Note: Not all historical Mayan languages have lacked tense and some would argue that in Teenek, we don't know whether they have tense or aspect. More research is needed.
I’m from Yucatán, thank you for making this video cuz our culture is slowly dying. It’s dope that you’re teaching people about us. I never noticed my vocabulary lacked past tense in maya lol
What about the words words like "yaax" - first / ka'ach- before / le ken - when / "Beora"or "Bejela" - now / Chéen ichil - while / "tak" - hasta / Tu yóox p'éel k'iine' - after three days.
I'm in Merida now! BTW, it isn't true that Maya vocabulary lacks words for time. It does have these words. It lacks grammatical tense, BUT people are still very much about to talk about time.
Yes, I think they're tensed. Unlike "perfective" and "irrealis", which aren't. Maybe we could say we're "adding" grammatical tense when we render the tenseless Maya phrases in English?
Belisarius yes but the irrealis and perfective forms are different for a given verb, and the former typically used to describe future (not yet real) events and the latter to describe past (definitively real, since they already occurred). So they’re “kind of” like tenses.
I understand where you come from. I hear ppl say the same thing about biblical hebrew. When I learned it I realized that it's all perception and semantics.
I am amazed at how passionate you are and how well your pronunciation is (at least in mandarin, spanish and english) I've been binge watching your videos this day. Cheers from Costa Rica, pura vida!
ASL (American Sign Language) is very similar. All the signs/words are in present tense. Time is established with signs for the concepts 'yesterday', 'tomorrow', 'will/future', 'finish', 'not yet', and so on.
The language I study doesn't even have it properly studied yet but it has some fun in time expression, it loves to narrate thru POVs, so if you talk about past or future, YESTERDAY and TOMMOROW (commonly glossed in all caps) are relative to the time you narrate in, they work more like "the day before/the next day". But there are also lexemes for more then one day before/after and week before/after and two weaks before/after. It's maybe kinda like chinese otherwise with it's other expressions, but very often you don't have to include any time expression, sometimes it's maybe just not right to include it - "What will you do? What did you do?" Both could (under some circumstaces at least) be expressed as "DO WHAT?".
My frustration with just about everybody who tries to teach Yucatec Mayan here on RUclips is that they never, ever break it down into its components in a way that might allow me to comprehend the grammar and the structure. Most simply teach isolated words or simple expressions, but I have yet to find anybody who actually explains Mayan in a way that permits ME to be able to express MY thoughts by constructing entire sentences in the Mayan language.
I imagine its cuz they are just regular people that dont really think too much about that stuff. If I tried to teach english I wouldnt know how to explain the structure either lol
Now that I think about it, this might be why I struggled fitting Cebuano's conjugations into a past-present-future (and later future-nonfuture) paradigm; not only is the line between past and present somewhat blurred in Cebuano, but future is very much easily equivalent to 'potential' such as that 'will eat' ~= 'potential to eat'
I grew up in a part of England where the local dialect of English has no verb tenses so I found this really interesting. Even with that background though I struggle to fully grasp how the Maya do it since we used other words to set the context of time such as 'I be yesterday' or 'tomorrow you be'. That said though, given the immense variation in England of mutually incomprehensible dialects unless speakers tone it down to speak more like London, I do wonder the degree to which when linguists analyse languages their findings are generally relevant or actually only apply to a single dialect which could be widely used or could be limited to a single valley.
that's because you're taking the translation as being the _meaning_ of the Mayan sentences. in English, we can't separate tense and aspect well, so there's no way to translate directly, without adding tense. around 4:14, you can see, "Táan in beetik le najo'." translated as "I was/am/will be building the house." the point is that "Táan" means something a little close to "building", and the sentence doesn't reference the time of speaking-"now"-at all. to know when in reference to the time of speaking the building happened/is happening/will happen, you have to have another sentence that grounds it. so, at 5:04, when that longer thing is glossed with English verbs in red, the tenses are only there in English, and are interpolated based on other factors-because there's no way *NOT* to include them in English without it being nonsense.
Finnish has some temporal oddities, but nothing quite as unusual as described in the video. Transitive clauses in Finnish differentiate perfective/imperfective aspect by the object's case marking. When this occurs in the present tense, the perfective aspect behaves like a future perfective. For example: "syön kalaa" eat.PRES.1SG fish.PART "I am eating a fish." "syön kalan" eat.PRES.1SG fish.GEN "I will eat a fish." I'm not exactly well-exposed to a large quantity of languages, so i'm not sure how common this kind of thing is.
Do you know Mayan language? Can you translate these sentences. They went to village yesterday. They will go to city tomorrow. (Without using tenses how would you translate them) Then please write its literally translation to English.
I almost thought it was rocket science to understand Maya until I imagined how it would be to speak in Spanish without using tenses: "Cuando nosotros llegado, nosotros visto todos estar diciendo ellos haber escuchado en la radio el huracán estar llegando" Sounds way easier to understand even without marking tenses, I guess part of my confusion came from the fact that I was trying to understand it using English conjugations.
It seems like the idea here is that a sequence of actions written in present tense nevertheless implies past (where the first action is the oldest, etc.). The ‘then’ can be inferred without being said, which means it’s the same difference as a language that has those words like ‘before’ or ‘after’ or actual verb tense changes that serve the same purpose. This really isn’t remarkable or all that significant, unless I am missing something.
Ahhh it's like a slavic language minus the tenses. It could be argued that Russian too has no tenses, as the past tense takes the form of adjectives and the future tense is just a present tense in perfective aspect. Very, very interesting. Thank you for this video
This was interesting, but left me hungry... Why wouldn't irrealis also translate to: what would you do, or what could you do, or what ought you do, instead of will do? Isn't a hypotetical aspect unreal enough? I really enjoy your videos but having to wait for a sequel sucks, especially if I only get presented 2 new ideas in a video. Also, I really didn't get the steps part.
The complexity of Maya's tensesness is reflected on the way the Mayan speakers use Spanish tenses. I'm a teacher in Yucatan, my students mostly come from small towns and villages around the capital. Although they are fluent in Spanish they struggle when writing reports or assignments, jumping from present tense to past tense in the same paragraph. Moreover, Yucatan Spanish is the most different form of the language of Mexico, sometimes non yucatecans have a hard time following our way or speaking. For instance, instead of saying "Fui a Mérida" (I went to Merida) most people say "tengo ido en Mérida" (I gone in Merida, or something close to that). Yucatecan Spanish is interesting. I assume you've noticed that when you were around here.
I used to live and teach there as well! They definitely have these words though - yaax" - first / ka'ach- before / le ken - when / "Beora"or "Bejela" - now / Chéen ichil - while / "tak" - hasta / Tu yóox p'éel k'iine' - after three days.
Ah~ This somehow makes me feel better. I tought that casually talking about some event in Bahasa Indonesia without knowing it's context is confusing enough to be considered as a cosmic horror. I always stuck wondering if said event has been ongoing for a thousand years.
7:06 Wait, perfective in present tense? As a speaker of a Slavic language i find it confusing. Slavic languages also use aspect to talk about time but there is no way you could use perfective when talking about an ongoing action.
Aboriginal languages dnt have words for direction or time yet they are some of the best trackers In the world and have a grand awareness of the universe
woooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww Que buena pronunciación, eres la primera persona no mexicana que menciona bien Chiapas y México("xi" como "ji") jajajaja me dejaste boqui abierto.
