Which came first: time or tenses?

In the beginning, there was nothing.

There were no stars, no planets, no humans nor animals, no seas nor birds, no turtles nor grasshoppers.

Nor was there light

nor was there dark

Nor was there a before nor an after.

There was only nothingness.

But in a slice, of a slice of a slice - something we will never understand, all of that nothingness amassed itself and it was so unbearable, for the very nano of a nanosecond, that an inconsequential particle of a particle awoke.  

There was no going back to sleep.   For where there had always been nothing there was now a single something.  A single point of awareness... a single thought created out of a sleep which then swum through the seas of a vast and infinite 

 nowhere,

it searched, blindly, through the terror of the nothingness for somethingness,

anything

which would allow it

to know that it actually existed.



But there was only disappointment awaiting it.

It was the single,

it was the only

it could not be.



How could it go

backwards,
back into the void?


How could it go forwards
into that which was not any longer only void?



Our Something was suddenly

desperate:

would it always be locked in this

infernal now

there must be something there

it thought


for the very first time

as it stretched its new muscles of intelligence.



There

must be a way to

validate existence...


But yet, it pondered, if there was no before,

if there was no after

and only this

infinite nowness

it could not

be

for to exist must

suggest that there was time

a time

She did not exist.

For something, surely can not be created

from nothing...

Oh! To ask someone else

she said glancing at her navel.



Our Something was dismayed

to exist it

is most surely

an undoable curse.



But then, suddenly that nano nano of a

nano particle

turned upon herself

as she had had the very brightest of bright ideas...



She

understood -

in order to find out, to know if she truly existed

she would need to become more than one. She would need her opposite.  The light to her darkness.

So in that moment, in a flashing, flaming friction
Our Something rubbed against all that she was

and all that she
was not.

And as ... she split, a multiplitude of universes were born... and from then on...  moment upon moment...
millenia upon millenia...

something in her
reflected back
on the nothingness
it conversed with the somethingness

and it was content for... all that struggle was good.  It showed her
what it most surely means
to be.



Okay, so there is a point... sort of...


Why do we teach grammar to adults in sequence, in steps?

I asked this a couple of weeks back in the ELTchat and a recent post on Berni's blog reminded me yet again of this age-old question...



Present Simple

then

Present continuous

then

Adverbs of frequency

then

Past simple regular verbs

and then

well, you know the drill...


Those fond of grammar do (and hey I revel in a little grammar too - just the sequence bugs me)

Why do we impose this bubble of now?

Why do we get a slightly panicky feeling when our adult English beginners try to express, dare to try to say something which might be happening to them, temporarily, at a far point in the future...

Who said the chicken has to come before the egg.  Or was it the egg before the chicken - I forget now.

Why do we think that if we teach grammar in step-by-step stages, they will get it?   If who they are is the sum of their pasts, the blend of all actions and experiences, the good, the bad, the ugly...  and if their opportunities rests upon their futures, how come we don't just teach them the words they need? 

Do we speak more in the present?  I suppose we probably do..or do we?  

Who made this system up?  

Who put this grammatical system we use today in place?  When? Why?  What was his intention, his agenda? Is grammar taught like this in all languages?   What do the linguists say about our brains and how we process time?  

Does this step-by-step structural system consolidate in our brains and has this been measured on those electrical thingiemajiggies.... do we have any empirical evidence that this system is supported by the way our brain processes meaning... and no, by the way I don't know the answers -I'm so really not being socratic this time - I just don't know, 

I simply just can't wrap my head around why we do this...

And then there's the whole imposition of time upon cultures...

Did you know that your perceptions of time are cultural?   As I mentioned in a comment a while back on Vicki's blog, there are those of us for whom 400 years ago was yesterday and there are those who see yesterday stretching back thousands and thousands of years and there are others of us for whom the past is an illusion in front of you and the future is behind you (South Seas or something)... and yet there are plenty of others who can only see tomorrow as being something they have influence over: to know they exist.

So...

Musings, ramblings...

thoughts, y'all?

Potentially interesting
Read a book review of The History of English Language Teaching by Alex Case