Notice how in paleontology eras are sometimes referred to in vertical terms (Upper / Lower Triassic) instead of the more common earlier/later. When you dig for fossils, old is naturally down, I guess.
I have a race of fairies in my world that write from bottom to top (based on the script of Ogham) and think of time as being like a tree sprouting out of the ground, a lot like this. They also think of things as being more important if they're below rather than above (since things on the bottom of a page are read first) which is really hard to wrap my brain around. They hang special clothes of their dead (long story) on a big sacred tree when they die, and the lower branches are reserved for royalty while the upper branches are for peasants. Their gods live underground, and even though they can shapeshift they usually choose to be fairy-sized to be closer to the earth and their gods rather than being like big, clumsy, lofty humans. Fairies in my world don't have wings, but pixies do and fairies think less of them because of it.
Obviously this reply is very late, but we can tell how late the night is (and thus how long we’ve been sleeping) by looking at the position of the moon. So perhaps their understanding of time could be based on the movement of the moon? Since the end of a dream would be around when you wake up, which is when the moon is setting. You could have early in time (so the past) be to the east, the present be above, and the future be to the west (or opposite if they live in their planet’s southern hemisphere). So a “long time” could be a “west time”. You could also use height in the sky to specify how far in the future or past. “High west time” would be a fairly long time whereas “Low west time” could be a very long time. If they are aware that the earth is a sphere and that the moon orbits it, perhaps time could instead be measured in position around the circumference of a circle. That could be interesting to map points in time to different angles around the unit circle As an alternative you could build your perception of time around the literal time of day, if people see their future in dreams then the future is the night and the past is the day, with the present being dawn/dusk.
God you put in so much more effort than I ever could with language. Even when the protagonist of my story is literally from our world and was initially meant to learn the language of the people she finds herself among I decide to cheese it with them just having a way to give her auto-translate, even if it also causes her to be temporarily physically disabled and experience identity problems. It's a wonderful idea.
That sounds like a cool story... Having to give up part of yourself to understand a language :o Tbh I don't put that much effort in, I just focus on the parts that interest me. Like, the Elush phonology is very vague and basic because phonology isn't that interesting to me. The blog miniatureconlangs is interesting cause the writer talks a lot about putting together a language, particularly grammar and syntax, while very rarely using words from it, just because that isn't interesting to them.
@@NakariSpeardane To be honest... yeah. I find language and things related to it interesting to hear from other people, like watching this video, but when actually making it myself it almost puts me to sleep. oh she isn't disabled like in terms of losing a limb or anything like that, although she does get a broken leg. The process she goes through is: - Get a Jarlet (magic family, abilities only inherited mother-to-child, mostly relating to memories and blood) who is available to do it. - Both take some ol' los drogas - Jarlet takes some of the ol' los drogas mixed with MC's blood - Wait half an hour - MC also takes some ol' los drogas mixed with that Jarlet's blood The process was kinda experimental and worked by copying the Jarlet's second instinct (things you can do without really thinking about it, like grabbing something, speaking your language, etc) onto Sarah, although it was only meant to copy language. Sarah ended up with contradicting muscle memory when it came to her movement since the Jarlet in question was a 13-year-old and one with an amputated leg at that. Because this new muscle memory, constantly at odds with her original muscle memory, was now embedded just as deeply as her old muscle memory she was effectively disabled for about a month and still clumsy for a further month, all while having to constantly move her body, running around and immediately falling over, to re-train herself to her body as otherwise these problems could've easily lasted a year or two, even as she broke her leg during one of her exercises. Also gets an identity crisis because she's pretty sure she's forgetting English, she starts having dreams from the POVs of long-dead Jarlets, she gets simultaneous contradicting impulses and emotional reactions to things based on how she'd react vs how the Jarlet would react (for example: human sacrifice. Sarah is horrified, but another part of her feels a bit of joy and is hungry, because the Jarlet Sarah went through the procedure with is a ritualistic cannibal).
@@jimothyworldbuilding3664 this is like very much later than when you commented this but just saying that sounds so so cool!! how is your story going now :)?
