Earthling languages lack proper tenses.

RichardGarfinkle

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How can a species consider itself civilized if its languages have no time travel tenses.

No Earth language can even handle causality from the future to the past, let alone a simple multi-past-single-present-multi-future sentence.

How can --evolutionary chain-- present day humans --doom-surivival-success-editing-SYW hope to be counted among sentients with such languages?
 

kuwisdelu

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What kind of silly race and language is constrained by time travel?

Tenses themselves are archaic.

Any civilized language realizes past, present, and future are but part of a continuous stream, its artificial boundaries set by the experiences of time-inferior races.

The idea of "present" is itself a myopic view of the universe.

A proper language has a single tense, unconstrained by time, and relies on context to establish "when", just as less civilized languages rely on context to establish "where".
 

evilrooster

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Do not tarnish all Earthlings simply because today's puny mammals are unable to express themselves clearly about the important technology of time travel.

I, Dr Dinosaur, have myself traveled in time on many occasions, and am fully capable of discussing time travel in all of its subtleties. My language has many tenses and specialized terms for these things.

But perhaps it is better that Earthling mammals cannot speak of the subtle intricacies of time travel, for otherwise they might be able to understand the secrets of the art. Then there would be messy Earth mammals all over time and space. They would change history in silly mammal ways.
 

Xelebes

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The metasyntactic configurations of your proposed tense structure undermines the location-specific notion of time, a mite big hole in your argument there. How are we supposed to provide application for such structure when you lack the very basics of astrography. It is quite evident that after you remove all intelligent life on Earth and replace it with a more intelligent life, the same will be done to your colonisation efforts. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
 

Kaidonni

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You there, with an image of the Doctor as his avatar at this point in time (the OP), I shall remind you of your own words:

"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff."

How can a species with time travel tenses be superior when time is non-linear anyway? It wouldn't make sense. They are no more superior than us current er - Dalekarthlings - are inferior. We are all one with time and also separate from it. We are[n't] all in the same [extermination] boat.

Exterminate.
 
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Drooling Blunder

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is upsetting to see the respecting of you fellow naked mole rat not being in thread of listening. Naked mole rats be traveling all over in tunnels and it be taking time. Nekkid mole rat traveling time in tunnels is tense. You peoples never be of the hearing of the snakes?