“Past” looks like one place only until a language asks how far into it you have travelled.
He died.
I saw him.
I went there.
I was born.
For an English speaker, all four sentences have something obvious in common.
They are about the past.
Of course, the events may belong to radically different periods.
I saw him could mean five minutes ago.
I went there could refer to yesterday.
He died might describe something that happened six months ago.
I was born reaches decades into the speaker’s past.
English can express all of those differences perfectly well.
We add:
this morning
yesterday
three weeks ago
last year
a long time ago
But the basic grammatical intuition remains comfortable:
past is past.
Now consider Yagua, a language spoken in Peru.
Its grammar asks a question that English usually leaves outside the tense itself:
How far into the past?
And suddenly something we thought belonged to the calendar can become part of grammar.
1. English past tense covers an enormous territory
Consider:
I saw him ten seconds ago.
I saw him yesterday.
I saw him three weeks ago.
I saw him last year.
I saw him twenty years ago.
The temporal expressions change.
The basic English past-tense form does not.
saw
can travel across all of them.
From the perspective of tense morphology, English places extraordinarily different temporal distances inside the same broad grammatical territory.
That feels natural because it is what English teaches its speakers to do.
But there is nothing inevitable about it.
A language can grammaticalize temporal distance more finely.
Yagua does exactly that.
2. Yagua does not have just one undifferentiated past
Descriptions of Yagua distinguish five degrees of past remoteness.
Approximately, they cover:
Proximate 1 — a few hours before the moment of speaking.
Proximate 2 — approximately the previous day.
Past 1 — roughly from about a week to about a month ago.
Past 2 — roughly from one or two months ago up to around one or two years ago.
Past 3 — distant or legendary past.
These boundaries should not be imagined as five perfectly measured compartments on a stopwatch.
Human grammatical categories rarely behave like engineering instruments.
But the architecture itself is unmistakable.
Where English can simply mark:
PAST
Yagua can require a substantially finer choice concerning temporal remoteness.
3. “I went” is no longer enough
One documented Yagua form is used for an event a few hours before the time of speaking.
Another is used for something that happened the previous day.
Other suffixes locate an event progressively farther into the past.
So the grammatical problem is not merely:
Did this happen before now?
It can become:
How remote from now is the event I am talking about?
That is a fundamentally different organization of the tense system.
English usually distributes the information between two components:
verb tense + temporal expression
Yagua can put part of the temporal-distance distinction into the grammatical marking itself.
4. Yesterday is not always “extra information”
This is where our own grammatical habits can mislead us.
An English speaker may think:
Past tense tells us that the event is past. “Yesterday” merely gives additional information.
That description works reasonably well for English.
It is not a universal architecture of time.
Across languages, temporal remoteness itself can become grammatical.
A distinction roughly corresponding to today versus before today, for example, occurs in a number of languages.
Linguists often use the term hodiernal for a tense associated with the current day.
Other systems divide the remoter past still further.
Yagua takes this principle remarkably far.
The question is therefore not:
How does Yagua add more precise time words?
The deeper question is:
Why should temporal distance belong to vocabulary in one language but grammar in another?
5. Grammar decides what information must repeatedly be managed
Imagine two hypothetical languages.
Language A says:
PAST + yesterday
Language B says:
YESTERDAY-PAST
Both can refer to the same event.
Both speakers can know exactly when the event happened.
But the information is packaged differently.
In Language A, the grammatical system makes a broad past distinction and allows lexical material to refine it.
In Language B, the grammar itself participates in locating the event at a particular temporal distance.
The difference is not what reality contains.
Yesterday exists for everyone.
The difference is:
where the language stores the distinction.
6. This is why “five past tenses” can be misleading
The phrase is useful as a first approximation.
But it can also produce the wrong mental picture.
A learner may imagine English Past Simple multiplied five times:
Past Simple 1
Past Simple 2
Past Simple 3
and so on.
That is exactly the kind of explanation that hides the interesting mechanism.
The point is not that Yagua has five classroom boxes where English has one.
The point is that its tense system grammaticalizes degrees of temporal remoteness.
That is the model worth understanding.
Once the model is clear, the individual forms stop looking like an arbitrary list.
7. A few hours ago and yesterday are grammatically different territories
For an English speaker:
I went this morning.
and
I went yesterday.
contain the same past-tense verb.
The distinction resides in:
this morning
versus
yesterday.
In Yagua, the difference can affect the tense suffix itself.
That means temporal distance is not merely something the speaker may optionally mention when useful.
It participates in the grammatical choice.
This is an important general principle.
Languages differ not only in what they can express.
They differ in what kinds of distinctions their grammar routinely asks speakers to encode.
8. But Yagua speakers do not possess five different pasts
Here we need to stop before an attractive idea turns into bad linguistics.
It would be easy to write:
English speakers perceive one past. Yagua speakers perceive five.
We do not have evidence for that claim.
English speakers can obviously distinguish:
five minutes ago
from:
yesterday
from:
last year
from:
twenty years ago.
Nothing about English grammar prevents those conceptual distinctions.
