I've always wanted to make a conlang that is used by a fictional race where time-travel is so normalized that their language has tenses and moods baked in to talk about relative pasts, presents, and futures that are constantly in flux because of their actions, and this video has gotten me one step closer to actually realizing it. Thank you!
Or for a kind of fictional race that is ever-knowing, they remember what happens in the future, past, and present, and their consciousness can sometimes just shift around across the flow of their lifespan, at one point they're 50 years old and another 230 and then 160
And I've tried to invent modal verbs to describe such tenses in English (like how the verb 'will' creates the future tense). But I always get too confused thinking about multiple reference points.
Artifexian I was surprised you didn't bring up Chinese for the total uselessness of tense conjugation, but it was interesting to see the languages people don't often hear of
DeluxeTux5249 Chinese tenses are actually really similar to English. The particle 了(le) acts in much the same way as the English "-ed" suffix, as it follows the verb and denotes the past tense. The word 要 (yǎo) is used similarly to the word "will", preceding the verb and denoting a future tense, the only difference being that 要 can also be used to say "I want to..." as well as "I will..." So, much like English, there are no true grammatical tenses, but instead words to denote aspect. Edit: I'm not saying English has no grammatical tenses, but it's close.
TissuePaper tense I'm not saying it wasn't similar (ing suffix is similar to the word zài), but in English verbs conjugate for tense (the word changes), while in Chinese another word is added, (I actually studied Chinese for a bit, didn't get anywhere though) If you couldn't tell I'm not good at saying what I mean
Some Mayan languages have a remote tense that does not care about future or past. So the system is better represented with a circle. The present is at the bottom of the circle, the left is the past, the future is the right and the top is remote tense.
Lojban has zi/za/zu to indicate temporal distance and vi/va/vu to indicate spatial distance. But it also has tense markers to indicate past, future, north, south, left, right, etc.
mPky1 It's a gramatical feature that indicates that the verb's action takes place in a far time, regardless of whether it's in the future or the past. In Mayan cosmology, it has a relationship with the idea that time is cyclical, and that something sufficiently far in the past will eventually happen again in the future. That's why the direction of time does not matter, only distance.
Definitely more tenses in French (and concern about aspects and mood built-in). So you have to memorize a lot of IF...THEN pairs where the verb-form with the IF phrase must determine the verb-form you'll use with the THEN phrase! Remember that French developed in musty Medieval castles where people originally spoke an evolved or DEvolved Gallo-Roman, but some Franks came in and became Germanic royalty and the new prestige language, and people pronounced their own Latin roots with new German vowel-sounds. This was THE WORST MISTAKE IN LINGUISTIC HISTORY and sets French disgustingly apart from the other Romance languages. You will need to learn 4 nasal vowels and 3 Germanic vowels WHICH ARE NOT HEARD IN ENGLISH.
My English grammar professor, Dr. Dorothy Disterheft would strongly disagree with your argument that English has no future tense. That we use the modal "will" instead of a suffix to mark future tense doesn't change that it's still grammatical future tense. She made a point of this pretty much immediately in class (many years ago). Not that I'm saying you're wrong. I don't have the qualifications to say that. Just pointing out that the argument exists among grammarians.
I think the important thing about the form is not the number of words used but rather whether the grammatical category is used regardless of its redundancy based on context. English definitely has plurals because most nouns are either explicitly singular or explicitly plural. You cannot speak "without number": whenever you say "a keyboard" the listener knows you mean a single item; whenever you say "keyboards" they know you mean 2 or more. Is expressing future obligatory? For English the answer is... sort of. On the one hand, you can say something "The train arrives at 3 a.m." in a limited set of contexts (where the schedule is rather rigid) and "We are leaving soon" in a much wider range of contexts. On the other hand, native speakers use "will" or "is going to" (or "'s gonna") far more often than it would be necessary to remove ambiguity. Also, I am not a native speaker but the future tense should stay consistent, should it not? Is it OK to say "I will meet you at noon. My wife comes, too. She is telling you something important."? With simple forms (bring, tells) it sounds odd to my ear. Logically, the first "will" is enough to show that you are talking about the future.
Chinese would fall into the same category as well. In fact, under this premise, Chinese has no tenses at all. We can only express tenses using modals, i.e. 'I will walk" and "I had walk".
Halfgild Wynac It's not grammatically correct. The first 'will' applies to the first verb and is needed before each successive verb, otherwise I think it changes to a present tense, third person narration. It does get repetitive but I guess that's why we change it up with contractions. For example: "I'll meet you at noon. My wife will come too. She'll tell you something important."
+Halfgild Wynac While someone could probably manage to figure out what you meant, the way I'd say that, changing as little as possible, as a native speaker is "I will meet you at noon. My wife is coming too She will tell you something important." Of course, I'd never say it like that to begin with. I'd say something more like: "My wife and I will meet you at noon, she has something important to tell you." Contractions will be fluidly swapped in depending on how formal I'm feeling.
I have really grown to love this channel. I was caught off guard by the inclusion of a Jamaican Patois referrence and much appreciated it. I just want to point out though that the pronunciation for "yeside" is 3 syllablles [yeh.si.deh] Thank you for this channel
This makes me glad for how ASL’s basic grammar is set up. Time-Topic-Comment-Negative. As you get more advanced in the language, the more you can bend the rules as you see fit. When indicating the past/future/present we will indicate in front/ ahead/ right by us, respectfully. When listing events we will often make a list on our hands or make a timeline in front of us.
My headache has more to do with my sporadic hemiplegic migraines then with the density of your explanation, so I watched the video twice. I think I more or less I understand the video.
I'm kind of dissapointed that Spanish is not mentioned on a video about verbal tenses, since I'm quite fond on my verbal system hahaha Anyways, this video really helps me. I've been trying to teach my students (I'm a tutor) how english verbal tenses correlate to each other and when should we use one or the other, but it seems like they don't really get it? Maybe this approach will help them. Thank you, Artifexian!
