i once read about an [N.A.] indian culture whose language included absolutely no provisions for the concept
of past, present or future...I've been passively searching for a language that is without tense. I've found several references that show that Chinese / Mandarin does not have tense in the way we think about it. Anyone here know about how Chinese handles tense?
I've also found references that the Hmong language has no past or future tenses and that ancient Hebrew has no tense. There seems to be a lot of research floating about where linguists search for tense markers in tenseless texts (whereas readers of my writing are looking for sense markers in my senseless texts).
And if you want to learn more about detensing languages (tensed language, this site notes, is responsible for this mistaken metaphysical picture of temporal reality; therefore we ought to divest language of tenses so that we may conceive of temporal reality as it really is), check this site out:
http://www.otago.ac.nz/philosophy/459/oldBtheory.html
