Re: CHAT: The Conlang Instinct

>To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
>Status: RO
>
>John Cowan wrote:
>>
>> Gerald Koenig wrote:
>>
>> > Dyslexia is of some concern to
>> > to me as the vector tense system depends on a clear right/left sense.
John:
>> I have no reading difficulties, but I often confuse left/right and east/west.
>> I have no similar troubles with north/south or up/down.
Andrew:
>Exactly the same for me.  No dyslexia at all.  But east and west are
>fiendish
>for me.  I have elaborate mnemonic rituals to remember them.  Left/right
>is
>less so, but a verbal problem: I'll sometimes shout "left" when I mean
>"right."
John:
>I suspect,
>> however that learning to associate past=up and future=down or vice
>> versa would be difficult as well.
With regard to the above correspondence, it doesn't seem that anyone is
actually using it. If anyone does associate the future with "up" would
you please let me know so I can put a module in VTT? According to Anna
Wierzbicka, "up", the motion, is one of the earliest childhood
acquisitions and is further distinguished as a primary orienting
concept due to its relation to gravity. On purely physical grounds I
would expect it to be the primary direction as we can sense it most
readily.


Sally:
>
>I think these things depend on what associations one has already made
>about
>divisions in time.  For me, the future is north and the past is south.
>When I see myself standing in space and time, I'm always facing north.
>Perhaps that's why I don't mix north and south up, but I do mix east and
>west.
>If a system required me to revise this entrenched association, I might
>have problems with it.
Sharing this information about your inner perceptions is most helpful
to me for the design of Vector Tense. I intend for VT to be
user friendly and ergonomic for more than myself. If language is a
communication mechanism, that mechanism should be structured to
comfortably fit as many users as possible. I think a lot of conlanging
is about customizing language.

If I understand your framework, you are standing facing North and you
are coincident with the "now" [mu in my system]. In front of you is the
future and behind you is the past. That is similar to .And's
orientation except he does not require facing Northward, only that the
the future is ahead and the past behind. For both of you the direction
of progress is on the plane, not up/down. What is different from
standard VTT is the point of view [POV], where you and And are on the
timeline riding the mu, moving and looking ahead, whereas I as VTT math
standard am on the sidelines watching the mu go by left to right. This
is a simple aspectual difference which I can incorporate into VTT as an
option, and I will.

>
>Sally
>============================================================
>
>From: And Rosta' <a.rosta@...>'
>Subject:      Re: The Conlang Instinct
>
>
>In Livagian, as in English, the start of something in time is
>its front and its end is its rear, while we in our present moment
>face and converge with future events and diverge from past events,
>which are behind us.
The idea of convergence/divergence is interesting and corresponds
partly to a tree system I have published only to some NGLers. Thanks
also for this explanation of the Livagian system, which makes the point
that your language fits your viewpoint. I would question that this is
not the only English metaphor. Time can pass us by as well as be behind
us.  I am currently working though on the expression, "Put that (time)
behind him", which does match your useage.  I want to thank you, John,
and Sally for courageously sharing your thought processes; this is
conlanging at its best for me.

>
>--And.
>
>From: And Rosta '<a.rosta@...>'
>Subject:      Re: The Conlang Instinct
>
Andrew:
>> >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.
>>
Jerry:
>> 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.
.And:
>
>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.
It might be difficult but it has been so successful in science via the
Cartesian coordinate system that it's hard to put aside. As I mentioned
above the most fundamental orientation to me seems to be the vertical
one based on the universal and greater force of gravity and the way
things go when released, as well its prior acquisiton. But I don't see
the (Conlang) grammars that use it. Well, I will put the option in VXT.

>
>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.
Sometimes they are quite confusing, such as in

"If X then Y", where the "if" clause is the dependent clause and yet is
first in line. The "left" or earlier clause is "lower" in the syntactic
tree and should be "higher". Or is this an argument for having the past
down and the future up?

Jerry

>--And.
>