Re: ГлубиннаяРеференцияОтнсительно"Я" - ЗапакованнаяСЦ ↑
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The development from the feeling to the concept of time reveals three differen stages, which are also of crucial importance. At first stage the consciousness is dominated by the opposition of "now" and "not-now", which has undergone no further differentiations; at the second, certain temporal "forms" - completed and incompleted, continued and momentary action - begin to be distinguished so that a definite distinction of temporal modes is developed; the final stage is characterized by the pure concept of time as an abstract concept of order.
In highly developed languages, the specification of time adheres essentially to those parts of speech which express a process or activity. Humboldt also thought that there is a necessary relationship between the specific nature of time conception and of the verb, but in Malay languages were developed a usage indicating that they connect time with the noun. This phenomenon is apparent where language designates time relations by the same means which it has developed for the designation of local relations. Somali uses the variations of vowels of the definite article not only to express differences of spacial position and situation, but also to present temporal differences. Pure nouns, which to our way of thinking embody not the slightest temporal reference, e.g., words such as "man" or "war", can be provided with a certain temporal index by changes of the vowel in their article. The vowel -a serves to designate the temporally present, the vowel -o designates the temporally absent, and no distinction is made between the future and the not yet distant past.
The development of child language shows that adverbs of time are formed appreciably later than those of place, and that terms such as "today", "yesteday", "tomorrow" have at first no sharply defined temporal sense. "Today" is the expression of the present in general, "tomorrow" and "yesteday" the future and the past in general. The same one can see in Ewe. Here one and the same adverb serves to designate both "yesteday" and "tomorrow" in general.
The Semitic languages start, not with the trichotomy of past, present and future, but with the simple dichotomy of completed and incompleted action. The "perfect", the tense of completed action can be used equally well to express the past and the present, for example it may designate an action which has begun in the past but extends into the present - on the other hand, the "imperfect", which designates an incompleted action in process, can be used for a future, as well as a present or past action. In this linguistic family the pure relative concept of time and the expressions of pure temporal distinctions have achieved their highest development.