Last time, we saw how the Maya have no past, present or future tense and no word for before,
until or after!
Despite that they can still tell stories just fine.
This time, I want to take a closer look.
Let's explore the complicated details behind how the Maya talk about events in the past.
The Maya strategy for talking time fascinated me.
It's all here, in this dense 40 page read.
When I first picked it up two years ago, by page 15, I was hooked when I saw this diagram of
the trickiest part of Maya's solution to a tenseless past.
I've wanted to share it with you ever since.
I admittedly simplified the details in my last tale, but from the comments I see I left
some of you confused.
Worried it'd take a degree to understand at all.
Or maybe wanting to understand more.
But maybe you still liked my pun?
Well, in hopes we can clear things up, today I'm going to break my own rule and do more
of something I try hard to do less of: instead of storytelling, explaining.
Last time I was ambitious.
I skipped ahead to page 33, where a village was about to be struck by a storm: so then
we arrived in Yaxley, we saw everybody was saying they had heard on the radio the hurricane
was coming.
This snippet of a story has five verbs, no time-specific adverbs and, unlike the English
translation, zero grammatical tenses.
How does Maya do it?
This paper opens a door to the answer.
To reach it though, we have to stretch beyond our comfortable time words and learn new ones.
First, coding time – that's when you're speaking.
Next, topic time, the window of time you're focused on.
And event time, the total time of the event you're talking about.
Topics vs events, it's getting abstract.
Say your event is "eating".
You could make your topic the start of the eating, somewhere in the middle, the end of
the eating, even the whole eating action.
Sticking with your new time terms, what is this word I'm throwing around, telling you
that English has but Maya doesn't?
What is "tense"?
For this paper, tense is temporal deixis, a Greek word you can still hear in Greece
today where δείξω is a verb form for "I point".
Tense is deictic; it points.
It points from when the speaker's speaking to the topic time.
Past tense points back, future tense points ahead, and present points to coding time.
Languages can divide this up differently, combining tenses into future vs nonfuture
or past vs nonpast.
But tenses point from coding times to topic times.
A big asterisk here, because there absolutely are relative tenses that point from somewhen
other than coding time, like if I say, "you will realize you already knew", the past "knew"
points back from some time in the future.
But it's still deictic.
Imagine instead you aren't concerned with when a talker is talking, but you're more interested
in the action itself.
You zoom in and you look at the relationship between an event and the slice of the event
that's the current topic of conversation.
What's the flow of the eating in the topic time window?
Is it ongoing?
Did it start?
Did it stop?
Now you're thinking with aspect!
Your topic might just capture some part of an event and fit neatly inside that event
using the imperfective aspect.
Take sentence d on page 20: táan in beetik le najo'.
No tense here.
It could be in the past was building, present am building, future will be building.
What's important is that I'm talking about the continuing flow of building, before and
after the topic time.
Flip this.
Put the event inside the topic.
Now your topic includes the entire event, every piece of the action.
This is the perfective aspect: tin beetaj le naajo'.
I've seen this described as a complete action or even depicted as a dot.
It leaves you with no sense that the action breaks down into smaller components.
Dots and lines, "ate" vs "was eating", perfectives and imperfectives,
but there's even more to aspect.
Maya splits the imperfective, which can also be used for repetitive, habitual or generic
actions, from a progressive aspect that is simply ongoing, in progress.
Maya has other aspects, too, like an aspect that can move your topic time window
entirely outside of the event.
Say the event happened before the topic but is relevant because the topic resulted from
it; it's in its "post-state".
Our trusty paper calls that terminative.
Or maybe that linked event happened after the topic, and the topic sits
in its "pre-state".
That's prospective.
For Maya's sake, we'll stop our list there, but around the world the list of possible
aspects goes on.
Maya has markers for these and more.
Many markers.
(Collect all 15.
Limit one marker per verb!)
How do tenseless markers pin down time?
Why, with one of the three "Natural Temporal Reference Points"!
Coding time (when you're speaking), calendar time (like tomorrow or a few days ago), and
event time.
What oh what could set an event time?
Well, something that could contain an entire event inside of a topic... a perfective.
In Maya, perfectives set reference points.
What about the other non-perfective aspects?
What do they do?
Well, turn to page 35, where a story is starting about something scary up a tree.
If a Maya storyteller said no more than these lines it would feel like "nothing ever happens"
in the story, but it would also be hard to interpret.
Non-perfective aspects need to bind their topic time to a reference point, like the
reference points introduced by perfectives.
This is your temporal anaphora - how to determine topic times from context.
Use a perfective to set up a topic time around an event.
Chain non-perfectives onto that same topic time.
With those hard-won temporal tools in mind, look back once more at the hurricane.
Can we make sense of it now?
First, there's a perfective plus imperfective, arrive and see.
This is actually a narrative idiom in Maya, and it's heard as perfective.
It sets our reference point.
The three sentences that follow bind to that reference point; that's now their topic time.
People saying is progressive, ongoing in that topic time.
Hearing is one of those terminatives that happened at a previous time where this topic
is in its "post state".
The cyclone coming is in progress, too.
The markers that mark these aspects are obligatory.
Each of the verbs here has one.
In fact, every basic "verbal core" in Maya needs one and only one.
You might've noticed these markers aren't all about aspect though.
Some share information about mood, like the irrealis markers I got into last time.
While I said words about how Maya uses unreal moods for the future, none were as pithy as
this comment.
Besides aspect and modality, other markers get picky about metricality, the "how much"
of time, how recently or how long ago some action occurred relative to the topic time.
But these clever aspect markers are key for understanding how Maya can tell
tenseless stories.
Think back to that diagram that captured my attention.
Can we read it?
Perfectives capture an event time, right.
Imperfectives or progressives chain ongoing within that event's topic time, sure.
Prospectives and terminatives can link events to a pre-sate or post-state topic, like the
village who had already heard of the storm.
Yes!
And that is temporal anaphora in a tenseless language.
Before you go, you've earned yourself one last surprise.
It's about English.
She walked in; the jaguar purred.
She walked in; the jaguar was purring.
Does the first one set up two topics, entering then purring?
Does the second chain onto one topic, with purring ongoing?
Congratulations, you're also the proud owner of this temporal anaphora.
You just don't use it to relate topic time to coding time.
That is what you have tenses for.
In the end, maybe we shouldn't feel odd about tenseless time at all.
As page 40 points out, many languages, like Mandarin and Russian, survive fine without
definite articles.
And Maya stories thrive with no need for a past tense.
Thank you for watching.
I know this got technical,
but how'd you like it?
Does it demystify the last video?
Appreciation to my patrons, your support keeps me from always chasing popular, shinier topics,
and lets me try something like this for a change.
Stick around and subscribe for language.