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The precise distinction and designation of time relations present language with a far more difficult and complex problem than the development of spatial conceptions and terms. "Here" and "There" can be subsumed much more simply and immidiately in an intuitive unity than is the case with the temporal factors "now", "earlier" and "later". What characterize these factors as temporal is precisely that they never, like things of objective intuition, given to the consciousness simultaneously. The units, the parts, which in spatial intuition seem to combine of themselves into a whole, here exclude one another: the existence of one signifies the nonexistence of the others. The whole fact of the representation of time is never contained in immidiate intuition.
In Ewe, one and the same adverb serves to designate both "yesteday" and "tomorrow". In the Shambala language, the same word refers both to the earliest time and the distant future. These people regard time as a thing, so that for them there is only a today and a not-today; whether the latter was yesteday or will be tomorrow is all the same to them; they do not reflect about it, since this would require not only intuition, but thought and a conceptual idea of the nature of time. One indication of this intuition of time as a thing is that time relations are expressed by nouns.
This view of the relatively complex and mediate character of the pure concept of time seems at first contrudicts with information about grammar of primitive languages. Their grammar contains an almost inconceivable wealth of "tense forms". In the Sotho language, Endemann lists 38 affirmative tense forms, 22 potential forms, 40 conditional, 4 optative or final forms, a great number of participial forms etc.; Roehl distinguishes 1000 forms in the Shambala language. But in reality, in Shambala, for example, the temporal distinction between past and future is in no way developed, and as for the so-called "tenses" in the Bantu languages the grammars expressly state that they cannot be regarded as tenses in the strict sense since the only temporal distinction which they take into account is that of earlier or later. What all these verb forms express is not pure temporal characteristics of action, but certain qualitative and modal differences in that action.
You see, the world of these people is very different from ours, despite we all live at the same Planet.
Boris.