tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Mar 02 19:46:42 1999

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Re: Placement of aspect suffixes

ja' charghwI':
>> "zuotian wo maiwan
>> shu" means "Yesterday I buy-finish [a] book." The is equivalent to simple
>> past tense (perfective), not the pluperfect.
>
>So, in Chinese, there is a redundancy between "Yesterday I buy a
>book" and "Yesterday I buy-finish a book", since they both
>indicate simple past tense. That tells me that this "finish"
>business is not the same thing as perfective. It is talking
>about the process of finishing, not the state of having finished.

I was correct in two of my earlier assumptions.  First, this "other language"
does not use its "perfective" analog the same way as Klingon does.  Using the
Chinese grammar as a guide for when {-pu'} is appropriate gives an incorrect
result.  Second, despite all his protestations to the contrary, peHruS still
is not making a clear distinction between tense and aspect.

For anyone who is following this discussion with the intent of learning how
to express things well in Klingon, notice that peHruS is mistakenly calling
simple past tense the same thing as perfective.  They are quite definitely
*not* the same thing in Klingon.  They often mean very nearly the same thing
in English, because they can both refer to something that took place before
right now.  Because Klingon doesn't have a grammatical marker for making a
distinction between past, present, and future, using perfective aspect when
there is already a contextual indication of past actions *does* imply what
in English we call "past perfect" or "pluperfect".

-- ghunchu'wI'

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