tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Apr 19 17:07:51 2002
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Re: tujpu'
ja' SuStel:
>My dictionary (American College Dictionary, 1966) has the following
>(relevant entries only):
>
>perfect
>11. Gram. a. denoting action or state brought to a close prior to some
>temporal point of reference, in contrast to imperfect or uncompleted action.
Interesting. I'd never seen the "brought to a close" idea mentioned
before. If it's a common definition and/or understanding of grammatical
perfective, I suppose I should accept it as implied by TKD's description of
{-pu'/-ta'}.
It actually sounds to me a little like a "change of state" idea which
should be carried by a hypothetical type 2 verb suffix. When I really want
to express "brought to a close" explicitly, I'll most likely say
{-be'choH}, but I'll stop piping up when I see {-pu'} explained the way you
do it.
>Perhaps you are bothered by the fact that Okrand speaks of an action being
>completed, but says nothing about a state being completed.,,
I'm sure that's the cause of most of my discomfort.
>My conclusion: Klingon completion suffixes imply an end to the state or
>action of the verb.
And a well-supported conclusion it is, sir.
-- ghunchu'wI'