@@meowden It's unironically going really well. You've replied right as I've put up an unlisted version of a video about one of the groups of the setting that I'm going to publish after giving it proper images and everything lmao. It will be the first of many videos I'll be voicing myself and making actually-somewhat-decent now that my throat's recovered from a cheeky bit of surgery. ruclips.net/video/MEfpxbgUW-8/видео.html
@@jimothyworldbuilding3664 that is so cool man!! wish you the best of luck with everything and your worldbuilding, I'll definitely keep watching your epic videos B)!!!! I watched/listened to what you put up and it's so interesting and also your humor is great X))
This up/down view of time is super intuitive, if you think about it. The the direction of influence is one way, like gravity: the past determines the present and future, but the airy future has little pull on the past. Time builds on what came before. The living stand on the shoulders of their ancestors, a people build on the history of their founders.
@@NakariSpeardane I’ve got one more I didn’t include because I’m not sure it fits: the change of the future comes from above, while the static past rests below. All the energy to create change comes down from the sun above. Winds, rain, tides, and seasons all seem to follow the dancing lights above. The changes they bring creates perceivable time on the skin of the present world, making it alive, giving it the ability to change form. Whenever a thing stops moving, it’s form becomes set and it gets buried by time, it becomes the immovable past.
In my worldbuilding project, the main culture is a group of insectoid aliens that construct underground hives. So in their minds the past is above and the future is below, and to move forward in time to us is to move down in time to them
The time and effort that must go into these videos needs way more recognition, this is high quality worldbuilding :D I love hearing your take on things, makes me think about concepts I never would have for my own worlds. You're doing a great job, I hope the drive that keeps you going doesn't stop!
I feel like the Elush would have some sort of layered cake or dish served at life cycle events representing layered time and with each life cycle event another layer is added
I love that you used the metaphors at the end of the video. It was such a small thing but it made me smile the way you use it so casually. It was like I had just finished a conversation with someone explaining their culture and they were bidding me farewell.
Great vid as always! I’ve never thought too in-depth about this stuff before, so thanks for the -food for thought- (You’re probably gunna get that joke a lot). Elush continues to fascinate me to no end! On another note, another WBuildin’ youtuber I watch recently got the plague and hasn’t been able to make videos, but has asked people to try to get him in touch with some other Ytubers in the meantime. The channel is Joriam Ramos and does a great series called Worldbuilding Tower, I’m sure -if you haven’t already heard of it- you’ll love it and he’s just so damn full of cheery vibes.
Might mountains have the mythology of being settlements of the ancients or of giants? With burial and Tel building, perhaps the idea of returning to the earth may be the concept of the afterlife
It's really neat to not only learn more about other cultures, real or fictional, but also how other cultures see yours. As a Chinese person (though culturally a bit “white-washed”) it never occurred to me that seeing time as going up to down as a thing that other cultures might not do, even though I'm more fluent in English. Speaking of the importance of the River Yangtze, a lot of classical Chinese poets, especially Tang poets, use the motif of a river flowing out to sea as a metaphor for the passage of time, especially in the context of time being irreversible and not reclaimable, since water having reached the sea cannot flow back upstream.
what a fantastic time concept! and the metaphors feel so intuitive too, while also having such a clear flavor to them. i just recently discovered your channel and i'm really enjoying going through all your videos - the amount of thought and detail you put into your worldbuilding is inspirational.
loved this video ! i think how time is conceptualised and talked about in different languages is such an interesting topic. it's difficult to come up with interesting takes on this for conlangs, but you definitely did !
Oh. I also did a 'Fullness' for various concepts of a [Process>Vessel/Segment] being complete, including time, but also numbers (i.e. 10 is "full" and overflows into the next space). One arising association from that was suggesting an idea might be "leaking" because it isn't outputting or holding together as suggested. It's useful framing for conceiving of closed systems and such reaching an identifiable end-point. Psycholinguistics and the associative aspects of language are really neat.
I wonder if they would use the term digging up the past the way we do. I feel like the phrase would have more grave robbing connotations and would be used to describe meddling or disrupting the past or tradition.
I’m super late on this video, but it would be really interesting if the different metaphors came from a past, disconnected people. If everyone had the house metaphor, but some groups used plants and some used containers, maybe wetter regions used plants, drier regions used containers. Over time these mixed, and they were left with a unified culture that mostly uses the house/container idea, but occasionally uses the plant idea in especially old phrases. Maybe some of those words or phrases don’t even clearly relate to plants anymore as the language adapted over time. Kind of like French and German derived words in English, especially animals and food.
