The complicated linguistics behind how the Maya talk about the past
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- Опубліковано 7 чер 2024
- The Maya language has no past tense, so how do they tell stories? I'll explain the complex way this tenseless language talks about events in the past.
Previous video about Maya tenselessness: • Maya Before, Maya Afte...
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~ Briefly ~
Last time we adventured through the strategies the Maya use for sequencing events in time. That journey took us from a lab to an ancient site to a town that was about to be struck by a hurricane.
It also left some of the audience confused. This time I'll spend more minutes following up on the details of just one piece of Maya's solution to tenseless time. By the end, we'll cover these concepts:
- coding time, topic time, event time
- deictic tense
- perfective vs non-perfective aspect
- imperfectives, terminatives, prospectives
- natural temporal reference point (NTRP)
- binding non-perfectives to a perfective topic time
- temporal anaphora: contextually determined topic times
~ Credits ~
Art, narration, animation and some of the music by Josh from NativLang
Sources for claims made, and credits for most of the music, fonts, sfx:
docs.google.com/document/d/1F...
Music:
Please see the sources doc above for full credits and list of songs. Besides parts of three of my own tunes, most of the credit goes out to these very talented and sharing creators:
- Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
- Josh Woodward (joshwoodward.com)
- Jason Shaw (audionautix.com)
Confused I be. Watch video then. Understanding follows.
confused [prospective marker], watching [perfective marker], understand [terminative marker].
In Yoda voice, I hear your comment
Did read comment. Enjoyed. When finish writing, pressing like.
Worst haiku ever. Awesome comment, though. :-)
This is basically how tenseless languages works. We just add some sort of time marker like, later, yesterday, just now etc.
You should have these technical videos once in a while. They're good.
Agreed. “Teach us, Master Josh, for we have come from far and wide to learn at your altar of knowledge!”
I agree. It’s hard to find things like this presented in a manner that is actually understandable.
I would love to have a technical playlist to refer to when I get confused by the regular language videos.
@@morganseppy5180 Agreed. While teaching us specific languages might be more than you can do in these short videos, clarifying the topics than cross languages (or even language families) would be very welcome.
Nativlang: Oh, no! I'm gonna release a technical video explaining abstract linguistic concepts! This is gonna be a disaster!
Reaction of the audience: YEAH! A video on abstract linguistics! This is great! We want MOAR!
MOAAAAR
MO,HA,HA,HAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHH
More I beg of You!
Right!!! Bring it!!!
I like your storytelling videos, but I also love getting the chance to learn real, contemporary linguistics. If you wanted to do more of these "didactic" videos, I wouldn't mind at all.
I second that. I think maybe a 3:1 or 4:1 proportion would be good.
Besides, Josh's voice is so soothing, I could listen to him reciting the phone book.
@Narokkurai @Łukasz Golowanow Oh yeah, remember phonebooks? Good times. In all seriousness, though, I fully agree.
the combination is ideal
Denser than usual but a nice payoff. When aspect comes up again, may this vid be our natural temporal reference point.
Also I updated the hurricane diagram so that it shows event times around a single topic time. Mentally cross out the old one from last time; this one should be clearer.
This was fantastic! I appreciated the depth of the explanation and came away feeling like I had understood - not merely glimpsed - an unfamiliar concept. I would certainly enjoy more technical videos of this form in addition to your fabulous stories.
Love the denser bits now and then. There are some hardcore nerds in your audience--embrace us.
Topic suggestion:
I've been studying Vietnamese, and the more I read about its system of Classifiers, the more intrigued I am. I recently found the paper linked below while searching the internet for a comprehensive list of Vietnamese classifiers, which apparently doesn't exist. The paper does have a table of 160 of them, though, in categories from "Collections of things in the shape of a pyramid" to "Written (distinct from oral) cultural, social, or artistic works." That latter category includes eight distinct classifiers, including the one I found in a news article classifying the noun "constitution" that sent me looking for such a table in the first place. Curiously, it's neither the classifier I've learned for "book," which is also on that list, nor the classifier for "newspaper," which is found instead under "Parts, 2-D, flat, square + width."
