Re: Tense on Nouns

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:42:45 -0700, Brian B <caol.kailash@...> wrote:
>I was reading the discussion on Time Travel and Grammar and came up
>with an idea that I thought I'd share/bounce off everyone: What if the
>tense was attached to the noun instead of the verb? So that it'd look
>something like this:
>
>I-(present)-(agent) type-(action) email-(present)-(direct object).
>
>And potentially, I guess you could have different tenses for different
>nouns in the sentence.
>
>I-(present)-(agent) see-(action) him-(past)-(direct object).
>
>And maybe with the last example, also have a thing denoting on the
>noun the day it was seen, like him-(past)-(yesterday)-(direct object).
>
>I assume this has been done/is done somewhere and would like
>suggestions for further examples of implementation.
>
>Peace and Light,
>B
>
>--
As far as language for time-travellers is concerned, this has been discussed on
this list before, and is even now being discussed on the Zompist BBoard.

What was suggested here before -- sorry I can't remember who suggested it,
or when -- was that the morphology keep track of past/present/future on
several timelines simultaneously.

The verb will be marked to show that the clause is about something in the
present or past or future of the speaker's subjective life-stream, and to show
that it is something in the present or past or future of the addressee's
subjective life-stream.

The subject (and possibly other noun phrases that are direct core arguments
or terms) will be marked to show that the clause is about something in the
present or past or future of the subject's subjective life-stream.  If all of the
noun-phrases are "tensed" in this way, the language can be very precise
about when each participant experiences/has experienced/will experience the
event in question, without piling up "tenses" on the verb.

------

In ZBB it has been pointed out that this basically means the major division in
noun-classes (or "genders") is between things that are capable of time-travel
and things that are not.  (For the careful, we mean things that can travel at a
non-default rate or in a non-default direction, versus things that can travel
only at the default rate and in the default direction).

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