Re: This day

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

Reply