tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Apr 17 13:31:20 2002
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Re: to' nech, 051-061
At 15:18 2002-04-17 +0000, you wrote:
> > > K: yItammoHpu' 'ej yIruchqa'!
> > > Gloss: Silence it, and proceed!
>How can you command someone to have completed something? I think {-pu'}
>here breaks your sentence.
I took {-pu'} to be purely aspectual: i.e., to be used along with any
action that reaches deliberate completion, regardess of whether it's
conceived of in the past or the future (as here -- the command is to
deliberately complete the act of silencing it, then proceed).
But now that I look at TKD's description again, it sounds like it's got
some tense semantics too. Correct?
I'm not sure what's indended in the TKD description, versus what is just
artifacts of trying to explain pure aspect, in English.
>I think that {-qa'} here adds a meaning that the original didn't state.
>How do we know that the advice is to resume anything? Perhaps you are
>starting from zero.
Hm, good point. For some reason I was picturing being interrupted by
something, silencing it, and resuming. But yes, silencing could be the
prerequisite to even starting.
--
Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/