. The idea of intuition/"commen
sense" itself, I'd gather, only works within the context of a culture,
so the statement is a meaningless one.
In Chinese there is literally no tense: a verb is one word, one form,
one pronunciation, one character, every time, everywhere. What time
sense is there is added with adverbs or particles but those are not
inherent to the verb in any way. In other words, time is an
afterthought in Chinese, and aspect. Some other eastern languages share
similar features although I'm most familiar with PuTongHua and GuangDongHua.
Bless the Name
Curtis Hinson
http://curtishinson.com
Mitch Larramore wrote the following on 9/20/2006 7:22 AM:
> It seems to me that if there were one, it would end up
> like Porter's view of Koine Greek where one tense is
> almost always used for past, one almost always used
> for future, and one almost always used for the
> present. It would appear that that is one of the
> constraints we as humans have: we think in terms of
> time. How could some group of people put a language
> together that is counter-intuitive, especially one the
> size of Greek? (And if Greek had no tense, I think the
> Romans would have insisted upon Latin being the lingua
> franca, and if not, the people would have gravitated
> toward a tensed language.)
>
> Mitch Larramore
> Sugar Land, Texas
>
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