Tag Archives: cool

“The Secret Powers of Time”: how to present effectively! And on the absense of future tense in Sicilian dialect…

Beside the content (which is interesting, he has a message), the way of presenting it is fabulous!!! I want to do something like that as well in the future!

An interesting tidbit of information. In the talk Professor Philip Zimbardo mention that in the Sicilian dialect (Sicily in the southern part of Italy) there is no verb tense for future! I checked quickly and what I got was a discussion in the Sicilian Wikipedia pointing to a web site that is now down. Being warned about the source, below you can find the translation in English, I modified some parts but over all Google Translate did a great job. Enjoy!
“THE FUTURE. In Sicilian dialect is missing the future tense of verbs and any statement about future action is constructed with present tense and the word becomes preceded by an adverb of time (eg: Duman vegnu, Tomorrow I come). Paul Messina explains: As you can understand (almost philosophically) this anomaly? Is the starting point for a link between language and culture, ways of being and thinking. This is the historical consciousness of Heideggerian being-here to produce a continuous reduction of the future to present, of ‘hic et nunc’ (‘here and now’) and this occurs having full possession of the past definitely conquered now. Sicilians are masters of time or, to put it in Tomasi di Lampedusa word, are Gods. But to be (or to be believed to be) masters of time can mean mentally dominate life and death, to be sure of its inviolability only in the present, one that appropriates the future time to prevent death, unavoidable shadow existence. What counts is the present. Being and becoming, in short, blend or merge themselves in the metaphysics anxiety”.