Re: THEORY: Tenses for Time Travelers; Plus, Moods and Modalities for Alternate Realities
| From: | # 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, August 18, 2005, 1:05 |
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Tom Chappell wrote:
>A society of time-travelers who meet at a particular time may need to
>specify "past" or "future" in three different time-scales:
>Speaker's past vs Speaker's future;
>Addressee's past vs Addressee's future;
>Subject's past vs Subject's future ("Subject" = subject of sentence.).
>
If the sentence carries a speakeror addressee's past or futur, isn't to tell
the time of the subject? I'd rather tell the opposition between past and
futur of the moment they are talking
With a prefix that carries the speaker's tense, a suffix for the addresse's,
and a final word for the tense relative to the moment, it could be "I
PRESENT-kill-FUTUR him PAST" to mean that the killing has been done by the
speaker later than when they are having this talking, sooner than the time
the speaker's from, and at the moment the addressee is from...
In a situation, it may be a man from 3000 that meets a man from 2500 in 2100
that says that he killed someone in 2500. The killing occured/occurs/will
occur before the speaker's time, during the addressee's time, and after the
time they aare having this talking...
Hard to handle... Principaly because one doesn't come from a single moment,
but from a lifetime. If someone comes in the past 50 years ealier at the age
of 75 (when he may or may not meet oneself), and decide to stay for its
whole life and never to get 50 years later, which speaker time will he use
during these 50 years? Its original one? The one he prefers?
>That leads to 11 tenses, since the Speaker's Present and
>the Addressee's Present will be the same moment, and we can assume
>that the Subject's Present takes place in the Speaker's and
>Addressee's Present.
>
If the speaker's past and futur are different from those of the adressee, I
assume that it means that their respective past and futur and based on the
time they come from instead of the time they are having this conversation.
Assuming this, their respective presents should mean the exact moment from
which they are from, which may be different.
The complcated part is, will the time travels alter the timeline? If not: A
man gets in the past to kill his mother before his birth before coming back
in his time when nothing has changed, the alternative timeline would have to
work differently in the speaker/addresse/moment/subject times... If so...
well, time travelling would be really chaotic and adapting grammar a
complicated thing.
I realise I don't help to nothing but to talking about sci-fi thories...
I'd like to see your grammar when it'll be done!
- Max
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