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

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.