ALGORITHM COMMENT... Thank you for making this video, it is very interesting because if you speak a language you don't think about all the theory that is behind it but when you start making up your conlang you starts struggling. So thanks again for sharing this video with us.
İn turkish there is a different tense for the past that you are not sure about for eg. Yürüdü means "he walked" Yürümüş means something like "i heard he walked"
Thanks for this video! I've been making my own language where I'm dropping tenses all together in favor of using prepositions. So instead of for example saying "I was eating", it would be "I eat before [now]" or "I before-eat". This would save me from a lot of conjugation, as my verbs conjugate to agree with the subjective noun phrase, and my nouns have plenty of inflection.
Are there languages with a specific past and a non-specific past tense? Like "yesterday, or on that specific moment, I did" versus "once, I don't realy know when, I did"
Julia Smith in Spanish the "perfect past" means something that was finished like "I walked home, and now I'm at home" and the "imperfect past" means something that started but not necessarily was finished, like "I was walking home, but something happened"
Generally, an unsubstantiated amount of time is just referred to as "a while ago" and has little or no impact on the verb since it's dealt with by a prepositional phrase.
DISTurbedwaffle918 in English you can use that, yes. In my conlang, I was more generally thinking about a six tenses system past specific, past non-specific, future specific, future non-specific, present, and a time independed tense that looks like a present non-specific for things that might have happened or will happen or just used for general facts. Can also be used for poetic purpose. For instance for a love declaration. Saying "I love you" in non-specific present implies "I love you, I always love you and I will always love you" in one elegant word.
Definitely an interesting topic. I like how in English you can circumvent tense altogether: yesterday I did some walking, I am currently walking, tomorrow I will go walking.
We will be going soon to the park, once it is not raining anymore, of which first we will need to feed the dogs, after we walk them, and after we go to the park, once it isn’t raining, we will eat, after we get to moordoor’s hill, and after we eat we will explore the park, right after everyone uses the bathroom, after everyone has a drink, and after coming back, we will go to the bus to leave, after everyone plays, and then afterwards we will go home, after we arrive back to school, and do the rest of it. *THE ULTIMATE RELATIVE SENTENCE!*
Thanks for the video. Awesome work. I plan on using this to help me explain how different tenses work in English to a co worker who isn't a native speaker.
Actually, the verb has more shapes than just these 3: think about the participe that is re-used in "J'ai mang*é*" and "J'aurais mang*é*" ("I ate" and "I would have ate") is different from the 3 others
My sister's friend's teacher (or something like that) once said "a few" refers to anything from 3 to 500 (although it wasn't in English and rather a translation of "a few").
01:42 In Czech it's same, we have "chodil/a/o jsem" (past tense, -a means woman -o means it [-a and -o are seperate]) ''chodím" is present tense, and "budu chodit" is future, it uses "budu" as future + infinitiv "chodiT": the -T means infinitiv.
I would say that English does actually have a future tense, it's just a periphrastic construction (i.e. some intransitive form and a form of the verb to be) rather than a directly conjugated single verb, which is a little different from a language like Jamaican Creole or Chinese which use an un-conjugated verb and a non-verbal time marker to indicate the same thing. So the distinction lies in the fact that English uses two verbal forms in conjunction, one of which happens to be un-conjugated in regards to tense rather than an un-conjugated verb and a non-verbal time marker.
I once thought of a story where a guy goes through a magic door that takes him into the future. The idea was that tge story would start out in past tense, when the protagonist walks down the magic hallway is in present tense and the future will be in future tense. It didn't work out as the future part was "will say" "will be" and "will do".
I'm with Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
I disagree. I think English has a true future tense, it just isn't marked with a suffix. It's still used regularly. Finnish on the other hand has true past - non-past system. 'Mä söin' =I ate 'Mä syön (nyt / ensi torstaina)' = I eat (now / next Thursday). We do have ways to refer to future with an auxiliary, but they are only used in special situations, e.g. 'Mä tuun syömään' = I come to eat -> I'll eat
Right but by definition tense as a grammatical category needs some kind of inflection. English has no grammatical future tense. Emphasis on grammatical. English future is more like a modal present than a future.
Artifexian First, I wonder whether you mean conjugation rather than inflection and, second, bollocks. Just because some over zealous grammarian objects to the lack of a future participle in English in no way means that the future tense does not exist and is instead some modal shade. Many good authorities have expounded upon not only the healthy existence of the English future tense, but have also pointed out how incredibly precise we can form future tenses with respect to aspect and mood. By this time tomorrow I shall have been brooding over this click bait title, or I will have forgotten it at some point. Half the languages on the planet could not make that subtle distinction.
It's just respecting our language, and not giving others false information about how things are said correctly. Grammar is really important. Maybe you are some dropout without any education and don't give a fuck, but I respect our language. And it shows you didn't even bother. It would be different if you didn't know how to properly use grammar, but of course you do. And if your point is to educate, like you are clearly trying to do, you should do it correctly or not do it at all. There is only one form on written grammar in Finnish, and it's the same for all of us no matter where we live. Your "mä" is not universal even in our spoken language, that's why it's incorrect. People use "mää", "mie", "myö" etc. You should always teach the stuff that works in most contexts first. And I'm sorry to say, but no one is going to take you seriously if you can't even articulate correctly and can't even bother to write "minä" instead of "mä", it really has nothing to do with me, just wanted to help you to be more credible in the future, but I guess it's pointless. You probably don't even give a fuck about closed compounds or anything.
French actually has four tenses: je mangeais (past) - je mangerais (future of the past) - je mange (present) - je mangerai (future). The conditional is traditionally counted as a mood, but in a French linguistics course I did we learnt that it's methodologically more consistent to count it as a tense (note how it contains the future suffix -r as well as the past suffix -ais at the same time - the conditional in French basically look like le passé simple and le future simple smashed together).
