Re: "To be" or not "to be"? (was Re: TRANS: something slightly more deep)

On 7 Feb, Paul Bennett wrote:

Phew!  I keep being surprised by rtemmu!  I hope I haven't misunderstood it
*too* horrendously in the following suggestion.  I've gone to the archive
and read your intro to rtemmu, so I hope I'm on track.

Thank you for your suggestions. Comments are always welcome.
I also went back again and reread my intro so that we
will both be on the same track
(hopefully going in the same direction! :-)  )


Possibly, g~am needs some "sister" morphemes (also bound prefixes?), to
function as markers of how soon a change in the rate of change (ie an
"acceleration" or "decceleration") is expected.

It seems to me that here you are talking about two different things:
1. nearness/remoteness in time
2. acceleration/deceleration of rate of change

Regarding the first, in my original post (13 Jan, 1999) I wrote:


  The basic element of an utterance in rtemmu is a word for the
process under discussion preceded by a marker containing elements
which convey the following information:

   1. how widely the process is or can be known
      (by the speaker alone, by others, by all)
   2. temporal information
   3. whether the process is directly observed or           thought
about (memory, in rtemmu, is treated          grammatically as a type
of thought)

   4. the rate of change of the observer(s)/thinker(s)

   5. the rate of change of the process itself



Under the rubric of "temporal information" rtemmu has a set
of optional elements that tell how near/remote in time the process is,
either in the past or the future:

ve =near in time
vi = not soon but not remote either
vo = remote in time
vr` = intensifier (more past than, more future than)
         (r` = [R] )  vevr` = more recent past/future than;
             vivr` = more past/future  than; vovr` = more remote than

Thus:
(fdihl = understand")
iuvenanu fdihl (I-past, recent, my subjective rate of change is normal,
                             the understanding is slow to change)
                            =( approximately) I recently slowly understood.
uivonanu fdihl (I-future, remote, same as above)
                            =(approximately) I will, in the far future,
                               slowly understand.

The fun comes in with applying ve, vi, vo to the present! What is the
difference between "ive" (present soon) and "ivo" (present remote)?
How much time must pass before remote present turns into near future?
How much memory until present turns into recent past, subjective?
The potential for all kind of complex temporal concepts is there.
And that is just the simple case where the speaker and the concept
are at the same time. If not, one can always have two temporal markers,
one for the speaker and one for the described process :

iuvonauivonu fdihl.
(iu-vo-na-ui-vo-nu fdihl)
(In the remote past I thought how I will,
                                   in a future even more remote than now,
                                   slowly understand.)

Regarding your second suggestion,  about acceleration/deceleration
of the process being described (or one's own subjective state),
I must admit that I hadn't thought of that. But now that you mention it,
it seems like a really good thing to grammatically mark in rtemmu.
Thanks for the assist!


I know rtemmu already has words for (subjective and objective) rates of
change (which I see as more analogous to verbs than any other POS in
rtemmu), {g~am} and sisters would function as (*big* terminological kludge
coming up...) something like adrates [*].

{g~am} would then function as the "rate of approach [**] of a change of
rate of change is too slow to observe" end of the adrate spectrum.  The
opposite end of this spectrum encompasses things changing unexpectedly or
unstably?


Interesting. But, as I see it, no matter how the rate of change
itself changes, or the rate of the rate of change, etc., you still have
_something_ changing, no matter how slowly or unexpectedly.
"g~am" is meant to stand for "nothing", the opposite of existence.
(Could one put an acceleration marker on _that_?
Accelerated nonexistence? Accelerating towards what-when? _How_?
Shades of quantum physics! [either that, or the late hour at which I am
typing this! :-) ] )


[*] kludged on analogy with "adverb", appologies if the word already
exists.

[**] I think "approach" is possibly an unsuitable word for rtemmu, but it's
the best I could come up with having agonised over that sentance for about
40 minutes!

---
Pb
izuvnu rtem! (or is that too strong a statement?)

I think it would mean "I am catatonic"  :-D
(But I really am flattered that you tried!)

i = speaker, present tense
zuv = speaker is objectively changing too slowly
         to notice (nothing is moving; he's not even breathing)
nu = the "rtem" is subjectively not changing very much
         either
rtem = word

I think it would be better to use "na" (normal subjective change)
or even "no" (slow subjective change to signify difficulty) for
the speaker.
Thus,  "inanu rtem" might mean "I am concentrating on the
idea of 'word'  and it's not leading to any conclusions"
Or, perhaps, "I am meditating on a word" (Maybe
that would be better expressed by "inono rtem" ?)
If you meant to say "I am speaking", I think I'd say it more like

"inakehs rtemmu"

na= normal subjective change in the speaker
kehs = normal observable change in the language
             (in the sense that phonemes, morphemes,etc.
              are heard or seen to come and go as the
               sentence progresses)
rtem = word
-mu =dynamic system   (rtemmu = language)


Dan Sulani
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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.