Re:Switzerland's mysterious fourth language
by foldr on Thursday June 28, 2018 @12:37PM
(#17418391)
If you really mean tense, then there are plenty of languages without tense at all. E.g. Chinese. They seem to be doing ok.
It is not necessary to have a grammatical future tense to talk or think about the future. In fact, English does not have a future tense in the technical grammatical sense of 'tense'.
More generally, there's no evidence for the existence of human languages with the sort of lack of expressive power that you're talking about. All languages appear to be more-or-less equivalent in their expressive power, although of course that does not imply that exact translation is possible in all instances.
It is not necessary to have a grammatical future tense to talk or think about the future. In fact, English does not have a future tense in the technical grammatical sense of 'tense'.
More generally, there's no evidence for the existence of human languages with the sort of lack of expressive power that you're talking about. All languages appear to be more-or-less equivalent in their expressive power, although of course that does not imply that exact translation is possible in all instances.