A friend remarked,
... the Hmong language has NO past or future tenses, which I found to be a fascinating concept.
Yes, this changes how you think about how you think.
Lojban is a humanly speakable, constructed language. In it, tenses are optional. You can, if you wish, make more distinctions than in English. It takes three syllables to state what in English requires twelve:
ba pu zi
shortly earlier than some time later than now
Also, Lojban has optional spatial tenses. these do not exist in English. These tenses specify the direction taken in a journey (which may, of course, be imaginary), the distance gone, or the line, area, volume, or space/time interval. Also, Lojban has tenses such as `habitually' and `intermittently (as in `he habitually drinks coffee; he intermittently types at the computer').
Of course, you can say all these things in English -- it is a question of how you say them, and how easily.
The most interesting tenses are `event contours'. These specify characteristic portions of an event, such as being on the verge of it, being in the continuation of it, being in the aftermath of it, being in the pause of it.
Tenses can be combined, as in
le xirma ca za'o jivna bajra
The horse [present] [superfective] compete-type-of runs.
The horse keeps on running a race too long.
which means that the horse ran past the finish line (after the
race was over).
Oh yes, there is also an optional grammatical form that is closer to Chinese; and a way to speak grammatically somewhat like the Nootka (a Pacific Northwest language). Apparently, Nootka has the single word 'inikwihl'minik'isit' meaning the equivlanet of the entire English sentence "Several small fires were burning in the house." In Lojban, you can also say this with a single (long, pronounceable) word.
For an introduction to the language see;
Lojban Intro (about 14 kbytes)
and also:
A Quick Tour of Lojban Grammar, With Diagrams (46k)
There is a Lojban site in Finland that has good beginners material:
http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban
You can find material about Lojban at:
ftp://ftp.access.digex.net/pub/access/lojbab/
At this site you can read about tenses in
ftp://ftp.access.digex.net/pub/access/lojbab/draft-reference-grammar/tense.txt
The paper is called "Imaginary Journeys: The Lojban Space/Time Tense System" and is about 90 kilobytes.
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