…And now I’m thinking about the time travel conlang and how I might want that to work.
I looked up the phrase just to see if I could get inspiration from other time travel–related languages and found Mpiua Tiostouea, the language of all time. It’s got some neat concepts, though it was designed to have an… interesting… phonology and I’d definitely make some different choices—which is good! It means I won’t be copying ideas when I make my own conlang.
A conlang for time travellers needs to be able to express some complex and seemingly self-contradictory tenses. For instance, I might tell you this sentence:
“After I go to my date with the time worm, I’ll text you how it went.”
Except today is Thursday, and my date with the time worm, which I’m going to tomorrow, is Wednesday (yesterday), and I plan on jumping again afterwards, but I’m not sure in which direction or how long it’ll take me to get around to texting you, and at any rate you only experience time forwards and will certainly receive the text in the next few subjective and objective days.
…Also, while I, the person talking to you, am going to be going to the date and sending the text, I’m not dating the time worm—the date is between myself from three years into the future (as opposed to an alternate version of myself whom I never have been and never will be), I’m spying on it, and also the time worm experiences all of time simultaneously in every universe and thus has no time clones or past/future selves.
…And the groupchat has like three versions of you in it.
A properly time travel–inclusive language should encode all of these things efficiently through the use of creative agreements, pronouns, and tenses.
It should also be inclusive towards people who experience time in reverse. Not those who’ve lived backwards all their lives—they can learn any language just fine, the same way everyone else does—but people who’ve found themselves temporarily moving the wrong way through time, despite having learned the language forwards. I think this can be settled by having two acceptable word orderings—one the reflection of the other—and employing asymmetrical particles that indicate important things like proper nouns and sentences, and maybe having a necessarily asymmetrical syllable structure.
Like CV. Every syllable necessarily has one consonant followed by one vowel, unless you’re experiencing time backwards relative to your conversation partner, in which case all their speech will sound to you like every syllable is VC, and the same from you to them. That ought to work and to be simple enough that anyone, with any native language from anywhere across time, can pick it up with relative ease.
Then we get to pronouns. Mpieua Tiostoeia has an impressive set of seven grammatical persons, numbered 1–7. I understand and respect the reasoning behind such a choice (and a dedicated grammatical person for antimemes is pretty darn cool), but I’d rather go in the opposite direction:
1st person: I, the one talking to you.
1.5th person: Me, but a different instance of me than the one talking to you.
2nd person: You, the one listening to me.
2.5th person: A different instance of you than the one listening to me.
3rd person: That guy, the one I’m pointing to.
3.5th person: That guy, but an instance of them that’s not right here.
4th person: The time worm, which experiences all of time and the multiverse simultaneously.…Which coincidentally is also seven grammatical persons.
Due to the need to stress subjective and objective time experience for multiple entities, basically everything that can take agreement will agree with the person and gender of whatever it can agree with—most crucially, verbs, which might include tense markings that have to agree with any number of people:
“I’m having a party with these guys last week, do you want to come?”
Where I’m going to the party in the future and inviting you to come along in your subjective future (while acknowledging you may have already been), but some of the people I’m gesturing to have already been to the party and others have yet to go. Also one of them is the time worm. I think this party might be where we met… will meet.. whichever. Both.
Now, when I say gender, I don’t mean male vs. female. Time travellers can come from any timeline. Some of them have only one acknowledged gender. Others have three. A few have as many as sixteen, or even more. Some of them plot gender on a four-dimensional spectrum encoded in the phonology of their gender pronouns. The only way to please everyone’s idea of what gender trappings deserve encodement is to encode them all equally—that is to say, not at all.
Besides, we’re all time travellers here. I don’t need to specify how you identify with each word. I want to know if this is you, or your future self, or your evil alternate universe self. That’s the kind of gender I’m concerned with.
Which means you can have a mixed-gender group (the three versions of you in the groupchat) that needs to be referred to with… essentially, it’d be something like you (2sg) and you (2.5pl), where you (2.5pl) is gendered both for your past self and for your alternate universe self, which are two different genders.
I think this ought to be my next conlang project. It’s been way too long since I really got into one—right now, Yvelse is my only conlang that’s not either dead or been in cold storage for the past year+.