tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Apr 12 15:47:28 2014
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Translating the past
On 4/12/2014 10:53 AM, Robyn Stewart wrote:
Ah that is useful to me. I don’t have a cassette player anymore. I hope
my CK cassettes still work.
So why do you think Marc Okrand uses the perfective so much more than we
do? There can easily be something special about hunger and thirst.
Maybe it’s specifically because the time stamp is there in those
sentences that the perfective isn’t used. English has the same rule, in
fact.
I have eaten.
I ate at five o’ clock.
*I have eaten at five o’clock.
The last one can be used, but only in a context like “I have eaten at
five o’ clock in the past, but usually I eat at eight.”
Think about the rule. It's exactly what I've been describing. "I have
eaten" means AT SOME POINT PRIOR TO NOW I ate something. Present
perfect. This is one of the meanings of -pu'.
"I ate at five o'clock" treats the eating as a simple whole without
structure. The eating is viewed as a moment in time without shape. We
aren't told anything about how you started to eat, or how long it took
you to eat, or whether you ate a bit, rested, then ate a bit more. This
is perfective aspect. Specifically, you've used the past perfective, or
preterite.
But Okrand's sentence wasn't about eating, it was about being hungry. He
said {wa'Hu' jIghung} "yesterday I was hungry" which, I'm sure you'll
agree, means that during some unspecified, non-instantaneous time
yesterday, I felt hunger. That is, we're not treating being hungry as a
simple whole without internal structure as we did with eating. This
sentence is fundamentally different in meaning, and so follows different
rules. {wa'Hu' jIghung} and {wa'maH Soch vatlh rep jISop[pu']} have
inherently different aspects whether you think it deserves a -pu' or not.
wa'Hu' jIghung.
I was hungry yesterday.
I was hungry during some unspecified period yesterday, and I'm not
describing the hunger being completed.
wa'maH Soch vatlh rep jISoppu'.
I ate at five o'clock.
I began eating at five o'clock, and I finished eating, but I'm not
describing the temporal characteristics of my meal.
Aspectually completely different.
--
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/
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