Re: THEORY: Tenses for Time Travelers; Plus, Moods and Modalities for Alternate Realities

Tom H. Chappell wrote/writes/will write on PI*((-1*(Thu 18
Aug 2005, 01:43 MET))^(-1/2))^(-1) in my current reality:

 > 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.).
 >
 > 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.
 >
 > (The Subect's Past or Future could overlap the Speaker's
 > and Addressee's Present, however.).

[...]

 > Throw in Alternate Time Lines, and it could get more
 > complicated; since a given present moment could have more
 > than one past as well as more than one future, and a given
 > past moment could lead to more than one present moment.

One question: why do you make it so complicated? If they can
travel in time, our current grammatical concept of past,
present and future would be of no use anymore. Only an
absolute system (i.e. the date of a point in time) would be
sensible then AFAICT. That still wouldn't solve the problem
of alternate realities or timelines, though.

 > Well, "Time as a Complex Number" was, I admit, kind of a
 > joke for this group/list;  but, seriously, handling
 > multiple time streams (or alternate time lines) seems like
 > the natural next step after Tenses for Time Travelers.

But how do you want to put alternate time lines into a
system? After all, there is potentially an infinitive number
of alternate timelines.

Carsten

--
"Miranayam cepauarà naranoaris."
(Calvin nay Hobbes)

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