Re: More on the Hermetic Language

Quoting Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:

> John Cowan wrote:
> > Punctuals in general can take a long period of time, provided the
> > speaker sees them as a single event without parts.  In English, this
> is
> > often done with a nominalization:  "Pheidippides' run from Marathon
> to
> > Athens", e.g.; it took hours, but here is treated as a unanalyzable
> > point event.  Similarly in "William Blake lived from 1757 to 1827."
>
> Uatakassi would use non-punctual there, at least for the second.  :-)
> Punctual is instantaneous or very brief in Uatakassi.  I suppose if
> one
> were to write from the perspective of an immortal being, punctual
> could
> be used for "William Blake lived from 1757 to 1827".  "Pheidippides
> ran
> from Marathon to Athens" I'm not sure if it would be non-punctual or
> punctual.
Yargish would use a past habitual. A past continuative would suggest that he
did something else before and after, which despite the Yargish's belief* in an
afterlife sounds odd. A past punctual would sound downright weird; having
never developed geology, nor any remotely scientific astronomy, probably no
Yargish is able to think of seven decades as a single "occasion" or "moment in
time".

* Of course, they believe in it in a way reminicent in how we believe that the
Earth is round; there may be some few doubters, and it may not be prooved in a
philosophical way, but accepting it certainly elegantly solves heaps of
mysteries that otherwise would require separate and convoluted explanations.

                                                        Andreas