CHAPTER 3. TIME IS LIKE A RIVER

Everyday language has phrases as a flow or passage of time, a course or current of events: we people happen to have such impressions about life and time. Let us imagine a river of time.

For known theories, such a river might be turbulent on occasions and have some relativity or even loops, but it is not always as bad as in the picture here to invoke also ancient decorations.

We may imagine there are pods of time, to help get across the river: to write or speak, we obviously do not run or drive the real time, as European Western or Universal, or USA Pacific, Mountain, or Central.

We use the grammatical time in context.

Our pods of time can carry us through the river, even if the run is very fast.

The symbolic river and pods can help with imagined tasks, before we take real linguistic challenges in real time. We may later abandon the imagery.

Spring Flowing Colors

There are word patterns to show in the river, and the pods of time surface with them. If we use a pattern, a pod will give us a way.

There might be hardly any way to predict exactly what pattern there comes to appear, and we may need to learn to tell them apart, but they all have words we know from the fields of time, marked in green here.

The river shows the grammatical PRESENT, PAST, and FUTURE, with particles as ING and 3RD.
Let us compare the fields of time.

In our fields, we may choose to consider the PRESENT first, then the PAST and the FUTURE: we usually refer to own experience and knowledge, to think about the future.

In the fields and the river alike, the verbs to be and to have can help tell about the FUTURE, PRESENT, or PAST.

The river brings the particle ING with the verb to be. The particle 3RD comes with the verb to have. The feature “S“ occurs as in our PRESENT field of time, with objects of thought that use the pronouns he, she, or it.

■→CHAPTER 1 tells about the feature “S“, and ■→PRACTICE 2.1 tells about forms of verbs. Particle 3RD marks the third form of verbs. The ■→EXTRAS tell about the color code. Feel welcome to further journey.
■→3.1. THE GRAMMATICAL ASPECT

■→This text is also available in Polish.

Book format in preparation.

In the first part of the language journey, feel welcome to consider a picture for
■ the grammatical Past, Present, and Future;
■ the Simple, Progressive, and Perfect;
■ infinitive, auxiliary, and head verb forms;
■ the Affirmative, Interrogative, Negative, and Negative Interrogative;
■ irregular verbs and vowel patterns: high and low, back and front.
Third edition, 2022.

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The world may never have seen her original handwriting, if her skill was taken for supernatural. Feel welcome to Poems by Emily Dickinson prepared for print by Teresa Pelka: thematic stanzas, notes on the Greek and Latin inspiration, the correlative with Webster 1828, and the Aristotelian motif, Things perpetual — these are not in time, but in eternity.
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