Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: 4D conlang [Was: Re: I'm back!]

From:Joe <joe@...>
Date:Wednesday, September 22, 2004, 19:56
H. S. Teoh wrote:

>On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 10:04:06PM -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote: > > >>On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 03:13:15PM -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote: >> >> >>>Considering that a 4D being would necessarily see in 3D (i.e., have a >>>3D retina), this seems to lead me to just 4 pairs of directions: >>> >>> >>Exactly so. >> >> >> >>>up/down, left/right, front/back, "in"/"out" (or whatever you call >>>it... this is different from being actually "inside" or "outside" a 4D >>>volume). >>> >>> >>The terms I've most often heard for the extra two directions along the extra >>spatial dimension in fourspace are "ana" and "cata" - presumably the same >>as the prefixes in e.g. anaphoric and cataphoric. >> >> > >I've seen it referred to as ana/kata or vinn/vout (Rucker). >Personally, I prefer "in" and "out" because it corresponds with what >you see in the 3D retina of a 4D person when the 4D person moves in >those directions. Of course, objectively speaking this is a bit silly, >since it's like telling a 2D person we're moving "inwards" when we >move forward in the 3rd direction, just because the image in our 2D >retina expands as we do so. But we don't have the benefit of having >native 4D terminology, so I chose the more suggestive terms over the >more abstract ones. > >
I don't know if a 3D retina is neccesary. It would be to see more than a limited number of sides/cells, but a 2D retina can see a 4D object in 3D space.