Maya Before, Maya After: How a Tenseless Language Talks Past and Future

[@jcortese3300]

English future: "will be" Mayan future: "isn't yet"

[@simonlow0210]

That pretty much sums up the whole video. 😆

[@_yuri]

bruh

[@Mitztliluna]

Ö

[@VolkColopatrion]

Yet? Isn't "yet" is a tense, no?

[@VolkColopatrion]

@Tòochi and there is no way to communicate what that means? Or sounds in English?

[@nakenmil]

I'll be honest - I really struggled to follow this. Utterly fascinating though.

[@disrespectthemwomensubjuga5471]

I have no idea what the fuck he said 😂

[@MorganHunter92]

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.

[@insolubletoaster8133]

@@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.

[@eugenetswong]

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.

[@cactustactics]

@@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!

[@wheedler]

I've gotten to the point where I need to actually study linguistics to keep learning more about it as a hobby.

[@craigcollings5568]

You should definitely do that. I did and I loved it.

[@lXBlackWolfXl]

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.

[@somedragontoslay2579]

@@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.

[@xoreign]

@@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.

[@ceruchi2084]

That's exactly how linguists begin, Wheedler :D

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

The past, the present and the future walk into a bar. It was tense. Then the barman said "It's about time!"

[@theangryaustralian7624]

Nice

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

@@theangryaustralian7624. A very timely reply.

[@nico.x06]

Jacksfilms?

[@chrisrosenkreuz23]

oh, you...

[@Nick-nh4nf]

hz

[@DerangedManiac12]

Maya is so cool! I love getting videos on Mesoamerican languages since you don't hear much about them

[@WWPM]

”don’t here“

[@horstheinemann2132]

Of course, that mistake has to be found, Herr von Grammatius.

[@WWPM]

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

[@somedragontoslay2579]

@@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.

[@WWPM]

Some Dragon to Slay he wrote ”here“ initially and corrected it to ”hear“ later on ;)

[@somedragontoslay2579]

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.

[@desireebach6394]

Teenek language is the one spoken in the Huastecas, right? Tanpicco city and around it.

[@OM19_MO79]

@@desireebach6394 You misspelled Tampico.

[@somedragontoslay2579]

@@desireebach6394 Correct.

[@Isumaeru4Cheshire]

He's only discussing Yucatec Maya here, and he mentions it at the beginning of the video. c:

[@williamwolf2844]

@@OM19_MO79 And yet, despite that misspelling, we all understand this person. You made a needlessly pedantic comment.

[@error.pleasetryagain7208]

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

[@blakedawson3074]

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.

[@williamwolf2844]

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.

[@NativLang]

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?

[@GuyNamedSean]

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.

[@fabienlehenaff2742]

NativLang I think this phenomenon can be found in the Piraha language too :D Was this grammatical feature only developed in south america ?

[@thefrenchpoet3160]

Irish doesnt have a yes or no

[@Xilotl]

They say Purepecha is related to the language of the Inca. It's surprising because the 2 tribes were FAR from each other.

[@crosisbh1451]

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 (

[@krupam0]

You know, comparing Maya with German is a pretty interesting idea, because Maya is uniquely tenseless, while German is uniquely aspectless.

[@laertesdd]

Please elaborate: how is German aspectless? Can you give examples?

[@eleSDSU]

@@paulalea7465 as a native Spanish speaker I struggle with this a lot.

[@batuhankaratas1440]

​@@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)

[@paulalea7465]

@@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.

[@thoperSought]

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?

[@beredentod]

I think you should have explained at the beginning what counts as a tense, because it is highly confusing during the whole video

[@Danelius90]

I think it's been explained before.. and can be looked up. It saves having to explain it for each vid that discusses them :)

[@NativLang]

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.

[@batuhankaratas1440]

@@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.

[@thoperSought]

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"?

[@mikeyking3670]

@@batuhankaratas1440 Thank you for that!

[@nobodyofinterest2822]

a new nativlang video? About one of my favourite culture's language? Oooh I sure am excited

[@Zappygunshot]

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).

