days of future passed

In order to construct a meaningful sentence in English, you've got to place the event you're describing in a context of time:

I speak English.

I am speaking English.

I will speak English.

I spoke English.

I would have been speaking English.

Verb tenses. Love 'em or...make no sense.

In Thai, on the other hand, every single one of those sentences above translates to:

Puut angrit.*

You can speak Thai all day and all night without ever making a decision about WHEN. This means that when I speak with my students, either in English or in Thai, I have a problem with any question or statement that depends on a point in time.

To my students,

"Have you played this piece before?"

sounds exactly like

"Play this right now."

"How much did you practice today?"

sounds exactly like

"How much will you practice today?"

Even non-verb words like before and after are confusing to them. There must be a way to say these things in Thai, but I don't know it.

There is a word that, added to a verb, means a kind of immediate future:

Ja puut angrit.

is something like "I'm about to speak English. Any minute now."

And there's a word that means something like "already."

Puut angrit lair-o.

is something like "I spoke English already. Finished."

So there is that.

As always, this difference between English and Thai makes me muse. What does it say about us, about how we think? Americans definitely think more linearly than Thai people: First I did this, then I did that, now I'm doing the other, and finally I'll scale that mountain, I'll pull myself up by my bootstraps, I'll use my Yankee ingenuity to be a high achiever.

There just isn't that kind of urgency here. Deadlines are mere suggestions. Appointments, class start times, and bus schedules are vague at best. Linguistically, everything is happening in a kind of constant present tense. Kind of like Bangkok traffic. Now, as always, I'm making the logical leap required to shoot my mouth off about a culture I don't really understand, but I think this question of language is an important one. Did the languages evolve differently because the people thought differently, or do we think differently because we think in these different languages, or does one continually inform and shape the other?

I definitely need another cup of coffee before I take that one any farther.

*The problem of gendered first-person pronouns that I discussed in a previous post evaporates in ordinary conversation, when most pronouns are omitted.