tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue May 20 00:38:22 2003

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RE: JangmeH toch De'wI' lo'

>So, am I just completely wrong on this...lol.  I always believed that these 
>type seven suffixes were "tense-makers."  My mother and father started 
>speaking Klingon to me when I was about twelve, and every time they used 
>these suffixes (when I could pick them out as they spoke) I thought they 
>indicated when something happened.  So, something like, "jISup" can be 
>translated as, "I jump," "I jumped," and "I will jump"???  What else can be 
>translated from that simple sentence?  And what else do I need to know 
>about the type seven suffixes...help me here, I'm drowning :)

Okay, here's how I understand it, but help from the BG (or former BGs or 
other experts) would not be unappreciated.

Every sentence in Klingon has a time context.  This time context can be 
explicitly stated, or it can be implicit.  (For stylistic reasons, an author 
might delibrately leave the time context ambiguous, but that's not germane 
to this discussion.)

{pu'} means that the action of the sentence is completed relative to the 
time context of the sentence.  It is usually translated by an English 
perfect tense (have done, had done, will have done), but it could be 
translated by something else.  {tlhIngan Hol mu'ghom vIlaDpu'} means "I 
have/had/will have read TKD".  If you make the time context of the sentence 
past, then it means "I had read TKD", for example:

tetlhvam vImuvDI', tlhIngan Hol mu'ghom vIlaDpu'
When I joined this list, I had (already) read TKD

Or you could make the time context future:

wa'leS tlhIngan Hol mu'ghom vIlaDpu'
Tomorrow, I will have read TKD

This implies that you have not yet completed the action, but will by 
tomorrow.  (As some will no doubt point out unless I add this disclaimer, 
this is only an implication - grammatically, this could mean you finished it 
some time in the past - either way, when tomorrow comes, it will be 
completed.  If Klingon pragmatics are anything like English, then saying the 
above sentence when the act was in fact already completed would be 
misleading, though still true.)

{taH} means that relative to the time context of the sentence, the action is 
still going on.  It means "is/was/will be doing" (although it is not 
necessarily translated by that English construction).

tlhIngan Hol mu'ghom vIlaDtaH
I'm (in the middle of) reading TKD

Here I don't explcitily state a time context, and there's no context to give 
it one, so I defaulted to using present tense in English.

{ta'} means the same as {pu'}, but with the added distinction that the 
action was deliberately undertaken (that is, it was not an accident).  Note 
that {pu'} does not mean it was not deliberately undertaken; {pu'} is 
neutral in this regard.

{lI'} means the same as {taH}, except that it adds the meaning that the 
action was undertaken with a goal or a definite stopping point in mind.  As 
with {pu'} versus {ta'}, {taH} is neutral in this regard.

Marc Okrand originally intended the type 7 suffixes to indicate tense, but 
changed his mind partway through (or so I have been led to understand by 
comments on this list).  Several of the examples in TKD were wirtten while 
they were tense markers, and were not retranslated after the change.  So 
it's quite easy to be confused.

-Sangqar

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