A LANGUAGE WITH NO WORDS FOR TIME. Bob Jordan called my attention to this article from BBC News which reports on research that concludes that the Amondowa tribe in the Amazon has no words for the abstract concepts of time. What this means is that “The Amondawa language has no word for ‘time’, or indeed of time periods such as ‘month’ or ‘year’.” The tribe does not have a calendar. “The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives….” The conclusion that the language has no concept of time is still disputed by some researchers on the basis that the tribe may be able to use the language to express some ideas of time in ways that are not directly obvious. They can talk about sequences of events, for example. But what is missing when you don’t have words for time. What else is there in addition to sequences of events? Bob asked: “I wonder how they would write a short story???
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I may have said this before. Martin Buber’s book “I and Thou” has an account of a tribe that has no word for “far way”–but only this poetic description, “that place where we cry out in the dark ‘O, Mother, I am lost.'”