I get it !!! It cuts out the bullshitt and gets directly to the point , I spoke to many elders in deep Mexico that spoke traditional Mayan and Spanish that still included many of the Mayan syllables , like instead of saying the lighting flashes , to Mayan it's like, the lighting there is real no reason to explain what the lightning is doing cause the flashing is the lighting , it gets to the point with the emotion and what's surrounding and also how it's pronounced with attitudes, and common sense, unlike English where it's nothing but bullshitt to hide truth if that's understanding , like with any language
Aspect is widely used in almost all Sinitic languages as well, it's in fact not very common to express time like "yesterday" or so on. But the mood one ...I'm not sure if there is something alike in Chinese since I don't speak Maya:P
Mayan Language: *has no verb tenses* Mayan Culture: *puts great importance on seasons, cycles, and calendars* Mayan People: "They don't think it be like it is, but it do"
I practically cannot believe the Mayan languages on the street or on the market sounded that convoluted. Could this "tenselesness" be only on Scripture or inscriptions?
Despite what he said, they definitely have these words- yaax" - first / ka'ach- before / le ken - when / "Beora"or "Bejela" - now / Chéen ichil - while / "tak" - hasta / Tu yóox p'éel k'iine' - after three days.
To a native speaker of any language, their language just sounds normal, and is completely translatable to any other language. What does that say about linguistics? I mean, linguistics is fascinating, but it's completely unconnected to language, sort of, maybe. It's like how cats feel about humans studying cats.
Excellent video, just one quibble: I think you are overstating the difference between how Mayan and Chinese languages work in this respect. Modern Chinese languages also rely heavily on aspect, specifically via the perfect particle "了" and its negation "没". But it does seem true that Mayan has a richer toolkit, especially with the addition of moods. It's always impressive to see how expressive Chinese can be with such minimal grammars.
Most his recent videos have been utter nonsense to me. It's like he understands what he's saying so he expects everyone to. He's gotten worse at explaining with each video.
@@MorganHunter92 It feels like, since I haven't been keeping up, I'm missing part of the lecture. Like only going to the first class of the semester and then trying to take the Final Exam.
This video doesn't seem factual or authoritative. I get the impression that it is similar to claims of the Inuit language(s) having multiple words for snow/water that English, that we can't translate. The fact is that English can translate them, and some of their words are not significantly interesting. Whether or not they use 1 or 2 words for frost, young ice, old ice, powder snow, or yellow snow, it's all the same complexity. English seems to be more modular in some respects, but everybody has ways to clearly express the specific concepts of water in all its states.
@@eugenetswong a translation is just a speaker of language A trying to express an idea that was originally expressed in language B. Obviously you can express any idea in English, but doing it accurately might mean explaining a whole bunch of context, outlining all the possible interpretations where the original meaning is ambiguous, or just choosing one meaning and losing the nuance of the original. Which is a problem when people communicate using carefully chosen words and shared reference points with different shades of meaning The idea is more that different languages allow you to express certain ideas elegantly and concisely that other languages do not, to operate natively in a certain psychological space. Yes you can explain that stuff in other languages with enough skill and time to craft an explanation, but even then you're not *thinking* in the same way as the native speaker. Like as an example, English (usually) requires a subject in every sentence, right? And we use pronouns a lot, so we don't keep repeating the subject. And our pronouns for people are gendered, so when you're talking about a person, you're required to say "he" or "she" a lot - which means you're required to make a decision about that person's gender and express it. You can be deliberately ambiguous by saying "they" (or using other neutral pronouns) but that's a conscious decision to get around this mental requirement that's *baked into the language*. Other languages don't require you to specify (or even include a noun at all), so even though those languages *can* translate the concept of "he" or "she", that doesn't get across the same sense of requirement - it might even sound like you're stressing their gender in languages where it's usually unsaid. And of course, going from one of those unspecifying languages to English means you have to crowbar a pronoun in there, and the one you choose colours things. Translation is actually pretty complex!
I've made an honest effort to learn linguistics on my own, even though I don't have a local college that teaches it (I rarely find anyone who even knows what it is, including some of the local professors). I did so not so much as for a hobby, but for making an auxlang. Long ago I tried to sell Esperanto to some actual linguists on a forum. All they did was point out its flaws and I couldn't get them to see it as being of any sort of value. Finally I asked them if they saw the language as so flawed, why don't they just make their own? I was aware that it was pretty rare for actual linguists to make conlangs, let alone auxlangs. They just insisted that it couldn't be done, so finally I decided that I would learn linguistics myself and do it. After years of studying, I came to agree with them that making a truly universal auxlang was a futile effort. I switched my focus to artlangs, but I eventually lost interest in that too since none of my languages really got well developed (most of them are just phoneme inventories, I can only recall one that actually had a vocab beyond grammatical terms). I don't have a degree, but honestly I hate being accused of not being a true linguist despite all my time studying (I pretty much lived and breathed linguistics for years). In fact, I discovered ergative verbs on my own (I actually thought they were a 'lazy passive' construction before I learned the proper terminology). I also got into a debate that languages were NOT equal in difficulty. It was plainly obvious, but no matter how much evidence I presented everyone refused to believe what I was saying, even when I pointed out how absurd it was that a language would be more complex in one area (such as its pronoun system) if it was simpler in another. Funny enough, I was vindicated after some black guy who DID have a degree in linguistics pointed out everything that I saw on my own. Personally, I think people mainly listened to him because he was a minority. Apparently this mindset that all language have the same complexity and difficulty came about because racists in the past thought that you could determine how smart a race was by how complex their languages were (European languages, which are often inflecting, tend to be the most complicated on the planet). I even recall hearing about a book where some guy argued that whites were the master race because they had the most complicated languages on Earth (the article I saw mentioned it noted how he completely ignored the fact that native American languages are even more complex than European languages). So yeah, I've studied all I can on linguistics for the past over 10 years now (probably more like 15 years by now), and I can even fully understand actual linguistic theories and even make my own which some do support, but yet I'm not an actual linguist just because I don't have a degree. I mean, I was highly disappointed in David Peterson's 'The Art of Language Invention', because it only covered stuff that I already knew! Well, besides this thing about Optimality Theory, but everything else I had known for years. And besides, that theory apparently isn't universally accepted. It looks more like something that would be more useful for conlanging than actual linguistics. However, I do confess that my knowledge is mostly limited to phonology, I'm not so much of an expert on everything else, though at the same time I rarely find a grammatical feature I haven't heard about before.
@@lXBlackWolfXl May I give you my perspective from within the linguistics degree and not knowing yourself personally? I know a lot of people who got passionate about linguistics for years and it's quite obvious. The problem with them (not necessarily you, I don't know you) is that they tend to think they know everything about linguistics and maybe just come for the recognition of their knowledge, but their knowledge is actually in a niche (like an acquaintance that knows everything about some obscure branch of languages and then he thought he knew everything worth knowing). The result is that they don't come to the lectures and then they just go to the tests or the final class and you get to see their Pikachu face when they don't understand anything. Those kind of people are usually the first to drop out after one to three semesters and not passing many classes. If they survive the first semesters, indeed, they reign over everyone but only in their niche topic. Again, not something about you, but the general kind of person you are describing. Btw, about Esperanto. Not all linguists reject it, I know a lot who actually study it. But everyone who cares about Esperanto does not in the spirit of an auxlang but for the sociological phenomenon it represents, for studying anthropologicaly the conlang community or for studying its naturalization. Only a few people realize that it had some chance of achieving its goals regardless of its flaws thanks to the support of many important institutions. Maybe in an alternate world where the two WW didn't happen, it would have succeeded. But in our timeline, all auxlangs have lost their chance. And that brings me to the last point: complexity. Indeed, that idea was initially rejected because of a tabu for racism in a similar way than many other disciplines got rid of other ideas (like race). However, the criticisms came from before and new evidence pointed out that this new perspective was right: First. A main critique is that people got mixed the ideas of complexity and difficulty. Complexity is a function of the amount of rules needed to describe a phenomenon in the simplest way. Difficulty is how easy is a language for a given person. The difficulty of a language is a function of the complexity of a language, but also of the previous familiarity of the subject with the new set of rules. From what you can see, the complexity of a language is not easy to study since you should to know the language on its entirety. However, it could help if you got rid of the previous knowledge of another language; then difficulty equals complexity. And children are in that state. And what have children studies shown? That languages' complexity does not vary significantly. Second. The previous point doesn't deny that some areas of a language are more complex than others. But observation has shown that whenever the phonetics of a language are simple, another area is extremely complex. English is a good example; it is known for being extremely simple morphologically and in basic syntax (the simplest of all European languages) but its phonetics are the hardest to have ever existed. Whenever someone proposes that a new natural language is simple because of x or y, someone has pointed out that a further study shows some compensation in another place. The recent model is that complexity is related to efficiency of communication and there's an equilibrium point as languages cannot be infinitely complex (since no one would be able to use them) nor overly simple (since that would be inefficient). Because of that, there's an optimum all languages tend to gravitate to when they are used by people. That process is called naturalization. And that's where Esperanto and Pidgins come to save the day. Since they are obviously simpler than most natural languages, a lot of studies have been done to see if they get more complex with use. And the answer seems to be yes: creoles are significantly more complex than their mother Pidgins and Esperanto seems to be doing the same. So, yeah. That sums up why most people reject the idea of differential complexity.
