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"Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)

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Re: "Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)

#5

Post by thaumasiotes »

paleotrope wrote: post #4

"It is noteworthy to point out that in Spanish or English, there are no expressions of time that go any further than two days into the past or the future;" I'll think about this more next week.

I figured they were going for a distinction between words and phrases, where it's true that "yesterday" is an opaque lexical item while "next week" is a compositional phrase.

But they seem to just be buffoons:

> Mayan languages express future and past days with great ease and expanse, both into the past and towards the future. To name past and future days in my Kaqchik’el Mayan language, for example, we construct the word starting with the number of days we want to express plus a suffix implying past or future.

This sounds about as exotic as an English construction of the form "three days ago".

Re: "Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)

#6

Post by paleotrope »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #5
paleotrope wrote: post #4

"It is noteworthy to point out that in Spanish or English, there are no expressions of time that go any further than two days into the past or the future;" I'll think about this more next week.

I figured they were going for a distinction between words and phrases, where it's true that "yesterday" is an opaque lexical item while "next week" is a compositional phrase. But they seem to just be buffoons: > Mayan languages express future and past days with great ease and expanse, both into the past and towards the future. To name past and future days in my Kaqchik’el Mayan language, for example, we construct the…

How about a fortnight ago?

Re: "Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)

#7

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #5
paleotrope wrote: post #4

"It is noteworthy to point out that in Spanish or English, there are no expressions of time that go any further than two days into the past or the future;" I'll think about this more next week.

I figured they were going for a distinction between words and phrases, where it's true that "yesterday" is an opaque lexical item while "next week" is a compositional phrase. But they seem to just be buffoons: > Mayan languages express future and past days with great ease and expanse, both into the past and towards the future. To name past and future days in my Kaqchik’el Mayan language, for example, we construct the…

For some reason, it's cooler of it's agglutinative.

Re: "Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)

#8

Post by paleotrope »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #7
thaumasiotes wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figured they were going for a distinction between words and phrases, where it's true that "yesterday" is an opaque lexical item while "next week" is a compositional phrase. But they seem to just be buffoons: > Mayan languages express future and past days with great ease and expanse, both into the past and towards the future. To name past and future days in my Kaqchik’el Mayan language, for example, we construct the…

For some reason, it's cooler of it's agglutinative.

"Ago" is kind of agglutinative. In english it isn't used by itself. It's pretty much a suffix even though by convention it is it's own word.

Re: "Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)

#9

Post by thaumasiotes »

paleotrope wrote: post #8
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, it's cooler of it's agglutinative.

"Ago" is kind of agglutinative. In english it isn't used by itself. It's pretty much a suffix even though by convention it is it's own word.

There are good reasons to think of it as being a word. For example, much like the particle 's, it applies to a phrase without being at all concerned with what word it modifies. (Think "a week and a half ago"; which word would you argue "ago" is being suffixed to?)

Does this make it different in any meaningful way from an agglutinative morpheme? No, obviously not. Whether to call a language "agglutinative" is already more a question of cosmetics than facts. It reminds me of the feature tagging guidance on Universal Dependencies, which notes that no language can ever simultaneously have "gender" and "noun class" features, because they are the same thing. If there are three or fewer, the feature is called "gender"; if more, "noun class".

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