tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Apr 12 19:57:50 2014

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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Translating the past

SuStel ([email protected])



On 4/12/2014 10:43 PM, Bellerophon, modeler wrote:
On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 6:23 PM, SuStel <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


    Klingon -pu' and -ta' have examples showing both PERFECTIVE and
    PERFECT aspects. They can mean either of these things. TKD calls it
    "perfective," but the definition is not strictly correct. What most
    people believe, incorrectly as I see it, is that these suffixes
    indicate what is correctly called perfect aspect.


Could one not say {wa'leS ghaH HoHlu'pu'}, indicating that by
tomorrow he will have gotten himself killed? This sentence uses
perfective but not in any past sense, Klingon cultural attitudes toward
counting one's chickens notwithstanding. If grammar allows such a
construction, it would divorce -pu' and -ta' from any connection with
the past, except insofar as the past is more somewhat more certain than
the future.

It could certainly be used for that. -pu' and -ta' are not connected to the PAST, they are connected to TENSE, in that their perfect usage tells us that an event occurs prior to the time context. In your sentence the time context is "tomorrow," and the killing takes place prior to tomorrow. That's tense, even if it's not PAST tense. It's future perfect tense.

I can't think of a way that this would make sense with a perfective aspect, since as of today tomorrow's killing is not completed as a whole unit.

--
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/

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