It is important to translate tense-system at the same time as you translate words. Esperanto has a more relative tense order where, "John said that he will go." does not mean that he will go after the moment of speech, but after the moment in the past when John said it, which might in fact have been before the moment of speech when he finally went. The subordinate verb always refers to the point relative to the main verb rather than the point of speech. Compound tenses also exist, which do not have aspect but nest actions relative to a past, the present, or a future point. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_grammar#Tense
this! this! is the reason I hate English class/exams. I'm okay with using the language but if the written homework/exam was about being specific about the different combination of tenses, I felt like I was baking and asked to separate each ingredient after mixing them.
I wish I had this video in high school. I would always mess up the differences between past/perfect past/past continuous/etc. Those diagrams solved everything.
1:52 Actually French has more different forms of past. Two by modifying the verb: Je mangeais (imparfait), Je mangeai (passé simple, pronounced the same in first person). Then there are the composed forms: J'ai mangé (passé composé), J'avais mangé (plus que parfait), J'eus mangé (passé antérieur). The latter two are to describe what has happened before something else. In addition to futur (Je mangerai) there's futur composé (Je vais manger) which is also called futur immédiat (to be used for what you're immediately going to do). In English there are the future forms "will" (it will happen no matter what) and "going to" (describing an intention).
What I do enjoy is the fact that third-person present-tense can also function like a future-tense. “He walks into a room and wrecks it.” “He kills the president.” Of course, it’s most often used under the assumption that the speaker is a time traveler, but it’s a cool trick of the language.
Personally, I'm a fan of (clausal) nominal TAM en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_TAM - it doesn't have to be all about the verb. My old conlang was built around this idea, but I'm not aware of anyone else doing anything with it. I suppose the reason almost all languages mark tense on the verb is that it's more efficient for e.g. conjunctions like "I just left and will be there soon".
At 1:50, the past and present examples were swapped: "mange" refers to the present tense while "mangeais" refers to one of the few existing past tenses.
Moribundi, Salutamus Te. We who are about to die salute you. I always think to think Latin phrase when trying to understand the future-future tense haha its the future infinitive in Latin I believe. Thank you very much, aweseome upload!
In Mandarin Chinese, there are five common tenses, 前天 (The day before yesterday), 昨天 (Yesterday), 今天 (Today), 明天 (Tomorrow) and 后天 (The day after tomorrow) 1:58
I will be honest. I like these videos not because the subject matter is engaging for me, but because you present it with interest and passion. So while I don't really care how many tenses you can string together, I do find your explanations to be interesting.
OMG finally someone talking about aspect and maybe the weirdness that things in the unreal times in English (future/conditional) seem to happen periphrastically while things in real times (present/past) happen verbally?
That point in the video when it all starts to look like Gallifreyan…. All these tenses used to confuse and annoy me so much as a kid, but it's so much clearer and easier to understand now. XD
My conlang has two past tenses, one for immediate/recent/personal past, and one for historical/ancient past. So for instance, you would use the "an/ane" suffix for the first and the "jxek/jxe" suffix for the historical past.
Flawless video! The last example was so tricky. I would stop at maximum 3 points relative to each other or some paper and drawing timeline would be necessary :)
In Standard german it is similar to english. My dialect (swiss german, how it is spoken in Zurich) is a lot less complex. We use the perfect tense for every past situation and the present tense for every present and future situation. When I say: “Ich ha Musig glost” (in standard german: “Ich habe Musik gehört” and in English: “I have listened to the music”) it could have happened a few minutes or a few years ago. When I say “Ich lose Musig” (standard German: “Ich höre Musik”, English: “I listen to the music”) it usually happens right now, but it could also happen in the future. To make sure something happens in the future, you have to say: “Morn losi Musig” (Standard German: “Morgen höre ich Musik”, English: “Tomorrow, I listen to the music”).
For my conlang, I'll add two suffixes (let's say -at for the past and -or for the future, however it will be different). These suffixes can superpose each other, such as "I walkorat", meaning "at some point in the future, I will have walked". That will allow for a simple way to instantly create an infinity of verb tenses, as precise as we want. to say the present, we will add no suffixes: "I walk". Just to be crazy: ! walkororatoratatatorator = "In the future, there will be a point where in the future, there will be a point where in the past, there was a point where in the future, there will be a point where in the past, there was a point where in the past, there was a point where in the past, there was a point where in the future, there will be a point where in the past, there was a point where in the future, I will walk". It's a bit shorter in my conlang...
You could also have a moment of speech with a reference point and event on opposite sides (This is covered by the scenarios listed but not explicitly mentioned.)
I think German has two tenses then too, although the "real" past tense (Präteritum) is mostly only used in writing. In speaking, we use a combined verb form, formed similarily to the English present perfect (we call it Perfekt). For future we even use the normal present tense most of the time, instead of the actual future construction ("become" + infinitive).
I'm currently working on a conlang that maps tenses in a separate word that represents a timeline. The beginning of the word is earlier in time and the end of the word is later in time. r represents the present time, or the time of speech. ne represents the beginning of the action, so adding 'ner' to the sentence means _'it began in the past'_ and 'rne' means _'it will begin in the future'._ e represents in action as progressive or incomplete, so 'er' means _'it was happening'_ and 're' means _'it will be happening.'_ en represents the end of the action, so 'enr' means _'it's finished happening'_ and 'ren' means _'it will finish happening'._ The elements can be combined in any combination, for example 'neren' which means _'it started in the past and will finish in the future',_ or 'ere' to simply mean _'it is happening now'_ (with the progressive in the past and the future). There are several other elements that can be added, as well as a filler vowel with no semantic meaning to break up undesirable consonant clusters, but this is the basic idea. Are there any natural languages or other conlangs that uses a similar system?
I'm going to chalk it up to me being tired and watching this late at night, because I legit thought that you were talking about the English language dying.
