@@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.
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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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? 🙂
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This reminded me of studying french in high school, and having to learn the imperfect tense, and our teacher always described it as "a thing happened, could it still be happening? Then it's imperfect" Great video
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.
Three years later and I finally understand aspect. The trouble I was having, and that I suspect many others were, is that in English, we often get taught 'tenses' that are really compound objects combining both tense and aspect. For instance, I remember being taught the 'present progressive tense', but that is not a tense! It's a present tense action with progressive aspect! Once you can imagine the separation of tense and aspect in English, this becomes much easier to understand. It's just that students are taught everything as 'tense', and so when you tell someone about a language without tense, it conjures an image where they not only lack actual tense, but also aspect that people think are part of tense. They may think they have no way to, to put it in an English form, express '-ing' verbs, or lack the have + ... syntax for perfective aspect.
I mostly got it the first time, but this video helped with grasping the mechanics a little better though. It's also super cool to see comments that I remember scrolling through and reading being featured! Makes the experience feel more real; so often when videos feature comments, the comments section was so huge I hadn't seen said features.
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
I speak Mayan language, I tried to make this line of time in my last class but l found it a challenge because one needs a way of explaining as a specialist in linguistics and l am not. Thank you for this explanation. Niiboolal yuum!
4:45 interesting how the sentence can be translated into Korean "집 다 지었는데(literally, having completed building the house and)" which sounds perfectly natural, and you could be talking about past, present, or the future depending on the context just like Yucatec Maya. But unlike Yucatec Maya you would need words like "what if", "now", "when I was there" in order to provide the context needed.
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! :)
Oh wow, this made so much sense. I actually would gladly welcome more of these in-depth but accessible looks into more complicated linguistic ideas like this. Sometimes, purely storytold videos kind of feel like they're missing something, like there's some big body of knowledge that we're only getting a glimpse of through your videos - which of course is true, even for an "in-depth" video like this one (you say yourself that this video is based on a dense 40-page paper; a 10-minute video isn't going to explain everything about the paper itself and the prerequisite knowledge needed to understand it), but at least it doesn't feel like we're missing out on something. But yeah, basically, it's not that Maya has no sense of time; it's that Maya's sense of time is set relative to events and not to the present - this is the difference between languages like English and languages like Maya, and in turn also the difference between tense and aspect. Those are terms that I hear sometimes and didn't really understand - people say all the time for example that Chinese has no tenses and a word like 了 marks not past tense but a perfect aspect, and I was mystified at what the difference between them was, because in English (and French, the other language I've been learning) we tend to roll this whole idea into one and call it tense. Also, I didn't realize until now you put a longer list of credits and additional notes in the descriptions of your videos. That's great; thanks for doing that!
@@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.
Hey man, I know relatively nothing about parts of language, but I want you to know that I loved the last Maya video and the way you used story telling to explain. I also love this video of further technical explaination, even if that seems more boring to you. I can tell by your voice that you're down about the comments (or maybe something additional on top of that). I just want you to know that critiques of certain aspects of your videos don't describe what your channel is or what you're trying to accomplish with it. You get excited about the history and story-related reasons for language differences and I love that about your channel! :) You get to decide what the purpose to your videos are, and if you're not satisfied with the results or the confusion afterward, you get to decide what was missing and what needs tweeking. You've got this, bro. Your trade and your art are allowed to exist in the way you are passionate about them. Your channel is allowed to be both "you" and growing, learning how to help others understand. Keep on rocking it. :)
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!
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
The original paper is indeed very hard to follow for amateurs, and this video turned out to be extremely helpful. You shouldn't be afraid of getting a bit technical at times, even though the material is more complicated, it's still comprehensible in one run.
@@basocheir I think it is more accurate to say that most languages have *some* degree of tenseless to various levels. (NativLang *did* also compare it to Chinese, which I assume is more tenseless at least comparatively to others.) It is just Mayan takes it to the extreme, for imho an experiential and even excellent level of tenseless in language studies. But you are basically correct, I am just being pedantic. 🎉
For your question near the end, I shall say I'm really fascinated (and fulfilled) with this video! I have read about the knowledge and somehow grasped a little of it, but the fact of your making a linguist-scope to see through things' essential does really cheer me up. The L-scope isn't my invented word (I've just collected this useful metaphor by reading books), but I wholy support it and those who make versions of them (you've made an Aspect L-scope). Anyway, make a video about 'aorist' (tense/aspects ?) in Ancient Greek, please. I was first captivated by its ... name somehow (something is felt about the blue, the horizon, something mysterious but of manners). After having read through my only found source - Wikipedia, I was left regretful: Oh, maybe this beautiful creation of language has died for so long, now there's no way to feel it again, at least in imagination. AND NOW, I WONDER IF THE 'DOT' IN YOUR CLIP IS TRULY (kind of) THE AORIST! It surely can be 'aorist' with its value if Ancient Greek did have more aspects, because value emerges with different things' living together.