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2a15/0b206d7b5e17599eacf40b5051f1d5e2aa58.pdf
Of course classifiers are far from unique to Vietnamese, making them a topic of fairly general linguistic interest.
My God. I have read so much on viewpoint aspect over many years learning Spanish and teaching English and this is by far the clearest explanation I ever saw. Thank you so much!!!!
I hope you consider covering lexical aspect someday. If Mayan languages distinguish a progressive from the imperfective, that could be a neat point of departure.
I really don't get what you're constantly apologising for being technical.
This was good, but it didn't start to click until the very end. With abstract concepts like these, it helps the most to have more concrete examples to flesh out the theory as we go along.
I don't think I got it until the end when he gave an example using English.
He could've explained everything by just using the last seconds of the video 🤣 but I appreciate the technical 😁
5:48 "The list of possible aspects can go on" as a Portuguese speaker, that was the bane of my middle school Grammar classes....
Ai, sim! Eu estou aprendindo o português, e entendo ele muito bem, mas não falo bem porque a conjugação é chata por caramba. ^^ Por exemplo, o portugês é o único idioma que eu conhece que tem um subjuntivo futuro.
*aprendendo *chata pra caramba
O espanhol tem Futuro do Subjuntivo, mas não é mais usado haha
@@Mikeztarp ...spanish has it too..
@@PH7018c Ah, verdad, pero es obsoleto, ¿no? No lo aprendí quando aprendí español en la escuela.
@Rodrigo Davy Valeu pela correção. :)
@@Mikeztarp No tan obsoleto, más bien técnico. Lo cual es raro, un tecnicismo gramatical. Lo usan mucho los abogados y áreas afines. Supongo que para evitar ambigüedades, como todos los tecnicismos.
Where's Netflix or AmazonPrime to hire this guy to make a documentary???
I kinda don’t want them to find him - he’d be too busy to teach and entertain us if they do. He’s my favourite creator on Patreon, very engaging and active.
I’m a selfish bastard, yes.
@@barbarajoseph-adam8337 Let the man make money, he deserves it.
Elvis Anselmi I said “kinda”; I’ve already sacrificed three goats and six pigeons at the altar of Ganesh, praying for his success.
Let's make him bigger so he could have more creative freedom (:
I’ve been watching your videos for more than 2 years and you’ve made me fascinated about linguistics to such an extent that I qualified for the International Linguistics Olympiad 2019 (I know you made a video about it the other day). Thank you! You do a very good job on UA-cam!
Hey! So have I! What country are you representing?
Congratulations!!!! I should have done it two years ago, but hey, I'm a linguistics major now, so I'm getting somewhere!
Flynn Germany, but I'm from Poland :)
Jesus Acuna Thanks!
@@beredentod Good job fellow krajan.
The surprise legit made me tear up, I am ashamed of being Mexican and not having a clue on pre hispanic languages. Thanks for your videos, NativLang.
No shame, there's time to learn. Thank you for watching, commenting and sharing emotion. ¡Un abrazo!
That's not your fault and you shouldn't be ashamed. The people in power were the ones that devalued these languages and erased them from your history books. They made sure you wouldn't know anything about them.
@@Artexerxes101 That's such an ignorant assessment of post-colonial Hispanic politics. Is that what you were taught in school?
@@alonsoACR If you have an issue, then do one better instead
9:18 "She walked in," the jaguar purred.
I think more examples would be helpful in videos like this, but I enjoyed this type of video a lot!
This is one of the most beautiful linguistics classes I've ever had. No kidding. You were born for this kind of stuff.
So good! I love your normal content, but this was fascinating too. It's funny how communicating is one of the most natural, simple things we do, but when we analyze it it's actually surprisingly complex.
The main source of confusion for me is how anyone could have arrived at the resulting translation with the obviously tensed verbs if the Maya languages have no tenses.
The paper's conclusion gives us the start of a hypothesis shortly after that final quote about definiteness: "the expression of functional categories such as tense... is not necessary for conveying the intended communicative content of linguistic utterances. The relevant conceptual distinctions are made whether or not they are expressed linguistically and speakers can rely on pragmatic means to communicate them where needed." If you accept that, sequenced time still comes up conceptually for the Maya (even if timelines bend into large wheels), but is expressed both grammatically and conceptually in English. But if language is tied more tightly to thought for you, I imagine it's trickier to explain than that.
