tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 25 18:59:21 1999
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Re: Placement of aspect suffixes
ja' peHruS:
><< And you're quite right, there are no explicit references to Klingon past
> tense, perfective or otherwise...for the simple reason that there is no
> Klingon past tense to refer to.
> >>
>
>Actually, TKD p41, section 4.2.7 does say explicitly that {-pu'} is
>"perfective." p167 says "perfective" again.
And how in blazes is that supposed to address what I just said? Klingon
past tense is not covered in TKD, because there is no Klingon past tense.
Perfective is aspect, not tense. As much as you insist that you do know
the difference between tense and aspect, your words reveal that you have
them quite badly mixed up.
>It seems that I am missing some discussion on (not verbatim) "a time stamp
>stays in place until another time stamp is introduced."
It's not a "rule", it's just how the context is carried in a language where
there is no explicit marking of tense. If you want to say something that
people will understand, you shouldn't change the time under consideration
without saying something to indicate that you did it. You *can't* change
the time under consideration and expect people to figure it out without a
clue of some sort. That can be with an explicit time reference, or with a
{-DI'} suffix, or with a sequence of events that are easy to recognize as
being a time-ordered sequence.
>Also, I had not heard
>that using the "perfective" in a statement that was already inferred to be
>occurring in the past changed the whole sentence into a "past perfect" or
>"pluperfect." What issues of HolQeD or what forum revealed these ideas to
>you?
Maybe the ideas of "happened before now" and "action was complete" don't
combine in your mind to form the idea "past perfect". That's about the
only way I can understand your request for someone to point out where it
was explicitly discussed. It's just a concept that I would assume anyone
sufficiently familiar with the ideas of tense and aspect would find to be
too obvious for words. That tends to reinforce my belief that you are not
sufficiently familiar with the separate ideas of tense and aspect.
I'd tell you to read the FAQ, but it doesn't say anything that you haven't
seen already, and since I'm the one who wrote what became the tense/aspect
section of the FAQ, I suspect it wouldn't help you anyway.
-- ghunchu'wI'