tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jul 16 01:03:25 1998

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pu' and past tense

  ghItlh "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>:-
> Time context is NOT established by aspect suffixes. It is established by
> timestamps or subordinate clauses. Once you have established the time ...

  Thank you for taking up so much of your time with this matter.

  ghItlh Robyn Stewart <[email protected]>:-
> One reason this is so painful and frustrating to learn is that TKD explains
> it very superficially, and even misuses it *because Marc Okrand changed his
> mind about /-pu'/ part way through!  He was originally going to make it a
> past tense suffix, and some of the examples reflect that. ... the one place
> you SHOULD be able to go for examples is confusing. Marc has explained this
> in more detail in person.

  When will TKD be properly revised to remove all uses of -pu' as simple past
and explain properly the difference between aspect and tense??? As long as the
text of TKD stands like it is, beginners will keep on wanting to use -pu' as
simple past.
  I suppose I could say: {pu'} also means "phaser", and guns in the wrong
place cause trouble! :-)

  There are real-world languages where the past tense gets confused with the
perfect tense-qoq (= aspect):
  Latin, and I believe Modern Greek, has the same form for both.
  Colloquial French often uses the perfect instead of the simple past, and has
even developed, for use as a pluperfect, a "supercomposed past"  (passe'
surcompose') "il a eu e'crit" = **"he has have written"!
  Common Germanic (the common ancestor of the Germanic languages) lost its
past, used its perfect as a past, and then developed the new perfect "I have
written a book" (which originally meant {paq ghItlhlu'pu'bogh vIghaj}).

  I saw a suggestion that in English also, the future tense "I will write" is
distinct from the future aspect "I am going to write".

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