He explained it much better than I could, but I think I can add that attempting to translate the Maya tenselessness into English would result in weird poetry with linguistic markers thrown in. It would essentially just be a gloss, and would have none of the tone of the original passage.
Translation always requires this. You express the communicative function, not the exact words or structures. If I'm translating 'I'm a teacher and I'm working today.' to Spanish, I wouldn't use the same verb for 'am' twice because Spanish has a distinction between 'soy profesor' and 'estoy trabajando hoy'. Similarly, when translating from Maya, the translator would have to understand that although Maya doesn't have tenses, you have to use tenses to code the language in something like English. That's why they say traduttore traidore. You always lose something when you translate.
Alejandro Martínez Montes “traduttore traditore” 😉
It's similar to how you can translate Japanese with pronouns even though the original sentence does not have them: context. So, when Japanese people hear the word 愛してる 'LOVE', they have a list of possible meanings:
1. I love you
2. We love you
3. He loves you
4. She loves you
5. I love him
6. You love him
...etc.
But they pick the first one that makes sense. In this example: I love you. If that doesn't work, the next and so on. If many make sense in context and you don't want to pick the higher on the list, then you can use pronouns. It is the same process with articles in languages that do not have them and also in this case with tense.
Thank you for the follow-up! That was enlightening.
I know it may be difficult, but I just had an idea: it would probably be very interesting for you to do a video on Sign Language.
Agreed on both points... as long as you mean specifically *British* Sign Language, of course. :)
I vote for American Sign Language, personally. :P
Or Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN), actually
@columbus8myhw Nicaraguan Sign Language would be interesting.
Oooooooooooo!!!
I have a Master in linguistics; your video always remind me about all the great things about linguistics and languages. I understood the previous video, too, but this was also great - I used it as a test, in order to remember everything I knew about aspect. I'm off to read the article you quoted ;)
thank you for giving linguistics a place in the real world, and not just in academic dusty places (or Google offices! :p), thank you for making linguistics something understandable and fascinating also to non-linguists! :)
Ooh, enjoy it! I'm sure you will. Thank you; I'm glad I am able, at times, to show how much of a place language has in our world.
These comments appear to be engaging in a punctuation competition.
Now I got it better. Before, it was a "kind of sort of I get it", but I let it go because I assumed I wasn't intelligent/smart enough to understand it (probably is true).
So I'm grateful you took the time to "spell it" and go over it again.
I felt like that too, for some reason
The surprise at the end really tied up what little I was able to understand. Great video! I would love to see more. Maybe a seperate series or channel for these academic deep dive explanations??
I subscribed to this channel.
I was subscribing to this channel.
Interesting.
There seems to be some similarities between how Maya talks about time and how most sign languages talk about spaces. Without having special words needed to specify time or space where Maya creates time through topics set in the conversation many sign languages establishes physical topic spaces within the signing space ahead that all relate to different locations needed in the conversation.
Sign languages are cool, how they use physical space to their advantage which sets them far apart from spoken language, do consider covering them!
(Or maybe I complete misunderstood the video and it’s not similar at all, also very possible 😅)
As a Linguistics Major in University at the moment, denser more technical videos like this make me really happy. Deictic Tense was not a topic that we went over in detail when we discussed deixis in my classes. As a lover of grammar and language-creation, learning about possible ways of going without things as seemingly universal as tense in a language is a marvelous tool for creativity.
YES! The next video about the Maya. I'm incredibly fascinated by the culture and especially the language. I absolutely love languages, I just can't get enough 😁. You are very nice to listen to, you make all of it even more interesting to learn! Keep it up.
BYEEEE
Awesome; I will!
