Timetravel tenses (was Re: No more plural? ..)

* tomhchappell said on 2005-08-18 01:38:33 +0200
/../
> a tense system for time-travellers.
>
> A society of time-travelers who meet at a particular time may need to
> specify "past" or "future" in three different time-scales:
> Speaker's past vs Speaker's future;
> Addressee's past vs Addressee's future;
> Subject's past vs Subject's future ("Subject" = subject of sentence.).
>
> Is anyone aware of a conlang that addresses such an issue?
Have you read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Such tenses are
used as joke there.

Anyways, some of the people in the Taruven-connected concultures can
time-travel without paradoxes resulting, but AFAIK it is not marked
morphologically in the language. There's relative time, which is the
time the time traveller experiences, and absolute, one-way, only forward
time, which is what relative time is relative to. There's also alternate
timelines and dimensions, time loops and all that jazz.

Then there's the question of the nature of your-singular alternate
selves. Are you-(distributive plural) different people, capable of
perceiving yourselves-(distributive plural) as individuals, or are
you-singular one single super-being regardless of timeline? The former
would be the case for the Mark 1 human. The latter is the case for a
handful of entities (and there seems to be a similar thing going on in
the movie "The One", <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267804/>); they don't
really need to mark relative timeline for themselves as they perceive
all alternatives where they exist simultaneously.

For the classic intro to time travelling and its paradoxes, see
<http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/chrono.html>


t.