"Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021) | Hacker News Reader

"Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)

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66 pointsshawndumas39 comments

I always find these articles about highly visual subjects that don't show any images to be a little bit under-researched. The Maya language and numeral system is fascinating in part because of its visual beauty. Maya text and design elements are widely incorporated into architecture and media in the region, even today.

This article showed us none of that. Not even a single image of a zero.

Check out Figure 1 again, it definitely has one.

"It is noteworthy to point out that in Spanish or English, there are no expressions of time that go any further than two days into the past or the future;"

I'll think about this more next week.

I figured they were going for a distinction between words and phrases, where it's true that "yesterday" is an opaque lexical item while "next week" is a compositional phrase.

But they seem to just be buffoons:

> Mayan languages express future and past days with great ease and expanse, both into the past and towards the future. To name past and future days in my Kaqchik’el Mayan language, for example, we construct the word starting with the number of days we want to express plus a suffix implying past or future.

This sounds about as exotic as an English construction of the form "three days ago".

How about a fortnight ago?

Yeah, or next month, next year, next decade..

For some reason, it's cooler of it's agglutinative.

"Ago" is kind of agglutinative. In english it isn't used by itself. It's pretty much a suffix even though by convention it is it's own word.

There are good reasons to think of it as being a word. For example, much like the particle 's, it applies to a phrase without being at all concerned with what word it modifies. (Think "a week and a half ago"; which word would you argue "ago" is being suffixed to?)

Does this make it different in any meaningful way from an agglutinative morpheme? No, obviously not. Whether to call a language "agglutinative" is already more a question of cosmetics than facts. It reminds me of the feature tagging guidance on Universal Dependencies, which notes that no language can ever simultaneously have "gender" and "noun class" features, because they are the same thing. If there are three or fewer, the feature is called "gender"; if more, "noun class".

It applies to week-and-a-half, which is a phrase only because there's not a word like fortnight means "two weeks"...

It applies to a phrase in all cases. If you don't like "a week and a half", you should rethink your approach to the problem, but you can still consider examples like "five years and fifteen days ago".

It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang)

Etymologically it's a past participle: three days agone (gone) => three days ago

> It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang)

There are some similar constructions:

- Three days hence. (archaic)

- Three days later.

- Three days beforehand.

- Three days afterwards.

I failed to think of one that didn't have to do with time.

You could think of "three days later" as being supposed to have a complement supplied to later, as in "three days later [than that]", but interestingly enough this isn't possible for "beforehand" or "afterwards".

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postscript: I think this can be conflated with a general syntactic possibility in English. I can describe an establishment as being "one floor up" from some other contextually-determined establishment, or, as with later, I can make that relationship explicit by saying "one floor up from [wherever]". This is also similar to the bog-standard measurement construction that gets you phrases like "three feet tall".

I like your antipenultimate example

Three days later? What about it?

> It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it.

Called a ‘postposition’. And that’s precisely what ‘ago’ is!

The nonjudgmental term of art appears to be "adposition". It isn't clear to me why this was coined as "adposition" and not "apposition".

"Preposition" is already something of an unnatural word class. They have two main functions in English: to describe some kind of location ("Sam? He's with Natasha"), and to mark certain arguments to verbs ("The tools? Sam's playing with them").

It's just a coincidence that prepositions serve both of these purposes in English; in Mandarin, the same two purposes are served by completely separate word classes. Verb argument markers are preposed; location markers are postposed.

> It's just a coincidence that prepositions serve both of these purposes in English

Not really… these categories fall together in a lot of languages. It doesn’t even require prepositions: a lot of languages have case markers which can be used for both location and verbal arguments.

The specific examples you’ve given are, respectively, called the ‘comitative’ and ‘instrumental’ uses of with. These two categories are particularly prone to falling together, mostly because the boundaries between them aren’t particularly clear: for instance, if you say, I made the coffee with milk, you could say that the coffee is accompanied by the milk (comitative), but you could also say that you’re using the milk (instrumental).

In linguistics, such usage is called collocation.

Agglutination is a different concept.

You’ll forgot about it in 2 days.

I think the distinction is that "2 days" is a composite which could also be constructed as "5 days", "91 days", etc.

There's no specific single word that cannot be modified which means exactly "2 days", like "uebermorgen" which specifically means "the day after tomorrow". You cannot have "5 uebermorgen", for contrast.

ueber-ueber-ueber-ueber-morgen?

The distinction between the use of "ago" and compositional words that this text makes doesn't make much sense to me, but I do find the lack of a common word for "the day before yesterday" and "the day after tomorrow" quite jarring when my native language has a common word for it.

Ereyesterday and overmorrow are perfect equivalents found in some dictionaries, but they're not exactly common.

Yesteryear is also one I've actually heard used. (But again, not exactly common.)

For abstract times gone by though right? I've never heard it used to mean specifically 'last year'. (And in fact typically much more than just one year ago, not including it.)

I stopped making assumptions about what terms people see as abstract and which they see as concrete when I found out not everyone understands a few as three.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/couple-few-several-u...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37722244

Not exactly three though, just not less.

If I send you to the shop for a few beers, you've got to return with a concrete number. Maybe 4 cans, because that's how they're sold, or maybe 3 bottles because there was a 3 for £5 deal. Or maybe you come back with a whole case because it caught your eye, and I say Woah hey you got several!

I daresay the statistics still favour one side or the other though for most words, even if it's not a whitewash (I also view yesteryear as an abstract time in the past, for instance).

Theoretically, in German you can stack the prefix, but it's also not exactly common (everybody would know what you mean though).

Vorvorgestern... would be the day before the day before yesterday.

Überübermorgen... the day after the day after tomorrow.

Instead you'd simply say the German equivalent of '3 days ago', or 'in 3 days'.

The simple vorgestern and übermorgen are absolutely in common use though.

I believe expressions in this case means words that refer to the concept, they are however wrong because I will be thinking about it in a fortnight.

"In a fortnight" is not a word, obviously we have words that refer to lengths of time greater than two days, but I think the point is that we have no single word to describe the day that is a fortnight from now.

One thing I found mildly interesting about the distinction between English and Spanish is that English has "tonight" but no single word for "last night", whereas in Spanish it's the opposite.

There is "yestereve" but it's archaic and never used. Despite not being used, totally understandable to English speakers.

and overmorrow

probably not understandable to many English speakers - however archaisms might not be equally archaic in every region and dialect of English.

hmm, you're right. I would probably have realized it myself in a triduum.

Probably a legacy of primitive humans only being able to count to 2. Such limitations are reflected in our language. Hence why we have 'half' rather than 'twoth'.

You can think more about that the week after.

English also doesn't have dedicated words for various familiar relationships, unlike some other languages. Older / younger brother, father's eldest brother, neighbors cousins friends neighbors dog, that sort of thing.

And yet, we still struggle through life.

(Some) australian aboriginal groups "wrap around" their kinship terms, so they can use a finite (but unbounded) set of dedicated words for arbitrarily complex relationship paths.

In particular, the example which led me to learn about this system was someone traversing something like "neighbour's cousin's friend's neighbour's adopted corella" and addressing him (once translated into english) as "uncle".

https://yidakistory.com/yolngu-malk-or-skin-names/

As a Spaniard we used to have a word for '3 days ago':

Maybe only slightly on topic, years ago I highly enjoyed this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero:_The_Biography_of_a_Dange...

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