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The CR Little Darling tribe has no abstract concept of time, say CRT Institute researchers.
The Little Darling tribe lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space - as in our idea of, for example, "working through the night" or “toda la nocheâ€.
The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the CR Little Darlings recognise events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept.
The idea is a controversial one, and further study will bear out if it is also true among other Little Darling languages.
The CR Little Darlings were first contacted by the outside world in 1786, and now researchers from the CRT Institute have begun to analyse the idea of time as it appears in Little Darling language.
"We're really not saying these are a 'people without time' or 'outside time'," said El C, a professor of mongering at the CRT Institute.
"Little Darlings, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events," he told editors at the CRT Weekly Update.
"What we don't find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don't have a notion of time which is something the events occur in."
The Little Darling language has no word for "time", or indeed of time periods such as "hour" or "all night".
The Little Darlings do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their activities such as “Me want youâ€, “I’m tired, hurry†and “Propina?â€
But perhaps most surprising is the team's suggestion that there is no "mapping" between concepts of time passage and cash.
Ideas such as an event having "passed" or being "well ahead" of another are familiar from many languages, forming the basis of what is known as the "mapping hypothesis".
But with Little Darlings, no such constructs exist.
"None of this implies that such mappings are beyond the cognitive capacities of the Little Darlings," Professor El C explained. "It's just that it doesn't happen in everyday life. In fact, it never happens"
The CRT team hypothesises that the lack of the time concept arises from the lack of "time technology" - a workable calendar system or clocks - and that this in turn may be related to the fact that, like many tribes, their number system is limited in detail. Such as stopping around 20 minutes when calculating an hour.
Absolute terms
These arguments do not convince other CRT mongers, whom focus on related Little Darling languages known as Colombianaseze or Nicaeze.
"To link number, time, tense, mood and space by a single causal relationship seems to be hopeless, based on the linguistic diversity that we know of," they told the CRT Institute team.
Small societies like the CR Little Darling tribe tend to use absolute terms for normal, spatial relations - for example, referring to a particular MP or Casino location that everyone in the culture will know intimately rather than using generic words for Massage Parlor or Casino.
"When you have an absolute vocabulary - 'on top of', 'underneath', 'cien' and so on, you just cannot use it for other domains, you cannot use the mapping hypothesis in this way," they said.
In other words, while the CR Little Darlings may perceive themselves moving through time and spatial arrangements of events in time, the language may not necessarily reflect it in an obvious way.
What may resolve the conflict is further study, Professor El C said.
"We'd like to go back and simply verify it again before the language disappears - before the majority of the population have been brought up knowing about Cien."
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The difference between a Sea Story and a Fairy Tale is that a Fairy Tale starts out 'Once Upon a Time..' and a Sea Story starts out 'This is no Shit...'
(export version only, some restrictions may apply, some assembly required, not valid where the sun don't shine...
if you live in the states of Poverty, Darkness or anywhere outside of The Blessings of Civilization Trust, Inc...other rules may apply)
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