Wow. Barngarla? Sorry, I love language but psycholinguistics is where I geek out most and, holy crap, that cyclical-past language with the proximity markers? Imagine how you could have two people telling the same story, but how someone more nostalgic who might not want to distance themselves emotionally from a memory might conjugate with a closer past. OR! I wonder if trauma influences how people refer to past events in relation to one another: childhood vs teen angst vs early adulthood. Or a first love / first marriage, or the distance-to-past tense discrepancy between an ugly divorce versus the death of a beloved. There could be so much nuance in memoir or poetry. Sooooo freaking cool.
Lithuanian has 2 past tenses (for lack of better terms): past singular & past plural(frequent). The later one is used for repetitive regular actions, like going to school.
Rewatching this; doesn’t French make a few distinctions between different future tenses? I remember learning in school about the immediate and long-term future tenses (futur simple et proche), and also the conditional future. Is this just a Canadian French feature?
German has five tenses: 1. A present tense (e.g. "I do") 2. A past tense which describes events that happened before the present tense (e.g. "I have done") 3. A second past tense which describes events that happened before the first past tense (e.g. "I had done") 4. A future tense which describes events that will happen after the present tense (e.g. "I will do") 5. A second future tense which describes events that will happen after the first future tense (e.g. "I will have done")
My conlang, Mipic, has a simple past/present/future but there's2 more "atemporal" tenses that don't really specify a time. One is used most commonly to describe hypothetical situations and another is used primarily in song/poetry, and both can be used to describe ongoing/eternal events (instead of saying was/was not something, is/isn't something, and will be/won't be something, you would just use tense 4 or 5 depending on whether or not you're speaking poetically)
That is to say; if I say "Cheese was always good, chess is good, and cheese will always be good" I would just say "cheese is good", with is being in an atemporal tense
Hey Edgar! It took me a few months, but I'm finally at the point where I'm financially comfortable enough to spare you $15 per video. I felt absolutely terrible when you pinned the comment where I encouraged people to pledge $3 and couldn't follow up on that at the time.
First off; much, much, much appreciated. Thank you. :) Secondly never ever feel terrible if you haven't the spare cash. If your situation changes and you ever need to drop the pledge it's entirely cool. You do you, man. That all said, thank you for being awesome.
I love English. One time I had to ask a classmate whether I had to write the essay in the present or past tense, asking "Should I use present or past tense because, I will have had said that"
I've always wanted to make a conlang that is used by a fictional race where time-travel is so normalized that their language has tenses and moods baked in to talk about relative pasts, presents, and futures that are constantly in flux because of their actions, and this video has gotten me one step closer to actually realizing it. Thank you!
nice basic name you got there
Or for a kind of fictional race that is ever-knowing, they remember what happens in the future, past, and present, and their consciousness can sometimes just shift around across the flow of their lifespan, at one point they're 50 years old and another 230 and then 160
@:O🍡 lol
also here's you but vertical for no reason:
Ö
_🍡_
Sounds interesting..
Any progress? ☺️
And I've tried to invent modal verbs to describe such tenses in English (like how the verb 'will' creates the future tense). But I always get too confused thinking about multiple reference points.
The past, present, and future walk into a bar...
It was *_tense_*
-I can't make original jokes-
Ba dum tish
It was better than what I could have come up with.
That Bad BLU Spy You will make it worse.
ba dum Tisch
José Vargas tis
Who else got a chuckle about the "English has no future" joke
Yay! I made a joke. :)
Artifexian I was surprised you didn't bring up Chinese for the total uselessness of tense conjugation, but it was interesting to see the languages people don't often hear of
DeluxeTux5249 lol
DeluxeTux5249
Chinese tenses are actually really similar to English. The particle 了(le) acts in much the same way as the English "-ed" suffix, as it follows the verb and denotes the past tense. The word 要 (yǎo) is used similarly to the word "will", preceding the verb and denoting a future tense, the only difference being that 要 can also be used to say "I want to..." as well as "I will..."
So, much like English, there are no true grammatical tenses, but instead words to denote aspect.
Edit: I'm not saying English has no grammatical tenses, but it's close.
TissuePaper tense I'm not saying it wasn't similar (ing suffix is similar to the word zài), but in English verbs conjugate for tense (the word changes), while in Chinese another word is added, (I actually studied Chinese for a bit, didn't get anywhere though)
If you couldn't tell I'm not good at saying what I mean
Some Mayan languages have a remote tense that does not care about future or past. So the system is better represented with a circle. The present is at the bottom of the circle, the left is the past, the future is the right and the top is remote tense.
Coool.
Lojban has zi/za/zu to indicate temporal distance and vi/va/vu to indicate spatial distance. But it also has tense markers to indicate past, future, north, south, left, right, etc.
What the heck? That's really interesting.
mPky1 It's a gramatical feature that indicates that the verb's action takes place in a far time, regardless of whether it's in the future or the past.
In Mayan cosmology, it has a relationship with the idea that time is cyclical, and that something sufficiently far in the past will eventually happen again in the future. That's why the direction of time does not matter, only distance.
Erómeon that's pretty sick, I'll have to study up on that. Do you know some examples of said languages?
I got an Artifexian video and a Nativlang video in the same day! It's like christmas in summer!
Eos Xo So like Australia but in the northern hemisphere?
Hello there my fellow Nativlang & Artifexian viewer! Merry Christmas! :D
Haha! Best comment. :)
+Eos Me too!
Definitely more tenses in French (and concern about aspects and mood built-in). So you have to memorize a lot of IF...THEN pairs where the verb-form with the IF phrase must determine the verb-form you'll use with the THEN phrase!
