tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 02 08:50:39 1996
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Re: pu'-pu' Platter (was Re: KLBC: jIqeqnISmo'...!)
- From: [email protected] (Alan Anderson)
- Subject: Re: pu'-pu' Platter (was Re: KLBC: jIqeqnISmo'...!)
- Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 11:52:48 -0500
David Wood writes:
>[checking account]wIj vIcherpu'DI' HuchwIj lulanHa'pu'.
>Standard condition would be neither perfective, in which case the logical way to
>translate the sentence would be simple past, or perhaps present. And it works
>that way, too: "As soon as I establish the account, they misplace the money."
>However, it has to agree with the tense of the sentences before it, right? And
>that used a perfective.
Whoa! "Perfective" is not a "tense", it's an "aspect". Tense is time: past,
present, future. Aspect is completion: finished, ongoing, incomplete. They
don't carry the same ideas. Klingon adds the concepts of intention and goal
to the set of aspect suffixes: accomplished, in progress.
The previous sentence was {munuQpu'}, meaning that as of some time, they had
annoyed you. The assumed time is the present, so I understood you to mean
that right now, they have annoyed you. The annoying has already happened.
The second sentence is apparently an explanation of why you are annoyed; as
a narrative, it implicitly describes past events. As you have seen, it has
an appropriate meaning without the aspect suffixes
>The next case is first perfective, second not, as you're proposing it. "As soon
>as I had established the account, they misplace the money." I suppose this works
>because the {DI'} ties the time of the second phrase to that of the first. So
>because the first is perfective, the second is aspected perfective too. Is this
>assessment right?
No, this is not right. "As soon as I had established" doesn't mean the same
thing as "as soon as I established". The first one implies *any* time after
the establishment took place, a lot like "after I established" does. The
second one ties the time specifically to that event. This case seems to say
that the money was misplaced sometime after the account was established, not necessarily soon afterwards.
>If both phrases are perfective, then when the first half is completed, the
>second half is already finished. And I say this is what happened: the meeting to
>open the account took a certain amount of time. And by the time that time had
>elapsed, the money was already well on its way to the wrong account, not to be
>found until late the following month.
Okay, I understand your reasoning here, and it is sound. But the sentence
with both perfectives seems so contrived and imprecise. Taking it logically,
at any time that satisfies "I have established the account", the actual misplacement of the money has already occurred. It just doesn't feel right
to say it this way, when leaving off the perfectives means the same thing
but with a specific time.
>And that's why I said the double perfective was appropriate -- moreso than the
>perfective and a simple past. If there's some sort of spurious argument here,
>then please point it out to me, 'cos it's a semantic point finer than any I'm
>considering.
I guess it comes down to a matter of "sounding right" vs. "sounding wrong".
The sentence without {-pu'}s sounds right to me.
-- ghunchu'wI' batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj