[B-Greek] Are there any aspect only language?

George F Somsel gfsomsel at yahoo.com
Wed Sep 20 12:02:12 EDT 2006


That Chinese doesn't include any time reference in the verb itself does not thereby necessarily indicate that time is an afterthought -- it is simply expressed differently (by your adverbs and particles).  While I don't know Chinese, I doubt that they would carry on their daily lives without reference to time.  This applies to all cultures whether prior to the mechanical clock or not.  It is one thing to say that the verb has no temporal component and another to say that a culture functions without reference to time.
 
george
gfsomsel
_________ 



----- Original Message ----
From: Curtis Hinson <curtis at curtishinson.com>
To: Mitch Larramore <mitchlarramore at yahoo.com>; B Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 11:50:02 AM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Are there any aspect only language?


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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