@@lXBlackWolfXl I can tell you right away, as someone who is studying linguistics in the scope of modern academia, there are some gaps in your knowledge that would have been filled had you taken a more structured approach. Yes, you can definitely learn on your own. But you need to know HOW to do so. There's no surprise why people discredit you when you have gaps such as the ones you have.
I've wanted to dig into this since 2017. Each time I reread the research extra bits of nuance emerge. Do you know of another language that's highly unusual because of what it lacks?
American Sign Language is very interesting due to both how stripped down it is and how expressive it can be. The levels of wordplay that are available by combining signs or playing off of the English equivalents to signs are insane. All of this is possible purely because of how relaxed the rules and conventions are in ASL.
I referenced English last video, and I'll do it here. English virtually has no conjugation, so much that English speakers really don't know what conjugation is until we study a foreign language. We are taught subject-verb agreement. I'm referring to conjugation for person. Many languages don't conjugate, but English is a Germanic language, an Indo-European language, languages rich with conjugation, and English is: I swim, - Ich schwimme you swim - Du schwimmst he/she/it swims (
Yeah :D The thing is, it’s really naff seeing such mistakes under a language related video, especially when you discover those without being a native speaker yourself
@@WWPM I don't get if you're being serious. "hear" is correct. "here" is not. The first means to listen without necessarily paying attention and the second means this place.
@@paulalea7465Actually you guys might be at fault here. German has the auxiliary HABEN to inform of a perfective event. as in "Ich hab etwas gesehen" The aspectless version of this would be along the lines of "Ich gesieht etwas" (Pardon my poor German :D)
@@batuhankaratas1440 Actually "Ich hab etwas gesehen" is not quite an example for that. Yes, there is a perfective aspect but perfective can also be a tense. Classily, it's aspect but in German this doesn't apply anymore. It's more or less weirldy in between aspect and a regular tense. Usually we (I'm a native speaker) just refer to perfect as "past tense". A German example with aspect would be "Ich war am laufen" engl. "I was walking".It's not exactly the same and it's not standard German and I would never use this in writing. However, it does exist in some dialects.
just to clarify, isn't it more that German largely lacks grammatical marking of aspect? I mean, the aspect is there, you just have to understand it from context, right?
As a Brazillian living in Chiapas, Southern Mexico where most of the people speak Tzeltal ( a Mayan Language)I can actually communicate my ideas I can tell you that is not nearly as hard as it looks, you of course have to think in an absolute different way but once you get it is quite easy and logical.
Sorry to hear that. I had hoped the timeline showing tense pointing from the time you're speaking to some other time, plus the presence of grammatical tense in the audience's language, could overcome that. It was a real challenge to streamline this up to this point. I'll consider this as I work on the more detailed followup.
@@NativLang It is actually allright. A studying Linguist here. It is quite diffucult to explain what is a tense. But recently in the literature Tense is assumed to be a position, which is usually filled by a word, in a sentence that inflects itself related to the tense and most usually agreement. So in English, Will, Do, Must, and so on fills the Tense position. But they also have the Modality and aspectual properties.
I don't think it's possible to explain easily what counts as a tense. it's all jumbled up in English, and the only words you can use about it are words that people already think they know. I just don't see an 8 minute video getting the difference across to people who have no idea that aspect is a thing, let alone that it's distinct from tense. I'm pretty sure I'm not stupid, and it took me a really long time to get the difference. maybe some more highlighting of Maya aspects and moods not being connected to "the time the speaker is speaking"?
I wish topics like this were made more accessible to those who aren't necessarily linguists. The explanation was generally confusing. The idea of the video was good, but seeing that not everyone was able to understand (and perhaps appreciate it at the end), the treatment was poor. I still like the channel though. Just giving my two cents for improvement and reach.
Something I think should be stressed because it may not be obvious to people, is that your example of a Maya and German in a lab isn't some random fantasy example: There are millions of Maya people still around today in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Obviously, not in the huge cities with stone pyramids and palaces as in prehispanic times, but in the more rural towns and villages and just many people living normal mainstream lives in cities, some of which do pursue careers studying the past. Sadly, despite the Prehispanic civilizations being a huge source of national pride in Mexico, these people, and other Indingious groups like the Nahuas (the culture the Aztec belonged to), Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Purepecha, Otomi, etc still have discrimination and exploitation today. I don't know of any specific groups doing work down there to help those communities, but it's worth checking out. I also want to stress the "huge cities" bit. A lot of people are under the impression that the Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures were basically glorified tribes living in huts around big pyramids and that's it. In reality., the Maya and virtually every other Mesoamerican culture were complex socities living in proper cities and towns, with formal governments. The larger Maya cities could have tens of thousands of people in and around their urban cores (which had pyramids, palaces, plazas, ball courts, markets, and housing for nobility, all built of stone with furnishings of textiles, murals, sculptures, etc.), and had less dense suburbs interspered with agricultural land, and complex, interconnected networks of agricultural canals, aquaducts, resvoirs and basins for storing drinking water, anddrainage systems to avoid flooding (and even sometimes running water, toilets. and pressurized fountains.) which could cover dozens of to even hundreds of square kilometers and house hundreds of thousands to millions of people.
MajoraZ Yep 👍 ! Here’s some numbers, for example: Prensa Libre of Guatemala reports the city of El Mirador had up to 1.2 million people. El Tintal, another city, reportedly had 400,000 people. According to historians from India, the cities of Copán and Uxmal each had around 200,000 people. According to a recent LiDAR search, a newly found true megalopolis-with urban sprawl, monumental architecture, massive suburbs, dense populations, and interconnected cities-covered today’s Petén region in Guatemala and had at least 10 million people (possibly up to 25 million). All of these numbers I gave you are from the Preclassic to the Classic Eras of Maya history, aka 2-3,000 years ago all the way up to around 1,000 years ago. And these cities weren’t gigantic slums with a few elite glittering sectors, like the tremendously overpopulated and overrated Ancient Rome (sorry Rome I still love you XD); in fact, there was a growing middle class and industrial-like commerce and agriculture, especially at cities like Caracol. Some Maya cities even sprang up for commercial purposes only, which is not at all the stereotype you think of when you think of the highly religious Maya cities with temple pyramids... more and more research is showing that the Maya cities were more and more similar to modern-day Los Angeles or New York City, for instance. In fact, instead of attributing the Terminal Classic collapse of Central Lowland cities to climate change, deforestation, warlike states, and the borderline racist accusation of a miserable failure of Maya civilization, new studies are showing problems in today’s LA or NYC-like socioeconomic inequality and opportunity-caused mass emigration from cities and thus caused their collapse. So in the end, all of this is a far cry from the notion of “warlike”, “bloodthirsty”, “savage”, “inferior”, “small” “chiefdom” city-states that old Eurocentric ideology tried to impose to legitimize the repression of Maya culture(s). As a European person myself, I hope all of the world will come to realize the importance of history and languages in order to create peace, justice, and happiness to truly all of humanity. “Rant” over 😂 :)
Majora z - I like your explanation, i could imagine it, very interesting. I like the sound and way of speaking of these type of languages espechially the classical ones with those -tl endings. 😁
@@TDHDN The claim that El Mirador had 1.2 million people is fringe. It is NOT supported by the vast majority of experts. All over the world, there are people who make wildly exaggerated claims about population size etc of places they are fans of. El Mirador was big, but at its pre-Contact peak, it had probably no more than 100,000 people. This is certainliy a true city, but it's not 1.2 million.
