Let's consider a situation along these lines: a language has TAM markers that serve to subordinate a verb in a sort of adverbial way: the verb now marks, for instance, reason, temporal things, and so on, e.g.:
eat-1sg-duration sit-1sg
I sit while eating
More complicated notions can easily be expressed:
fear-1sg juggle-2sg-reason knives
I am afraid because you juggle knives
In combination with aspects, we can turn duration into "ever since", "until", and so on.
The language does not have a comparable set of things for nouns, but can use auxiliary verbs to some extent:
harvest being-3sg-reason have-1sg no extra time
because it is harvest/because of harvest, I have no extra time
The language might also have some more normal adpositions or such for similar uses with regards to nouns. However, and here's the fun bit: the language has no nouns for time units, holidays, seasons or moments: it has verbs.
These verbs generally are in the third person without any subject, but can at times take normal subjects. For instance,
day-2sg-duration drink-2sg enough?
do you drink enough during your day?
how christmas-2sg-past-perfect?
how was your christmas?
Certain verbs conflate time-spans with things we do in those time-spans: night and sleep are conflated, but can be disambiguated with an adverb. Likewise, wake up and morning are conflated. (The imagined ethnicity place morning much earlier than we do, due to agricultural needs.)
Weeks (or their equivalent), months (or their equivalent), years, minutes, hours, etc all have their own verbs. We also get a kind of "case rection" kind of analogue with regards to verbs with embedded verb phrases - 'to think that X verbs', for instance, takes the embedded verb in the consequent form:
moment-3sg-duration thought-1sg go-2sg-future-consequence
for a moment, I thought you were going mad
Similarities to case thus abound, yet these markers only appear on verbs.
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