Likewise, the existence of grammatical remoteness distinctions in Yagua does not prove that its speakers experience physical time through five fundamentally separate psychological compartments.
Again:
grammatical category ≠ limit of thought.
What Yagua demonstrates is more precise and more interesting:
a distinction that English usually handles lexically can be built into the grammatical tense system of another language.
That is enough.
9. The calendar did not create the grammar
There is another tempting simplification.
One might assume that the five distinctions correspond to exact objective calendar units.
But grammatical categories do not have to function as timestamps.
Even when descriptions give ranges such as:
a few hours
one day
a week to a month
months to years
distant past
we should understand these as grammaticalized zones of remoteness rather than mechanical chronological measurements.
The category belongs to language.
The clock belongs to another system.
They interact, but they are not identical.
10. “A long time ago” is doing different work in English
Suppose I say:
He died a long time ago.
English has done two things.
The verb died locates the event before the present.
The phrase a long time ago tells you that the temporal distance is large.
Now imagine a grammatical system in which remoteness already affects the verb form.
The translation can preserve the chronology:
He died a long time ago.
But English has redistributed the information.
What was partly grammatical in the source language may become partly lexical in translation.
Once again, translation can preserve the event while changing its architecture.
11. We have seen this pattern before
In Plains Cree, English can preserve who sees whom while making the direct–inverse organization of participants disappear.
In Yélî Dnye, translation can identify the same physical body region while imposing English lexical boundaries on it.
In Maniq, English can communicate an odor while replacing an abstract olfactory category with a description based on its source.
Yagua adds a fourth possibility:
translation can preserve when an event happened while relocating temporal distance from grammar into vocabulary.
The information survives.
The linguistic mechanism does not necessarily survive with it.
12. This is why translation equivalence is never the whole story
Consider an imaginary dictionary entry:
Yagua form → English past tense
It may be practically useful.
But it hides the crucial question:
Which past?
Not which English tense name.
Which temporal relationship is being grammaticalized?
A translation can tell us what happened.
A grammatical analysis tells us what choices the source language required before the speaker could say it.
Those are different levels of understanding.
13. “Past, present and future” are not nature’s three drawers
Many students first encounter tense through a familiar diagram:
PAST — PRESENT — FUTURE
It looks almost cosmological.
Time itself seems to come pre-divided into three grammatical compartments.
But languages do not owe us that architecture.
Some languages grammaticalize future differently from English.
Some make aspectual distinctions more central.
Some distinguish evidential relationships.
Some have little or no obligatory tense marking of the kind familiar from European languages.
And some divide past time according to remoteness.
The timeline is useful.
The mistake begins when the teaching model is mistaken for the universal structure of human grammar.
14. English itself should have warned us
Even English shows that grammatical tense is not simply a transparent copy of chronological time.
Consider:
I leave tomorrow.
The form conventionally called present can refer to the future.
Or:
If I knew the answer, I would tell you.
The form associated with past morphology participates in a construction that does not simply describe past chronological time.
Or:
I wanted to ask you something.
In an appropriate context, wanted can soften a present request rather than report an abandoned desire located entirely in the past.
English grammar itself already tells us:
grammatical form and physical time do not map onto each other mechanically.
Yagua merely makes another dimension of that relationship impossible to ignore.
15. Temporal distance can become grammar
This is the central mechanism.
Human beings experience events at different distances from the present.
That fact is universal.
Languages can distribute information about those distances differently.
One language may rely heavily on adverbs:
just now
yesterday
last month
years ago
Another may grammaticalize part of that contrast.
The distinction has moved.
Not from reality into imagination.
From one part of linguistic architecture into another.
That is what grammaticalization repeatedly teaches us:
information does not have one predetermined address inside language.
16. Why should grammar care about remoteness?
We should be careful with the word why.
Historical languages are not engineered systems.
Nobody assembled Yagua grammar around a table and decided that five degrees of past remoteness would be useful.
Grammatical systems develop historically.
Categories can emerge, shift, expand and erode.
So we should not invent a functional story merely because the finished system looks meaningful.
But synchronically we can still ask what the system accomplishes.
It requires speakers to situate past events within a set of conventional remoteness distinctions.
That is a real grammatical property even if the complete historical path that produced it is more complicated.
17. Does more grammatical precision mean more precise thought?
No.
At least, we cannot infer that.
English does not grammaticalize the sex of the speaker in the verb went.
That does not mean English speakers cannot know whether a man or woman went somewhere.
English does not grammatically distinguish five degrees of past remoteness.
That does not mean English speakers cannot remember whether something happened yesterday or ten years ago.
A grammatical system tells us which distinctions are structurally encoded.
It does not provide a complete inventory of the distinctions available to human cognition.
This distinction has now appeared repeatedly across our investigations because it is one of the most important safeguards in comparative linguistics.
18. But obligatory distinctions still matter
Rejecting determinism does not make grammar irrelevant.
If your language repeatedly requires a choice, you repeatedly have to make that choice while constructing an utterance.
That is linguistically significant.
Suppose every time you described a past event you had to select among several remoteness categories.
