Unlocking the secret sounds of language

[Scott DeLancey]

On Tue, 9 May 2006, Richard Smith wrote:

> Would people who have no words for past tense
> be forced to live in a collective amnesia?

Except possibly for Whorf (depending on what you think he was
actually saying) I don't think any serious linguist has ever suggested
this.  Whether a language has tense, or some other grammatical category,
or not isn't a question of what you *can* say, so much as of what you
*have to* say.  For example, English "has" plural, while Chinese doesn't.
This doesn't mean that Chinese speakers can't indicate the difference
between one and more than one.  What it means is that English speakers
*must* indicate it, even when it's not really relevant--anytime you
say an English noun, it's necessarily either in the singular or plural
form, and you've committed yourself to one or the other.  Same with
tense--any English verb is unavoidably in the present or the past form
(or one of the participles).  Notice, though, that that's only loosely
connected to our understanding of what we're talking about, since we
regularly use the "present" form to talk about both past ("So this guy
comes up to me and ...") and future ("We leave for Canada tomorrow")
events.

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
1290 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1290, USA

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html