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Telling time

A clock time is the numbers you already know with one word in the middle. ora stands where the colon is, and that is the whole of it — nine o'clock is noks ora.

Any time on the clock

The colon is ora

Write a time in digits, exactly as you already do. To say it, read the hour, say ora, and read the minutes. Nothing stands for "minutes" — a number after ora can only be minutes.

A time on the hour says no minutes at all: 9:00 is simply noks ora. There is no "half past", no "quarter to", and no counting down from the next hour — half past nine is 9:30, said as noks ora tets tekas.

Morning, noon, and night

Pikotika has no direct equivalent of AM/PM. Instead, either use the 24-hour clock, or say which part of the day you are in and put it in front of the time.

• suryan morning 上日
• metseyan noon, midday 中日
• yan day, daytime 日
• tunyan afternoon, evening 下日
• nemyan night 无日

Each is the sun in a position — up-sun, middle-sun, down-sun, no-sun — so they're easy to remember. suryan noks ora is nine in the morning; nemyan noks ora is nine at night.

Asking

Questions move nothing. Put ker what in the slot the answer belongs in, and the sentence is otherwise a statement.

For at what time, the standing compound is kerora what-hour, sitting where a time would sit.

To say when something happens, put the time in a prepositional phrase at the end with in, exactly as you would any other place or time.

Describing duration

A clock time is a point in the day. For a length of time, add turan interval after the amount. That one word is the whole difference: noks ora is nine o'clock, and noks ora turan is nine hours.

A minute is a parte part — a part of an hour — and a second is a pikoparte small-part. Both need turan to be a duration.

When you do not want to be exact at all, there is pikotempo small-time, a moment or a little while — and it takes no turan, being a length already.

Now, earlier, later

Three compounds place you on the timeline, and two bare roots do the rest. yer is before, ago, early and tar is after, from now, late — the same two words whether you are counting hours or apologizing for the delay.

• tistempo now 此时
• yertempo in the past 前时
• tartempo in the future 后时

These name a stretch of time, not a point in it, so they do two things the bare roots cannot. They can be what a sentence is about:

And they can open a sentence to set when it happens — which, since time is stated once and then assumed, is all the tense you need. Notice there is no verb here at all:

For counting days rather than naming an era, use yer and tar after the amount — 2 yan yer is two days ago.

Counting whole days forward and back — yantar day-after for tomorrow, 2 yan yer for two days ago — works the same way, and lives on the Dates and weekdays page with the weekday names and the months.

More examples

The numbers themselves — every digit, and how they stack up past ten — are on the Numbers page.

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