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Re: This day

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Friday, March 23, 2007, 17:51
On 3/23/07, Christopher Bates <chris.maths_student@...> wrote:

> > I find the meanings of moving an appointment "back" or "forward"*, as > > well as "up" and "down" (not to mention the "top" and "bottom" of an > > hour), somewhat opaque; I have to consciously think about what they > > mean, failing context. (For some reason I have no trouble with the > > description of time travel as moving backward and forward.)
.....
> I dislike these terms as well. I think the issue here is that when > people time travel they conceptually have an orientation time-wise > (facing the future) so using backwards and forwards is fairly clear > (incidentally, I have heard that some cultures conceptualize movement > through time as falling, in which case the future would be down not > forwards). An appointment, being a fixed point in time rather than an > entity which can be thought of as moving through time, has no conceptual > temporal orientation either backwards or forwards, so the terms come
......
> The issue here is with conceptualizations of time. Moving an > appointment backwards or forwards sounds as odd as, in most contexts,
..... The earliest form of gjâ-zym-byn had no root morphemes for "before / after" or "since / until", but derived such postpositions from the prefixes for "above" and "under" with an additional prefix -w-: so {swi}, temporally above = after, and {θwi}, temporally below = before. (The metaphor was based, I think, on gradually accreting strata of rock, etc.) I also combined this -w- with the postpositional prefixes for left and right, to get postpositions referring to parallel universes. Later I added new root morphemes ð- and š- for before and after. So moving an appointment through time would be unambiguous -- if you're moving it closer to now, it would be {ðo}, if further from now, {šo}. On 3/23/07, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> ......... But "top" and > "bottom of the hour" are quite intuitive to me, relating as they do to > the minute hand's position at the top or bottom of the clock, > respectively.
Do you mean you understand "bottom of the hour" to signify "N:30 plus or minus a few minutes" and "top of the hour" to signify "N:00 plus or minus a few minutes? -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>