tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 25 18:59:30 1999
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Re: Placement of aspect suffixes
ja' peHruS:
>I definitely look at verb suffixes type 7 as aspect markers, not tense
>markers. I am bilingual, completely fluent in another language which does not
>have tense.
Maybe that's part of the problem. You're assuming that Klingon treats
the lack of tense the same way as that other language does, instead of
thinking about how people reading Klingon will interpret the suffixes.
It's quite possible that the "other language" actually uses perfective
aspect markers when referring to imperfective past tense ideas; Hebrew
does that at times, I think. The aspectual aspects of Biblical Hebrew
perfective are...imperfect. :-)
>The "trick" I use is to compare Klingon to that language in regard to when and
>where and how to use aspect suffixes.
If that's how you've been deciding when to use {-pu'}, then I give you
very strong advice to abandon that "trick", because it isn't working.
-- ghunchu'wI'