tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 03 16:16:19 1999

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Re: Placement of aspect suffixes



In a message dated 3/2/1999 8:52:54 PM US Mountain Standard Time, [email protected]
writes:

<< >> "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".
  >>

=====================================

HIvqa' veqlargh.

I definitely should not have put (perfective) inside parentheses right after
saying "past tense."  There is no way they mean the same thing.  I meant to
say:  When Mandarin uses {-wan} "finish," it comes across in English as "past
tense" and in Slavonic languages and dialects as "perfective."

Furthermore, this was extracted from an argument about "pluperfect" versus
"perfective" with or without the proper time stamp.  Some member of the
argument had claimed that putting time stamp indicating prior time AND a
"perfective" in the same sentence meant "had done" rather than "have done."  I
did not think so.  I said I did not think so.

I do suggest that all read ghunchu'wI's contribution to the FAQ.  It is an
excellent exoteric explanation of aspect.  For a further explanation, read
"Aspect" by Bernard Comrie, esoteric but extremely poignant.  Also, read "An
Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics" by Gleason and "Language and Language
Learning" by S.I. Hayakawa.  Noam Avram Chomsky's lectures at MIT and Otto
Jesperson's definitions are considered out-of-date.  Chomsky was a
"generative" and "cognitive" psychology expert more than a linguist, according
to all I can discover.  I had an interview over the telephone with Dr. Charles
Albee, Dean of Linguistics, UC.  The comments were not flattering.  Still, he
pointed out how and why he disagrees with Chomsky's definitions, going back to
Molière's definitions of Aspect when grammarians were trying to deal with the
reasons for Slavic languages having extra "tenses" (really aspect markers, not
tenses at all) and Jesperson's 1924 lectures.  Hayakawa, too, was interested
in "cognition," but gained acclaim as a linguist first.

peHruS



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