tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Apr 11 09:12:41 1996

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Re: jI'It

charghwI' writes:
>I think you are fixating on an extreme, pure interpretation of
>{-pu'} as perfective.

I figured it out in the shower this morning.  My problem isn't {-pu'},
it's {wa'Hu'}.  I view "yesterday" as encompassing the entire day, and
not referring to some unspecified moment during that period of time.
I just reviewed the last couple of times my {-pu'}-detector went off,
and the ones that bothered me more than the rest of you involved the 
word "yesterday".

>...It can mean that the book arrived while the writer was
>at work and when he got home yesterday, the book HAD arrived.
>The event of the completion of the arrival occured during the
>day, and since it happened when he wasn't there, it fits that
>he could use the perfective to refer to it.

I could accept this if the sentence referred to the event of getting
home yesterday, but that's not what it says.  I'm going to fall back 
on the fact that Klingons are never approximate -- if you talk about
"yesterday", I'm going to assume you mean *all* of yesterday.  If you 
mean some particular time or event yesterday, you should say so.

>...Maybe it had arrived day before
>yesterday and I just didn't notice until yesterday. I can't be
>sure. But I CAN be sure that it HAD arrived yesterday.

If I noticed it yesterday afternoon, I can be certain that it had
arrived when I noticed it, but I don't know that it was already there
yesterday morning.  I can't assume that it completed its arrival
before yesterday, so I won't use {-pu'} to say that it *had* arrived
yesterday.

--------------------------------------------
Alan Anderson              Delco Electronics
{ghunchu'wI'}       Remanufacturing Services
        Test Equipment System Software Group

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