(urth) Lupiverse(es)

[Jeff Wilson]

On 3/12/2012 8:06 PM, António Pedro Marques wrote:
> In romance,
> - 'present' (praesens 'being in front of') is a present participle
> - 'past' (passatus 'passed') is a past participle
> - 'future' (futurus 'going to be') is a future participle

The ancient Greeks (among others) saw themselves as metaphorically 
looking backward in time as they moved toward the unseen future, or 
perhaps standing in a river forever looking downstream. As Antonio 
notes, their cultural inheritors, the Romans, spoke of the current 
moment, or year, or hour, as praesens, being in front of the rest. Thus 
"the present hour" has come to be known as "the present" in English, but 
the Roman's cultural inheritors, the Hispanics, diverged in their 
emphasis on the subject noun instead of the adjective, "agora" or 
"ahora", "this hour". So I think English is more likely the forgotten 
tongue, while Spanish and Portuguese are more likely to be the not-quite 
forgotten tongues connected to the inscriptions Valeria reads in the 
Atrium of Time.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >