Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Maya Before, Maya After: How a Tenseless Language Talks Past and Future" video.

  1. If it helps any, English arguably doesn't have a Future tense, as such. We use mood and aspect to distinguish​ future events from present ones (ok, it's more complicated and messy than that, but it should be a helpful starting point for getting your head around things, maybe.)
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  2. Rough summary (if I haven't misunderstood): Maya's tense/aspect/mood system doesn't actually have a Tense element, instead offloading that work onto aspect and mood, in such a way as to let them also skip a bunch of temporal adverbs and adjectives. English does a lesser version of this when dealing with the difference between present and future. It marks the Past tense as a tense, then lumps present and future together as a null-marked "not that", so far as tense goes. Moods and aspects are then combined in such a way as to render the incorrect option between present and future nonsensical (or the distinction irrelevant), rather than actually having two separate tenses. (And yes, some of the mood markers commonly get described as marking "future tense" instead, but that's almost entirely because no one bothers actually explaining aspect or mood to the native English speaker untill said individual tries to learn a language that uses them differently. (Or studies linguistics, even at the level of a hobby, and goes "Oh, so That's how that works!")) Maya seems, going by the video, to do something similar, but instead of just the present/future distinction, uses it to indicate all temporal distinctions and relationships (past, present, future, before, after, during, and so on.)
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