tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jan 04 20:36:47 1998

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Re: Translation of English Past and Present Perfect Tenses inKlingon

I'm joining this discussion a bit late, but I think I can add something.

ja' mIHayl:
>On this list I have seen this idea expressed many times, namely that ñpuí
>should only be translated by an English perfect tense, not an English past
>tense, and that an English past tense should not have ñpuí but should be
>figured out from context.

[I'm having difficulty reading through the unusual quote characters, but I
think I can figure out what you mean.]

The idea is not that {-pu'} should always be *translated* with perfective,
but that it always *means* perfective aspect.  Sometimes a translation can
be smoother with the English simple past tense, but {-pu'} never implies
past tense automatically.

>It seems clear to me that Marc Okrand intended that although the Klingon
>verb uses aspect rather than tense, for all practical purposes, the ñpuí
>and ñtaí aspect markers can in nearly every case be translated into English
>as either a simple past or present perfect, as his own translation clearly
>show.

Translations are funny things.  The same idea can be expressed using many
different collections of words.  Without more context, perfective aspect
and past tense are similar:  "my clock stopped" and "my clock has stopped"
aren't all that different in meaning.  But as soon as you specify the time
which you are considering, the meaning changes noticably: "my clock stopped
this morning" and "my clock had stopped this morning" are quite distinct.

>And conversely, when translating an English past tense into Klingon,
>the ñpuí or ñtaí aspect marker should be used.  There is no justification in
>the published books on Klingon for translating an English past tense into
>Klingon without using ñpuí or ñtaí.

I have found nothing in "the published books" that mentions anything about
translating English past tense into Klingon.  Indeed, TKD 4.2.7 explicitly
says "Klingon does not express tenses (past, present, future)."  If your
idea is merely past tense, with no implication of perfective aspect, then
there's no justification for using {-pu'} or {-ta'}.

You've already been told of the {wa'Hu' jIghung} "yesterday I was hungry"
example from Conversational Klingon.  Accept it as clarification of the
[apparently less than perfectly clear to you] description in TKD.

-- ghunchu'wI'

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