Remember that French developed in musty Medieval castles where people originally spoke an evolved or DEvolved Gallo-Roman, but some Franks came in and became Germanic royalty and the new prestige language, and people pronounced their own Latin roots with new German vowel-sounds. This was THE WORST MISTAKE IN LINGUISTIC HISTORY and sets French disgustingly apart from the other Romance languages. You will need to learn 4 nasal vowels and 3 Germanic vowels WHICH ARE NOT HEARD IN ENGLISH.
I love how you pronounce the letter "R" like "or". It's really caught me off guard.
Haha! Pronouncing it like 'are' would be awesome though. I'm be like a legit pirate.
Dragonite905 It's a Dublin thing. All Dubs do it, and no one else.
"E, relative to oar, relative to S."
you mean off gourd :)
I have heard Northern Irish people pronounce 'H' - haytch, with emphasis on the 'ha'.
When I studied Chinese and English, I'm amazed by how advanced the Chinese language is. Not because of its complexity but because of how simple it is.
that's why I love Chinese, my native language. It has no tense unless you give it some.
Still it has no tenses. I really don't appreciate languages that are with almost no grammar.
My English grammar professor, Dr. Dorothy Disterheft would strongly disagree with your argument that English has no future tense. That we use the modal "will" instead of a suffix to mark future tense doesn't change that it's still grammatical future tense. She made a point of this pretty much immediately in class (many years ago).
Not that I'm saying you're wrong. I don't have the qualifications to say that. Just pointing out that the argument exists among grammarians.
Ye, I hear it's fairly contentious. Just be be clear, I'm getting my info for Bernard Comrie's 'Tense' so this isn't my crack pot theory.
I think the important thing about the form is not the number of words used but rather whether the grammatical category is used regardless of its redundancy based on context.
English definitely has plurals because most nouns are either explicitly singular or explicitly plural. You cannot speak "without number": whenever you say "a keyboard" the listener knows you mean a single item; whenever you say "keyboards" they know you mean 2 or more.
Is expressing future obligatory? For English the answer is... sort of. On the one hand, you can say something "The train arrives at 3 a.m." in a limited set of contexts (where the schedule is rather rigid) and "We are leaving soon" in a much wider range of contexts. On the other hand, native speakers use "will" or "is going to" (or "'s gonna") far more often than it would be necessary to remove ambiguity.
Also, I am not a native speaker but the future tense should stay consistent, should it not? Is it OK to say "I will meet you at noon. My wife comes, too. She is telling you something important."? With simple forms (bring, tells) it sounds odd to my ear. Logically, the first "will" is enough to show that you are talking about the future.
Chinese would fall into the same category as well. In fact, under this premise, Chinese has no tenses at all. We can only express tenses using modals, i.e. 'I will walk" and "I had walk".
Halfgild Wynac It's not grammatically correct. The first 'will' applies to the first verb and is needed before each successive verb, otherwise I think it changes to a present tense, third person narration.
It does get repetitive but I guess that's why we change it up with contractions. For example:
"I'll meet you at noon. My wife will come too. She'll tell you something important."
+Halfgild Wynac While someone could probably manage to figure out what you meant, the way I'd say that, changing as little as possible, as a native speaker is "I will meet you at noon. My wife is coming too She will tell you something important."
Of course, I'd never say it like that to begin with. I'd say something more like: "My wife and I will meet you at noon, she has something important to tell you."
Contractions will be fluidly swapped in depending on how formal I'm feeling.
6:00 "Ahh, I see you're a man of culture as well😌"
+
The best series ever made. ^_^
6:16 MY CABBAGES!!!
Hehe
I don't even know if it was intentional but "Tons of cool stuff CROPS up here." sealed the deal for me.
For a moment there I had a small crisis when reading the title!
I thought he was talking about the doom of the English language, then I saw the word "Tense"
Well, I mean everyone should be a little tense when English has no future.
Merritt Animation Yeah that's what I thought too
Isvoor I'll report for these dad puns. Nah JK they're hilarious
-T-X-M- Cyat blat comrade! Leningrad matryoshka Rosija Stalin!
I love how the title is ironic in several different ways.
'has' has no future tense.
This feels like it belongs in Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.
I wioll haven be thoughten the same thing.
I have really grown to love this channel. I was caught off guard by the inclusion of a Jamaican Patois referrence and much appreciated it.
I just want to point out though that the pronunciation for "yeside" is 3 syllablles [yeh.si.deh]
Thank you for this channel
First Nativlang uploads a video, then Artifexian! Is this Christmas??
It does, it just doesn't mark it on the verb itself... Instead relegating it to an auxiliary verb .
3:45 "A quasi-cyclical discontinuous tense that conveys... and superposes..."
...You did WHAT to your tense?
This makes me glad for how ASL’s basic grammar is set up. Time-Topic-Comment-Negative. As you get more advanced in the language, the more you can bend the rules as you see fit. When indicating the past/future/present we will indicate in front/ ahead/ right by us, respectfully. When listing events we will often make a list on our hands or make a timeline in front of us.
I'm getting Classical Latin flashbacks, thanks a lot (still love the videos!)
Thanks for watching, pal. Means a lot.
that way of visualizing the timeline is just so neat, thank u
My headache has more to do with my sporadic hemiplegic migraines then with the density of your explanation, so I watched the video twice. I think I more or less I understand the video.
I'm kind of dissapointed that Spanish is not mentioned on a video about verbal tenses, since I'm quite fond on my verbal system hahaha Anyways, this video really helps me. I've been trying to teach my students (I'm a tutor) how english verbal tenses correlate to each other and when should we use one or the other, but it seems like they don't really get it? Maybe this approach will help them. Thank you, Artifexian!
can i just give a hats off to how visually appealing that outro looks
i mean it just looks so nice!
Nativlang and Artifexian upload today! It's Christmas in summer!
ALGORITHM COMMENT... Thank you for making this video, it is very interesting because if you speak a language you don't think about all the theory that is behind it but when you start making up your conlang you starts struggling. So thanks again for sharing this video with us.
No problems pal. Glad you enjoyed.
