Re: Noun tense

Peter Clark writes:
 > 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. :)

Agreed that such a shift could, in principle, occur - I just think
it's a stretch to call it a "proto-version" of a noun-tense system.
Although, it's closer to the Emanym kind of noun-tense than to the
kind I was thinking of.

 >         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...

[...]

 >         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

Thank you, this makes it much clearer.  I suppose that... a
declarative sentence describes an event or state, and in a language
with verb tense, this shows when the event occured, or when the state
was in process.  Now, the subject we are talking about must be the
specific state of the continuing entity which we identify by the noun
at the time when the event occured.  In most cases, the
time-specific-version of the other nouns involved can be inferred by
the nature of the verb, so it's not necessary to supply any additional
tense information, and therefore the tense is marked on the verb
(although it could just as well be marked on the subject).  But I can
see that you could achieve considerable subtlety of expression through
marking the relevant time-slice of each eotemporal* noun in this way.

I like the relative tense markers, too**.

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?

* 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.

**Generally, this kind of thing is part of the perfect/prospective
  aspect, but full analysis of what the perfect means always escapes
  my understanding, and I don't bellyfeel the prospective at all.  I
  don't really feel that they're necessary, but I do need to be able
  to refer to something being before or after something else.  Tense
  isn't really grammaticalized on LC-01, but will be expressed
  lexically when I get around to it, so perhaps this won't present a
  problem.

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