tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Apr 13 19:41:12 2014

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Translating the past

Alan Anderson ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']



On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 9:27 PM, lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh
<[email protected]> wrote:
> ...The Perfective refers not to the action of a verb, but instead to the
> completion of the action of the verb. The action has a duration, but the
> completion is an event.

I'd like very much that to be the way Klingon perfective works,
However, even if canon didn't give us examples that don't quite follow
this description, there's a minor detail that makes it problematic:
not all verbs describe an "action". What would the completion of a
quality mean? The way I would interpret something like {jIbuDpu'} ends
up being essentially the "happened prior to the time context" idea.

In order to make things come out consistent for various kinds of
verbs, I tend to think of perfective as describing not the completion
event but the resulting state. I'm probably not "right" to think that,
but it usually gets the appropriate meaning through.

-- ghunchu'wI'

_______________________________________________
Tlhingan-hol mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.kli.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol



Back to archive top level