when we engage our cognitive skills in the English language, we
have already bought over the English's worldview.
The grammar, syntax, vocabulary of a certain language will have
a profound influence on the speaker and will shape his outlook and
worldview. That is true.
The ordinary African is very remote from either future
preference or infinitely expandable material demands. He generally
has preference for the present, and his demands are often
nonmaterial and even non-economic, such as his desire for leisure
or for social approval. The African has a fair recognition of the
immediate past, a dominant concern for the present, and little
concern for the future.
Accordingly, his conception
of time is totally different from that of the average Western
man. The latter sees the present only as a
moving point of no dimension that separates the past from the
future. The African sees time as a wide gamut of the present with a
moderate dimensioned past and almost no future.
This outlook is reflected in the structure of the Bantu
languages, which do not emphasize the tense distinctions of past,
present, and future, as we do, but instead emphasize categories of
condition, including a basic distinction in the verb between
completed and incompleted actions that places the present and the
future (both concerned with unfinished actions) in the same
category.
We do this occasionally in
English when we use the present tense in a future sense by saying,
"He is coming tomorrow," but this rare use of the present to
indicate the future does not blur our conception of the future the
way constant use of such a construction does in
Bantu.
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/19.html#73
In fact the average asian in the 19th century, did not share the
same "outlook" or understanding on time, space, world as a
western man. This however has changed through the course of 20th
century.
For example General Yamashita's tells us:
Second, I would like you to promote education in science. No one
can deny that the level of Japan's modern science, apart from
certain minor areas, is well below world standards. If you travel outside Japan,
the first thing you notice is the unscientific way of life of the
Japanese. To search for truth with
Japan's irrational and
cliquish mentality is like searching for fish among the
trees...
http://japanfocus.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/1753
