Two-dimensional time and the friends of Whorfians (was:Re:Chinese dimensionality

Hello again, Andreas.  I have thought on this matter further.

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Andreas Johansson <andjo@F...> wrote:
> Quoting tomhchappell <tomhchappell@Y...>:
> [snip]
> > In my opinion, any person who has a spouse
> > or a child of sufficient
> > age, will come to the view that time must have more than one
> > dimension; this is the only reasonable explanation
> > for the fact that
> > two people can meet, repeatedly, in a single location,
> > and have had
> > alternate histories during the meantime.
Moreover, they may have alternate histories of their last (or some
other recent) meeting!  /That/ is the /real/ clue that time must be
at least two-dimensional.

I have considered it further, and have decided that even a person
without a family might realize that time is, in fact, best measured
as a complex number, rather than as a real number.

Any person who works for certain organizations -- whether for-profit
organizations, certain single-owner or closely-held proprietorships,
certain large corporations, some non-profit organizations, certain
government departments, especially the military or politically
sensitive ones -- must have realized, from comparing the project-
scheduling and progress-reporting to actual progress, that time has
both a real part and an imaginary part.

;-)

That should further elucidate the two-dimensional nature of time.

Once your children are old enough to ride their bikes out of the
neighborhood on their own, you are forced to believe (by breakfast-
table and dinner-table conversations) in alternate histories; and if
you take a job that involves Gantt charts, PERT charts, and/or CPM
charts, you realize time has an imaginary component, so it must be a
complex number.

> > Is your Whorfian friend, or are his or her Chinese friends, family
> > people, by any chance?  That may be the real explanation.
> No idea, tho it does seem likely that
> he's got neither family nor friends.
/Surely/ he has at least one acquaintance (if not friend) who is a
native L1-speaker of some Chinese dialect, or he would not have made
that very "creative" generalizing conjecture about
the "dimensionality" of Chinese mentation -- would he?

By the way --- is your conjecture that he likely has no family nor
friends, a deduction based on his Whorfianness?  Or is it based
instead on information you have not published on-list here?

-----

Tom H.C. in MI

Reply