From the list of unfortunate places to make a grammatical/spelling error: this comment! When it comes to placing the apostrophe in regards to "culture", the important thing to consider is that you're talking about one _of_ a group. While the _one_ is always just one, the group the one is _part of_ is always plural: Mayan is one culture... of several cultures you would call your favourites. As a result, you'd write it as "about one of my favourite cultures' language," or "cultures's" (up to personal preference).
Generally speaking, a language can only be tenseless in the sense of morphological tenses. All languages, however, have to capacity to refer to events which occur in either the past, present, or future, even if they only do so through context or temporal phrases.
If it helps any, English arguably doesn't have a Future tense, as such. We use mood and aspect to distinguish future events from present ones (ok, it's more complicated and messy than that, but it should be a helpful starting point for getting your head around things, maybe.)
Obviously, English doesn't have a future tense, nor does German. You have to use an auxiliary verb to get across the idea of a future event idiomatically. In the same way, English and German lack a conditional mood, so you have to use the subjective form of that auxiliary verb to get across the idea of conditionality.
@@ghenulo I've heard this about English before. Do you have an example? ie. comparing a past statement vs a future statement in english so we can see how it's put together?
can you please please please please do a video on the berber/amazigh language and its variations in north africa ? (Algeria,Morroco,Tunisia....), keep the good stuff coming!
Great vid, but I see many people like myself who were confused by the additional "timeness" of your translations. Perhaps it would be better to put the literal translation (what is it saying) and the "semantic" translation (what does it actually means) below. I know that "what's done it's done", but maybe the program you used may easily allow you to add the phrases without altering the cinematics that much. It would be nice if you did, just saying.
Oh my gosh native Lang video!!!! I’ve been so sad without you uploading. I want to tell you I’ve watched thoth’s pill a million times and you’ve inspired me to learn many languages! Love from North Carolina
I’m discovering something new here. Now I know it’s not only my mother tongue of Bahasa Indonesia that seems tenseless. Having learned both a Germanic and some Romance languages, now I can make some comparisons.
Indonesian is tenseless, but we still have to use "adverbial aspects" such as 'sudah', 'dulu', 'nanti', 'sekarang', just to perceive actions in certain different times. Mayan language, meanwhile, is very different from this, their way to indicate the time has been uncovered by this video (which I still don't really understand), and we can conclude that it's very different with Indonesian, and, they don't even have words that have similar meaning with 'sebelum' or 'sesudah'. Generally, despite of not having tense like European language, the way we, Indonesians and most Asians, perceive time is relatively the same.
I´m from Guatemala, 22 mayan languages are spokes and over 50% of the population is maya and it´s such a shame that non indigenous citizens only speak spanish. I want to learn Kiche so bad, but as you can see its sooooo difficult.
I had an a-ha moment when you explained the Mayan construction equivalent to 'before'. Japanese seems to have the same thing: 友達が来ないうちに掃除したい。I want to clean before my friends arrive. (= while my friends have not come, I want to clean)
Despite what he said, they definitely have these words- yaax" - first / ka'ach- before / le ken - when / "Beora"or "Bejela" - now / Chéen ichil - while / "tak" - hasta / Tu yóox p'éel k'iine' - after three days.
English future: "will be"
Mayan future: "isn't yet"
That pretty much sums up the whole video. 😆
bruh
Ö
Yet? Isn't "yet" is a tense, no?
@Tòochi and there is no way to communicate what that means? Or sounds in English?
The past, the present and the future walk into a bar. It was tense.
Then the barman said "It's about time!"
Nice
@@theangryaustralian7624. A very timely reply.
Jacksfilms?
oh, you...
hz
Note: Not all historical Mayan languages have lacked tense and some would argue that in Teenek, we don't know whether they have tense or aspect. More research is needed.
Teenek language is the one spoken in the Huastecas, right? Tanpicco city and around it.
@@desireebach6394 You misspelled Tampico.
@@desireebach6394 Correct.
He's only discussing Yucatec Maya here, and he mentions it at the beginning of the video. c:
@@OM19_MO79 And yet, despite that misspelling, we all understand this person. You made a needlessly pedantic comment.
I’m from Yucatán, thank you for making this video cuz our culture is slowly dying. It’s dope that you’re teaching people about us. I never noticed my vocabulary lacked past tense in maya lol
What about the words words like "yaax" - first / ka'ach- before / le ken - when / "Beora"or "Bejela" - now / Chéen ichil - while / "tak" - hasta / Tu yóox p'éel k'iine' - after three days.
I'm in Merida now! BTW, it isn't true that Maya vocabulary lacks words for time. It does have these words. It lacks grammatical tense, BUT people are still very much about to talk about time.
I've always been so fan of the little "woosh" whispers :D
"The Mayan future is a mood"
Mood
I'm confused... don't words like "will" and "did" include tense inherently?
Yes, I think they're tensed. Unlike "perfective" and "irrealis", which aren't. Maybe we could say we're "adding" grammatical tense when we render the tenseless Maya phrases in English?
Consider his translation as just that: a translation. He has to translate it into what it “means” in English so we lose the maya meaning.
@@kendalljohnson6466 Yeah. The mayans didnt actually use these words. Nativ just translated it into english, where those words obviously do get used.
Belisarius yes but the irrealis and perfective forms are different for a given verb, and the former typically used to describe future (not yet real) events and the latter to describe past (definitively real, since they already occurred). So they’re “kind of” like tenses.
I understand where you come from. I hear ppl say the same thing about biblical hebrew. When I learned it I realized that it's all perception and semantics.
Your production value production gets better each episode. I love every single video you put out
Absolutely fantastic video on some unusual and interesting aspects of the Mayan language. I can hardly wait for your promised sequel video.
I am amazed at how passionate you are and how well your pronunciation is (at least in mandarin, spanish and english) I've been binge watching your videos this day.
Cheers from Costa Rica, pura vida!
ASL (American Sign Language) is very similar. All the signs/words are in present tense. Time is established with signs for the concepts 'yesterday', 'tomorrow', 'will/future', 'finish', 'not yet', and so on.
This is so cool! Thanks for doing a video on this. Very excited for the sequel.
awesome video. great to see you back
This gives me some insight on the inspiration of Jel and how it may work in Elder Scrolls
I'm confused. Is this a NEW Nativlang video? Is that a thing that exists?
The correct aspect woul dbe perfect (and apply to quality as well)
Love your videos especially when theyre about mesoamerican subjects
Dude you narrate so damn good.love your videos
The language I study doesn't even have it properly studied yet but it has some fun in time expression, it loves to narrate thru POVs, so if you talk about past or future, YESTERDAY and TOMMOROW (commonly glossed in all caps) are relative to the time you narrate in, they work more like "the day before/the next day". But there are also lexemes for more then one day before/after and week before/after and two weaks before/after. It's maybe kinda like chinese otherwise with it's other expressions, but very often you don't have to include any time expression, sometimes it's maybe just not right to include it - "What will you do? What did you do?" Both could (under some circumstaces at least) be expressed as "DO WHAT?".
