Re: CHAT: relative tense
| From: | dunn patrick w <tb0pwd1@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Tuesday, March 23, 1999, 0:38 |
|---|
On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Jim Grossmann wrote:
> >Perhaps a society that doesn't differentiate between past and future,
> >considering both equally illusory and the present to be the only true,
> >objective reality.
>
> JimG -- to repeat an earlier criticism of one of my posts, they could make
> the distinction lexically if they had to. This makes the society you just
> described all the more credible.
I was thinking perhaps of adding some sort of indicator of perfection or
imperfection of the action. Past and futurity could be indicated, as you
say, lexically if necessary; or they could use the perfect tense as a
rough-and-ready past (much as Biblical Hebrew does).
I'm thinking agglutinating here, perhaps based off of some Native American
languages.