Congrats on 100 subscribers
can't wait for 101. :P
A bit late, there.
*100k
İn turkish there is a different tense for the past that you are not sure about for eg.
Yürüdü means "he walked"
Yürümüş means something like "i heard he walked"
I had decided to watch this video thinking it would help me relax after a stressful morning, but instead I found it left me tense.
Thanks for this video! I've been making my own language where I'm dropping tenses all together in favor of using prepositions. So instead of for example saying "I was eating", it would be "I eat before [now]" or "I before-eat". This would save me from a lot of conjugation, as my verbs conjugate to agree with the subjective noun phrase, and my nouns have plenty of inflection.
Are there languages with a specific past and a non-specific past tense? Like "yesterday, or on that specific moment, I did" versus "once, I don't realy know when, I did"
Julia Smith in Spanish the "perfect past" means something that was finished like "I walked home, and now I'm at home" and the "imperfect past" means something that started but not necessarily was finished, like "I was walking home, but something happened"
Good question. I don't know.
Generally, an unsubstantiated amount of time is just referred to as "a while ago" and has little or no impact on the verb since it's dealt with by a prepositional phrase.
DISTurbedwaffle918 in English you can use that, yes. In my conlang, I was more generally thinking about a six tenses system past specific, past non-specific, future specific, future non-specific, present, and a time independed tense that looks like a present non-specific for things that might have happened or will happen or just used for general facts. Can also be used for poetic purpose. For instance for a love declaration. Saying "I love you" in non-specific present implies "I love you, I always love you and I will always love you" in one elegant word.
Aleixo Abreu The "I was walking" thing is more of an aspectual distinction, isn't it?
Definitely an interesting topic. I like how in English you can circumvent tense altogether: yesterday I did some walking, I am currently walking, tomorrow I will go walking.
Ye...it's more aspectual and modal then.
We will be going soon to the park, once it is not raining anymore, of which first we will need to feed the dogs, after we walk them, and after we go to the park, once it isn’t raining, we will eat, after we get to moordoor’s hill, and after we eat we will explore the park, right after everyone uses the bathroom, after everyone has a drink, and after coming back, we will go to the bus to leave, after everyone plays, and then afterwards we will go home, after we arrive back to school, and do the rest of it.
*THE ULTIMATE RELATIVE SENTENCE!*
i had no idea you can mathematize grammar
Nor did I until I read 'Tense' by Bernard Comrie.
Chomsky does a lot of that
As someone said: true sciene begins only when you bring math in it.
my brain is spinning. the rabbit hole has looped back in on itself and is now a concentric mobius loop.
Glad to be of service. :)
Your enthusiasm for language is awesome!
Thanks for the video. Awesome work. I plan on using this to help me explain how different tenses work in English to a co worker who isn't a native speaker.
1:53 French is MUCH MORE complicated, look at a "Bescherelle conjugaison" to see
The video is about tenses only. French has a complex aspect and mood system, but no more than those three tenses.
Actually, the verb has more shapes than just these 3: think about the participe that is re-used in "J'ai mang*é*" and "J'aurais mang*é*" ("I ate" and "I would have ate") is different from the 3 others
These are gerunds, they are moods, not tenses.
Je suppose qu'on peut continuer en français si c'est plus clair.
Remember this video only covers tense. Aspect and mood will be discussed in the future.
Julio974 and yet we bearly use all the tenses of 'être' outside of school. What about a waist.
0:06 oh hey it's the triforce logo
2:32 So does that mean that the official upper limit of "a few" is 364 or 365 if there's a leap day?
I don't know.
My sister's friend's teacher (or something like that) once said "a few" refers to anything from 3 to 500 (although it wasn't in English and rather a translation of "a few").
The past, present, and future all walk into a bar. Things get tense...
Your videos always remind me why I love linguistics!
Awesome! :)
I'm a new subscriber but I've been listening to the podcast and watching your vids for a while now. Keep up the great work!
Will do. Thanks for watching and subbing. :)
7:35 "The question is begged". No, the question arises.
Hum... When are we going to get to culture-building stuff?
Long way off, I'm afraid.
01:42 In Czech it's same, we have "chodil/a/o jsem" (past tense, -a means woman -o means it [-a and -o are seperate]) ''chodím" is present tense, and "budu chodit" is future, it uses "budu" as future + infinitiv "chodiT": the -T means infinitiv.
It is not the same in Czech since "budu" itself is a future form and "will" in English is a present form.
I would say that English does actually have a future tense, it's just a periphrastic construction (i.e. some intransitive form and a form of the verb to be) rather than a directly conjugated single verb, which is a little different from a language like Jamaican Creole or Chinese which use an un-conjugated verb and a non-verbal time marker to indicate the same thing. So the distinction lies in the fact that English uses two verbal forms in conjunction, one of which happens to be un-conjugated in regards to tense rather than an un-conjugated verb and a non-verbal time marker.
I frequently hear now on the BBC "we're back in half an hour" meaning we WILL be back.
1:50 the present of «manger» is «Je mange». Je mangeais is something like "I used to eat" or "I was eating"
That was intense
Bye
bye
I once thought of a story where a guy goes through a magic door that takes him into the future. The idea was that tge story would start out in past tense, when the protagonist walks down the magic hallway is in present tense and the future will be in future tense. It didn't work out as the future part was "will say" "will be" and "will do".
I'm with Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
I disagree. I think English has a true future tense, it just isn't marked with a suffix. It's still used regularly.
Finnish on the other hand has true past - non-past system. 'Mä söin' =I ate 'Mä syön (nyt / ensi torstaina)' = I eat (now / next Thursday). We do have ways to refer to future with an auxiliary, but they are only used in special situations, e.g. 'Mä tuun syömään' = I come to eat -> I'll eat
Right but by definition tense as a grammatical category needs some kind of inflection. English has no grammatical future tense. Emphasis on grammatical. English future is more like a modal present than a future.