My frustration with just about everybody who tries to teach Yucatec Mayan here on RUclips is that they never, ever break it down into its components in a way that might allow me to comprehend the grammar and the structure. Most simply teach isolated words or simple expressions, but I have yet to find anybody who actually explains Mayan in a way that permits ME to be able to express MY thoughts by constructing entire sentences in the Mayan language.
I imagine its cuz they are just regular people that dont really think too much about that stuff. If I tried to teach english I wouldnt know how to explain the structure either lol
Many languages with Philippine type morphosyntactic alignment are also like this. Aspect verbal affixes give hints of time.
Now that I think about it, this might be why I struggled fitting Cebuano's conjugations into a past-present-future (and later future-nonfuture) paradigm; not only is the line between past and present somewhat blurred in Cebuano, but future is very much easily equivalent to 'potential' such as that 'will eat' ~= 'potential to eat'
I grew up in a part of England where the local dialect of English has no verb tenses so I found this really interesting. Even with that background though I struggle to fully grasp how the Maya do it since we used other words to set the context of time such as 'I be yesterday' or 'tomorrow you be'.
That said though, given the immense variation in England of mutually incomprehensible dialects unless speakers tone it down to speak more like London, I do wonder the degree to which when linguists analyse languages their findings are generally relevant or actually only apply to a single dialect which could be widely used or could be limited to a single valley.
yaaay, a new nativlang video!!😋
I don't see the difference. They seem to have time. "Has heard" "saw" isn't time
Those are the translation in English, this Maya dialect doesn't it's just the best equivalent in English.
that's because you're taking the translation as being the _meaning_ of the Mayan sentences. in English, we can't separate tense and aspect well, so there's no way to translate directly, without adding tense.
around 4:14, you can see, "Táan in beetik le najo'." translated as "I was/am/will be building the house." the point is that "Táan" means something a little close to "building", and the sentence doesn't reference the time of speaking-"now"-at all.
to know when in reference to the time of speaking the building happened/is happening/will happen, you have to have another sentence that grounds it.
so, at 5:04, when that longer thing is glossed with English verbs in red, the tenses are only there in English, and are interpolated based on other factors-because there's no way *NOT* to include them in English without it being nonsense.
He could have used infinitive.
Finnish has some temporal oddities, but nothing quite as unusual as described in the video. Transitive clauses in Finnish differentiate perfective/imperfective aspect by the object's case marking. When this occurs in the present tense, the perfective aspect behaves like a future perfective. For example:
"syön kalaa"
eat.PRES.1SG fish.PART
"I am eating a fish."
"syön kalan"
eat.PRES.1SG fish.GEN
"I will eat a fish."
I'm not exactly well-exposed to a large quantity of languages, so i'm not sure how common this kind of thing is.
The animation is fabulous in this one!
Interesting! Ancient Egyptian and Coptic also are tenseless, and similarly rely mostly on aspect and mood to convey information about time.
Wow...
Present tense is a legal thingy too.
Excellent. Thank you.
I am Mayan and you nailed it perfectly.
Do you know Mayan language?
Can you translate these sentences.
They went to village yesterday.
They will go to city tomorrow.
(Without using tenses how would you translate them) Then please write its literally translation to English.
This is making me tense.
I almost thought it was rocket science to understand Maya until I imagined how it would be to speak in Spanish without using tenses:
"Cuando nosotros llegado, nosotros visto todos estar diciendo ellos haber escuchado en la radio el huracán estar llegando" Sounds way easier to understand even without marking tenses, I guess part of my confusion came from the fact that I was trying to understand it using English conjugations.
It seems like the idea here is that a sequence of actions written in present tense nevertheless implies past (where the first action is the oldest, etc.). The ‘then’ can be inferred without being said, which means it’s the same difference as a language that has those words like ‘before’ or ‘after’ or actual verb tense changes that serve the same purpose. This really isn’t remarkable or all that significant, unless I am missing something.
This reminds me of Ancient Hebrew. AH doesnt express tense, rather only complete or incomplete action. Tense must be inferred from the context.
Ahhh it's like a slavic language minus the tenses. It could be argued that Russian too has no tenses, as the past tense takes the form of adjectives and the future tense is just a present tense in perfective aspect. Very, very interesting. Thank you for this video
This was interesting, but left me hungry... Why wouldn't irrealis also translate to: what would you do, or what could you do, or what ought you do, instead of will do? Isn't a hypotetical aspect unreal enough? I really enjoy your videos but having to wait for a sequel sucks, especially if I only get presented 2 new ideas in a video. Also, I really didn't get the steps part.
Oh my
Good job, thank you for your work
Your Spanish accent is spot on. I don't even know if you're a native speaker or not!
The complexity of Maya's tensesness is reflected on the way the Mayan speakers use Spanish tenses. I'm a teacher in Yucatan, my students mostly come from small towns and villages around the capital. Although they are fluent in Spanish they struggle when writing reports or assignments, jumping from present tense to past tense in the same paragraph. Moreover, Yucatan Spanish is the most different form of the language of Mexico, sometimes non yucatecans have a hard time following our way or speaking. For instance, instead of saying "Fui a Mérida" (I went to Merida) most people say "tengo ido en Mérida" (I gone in Merida, or something close to that). Yucatecan Spanish is interesting. I assume you've noticed that when you were around here.
I used to live and teach there as well! They definitely have these words though - yaax" - first / ka'ach- before / le ken - when / "Beora"or "Bejela" - now / Chéen ichil - while / "tak" - hasta / Tu yóox p'éel k'iine' - after three days.
This is amazingly fascinating! Although it feels like a powerhouse pointed at a tea cup. ill be watching this a few more times
Ah~ This somehow makes me feel better. I tought that casually talking about some event in Bahasa Indonesia without knowing it's context is confusing enough to be considered as a cosmic horror. I always stuck wondering if said event has been ongoing for a thousand years.
nicely done
I am a simple man. I see NativLang, I click
interesting, this goes way over my head.
where can I learn Yucatan Mayan tho? Any reference books you would recommend?
I understood nothing
Tldw: Maya uses grammatical mood and aspect to make up for tenses, which is opinion on events and duration of events, this is extremely oversimplified
Please! A video on Faroese language! i'm quite interested in it and dying to know more about!
7:06 Wait, perfective in present tense? As a speaker of a Slavic language i find it confusing. Slavic languages also use aspect to talk about time but there is no way you could use perfective when talking about an ongoing action.
Aboriginal languages dnt have words for direction or time yet they are some of the best trackers In the world and have a grand awareness of the universe
Great video!
If someone don't cover things like this they'll be forgotten well done
You haven't posted; I have missed your videos.
Your Spanish is really good!
Magnificent!!!
woooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww Que buena pronunciación, eres la primera persona no mexicana que menciona bien Chiapas y México("xi" como "ji") jajajaja me dejaste boqui abierto.
Can you make a video about tagalog? a language without preposition
2 views, 38 likes, 7 comments
No, RUclips is not drunk, it's just that most people didn't finish the video.
@@thedorku9500 Lel
I get it !!! It cuts out the bullshitt and gets directly to the point , I spoke to many elders in deep Mexico that spoke traditional Mayan and Spanish that still included many of the Mayan syllables , like instead of saying the lighting flashes , to Mayan it's like, the lighting there is real no reason to explain what the lightning is doing cause the flashing is the lighting , it gets to the point with the emotion and what's surrounding and also how it's pronounced with attitudes, and common sense, unlike English where it's nothing but bullshitt to hide truth if that's understanding , like with any language
How does Maya communicate specific time passage, then? "When not twenty years, I am born"?
I just realize that this guy is pretty much just like Vihart except to do with linguistics
I really want to learn the mayan writing system, but I don't know how to start. Any tip?
