tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Aug 09 22:28:05 1999
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Re: Aspect (was RE: KLBC-Fr.)
ja' peHruS:
>...Important here
>is that I still have a lot to learn about how Klingon adverbials establish
>the aspect...
More important yet is that you read clearly the note to which you are
responding. You are the only one trying to link Klingon adverbials to
aspect. charghwI' was pointing out that there are adverbial words in
Klingon which can set a time context, which is a close analog to *tense*
in English. Tense. *NOT* aspect.
Reread it at /tlhIngan-Hol/1999/current/0108.html
(or /tlhIngan-Hol/1999/Aug99/0108.html next month).
>...In the
>case of "not yet," {hai mei-you} virtually always is imperfective.
If this "hai mei-you" formula is really expressing the idea of "not yet",
then based on your description of its parts it looks very much to me like
a *perfective* concept. I suspect that the terminology here is more at
fault than any basic understanding of the concepts. You're apparently
trying to match Mandarin grammar up with Klingon grammar, and because of
the labels attached to some of the constructions, you're getting them
badly mismatched.
Do not try to apply anything you know about aspect in other languages to
aspect in Klingon. There are only two things you need to consider about
Klingon aspect:
1) "perfective" aspect refers to a completed action.
2) "continuous" aspect refers to an ongoing action.
The idea of intentional action or a known or implied end to a process
influences the choice of suffix, but the aspect idea is almost trivial.
>So, when
>people tell me that Klingon's {wej} establishes a perfective, I have a lot of
>re-learning to do to catch up with those people.
You seem to have completely misread that note also. Holtej said that
*{-ta'}* carries the completion idea (i.e., perfective). Using {wej} is
unrelated to the aspect. It merely indicates that the expected action
is complete at some unspecified time in the future. Again, {wej} is an
adverbial that defines a time context, one that is superficially similar
to the English future tense.
See Holtej's note at /tlhIngan-Hol/1999/Jul99/0476.html
if you're still unclear about what he said.
-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh