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"Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)
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- paleotrope 2y ago"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.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoI 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".
- paleotrope 2y agoHow about a fortnight ago?
- episteme 2y agoYeah, or next month, next year, next decade..
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoFor some reason, it's cooler of it's agglutinative.
- paleotrope 2y ago"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.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoThere 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".
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoIt applies to week-and-a-half, which is a phrase only because there's not a word like fortnight means "two weeks"...
- thaumasiotes 2y agoIt applies to a phrase in all cases. If you don't like "a week and a half", you should rethink your approach to the problem, but you can still consider examples like "five years and fifteen days ago".
- bloak 2y agoIt's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang) Etymologically it's a past participle: three days agone (gone) => three days ago
- baxtr 2y agoYou’ll forgot about it in 2 days.
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoI think the distinction is that "2 days" is a composite which could also be constructed as "5 days", "91 days", etc. There's no specific single word that cannot be modified which means exactly "2 days", like "uebermorgen" which specifically means "the day after tomorrow". You cannot have "5 uebermorgen", for contrast.
- amelius 2y agoueber-ueber-ueber-ueber-morgen?
- jeroenhd 2y agoThe distinction between the use of "ago" and compositional words that this text makes doesn't make much sense to me, but I do find the lack of a common word for "the day before yesterday" and "the day after tomorrow" quite jarring when my native language has a common word for it. Ereyesterday and overmorrow are perfect equivalents found in some dictionaries, but they're not exactly common.
- Quekid5 2y agoYesteryear is also one I've actually heard used. (But again, not exactly common.)
- OJFord 2y agoFor abstract times gone by though right? I've never heard it used to mean specifically 'last year'. (And in fact typically much more than just one year ago, not including it.)
- Kye 2y agoI stopped making assumptions about what terms people see as abstract and which they see as concrete when I found out not everyone understands a few as three. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/couple-few-several-use https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/couple-few-several-u... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37722244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37722244
- OJFord 2y agoNot exactly three though, just not less. If I send you to the shop for a few beers, you've got to return with a concrete number. Maybe 4 cans, because that's how they're sold, or maybe 3 bottles because there was a 3 for £5 deal. Or maybe you come back with a whole case because it caught your eye, and I say Woah hey you got several!
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- bryanrasmussen 2y agoI believe expressions in this case means words that refer to the concept, they are however wrong because I will be thinking about it in a fortnight.
- NoboruWataya 2y ago"In a fortnight" is not a word, obviously we have words that refer to lengths of time greater than two days, but I think the point is that we have no single word to describe the day that is a fortnight from now. One thing I found mildly interesting about the distinction between English and Spanish is that English has "tonight" but no single word for "last night", whereas in Spanish it's the opposite.
- superhuzza 2y agoThere is "yestereve" but it's archaic and never used. Despite not being used, totally understandable to English speakers.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoand overmorrow probably not understandable to many English speakers - however archaisms might not be equally archaic in every region and dialect of English.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agohmm, you're right. I would probably have realized it myself in a triduum.
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- linearrust 2y agoProbably a legacy of primitive humans only being able to count to 2. Such limitations are reflected in our language. Hence why we have 'half' rather than 'twoth'. You can think more about that the week after.
- zdragnar 2y agoEnglish also doesn't have dedicated words for various familiar relationships, unlike some other languages. Older / younger brother, father's eldest brother, neighbors cousins friends neighbors dog, that sort of thing. And yet, we still struggle through life.
- 082349872349872 2y ago(Some) australian aboriginal groups "wrap around" their kinship terms, so they can use a finite (but unbounded) set of dedicated words for arbitrarily complex relationship paths. In particular, the example which led me to learn about this system was someone traversing something like "neighbour's cousin's friend's neighbour's adopted corella" and addressing him (once translated into english) as "uncle". https://yidakistory.com/yolngu-malk-or-skin-names/ https://yidakistory.com/yolngu-malk-or-skin-names/
- anthk 2y agoAs a Spaniard we used to have a word for '3 days ago':
- dtagames 2y agoI always find these articles about highly visual subjects that don't show any images to be a little bit under-researched. The Maya language and numeral system is fascinating in part because of its visual beauty. Maya text and design elements are widely incorporated into architecture and media in the region, even today. This article showed us none of that. Not even a single image of a zero.
- hobs 2y agoCheck out Figure 1 again, it definitely has one.
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- sbarre 2y agoMaybe only slightly on topic, years ago I highly enjoyed this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero:_The_Biography_of_a_Dangerous_Idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero:_The_Biography_of_a_Dange...