tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 02 02:57:07 1996

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pu'-pu' Platter (was Re: KLBC: jIqeqnISmo'...!)

ghItlh ghunchu'wI':

=>[checking account]wIj vIcherpu'DI' HuchwIj lulanHa'pu'.
=>
=>Note that the {pu'}s are still there. The way you interpreted the sentence 
=>before was correct; they DID misplace the money as soon as I opened the 
=account.

=Now I *am* convinced you are misusing {-pu'}.  "When I had established
=my checking account, they had misplaced my money."  This implies to me
=that the money was already misplaced by the time the account was set up.
=Your "DID" sure looks like past tense, not perfective.  That last word
=definitely shouldn't have a perfective suffix.  Without it, it translates
=as "When I had established my checking account, they misplaced my money."
=This is pretty close, but now it implies that the money was misplaced
=sometime *after* the account was set up.  Removing the other {-pu'} gives
="As soon as I established my checking account, they misplaced my money."
=I really think this has the correct meaning.

English is rife with helping verbs, and I thought I knew how to use most of 
them. C'est la spud.

Hokay. Right. I think I understand it now (shakes head slowly).

Standard condition would be neither perfective, in which case the logical way to
translate the sentence would be simple past, or perhaps present. And it works 
that way, too: "As soon as I establish the account, they misplace the money." 
However, it has to agree with the tense of the sentences before it, right? And 
that used a perfective.

The next case is first perfective, second not, as you're proposing it. "As soon 
as I had established the account, they misplace the money." I suppose this works
because the {DI'} ties the time of the second phrase to that of the first. So 
because the first is perfective, the second is aspected perfective too. Is this 
assessment right?

If both phrases are perfective, then when the first half is completed, the 
second half is already finished. And I say this is what happened: the meeting to
open the account took a certain amount of time. And by the time that time had 
elapsed, the money was already well on its way to the wrong account, not to be 
found until late the following month.

And that's why I said the double perfective was appropriate -- moreso than the 
perfective and a simple past. If there's some sort of spurious argument here, 
then please point it out to me, 'cos it's a semantic point finer than any I'm 
considering.

-- David Wood, Freelance Computer Consultant
("Freelance" is just a cheesy way of saying "Irregularly Employed")

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