Aymara's time metaphor reversed?

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/15/06 5:12:32 PM, pyoung at uoregon.edu writes:
<< Ancient German time, according to Bauschatz, is binary, not tripartite.  
It divides into past and non-past, not into past, present, and future.  There 
are no explicit references in early Germanic materials to a concept like the 
future.  He points out that future references in Old English are translations of 
explicitly Christian, Latin materials.  The past, as collector of events, is 
clearly the most dominant of the two components of time. >>

Actually, the curiousity is that the basic b-root word (as in to be or not to 
be) -- reconstructed as IE*bheu-, *bhu- "grow, come into being, become" -- 
did not have a regular 'past' tense in Old English.  But it was used to express 
both the present and the future, which sounds pretty forward-looking to me.  
At least with this verb, the attitude seems to have been the past is merely 
prologue.

Of course, there still is no future tense, in the inflective sense, in 
English.  But I don't think anyone anywhere has ever talked more about the future 
than American English-speakers.

Maybe this goes back to the recent analytic-synthetic debate.  Were those 
Old-English speakers expressing some kind of an anti-future world view by failing 
to have a future tense?  Or were they just living with the amibiguoty until 
the contrast became necessary or convenient?  Since they don't not appear to 
have been particularly poor planners or 
terribly phobic about hitting the road for parts unknown, I'd have to 
conclude that they had a pretty good concept of the future, even if they didn't have 
a word for it.

<<The tripartite Christian time that we have come to accept is static, 
without space, and outside humanness.>>

Tripartite Christian time?  Isn't that how they set their clocks at the NIST?

Steve Long