tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Mar 04 16:04:54 1999
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Re: Aspect
ja' charghwI':
>> loD leghlI' puq = The boy sees the man now but won't keep on seeing him for
>> long.
>
>That's passibly close. This is another thing more gracefully
>said in Klingon than in English. {-lI'} is just like {-taH}
>except it implies a definite, foreseeable completion to the
>action. It was apparently designed to mirror the {-pu'/-ta'}
>division, and so tends to imply an intentionality to the action,
>though this is not always the case. It is okay, for example, to
>say {pumlI' nagh}. Even though the rock is not INTENTIONALLY
>falling with the goal of completing the act of falling, the
>completion of the act is so foreseeable that {-lI'} works.
>
>So, in the purest sense, it means something close to "is
>accomplishing X", when it ties into that same sense of
>accomplishment that {-ta'} carries, but its meaning apparently
>stretches to cover other actions without an intentional goal
>when the end of the action is clearly foreseeable. You are
>calling attention to the fact that the action is now continuous,
>but will foreseeably end when you use {-lI'}.
I'd like to add one additional comment to this quite well-detailed
explanation. TKD says, "In other words, it suggests that progress
is being made toward that goal." I think the "progressing" idea is
a good one to keep in mind when interpreting the verb suffix {-lI'}.
-- ghunchu'wI'