If you’ll forgive diving into the linguistics here, English is atypical in that we have a distinctive present perfect.
In French, the present perfect—type construction (passé composé) has subsumed the past simple, which is now reserved for literate or archaic uses, so you use that for any past experience. But you can use something close to our future perfect with a similar sense: (I will have finished my degree by March/ “J’aurai terminé mon diplôme d’ici mars”). In Chinese (and other Sino languages), there’s a present-perfect type construction, albeit used less consistently (e.g. have been to… quguo 去过）, but it’s very awkward to use future perfect-style constructions: “I just want to have read this”. I’m sure many obscure languages will have even less of a distinction.
So, if the theory in your title is correct, people from languages without a present perfect will have unruined lives, or at least lives ruined by different grammatical structures (we’re looking at you, subjonctif...)! This sounds like a testable theory to me!
There’s a bunch of theories around language influencing thought patterns, e.g. the idea that people who speak future-less languages save more etc. https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf , so you could test something similar for perfect tenses. I hear that some Italian and Spanish dialects differ in whether the present-perfect and past simple are distinct. So you might have a great natural experiment there.
My personal hobby horse here iscounterfactual conditionals,usually used to express regret (mainly: “If I had done x...” or “I should have done x …”, “I wish I’d done x …”). I used to have harmful, regretful thought patterns like this until I learned Chinese very immersively. I realised that, in Chinese-thinking mode, I had stopped using these conditionals in my train of thought, and noticed them returning when I reintegrated into an English-speaking context. It wasn’t a clean experiment by any means—it could have been partly due to thinking in a non-native language, which made (over-) thinking slower, and of course, I was living in China, with obviously massive lifestyle effects. But still, I did identify these conditional thought patterns as almost definitely negative, so I’m convinced there’s at least some effect.
I haven’t noticed “wanting to have done something” being less common in Chinese- or French-mode because of a more limited present perfect tense, but it would be interesting if bilinguals on LW have noticed something there.
If you’ll forgive diving into the linguistics here, English is atypical in that we have a distinctive present perfect.
In French, the present perfect—type construction (passé composé) has subsumed the past simple, which is now reserved for literate or archaic uses, so you use that for any past experience. But you can use something close to our future perfect with a similar sense: (I will have finished my degree by March/ “J’aurai terminé mon diplôme d’ici mars”). In Chinese (and other Sino languages), there’s a present-perfect type construction, albeit used less consistently (e.g. have been to… quguo 去过）, but it’s very awkward to use future perfect-style constructions: “I just want to have read this”. I’m sure many obscure languages will have even less of a distinction.
So, if the theory in your title is correct, people from languages without a present perfect will have unruined lives, or at least lives ruined by different grammatical structures (we’re looking at you, subjonctif...)! This sounds like a testable theory to me!
There’s a bunch of theories around language influencing thought patterns, e.g. the idea that people who speak future-less languages save more etc. https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf , so you could test something similar for perfect tenses. I hear that some Italian and Spanish dialects differ in whether the present-perfect and past simple are distinct. So you might have a great natural experiment there.
My personal hobby horse here is counterfactual conditionals, usually used to express regret (mainly: “If I had done x...” or “I should have done x …”, “I wish I’d done x …”). I used to have harmful, regretful thought patterns like this until I learned Chinese very immersively. I realised that, in Chinese-thinking mode, I had stopped using these conditionals in my train of thought, and noticed them returning when I reintegrated into an English-speaking context. It wasn’t a clean experiment by any means—it could have been partly due to thinking in a non-native language, which made (over-) thinking slower, and of course, I was living in China, with obviously massive lifestyle effects. But still, I did identify these conditional thought patterns as almost definitely negative, so I’m convinced there’s at least some effect.
I haven’t noticed “wanting to have done something” being less common in Chinese- or French-mode because of a more limited present perfect tense, but it would be interesting if bilinguals on LW have noticed something there.