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

Curtis Hinson curtis at curtishinson.com
Wed Sep 20 12:08:39 EDT 2006


Yes, but nobody said that anybody functions without reference to time.  :-)

My point is, cultures think and deal with time differently and that 
there's nothing counter-intuitive about that.  Each to his own.  It's 
only counter-intuitive as non-natives are superimposing their foreign 
values on the language and culture.

Bless the Name
Curtis Hinson
http://curtishinson.com

P.S.  I mistyped "common", whoops. 

George F Somsel wrote the following on 9/20/2006 11:02 AM:
> 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 <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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