Re: Noun tense

On Monday 22 July 2002 15:22, Tim May wrote:
> This, it seems to me, is perfectly reasonable, but is a matter of
> marking verb tense on nouns, rather than of noun tense in the sense
> that I understand the term.  In your example, "The catll catch the
> mousll.", the -ll marker refers to the tense of the catching, not of
> the cat and the mouse.  The future tense of "cat" would mean "that
> which will be a cat".  Granted, a language with such a feature might
> well use future tense of cat and mouse in this case, as the event is
> in the future, but I don't see any evidence that English is developing
> such a system.
        The -ll marker refers to the tense of catching only because you are used to
thinking of the verbs receiving the tense. :) There is nothing that forbids a
semantic shift in meaning of -ll from one indicating "will" to one indicating
"that which will be X." [Quick Google search] Ok, check out the semantic
shifts in the chart at http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba/395/semchng.html. If
"cloud" used to mean "hill", then the magic wand of semantic shifts cures
all. :)
        Initially, you are correct; it is simply marking verb tense on the noun. But
once that happens, it is not that much of a stretch to re-analyze it as the
future form of the noun. Or perhaps we are engaging in excessive amounts of
mental gymnastics; speakers of Enamyn probably would not say that they have a
"stateful" view of the world, but simply that in the future, the cat catches
the mouse. That is, they would not make a distinction between the *now*-cat
and the *future*-cat or the *now*-mouse and the *future*-mouse in semantic
meaning, other than the fact that the *future*-cat will be full and happy,
and the *future*-mouse will be dinner. :)       (Can you tell I don't really buy
into Sapir-Whorf?)
        As for English--alas, I fear we shall all be dust long before we could ever
find out...


>  >         What happened in the case of Enamyn was that the auxiliary
>  > became a morpheme of the stem of the main subject. The various markers
>  > for direct and indirect objects were re-analyzed as temporally
>  > relational markers; as time went on, these relational markers gained
>  > additional semantic meaning to indicate that they refered to either the
>  > future, the present, or the past of the subject. Hence, in the sentence
>  > "She-past write poem-r.pres to.honor
>  > grandfather-r.past" has three nouns: "She," which is in the past,
>  > "poem," which is concurrent in the past with "she" (relative-present),
>  > and "grandfather," which is in the past of the past "she"
>  > (relative-past). The literal sense of the sentence is, "She wrote a poem
>  > to honor her dead grandfather."
> Interesting.  I'm not sure that I fully understand what these tenses
> mean, though.  Is the verb generally in the relative present?  I
> mean... I'm not sure which tense marker absolutely determines the
> tense of the action, "write", which is what most often has a tense in
> natlangs.
        There are two markers; one indicates "absolute" tense and invariably is
affixed to the subject of the sentence. The other marker is the "relative
tense" and is affixed to all other nouns in the sentence. "Absolute" refers
to whether we are refering to the subject in the past, present, or future;
"relative" is past, concurrent, or future of the absolute. If you must get
stuck on verbs ;>, then you would normally translate the tense of the verb by
the tense of the absolute.
        To return to my example above, a speaker of Enamyn would not ordinarily refer
to the dead in the relative concurrent tense, unless context made it clear
that the speaker was speaking in the terms of an afterlife. ("Grandfather is
still with us" sort of deal...) Little Betty Sue who wrote a poem in honor of
her grandfather did so to honor him as he was in the past, when he was still
alive. (Otherwise, Betty Sue's parents might think of her as a little morbid,
not to mention grotesque, for her to honor gramps in his present bodily
condition.)
        Here's an analysis of the nouns:
        She-past: the subject of the sentence which receives an absolute marker that
indicates that we are talking about Betty Sue in the past.
        poem-r.pres: Betty Sue, in the time that we are talking about, wrote a poem;
thus it is relatively present to her.
        grandfather-r.past: Gramps has been gone for five years, but his memory
lingers on; Betty Sue wishes to honor the man he was and so "grandfather" is
in the past relative to Betty Sue.
        Another example, this time with the relative future:
        "We-present want a baby-r.future."
        That is, we want a kid, but none is in the oven yet. :) If baby was relative
present, then that would indicate that maybe we want a baby that we think
already exists; perhaps adopt one.
        :Peter

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