@@NativLang ✌🏻😊👍🏻
I absolutely loved this, and while it might not be exactly what a lot of your audience are looking for, it's precisely what I'm constantly wishing there was more of on youtube. This stuff is fascinating and I think the reception to the last video was more about the mind-bending nature of aspect vs tense than anything else
I’ve been thinking that if I should ever make another conlang, I’d probably use tones for tenses, or even better, for aspects, like:
• ”do” (neutral tone) = do (in general)
• ”dó” (rising tone) = begin doing
• ”dō” (high tone) = be doing
• ”dò” (falling tone) = finish doing
• ”dô” (arching tone) = do entirely (perfective)
• ”dǒ” (bouncing tone) = do repeatedly
Seems nice and intuitive, right? 🙂
Wow
@@lemon8944 Thanks 😊.
Thank you for this video! Last time I wrote a comment that I haven’t understood the difference between aspects and tenses and I’m very glad you’ve done a video on this! It’s a real proof you care about your viewers! Great work ;)
"So, how do pre-state and post-state work?"
"Imagine I’m talking about a house... But my speech doesn’t contain the house."
Suppiluliuma I think the pre-state and post-state are kind of like our English has, have, had, or will have, but I could be wrong. Pretty sure the mechanics of how the Mayans do it are pretty complicated. I think verb usage, alone, would have to be a course to itself!
I went to a house... - Perfective (past)
...that was built in the 1800s. - Pre-State
The pre-state is still relevant to the story, but it happened before the action. (The house being built took place long before you got there.)
In French, it has its own tense:
J'ai visité un maison... Passé Composé
...qui avais été construit pendants la 19e siècle. - Plus-Que-Parfait
You would have fun with Thai. I used to teach at a Thai university and offered a class on how to write more effectively in English. I had to broach the subject of English tenses to tenseless Thai language speakers. In Thai, the speaker's perspective never changes; s/he is always in the present and speak only about the flow of time. This stationary perspective is mirrored by set verb forms that never change (unlike Mayan). The verb /kin/ to eat is always "kin" and aspect is shown through words that surround it in the sentence. Their use of aspect is extremely rich and complex.
I would explain that English tenses shifted perspective by saying "imagine you and I are in last Wednesday ( or next Thursday), this is the flow of time that I, as the narrator, see from there." Within the shifting perspective, English aspects are incredibly simple, especially compared to Thai. We only have progressive, perfect, both, and neither.
What is interesting is how the verbs function differently in these two languages. Thai verbs are weak within the sentence; they require that the other parts of the sentence tell it what to do through aspect words. English verbs are strong; they arrogate meaning into their aspect/tense structure and tell the sentence what to do. (Russian verbs are even stronger.)
Now, every language is capable of expressing everything it needs to as a cultural medium for information. However, some languages are better at certain things. Thai is rich in narrative. It's broad range of aspect plays with relations through time beautifully. English verbs, with their imagination and shifting perspective, are better at explaining complex systems of cause and effect, and the subtle possibilities that can cause a system to change. Tenses allow triangulation of time and perspective that can aid in analysts, and give English a compact way of expressing all this.
One last related point--Thai struggles with expressing counterfactuals. Thai verbs lack moods. The language beautifully expresses what it knows is occurring, but must use a lot of circumlocution to express what is not. To drive this home with mt students, I would ask them to translate this Beatles lyric from "I've Just Seen a Face" into Thai:
Had it been another day
I might've looked the other way
And I'd have never been aware
But as it is I'll dream of her tonight
Nobody ever could render it cleanly into Thai. The language manages subjunctives like counterfactuality badly. This is why they has so much trouble with the shifting perspective of English tenses.
Loved this type of video. Keep it up.
Honestly, you've increased my appreciation for forieng languages and are currently changing my tactics to learn a language.
As a Thai native speaker, I can understand this so easily. :v
In Thai, 'where did you go?' is 'go where come' (ไปไหนมา/pai nai ma).
Ps. Speaking from a girl who has lived in Korea for two years, I don't think that Korean is lack of tense marking. It has way more tense marking than Thai language and it makes me really confuse.
I like it. When storytelling, describing everything relative to the event that you’re talking about would draw you more into the story and give you a more vivid experience (I think so anyway). I also think it would eliminate some of the ambiguity that English tenses can have.
This type of explanatory content is absolutely fantastic, especially when combined with your other storytelling approach on the same topic. I would love more of these in-depth explanations of the concepts you introduce in your other videos!
This was amazing! You've listened to your viewers and responded adequately. Now I understand the topic much better and boy is this fascinating. Thank you!
