To a certain extent, languages can be considered as the greatest reflection of a society's philosophy, culture, and accumulated train of thought. Most people are naturally unaware of this phenomenon; nonetheless, in the past century linguists, translators, and writers have been investing much effort exploring how the "time concepts" of a society could lead to significant changes or uses in grammar or language use. Though each language has its own unique grammar structure, experts in intercultural linguistics have basically classified all known world languages into two categories, according to "the impact that the concept of time makes in their languages".
The first category includes basically all occidental (mostly international) languages. As races in the western hemisphere view the flow of time as a straight line, Romance, Germanic, and Slavic tongues usually include very complex past and future tense rules(In the Spanish language, we see that the past tense can be even more detailedly divided into four types). In addition to this, the majority of these languages include the subjunctive, a tense quite abstract which is often used in inconcrete contexts. Westerners believe that because there are many things in life which do not actually occur in the "straight time line", the subjunctive could serve as the most perfect tense when expressing uncertainty in the future.
The rules in the oriental nations in quite the opposite. Because Confucianism has been so influential in history, Asian nations follow China's train of thought to a great extent. As stated in China's greastest work of philosophyYiJing, Asians view time not in a straight line, but in a circle. Unlike westerners, they trust that things in life repeat, and that there is no need to distinguish that clearly the past from the future. With this mindset, Asian languages do not really have a very concrete past tense, future tense, or subjunctive mood, leaving the Chinese language with a very concise grammar structure.
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