Aspect is widely used in almost all Sinitic languages as well, it's in fact not very common to express time like "yesterday" or so on. But the mood one ...I'm not sure if there is something alike in Chinese since I don't speak Maya:P
Slavic languages also make use of grammatical aspect to express the concept of tense.
I love these videos. Especially when the narrator speaks the native language with such precision. THANK YOU!
This could have been much clearer if the speaker literally translated all the phrases he's referring to, so we can see what is going on linguistically
FINALLY
Mayan Language: *has no verb tenses*
Mayan Culture: *puts great importance on seasons, cycles, and calendars*
Mayan People: "They don't think it be like it is, but it do"
YES!
It's generally a mistake to investigate tense, aspect, or mood in isolation. In any language.
I practically cannot believe the Mayan languages on the street or on the market sounded that convoluted. Could this "tenselesness" be only on Scripture or inscriptions?
Despite what he said, they definitely have these words- yaax" - first / ka'ach- before / le ken - when / "Beora"or "Bejela" - now / Chéen ichil - while / "tak" - hasta / Tu yóox p'éel k'iine' - after three days.
To a native speaker of any language, their language just sounds normal, and is completely translatable to any other language. What does that say about linguistics? I mean, linguistics is fascinating, but it's completely unconnected to language, sort of, maybe. It's like how cats feel about humans studying cats.
Wonder of there is an analogon in programming languages for this difference.
Excellent video, just one quibble: I think you are overstating the difference between how Mayan and Chinese languages work in this respect. Modern Chinese languages also rely heavily on aspect, specifically via the perfect particle "了" and its negation "没". But it does seem true that Mayan has a richer toolkit, especially with the addition of moods. It's always impressive to see how expressive Chinese can be with such minimal grammars.
In short, instead of past, present and future tense are substituted with perfectives; on non-perfective you answer with perfective.
I'll be honest - I really struggled to follow this. Utterly fascinating though.
I have no idea what the fuck he said 😂
Most his recent videos have been utter nonsense to me.
It's like he understands what he's saying so he expects everyone to.
He's gotten worse at explaining with each video.
@@MorganHunter92 It feels like, since I haven't been keeping up, I'm missing part of the lecture. Like only going to the first class of the semester and then trying to take the Final Exam.
This video doesn't seem factual or authoritative. I get the impression that it is similar to claims of the Inuit language(s) having multiple words for snow/water that English, that we can't translate. The fact is that English can translate them, and some of their words are not significantly interesting. Whether or not they use 1 or 2 words for frost, young ice, old ice, powder snow, or yellow snow, it's all the same complexity. English seems to be more modular in some respects, but everybody has ways to clearly express the specific concepts of water in all its states.
@@eugenetswong a translation is just a speaker of language A trying to express an idea that was originally expressed in language B. Obviously you can express any idea in English, but doing it accurately might mean explaining a whole bunch of context, outlining all the possible interpretations where the original meaning is ambiguous, or just choosing one meaning and losing the nuance of the original. Which is a problem when people communicate using carefully chosen words and shared reference points with different shades of meaning
The idea is more that different languages allow you to express certain ideas elegantly and concisely that other languages do not, to operate natively in a certain psychological space. Yes you can explain that stuff in other languages with enough skill and time to craft an explanation, but even then you're not *thinking* in the same way as the native speaker.
Like as an example, English (usually) requires a subject in every sentence, right? And we use pronouns a lot, so we don't keep repeating the subject. And our pronouns for people are gendered, so when you're talking about a person, you're required to say "he" or "she" a lot - which means you're required to make a decision about that person's gender and express it. You can be deliberately ambiguous by saying "they" (or using other neutral pronouns) but that's a conscious decision to get around this mental requirement that's *baked into the language*. Other languages don't require you to specify (or even include a noun at all), so even though those languages *can* translate the concept of "he" or "she", that doesn't get across the same sense of requirement - it might even sound like you're stressing their gender in languages where it's usually unsaid. And of course, going from one of those unspecifying languages to English means you have to crowbar a pronoun in there, and the one you choose colours things. Translation is actually pretty complex!
I've gotten to the point where I need to actually study linguistics to keep learning more about it as a hobby.
You should definitely do that. I did and I loved it.
I've made an honest effort to learn linguistics on my own, even though I don't have a local college that teaches it (I rarely find anyone who even knows what it is, including some of the local professors). I did so not so much as for a hobby, but for making an auxlang. Long ago I tried to sell Esperanto to some actual linguists on a forum. All they did was point out its flaws and I couldn't get them to see it as being of any sort of value. Finally I asked them if they saw the language as so flawed, why don't they just make their own? I was aware that it was pretty rare for actual linguists to make conlangs, let alone auxlangs. They just insisted that it couldn't be done, so finally I decided that I would learn linguistics myself and do it. After years of studying, I came to agree with them that making a truly universal auxlang was a futile effort. I switched my focus to artlangs, but I eventually lost interest in that too since none of my languages really got well developed (most of them are just phoneme inventories, I can only recall one that actually had a vocab beyond grammatical terms).
I don't have a degree, but honestly I hate being accused of not being a true linguist despite all my time studying (I pretty much lived and breathed linguistics for years). In fact, I discovered ergative verbs on my own (I actually thought they were a 'lazy passive' construction before I learned the proper terminology). I also got into a debate that languages were NOT equal in difficulty. It was plainly obvious, but no matter how much evidence I presented everyone refused to believe what I was saying, even when I pointed out how absurd it was that a language would be more complex in one area (such as its pronoun system) if it was simpler in another. Funny enough, I was vindicated after some black guy who DID have a degree in linguistics pointed out everything that I saw on my own. Personally, I think people mainly listened to him because he was a minority. Apparently this mindset that all language have the same complexity and difficulty came about because racists in the past thought that you could determine how smart a race was by how complex their languages were (European languages, which are often inflecting, tend to be the most complicated on the planet). I even recall hearing about a book where some guy argued that whites were the master race because they had the most complicated languages on Earth (the article I saw mentioned it noted how he completely ignored the fact that native American languages are even more complex than European languages).
So yeah, I've studied all I can on linguistics for the past over 10 years now (probably more like 15 years by now), and I can even fully understand actual linguistic theories and even make my own which some do support, but yet I'm not an actual linguist just because I don't have a degree. I mean, I was highly disappointed in David Peterson's 'The Art of Language Invention', because it only covered stuff that I already knew! Well, besides this thing about Optimality Theory, but everything else I had known for years. And besides, that theory apparently isn't universally accepted. It looks more like something that would be more useful for conlanging than actual linguistics. However, I do confess that my knowledge is mostly limited to phonology, I'm not so much of an expert on everything else, though at the same time I rarely find a grammatical feature I haven't heard about before.
@@lXBlackWolfXl May I give you my perspective from within the linguistics degree and not knowing yourself personally?
I know a lot of people who got passionate about linguistics for years and it's quite obvious. The problem with them (not necessarily you, I don't know you) is that they tend to think they know everything about linguistics and maybe just come for the recognition of their knowledge, but their knowledge is actually in a niche (like an acquaintance that knows everything about some obscure branch of languages and then he thought he knew everything worth knowing). The result is that they don't come to the lectures and then they just go to the tests or the final class and you get to see their Pikachu face when they don't understand anything. Those kind of people are usually the first to drop out after one to three semesters and not passing many classes. If they survive the first semesters, indeed, they reign over everyone but only in their niche topic.
Again, not something about you, but the general kind of person you are describing.
Btw, about Esperanto. Not all linguists reject it, I know a lot who actually study it. But everyone who cares about Esperanto does not in the spirit of an auxlang but for the sociological phenomenon it represents, for studying anthropologicaly the conlang community or for studying its naturalization. Only a few people realize that it had some chance of achieving its goals regardless of its flaws thanks to the support of many important institutions. Maybe in an alternate world where the two WW didn't happen, it would have succeeded. But in our timeline, all auxlangs have lost their chance.
