Tense-aspect-mood is a grammatical system with three distinct, yet often times
fundamentally intertwined ideas that will affect how we deal with verbs in our conlangs
particularly when it comes to conjugation.
Briefly, tense tells us when an event occurs,
aspect tells us how an event relates to the flow of time,
& mood, or modality, tells us how a speaker feels about what they're saying.
Now, to be clear, I'm using the word ‘event’ here to mean
any action, state, or ocurrence conveyed by a verb.
Anyways, each will get their own video, but for now
let's focus on tense & the various systems
languages employ to locate events in time.
The simplest systems are of those that lack tenses altogether
Think, “I walk yesterday” “I walk today” “I walk tomorrow”.
There's no verbal morphology,
meaning tense is not grammaticalized through inflections.
Instead, events are located in time through order means, like adverbs.
In Jamaican Creole you might hear something like
“Yeside, me a sing”.
Further, if we drop the adverb we'd have to introduce a time marker:
“Mi en a sing”.
That ‘en’ there is signaling the past tense.
Jamaican Creole, along with the likes of Burmese & Dyirbal,
are so called tenseless languages.
Next up will be languages that divide time into two.
Future versus non-future, like Hua,
& past versus non-past like Japanese or English.
Yup, you heard right. English has two main tenses & lacks a Future tense.
Now that's not to say that English has no concept of the future, rather it only grammaticalizes past & non-past forms.
“I walked” “I walk” “I will walk” the past has a distinct verbal form but both the present & future
Share the same form. Two basic forms, two grammatical tenses
Like compare English's binary system to French's tertiary system. Past, Present, Future,
three distinct forms, three distinct grammatical tenses.
From here we get languages which split up time into more degrees of remoteness.
The most prolific of these languages is Bamiléké Dschang Aka Yemba with its...
five past tenses & five future tenses.
Past tense one & Future tense one are used when referring to the immediate past & future.
P2 & F2 tenses are used for Earlier today & Later today.
P3 & F3 are used for Yesterday & Tomorrow
P4 is used for an event that occurred the day before yesterday or a few days earlier &
F4 is the same but in the future. The day after tomorrow or a few days later.
Finally the p5 & f5 tenses are used for a year or more in the past or future.
Yemba is extreme.
More typical is Haya.
There's two things to know here. 1. Haya's past has more distinctions than its future. This is common. Think about it,
We can say more about known quantities. 2. Its cutoff points are pretty typical. We've only observed a handful of divisions cross-linguistically.
Interestingly though, Haya allows its tenses to be applied fluidly like “it will happen in a hundred years”
marked with the after tomorrow future tense [-at] implies
It will happen a hundred years from now, which, subjectively, is a very remote event.
But if we mark the verb with the seemingly incorrect today-tomorrow future tense [-t]
The implication becomes: it will happen in a hundred years from now, which, subjectively, isn't that far away. Which is cool...
But it's nothing like Burarra, which takes a totally different approach again.
It has two non future tenses that take their -nga & -de suffixes
So, I am eating: “ngupanga”. I ate today: “ngupade”.
I have eaten within the past few days: “ngupanga”. & I ate a long time ago: “ngupade”.
Which, on the face of it, seems like a real head-scratcher of a system & it turns out what's going on here
Is that Burarra has a quasi-cyclical discontinuous tense system
that conveys closeness & remoteness & superimposes these ideas onto a “Today” versus “Before Today” cutoff point.
Which I know sounds really complicated but in plain english all this means is that in each time frame,
then “-nga” tense marks the events closest to the moment of speech, & the “-de” tense marks the most remote events.
How fracking cool is that!
Kalaw Lagaw Ya, another Australian aboriginal language,
has a cool tense layering thing going on.
Tense A is used to cover the recent past & present, whilst Tense B covers the present & immediate future,
So Kalaw Lagaw Ya allows a choice of two present tenses because of the overlap. Perhaps if the current situation is a result of a past action,
Maybe tense A will be preferred. If the current situation will have implications for the future,
Perhaps tense B might be preferred. Again, another really cool system. Now all the tenses thus far have been...