Artifexian First, I wonder whether you mean conjugation rather than inflection and, second, bollocks. Just because some over zealous grammarian objects to the lack of a future participle in English in no way means that the future tense does not exist and is instead some modal shade. Many good authorities have expounded upon not only the healthy existence of the English future tense, but have also pointed out how incredibly precise we can form future tenses with respect to aspect and mood. By this time tomorrow I shall have been brooding over this click bait title, or I will have forgotten it at some point. Half the languages on the planet could not make that subtle distinction.
You should really use correct written language as an example or you undermine your own credibility.
Ok. That only shows how close minded and old fashioned person you are :)
It's just respecting our language, and not giving others false information about how things are said correctly. Grammar is really important. Maybe you are some dropout without any education and don't give a fuck, but I respect our language. And it shows you didn't even bother. It would be different if you didn't know how to properly use grammar, but of course you do. And if your point is to educate, like you are clearly trying to do, you should do it correctly or not do it at all. There is only one form on written grammar in Finnish, and it's the same for all of us no matter where we live. Your "mä" is not universal even in our spoken language, that's why it's incorrect. People use "mää", "mie", "myö" etc. You should always teach the stuff that works in most contexts first. And I'm sorry to say, but no one is going to take you seriously if you can't even articulate correctly and can't even bother to write "minä" instead of "mä", it really has nothing to do with me, just wanted to help you to be more credible in the future, but I guess it's pointless. You probably don't even give a fuck about closed compounds or anything.
French actually has four tenses: je mangeais (past) - je mangerais (future of the past) - je mange (present) - je mangerai (future). The conditional is traditionally counted as a mood, but in a French linguistics course I did we learnt that it's methodologically more consistent to count it as a tense (note how it contains the future suffix -r as well as the past suffix -ais at the same time - the conditional in French basically look like le passé simple and le future simple smashed together).
Wow.
Tenses are class.
Dayum, that was satisfying to watch! I am a sucker for everything grammar related 😏
Great job!
It is important to translate tense-system at the same time as you translate words. Esperanto has a more relative tense order where, "John said that he will go." does not mean that he will go after the moment of speech, but after the moment in the past when John said it, which might in fact have been before the moment of speech when he finally went. The subordinate verb always refers to the point relative to the main verb rather than the point of speech. Compound tenses also exist, which do not have aspect but nest actions relative to a past, the present, or a future point.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_grammar#Tense
this! this! is the reason I hate English class/exams. I'm okay with using the language but if the written homework/exam was about being specific about the different combination of tenses, I felt like I was baking and asked to separate each ingredient after mixing them.
I wish I had this video in high school. I would always mess up the differences between past/perfect past/past continuous/etc. Those diagrams solved everything.
One of the most fascinating linguistics vids I've seen! Great infographics too!
Awesome! Glad you enjoyed.
1:52 Actually French has more different forms of past. Two by modifying the verb: Je mangeais (imparfait), Je mangeai (passé simple, pronounced the same in first person). Then there are the composed forms: J'ai mangé (passé composé), J'avais mangé (plus que parfait), J'eus mangé (passé antérieur). The latter two are to describe what has happened before something else.
In addition to futur (Je mangerai) there's futur composé (Je vais manger) which is also called futur immédiat (to be used for what you're immediately going to do).
In English there are the future forms "will" (it will happen no matter what) and "going to" (describing an intention).
What I do enjoy is the fact that third-person present-tense can also function like a future-tense.
“He walks into a room and wrecks it.”
“He kills the president.”
Of course, it’s most often used under the assumption that the speaker is a time traveler, but it’s a cool trick of the language.
Why do you interpret this as future? I don't.
Personally, I'm a fan of (clausal) nominal TAM en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_TAM - it doesn't have to be all about the verb. My old conlang was built around this idea, but I'm not aware of anyone else doing anything with it. I suppose the reason almost all languages mark tense on the verb is that it's more efficient for e.g. conjunctions like "I just left and will be there soon".
At 1:50, the past and present examples were swapped: "mange" refers to the present tense while "mangeais" refers to one of the few existing past tenses.
Moribundi, Salutamus Te. We who are about to die salute you. I always think to think Latin phrase when trying to understand the future-future tense haha its the future infinitive in Latin I believe.
Thank you very much, aweseome upload!
In Mandarin Chinese, there are five common tenses, 前天 (The day before yesterday), 昨天 (Yesterday), 今天 (Today), 明天 (Tomorrow) and 后天 (The day after tomorrow)
1:58
I will be honest. I like these videos not because the subject matter is engaging for me, but because you present it with interest and passion. So while I don't really care how many tenses you can string together, I do find your explanations to be interesting.
OMG finally someone talking about aspect and maybe the weirdness that things in the unreal times in English (future/conditional) seem to happen periphrastically while things in real times (present/past) happen verbally?
The present and past tenses in French at 1:53 are switched.
Your videos are super interesting!
When I have kids, I am going to use your videos to teach them more about language because, DANG, you are just so flipping educational!
That point in the video when it all starts to look like Gallifreyan….
All these tenses used to confuse and annoy me so much as a kid, but it's so much clearer and easier to understand now. XD
Artifexian: The simplest systems are those that don't employ tense at all.
Me, still trying to wrap my head around Yucatec Mayan: *Explodes*
I must say, this was a very intense video; I had to tense up my body while watching it.
My conlang has two past tenses, one for immediate/recent/personal past, and one for historical/ancient past. So for instance, you would use the "an/ane" suffix for the first and the "jxek/jxe" suffix for the historical past.
This video literally summed up all english grammar i learned in my german school (since there isn’t really conjugation going on)
Flawless video! The last example was so tricky. I would stop at maximum 3 points relative to each other or some paper and drawing timeline would be necessary :)
In Standard german it is similar to english.
