tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Mar 04 12:34:12 1999
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Re: Aspect
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Aspect
- Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 15:34:04 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
- Priority: NORMAL
On Thu, 4 Mar 1999 11:31:34 -0800 (PST) [email protected] wrote:
> In a message dated 3/4/1999 8:51:12 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
> [email protected] writes:
>
> << > be' SuchtaHvIS loD, loD leghpu' puq = The boy saw the man while the man
> was
> > visiting the woman.
>
> No. While the visit happened, the seeing had been completed.
> Three possibilities:
>
> While the man visited the woman, the boy had seen the man.
> [English doesn't as clearly indicate that the seeing happened
> and was not continuing BEFORE the visiting. Again, this is
> something Klingon says more precisely than English.]
> >>
> ====================
>
> You have capitalized "before" to point out to me that the Klingon perfective
> {-pu'} action must have been completed before the action of the dependent
> clause can have begun. Is this not correct?
Yes.
> Why cannot the perfection of the action take place "during" the visiting?
If your time stamp has a duration, then if the completion occurs
after the beginning of that duration there is a part of that
time stamp during which the action is incomplete. It is then
misleading to say that it was complete for that time stamp. If I
say to you, "Yesterday I had seen the report," does that sound
like to you that the action of seeing it occured yesterday?
The perfective does not point to the act of finishing. It points
to the state of having already finished.
> If
> it cannot, then Klingon is different from ANY Earth language I have been able
> to discover which uses aspect alone or a combination of aspect, aktionsart,
> and/or tense.
I think this is easier to see as the time stamp becomes more
specific. In general, I think you are overly concerned about the
"finishing" of the action as opposed to the state of the action
having been completed. If something could have been finished
decades ago and I can still refer to it in the future
perfective. The important thing is that the completion of the
action is a past event within the context of the time stamp.
When I say, "I saw Jim yesterday," I'm not really saying that I
was watching him all day long. I didn't choose "yesterday"
because of its duration. I chose it because it is specific
enough for my needs when I want to express this thought. The
action occurred yesterday. It totally happened yesterday. It
started yesterday. It did what it did yesterday. It completed
yesterday. This is still simple past tense.
When I use the perfective on something referring to yesterday,
it has that same kind of sufficient accuracy, if a bit vague.
What I mean is that at some unspecified point yesterday, the
action had already been completed.
Unless I want to go to the effort of specifying what part of
yesterday involved the transition to complete, the only way that
the perfective can be generally true for yesterday is if it were
true for ALL of yesterday.
> Finally, how do you render the Klingon sentence meaning "The boy saw the man
> (and that completion of seeing the man occurred during) while the man was
> visiting the woman"?
First, note that you had to go to awkward lengths to be this
specific in English. You are trying to nail down the point in
time that the action complete. You want the language to see that
completion as an event with lots of detail on exactly when that
event occurred.
Perfective is not that specific. It is not meant to point AT the
completion of the action. It is meant only to point backwards in
time in the general direction of the event. It is a state.
You keep wanting to focus on the change of state and I keep
trying to explain to you that the point is the state itself, not
the change of state.
It's like I'm talking about "going fast" and you are assuming
that means "accellerating". Going fast does not imply
accelleration. Giving the state of an action as finished says
nothing about the specific moment when the action finished. It
just generally states that the action was occurring at some
peoint before this and it stopped before this. I'm talking about
the state of being complete and you are talking about the event
of the changing of the state into completion. These are not the
same thing.
You can't pick up a magnetic compass and tell how far you are
from the North Pole. A compass measures direction, not distance,
and the closer you get to the North Pole (or the South Pole),
the less accurate a compass becomes; the less useful the compass
becomes. Get very close and it is time to use some OTHER tool to
navigate.
This brings us right back to the Chinese *wan* and its "finish"
meaning. There is a difference between "to finish" and "to be
finished". The perfective is the state of being finished. It is
not the act of finishing.
Your example shows that you still want to point to the time when
the finishing occurred. You still don't get it when it comes to
understanding that the perfective doesn't mean "to finish". It
means "to be finished". Maybe it was finished decades before the
time stamp. Maybe moments. The important thing is that the state
of being finished was true for the temporal environment of
the time stamp.
As for your example, I wouldn't even USE the perfective, since
you are trying to point out a sequence, nailing down the moment
of completion:
be' SuchlI'DI' loD, loD legh loDHom. mejpa' loD mej loDHom.
We are too close to the pole for the compass to work well.
> peHruS
charghwI' 'utlh