Re: Back!

Adam Parrish wrote:
>         I'm curious as to how other conlangers have solved the problem
> of cosmic location, since it does seem to be rather vital to an
> important part of a language's vocabulary.
For me, I chose Alpha Centauri A for several reasons.  One, I knew the
relative masses of the suns, and their orbital period around each other
(80.09 Earth years), and other data; 2, Alpha Centauri A is very similar
to our sun (1.08 solar masses, just a little warmer, 30% brighter), and
3, it gave me an excuse to place humans there without conquest.  I
wanted to place humans on the same world, but without having conquest.
My problem was, if they were non-conquering people, why would they
settle on an already-inhabited world?  So, I decided that when the
colonists headed to Alpha Cen, they didn't know that it was inhabited.
The probe that had brought back data malfunctioned.  The high-resolution
cameras were non-functioning.  Enough data came back to see that the
world was habitable, that it had life on it, but not enough data came
back to detect the influences of a low-tech society.  Fortunately, there
were a number of uninhabited islands.

> I'm not satisfied with either of these
> options.  Have I missed anything?  Is there a middle ground?
Well, you could always put it on our world in the past, or in the
present, in some remote location [as I believe the inventor of Jakutdok
(sp?) has done].  Or, you could place it in the future.  But other than
our world, parallel Earth, or other world, I see no other possibility.

--
"[H]e axed after eggys: And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude not
speke no Frenshe ... And then at last a nother sayd that he woulde haue
hadde eyren: then the goode wyf sayd that she vnderstood hym wel." --
William Caxton
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