Topic: Time

[Makxarrios]

I'm not sure if the time format that the Na'vi uses is issued or not but just want to have the time to tell others.
also the following words will be what i wanna know about the time:

morning
afternoon
evening
midnight
hour
minute
second

also please tell us how to convert Na'vi's time measure like year, day, hour, minute, second etc. into Earth's.(ask james cameron if possible cuz he's the writer of the story)

['eylan na'viyä]

i dont think they have words for minutes and hours. maybe they say something like quarter of a day, or something that resembles an action that takes about 10 minutes. maybe "yol" fits for one of these

and for short times(maybe something like a second) i think we have a word but i couldnt find it in the dict atm

i would be interested if someone is able to tell how people on earth talked about time before there were clocks

[Nyx]

How about teatime? It's very important

[Kayrìlien]

i would be interested if someone is able to tell how people on earth talked about time before there were clocks

Well, clocks have been around in some form or another for a long time. I'm no horologist, but I believe that even the ancient Egyptians and/or Sumerians used large urns filled with water that had small holes in the bottom to allow a slow, constant drainage, then measured units of time by looking at the water level compared to marks on the urn.

But even until relatively modern times, specific details about time were rather unimportant to the average person. I believe Britain standardized all their clocks in the middle of the 19th century to allow different railroads to connect with each other's schedules better, and most people just followed the natural rhythm of sunrise and sunset as they varied through the seasons until the advent of alarm clocks.

Now, because the Na'vi have so many things in their sky to look at relative to ours, plus a giant glow-in-the-dark forest, their distinctions between night and day might not be the polar opposites we tend to think of them as.

Also, I don't think the Na'vi would have extremely precise standardized divisions of the day as we do, as they really don't have the need for it. I can see a word like "hour" being adopted as a loanword (awrr, perhaps?) for a period of time roughly corresponding to the length of, say, one of Grace's school lessons, but that's a bit of a stretch.

Anyway, does anyone know what words a pre-industrial culture has for concepts such as morning, noon, evening, etc? I only speak English, bad Spanish, and worse Na'vi, so I don't really know how, say, Australian Aborigines such as the Mardu would classify time.

Kayrìlien

[Talis]

Isn't one meaning of "hì'krr" "second" ?

--> http://wiki.learnnavi.org/index.php?title=Canon#Zenke

[Keylstxatsmen]

Isn't one meaning of "hì'krr" "second" ?

--> http://wiki.learnnavi.org/index.php?title=Canon#Zenke

I think it's the other way around, sometimes "a second" means "a very short amount of time" - like "I'll be there in a second".  I don't think it corresponds to an Earth "second" as in "1-Mississippi" exactly.

I don't expect we will need or get precise hours or seconds in Na'vi, Prrton's 'Rrta time-keeping project will probably get some response from Dr. Frommer about how we should keep Earth time in Na'vi.

-Keyl

[Keylstxatsmen]

Also, and roger has already mentioned this a little bit, we have zusawkrr for "in the future", but that is not enough I don't think.  

I would like to see:

in the past
time related preposition: before, at(unless tsa- works),in(not after, but duration) for(duration as well, may be the same as "in")
old(Japanese has old for people and old for things)　for example: 年取ってる(toshi totteru - taking on years) vs 古い (furui - old - never for people) They also have a ruder word 古臭い (furukusai - "stinks of being old") They actually have tons of words, but these are some of the more interesting distinctions. 　
always(we can probably figure this one out)
forever(there is a difference)
does never (kawkrr) have a pair as with English always/forever (habitual vs absolute), English doesn't but I could see it happening.

-Keyl

[Lance R. Casey]

old(Japanese has old for people and old for things)　for example: 年取ってる(toshi totteru - taking on years) vs 古い (furui - old - never for people) They also have a ruder word 古臭い (furukusai - "stinks of being old") They actually have tons of words, but these are some of the more interesting distinctions.

Klingon differentiates between "not new" (ngo') and "not young" (qan). There is also an idiomatic usage of the latter word, which doubles as a verb meaning "use the little finger" (how Klingons regard and speak about their various digits is a whole dissertation in itself): SoHDaq jIqan I point at you with my little finger = I think you're old.

always(we can probably figure this one out)

Confirmed as frakrr.

[Prrton]

old(Japanese has old for people and old for things)　for example: 年取ってる(toshi totteru - taking on years) vs 古い (furui - old - never for people) They also have a ruder word 古臭い (furukusai - "stinks of being old") They actually have tons of words, but these are some of the more interesting distinctions.

Klingon differentiates between "not new" (ngo') and "not young" (qan). There is also an idiomatic usage of the latter word, which doubles as a verb meaning "use the little finger" (how Klingons regard and speak about their various digits is a whole dissertation in itself): SoHDaq jIqan I point at you with my little finger = I think you're old.

always(we can probably figure this one out)

Confirmed as frakrr.

"Forever" can be pretty clearly expressed (non-canonically) as frakrr a zaya'u. It's perhaps a bit poetic, but "forever" pragmatically usually is too. 

[Plumps]

In Swedish there is the concept of a future event that the speaker can influence (choses to do, intention etc.) and a future event that can't be influenced (like rain, destiny, etc.)

Our Swedish native speakers will correct me if I make a kxeyey now I haven't done Swedish in a while:

(Se) Jag kommer att dö
(En) I will die (there is nothing I can do about it)
(D) Ich werde sterben (nichts, was ich dagegen tun kann)

vs.

