Re: Noun tense

On Monday 22 July 2002 19:08, Tim May wrote:
> Now, I'd be interested to hear how Emanym expresses noun-tense of the
> type I was thinking of.  How do you say "The former king meets the
> future president" - where both the actors, and the action, are in the
> present, but the nouns by which we refer to them refer to their states
> in the past and future respectively?
        *cough* eNaMyN. :)
        Sorry, you asked at the wrong time; inspired by Ray Brown's post (too bad
he's on vacation and won't learn of the damage he caused :), I've decided to
do some more revamping to the whole system. Some of what Ray suggested can be
handled just fine by the system as it is; however, I don't have a way to
express _changes_ in state, like "former" and "future." I think I would also
add a "becoming" to the mix as well to round things off. Hence, we could
have:
        former-house.[TENSE] = "the ex-house" (that is now a museum)
        becoming-house.[TENSE] = "that which is becoming a house" (under
construction, perhaps)
        future-house.[TENSE] = "that which is, and will become a house" (a barn,
perhaps, that someone wants to remodel into a house)

        I'm liking this! Existence, as I already said, can be implied by using the
tense (see my "grandfather" and "baby" examples) without the need for
explicit marking.
        Well, things are a little rough, but perhaps you can see how I will answer
your question. :) As for the ins-and-outs of deciding who the actor is,
that's not too complicated. Because Enamyn is an active-case language, it
would mark both as agents in the case of a verb like "meet," assuming that
they planned on meeting at such-and-such a time. If they just bumped into
each other on the street corner, then they would both be patients. However,
whichever actor/patient we decide is more subject worthy gets the absolute
tense, while the other gets the relative tense. For instance, if our story
began, "The ex-king was walking down the street on fine summer morning..."
then the ex-king would be most likely to receive the absolute tense.

> * I have no idea if this is really correct usage of the word
>   eotemporal, but I felt a powerful urge to make use of it somehow. I
>   mean the 3+1 dimensional object of the noun-referent considered
>   across its entire lifetime.
        It's a very fine word, although I keep wanting to see it as a-temporal. On
the other hand, are you sure that eo- means what you want it to mean? As far
as I understand it, eo- means oldest or earliest.
        :Peter

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