By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban
The largely indecipherable mysteries of time, and of course space, have long hounded people and gripped their imagination. Physicists argue that time and space came into existence with the Big bang. Before that the universe was just a dot. The creation and movement of the earth, the moon, the sun and the other planets and galaxies make us feel the passing of time. Thus, space and time are inseparable; it is through motion that we measure time. Our life is a travel in time, at a regular pace, one second in a second, and the concept of time travel is possible; you can travel to the future by a fraction of the second when you travel very fast. How do we communicate time?
The big hook
Some physicists say that time doesn’t exist; it is an illusion; there is nothing called present, past or future. Albert Einstein says that time is relevant: “this is a very interesting code when you sit with a nice girl for two hours it seems like two minutes and when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes it seems like two hours. That’s relativity.” Psychologists argue that time is subjective; they institute the term ‘psychological time’. For philosophers, time has been their main preoccupation. Eternalists believe in time existence, whereas presentists think that time is only the present time, no future or past. Time has been intriguing writers, novelists and poets and artists because time is the envelope in which we live; it is the very key component of our existence as humans.
Some languages use the grammatical category ‘tense’ to grammaticalise and communicate the concept of time, and metaphorically chop time flow or the hypothetical timeline into three major domains: past, present and future. In each domain, there can be an infinite number of time slices and time expressions. Think about the past domain, for instance; you can use infinite time distinctions: ‘yesterday’, ‘the day before’, ‘last week’, ‘last month’, ‘last year’, ‘last century’, ‘a few moments ago’, etc. Such distinctions are temporal reference points which indicate whether the action took place in the near or remote past, and whether it was preceded or followed by another past action i.e. the temporal proximity of an event to the present moment.
Thus, tense is a grammatical device placing action in time. In most languages, tense is usually marked on verbs. In English, we say he ‘goes’, ‘went’ and ‘is going’; time is communicated through tense distinctions marked on verbs. In some languages, tense is marked on nouns. A case in point is Hupa, an indigenous language in California. A noun may have three tenses. The noun ‘house’, for instance, could have the present tense ‘xonta’ (an existing house), the past tense ‘xontaneen’ (a no-longer-existing house) and the future tense ‘xontate’ (a not – yet – built house). Other languages are tenseless. Time is communicated through time expressions. In Chinese, for instance, you can say ‘I go to the movies tomorrow’, ‘I go to the movies yesterday’, and ‘I go to the movies in the evening.’ The verb does not change, no inflections, no attached morphemes, and no tense.
Three temporal systems
Interestingly, there are three temporal systems: speech or ‘speaking time’, ‘reference time’ which refers to when exactly an action takes place and ‘event time.’ To illustrate this, consider the following example: ‘Sam had finished his presentation before he went home.’ The speaking time is now, the event time is ‘finishing his presentation’, and the reference time is ‘before he went home.’
Complete or in progress?
On the other hand, grammar needs to show whether the action is complete or in progress; this is the role of ‘aspect’, a related grammatical device which refers to the point of view or the angle from which we look at an event to see if it is complete (perfect) or incomplete (progressive). In ‘he’s eating’ vs. ‘he has eaten,’ the action of eating is in progress in the former example, while complete, perfect in the latter. Consequently, the verbs here are in the progressive and perfective aspects, respectively.
The number of tenses varies significantly across languages. Some languages have only two tenses (past and present). Others have up to 11 tenses and you can add various aspectual forms. A West African language, for instance, has five kinds of past tenses as well as an equal number of future ones.
Finally, languages differ only in the amount of grammatical details they glue on verbs or elsewhere to express time. However, anything expressed in one language can be expressed in the others, according to ‘the effability principle.’ Any language can express any thought, any attitude, any concept and any idea. All languages are equal; they embroil human experience equally. Therefore, the stark prejudice and discrimination against some languages and their speakers is no longer acceptable. Indeed, what’s common among languages is so greater than what divides languages.
By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban Professor of linguistics Faculty of Arts Kafr el-sheikh University
Email: [email protected]
