tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 06 13:30:01 1998
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Re: Exercises?
- From: "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Exercises?
- Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 09:16:44 -0400
From: Robyn Stewart <[email protected]>
>---Matthew Peperell <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>How do you differentiate between tenses?
>
>Excellent question. The answer is, by context and/or by specifying
>when it will happen. This may be strange and unnerving for an English
>speaker who can't even say most verbs without giving tense, but it's
>the way Klingon works.
>
>rejey - we will defeat you/we defeat you/we defeated you
>wa'Hu' rejey - yesterday we defeated you
>wa'leS rejey - tomorrow we will defeat you
I'd like to point out something which I think confuses some beginners. The
first of Qov's sentences, {rejey}, has been translated with three possible
tenses. This is not to say that you choose the tense you mean. {rejey}
carries absolutely no information about tense at all. It doesn't "think of
itself" in any tense, no matter what your intentions.
{wa'Hu' rejey}: Adding {wa'Hu'} does NOT make {rejey} a past-tense verb.
{rejey} still has no tense associated with it. Rather, you're giving a time
context which is being associated with a completely tenseless action.
Consider:
"Yesterday: we-you defeating."
This pseudo-sentence mentions a time ("yesterday"), the people involved
("we-you") and the action ("defeating", or "defeat"). "Defeating" by itself
does not say anything about when "defeating" takes place. It might be
later, it might be earlier, or it might be right now. But even if you
decide what *you* mean, the word "defeating" doesn't suddenly mean anything
more than it did before.
"We-you defeating."
This has no tense associated with it.
{rejey} doesn't mean "we will defeat you/we defeat you/we defeated you" so
much as it means "we-you defeating." The former seems to imply that there
is a choice of tenses. There is not. There is no tense involved with the
verb. "We-you defeating" is closer to the meaning, though it's not good
English and we cannot usually translate in this way.
Did this make sense to anybody?
SuStel
Stardate 98597.0