Friday, 7 August 2015

Temporal

"Temporal, the artificial language with which Patrolmen from all ages could communicate without being understood by strangers, was a miracle of logically organized expressiveness." (Time Patrol, p. 12)

Yet later, Merau Varagan, an enemy of the Patrol:

"...used fluent Temporal, the common speech of the Time Patrol and many civilian travelers..." (p. 657) (my emphasis)

Between p. 12 and p. 657, has the narrative moved to a different timeline where knowledge of Temporal has not been restricted to the Patrol?

We also learn that Temporal has tenses appropriate to time travel and variable reality. I would like to learn such tenses. Discussion of time travel paradoxes in English leads to confusion. Thus, World War II is in our past in our timeline (timeline 1). If we moved to the 2015 of timeline 2 where World War II never happened, then World War II would not be in our past in that timeline. But timeline 1, including its World War II, would be in the past of a second temporal dimension at right angles to the first. Thus, there would be a past tense in which it was true to say that World War II never happened and another past tense in which it would be equally true to say that World War II did happen. This is the source of some confusion in discussing the Time Patrol series.

Anderson's Technic History refers to fictional languages: Anglic; Eriau; Planha. CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy has a Solar language and some Martian languages. Lewis' Narnians speak English since human beings entered that world from ours. Tolkien created imaginary languages, then the beings that spoke them, then those beings' histories.

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