@@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).
When my channel blows up I'm going to plug every video you upload as you're one of the 3 youtubers that has had the biggest impact on my real life, AND I'm going to donate to your patreon as much as I can then. That's a promise. Screencap this, let's see how long it takes to happen
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!
So, to say "after I walked home, I slept" in maya, you would put the verb 'walk' in the perfect aspect and the verb 'sleep' in the terminative? I walk(perfect marker) home I sleep(terminative marker).
More likely you'd put "sleep" in perfective, as it's the thing you're putting the focus on, and "walk" in terminative (you've finished walking by the time you go to sleep).
this is a really great video tbh. tense-aspect-mood relations have always fascinated me, and aspect esp has always been one of the most hard-to-learn lessons for me when learning languages (being 10yo and knowing no aspect system from german, and then trying to understand wtf a progressive English tense is, or why latin has imperfect were WILD times)
I really enjoy the stories and how they give historical and social context to linguistic topics. But especially in the last one I missed the theoretical background you've given here. Please don't be afraid of making some more technical or theoretical explanatory videos that cover the mechanics of language. The little remark on definitive articles made me look up how other languages "replace" the definitive article. :-) Cases are another fascinating thing in languages. I'd really like to see you covering that topic but doubt that all of that can be done in story form without some interludes that are more theoretical. Interestingly even closely related languages have big differences here. While English lost cases, German still has four. Dutch had four but not anymore but there're still expression where one can see traces of them. Other languages like Finnish still have more than ten...
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.
Great video.. I watched both. I am 68 years old and decided to go back to college. I took a class in Basic English Grammar taught by a linguist.. I was totally confused.. However after watching your videos many aspects of the course have become clear. By the way my father was Mexico.. Genetics
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.
I needed this! I've struggled with understanding what grammatical aspects even are for the longest time! How did it take me until a year after it was uploaded - almost to the day - to watch this?
In order to understand aspects in Spanish (since it uses different verb conjugations for perfective past (hice) and imperfective past (hacía), it helped me a lot to recognize the words etymology: "perfective" can be translated from latin to "done trough" and "imperfective" to "not done through". Another interesting thing is that tenses are not always deictic, for example, in english you can use present for a past situation (for example: telling a friend a story like "so, I'm standing there and suddenly a car crashes in front of me") or future (When are you leaving? I take the plane next monday). I hope my explanation makes sense at all. Anyways, your videos are great and thanks for providing an entertaining way to learn about linguistics!
That future example is also covered by the fact that English doesn't have a future tense. We actually have a past and non-past tense, and we use aspect to indicate the future!
This is really interesting. So to say something happened it the past, you say it caused what is happening now. I’m going to have to research this more. I want to include it in a Maya-Nahuatl inspired conlang I’m working on.
Languages of the Gran Chaco do some neat stuff with tenselessness too, they often use demonstratives to give time context, meaning what little information they give about when an event takes place occurs on the noun phrase rather than a verb phrase. The Nivaclé demonstrative that denotes something that is known but no longer present hints at the past. Pilagá does something similar. Ticuna (outside of the Gran Chaco) can be analyzed as having three types of noun, Masculine, Feminine, and Past, which is like, insane but awesome. (Making it another of the few languages with purely nominal tense)
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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
Yet another brilliant video about a language that mystifies me - especially the numbers. I recommend this channel to all my language students to get them interested in just how fun and fascinating languages can be. With profound thanks for your efforts!
Thanks for the excellent video (and videos!). You do a good job of illustrating your concepts. The previous video on Mayan was also good, but it may be that I was expecting some of its content, as it is similar to how ancient and Koine Greek use verbal aspect, which is part of my own research. Nonetheless this video certainly added much to the clarity of your topic. Thanks!
Knowing Spanish helped a lot while I was trying to understand this video, Spanish has a (in)famous distinction of perfective past and imperfective past, it's not a lot compared with Mayan, but I guess it's a great example of aspects.
I really liked this video. The previous video contained the same vocabulary but with definitions; it was assumed that I knew a lot of those terms. I am a mining engineer, not a linguist. So I didnt get the core of the video. This most recent did a great job of explaining what I didn't know. Thanks.