This video is wonderful. Your explanation is clear without being boring, your examples are varied without being overwhelming. Definitely one of my favourite videos on your channel! Thank you for making it! :)
Thanks for explaining this after the last video. I think it would be cool to see a video about an ancient language like Egyptian or a reconstructed one like P.I.E
#tea
I could go in on an Egyptian or Sanskrit video, that would be so neat
I've never heard the perfect and imperfect described like this! I'm definitely going to be looking into that when I resume my language learning. I'd love seeing more involved videos like this.
This was fantastic! So glad to have your vids back, I really love this channel. And feel free to get as technical as you want!
Wow, that gave food for thought! Thank you for making videos on such interesting and original topics 😊
Please some native american languages like ojibwe, navajo etc. It would be great
Oh, great idea! Yes, please!!
Guarani!
Agreed, though in fairness Yucatec and Nahuatl are also Native American
@@Cuix yeah. But you know what I mean
Maya is native American language, you should have said some More Native American language would be great.
This was one of the clearest explanations of aspect I've had the pleasure to hear. Amazing.
Thank you for the work you do!
Thanks! It definitely cleared things up. It was more technical, but the more in-depth explanation and the slower pace both helped me understand!
Thank you for this video! Perfective vs. imperfective aspect was one of the tricky bits that I never quite wrapped my head around when I was learning Russian. I didn’t expect to understand Russian better after watching a video about Maya, but here we are.
For me, as a native Finnish-speaker, Russian aspects were very intuitive, as Finnish aspects work the same way 🙂.
This was great, thanks. As much as I enjoyed and was fascinated by the concept in the previous video, it never quite clicked fully. With a little bit more background information from this video I had a very satisfying "Aha!" moment when it all came together.
Fascinating. This totally held my interest. I’d be happy to watch more of these.
Dude I feel like you just uploaded! This makes me so happy! Updates: I'm creating a lesson plan for the English class I am teaching to Chinese students right now. Masters is on hold as I've been working as a freelance writer for several UA-cam channels and mine is beginning to grow so I hope to make it a career. Still, I use linguistic skills everyday. I rewatched your video on relative systems last night! Hope you're well. Try and make it to Vidcon next year, it's a blast!
I love the technical as much as the story. More of these videos would be very appreciated.
As someone working on a nativistic conlang that makes use of aspect and mood, but not tense, these last two videos have been a huuuuuge help in approaching some of the problems I've been having wrapping my head around the concept, and pointed out some flaws in my (tense-using-native-language-perspective) approach I hadn't even noticed I was making. Thanks a ton, and keep up the great work.
I enjoy you usual style for casual listening, but this in depth explanation of an interesting (and complex!) topic was amazing. Explained well and beautifully presented.
This was awesome and I need more of this type of breaking down of complex linguistics
I was one of the people hopelessly confused after the last video but now, I got it! Thanks for taking your... time with us!
I loved this video. A bit denser, yes, but well explained, and with cool visual aids that really worked. Languages are fascinating and this video made me really happy, so thank you!
This is an amazing channel. Keep the linguistics videos coming
Still confusing but improvement. If you parsed the Mayan sentences that would have helped a lot, it was almost useless when you referred to them as examples
As an ABC trying to learn my heritage language, I find this lowkey useful for conceptualizing aspect in Chinese.
more like this man! loved the nitty-gritty linguistics. its so darn interesting!
When Language is actually dope.
Basically this hole channel.
@@meaninglesscommenter8457 Sometimes,it's better to make mistakes and learn from them...but this is a language channel and maybe I should be more careful,at least in this part of the internet.
RealThunder 6 lol making mistakes is better than not speaking at all
Just learn from the small mistakes :)
I like the technical! I don't need to understand every single word to still be able to get a much deeper understanding and answer my own questions.
This really cleared things up for me, Thank you! I will love collecting all the aspects concepts!
Definitely cleared things up, thanks
Very good that you revisited to explain this. It was not clear before.
Thanks for making this video! It’s always a good day when NativLang posts a video! :D
Thanks! This video was much clearer and simpler than the previous one, and more interesting to me.
