tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon May 05 12:38:06 1997

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Re: 'ejyo' 'ampaS vIta'ta'?

:> Message text written by "Eric Zay"
:>> "I am a starfleet academy graduate.  I know many things."
:>> SuSvaj
: 
:> How's this?:
:> "'ejyo' 'ampaSDaq jIHaDta'."
: 
: That means only 'I have studied (intentionally) at Starfleet Academy.' It 
: doesn't say or imply graduation. It could be used by someone who is
: partway through the course of studies, 

Not if the entire course of studies isn't finished and you're still studying
at the Academy. -ta' is a perfective marker, indicating the action *as a
whole* is completed. Depending on the speaker's intent, the nature of the
"whole action" may vary, but it's usually mentioned somewhere in the
sentence or clear from context. You could use it if you're talking about,
say, only your freshman year which you've just finished. 

Also, is "intention" really relevent here--how can you apply to Starfleet
Academy, take and pass the difficult aptitude tests, travel to Earth, enroll
and register for classes, and then study unintentionally, or by accident?
Well, I suppose it could happen if you stumbled into one of those temporal
or dimensional anomalies and woke up one morning in the SFA dormitory!

: or even someone who has left (voluntarily or in-) before graduation.

Now this may work, since now you're talking about a discrete block of time.
For example if B'Elanna (who resigned after 1 or 2 years) looks back at her
brief career at the Academy. I think in this case dropping the Type 7 suffix
probably works best: 
     'ejyo' 'ampaSDaq jIHaD 'e' DaSov, qar'a'?   
     "You knew that I studied at Starfleet Academy, didn't you?"
Whether or not she graduated isn't relevent here, merely that she attended.
You mark the aspect if you want to draw particular attention to it for some
reason.

: Let's try 
:         'ejyo' 'ampaSDaq jIHaDchu'ta'
: <-chu'> is glossed 'clearly, perfectly', but we see in canon that this can 
: include completion:
:         yItlhutlhchu'!          Drink up! [I.e., drink it all]

That's a good idea since -chu' is often overlooked (though I still don't
like -ta' without a direct object). I know I'm jumping into the middle of
this thread, but this feels like a perfect place for rIntaH -- it's a little
more dramatic and Worf is after all boasting (or is he just being smug?):

     'ejyo' 'ampaSDaq jIHaD rIntaH.

I suppose it depends on just what we think Worf means: that he knows many
things by virtue of his having attended SFA (it's an excellent school, I was
fortunate to attend) or is he really saying that only people who have
successfully completed the Academy (just graduates, not underclassmen or
drop-outs) would know such arcane trivia?

Aspect in Klingon is tricky; it doesn't quite work the way it does in other
aspectual languages (Russian, for example, which I've been speaking for
nearly 25 years). I've noticed that many people sometimes confuse the
Klingon perfect aspect with the English perfect tense -- including Okrand at
times. This may not be surprising in view of charghwI's comment that at
qep'a' wejDIch Okrand mentioned in passing that -pu' was originally intended
to be just the Klingon past tense marker, but that he reconsidered and
decided to do away with grammatical tense altogether. It does seem, however,
that a few of his examples with -pu' in TKD may have been written before
this change from tense to aspect.

But that's the topic for another thread.

-- Voragh

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