This just makes me feel like maya "not having tense" is more of a technicality than anything, since imperfective & progressive mean "during the topic," prospective means "before the topic," and terminative means "after the topic" they are in effect just relative tenses
In French, I believe, you often narrate, especially in historical accounts, with present tenses throughout. Obviously not the same as this, but what with the mention of the "narrative idiom" of perfective + imperfective chain, I immediately thought of this French narrative idiom. I also like how Slavic languages possess a (much simpler) aspect system, but to the point where the imperfective and perfective verbs sometimes have completely different stems.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
@@crusaderACR If you have an issue, then do one better instead
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.
This is one of the most beautiful linguistics classes I've ever had. No kidding. You were born for this kind of stuff.
9:18 "She walked in," the jaguar purred.
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 😅)
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
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.
"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
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
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 ✌🏻😊👍🏻
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.
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’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
@@emmanuelmacron4 Thanks 😊.
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!
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
That "arrive and see" idiom is actually really poetic feeling, and I can't point at exactly why. I like it.
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.
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.
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.
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 reminded me of studying french in high school, and having to learn the imperfect tense, and our teacher always described it as "a thing happened, could it still be happening? Then it's imperfect"
Great video
I think you did a wonderful job at explaining all of this in a natural and digestible manner.
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.
Three years later and I finally understand aspect. The trouble I was having, and that I suspect many others were, is that in English, we often get taught 'tenses' that are really compound objects combining both tense and aspect. For instance, I remember being taught the 'present progressive tense', but that is not a tense! It's a present tense action with progressive aspect!
Once you can imagine the separation of tense and aspect in English, this becomes much easier to understand. It's just that students are taught everything as 'tense', and so when you tell someone about a language without tense, it conjures an image where they not only lack actual tense, but also aspect that people think are part of tense. They may think they have no way to, to put it in an English form, express '-ing' verbs, or lack the have + ... syntax for perfective aspect.
I mostly got it the first time, but this video helped with grasping the mechanics a little better though. It's also super cool to see comments that I remember scrolling through and reading being featured! Makes the experience feel more real; so often when videos feature comments, the comments section was so huge I hadn't seen said features.
I love the technical as much as the story. More of these videos would be very appreciated.
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
I speak Mayan language, I tried to make this line of time in my last class but l found it a challenge because one needs a way of explaining as a specialist in linguistics and l am not. Thank you for this explanation.
Niiboolal yuum!
4:45 interesting how the sentence can be translated into Korean "집 다 지었는데(literally, having completed building the house and)" which sounds perfectly natural, and you could be talking about past, present, or the future depending on the context just like Yucatec Maya. But unlike Yucatec Maya you would need words like "what if", "now", "when I was there" in order to provide the context needed.
8:40 ”That captured *Maya tense-ion…”* 😆.
Thanks! It definitely cleared things up. It was more technical, but the more in-depth explanation and the slower pace both helped me understand!
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! :)
Oh wow, this made so much sense. I actually would gladly welcome more of these in-depth but accessible looks into more complicated linguistic ideas like this. Sometimes, purely storytold videos kind of feel like they're missing something, like there's some big body of knowledge that we're only getting a glimpse of through your videos - which of course is true, even for an "in-depth" video like this one (you say yourself that this video is based on a dense 40-page paper; a 10-minute video isn't going to explain everything about the paper itself and the prerequisite knowledge needed to understand it), but at least it doesn't feel like we're missing out on something.
But yeah, basically, it's not that Maya has no sense of time; it's that Maya's sense of time is set relative to events and not to the present - this is the difference between languages like English and languages like Maya, and in turn also the difference between tense and aspect. Those are terms that I hear sometimes and didn't really understand - people say all the time for example that Chinese has no tenses and a word like 了 marks not past tense but a perfect aspect, and I was mystified at what the difference between them was, because in English (and French, the other language I've been learning) we tend to roll this whole idea into one and call it tense.
Also, I didn't realize until now you put a longer list of credits and additional notes in the descriptions of your videos. That's great; thanks for doing that!
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 :)
Thank you so much for doing your part in making Native languages more accessible.
Hey man, I know relatively nothing about parts of language, but I want you to know that I loved the last Maya video and the way you used story telling to explain. I also love this video of further technical explaination, even if that seems more boring to you. I can tell by your voice that you're down about the comments (or maybe something additional on top of that). I just want you to know that critiques of certain aspects of your videos don't describe what your channel is or what you're trying to accomplish with it. You get excited about the history and story-related reasons for language differences and I love that about your channel! :) You get to decide what the purpose to your videos are, and if you're not satisfied with the results or the confusion afterward, you get to decide what was missing and what needs tweeking.
