English tenses are so much fun. She speaks Japanese but right now she's speaking English. The factory makes toys, but right now it is closed for the night. B

English tenses are so much fun. She speaks Japanese but right now she's speaking English. The factory makes toys, but right now it is closed for the night. But when we get to Malay, things get really weird. Malay doesn't have tenses. You express timeframe with additional words. It does however have something like a tense, namely a sort of "bounding" quality but that's not like bounded vs unbounded aspects in English since bounding may occur either in time, in manner, or in social convention. Thus one can reduplicate for emphasis, to imply continuation, to imply reciprocity, or to imply a relaxation of social convention. Consequently we'd reduplicate the verb for "to beat" if we wanted to say "he frequently beats his son" or "give" if we wanted to say "they gave eachother gifts," or "walk" to mean "take a stroll," or "arrived" to indicate that in fact they arrived suddenly and unexpectedly. (Reduplication of nouns looks kind of like pluralization but it also involves an unbounding rather than a true pluralization.)