Absolute Tenses. Absolute Tenses are ones that locate events in time relative to the present moment of speech, like when I say “I walked”
I'm really saying that with respect to the moment I uttered the words
“I walked” there was a time in the past where I did some walking. Same goes for Present, Future,
Non-Past, & Non-Future. Absolute tense is an event relative to moment of speech.
But there exists another category. The Relative Tenses
Which do not necessarily reference the present moment when locating events in time.
They can be split into absolute relative tenses & strict relative tenses.
So, to explain. “I walked” absolute past tense. The walking occurred relative to the moment of speech.
I had walked fields kind of the same,
But the “had” part seems to place the events slightly further back in time
Saying I had walked is like saying “relative to the present moment of speech,
There was a point in the past before which I did some walking” this, by definition, is what's known as an absolute-relative tense
The event is relative to a reference point which in turn is relative to the moment of speech.
On the other hand, strict relative tenses do not necessarily take the present moment as reference.
Take “Sokka said ‘Aang say that Katara paid for the cabbages’ ”
That past tense “paid” is not using Sokka's moment of speech as its reference point.
Rather, paid is a past event with respect to Aang's situation in the future
so if the reference point is not the moment of speech then we're looking at a strict relative tense.
E relative to R. Now, tons of cool stuff crops up here
“I had walked” from earlier, is an example of the past-in-the-past. Aka, the pluperfect tense
Moment of speech, Past reference point, Prior event,
E relative to R relative to S. “I was going to walk” is what's known as the Future in the past tense.
There was a time in the past after which I was going to walk
Moment of speech
Past Reference point
Subsequent Event
E relative to R relative to S. “I will have walked” is what's known as the Future-Perfect tense
There will be a time in the future prior to which I did some walking.
Moment of speech
Future Reference point
Prior Event
E relative to R relative to S & finally “I will be about to walk” is the Future-in-the-Future tense.
There will be a time the future after which I will walk.
Moment of speech
Future Reference point
Future Event
E relative to R relative to S. Now, full disclosure. Relative tenses in English aren't strictly tenses due to all of these...
Aspectual periphrastic constructions, which is fancy linguist speak for “It doesn't matter we'll talk about in another video” caveat done.
Let's get trippy. If we think of absolute tenses as being one step removed from the moment of speech
& absolute-relative tenses as being two steps removed. Then the question is begged. Could we have a tense...
That's three steps removed? An absolute-relative-relative tense for want of a better term? answer, Yes
“Tyrion left for the front; by the time he should return, the fields would have been burned to a stubble”
That “would have been” is an example of the future-perfect-in-the-past tense.
Relative to the present moment, there was a time in the past when Tyrion left. He was due to return sometime in the future,
but prior to this time, the fields were burning three steps removed.
E relative to R relative to another R relative to S. So, by extension, all possible permutations,
Eight in total could, in theory, work. Hell, if we want to, we can even endlessly daisy chain reference points together
I can't imagine why we'd do this, but the fact that it's a possibility is pretty damn mind-blowing
Oh & you know what else is mind-blowing?
This.
Good morning interweb, if I have piqued your interest in this topic, consider picking up tense by Bernard Comrie
It is a great book. Links in the description.
Also in the description will be a link to all the languages. I mentioned in the video. Go check them out. As always...
Thank you so much for watching & a special...
Thanks go out to Isaac Silbert, Andrew Chehayl, Robin Hilton, Ripta Pasay, Borja de Zavala Torres, & World Anvil
I'm gonna give another shout out to World Anvil here because I'm still getting comments from people's being all like “Hey...
Thanks for the heads up. World Anvil is a great service.”
So, if you're a world builder & you do world building, which I assume you do, World Anvil could be for you go...
check it out, links in the description & until next time, Edgar out