You've got this, bro. Your trade and your art are allowed to exist in the way you are passionate about them. Your channel is allowed to be both "you" and growing, learning how to help others understand. Keep on rocking it. :)
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!
The technical linguistic jargon actually made your last video much clearer!
Now take a look at Navajo. That there's aspectual overload
Definitely cleared things up, thanks
I would like to find this explanation before. As a Maya student, it was very challenging to make a sentence in my mind, but now it is so much clear...
This is so much better than the previous video on the topic! It makes complete sense now... the last one not as much
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
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. :)
Thanks! This video was much clearer and simpler than the previous one, and more interesting to me.
Fascinating. This totally held my interest. I’d be happy to watch more of these.
This is still melting my mind but I feel much much closer to understanding it now, thank you!
Very good that you revisited to explain this. It was not clear before.
The original paper is indeed very hard to follow for amateurs, and this video turned out to be extremely helpful. You shouldn't be afraid of getting a bit technical at times, even though the material is more complicated, it's still comprehensible in one run.
Are tenseless languages uncommon?
It is fascinating to see how other languages can communicate the same concept in such different ways.
I think tenseless languages are pretty common, but Maya level of tenseless, not even word for before or after, is very rare
@@basocheir I think it is more accurate to say that most languages have *some* degree of tenseless to various levels. (NativLang *did* also compare it to Chinese, which I assume is more tenseless at least comparatively to others.)
It is just Mayan takes it to the extreme, for imho an experiential and even excellent level of tenseless in language studies. But you are basically correct, I am just being pedantic. 🎉
@@basocheirNivaclé does this as well
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!!!
That was really helpful! Definitely helps clarify the last video.
This video is amazing and as a theoretical linguistic, I really enjoy your discussions
For your question near the end, I shall say I'm really fascinated (and fulfilled) with this video! I have read about the knowledge and somehow grasped a little of it, but the fact of your making a linguist-scope to see through things' essential does really cheer me up. The L-scope isn't my invented word (I've just collected this useful metaphor by reading books), but I wholy support it and those who make versions of them (you've made an Aspect L-scope).
Anyway, make a video about 'aorist' (tense/aspects ?) in Ancient Greek, please.
I was first captivated by its ... name somehow (something is felt about the blue, the horizon, something mysterious but of manners). After having read through my only found source - Wikipedia, I was left regretful: Oh, maybe this beautiful creation of language has died for so long, now there's no way to feel it again, at least in imagination. AND NOW, I WONDER IF THE 'DOT' IN YOUR CLIP IS TRULY (kind of) THE AORIST! It surely can be 'aorist' with its value if Ancient Greek did have more aspects, because value emerges with different things' living together.
Not only did you explain Temporal Anaphora in Maya well, but you finally helped me make sense of what "aspect" actually is!
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).
When my channel blows up I'm going to plug every video you upload as you're one of the 3 youtubers that has had the biggest impact on my real life, AND I'm going to donate to your patreon as much as I can then. That's a promise. Screencap this, let's see how long it takes to happen
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!
So, to say "after I walked home, I slept" in maya, you would put the verb 'walk' in the perfect aspect and the verb 'sleep' in the terminative?
I walk(perfect marker) home I sleep(terminative marker).
Looks like "I slept" would be in the prospective, if the reference point is your walking. Sleeping comes later, so it's in the prospective.
@@imokin86 oh, thanks.
I don’t know, but I’d think:
walk - prospective
sleep - imperfective
or what you said originally.
More likely you'd put "sleep" in perfective, as it's the thing you're putting the focus on, and "walk" in terminative (you've finished walking by the time you go to sleep).
I would expect that the closer to NOW would come first . so I Slept at Home, I got home by walking ?? maybe ??
I had to watch this video like 4 times to understand the basics of what he saying. Fascinating.
this is a really great video tbh. tense-aspect-mood relations have always fascinated me, and aspect esp has always been one of the most hard-to-learn lessons for me when learning languages (being 10yo and knowing no aspect system from german, and then trying to understand wtf a progressive English tense is, or why latin has imperfect were WILD times)
I really enjoy the stories and how they give historical and social context to linguistic topics. But especially in the last one I missed the theoretical background you've given here. Please don't be afraid of making some more technical or theoretical explanatory videos that cover the mechanics of language. The little remark on definitive articles made me look up how other languages "replace" the definitive article. :-)
Cases are another fascinating thing in languages. I'd really like to see you covering that topic but doubt that all of that can be done in story form without some interludes that are more theoretical. Interestingly even closely related languages have big differences here. While English lost cases, German still has four. Dutch had four but not anymore but there're still expression where one can see traces of them. Other languages like Finnish still have more than ten...
