tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 12 10:52:20 2002
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Re: Was: RE: cha'DIch KLBC rI' BG
- From: "Sangqar (Sean Healy)" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Was: RE: cha'DIch KLBC rI' BG
- Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 23:00:38 +0000
>I would definitely not lean heavily on a potentially obsolete rule as a
>precedent used to justify using perfective as past tense, which is what you
>are
>doing, whether you know it or not. Your attachment to the moment of
>utterance
>is the way you are mistakenly associating the perfective with the past
>tense.
Epiphany! While I wasn't intentionally using {-pu'} to represent past
tense, I have been (in general) assuming a timestamp of the time of
utterance for all sentences without an explicit time stamp. I must get out
of that habit.
>Change your model of time in Klingon. It's more like American Sign
>Language.
>You give some sort of time stamp. That is now your time anchor. All
>sentences
>you express from that point forward relate to that time context unless you
>express a new time stamp. The current time context is always the most
>recently
>expressed time stamp. You don't use the perfective to establish a time
>stamp.
>You use it only to mark an exception to the time context; a brief, one-verb
>reference to an action that was complete at the time of the current time
>context set by the most recent time stamp.
>
>No other verb "inherits" the perfective. All verbs "inherit" the time
>context
>stated in the most recent time stamp.
I actually took a semester of ASL long ago, but I never thought to apply it
to Klingon. ASL has always kind of stood on its own my mind, aprt from
spoken languages. I never think to compare other languages to it (although
I probably would if I learned any other signing languages).
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