My dialect (swiss german, how it is spoken in Zurich) is a lot less complex. We use the perfect tense for every past situation and the present tense for every present and future situation.
When I say: “Ich ha Musig glost” (in standard german: “Ich habe Musik gehört” and in English: “I have listened to the music”) it could have happened a few minutes or a few years ago.
When I say “Ich lose Musig” (standard German: “Ich höre Musik”, English: “I listen to the music”) it usually happens right now, but it could also happen in the future.
To make sure something happens in the future, you have to say: “Morn losi Musig” (Standard German: “Morgen höre ich Musik”, English: “Tomorrow, I listen to the music”).
For my conlang, I'll add two suffixes (let's say -at for the past and -or for the future, however it will be different). These suffixes can superpose each other, such as "I walkorat", meaning "at some point in the future, I will have walked". That will allow for a simple way to instantly create an infinity of verb tenses, as precise as we want. to say the present, we will add no suffixes: "I walk".
Just to be crazy:
! walkororatoratatatorator = "In the future, there will be a point where in the future, there will be a point where in the past, there was a point where in the future, there will be a point where in the past, there was a point where in the past, there was a point where in the past, there was a point where in the future, there will be a point where in the past, there was a point where in the future, I will walk". It's a bit shorter in my conlang...
You could also have a moment of speech with a reference point and event on opposite sides (This is covered by the scenarios listed but not explicitly mentioned.)
I think German has two tenses then too, although the "real" past tense (Präteritum) is mostly only used in writing. In speaking, we use a combined verb form, formed similarily to the English present perfect (we call it Perfekt). For future we even use the normal present tense most of the time, instead of the actual future construction ("become" + infinitive).
man, where was this video when i had to learn Spanish tenses, it makes them all so clear.
Great video! Would like to see some videos on language evolution after TAM
Hang in there.
This video was INTENSE!
Jam packed with info as always :D can't wait to flesh out my conlang on WorldAnvil!
I'm currently working on a conlang that maps tenses in a separate word that represents a timeline. The beginning of the word is earlier in time and the end of the word is later in time.
r represents the present time, or the time of speech.
ne represents the beginning of the action, so adding 'ner' to the sentence means _'it began in the past'_ and 'rne' means _'it will begin in the future'._
e represents in action as progressive or incomplete, so 'er' means _'it was happening'_ and 're' means _'it will be happening.'_
en represents the end of the action, so 'enr' means _'it's finished happening'_ and 'ren' means _'it will finish happening'._
The elements can be combined in any combination, for example 'neren' which means _'it started in the past and will finish in the future',_ or 'ere' to simply mean _'it is happening now'_ (with the progressive in the past and the future).
There are several other elements that can be added, as well as a filler vowel with no semantic meaning to break up undesirable consonant clusters, but this is the basic idea. Are there any natural languages or other conlangs that uses a similar system?
0:54 And That's How Tenseless Languages Locate Events In Time
I'm going to chalk it up to me being tired and watching this late at night, because I legit thought that you were talking about the English language dying.
Artiflexian AND Nativlang uploaded on the same day??? The only thing that could make this day even better was if Langfocus uploaded too
Wow. Barngarla? Sorry, I love language but psycholinguistics is where I geek out most and, holy crap, that cyclical-past language with the proximity markers? Imagine how you could have two people telling the same story, but how someone more nostalgic who might not want to distance themselves emotionally from a memory might conjugate with a closer past. OR! I wonder if trauma influences how people refer to past events in relation to one another: childhood vs teen angst vs early adulthood. Or a first love / first marriage, or the distance-to-past tense discrepancy between an ugly divorce versus the death of a beloved. There could be so much nuance in memoir or poetry. Sooooo freaking cool.
Lithuanian has 2 past tenses (for lack of better terms): past singular & past plural(frequent). The later one is used for repetitive regular actions, like going to school.
je mange is the present tense in French of 'i eat', je mangeais is the imperfect past tense 'i was eating'
The past tense, it creeps in already. not long past, but already very tense. - Sam Vimes
Rewatching this; doesn’t French make a few distinctions between different future tenses? I remember learning in school about the immediate and long-term future tenses (futur simple et proche), and also the conditional future. Is this just a Canadian French feature?
Every time I go to your channel, you make a new video the next day.
If I check your channel daily...
German has five tenses: 1. A present tense (e.g. "I do")
2. A past tense which describes events that happened before the present tense (e.g. "I have done")
3. A second past tense which describes events that happened before the first past tense (e.g. "I had done")
4. A future tense which describes events that will happen after the present tense (e.g. "I will do")
5. A second future tense which describes events that will happen after the first future tense (e.g. "I will have done")
my native lenguage has the future, but we use frequently a auxiliar verb to indicate the future, we only
uses the future form of verb in formal cases.
My conlang, Mipic, has a simple past/present/future but there's2 more "atemporal" tenses that don't really specify a time. One is used most commonly to describe hypothetical situations and another is used primarily in song/poetry, and both can be used to describe ongoing/eternal events (instead of saying was/was not something, is/isn't something, and will be/won't be something, you would just use tense 4 or 5 depending on whether or not you're speaking poetically)
That is to say; if I say
"Cheese was always good, chess is good, and cheese will always be good" I would just say "cheese is good", with is being in an atemporal tense
Hey Edgar! It took me a few months, but I'm finally at the point where I'm financially comfortable enough to spare you $15 per video. I felt absolutely terrible when you pinned the comment where I encouraged people to pledge $3 and couldn't follow up on that at the time.
First off; much, much, much appreciated. Thank you. :)
Secondly never ever feel terrible if you haven't the spare cash. If your situation changes and you ever need to drop the pledge it's entirely cool. You do you, man.
That all said, thank you for being awesome.
I love English. One time I had to ask a classmate whether I had to write the essay in the present or past tense, asking "Should I use present or past tense because, I will have had said that"
Just found this channel, i like it.
Past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense