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A language with no concept of time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6015 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 17 of 24 21 May 2011 at 9:35am | IP Logged | ||
Well, as the BBC article makes it clear they have no particular problems learning Portuguese, I'd say it's a big kick in the nuts for Sapir-Whorf. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6054 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 18 of 24 21 May 2011 at 1:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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So then the essentially don't have a dating system, not necessarily "no time". Their system of organizing time must just consist of "before" and "after". It's like not having numbers but still understanding the concept of greater and less...? Edited by irrationale on 21 May 2011 at 1:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Romanist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5286 days ago 261 posts - 366 votes Studies: Italian | Message 19 of 24 22 May 2011 at 10:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Maybe they have arranged marriages? Ho..Ho..;-D 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| KimG Diglot Groupie Norway Joined 4981 days ago 88 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Portuguese, Swahili | Message 20 of 24 23 May 2011 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is a language in the Tupi-Guarani family somehow, right? Even if they got nothing comparable to saying "I will work from the sun go up to the sun go down", a sentence who should be translateable to most languages, somehow, on the planet,what would it mean, if we assume it is related to the Tupi and Guarani languages?
I'm a amateur with no linguistics training, but finds such things as these interesting. If we assume it's classified properly, would it mean, either it could show us simpler enviroment do not require the advanced time concepts we have, since virtually ALL modern languages have somehow had use of the time feature, while these people just seem to have a means to count how old they are by altering their names to fit their age category? Id assume if this is correct, they would get by in their enviroment quite nicely, saying things like "OldWomanName you are too old to go to the great river by yourself, dangerous, you are not YoungWomanName anymore". You people agree on this assumption? Well, if nothing around them alters, exept it stops raining and starts raining according to the seasons, i presume they remember what their Mothers in laws, and great Uncles had as names when youngers, and thus can refer to themself not being "young bob" but "grown bob" so to say, and refer to their time passing by using alternative ways? My thoughts on this language, is if these articles are correct, don't it show we could loose, or never invent, features of our main language who we do not need? I assume, they can tell stories? If i remember correct about other tupi-guarani, there is some, as the extinct Guarani language influencing modern Brazilian, who did not use big and complex sentences, but instead many small sentences. Would not it be possible to imagine the researchers overlooked they could say stuff as: I tell an story. Story short. Sun up. Bob fishing. Sky drop water. Water hit bob. Bob go to shelter. Instead of "bob fished from the sun rose in the morning until it started to rain". Hmm, to be honestly, am I somehow correct in how I understand this, or way wrong, and what would this mean? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 24 24 May 2011 at 11:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Even if there isn't any overt morphological category for a notion in a language there can be other, more or less standardized ways to express a certain thing. For instance Bahasa (both Indonesia and Malaysia) hasn't got grammatical tempus, but if you want to indicate that something happens in the future you can use "akan" and/or other time markers. For instance "Saya akan melakukan besok" = I ["will"(future)] do tomorrow, or "Saya sudah melakukan kemarin" = I ["already"(past)] do yesterday.
I'm fairly convinced that all languages use such methods, and this includes the ones we mostly discuss here. For instance many languages including Bahasa I&M have two 1. persons plural - one that includes the person you speak to and one that doesn't. Oh my, how could we ever live without that??? Well, we could/can/will could be doing live without this feature because there are other ways to mark it if the distinction is important. Of course the notion of 'being important' is relative. In some cultures the exact time of the day may be less important than in others, and one culture may find extremely detailed descriptions of family memberships less important than another, but if something is perceived as important then there will be some more or less conventionalized way of expressing it. Edited by Iversen on 24 May 2011 at 12:12pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5732 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 22 of 24 25 May 2011 at 10:43am | IP Logged | ||
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I've recently finished reading Guy Deutscher's "Through the langugage glass. Why the
world looks different in other languages". He analyzes some of those languages that don't supposedly have a concept of time, etc, or why in Homer's Iliad sheep were described as purple and the see was of deep-wine colour. I recommend it to anyone who got intrigued by this article. His earlier book "The unfolding of language" was fascinating, too. They're accessible for non professionals and I enjoyed them a lot! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5098 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 23 of 24 26 May 2011 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's interesting, but just because they don't have words for time doesn't mean they don't have any concept for it, as the article implies. Is it just that they have a different concept of time-- or that time is not explicitly stated in the language, but inferred through context? Or maybe they just don't have one specific word that directly translates to "time"?
The article says "The scientists argue that it is the first time they have been able to prove time is not a deeply entrenched universal human concept, as previously thought." How does this prove that? Aren't words for divisions of day and night, and seasons, still words describing time? Why would they need words describing dates and aspects of a western calendar if they don't measure time that way? Maybe they don't measure time by lunar months or years, but by the passage of seasons. They know when a certain number of seasons have passed and it's time to enter a new phase of life and adopt a new name. That implies they must be counting or tracking time somehow. Yeah, the article isn't nearly detailed enough to tell. I just remember starting Japanese and being vaguely told that Japanese doesn't have any plurals, and no future tense... doesn't mean they don't have any concept of the future, other ways of expressing number, or inferring it from context. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6869 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 24 of 24 30 May 2011 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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language with no concept of time
Spoken fluently with every public transport company in the world 1 person has voted this message useful |
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