How each language tells the past in its own way

PalmAugust is ending, it's time to meet people again on the street, at work, or on the sports team we play, and, without thinking about it, we throw out the classic question: "What have you done this summer?" The answer, which seems so trivial, is already a grammatical decision. It's not the same to say "I went to Vilaverd," which sounds as if there's still a thread of summer left to pull, than "I went to Xàtiva in July," which closes the episode and leaves it far away. And there's still the resource of the imperfect: "I used to go to the beach every day (but now I don't like it anymore because there are too many people)" tells us about a habit we had, rather than a specific event.

Catalan makes us choose between these three paths: the perfect ('he ido') for experiences that still resonate, the periphrastic or simple past ('fui or fui') for closed events, and the imperfect ('iba') for repeated or background scenes. In a way, this system plays with time like a painter with shadows. It's a subtle temporal sensitivity, but it explains why "I've been" to describe the summer sounds natural in early September but forced in November.

Verb aspect

Now let's move on to Czechia. Czech, like many other Slavic languages, doesn't distinguish between perfect and simple past: there's only one past tense, and what counts is the aspect of the verb. Thus, a Czech might say:Toto léto som byl v Brne"("this summer I was in Brno"), with the verb 'byte', which emphasizes the fact of having been there. If you want to emphasize the journey, you can say: "V júlio som jel do Brna"("in July I went to Brno"), with the verb 'jet', which presents the trip as a complete blog. And if it says "Letos som jazdil do Brna", the sentence suggests repetition: "This year I have often gone to Brno." In all three cases, the past tense is formed the same (with a participle ending in 'l' and an auxiliary verb, 'byť'), but the choice of verb makes us change the focus of the action, as if it were a movie: we can focus on the main plan, the journey, or the repetitions of the scenes.

Polish plays the same game. "W lato pojechałem do Gdańska" means "in the summer I went/have gone to Gdańsk" and closes the action, while "Tej wiosny jeździłem do Gdańska" expresses that "in spring I went repeatedly to Gdansk", out of habit. The difference, once again, is one of perspective, rather than time.

In Southeast Europe, Bulgarian still retains pieces that other languages have lost. Thus, it has what we call an oral fact, like a verbal fact, which is a verb tense. say ""Blanda liato som khodil do Varna" (transcription of the Cyrillic alphabet), which indicates that the person telling us about the summer has been there once. However, this language has an imperfect tense that is used to describe background actions, and a perfect tense that, apart from narrating, can indicate a result or experience.

In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, the aorist and imperfect tense are practically no longer used, and what there is is, as in Czech and Polish, an aspectual contrast. Thus, "Išao sam u Sarajevo" draws a long activity: he often went to Sarajevo. On the other hand, "Otišao sam u Sarajevo" closes the story: I went and that's it.

If we go up to the Andean Plateau, things get even more complicated. In Quechua, the key is evidence. A speaker can say "Qusquman risaqmi" ("I will go to Cusco, and I know it because I say so myself"), with the suffix '-my' which certifies direct experience. If it says '-Yeah', it's because he's heard it said; with '-tea, expresses doubt. When a Quechua speaker says what they did this summer, the sentence carries the stamp of the source.

The Guaraní of Paraguay organizes the past tense according to proximity.A-ha-kuri Incarnation" means "I went to Encarnación", in a complete but not immediate past, while "A-ha-raka'e Incarnation" places the memory in a very recent past ("I just went"). The language not only says that the action is complete, but it also indicates the distance in time.

And in Aymara, even the spatial metaphor of time is reversed. Here the past is seen in front and the future behind, as if time were a glimpse; what is to come remains behind, out of our field of vision. An Aymara story of summer, then, not only tells what happened: it physically places the past before our eyes. in July "we went to Xàtiva", we close it with "we went to the beach every day", the imperfect turns the action into a habit. We have to decide whether the verb is perfective or imperfective;

Most speakers don't think about it: we just chat. However, when we learn a new language, these differences can become visible, and they can make us realize that stories aren't always told the same way. Knowing this should make us more empathetic with those who are just beginning to learn our language and make mistakes with verb tenses. After all, each language draws perceived time with its stroke.

When we return to the initial question ("What did you do this summer?"), we discover that, in addition to recounting our vacations, when we answer, we show how we think about the past, how we feel about it, and how we share it. And maybe, just maybe, this awareness makes us value more the richness of opening our mouths to tell a story.