[@nobodyofinterest2822]

@@Zappygunshot yup I was struggling to choose there and it turns out I was *on the verge of greatness, this close.*

[@Zappygunshot]

@@nobodyofinterest2822 "to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory," I suffer from that a lot, as well.

[@yeetyeet-jb6nc]

So you say human sacrifice is cool

[@nobodyofinterest2822]

@@yeetyeet-jb6nc pretty sure you're thinking of aztecs pal

[@keeteeh]

5:28 "Boom! Exactly as aspect-ed." is an amazing pun xD

[@Bimtavdesign]

I thought I was the only one to notice it!!! No one mentioned it in the comments

[@Kolajer]

Congrats on being mentioned in the next video

[@keeteeh]

@@Kolajer Haha, thanks! When I noticed I was in that video, it really made my morning!

[@johannfer7073]

Congratulation, this comment is showed in the next video

[@jeremieherard2166]

I've always been so fan of the little "woosh" whispers :D

[@wolfrig2000]

It takes so long for a NativLang video to come out, but they're well worth the wait and always good!

[@MajoraZ]

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.

[@TDHDN]

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 😂 :)

[@martinkullberg6718]

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. 😁

[@reefkeepingandeverythingelse]

México loves to glorify the past to avoid the present

[@williamwolf2844]

@@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.

[@nespppp]

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.

[@maxiapalucci2511]

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

[@ShadowDrakken]

I'm confused... don't words like "will" and "did" include tense inherently?

[@NativLang]

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?

[@kendalljohnson6466]

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.

[@belisarius6949]

@@kendalljohnson6466 Yeah. The mayans didnt actually use these words. Nativ just translated it into english, where those words obviously do get used.

[@ytyt3922]

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.

[@leejones2113]

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.

[@g0thfae]

"The Mayan future is a mood" Mood

[@johndubiel1149]

I'm so glad you're back.

[@mhv2867]

This is one of the best birthday presents I've ever had. Love from Estonia❤️🇪🇪

[@NativLang]

Happy Birthday!

[@mhv2867]

@@NativLang Thank you!

[@ArturoStojanoff]

Maya learner: It's easy, it doesn't even have tenses. Maya: I'm about to end this man's whole career.

[@amirkapon948]

Please make a video about how Semitic languages use roots and templates instead of an affix-base-suffix structure

[@ghenulo]

LangFocus already did that.

Yay! You're back! Easily one of my favourite channels.

[@svobodniknarodnik7128]

"I'm animating a sequel to get into some of the more technical details, too." The best thing I've heard all day

[@zerbgames1478]

This is a question I have had for so long. Especially with Chinese, but this is absolutely fascinating. Thanks for the new upload man!

My brain (is/was/has been) exploded.

[@russell_w21]

Your brain already explode(d)

[@marcelvazquez8617]

Never clicked so fast in my life. I was waiting for this video for so long. I am actually from Mérida in the Yucatan Peninsula and have wanted to learn mayan for quite a while now, every time I hear such ancient language being spoken on the streets I get excited and want to learn it. Xi'iktech uts!

[@NativLang]

Ooh, do it!

[@marcelvazquez8617]

@@NativLang will do for sure :)

[@ilyasmasker4242]

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!

[@eleSDSU]

That would be Amazingh. Ok I'll leave now

[@ilyasmasker4242]

@@eleSDSU 😂

[@fish4225]

For a second it thought you had misspelled amazing and was gonna scroll past until I realized "Wait, amazing language?"

[@mikeyking3670]

Look up Langfocus here on youtube - he has a pretty good video thereon 😊

[@ilyasmasker4242]

@@mikeyking3670 thanks !

[@tegarlagajoebhaar8936]

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.

[@trevorjames7490]

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.

[@Artur_M.]

I'm just gonna pretend I understood everything.

[@RedHair651]

Need help?

[@t6amygdala]

Tarin yeah

[@eduardodelapena7075]

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.

[@matthewreid7814]

Your skills in linguistics, animation, inutitiveness, and explanation allow for insights into discussions that otherwise would not have been realized + producable + structured in a way that resonates with an audience. I love your work.

