In English, we use “have” to represent past experience, and “will” to represent future — “I have skied before”, “I will ski tomorrow”. Since English is full of homonyms, we seldom think about the fact that “have” is also used to indicate posession, and “will” is used to represent desire (“I have some money. I will that it be given to my nephew when I die.”) It’s just a coincidence, right?
Actually, Chinese has the same construct, but without homonyms. In Chinese, the word “you” (pronounced “yo”) is used to signify both posession and past action (exactly like “have”) in English. And the word “yao” (pronounced “yow”) is used to signify both wanting and future action. In Chinese, there are plenty of homonyms too, but every word has a different character, so you can tell the difference between homonyms in written text. In this case, the “you”s and “yao”s are exactly the same character. There is no ambiguity — wanting is future action, and posession is past action.
It is remarkable that two languages so distantly separated use exactly the same constructs to represent the most basic concepts of past and future. These are fundamental to human thought. Since English has many homonyms, and “will” has fallen out of use as a word for “want”, it’s understandable that most English speakers don’t make the connection. In fact, the use of inflected verb forms makes the “have” and “will” somewhat unnecessary, and many English speakers omit them. But it’s interesting that most Chinese speakers don’t notice it either. In part, I think it is because modern Chinese has an alternative form to “you” that can be used to indicate past action (similar to English -ed). In Taiwan, people still say “wo you kan shu” (“I have read a book”), but in the north, they prefer “wo kan le shu”. The “you” form is considered stiff and old-fashioned. But even Chinese speakers I’ve talked to have assumed that this is just some accident of history.
The fact that exactly the same structure exists in both languages has got to be more than just a coincidence. Having, wanting, past, and future are four of the most fundamental concepts for enabling human thought. I am sure that some linguists have remarked on this before, but I couldn’t find anything about it.
So, why is posession so tightly tied with past, and want so tightly tied with future, in our deep structure? Wanting is somewhat understandable, but for many people, the past is about loss. It’s also interesting that Chinese and English have somewhat deprecated the opposite poles of this relationship — English has mostly de-linked want/future, while Chinese has started to deprecate posession/past. While I think that sapir-whorf is a bunch of B.S., I wonder if this indicates anything about relative cultural priorities. I would be interested to read more about this.