Re: CHAT: The Conlang Instinct

jerry:
> >I mastered east/west after I learnt that facing north spells W.E. (west.
> >east.)  I have never mastered left/right.  To this day I still look for
> >the L made by the index finger and the thumb of the left hand.
>
> Andrew, or John, if you can answer this it will help me with vector tense
> design options.
>
> Suppose that past is left and future is right.
>
> If I say, "It happened 6 hours left of now" does that take a lot of
> extra time to process for you? Is it evident that it means "It happened
> 6 hours ago"? If "left of now" is a word, which it is, <vomu>, would it
> come to mean <ago> or would it always take time to analyze as
> <left-of-now>?  And even harder, how about <demu> which means "right of
> now" or  <future ago> or "after now"?
> In other words do you think the derivation of the words based on
> directionality would drop out and they would become just time words or
> would their origin as space analogs continually be a drag on
> conceptualization for you?
> Sorry if this question is not to the point, I have a quite definite
> sense of right and left and I'm not sure I'm walking in your moccassins.
Left/right strikes me as a very difficult metaphorical basis for
temporal precedence, partly because so many people have so much more
trouble with the lateral dimension (things tend to symmetry in that
dimension more than others) and partly because there is scant basic
for the metaphor.

In linguistics, "left"/"right" are informally used to mean "earlier"
and "later". The basis for this is the way european lgs are written
left to right, and the metaphor has the advantage of fudging the
distinction between linear precedence and syntactic subordination/
domiance [i.e. being higher/lower in a syntactic tree structure],
since in languages that tend to be head-initial the two things are
hard to tell apart.

--And.