Re: Grammar of time travel

There would be more tenses than that in any natural language. Even in
non-time-traveling languages, you still often have more than one past
tense: there's "a past activity that has stopped", there is "something
past that is still going on", and even "something past that has
stopped at the moment but will likely start in the future". I just
used compound tense (just concatenate the suffixes), but for a more
naturalistic approach, you may want something more complicated.

Wow, I'm confused.

On 2/10/07, Sanghyeon Seo <sanxiyn@...> wrote:
> In many science fictions which feature time travel, the problem of
> grammar for time travellers are often recognized. (Well, it's often
> ignored too.) I wonder whether someone included grammar of time travel
> to their languages?
>
> Rough sketch of mine:
>
> In normal timeline, time is totally ordered, and therefore,
> trichotomous. So for any time a and b, exactly one of a<b, a=b, a>b is
> true, which corresponds to past, present, and future.
>
> With multiple timelines, time could be partially ordered, then one of
> four things happen when comparing two times: less than, equal to,
> greater than, not comparable. So let's give an "alternate" tense for
> the last case.
>
> When the time forms a lattice, say, in a closed universe, it would be
> bounded, and has Big Bang and Big Crunch as least and greatest
> element. When closed timelike curve is not involved, there can be a
> partial order where any two times can meet and join.
>
> Given two timelines, ax<a<bx<b<by<d<dy and a<cx<c<cy<d<dy, two
> speakers in b and c may communicate via some exotic time-crossing
> communication device.
>
> ax and a, or anything before meet of b and c, are "our past".
> bx, between meet and speaker's present, is "my past".
> cx, betwwen meet and listener's present, is "your past".
> b is "my present", c is "your present".
> In the same way, by is "my future", cy is "your future".
> d and dy, or anything after join of b and c, are "our future".
>
> This creates 8 distinct tenses, and obviously differentitation of
> shared timeline and non-shared timeline would be useful. In a simpler
> system, your past/present/future could be compressed to alternate
> tense discussed above. This leaves, shared-past, past, present,
> future, shared-future, alternate.
>
> Above system could be implemented by modifying tense markers with
> pronominal markers, maybe omission defaults to "my", or defaults to
> subject of current sentence. Or, when timeline marking is very
> essential, omission of one could default to shared times.
>
> --
> Seo Sanghyeon
>