I just found your channel and have just binged everything. Your work is really great and has helped me a lot with my own worldbuilding. Personally I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to go about seasons. What they should be named, how long they last and how does that impact a culture. Stuff like that.
your illustrations look so good! Also it would be kinda cool if people referred to time as if each day was a log of wood burning, just a weird idea i had.
digging being this languged equivilented to triggering like ptsd or maybe triggers could be like toxic dangerous plants that sprout up when you walk over them
Do they live in a planet? If they do, do they know they live in one? Because maybe they might believe the ground below goes down infinitely, and downtime is infinite too. So in their culture, there might not be a starting point (maybe). Or maybe, the opposite. Time is finite, and so the ground below (but I think that conceptually this is less interesting).
Faith in the the Bible is compared to a plant when Jesus says :if you have faith as small as a little mustard seed and do not doubt you can say to this mountain be removed and cast into the sea, and it will be done for you. Amazing connections
Really intriguing idea. I wonder if they'd have a proverb like "when we reach the sky" signifying the far future.
Something like "Deep down and far away"
Every person in a school.
“This day is over flowing.”
Notice how in paleontology eras are sometimes referred to in vertical terms (Upper / Lower Triassic) instead of the more common earlier/later. When you dig for fossils, old is naturally down, I guess.
damn that is actually quite interesting ! never thought about it before
I have a race of fairies in my world that write from bottom to top (based on the script of Ogham) and think of time as being like a tree sprouting out of the ground, a lot like this.
They also think of things as being more important if they're below rather than above (since things on the bottom of a page are read first) which is really hard to wrap my brain around. They hang special clothes of their dead (long story) on a big sacred tree when they die, and the lower branches are reserved for royalty while the upper branches are for peasants. Their gods live underground, and even though they can shapeshift they usually choose to be fairy-sized to be closer to the earth and their gods rather than being like big, clumsy, lofty humans. Fairies in my world don't have wings, but pixies do and fairies think less of them because of it.
I have a group of people whose whole thing is seeing the future in dreams, now I'm completely at a loss for how they would see time
Obviously this reply is very late, but we can tell how late the night is (and thus how long we’ve been sleeping) by looking at the position of the moon. So perhaps their understanding of time could be based on the movement of the moon? Since the end of a dream would be around when you wake up, which is when the moon is setting.
You could have early in time (so the past) be to the east, the present be above, and the future be to the west (or opposite if they live in their planet’s southern hemisphere). So a “long time” could be a “west time”. You could also use height in the sky to specify how far in the future or past. “High west time” would be a fairly long time whereas “Low west time” could be a very long time.
If they are aware that the earth is a sphere and that the moon orbits it, perhaps time could instead be measured in position around the circumference of a circle. That could be interesting to map points in time to different angles around the unit circle
As an alternative you could build your perception of time around the literal time of day, if people see their future in dreams then the future is the night and the past is the day, with the present being dawn/dusk.
God you put in so much more effort than I ever could with language. Even when the protagonist of my story is literally from our world and was initially meant to learn the language of the people she finds herself among I decide to cheese it with them just having a way to give her auto-translate, even if it also causes her to be temporarily physically disabled and experience identity problems.
It's a wonderful idea.
That sounds like a cool story... Having to give up part of yourself to understand a language :o
Tbh I don't put that much effort in, I just focus on the parts that interest me. Like, the Elush phonology is very vague and basic because phonology isn't that interesting to me. The blog miniatureconlangs is interesting cause the writer talks a lot about putting together a language, particularly grammar and syntax, while very rarely using words from it, just because that isn't interesting to them.
@@NakariSpeardane
To be honest... yeah. I find language and things related to it interesting to hear from other people, like watching this video, but when actually making it myself it almost puts me to sleep.
oh she isn't disabled like in terms of losing a limb or anything like that, although she does get a broken leg. The process she goes through is:
- Get a Jarlet (magic family, abilities only inherited mother-to-child, mostly relating to memories and blood) who is available to do it.
