Re: time distinctions

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> A Chinese-American told me once that Chinese (Mandarin?) doesn't have
> verb tenses.  Is this true?  I can see a language getting by using
> circumlocutions or something to indicate time.
Chinese uses adverbs of time like "yesterday", "tomorrow", "last year",
"comes the revolution", etc.  And perfectly often it's obvious what
the time reference is, so why force people to specify it?

> Various things like progressive, imperfect, perfect, etc.  (Do they count
> as time distinctions?)
These are aspect distinctions, and Chinese does have a bunch of these.

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