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

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.

In the final analysis, no term would be ideal unless we create a
conlang that is natively embedded in a 4D setting.  Which is what I
intend to do. :-)


T

--
Just because you survived after you did it, doesn't mean it wasn't stupid!

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