8:40 ”That captured *Maya tense-ion…”* 😆.
Thank you, much clearer this time around!
Actually this may be my favorite video yet, I had to skip back and forth and rewatch it many times but it was really rewarding when I finally felt like I more or less understood it! The symbols used in the diagrams were very helpful for conceptualizing it for me
Definitely loved the deeper insight. Thanks!
That was really helpful! Definitely helps clarify the last video.
Loved the technicality of this one!
The interesting thing is that my Russian teachers, when explaining perfective and imperfective stuff, also use their hands to do that wavy gesture, just like your diagrams haha
Really like this kind of video. It's one of recent favorites!
That "arrive and see" idiom is actually really poetic feeling, and I can't point at exactly why. I like it.
I just realized after some google searches that the prospective and the perfect aspects are two peas of a pod.
This is groundbreaking knowledge for me; really furthers my understanding of both the video and aspect.
Thanks for that, NativLang.
Not that your last video wasn't good, but with this detailed explanation it was much clearer. Congrats, excellent job!
great vid Nativ-Lang. loved it.
You explain well, so I understand. Please make more.
Thanks, previous video left me puzzled & this one really helps!
Thanks, more explanation is always welcome.
Thank you for making this video! It really cleared up my confusion from your last video.
Cool video. I'll have to watch it a few more times to get the whole thing in my head - but the explanation helped a lot!
Thanks for the followup video, it did clear things up more. In the original, I did understand how tenseless could work, but not exactly how it did.
By the way, I love your stories, but I did love this other style as well, very much. Please consider having more videos like this for us. We love you
This is one of my favorite videos. Thank you very much for making it.
Thank you for speaking slowly, so I could get about 15% of the topic 😁 (you are a great teacher, btw, but my IQ is failing me)
Paraphrasing helps me, try to draw the grammatical structure and use colours?
I’m also glad for the rewind/pause/replay option on videos. This speed in a university lecture and I would drop out at once :=)
@@bejoscha digital lectures are a blessing (I needn't wait for the boring parts to pass at 2x speed nor is anyone annoyed when I need to be told the same thing 3x before I understand it (and having in person mandatory setions helps me to stay on top of it before exam season).
This video is truly a great follow up to the other. It answered the questions I was left with
I think more technical videos like this are neat! Obviously, not every topic needs this, but I'll admit that I was left with more questions than answers from your last video and this cleared a lot of things up.
This is still melting my mind but I feel much much closer to understanding it now, thank you!
I enjoyed both this video and the previous one, and while I wasn't too confused by the last one, I appreciate the deeper dive. :)
Can you do more videos on Chinese (sinitic) languages?
Explaining is good and you do it well.
You should do more of it.
I love your videos
Wow!!!!!
What an amazing video
I’ve always kind of understood aspect but never quite like this
Really did shed light
Thank you so much!!!
Awesome video! The technical terms and aspects are often cloudy to amateurs like myself. More videos like this would be great for those entering the world of linguistics!
OK now THIS is something you can consider doing from time to time. I do follow your other videos fairly well (even the preceding Maya one lol) but it felt like having a cool, refreshing shower on a sweltering day by the end of me watching this video.
Well done!
Great video, thank you! Now I'm eager to dig into it.
I especially enjoyed the video being more technical than usual :)
this is a great video! I'd love to see more videos like this
Thank you for the follow-up, it was really helpful
This is so much better than the previous video on the topic! It makes complete sense now... the last one not as much
Finnish also has that temporal anaphora; but, thanks to our non-finite clauses, it’s even more streamlined than in English:
_”Hän tuli paikalle. Jaguaari kehräsi.”_
_”Hän tuli paikalle jaguaarin kehrätessä.”_
🇫🇮
this was excellent, and your diagrams really made it work.
I really liked the combo of the first vid being so high level and narrative and this one going deeper into the subject. I probably got 20% of it (languages are just a mild interest right now) but was highly intriguing and informative. I probably will come back and watch it again as my understanding evolves :)
nativlang: really thoughtful intro to difficult abstract linguistic concept
my dumb ass: (semisonic voice) CODING TIME
This video is amazing and as a theoretical linguistic, I really enjoy your discussions