[@imokin86]

That was cool and informative, thanks! In Russian, imperfective verbs have present tense, but perfective verbs in the same form automatically turn into future tense.

[@drazlet]

Your production value production gets better each episode. I love every single video you put out

[@dondeestaCarter]

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.

[@lambda494]

This is fantastic. I love learning how languages solve their "problems" with various tools. "Oh, you use tense? We use aspect and mood!" When I learned about the subjunctive mood in Spanish, I actually was really excited since that was a distinction that is not as prevalent (morphologically) in English.

[@MurasakiMonogatari]

You set this up as something extraordinary. In fact, the elements are not uncommon, only the usage is extreme. All Slavic languages have verbal aspect so we have fewer tenses then Romance languages. You can speak sensibly with as few as two tenses, present and simple past. Persian, I believe, also has verbal aspect. Both Romance and Slavic languages have verbal mood to distinguish between strictly real (indicative) and desired or otherwise emotion-related (subjunctive, imperative, conditional) actions.

[@NativLang]

I thought of taking a tangent into Slavic aspects in an earlier draft. It's relevant, it was taking momentum from the main story and is really worth its own discussion. To draw on one of my sources (Bohnemeyer), what makes this remarkable isn't the presence of mood and aspect, but instead "[t]he expression of a rich system of aspectual and modal distinctions and simultaneous absence of tense marking" that characterize Maya's binding implicatures and temporal anaphora.

[@mrpellagra2730]

Turkish also has aspects, but they are glommed on to the verb.

[@RedHair651]

Yomiko: I feel like you're talking about "past" and "non-past"

[@erkinalp]

@@mrpellagra2730 Turkish even has a tense-aspect combination: perfective indirect past -miş.

[@robertschlesinger1342]

Absolutely fantastic video on some unusual and interesting aspects of the Mayan language. I can hardly wait for your promised sequel video.

[@krono5el]

as a guat its crazy t think we are still finding cool maya stuff to this day.

[@prezdabeast6264]

This is so fascinating!! As long as we’re tense/aspect/mood, do you think you’d ever do a video about AAVE? It has something like seven different kinds of future tense, and I love the layers of nuance in that.

[@OK-ge4dk]

Comprehensive and enjoyable, as always. Keep up the good work!

[@NativLang]

Thank you!!

[@infinite_cows]

This is the first one of your videos that went almost 100% over my head.

[@biancafina3012]

I still don’t understand how a language can be tenseless, but I enjoyed the video nonetheless. 😅

[@Sovairu]

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.

[@MorganHunter92]

Because he didn't actually explain anything in the video.

[@laurencefraser]

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.)

[@ghenulo]

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.

[@areitu]

@@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?

[@megantaylor2871]

I lived in Guatemala for a few months and my host family was Pokomchi (aka Pokom). They speak a Mayan language known as Pokomchi. It was so hard for me. I tried to learn it on top of Spanish but I only picked up some basic phrases and words for “young woman,” “rat,” and “cat.” I really would like to study it more. It’s completely unlike any other language I’ve studied.

[@pablocifuentes2607]

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.

[@samarabob]

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)

[@blakedawson3074]

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.

[@dickyadhadyanto4986]

Most of asian and southeast asian languages are tenseless, including chinese. I'm Indonesian, we never say literal "will" when you want to do something in the future, you just say you WANT to do something (Bakal, Hendak, Akan or Mau). It's a contextual language, when you say you want to do something, it definitely means you want to do it in the future. Or you don't just say "Until", you just say "arrive" (Sampai) in a sense to describe the final moment of the action. (arriving at the end of the action). Just like BELUM (not happening) and we use seBELUM literally means the time when it's not happening (before). No Verb1, Verb2 or Verb3. All Verbs are the same (Makan (Eat) is just Makan in past, present or future), you just need to change the context. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenseless_language.

[@nyanard]

But they still have words to describe time like "before" & "after" unlike Mayan

[@orochirel]

Hi :) I’m from Merida, Yucatan. Thanks for this video, I really appreciate the animations of local common objects and past cultural objects, really nice

[@JustinArmstrongsite]

I found this video pretty difficult to follow and understand to be honest.