And that brings me to the last point: complexity. Indeed, that idea was initially rejected because of a tabu for racism in a similar way than many other disciplines got rid of other ideas (like race). However, the criticisms came from before and new evidence pointed out that this new perspective was right:
First. A main critique is that people got mixed the ideas of complexity and difficulty. Complexity is a function of the amount of rules needed to describe a phenomenon in the simplest way. Difficulty is how easy is a language for a given person. The difficulty of a language is a function of the complexity of a language, but also of the previous familiarity of the subject with the new set of rules. From what you can see, the complexity of a language is not easy to study since you should to know the language on its entirety. However, it could help if you got rid of the previous knowledge of another language; then difficulty equals complexity. And children are in that state. And what have children studies shown? That languages' complexity does not vary significantly.
Second. The previous point doesn't deny that some areas of a language are more complex than others. But observation has shown that whenever the phonetics of a language are simple, another area is extremely complex. English is a good example; it is known for being extremely simple morphologically and in basic syntax (the simplest of all European languages) but its phonetics are the hardest to have ever existed. Whenever someone proposes that a new natural language is simple because of x or y, someone has pointed out that a further study shows some compensation in another place.
The recent model is that complexity is related to efficiency of communication and there's an equilibrium point as languages cannot be infinitely complex (since no one would be able to use them) nor overly simple (since that would be inefficient). Because of that, there's an optimum all languages tend to gravitate to when they are used by people. That process is called naturalization. And that's where Esperanto and Pidgins come to save the day. Since they are obviously simpler than most natural languages, a lot of studies have been done to see if they get more complex with use. And the answer seems to be yes: creoles are significantly more complex than their mother Pidgins and Esperanto seems to be doing the same.
So, yeah. That sums up why most people reject the idea of differential complexity.
@@lXBlackWolfXl I can tell you right away, as someone who is studying linguistics in the scope of modern academia, there are some gaps in your knowledge that would have been filled had you taken a more structured approach. Yes, you can definitely learn on your own. But you need to know HOW to do so. There's no surprise why people discredit you when you have gaps such as the ones you have.
That's exactly how linguists begin, Wheedler :D
I've wanted to dig into this since 2017. Each time I reread the research extra bits of nuance emerge. Do you know of another language that's highly unusual because of what it lacks?
American Sign Language is very interesting due to both how stripped down it is and how expressive it can be. The levels of wordplay that are available by combining signs or playing off of the English equivalents to signs are insane. All of this is possible purely because of how relaxed the rules and conventions are in ASL.
NativLang I think this phenomenon can be found in the Piraha language too :D Was this grammatical feature only developed in south america ?
Irish doesnt have a yes or no
They say Purepecha is related to the language of the Inca. It's surprising because the 2 tribes were FAR from each other.
I referenced English last video, and I'll do it here. English virtually has no conjugation, so much that English speakers really don't know what conjugation is until we study a foreign language. We are taught subject-verb agreement. I'm referring to conjugation for person. Many languages don't conjugate, but English is a Germanic language, an Indo-European language, languages rich with conjugation, and English is:
I swim, - Ich schwimme
you swim - Du schwimmst
he/she/it swims (
Maya is so cool! I love getting videos on Mesoamerican languages since you don't hear much about them
”don’t here“
Of course, that mistake has to be found, Herr von Grammatius.
Yeah :D
The thing is, it’s really naff seeing such mistakes under a language related video, especially when you discover those without being a native speaker yourself
@@WWPM I don't get if you're being serious. "hear" is correct. "here" is not. The first means to listen without necessarily paying attention and the second means this place.
Some Dragon to Slay he wrote ”here“ initially and corrected it to ”hear“ later on ;)
You know, comparing Maya with German is a pretty interesting idea, because Maya is uniquely tenseless, while German is uniquely aspectless.
Please elaborate: how is German aspectless? Can you give examples?
@@paulalea7465 as a native Spanish speaker I struggle with this a lot.
@@paulalea7465Actually you guys might be at fault here. German has the auxiliary HABEN to inform of a perfective event. as in "Ich hab etwas gesehen"
The aspectless version of this would be along the lines of "Ich gesieht etwas"
(Pardon my poor German :D)
@@batuhankaratas1440 Actually "Ich hab etwas gesehen" is not quite an example for that. Yes, there is a perfective aspect but perfective can also be a tense. Classily, it's aspect but in German this doesn't apply anymore. It's more or less weirldy in between aspect and a regular tense. Usually we (I'm a native speaker) just refer to perfect as "past tense". A German example with aspect would be "Ich war am laufen" engl. "I was walking".It's not exactly the same and it's not standard German and I would never use this in writing. However, it does exist in some dialects.
just to clarify, isn't it more that German largely lacks grammatical marking of aspect? I mean, the aspect is there, you just have to understand it from context, right?
I'm just gonna pretend I understood everything.
Need help?
Tarin yeah
As a Brazillian living in Chiapas, Southern Mexico where most of the people speak Tzeltal ( a Mayan Language)I can actually communicate my ideas I can tell you that is not nearly as hard as it looks, you of course have to think in an absolute different way but once you get it is quite easy and logical.
I think you should have explained at the beginning what counts as a tense, because it is highly confusing during the whole video
I think it's been explained before.. and can be looked up. It saves having to explain it for each vid that discusses them :)
Sorry to hear that. I had hoped the timeline showing tense pointing from the time you're speaking to some other time, plus the presence of grammatical tense in the audience's language, could overcome that. It was a real challenge to streamline this up to this point. I'll consider this as I work on the more detailed followup.
@@NativLang It is actually allright. A studying Linguist here. It is quite diffucult to explain what is a tense. But recently in the literature Tense is assumed to be a position, which is usually filled by a word, in a sentence that inflects itself related to the tense and most usually agreement. So in English, Will, Do, Must, and so on fills the Tense position. But they also have the Modality and aspectual properties.
I don't think it's possible to explain easily what counts as a tense. it's all jumbled up in English, and the only words you can use about it are words that people already think they know. I just don't see an 8 minute video getting the difference across to people who have no idea that aspect is a thing, let alone that it's distinct from tense. I'm pretty sure I'm not stupid, and it took me a really long time to get the difference.
maybe some more highlighting of Maya aspects and moods not being connected to "the time the speaker is speaking"?
@@batuhankaratas1440 Thank you for that!
5:28 "Boom! Exactly as aspect-ed." is an amazing pun xD
I thought I was the only one to notice it!!! No one mentioned it in the comments
Congrats on being mentioned in the next video
@@Kolajer Haha, thanks! When I noticed I was in that video, it really made my morning!
Congratulation, this comment is showed in the next video
I wish topics like this were made more accessible to those who aren't necessarily linguists. The explanation was generally confusing.
The idea of the video was good, but seeing that not everyone was able to understand (and perhaps appreciate it at the end), the treatment was poor. I still like the channel though. Just giving my two cents for improvement and reach.
Something I think should be stressed because it may not be obvious to people, is that your example of a Maya and German in a lab isn't some random fantasy example: There are millions of Maya people still around today in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Obviously, not in the huge cities with stone pyramids and palaces as in prehispanic times, but in the more rural towns and villages and just many people living normal mainstream lives in cities, some of which do pursue careers studying the past. Sadly, despite the Prehispanic civilizations being a huge source of national pride in Mexico, these people, and other Indingious groups like the Nahuas (the culture the Aztec belonged to), Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Purepecha, Otomi, etc still have discrimination and exploitation today. I don't know of any specific groups doing work down there to help those communities, but it's worth checking out.