(Se) Jag ska dö
(En) I will die (because I chose to)
(D) Ich werde sterben (weil ich es so entschieden habe)

I thought this concept gives a richness to what is being said. I think it would be a great advantage to have something similar in Na'vi - it doesn't have to be in the future tense necessarily . . . if that can't be achieved through a word then this is probably something for the grammar section

[Meuia te Stxeli Tstew'itan]

What about before, after.

[roger]

You don't really need much for time, and some languages don't have much. If you leave now (point at sun), you'll arrive here (a couple handspans toward the horizon). "I left this morning when the sun was here." (And the same things w the moon/stars at night.) Morning/early, evening/dusk, day, middle of the day, night, but no words for yesterday or tomorrow, for month or year. (though you can say 'when the moon was full', 'when the rains came', etc.) No numbers beyond "two" apart from "many". So I think for pre-agricultural societies, there probably wasn't much concern with time, not enough to come up with temporal vocab, at least in some societies.

[Meuia te Stxeli Tstew'itan]

You don't really need much for time, and some languages don't have much. If you leave now (point at sun), you'll arrive here (a couple handspans toward the horizon). "I left this morning when the sun was here." (And the same things w the moon/stars at night.) Morning/early, evening/dusk, day, middle of the day, night, but no words for yesterday or tomorrow, for month or year. (though you can say 'when the moon was full', 'when the rains came', etc.) No numbers beyond "two" apart from "many". So I think for pre-agricultural societies, there probably wasn't much concern with time, not enough to come up with temporal vocab, at least in some societies.

No yesterday and tomorrow are very important words and where in use (or at least their concept) since very long time. We might need words for season more than a word for month, that is, if they have seasons.

[roger]

No yesterday and tomorrow are very important words and where in use (or at least their concept) since very long time. We might need words for season more than a word for month, that is, if they have seasons.

There are languages today which don't have those words. But we already have trram for Na'vi.

As for seasons, there's the half the year w Kent (Alpha Centauri B) in the night sky, and half the year without. Those would be seasons.

[Prrton]

No yesterday and tomorrow are very important words and where in use (or at least their concept) since very long time. We might need words for season more than a word for month, that is, if they have seasons.

There are languages today which don't have those words. But we already have trram for Na'vi.

As for seasons, there's the half the year w Kent (Alpha Centauri B) in the night sky, and half the year without. Those would be seasons.

It seems absolutely impossible for us to keep precise time on Earth without a system that derives somehow from 360º into our modern approach that is 12-centric. Hence, my proposal of a couple of weeks ago, which K. Pawl has and will give us feedback on when he can find/make the time. The thread is locked, but here's the original. And, tsmukan Eri did this one later, which is related...

I've seen TRRAY as confirmed by Pawl somewhere for "TOMORROW" too. If no one else has, then maybe I forgot to post it... O, I just remembered, it was confirmed verbally. Perhaps Ftiafpi wrote it somewhere. Anyway, tomorrow is «TRRAY». I would LOVE to have -ay- and -am- work for more than just verbal infixes a power roots.

[Erimeyz]

As for seasons, there's the half the year w Kent (Alpha Centauri B) in the night sky, and half the year without. Those would be seasons.

Wikipedia suggests that Kent's presence in the nighttime sky would affect how dark the night got, but not affect climate or plant photosynthesis.  What we think of as seasons would be determined by the angle of Pandora's axial tilt relative to Polyphemus' ecliptic plane, plus the latitude on Pandora that the Na'vi inhabit.  Both the nighttime illumination "seasons" and the climatic seasons would have the same year-long cycle, but their maxima may not be synchronized (i.e. the time of brightest night could also be the shortest winter day, the longest summer day, or anywhere in beetween).

  - Eri

[roger]

too bad we don't have trrìm "yesterday" and trram "the other day", but oh well.

per that article, Kent-at-night would be like a total Solar eclipse, bright enough to read by and to walk around without any problem. I wonder how bioluminescence would fare during that time: that alone might create big changes in the behavior of plants and animals. But then Pandora would be so bright as to almost drown it out, I'd think.

[Kì'eyawn]

In Swedish there is the concept of a future event that the speaker can influence (choses to do, intention etc.) and a future event that can't be influenced (like rain, destiny, etc.)

Our Swedish native speakers will correct me if I make a kxeyey now I haven't done Swedish in a while:

(Se) Jag kommer att dö
(En) I will die (there is nothing I can do about it)
(D) Ich werde sterben (nichts, was ich dagegen tun kann)

vs.

(Se) Jag ska dö
(En) I will die (because I chose to)
(D) Ich werde sterben (weil ich es so entschieden habe)

I thought this concept gives a richness to what is being said. I think it would be a great advantage to have something similar in Na'vi - it doesn't have to be in the future tense necessarily . . . if that can't be achieved through a word then this is probably something for the grammar section

I really, really like this suggestion.  I think with the way the Na'vi submit themselves to the cycles of the seasons and the "will of Eywa," they would definitely make use of this kind of distinction.

[roger]

I wonder if <ac> can be used for that, at least partially as far as the certainty goes: tayerkup vs. tayerkacup.

[Plumps]

On another note: how to say "I am (number) years old"
I came across this in this thread and remembered that the French say

(Fr) J'ai 20 ans. ("I have 20 years")
(Engl.) I am 20 (years old).
(Dt.) Ich bin 20 (Jahre alt). ("I am")

Would you need "old" in Na'vi? Some cultures say "young" instead or just "in years" (IIRC)

What happens if you wanted to say: "I will be (number) years [next week etc.]"

Depending on the construction for "I am (number) years old" will it be layu/lìyu, slayu/slìyu, payähem, tayel ...  or something completely different?
There could even be a special verb for that (cf.: be near, be angry, *be years old/young)

How do other languages/cultures handle age?