[@NativLang]

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.

[@haiironosora9714]

@@NativLang don't worry dude, we're just not cognitive enough 😁. Your videos are awesome keep up!

[@renzokukenleneyoyo522]

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!

[@viracocha6093]

Congrats, you now made me want to know more about the Mayan languages

[@stefansauer2382]

Hearing you pronounce cool words in different languages makes me want to learn new languages. Keep up the good videos :)

[@CJonesApple]

I'm confused. Is this a NEW Nativlang video? Is that a thing that exists?

[@HagenvonEitzen]

The correct aspect woul dbe perfect (and apply to quality as well)

[@goldburnm]

Missed your videos. Glad you're back.

[@miroku1026]

You had me at "tenseless"

[@nickzardiashvili624]

I love your videos and am happy to see new ones, but I'll kind of jump on a common bandwagon in the comments and ask you to be slightly more detailed in your explanations. I found it tough to follow and my immediate thought was it's my problem, but many in the comments seem to be saying the same. For your next topic, maybe a couple more examples or making sure each aspect of an example is defined will get the message across better. Once again, thanks for such fascinating content!

[@MrBuns-yi2hk]

This was pretty intense.

[@Vapouriste]

@Jason Voorheese Not really.

[@angelrodriguez732]

Ba'ax ka wa'alik! Yucatecan here This video is amazing. Your pronunciation is impressive. Also your videos are highly informative and educational. Keep it up

[@GarfieldRex]

I think we need examples translated into English, still not clear. I understand the methods, but still examples are missing

[@impishDullahan]

Really insightful, I've had a conlang boggling about that takes influence from Mayan but still have yet to work out a TAM system that reflects both the Mayan influence and respects the culture of the people the conlang is for.

[@erikmerckx2958]

This was a bit confusing and unfocused. ("Let me tell you about how a tenseless language can convey time WAIT LET'S LISTEN TO HOWLER MONKEYS") It's nice to have a sources doc in the description so I read it. It's definitely interesting.

[@valkeakirahvi]

Cool video! I took a short course on Classical Maya, but we mostly focused on the hieroglyphs and not a lot on the language itself.

[@wheelsygamer2203]

this was one of your more difficult videos to follow, i'm however not really sure if it was just me, the complexity of mayan, or the way you explained it that made it so

[@GlitchmasterStudios]

The dialect of Shoshoni I learned has a near-nonexistent temporal factor too. :D There are past and future suffixes for very specific instances like promises (future) or confirmation (past), but I remember the elder I learned from telling me "Don't worry about when. Nobody cares. Its HOW that matters. Tell me how the verb happened." So stuff like "leave to [verb] and come back" and "repeatedly [verb] with [instrument]" replace time words and ya gotta be kinda creative about it. All really neat stuff. Love your videos :D Indigenous languages of the Americas are my favorites.

[@JayPfo]

Love your videos especially when theyre about mesoamerican subjects

[@SachaCubesLatino]

This was a flawless video, I loved it! I know you are particularly fond of aztec and maya, but for the follow up you could grab some examples or make comparisons with another awesome tenseless language: Aymara!

[@hasafienda]

I've got a book to learn a Maya language, kaqchikel. Really gotta get on to it.

[@Sovairu]

Is the book ¿La ütz awäch? That was the textbook for the Kaqchikel class which I took.

[@monkofdarktimes]

I have a friend of my who speaks a rare mayan language thats only found in a valley

[@mdstanton1813]

Your video topics are, by nature always going to be difficult. How you guys outline and execute the discussion and answers always astound me. Well done!

[@WadelDee]

"When we arrive, we see everyone say they hear on the radio the cyclone comes." This sentence doesn't really need tenses or adverbials or words like "before" or "after" or "until" to be somewhat understandable. Just imagine that the sentence wasn't written in the present form but in a timeless form and you can easily guess that this is talking about the past, based on the context alone.