I also want to stress the "huge cities" bit. A lot of people are under the impression that the Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures were basically glorified tribes living in huts around big pyramids and that's it. In reality., the Maya and virtually every other Mesoamerican culture were complex socities living in proper cities and towns, with formal governments. The larger Maya cities could have tens of thousands of people in and around their urban cores (which had pyramids, palaces, plazas, ball courts, markets, and housing for nobility, all built of stone with furnishings of textiles, murals, sculptures, etc.), and had less dense suburbs interspered with agricultural land, and complex, interconnected networks of agricultural canals, aquaducts, resvoirs and basins for storing drinking water, anddrainage systems to avoid flooding (and even sometimes running water, toilets. and pressurized fountains.) which could cover dozens of to even hundreds of square kilometers and house hundreds of thousands to millions of people.
MajoraZ Yep 👍 ! Here’s some numbers, for example:
Prensa Libre of Guatemala reports the city of El Mirador had up to 1.2 million people. El Tintal, another city, reportedly had 400,000 people. According to historians from India, the cities of Copán and Uxmal each had around 200,000 people. According to a recent LiDAR search, a newly found true megalopolis-with urban sprawl, monumental architecture, massive suburbs, dense populations, and interconnected cities-covered today’s Petén region in Guatemala and had at least 10 million people (possibly up to 25 million). All of these numbers I gave you are from the Preclassic to the Classic Eras of Maya history, aka 2-3,000 years ago all the way up to around 1,000 years ago. And these cities weren’t gigantic slums with a few elite glittering sectors, like the tremendously overpopulated and overrated Ancient Rome (sorry Rome I still love you XD); in fact, there was a growing middle class and industrial-like commerce and agriculture, especially at cities like Caracol. Some Maya cities even sprang up for commercial purposes only, which is not at all the stereotype you think of when you think of the highly religious Maya cities with temple pyramids... more and more research is showing that the Maya cities were more and more similar to modern-day Los Angeles or New York City, for instance. In fact, instead of attributing the Terminal Classic collapse of Central Lowland cities to climate change, deforestation, warlike states, and the borderline racist accusation of a miserable failure of Maya civilization, new studies are showing problems in today’s LA or NYC-like socioeconomic inequality and opportunity-caused mass emigration from cities and thus caused their collapse.
So in the end, all of this is a far cry from the notion of “warlike”, “bloodthirsty”, “savage”, “inferior”, “small” “chiefdom” city-states that old Eurocentric ideology tried to impose to legitimize the repression of Maya culture(s). As a European person myself, I hope all of the world will come to realize the importance of history and languages in order to create peace, justice, and happiness to truly all of humanity.
“Rant” over 😂 :)
Majora z -
I like your explanation, i could imagine it, very interesting. I like the sound and way of speaking of these type of languages espechially the classical ones with those -tl endings. 😁
México loves to glorify the past to avoid the present
@@TDHDN The claim that El Mirador had 1.2 million people is fringe. It is NOT supported by the vast majority of experts. All over the world, there are people who make wildly exaggerated claims about population size etc of places they are fans of. El Mirador was big, but at its pre-Contact peak, it had probably no more than 100,000 people. This is certainliy a true city, but it's not 1.2 million.
a new nativlang video? About one of my favourite culture's language? Oooh I sure am excited
From the list of unfortunate places to make a grammatical/spelling error: this comment!
When it comes to placing the apostrophe in regards to "culture", the important thing to consider is that you're talking about one _of_ a group. While the _one_ is always just one, the group the one is _part of_ is always plural: Mayan is one culture... of several cultures you would call your favourites. As a result, you'd write it as "about one of my favourite cultures' language," or "cultures's" (up to personal preference).
@@Zappygunshot yup I was struggling to choose there and it turns out I was *on the verge of greatness,
this close.*
@@nobodyofinterest2822 "to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory," I suffer from that a lot, as well.
So you say human sacrifice is cool
@@yeetyeet-jb6nc pretty sure you're thinking of aztecs pal
Maya learner: It's easy, it doesn't even have tenses.
Maya: I'm about to end this man's whole career.
My brain (is/was/has been) exploded.
Your brain already explode(d)
I found this video pretty difficult to follow and understand to be honest.
Thank you for your honest comment. From other responses, I don't think you're alone. I'll give this more thought when I work on the followup.
@@NativLang don't worry dude, we're just not cognitive enough 😁. Your videos are awesome keep up!
Please make a video about how Semitic languages use roots and templates instead of an affix-base-suffix structure
LangFocus already did that.
It takes so long for a NativLang video to come out, but they're well worth the wait and always good!
I still don’t understand how a language can be tenseless, but I enjoyed the video nonetheless. 😅
Generally speaking, a language can only be tenseless in the sense of morphological tenses. All languages, however, have to capacity to refer to events which occur in either the past, present, or future, even if they only do so through context or temporal phrases.
Because he didn't actually explain anything in the video.
If it helps any, English arguably doesn't have a Future tense, as such. We use mood and aspect to distinguish future events from present ones (ok, it's more complicated and messy than that, but it should be a helpful starting point for getting your head around things, maybe.)
Obviously, English doesn't have a future tense, nor does German. You have to use an auxiliary verb to get across the idea of a future event idiomatically. In the same way, English and German lack a conditional mood, so you have to use the subjective form of that auxiliary verb to get across the idea of conditionality.
@@ghenulo I've heard this about English before. Do you have an example? ie. comparing a past statement vs a future statement in english so we can see how it's put together?
can you please please please please do a video on the berber/amazigh language and its variations in north africa ? (Algeria,Morroco,Tunisia....), keep the good stuff coming!
That would be Amazingh. Ok I'll leave now
@@eleSDSU 😂
For a second it thought you had misspelled amazing and was gonna scroll past until I realized "Wait, amazing language?"
Look up Langfocus here on youtube - he has a pretty good video thereon 😊
@@mikeyking3670 thanks !
Great vid, but I see many people like myself who were confused by the additional "timeness" of your translations. Perhaps it would be better to put the literal translation (what is it saying) and the "semantic" translation (what does it actually means) below. I know that "what's done it's done", but maybe the program you used may easily allow you to add the phrases without altering the cinematics that much. It would be nice if you did, just saying.
This is one of the best birthday presents I've ever had. Love from Estonia❤️🇪🇪
Happy Birthday!
@@NativLang Thank you!
Oh my gosh native Lang video!!!! I’ve been so sad without you uploading. I want to tell you I’ve watched thoth’s pill a million times and you’ve inspired me to learn many languages! Love from North Carolina
I’m discovering something new here. Now I know it’s not only my mother tongue of Bahasa Indonesia that seems tenseless. Having learned both a Germanic and some Romance languages, now I can make some comparisons.
Indonesian is tenseless, but we still have to use "adverbial aspects" such as 'sudah', 'dulu', 'nanti', 'sekarang', just to perceive actions in certain different times. Mayan language, meanwhile, is very different from this, their way to indicate the time has been uncovered by this video (which I still don't really understand), and we can conclude that it's very different with Indonesian, and, they don't even have words that have similar meaning with 'sebelum' or 'sesudah'.
Generally, despite of not having tense like European language, the way we, Indonesians and most Asians, perceive time is relatively the same.
I'm so glad you're back.
I think we need examples translated into English, still not clear. I understand the methods, but still examples are missing
as a guat its crazy t think we are still finding cool maya stuff to this day.
I´m from Guatemala, 22 mayan languages are spokes and over 50% of the population is maya and it´s such a shame that non indigenous citizens only speak spanish. I want to learn Kiche so bad, but as you can see its sooooo difficult.
I had an a-ha moment when you explained the Mayan construction equivalent to 'before'. Japanese seems to have the same thing: 友達が来ないうちに掃除したい。I want to clean before my friends arrive. (=
while my friends have not come, I want to clean)
Despite what he said, they definitely have these words- yaax" - first / ka'ach- before / le ken - when / "Beora"or "Bejela" - now / Chéen ichil - while / "tak" - hasta / Tu yóox p'éel k'iine' - after three days.