future past:Rihana-ye

I have been really struggling with this in Rihana-ye for a long time, and
have gone (naturally) back and forth on  it a lot. In the Rihana-ye basic
vocabulary there are two
postpositions, -ve and -we. Their basic meanings are "in front of" and "in
back of"
(e.g. seba basa-ve hevejo-mi: I house-in front of-am standing: I am standing
in front of the house.)They are also related to the forms used for past and
future verbs--wi indicates past (and is a prefix--as I have noted in previous
posts, this is now unique and irregular)
and -vi as a verb suffix indicates future. But when it came to using -ve and
-we to indicate time, I kept getting confused. At some points in my language
development, I thought of -ve as "before" and used it for the past, so
wobomiha-ve would mean "before the war" and thought of -we as "after" and used it for
the future, so wobomiha-we would mean "after the war." But I also sometimes
thought of "ve" as meaning -going-forward-in-time so "wobomiha-ve" would
mean"later in time than the war" --I sometimes translate this interlineally as
"war-beyond" --and wobomiha-we would mean "backward in time from the war," hence
earlier in time. Officially I adopted this second usage some time ago (as it is
more consistent with the verb forms, which became fixed very early),.but
even so, I sometimes have forgotten and written texts the other way--if I
ever revise all the texts, I will have a lot of normalizing to do. There are some
fixed words that really make more sense in terms of the first usage, e.g.
wevaro 'back-say" means to reply, and of course the reply really comes second.
John Leland