Re: time and place

--- claudio <claudio.soboll@...>
> wrote:
>hi !
>may i ask you a locical question ?
>i dont want to disturb you in this list but i this problem
>doesnt let me sleep well.
>
>root-words are:
>NOW (with the meaning of "right now" or "this time").
>HERE (with the meaning of "right here" or "this place").
>AHEAD (with the meaning of "in front of").
>AFTER (with the meaning of "behind").
>
>i combine "ahead and after" with temporal "now" and lokative "here".
>think of a man who is on the way walking from home to the church.
>he started walking at 7:00 o'clock and he plans to arrive at the church at 8:00 o'clock.
>his home lies *after* him. the church lies *ahead* of him.
>
>the church is his target-place. it is *ahead here*. so far so good.
>"8 o'clock" is his target-time. it is *ahead now*. so far so good.
Well... I wouldn't really say "ahead of now"; "ahead" is only really used with times
when the time in question is something like a deadline. "He got the project in
ahead of time." But this only supports what you're saying.

>his home is his origin-place. it is *after here*. so far so good.
Now, I wouldn't use "after" when talking about the locations of things unless there
was a sense of travel involved - "the first left after the newsagent's as you
go south". And with a sense of travel, there is automatically a sense of time
tied in, as you come to one place after another so that each position maps to a
time.

I think your confusion lies in the fact that "after" is used with things that
are sitting in one place, whereas "ahead of" is used with things that are
moving. They're not really opposites, they're just different. "Behind" is the
opposite of "ahead of" (or "in front of"), and "before" is the opposite of
"after".

>wouldnt it be more logical to say "after this time" when we refer to the past ?
Now we can see why we use "after" for a time later than some specified time. There
is a sense of "moving through time", and of particular time points being fixed
landmarks like the newsagent's in my example above, and a point after such a
time is specified using "after" (as I just did).


>we have the same weird "up-side-down-logic" in other languages, and i dont get it.
A useful thing to do when you see things in more than one language is to ask
whether they're all related, and if so, whether it could be the case that only
one ancestor language developed the peculiarity and it was preserved in a
number of later languages. If you get the same feature in unrelated languages,
then there's something interesting going on.


==

   Tom Pullman

"Dochuala as borb nad légha."

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