>I for one, don't even believe that Pure Mostali speech even contains
>verbs, since verbs suggest change and action.
No, they don't. "I am" is a statement that doesn't imply any change or action. Furthermore the basic dwarvern cosmology as stated in Glorantha: Intro pp62-65 does imply an understanding of progress and change.
That said, Dwarves do have alien modes of thought and the closest human parallel is probably the idiot savant - amazing acts of computation without real understanding. The Dwarvern notion of time (calculated by caste-specific work periods yet they have no problem understanding another's scheduling) is an example of this.
>Sure, there's that picture from Genertela:Crucible,etc, that shows a dwarf
>checking his aeopile or some such thing that's supposed to tell time. But
>look at how he's dressed, and tell me he's not a heretic individualist.
(actually Gods of Glorantha) He's from Dalamdring in Jrustela since the Dwarves of that city trade Iron for toucan feathers. I dunno why, but being touched in the head is very plausible. I doubt he's a heretic as he's stated to be a Diamond Dwarf.
>Maybe this is a faulty memory on my part, but don't some real world
>eastern languages lack tense? Don't all things simply "be", with
>past, present or future figured out from context????
Whorf once alleged that Hopi speakers lacked a sense of time. But then he didn't know Hopi very well for the following is a perfectly ordinary Hopi sentence:
"Then indeed, the following day, quite early in
the morning at the hour when people pray to the
Sun, around that time then he woke up the girl
again"
Stolen from S. Pinker's "The Language Instinct".
FWIW the lack of tenses means diddly-squat to conventional thought as one well-known language has an almost complete lack of future tenses for its verbs (the _single_ exception is the verb "to exist"). Apparently the future tenses dropped out of existence sometime around the 1500s and the speakers have to indicate future events by clumsy tense participles. The unfortunate speakers are not aware of their loss and delude themselves into thinking their language has a future tense because traditionally they have been taught that all civilized languages have three tenses: past, present and future.
The name of this language? English.
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