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.
Great video.. I watched both. I am 68 years old and decided to go back to college. I took a class in Basic English Grammar taught by a linguist.. I was totally confused.. However after watching your videos many aspects of the course have become clear. By the way my father was Mexico.. Genetics
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.
I needed this! I've struggled with understanding what grammatical aspects even are for the longest time! How did it take me until a year after it was uploaded - almost to the day - to watch this?
In order to understand aspects in Spanish (since it uses different verb conjugations for perfective past (hice) and imperfective past (hacía), it helped me a lot to recognize the words etymology: "perfective" can be translated from latin to "done trough" and "imperfective" to "not done through".
Another interesting thing is that tenses are not always deictic, for example, in english you can use present for a past situation (for example: telling a friend a story like "so, I'm standing there and suddenly a car crashes in front of me") or future (When are you leaving? I take the plane next monday). I hope my explanation makes sense at all.
Anyways, your videos are great and thanks for providing an entertaining way to learn about linguistics!
That future example is also covered by the fact that English doesn't have a future tense. We actually have a past and non-past tense, and we use aspect to indicate the future!
This is really interesting. So to say something happened it the past, you say it caused what is happening now. I’m going to have to research this more. I want to include it in a Maya-Nahuatl inspired conlang I’m working on.
Languages of the Gran Chaco do some neat stuff with tenselessness too, they often use demonstratives to give time context, meaning what little information they give about when an event takes place occurs on the noun phrase rather than a verb phrase. The Nivaclé demonstrative that denotes something that is known but no longer present hints at the past. Pilagá does something similar.
Ticuna (outside of the Gran Chaco) can be analyzed as having three types of noun, Masculine, Feminine, and Past, which is like, insane but awesome. (Making it another of the few languages with purely nominal tense)
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
Really like this kind of video. It's one of recent favorites!
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!
Yet another brilliant video about a language that mystifies me - especially the numbers. I recommend this channel to all my language students to get them interested in just how fun and fascinating languages can be. With profound thanks for your efforts!
Having watched both videos back to back I can say that this was much harder to follow than normal, but very, very interesting.
Thanks, previous video left me puzzled & this one really helps!
I'm all for more technical videos like this!
This graph thing for expressing time helps a lot.
Thanks for the excellent video (and videos!). You do a good job of illustrating your concepts. The previous video on Mayan was also good, but it may be that I was expecting some of its content, as it is similar to how ancient and Koine Greek use verbal aspect, which is part of my own research. Nonetheless this video certainly added much to the clarity of your topic. Thanks!
The whole explanation of perfective vs. imperfective would have been amazing during my second year of Spanish Classes
Knowing Spanish helped a lot while I was trying to understand this video, Spanish has a (in)famous distinction of perfective past and imperfective past, it's not a lot compared with Mayan, but I guess it's a great example of aspects.
Oh man, this channel is so very, very good.
I really enjoyed how you explained the way Mayans modify their verbs in a way that does not use time tenses. You’re a true linguist, dude
And I thought learning my French tenses was hard enough..
I really liked this video. The previous video contained the same vocabulary but with definitions; it was assumed that I knew a lot of those terms. I am a mining engineer, not a linguist. So I didnt get the core of the video. This most recent did a great job of explaining what I didn't know. Thanks.
The complexity level here is totally worth it 💪
Thanks for this, I was super confused after that last video...
This video gave me a tool to comprehend tenses and aspects. Thank you so much!! ^^
Thanks for making this video! It’s always a good day when NativLang posts a video! :D
This just makes me feel like maya "not having tense" is more of a technicality than anything, since imperfective & progressive mean "during the topic," prospective means "before the topic," and terminative means "after the topic" they are in effect just relative tenses
New Nativlang video....*instantly likes*
Love this but will need to watch it several more times to fully grasp.
this is a great video! I'd love to see more videos like this
this is the best video i have found explaining how aspect can be used instead of tense, thanks for helping me out
This video was exactly what I needed after having been left with the thoughts after the previous one. Thanks a lot :)
Great job! I much prefer these technical, explanatory videos. The story based ones are still great though!
It's all clear now. Thanks for the video!
In French, I believe, you often narrate, especially in historical accounts, with present tenses throughout. Obviously not the same as this, but what with the mention of the "narrative idiom" of perfective + imperfective chain, I immediately thought of this French narrative idiom. I also like how Slavic languages possess a (much simpler) aspect system, but to the point where the imperfective and perfective verbs sometimes have completely different stems.