Languages without tenses

Hi!

AFAIK Malaysian don't have no tenses.
So:
makan = eat, ate, eaten
minum = drink, drank, drunk
pergi = go, went, gone
etc.

Are there other languages without tenses?

Thanks

English comes pretty close, with just two (or three) inflected verb tenses for most verbs.

I suppose every language must have some way of indicating verb tense (adverbs, particles, helper/auxilliary verbs, etc.)

As I understand it, the term ''tense'' refers to ''inflected'' verb tenses as well as periphrastic verb tenses.

If Malaysian don't have no tenses, you say that it actually has tenses!

Are there other languages where the verb doesn't change according to tense?

Chinese.

and how do they know if some is talking about the past present of future?

They tell by adverbs.

they use a word, like "today"/"tomorrow"/"yesterday" to indicate when an action occurs/will occur/has occurred

Chinese uses articals to indicate when an action occurs/will occur/has occurred

***ga plz, Thai

<<Are there other languages where the verb doesn't change according to tense? >>

With some verbs in English , you can form 3 tenses without inflection:

I set (present)
I set (past)
I will set

For most verbs you also have:

I go
I did go
I'll go (or I'm gonna go)

If you want aspect and voice, I think you're stuck with inflected forms, though.

But culturally many have speculated that Chinese grammar makes less sense than, say, English and German. This has probably nothing to do with the lack of everything typical of any European grammar but, rather, how people think their language philosophy is. I must still be writing with a slight "written" accent, but do you see any part of my syntax (content is irrelevant) that makes "less" sense than yours?

There have been quite a few Eurocentric (or Sinocentric as opposed to it) views for this speculation. Is it Sapir-Whorf-ish to say, because everything (except the characters) sounds so simple, when compared to typical languages that the Chinese may know (and primarily English only), they can't avoid being "Sino"centric? Indeed, I can't generalize too blatantly: while many say European grammars (actually, West European; and actually, just everything around France) make more sense in terms of their tenses, modal verbs, and whatnot, they also get terribly confused with genders, spelling (hey, we don't "spell" at all), and exactly tenses, and then whine about it.

I'd rather say the lack of tenses kind of takes away a significant part of theirs when thinking. Those who do so lose the ability to discover that, rather than the language itself, it is they who ignore the very essentials of Chinese grammar, or some particular functions that human beings use all the same everywhere, by NOT using their own modal verbs well. While they don't have may, might, can, could, shall, should, and whatnot, they can use all those little adverbs like "probably" all the same in order not to make over-generalizations. I could just say that the average native DOES tend to over-generalize quite often, maybe for educational reasons and a lack of knowledge of "logic", which human beings also use all the same in any language.

How about the other Sino-Tibetan language: Burmese, Tibetan, et al. And also other Southeast Asian languages, like Vietnamese and Lao.

Old English only had past and present... Future was formed with the present and a future temporal adverb like "tomorrow" or "three weeks from now."

Also I heard that some Native American languages don't have tense, but I can't say which ones.

<< How about the other Sino-Tibetan language: Burmese, Tibetan, et al. And also other Southeast Asian languages, like Vietnamese and Lao. >>

Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian don't have grammatical tenses.
I don't know about Tibetan and Lao yet.