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From: rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo)
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.nlang
Subject: Re: natural language deficiencies?
Message-ID: <334@ptsfa.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Oct-84 16:22:31 EST
Article-I.D.: ptsfa.334
Posted: Thu Oct 25 16:22:31 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Oct-84 06:15:45 EST
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Organization: Pacific Bell, San Francisco
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> <>
> It is well-known that the Hopi (American Indian) language only has a
> present tense, there are no past or future tenses for their verbs.
> Surely this is a language deficiency.

Similarly Indonesian does not have tenses either (nor aspect or person
or number).
However, the meanings that tenses, etc. express in English et al. get expressed
with separate words in Indonesian. In fact English doesn't even have a real
future tense, e.g. no prefix/suffix added to verb root to denote future;
English uses a separate word 'will' to denote futurity, as well as phrases
like 'be going to'.
Indonesian has a whole battery of adverbs to take the place of verb tense.

The lack of a syntactic feature does not necessarily mean a communicative
deficiency. And in any case it is not clear that if a language cannot
communicate some certain meaning it is deficient - maybe the native speakers
of that language have no need to express that meaning.
Do Congolese Pigmies need to have a word for snow? Actually that's a slightly
different issue than tense, because 'snow' is an object whereas tense is
has a more abstract significance.
use the separate auxiliary verb 'will' with the verb root.
-- 


Rob Bernardo, Pacific Bell, San Francisco, California
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