Spatial tense
Spatial tenses are a category of tenses not found in English. Unlike temporal tenses, which modify a verb according to the time in which it takes place, spatial tenses, as their name implies, modify it according to the place in which it takes place. Obviously, this requires more than adding "here" and "there", as English does. In fact, an observation can be made that English and similar languages actually treat time as if it were a spatial concept, yet do not have any proper tenses for discussing events in physical space.
Spatial tenses are found in several languages, some artificial. One example for such a language is Lojban, which is also interesting in that that while English demands a temporal tense but not a spatial tense, Lojban has no requirement for a temporal tense to be provided.
Spatial tenses reflect on the connection between language and the way we perceive the world (the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis), which has implication on everything from linguistics to the semantic web. (Spatial languages are also important to visually-impaired people, yet this is not at the moment discussed in this article.) Given that events have both a time and a place, choosing one over the other is curious. Many have pondered the development of mathematics and physics in a language that contains spatial tenses. Extensive literature has been written about the Hopi language (the first to thoroughly explore whose peculiarity was Benjamin Lee Whorf), spoken by several tens of thousands Hopi in the north-east part of Arizona. (Another language which has extensive spatial cases is the Archi language.) Although Worlf positited that the Hopi were unable to grasp the meaning of time as per English or German, it was later found that the Hopi used adverb-like objects to inject time in their sentences.
