I know of a language with no past, present or future tense. Not even a word for "before"!
And yet somehow this language can talk about time as well as you can. How? Well, here is
the story of time in Maya, an extreme case of tenselessness.
A Maya and a German are watching videos in a lab. Sounds like start of a bad linguistics
joke, but actually they're competing to see who's better at talking time in an experiment
designed to investigate a difference between their languages.
See, "maaya t'aan", which linguists call "Yukatek Maya", is fascinatingly unusual for something
it lacks. No tenses, and not even basic time sequence words like before, until or after!
The researcher is eager to test whether this impacts the way they communicate about time.
Here's the task: enter two speakers of the same language, A and B. A watches two videos
with slightly different sequences of events. B only watches one video. A describes both
videos, then asks B a question about their single video. B answers. Based on that, A
guesses which video B saw.
Across a hundred-plus runs of this task, speakers of both languages guess right at nearly the
exact same rate. Despite its tenselessness, Maya seems no more timeless than German.
Even outside of a modern lab, this quirk has history. Travel to Chiapas in the southeast
of Mexico, and go about as far east as you can towards the border with Guatemala.
Wade through the forest and let the sounds sink in...
No fear, those are just the howler monkeys.
As you approach the Usumacinta River, you come across the site of Yaxchilán.
The structures here abounded with inscriptions. Above doorways, lintels with glyphs. Facing
the buildings, stelae with glyphs. Even stairways leading up to buildings were carved on the
tread and on the riser. In front of structure 44 is stairway three. On the tread of the
first and third steps, we see one verb used in two forms: chukaj and chukji, "is captured"
and "was captured".
These glyphs record history in Classic Maya, an ancient relative of Yukatek. But, despite
my translation and just like in that study, they do it without tenses. How are Maya past
and present going so tenseless?
Hmm, here's a guess, one I remember first hearing about Mandarin: maybe tenseless languages
rely on adverbials like "yesterday" or "next year". No, in fact, Maya speakers use words
like these no more often and with no more emphasis than you do. The real answer isn't
so simple. It works more like this...
Hurricane Roxana struck the Yucatán Peninsula back in 1995. A week after it hit, a Maya
speaker shared the story of when news came to Yaxley village ahead of the impending huracán:
when we arrived, we saw everyone was saying they had heard on the radio the cyclone was
coming. I count five verbs. All five were heard in a predictably and clearly timed way.
And all five were tenseless. See, tense is a way for you to relate the time of the topic
you're speaking about to the time when you're speaking. But watch what happens when Maya
drops tense and thinks about another property: aspect. This is about flow. Not the when but
the how of time.
"Táan in beetik le naajo'". This could be happening at any time. But with this non-perfective
aspect here, it slices into an event that's happening, putting the topic inside the event. This ongoing
topic feels unattached, like it's in search of some
nearby reference point to chain itself to.
A reference point like... well, look back at those Classic stairstep glyphs that spell
"chukji". It's a perfective, and perfectives set events. They place the entire event time
inside the topic time.
Now behold the complex beauty that Maya grows from this grammatical seed in that hurricane
news. Five verbs, five aspects: we arrive, we see, people say, they hear, cyclone come.
First, a new topic is set up: arrived in town, realized what was happening. This is the reference
point for the whole thing. Then a chain of non-perfectives. The talk was ongoing around
that time, while hearing carries over from a previous time and this topic follows from
it. The storm was also ongoing.
Boom. Exactly as aspected. Maya tenselessness isn't only about aspects though. "Ba'ax kéen
a beetej?" The action here is aspect-free. It partakes in the other part of Maya's solution
to tenseless time: mood, which gives grammar a way to share our moods, our senses of obligation,
desire, uncertainty, need. Factual statements are realis, real. Other moods are irrealis,
unreal or not necessarily fact.
The Maya future is not a fact, it's a mood. An irrealis mood. So when I ask "ba'ax kéen
a beetej?", the unreal action is easy to interpret as future: "what will you do?" Just like in
"ba'ax ta beetaj?", the perfective event-inside-topic is readily translated as in the past: "what
did you do?"
Mood also gives Maya a way to say something like "before" without a word for it: negative
unreal, plus event. You hadn't watched, I animated. It's not far from
I animated before you watched.
Are we playing semantics though? Is perfective just another word for past? Does irrealis
actually mean future? Say you're asked about building a house two years ago, around now
or next year. Past, present, future
For each time, you can answer with most any aspect or mood! With nuances: our trusty
perfective sets up a clean past event, does "blow-by-blow reporting" in the present and
has a conditional setup feel in the future.
Whew! All that work for a glimpse of how one speaker of a Mayan language inscribed history
into stairsteps without tenses, and well over a thousand years later a speaker of a different
Mayan language sat in a lab and communicated time accurately in
an extremely tenseless language.
Jach yuum bo'otik te'ex, gracias a mis patrocinadores at every level. This was a fun challenge.
I'm animating a sequel to get into some of the more technical details, too.
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