Another Short History of Linguistics (53)

Now let’s talking about tense. When we talking about words of animals, we have said that comparing English word and Chinese word we found that the English word normally are not separable, while the Chinese word are. For instance ‘sow’ in Chinese is ‘female pig’. In this way, we can also regard the designer of English put two meanings in one form of word, while the designer of Chinese only put each meaning in one form. It is the same thing when we examine the tense, the only difference is that in the word of ‘sow’ they put two meanings as ‘pig’ and ‘female’ in one form. But in the case of tense, they put one verb and one time in one form of word. With this arrangement many trouble occurred. I know many teachers, lecturers and professors they could not decide using past present or future tenses. Why this happened, for in many case the listener or receiver didn’t want to know what time it happened. They just want to know what action have been done. If you want insert a time then you have to find out a reason for it. And any reason you find, it will violate the simplification process, so the grammar is a method of anti-science.  

Yet why some linguists insisted to make grammar complex? Like the irregular noun, in the ancient time, people say ‘took’ would be easier than ‘taked’ or ‘have take’ in their simple life, they find a new word in order to reduce an action of mouth. When speak slowly, you will find that comparing with ‘taked’ the word ‘took’ will save one action of mouth. This is the original motivation of inventing such a word. But when the grammarian involved this process, they invented a signal ‘ed’ for every verb and they announced that every verb has at least three tenses. And a language without such symbols would not be a logic language. Yet the funny thing is that only in ancient time people separate time into past, present and future, but today, people treating time more carefully. They want exactly the time of one second, or even one percent of one second. If the grammarian wanted to invent new tenses, they have to give every such verb a new form, such as a verb +ea=past 1 second, +eb=past 2 second, +ec=past 3 second, +ed=past 4 second and so on.

Grammar was regarded as the logic of language. Yet the rule of grammar was invented by ancient people, they didn’t know what is microscope, telescope and iPhone, how can they know that such rules could be suitable to any development of human’s expression and another question is that why that in the world, we could not find two different languages with the same grammar. Is that means to say, each language has a different logic?