Re: irregularities

En réponse à Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>:

> I don't quite understand. "North" and "South" as you are using them seem
> to
> mean "geometrically North and South of the Earth's equator" rather
> than
> "Northward" and "Southward". But the division of the world into two
> distinct
> halves is merely a result of the drawing of a line on a map (okay, I
> know
> it's the locus of all points intermediate between the poles as well) and
> the
> point is surely that nobody, in a cultural sense, actually perceives
> them
> this way. There is no real dividing line between one hemisphere and
> another
> that would enable you to actually know whether you could see the South
> of
> the world or not. The night sky is different; you can easily determine
> where
> the celestial poles are, and thus by interpolation, the equator. But in
> this
> case, even though you can't see 'the South of the world' in the sense
> of
> 'places with negative latitudes' you can certainly see (some of) the
> South
> of the sky, unless you're standing at the North Pole.
> Mike
I don't see what's to understand about it! This culture sees the sky into two
parts: a "North sky" and a "South sky". Why they do so may have nothing to do
with what they see or not. It may have mythological reasons, or other reasons
that we don't know. I don't understand how one could think of the "day sky" and
the "night sky" as two different skies, since the passage from one to another
is slow and can be seen  (stars appear in the sky well before the sky is really
dark). Yet it's well accepted, through reconstruction evidence (and quite
strong for those two words) and maybe other evidence, that the Proto-Indo-
European people thought there was two skies turning around the planet, one for
the day and one for the night. The fact that there is no actual frontier
between the two doesn't change anything.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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