zarth

This is a long setup to something I find more generally interesting. I'd spoiler the duller part, but there's no convenient break in the train of thought. Sorry.

So, I invent languages as a hobby (yeah, I'm a nerd, fuck you). One of the ones I'm working on right now is spoken by equally imaginary Bronze Age nomads called "Tlan," for anyone who gives a fuck.

While developing this language, I decided that verbs (placed at the beginning of a sentence in fairly strict sentence-order) inflect only for aspect, which signifies whether an action is completed or not, rather than when it's taking place, while tense would be indicated by auxiliary verbs, which would also inflect for something called evidentiality, which indicates whether the information in the sentence was known firsthand, by hearsay, or merely conjecture.

Obviously, in this scheme (so far, anyway - it's a work in progress), there are only two aspects, and I've chosen three selections for evidentiality (caled factual, reportative, and inferential). For tenses I decided on a "proximate/nonproximate" contrast - basically referring to the present (more-or-less) and everything else (this is probably going to change, since I've now realized it was based on a faulty interpretation of some of things I was researching, but it was working alright for awhile).

So I created a series of six inflections for auxiliary verbs, for present/nonpresent and factual/reportative/inferential, and it struck me that anything that was said in the nonpresent/factual would have to be assumed to have taken place in the past, since there's no way to know anything about the future firsthand.

Now, this could lead to some heavy implications about any people speaking such a language. It would mean that they could not speak of anything even as basic as the sun rising tomorrow without presenting it as a conjecture, rather than a certainty.

At first, that struck me as profoundly alien. I felt perhaps I was going too far with the weirdness of this language, that humans couldn't really live like that. I mean, sure, when I was a kid I always wondered whether the world around me was really what it seemed or if it was just some kind of dream or alien experiment, but I always figured that the maturation process consisted, in large part, of learning to reject solipsism and take the exterior world for granted.

But I started thinking about it a little more, and I remembered that, in fact, there have been entire human civilizations based around the uncertainty of tomorrow's dawn, living in constant existential terror and driven to commit acts of unspeakable horror in a neverending effort to resist that fear. Unsurprisingly perhaps, I used to identify with those civilizations a lot.

Moreover, the idea isn't even so alien to our own culture. A secular worldview assumes a consistency to the material world. It expects that the sun will rise, the stars will keep to their courses, and shrubs won't transform into goblins in the night. It assumes this because it also assumes that any changes in these things will occur solely in accordance with predictable laws and identifiable causes - as such things have consistently done since they began being attentively observed.

But secularism is scarcely universal even in the industrialized West. There is another mode of thought, an older mode of thought, a superstitious mode of thought, to which natural causes are opaque and therefore seemingly arbitrary. In which the world is directed by unknown and unknowable authorities of apparently limitless power.

Or so it seems to me. But I realized fairly quickly that I was wrong in some essential aspect, there. A typical pious (or, perhaps more properly, a pharasaical) attitude does not regard such authorities as "unknown" at all, let alone unknowable. It's as certain, if not more certain, that its information about the "opaque" authorities which dictate reality is correct. In terms of certainty, properly considered, the Aztecs were probably more sure of their "facts" than, say, Richard Feynman was of his.

This is mysterious to me. It doesn't feel like enough to say that humans will simply invent lies to cover ignorance (and, obviously, I cannot believe that the Aztecs or any of their modern heirs are actually right). The question remains, why?

And I'm not taking some bullshit answer of "because it's more comfortable that way." That postpones the question wihout answering it, because it leads to the question of why it's "more comfortable."

Why have we evolved like that?

Anyway. That's my cerebrobabble for the day. Now go look at tits, wanker.