tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 20 10:55:39 2012

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[Tlhingan-hol] why I think tense is not optional in Federation Standard

De'vID ([email protected]) 

<p>On p.40 of TFSD (The Federation Standard Dictionary), in the section on tense, we find the following statement:</p>
<p>&quot;Federation Standard does not express aspect... The language does, however, express tense: whether an action occurred in the past, is occurring now, or will occur in the future... When a verb is neither in the past tense nor in the future tense, it usually indicates that the action takes place neither in the past nor the future (that is, it is not one of the things indicated by the past or present tense).&quot;</p>

<p>In TFSD and other canonical works, we find many instances of verbs conjugated in present tense translated into Klingon using continuous aspect.  Furthermore, we also have a few canonical examples of Federation Standard sentences with verbs which are in neither past nor present tense, and yet indicate events in the past or future:<br>

- &quot;Yesterday I see my friend at the mall, so I go and say &#39;hi&#39; to him.&quot;<br>
- &quot;We fly tomorrow at dawn.&quot;</p>
<p>Given only the above information, Federation Standardists seem to have divided themselves into the following positions:</p>
<p>1) Tense in Federation Standard is *very optional*.  If you want to *emphasise* that an event takes place in the past or future, then use past or future tense, but otherwise marking tense is unnecessary.  When TFSD says &quot;present tense&quot;, it doesn&#39;t really mean what linguists or grammarians would call &quot;present tense&quot;.  It&#39;s actually something like continuous aspect, as can be seen by the fact that many &quot;present tense&quot; sentences are translated using continuous aspect.  </p>

<p>1&#39;) The above, plus: anyone who says that &quot;present tense&quot; in TFSD means what linguists call &quot;present tense&quot; is bringing extra information from outside TFSD into it and tainting their reading of it.  The position that tense is not optional is not supported by (or even consistent with) the evidence.</p>

<p>2) Tense in Federation Standard is not optional.  When TFSD says &quot;present tense&quot;, it actually means what linguists or grammarians (such as T&#39;Pinkor or K&#39;Omri) refer to as &quot;present tense&quot;, more or less.  There may be instances were a verb not in past or future tense describes an event not in the present, but these are exceptions whose existence are covered by the &quot;usually&quot; part of the rule.  But in most cases, the rule holds, and when it is violated, there&#39;s often a reason.</p>

<p>Personally, I think that position #2 is a better fit for the evidence.  It is, at least, *consistent* with the evidence.  It may not be right, but it&#39;s not obviously wrong.</p>
<p>I think position #1 is based on misreading &quot;usually&quot; for &quot;optionally&quot;, and confusing tense with aspect.  It is an internally consistent position, but requires introducing the addition idea into the language that tense is optional, contrary to what the rules say.  </p>

<p>I think position #1&#39; is unreasonable.  The evidence really does leave room for position #2 to be correct.  I can understand that someone can believe, based on the evidence, that position #2 is not correct; but I cannot understand why someone would insist it *cannot* be correct.</p>

<p>--<br>
De&#39;vID</p>

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