[@craigcollings5568]

Wow! That is really cool. In a way those nested topics, portraying the dependencies of the speaker's understanding, is more "honest" than a simplistic assertion of cause.

[@kyonthirtytwo2456]

Could you examine the Guarani language from South America too? I'd really like to hear your take on this language and it's use as a language of emotion for duo lingual Spanish and Guarani speakers. Also could you go into detail about some of its complexities and characteristics.

[@madjames1134]

Guarani is specially interesting because its system of nasal harmony and their alignment having different treatments for agent and patient of a verb (it's more or less as saying "fell me, but I arrived". A nominative language like English would say "I fell, but I arrived". An ergative language like Basques would say "fell me, but arrived me").

[@isaacbruner65]

​@@madjames1134this is a fluid-s system, which is related to the concept of active-stative alignment. Active-stative languages mark the subject of an intransitive verb differently depending on whether the verb is considered agentive or not, and fluid-s languages can use the same verb to indicate both an agentive and patientive meaning, and the subject is marked accordingly.

[@saoirsejensen5437]

So happy to see a new video!

[@arnoldspazzanewer6288]

I appreciate this channel and love the contents you treat as well, but some concepts are so difficoult that we (non English native speakers) may not understand, so I advice you to hire someone who can put the translation on the subtitles or translate it yourself or ask to your subscribers, or something like that

[@NativLang]

Thanks for that info. I often see subscribers or fans create draft translations for captions during the month or so after a video launches. It's a lot of work for them, but it's greatly appreciated.

[@arnoldspazzanewer6288]

@@NativLang Ok, thank you p.s. beautifull video

[@onegrapefruitlover]

As someone who’s moving to a mayan-speaking village from central Mexico, this video was both inspiring and terrifying 😅 Thank you so much :)

[@bluellamaslearnbeyondthele2456]

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.

[@Alice-gr1kb]

I’ve been waiting for this for so long

[@stansantos4733]

Many languages with Philippine type morphosyntactic alignment are also like this. Aspect verbal affixes give hints of time.

[@takumiyamamiya8877]

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'

[@demnotmem]

I appreciate your effort. The video is brilliantly done, but your explanation makes the topic even harder than it is.

[@rasho2532]

I don't see the difference. They seem to have time. "Has heard" "saw" isn't time

[@sion8]

Those are the translation in English, this Maya dialect doesn't it's just the best equivalent in English.

[@thoperSought]

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.

[@rasho2532]

He could have used infinitive.

[@EnricoDandolo1204]

Would love to see more videos about Sumerian. Learning the language at the moment and can't help but find its strangely computer code-like nominal phrases fascinating. Not to mention the fact that we only have access to the language through a highly defective script system that never fully, and at times barely, represents the actual language behind the writing. Gets to the point where my teacher, one of the world's foremost Sumerologists, flat-out admitted that we can't even say whether the language had tonal elements or not.

[@ytyt3922]

The aspect concept could have been explained much better. Assuming your audience doesn’t all have PhDs in linguistics.

[@justinmacy8034]

Aspect is a way to describe how something can be viewed in relation to time. An example is: 'I ate', 'I had eaten', 'I was eating". These three versions of the verb 'to eat', are all set in the past tense but describe it differently. One can tell you if the action happened once, or if it happened before an action, or if the action continued until being interrupted by another action

[@eleSDSU]

If you speak Spanish it's the difference between pretérito perfecto, imperfecto e indefinido for example.

[@ytyt3922]

Cptn. Greedy but those are tenses are they not? I speak fluent French so I’m well versed in the difference between the past perfect and the imperfect. But I always learned those as tenses. Here the narrator is saying that Mayan has no tense, but does have aspect.

[@justinmacy8034]

@@ytyt3922 So, there are different types of aspects. An example is the progressive aspect: He is running right now, he was running yesterday, he will be running in about an hour. They express how the speaker views the action of the verb. It can be tricky when you first start learning about this

[@asthmen]

This is so cool! Thanks for doing a video on this. Very excited for the sequel.

