Originally published at: How to talk about time in a language that doesn't have any tenses | Boing Boing
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I don’t know if this song is the perfect expression of time, but it is the one that immediately popped into my head…
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What is it with German rock musicians and time?
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Well, time is a pretty universal concern 
As for the German part, ich weiß es nicht
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Lunchtime, doubly so.
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If only yours was the 42nd comment…
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That reminds me that in the novelisation, Douglas Adams went on for pages about how time travel, once possible, would introduce all sorts of new tenses to verbs, for “in the speaker’s past but the subject’s future”, “in the speaker’s potential future but the subject’s past”, “in the future of the speaker but happening to the subject right now”, “will do but had already done in the future”, and so on.
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did everybody here in this thread understand the video? because I could not make head nor tail of it.
it seemed like one of those things where the speaker clearly understood a phenomenon but his explanation only confirmed the understanding of those who already understood the phenomenon rather than explaining it to someone who didn’t.
of course, I could just be too thick to follow it.
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From Duolingo lessons (and kinda relevant):
Klingon verbs do not have tense (past, present, future), so a verb such as yaj could mean “understands, understood, will understand”. They do have aspect (e.g. whether an action is completed or is continuous).
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I’m feeling the same way. Once the narrator started talking about aspects, I got a glimmer of understanding, but it’s definitely not clicking for me.
Also, here’s another song about time:
Edit: Suprise bonus track!
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Yes, Nativelang is a great channel if you want to dip your toe into learning about how languages are different from each other - but also often have commonalities.
His early video on the history of writing is fantastic.
Also, if we are linking videos about times:
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Ditto.
To try to make sense of it, I read Grammatical aspect - Wikipedia . The distinction between aspect and tense is exciting to people who get excited about such things, but it left me cold.
Fortunately for English speakers, we’ve got a There’s More Than One Way To Do It language, so Wikipedia includes an example of conveying time information with aspect rather than tense:
For example, consider the following sentences: “I eat”, “I am eating”, “I have eaten”, and “I have been eating”. All are in the present tense, indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence ( eat , am , and have ). Yet since they differ in aspect each conveys different information or points of view as to how the action pertains to the present.
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There’s a follow up that gives a more technical explanation… enough that I have a vague grasp of it, compared to the complete bafflement after the first video.
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Didn’t knew Anthrax covered Joe Jackson! Thanks, good find!
“Any sufficiently advanced understanding of cause and effect, is indistinguishable from time travel”
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In Newfoundland, “I’m after eating that leftover pizza” means “I ate that leftover pizza”.
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