- Both take some ol' los drogas
- Jarlet takes some of the ol' los drogas mixed with MC's blood
- Wait half an hour
- MC also takes some ol' los drogas mixed with that Jarlet's blood
The process was kinda experimental and worked by copying the Jarlet's second instinct (things you can do without really thinking about it, like grabbing something, speaking your language, etc) onto Sarah, although it was only meant to copy language.
Sarah ended up with contradicting muscle memory when it came to her movement since the Jarlet in question was a 13-year-old and one with an amputated leg at that. Because this new muscle memory, constantly at odds with her original muscle memory, was now embedded just as deeply as her old muscle memory she was effectively disabled for about a month and still clumsy for a further month, all while having to constantly move her body, running around and immediately falling over, to re-train herself to her body as otherwise these problems could've easily lasted a year or two, even as she broke her leg during one of her exercises.
Also gets an identity crisis because she's pretty sure she's forgetting English, she starts having dreams from the POVs of long-dead Jarlets, she gets simultaneous contradicting impulses and emotional reactions to things based on how she'd react vs how the Jarlet would react (for example: human sacrifice. Sarah is horrified, but another part of her feels a bit of joy and is hungry, because the Jarlet Sarah went through the procedure with is a ritualistic cannibal).
@@jimothyworldbuilding3664 this is like very much later than when you commented this but just saying that sounds so so cool!! how is your story going now :)?
@@meowden It's unironically going really well. You've replied right as I've put up an unlisted version of a video about one of the groups of the setting that I'm going to publish after giving it proper images and everything lmao. It will be the first of many videos I'll be voicing myself and making actually-somewhat-decent now that my throat's recovered from a cheeky bit of surgery.
ruclips.net/video/MEfpxbgUW-8/видео.html
@@jimothyworldbuilding3664 that is so cool man!! wish you the best of luck with everything and your worldbuilding, I'll definitely keep watching your epic videos B)!!!! I watched/listened to what you put up and it's so interesting and also your humor is great X))
This up/down view of time is super intuitive, if you think about it. The the direction of influence is one way, like gravity: the past determines the present and future, but the airy future has little pull on the past.
Time builds on what came before. The living stand on the shoulders of their ancestors, a people build on the history of their founders.
I hadn't even thought of the connection with gravity - great point!
@@NakariSpeardane I’ve got one more I didn’t include because I’m not sure it fits: the change of the future comes from above, while the static past rests below.
All the energy to create change comes down from the sun above. Winds, rain, tides, and seasons all seem to follow the dancing lights above. The changes they bring creates perceivable time on the skin of the present world, making it alive, giving it the ability to change form. Whenever a thing stops moving, it’s form becomes set and it gets buried by time, it becomes the immovable past.
I was about to shout out Aymara, glad you did
In my worldbuilding project, the main culture is a group of insectoid aliens that construct underground hives. So in their minds the past is above and the future is below, and to move forward in time to us is to move down in time to them
That makes so much sense with their culture :D great idea!
The time and effort that must go into these videos needs way more recognition, this is high quality worldbuilding :D I love hearing your take on things, makes me think about concepts I never would have for my own worlds. You're doing a great job, I hope the drive that keeps you going doesn't stop!
Thank you so much!! :D I also hope it won't stop but I'm enjoying making these so it shouldn't any time soon!
Metaphors are some of my favorite aspects of language, very cool to see how a culture views the world through them!
I feel like the Elush would have some sort of layered cake or dish served at life cycle events representing layered time and with each life cycle event another layer is added
I love that you used the metaphors at the end of the video. It was such a small thing but it made me smile the way you use it so casually. It was like I had just finished a conversation with someone explaining their culture and they were bidding me farewell.
This was a really good video and give a lot of food for thought.
i see what you did there :3
Great vid as always! I’ve never thought too in-depth about this stuff before, so thanks for the -food for thought- (You’re probably gunna get that joke a lot).
Elush continues to fascinate me to no end!
On another note, another WBuildin’ youtuber I watch recently got the plague and hasn’t been able to make videos, but has asked people to try to get him in touch with some other Ytubers in the meantime. The channel is Joriam Ramos and does a great series called Worldbuilding Tower, I’m sure -if you haven’t already heard of it- you’ll love it and he’s just so damn full of cheery vibes.
Thank you, I'll check him out! :D
Might mountains have the mythology of being settlements of the ancients or of giants? With burial and Tel building, perhaps the idea of returning to the earth may be the concept of the afterlife
glad I watched all the way to the flowering of this video, it was well worth it :)
The past is in front of you. That is why you can see it but you can't see the future.
