From: Brian Swedburg (brian@discoveryhills.org)
Date: Thu Sep 23 1999 - 15:06:16 EDT
<x-html><!x-stuff-for-pete base="" src="" id="0"><!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
<p>Jim West wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE><i> Is</i>
<br><i>>time grammaticalized in Greek?</i><i></i>
<p><i>It certainly is. How shall we conceive of a language which
has no reference</i>
<br><i>to temporality? Are we to visualize a timeless universalism
in which every</i>
<br><i>action is present and every truth relativized to some sort of timelessness?</i><i></i>
<p><i>I cannot even begin to imagine what such a language would sound like-
nor</i>
<br><i>can I imagine what meaning words would have removed from time and
placed in</i>
<br><i>some sort of utopian never-never-land (with apologies to the fans
of Michael</i>
<br><i>Jackson who are fond of the never-never-land ranch).</i><i></i>
<p><i>Sometimes I get the feeling that the more bizarre an idea is, the
more</i>
<br><i>popular it will be. And, to me, it is simply bizarre to suggest</i>
<br><i>a-temporality when it comes to language.</i>
<p>Jim and others, greetings</blockquote>
As I noted previously, I am
just a "little greek" , so I toss this thought out with a sense of humor.
Last year when we studied aspect and aktionstart, along with probing the
question of whether or not time is grammaticalized in the verb's morphology,
I had the same basic objection as Jim to considering the verbs of a language
not being temporal.
<br> As I pondered this in my
studies, I realized that American Sign Language does not grammaticalize
time in the verb. Seperate signs are used to indicate whether the
verb is present, past, future, etc... This does not prove anything
concerning greek, It just opened the door to my considering the possibility
that a language can indicate time through means other than the verb itself,
in a given phrase.
<p>Just a thought. Thanks,
<p>Brian
<br>M.A.E.T. Student Western Sem.
<br> </html>
</x-html>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:40:39 EDT