Re: No more plural? No,more plural!:-- Gramm. Numbr when Non-Integer Semantic #

On 8/17/05, tomhchappell <tomhchappell@...> wrote:

> So, of course, I got to thinking, what system would a language with
> nullar and dual and trial (and maybe paucal) numbers use for
> fractional amounts?
>
> One accepted system in science is to round to the nearest whole
> number; and, in case of a tie, to the nearest even number.
>
> Pretend singular and trial are odd, and nullar, dual, and paucal are
> even (letting paucal stand in for quadral).
>
> This would make
> 1/3   day-NULLAR
> 1/2   day-NULLAR
> 2/3   day-SINGULAR
> 1+1/3 day-SINGULAR
> 1+1/2 day-DUAL
> 1+2/3 day-DUAL
> 2+1/3 day-DUAL
> 2+1/2 day-DUAL
> 2+2/3 day-TRIAL
> 3+1/3 day-TRIAL
> 3+1/2 day-PAUCAL
> 3+2/3 day-PAUCAL
This looks fairly good, except that it seems
counterintuitive to use a nullar number inflection
to mark a nonzero amount of something.


> But the discussion about Chinese time had gotten me thinking about
> complex numbers (a real number plus some real multiple of the square
> root of -1).  I wonder, does anyone's conlang handle complex numbers
> of that type?
gzb has a word for i,  {cix'tu}.  So complex numbers can
be expressed by compounding that with other number roots.
E.g.,

5 + 3i
dxy-cix'tu-dax
five-i-three


> The same impulse prompts me to ask about
> 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.).
I worked out a similar system once; there were first-person,
second-person, third-person, and absolute triplets
of tense particles.  They could be used alone or in
combination with either nouns or verbs.  But I didn't
work on it for very long or develop the rest of the language
much if any.

> That leads to 9 tenses, or maybe 11, since the Speaker's Present and
> the Addressee's Present will be the same moment,
Not necessarily.  The moment you are reading this
is not the moment I am writing this, but sometime later;
and with time-travel you might read this before I write it.

gzb can express this well enough (it has different phrases
for "now" corresponding to speaker and listener),
though it is not robust enough for time travel without
a little more tinkering.

> and we can assume
> that the Subject's Present takes place in the Speaker's and
> Addressee's Present.
Why?  Suppose I (on Phobos Station in 2103) send you
a chronogram (you receive it in London in 1666)
asking you where/when you saw Henrik last, and
you reply that you think he's in San Francisco in 1906.
Three different persons, three distinct presents.

> Throw in Alternate Time Lines, and it could get more complicated;
> since a given present moment could have more than one past as well as
> more than one future, and a given past moment could lead to more than
> one present moment.
>
> That was kind of why I suggested Time as a Complex Number in that
> thread.  "Sideways Time" was "Irrealis", I suggested; and a tense
> could be some "linear combination" of Realis (past = negative (? or
> positive ?), present = zero, future = positive (or the opposite of
> past, at any rate) with Irrealis (a 0 "imaginary part"
> meaning "nothing but realis" just as a 0 "real part" would
> mean "nothing but present").  Of course I couldn't figure out what
> the difference would be between positive and negative Irrealis time.
I toyed with this in the earliest stages of gzb; it had
time postpositions formed from space postpositions
by prefixing /w/ between the orientation prefix and the
core directional vowel.  So "after" was /swi/,
"before" was /Twi/.  (/si/ and /Ti/ are "above" and "below").
But I also had /tswi/ and /Zwi/ (from /tsi/ "left of"
and /Zi/ "right of") for left and right alternate worlds.
I think they were supposed to represent hypothetical
worlds better and worse than the real one,
but I don't recall for sure.


--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm
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