tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jan 26 08:53:21 1996
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Re: KLBC -- tense
According to Alan Anderson:
>
> K'Daq writes:
> > How do you expressa simple concept like - It was night. ?
[ghunchu'wI''s good explanations deleted]
> > ie how do you express the difference between -
> >
> > It IS night. It WAS night.
>
> Usually, the distinction isn't really that important. It's only because
> you're used to explicit tense in English that you're even asking about it.
I completely agree with all of this and am only speaking
because I've heard this problem a lot of times and want to
offer a little more insight into it. Perhaps it is unnecessary
and the BG's comments are quite enough. Meanwhile, the same
urges that drove me to be a BG in earlier times, call to me...
You seem to be asking for a way without context to
differentiate between the present and the past. This ignores
the simple truth that there is no such thing as real language
without context. There are words without context, but anything
with meaning has context and to try to interpret words without
context is to miss something very important.
In my work, I see this all the time. If you see the number
3,000, it doesn't mean much. Put it on a spreadsheet labled
"Payroll" under the word "January", to the right of somebody's
social security number, and suddenly, the number 3,000 has a
lot more meaning. In a different application, like a word
processor, you might tend to express this context differently,
like typing the sentence, "Jim's January net pay will be
$3,000." Just because that is how you express it with a word
processor does not mean you have to say it that way on a
spreadsheet. In fact, a spreadsheet can express this kind of
meaning much more concisely for a great many more numbers than
a word processor could ever do, unless, of course, you try to
use your spreadsheet as if it were a word processor.
So, in what kind of context would you wish to express the
difference between "It is night," and "It was night"? You could
be telling a story. "It was a dark and stormy night," has been
uses so many times, you just want a shorter version. "It was
night. A shot rang out! Someone screamed in the distance."
ram baHlu'DI' pa' jachlu'.
Klingon is very concise. "At night, when someone shot,
thereabouts somebody cried out!" This conveys the meaning that
it was night. In English, we'd use a lot of past tense to tell
the story. In Klingon, we just tell the story and it is clear
from context that stuff happens in the sequence of the story in
the time setting of the story. You really don't need tense.
> -- ghunchu'wI' batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj
charghwI'
--
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"> | Get a grip.
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