It's really neat to not only learn more about other cultures, real or fictional, but also how other cultures see yours. As a Chinese person (though culturally a bit “white-washed”) it never occurred to me that seeing time as going up to down as a thing that other cultures might not do, even though I'm more fluent in English. Speaking of the importance of the River Yangtze, a lot of classical Chinese poets, especially Tang poets, use the motif of a river flowing out to sea as a metaphor for the passage of time, especially in the context of time being irreversible and not reclaimable, since water having reached the sea cannot flow back upstream.
what a fantastic time concept! and the metaphors feel so intuitive too, while also having such a clear flavor to them. i just recently discovered your channel and i'm really enjoying going through all your videos - the amount of thought and detail you put into your worldbuilding is inspirational.
Would it be possible for tenses to be expressed in 3D terms?
The video was enlightening in how everyone is the same in their own different way.
loved this video ! i think how time is conceptualised and talked about in different languages is such an interesting topic. it's difficult to come up with interesting takes on this for conlangs, but you definitely did !
"babe wake up Nakari just dropped new Elush lore"
Good work, Nakari!
I get so excited whenever a new vid of yours is released!
There’s a reverse example in English; before meant and still means “in front of” in some contexts
Oh yeah! I LOVE these videos!
Oh. I also did a 'Fullness' for various concepts of a [Process>Vessel/Segment] being complete, including time, but also numbers (i.e. 10 is "full" and overflows into the next space). One arising association from that was suggesting an idea might be "leaking" because it isn't outputting or holding together as suggested. It's useful framing for conceiving of closed systems and such reaching an identifiable end-point. Psycholinguistics and the associative aspects of language are really neat.
I love your worldbuildings videos so much!!!!
Definitely looking more into conceptual metaphors, never even thought about things like that with speech. Thanks for another insightful video!
Wooo, another Nakari video!
I wonder if they would use the term digging up the past the way we do. I feel like the phrase would have more grave robbing connotations and would be used to describe meddling or disrupting the past or tradition.
You can try and separate yourself from your past by digging it up, but that still leaves a hole...
@@NakariSpeardane ohh I like this too, it feels like the framework for a good cautionary fairytale
Thank you SO MUCH for this video!
Fascinating ways to think about time!
got yourself a new subscriber mate. knew Aymara would be up from the banner, but liked the video nonetheless
I love your videos, every single one is such a treat!
I’m super late on this video, but it would be really interesting if the different metaphors came from a past, disconnected people. If everyone had the house metaphor, but some groups used plants and some used containers, maybe wetter regions used plants, drier regions used containers. Over time these mixed, and they were left with a unified culture that mostly uses the house/container idea, but occasionally uses the plant idea in especially old phrases. Maybe some of those words or phrases don’t even clearly relate to plants anymore as the language adapted over time. Kind of like French and German derived words in English, especially animals and food.
I just found your channel and have just binged everything. Your work is really great and has helped me a lot with my own worldbuilding. Personally I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to go about seasons. What they should be named, how long they last and how does that impact a culture. Stuff like that.
great video! never knew about these concepts, thank you!
beautiful 😌
your illustrations look so good! Also it would be kinda cool if people referred to time as if each day was a log of wood burning, just a weird idea i had.
SO COOL!!!
digging being this languged equivilented to triggering like ptsd or maybe triggers could be like toxic dangerous plants that sprout up when you walk over them
Awesome!
oh cool a new video!
Looking up or down when talking about events would probably become instincutal habits for the Elush people!
english does this sometimes! for example, the "upper" vs "lower" palelithic for the later and earlier paleolithic
Yess! That inspired this a little :D
Do they live in a planet? If they do, do they know they live in one? Because maybe they might believe the ground below goes down infinitely, and downtime is infinite too. So in their culture, there might not be a starting point (maybe). Or maybe, the opposite. Time is finite, and so the ground below (but I think that conceptually this is less interesting).
Algorithm boost!
yay im early
Faith in the the Bible is compared to a plant when Jesus says :if you have faith as small as a little mustard seed and do not doubt you can say to this mountain be removed and cast into the sea, and it will be done for you. Amazing connections