Re: future past:Rihana-ye

John wrote:

<< 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.>>

For the strange, of course, there's always English.   Consider that "after"
means "towards the aft", or "behind", and "before" means "in front of"
or "ahead".   Yet, temporally, "after" means further in time, and "before"
means earlier in time, whereas all the rest of the English metaphors
work in *exactly* the opposite way: "Let's leave that meeting behind us,
and move on ahead to our next meeting."   I can imagine this happening
by having the different words being transported to the temporal realm
at radically different times.   So maybe way back when "aft" and "fore"
were used most commonly they got mapped in the way they did, and
then much later, the system switched, because that's the way the speakers
of the time conceptualized it.

Relating this specifically to your conlang, you could have two different
systems.   After all, you've shown how the forms are related, but not
identical.   This indicates to me that the suffixing/prefixing happened
while the others were in use, but then began to be thought of as different
some time down the road.   So maybe what you can do is this:

(1) The affixes reference time in a particular way: -vi means future, and
-wi means past.

(2) At some later point in time, the connection between -vi/-wi and -we/-ve
is lost (the phonology will help this).   Therefore, the markers -vi/-wi are
*only* associated with tense; there's no connection to spatial relations 
anymore.

(3) Now the speakers decide to use the spatial suffixes in the temporal 
realm.
*However*, now that they've progressed in time several hundred years, they
no longer think in the "old" way, and so the suffix -we is now associated 
with
the future tense, and the suffix -ve is now associated with the past tense.

Voila!   Now you've got a split not unlike English, and a *very* interesting 
story
to tell!   (Hey, I like this idea.   I may borrow it...)

-David
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"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
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-Jim Morrison

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