When Poul Anderson's Manse Everard approaches another time traveller in a past era, he can identify himself and indicate his purpose by saying just: "Time Patrol." In fact, I would guess that "Time Patrol" is a single word or even just a single syllable in Temporal. When Everard transmits:
"'Unattached Everard. Come immediately. Combat.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B. C., p. 113 -
- that is five words in English but how many in Temporal? "I sing of arms and a man" is seven words in English but three in Latin: Arma virumque cano.
When SM Stirling's Luz O'Malley needs a night-shift doctor to treat a wounded man urgently without informing the police, she gets results with just two words:
"'Black Chamber.'"
-Daggers In Darkness, CHAPTER SEVEN, p. 133.
Well, Luz goes on to say considerably more than that but it is those first two words that do the trick.
In a Trade Union Centre in Liverpool, I was astounded to see a man wearing a black shirt with a swastika arm band standing to attention outside the door of a meeting room, especially since there was a memorial to the International Brigade elsewhere in that same building. Then someone spoke two words that made everything OK:
"Drama group."
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Maybe this addendum belongs only in the combox but, in a DC Universe TV series, when a character who had been battered to death is almost immediately alive and active again, a two-word explanation suffices:
"Lazarus Pit!"
Of arms and the man I sing" is longer in English because in Latin meaning is largely inflectional, whereas in English it's more positional and by use of pronouns, and qualifiers.
Arma virumque cano -- "arma", arms in the plural, "vir", man singular (specifically warrior), "-umque", concerning/about (applying to the two previous words), and "cano", first person present indicative, I sing.
Inflection is a worn-down stub in English; it used to be a lot more like Latin that way, because Latin is closer to the Indo-European original and IE was a highly inflected language.
In English, 'sing':
I sing
you sing
he sings
we sing
they sing
In Latin
canto
cantas
cantat
canimus
cantat
Proto-Indo-European
kanÅ etc.
So in English, we say "I will sing"; in Latin it would be simply "cantabo".
Right on.
"cantant" in 3rd person plural.
"-um" = the accusative inflexion of "vir."
"-que" = an affix meaning "and" as an alternative to "et" before the word, as in:
"Senatus Populusque Romanus" (SPQR) = the Roman Senate and People.
Right, cantant -- left out the n!
Proto-Germanic had a very stripped down verbal system -- only two tenses (past and present) for example. Present could be used to construe future action.
I was told that ancient Hebrew had no tenses! But they must have had some way to differentiate history from prophecy.
Paul: it's a little more difficult than that. Biblical Hebrew has a system where suffixes and prefixes determine the time-frame of a verb. The prefix would indicate an action that was ongoing, incomplete, extending into future time; the suffix would indicate an action that was over, complete. There's also a special word which links together the verbs in several sentences to indicate they're about a single narrative explanation. Sorta complex.
Fortunately, more modern forms of Hebrew have a standard past-present-future tense system.
I suspect that Biblical Hebrew was a liturgical version of the language -- very formal, used for holy things.
On reflection, maybe what I was told was just that there was no future tense. Any way, there would have to be some way of doing the job if not by inflecting the verb or by adding auxiliary verbs.
You don't need an inflectional system to indicate tenses.
Eg., In Latin, you say 'canto' and 'cantabo' for "I sing" and "I will sing".
In English, we don't inflect the verb for the future tense; we just put 'will' between 'I' and 'sing'.
The final 's' in 'he sings' is a worn-down stub of a previous inflectional system. Note that we don't say 'he will sings', we just say 'he will sing'.
Likewise 'I sang', 'I sing', and 'I will sing'. Eventually, we will probably say 'I have sing' instead.
Afrikaans, a closely related language, has gone further in this direction, and much further than its parent, Dutch.
For example, with "to be" English has:
I am
you are
he is
we are
they are
Dutch has:
Ik ben
Hij is
U/Jij bent
Wij zijn
Zij zijn
But in Afrikaans, it's:
ek is
u is
hy is
ons is
hulle is
Much less inflection than Dutch, somewhat less than English; it's as if English did "I is, you is, he is, we is, they is".
Afrikaans is a "contact creole", a new language based on Dutch which was radically simplified as a lot of illiterate non-Dutch speakers learned just enough to make themselves understood to Dutch speakers and to others who'd learned as they did.
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