"Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)(baas.aas.org) |
"Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)(baas.aas.org) |
This article showed us none of that. Not even a single image of a zero.
I'll think about this more next week.
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".
Ereyesterday and overmorrow are perfect equivalents found in some dictionaries, but they're not exactly common.
Vorvorgestern... would be the day before the day before yesterday.
Überübermorgen... the day after the day after tomorrow.
Instead you'd simply say the German equivalent of '3 days ago', or 'in 3 days'.
The simple vorgestern and übermorgen are absolutely in common use though.
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.
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.
You can think more about that the week after.
And yet, we still struggle through life.
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero:_The_Biography_of_a_Dange...
probably not understandable to many English speakers - however archaisms might not be equally archaic in every region and dialect of English.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/couple-few-several-u...
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!
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".
Etymologically it's a past participle: three days agone (gone) => three days ago
There are some similar constructions:
- Three days hence. (archaic)
- Three days later.
- Three days beforehand.
- Three days afterwards.
I failed to think of one that didn't have to do with time.
You could think of "three days later" as being supposed to have a complement supplied to later, as in "three days later [than that]", but interestingly enough this isn't possible for "beforehand" or "afterwards".
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postscript: I think this can be conflated with a general syntactic possibility in English. I can describe an establishment as being "one floor up" from some other contextually-determined establishment, or, as with later, I can make that relationship explicit by saying "one floor up from [wherever]". This is also similar to the bog-standard measurement construction that gets you phrases like "three feet tall".
Called a ‘postposition’. And that’s precisely what ‘ago’ is!
Agglutination is a different concept.
"Preposition" is already something of an unnatural word class. They have two main functions in English: to describe some kind of location ("Sam? He's with Natasha"), and to mark certain arguments to verbs ("The tools? Sam's playing with them").
It's just a coincidence that prepositions serve both of these purposes in English; in Mandarin, the same two purposes are served by completely separate word classes. Verb argument markers are preposed; location markers are postposed.
Not really… these categories fall together in a lot of languages. It doesn’t even require prepositions: a lot of languages have case markers which can be used for both location and verbal arguments.
The specific examples you’ve given are, respectively, called the ‘comitative’ and ‘instrumental’ uses of with. These two categories are particularly prone to falling together, mostly because the boundaries between them aren’t particularly clear: for instance, if you say, I made the coffee with milk, you could say that the coffee is accompanied by the milk (comitative), but you could also say that you’re using the milk (instrumental).