Language vs. Spacetime

According to awesome scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson, reality as we know it is not possible unless time and space are one – just like no piece of paper can have a curved line on it without an x-axis and a y-axis, even if they are not explicitly drawn.

I always found space and time to be strange bedfellows, perhaps because I learned about their union on the Alien History Channel and it just seemed surreal. Then the other day, as I was doing some reading to undo the harm from watching television, I noticed that the author was using where and when interchangeably.

That was where I panicked.
That was when I panicked.

French takes the union of space and time even more seriously. There is no interchangeability, one must use où (where) for all sentences like the ones above.

C’était l’heure où j’ai paniqué.
That was the time where I panicked.

English and French are not alone. The Inca had a name for a unified space and time called pacha, a concept that is alive today in their descendants. Mandarin Chinese features an entirely different spacetime construct that, as I mentioned before, I will never be able to understand, so I’m just taking Wikipedia’s word on that.

So is there some truth that lies in the spoken words of English or Mandarin or any language which reveals a union of space and time in physics? Is a math equation one and the same as sentence?

Cats and dogs do not comprehend the connection between the last time they ate and the next time they will eat. Maybe humans (at least this human) are too dumb to understand the fusion of language and mathematics. Considering their close working relationship with “the aliens,” The History Channel might be key in unraveling this mystery. Because as everyone knows, aliens are smarter than us.