Re: survey: time and space

On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 09:13:37AM -0700, Garrett Jones wrote:
> i was wondering how many of you have thought about the terms for time &
> space in your conlangs. here are some interesting things i thought of:
Funny you should ask!

The second language I designed is inflected.  In order to select the
cases to include,  I started with the "journalism questions" list:
Who, what, why, where when, and how.

That gave me Nominative (Who did it?), Accusative (What did they do?
or Whom did they affect?), Causative (Why did they do it?),
Spatial Locative (Where did they do it?), Temporal Locative (When
did they do it?) and Instrumental (How did they do it?)

I then decided to add Genitive (Whose?), Dative (To whom did they do it?),
and directional versions of Where and When:  Spatial Allative
(Whither/To where?), Temporal Allative (Until when?), Spatial Elative
(Whence/From where?), and Temporal Elative (Since when?).

The spatial/temporal parallelism struck me as interesting,
so I decided not to have separate cases for them.  There is just
one locative case, one elative case, and one allative case, but there is
a separate, independent noun modification that makes a word specifically
temporal or spatial, usable in all cases.

So, for instance, the interrogative word "who" is "sim" in the
nominative case.  If you put it in the locative case ("sat"), it
can mean either "where" or "when" or both, depending on context.
However, you can explicitly make it spatial ("salt" = "where") or
temporal ("sart" = "when").  And it becomes useful in other cases:
"silm" = "what place" as a noun, "sirm" = "what time" as a noun.

This simplifies the vocabulary.  The adverbs "here" and "now" are
both rendered simply by putting the pronoun "I" into the locative case.
If you spatialize the nominative "I" you get the noun "this place",
whereas if you temporalize it you get the noun "this time".  Etc.

On the other hand, while the "adverbial" cases may sometimes
be construed as referring to both space and time simultaneously,
there's no way to get a single noun that does so in a nominal case;
you can't both spatialize and temporalize at the same time.
Ah, well. :)

-Mark