The temporal relationship would become part of routine grammatical formulation in a way that it is not in the same form for an English speaker.
We do not need to claim:
therefore you experience time differently.
The observable claim is already strong:
you have to encode temporal remoteness differently when you speak.
That is the phenomenon.
19. Grammar is partly a system of compulsory decisions
This may be a better way to teach grammar.
Instead of presenting grammar only as:
rules for forming correct sentences,
we can ask:
What decisions does this language force or encourage the speaker to make?
English articles ask us to manage distinctions involving definiteness and reference.
Other languages may not package those distinctions through an English-like article system.
Some languages grammatically encode information source.
Some distinguish inclusive and exclusive forms of we.
Some distinguish singular, dual and plural.
Yagua asks the speaker to manage temporal remoteness with considerably greater grammatical differentiation than English does.
Seen this way, grammar stops being a catalogue of endings.
It becomes a map of obligatory or conventional choices.
20. Imagine learning Yagua through a tense table
A traditional lesson might begin:
Suffix A = Proximate Past 1
Suffix B = Proximate Past 2
Suffix C = Past 1
Suffix D = Past 2
Suffix E = Past 3
Memorize.
Test.
Forget.
But the student still does not understand what the system is doing.
A better starting point is a line:
NOW ← hours ← yesterday ← weeks ← months/years ← distant past
Then ask:
Where is the event relative to the moment of speaking?
Only after the conceptual map is understood do the forms become worth learning.
The morphology is the encoding.
The temporal model is the mechanism.
This is exactly what Thinking Instead of Memorizing means in practice.
21. The same event can require a different grammatical decision tomorrow
There is a particularly interesting consequence of remoteness systems.
Imagine that an event happens today.
You talk about it several hours later.
Then you describe the same event tomorrow.
Later you describe it weeks afterward.
The event itself has not changed.
Its location in history has not changed.
But its distance from the moving speech moment has changed.
Therefore the grammatical relationship between speaker-now and event can change.
This reveals something fundamental about tense.
Tense is not simply a label permanently attached to an event.
It is a relationship between temporal points.
Move the point of speech, and the grammatical description may move with it.
22. Yesterday is not a property of the event
Suppose an event occurred on 1 January.
On 2 January it happened yesterday.
On 10 January it happened nine days ago.
A year later it happened last year.
Decades later it belongs to the distant personal past.
Nothing happened to the original event.
What changed was the observer’s temporal position.
This makes Yagua particularly valuable for understanding tense because its remoteness distinctions expose something that simpler classroom diagrams can conceal:
time reference is relational.
The speaker stands somewhere.
The event stands somewhere else.
Grammar can encode the distance between them.
23. A timeline is not enough unless someone stands on it
School diagrams often draw:
PAST — NOW — FUTURE
But the most important element is NOW.
Not as a metaphysical present.
As a reference point.
Change that point and relationships change.
This is similar to spatial language.
here
and
there
cannot be interpreted without knowing the relevant point of reference.
Temporal expressions such as:
now
yesterday
ago
and grammatical tense also depend on temporal perspective.
Yagua simply makes temporal distance unusually visible in the morphology.
24. Five pasts or one past seen from five distances?
Now we can return to our original formulation.
Does Yagua really have “five pasts”?
As a shorthand description of the tense inventory, the phrase is useful.
Conceptually, however, another formulation may be better:
one temporal domain can be grammatically divided according to different degrees of remoteness from the speech moment.
That description tells us what the system is doing.
And once we understand that, the apparent exoticism disappears.
The system is unusual from an English perspective.
It is not irrational.
It is simply solving the temporal-reference problem with a different grammatical architecture.
25. Language does not merely name time
Clocks measure.
Calendars organize.
Memory reconstructs.
Narratives order.
Grammar relates.
Those functions overlap, but they are not identical.
Yagua reminds us that tense can encode more than the binary question:
before now or not?
Grammar can make the distance from now structurally relevant.
And once we discover that possibility, the familiar English category called “the past tense” stops looking like time itself.
It becomes what it always was:
one language’s solution to the problem of talking about time.
Conclusion: the past has no universal grammatical size
A few hours ago.
Yesterday.
Three weeks ago.
Last year.
Long ago.
English can express every one of these distinctions.
But it usually does so by combining a broadly applicable past-tense form with additional temporal expressions.
Yagua demonstrates another possibility.
Temporal remoteness itself can enter the tense system.
The important lesson is not that Yagua speakers possess five psychological pasts.
Nor is it that English speakers experience time less precisely.
The lesson is architectural.
Human languages can decide that different kinds of information belong in different places.
What one language leaves to an adverb, another can build into morphology.
What one language treats as optional specification, another can make part of a routine grammatical choice.
And once that happens, the apparently obvious category PAST stops being obvious.
It becomes a question:
How far past?
Time does not come divided into tenses. Languages decide which distances are worth turning into grammar.
Tymur Levitin
Founder & Director, Levitin Language School
Certified Translator and Language Teacher
© Tymur Levitin / Levitin Language School. All rights reserved.