[@ruawhitepaw]

Proto-Indo-European is commonly reconstructed with a system similar to this, and later languages have forms like "aorist" that are often more perfective than past.

[@tudorsike736]

Alright, I was having a bit of trouble understanding this one, and I noticed many people in the comments sharing my confusion. I was thinking of going over every point in the video that wasn't clear enough, but I soon realized that's not interesting to anyone and @nativlang has better things to do than scrolling through old comment threads. Instead, for anyone still struggling with this topic, I thought I'd share the thing that jumped at me when I took the English translation of paragraph on the hurricane and removed all the tenses, leaving only the aspect: When we *arrived* we *saw* everyone *saying* they *heard* on the radio the cyclone *coming* . I was surprised with how much this still makes perfect sense in English. Made me realize that when describing verbs we tend to get boggled down in tenses, when aspect could be at least as important.

[@Thedirk4444]

2 views and 126 likes.. makes sense. Love the vids!

[@Mendiar88]

So much time without watching a video from you!!!

[@BioShaftBand]

Your Spanish accent is spot on. I don't even know if you're a native speaker or not!

[@Chantwizzle]

I just went to the Mayan exhibition at The Royal British Columbia Museum. Looking at all the tablets of their writing was so fascinating. I love language, and particularly, different writing systems.

[@Nomo_Popo]

Maya had a special relationship with time. It would be fascinating to know more about it through their language. So much can be learned that way.

[@robertobahamondeandrade]

Very useful for understanding Maya and "two past tenses" of Spanish: canté (I sang: past, perfective), "cantaba" (I sang: past, non-perfective).

[@KenoticMuse]

Confusing video. The examples clearly seems to have tenses in them.

[@EmmaForman28]

IVeverm0re Because English, as a language with tenses, must use tenses to be understood. The translated examples contain the tenses necessary to provide a translation, as it wouldn’t be correct in English without those tenses.

[@zeitxgeist]

Think of it this way: Most Eastern math students will say 3 is halfway between 1 and 9. Most Western would use 4.5 or 5. Either way, there's a correct mathematical answer just like there's a correct tense in the language. Just two different ways of thinking about it.

[@cecileheart]

@@zeitxgeist how is 3 halfway between 1 and 9?

[@quynhanhnguyennhu516]

@@cecileheart 3^2 is 9, so 3 is halfway nine. This is ridiculously true.

[@AlexanderConnan]

I agree, he could have done more work to remove tense from the examples by relying on the aspect present in English and verbosely inserting clarification when necessary. But going straight back to English tense really doesn't help at all.

[@penand_paper6661]

Going in, I felt a little tense, but after reviewing all of the video's inherent aspects, I must admit that I'm in quite a good mood!

[@Mcgturtle3]

I understood nothing

[@DeyaIV]

I really appreciate your pronunciation in Mayan language, seemed authentic, even though isn’t as strong as it is in reality. Thanks for sharing this, my parents grew up speaking Mayan but they lost a little of it when they start going to school and everything outside their homes was in Spanish. Still they could hold long conversations in maya with their relatives. I know some words in Mayan, every time I hear the mayan language is like taking a trip to memory land.

[@camrendavis6650]

I don't get it

[@lostbutfreesoul]

This language is fascinating, thank you for doing this channel. Personally; It feels as if I am being handed a whole slice of time instead of being forced to view time from a single perspective. Thus, I can slide that slice back and forth at my pleasure in order to better understand my place within the sequence of events. It does require a lot more detail to work, but I happen to feel our modern English fails to convey meaning as well as it could. "I can't see video. You animate video. I see video. I thank you!"

[@jamespigeon1399]

4th also love you’re content. I know English and I am learning vietnamise.

[@pentelegomenon1175]

I actually wondered this exact thing before, why is present/ past/ future necessary? If you know whether or not an action is started (imperfect) and whether or not it's completed (perfect), you can easily figure out the time period that the action is occurring in.

[@ANTSEMUT1]

Because languages that require tenses to communicate the passage time of an action, sound really robotic without tenses.

[@omermihovic9426]

I am a simple man. I see NativLang, I click

[@RosebeeVids]

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.