tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 17 20:44:15 1994
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Dung="north" NOT
- From: mark <[email protected]>
- Subject: Dung="north" NOT
- Date: Fri, 18 Feb 94 09:35:25 EST
Not only don't we have words for groundling directions, but
there's another, much more important, reason for not drafting
vertical words (Dung, bIng) into the horizontal compass:
SPACE IS THREE-DIMENSIONAL!
You may very well have stable referents for the compass points in
space, say, Galactic N/S/E/W*. But you ALSO have your own
coordinate system in terms of your own ship: ahead, astern, port,
starboard, above, and below. And those are the most obvious uses
for 'et, 'o', poS, nIH, Dung, and bIng. You better not tell the
captain the enemy is above the ship when it's actually to
Galactic North, which may be in any direction vis-a-vis the ship.
* The North Pole of a celestial body is defined as that pole
which rotates counterclockwise with respect to the stellar
background when viewed from above. Since our Galaxy rotates on
an axis, it has a North (if not a precisely-defined pole) and the
other directions too). My astrophysicist co-worker isn't sure
that Terran astronomers use this definition for Galactic north,
but the convention is in use for planets, satellites, and such.
- marqem
Mark A. Mandel
Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : [email protected]