tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue May 30 17:23:10 2006
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Re: Brainfart question (so dumb it should be KLBC)
- From: "QeS 'utlh" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Brainfart question (so dumb it should be KLBC)
- Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 10:22:54 +1000
- Bcc:
ghItlhpu' Shane MiQogh, ja':
>I always considered -taH to enforce present dence and -ta'/-pu'
>inforce past tense,
That's just your English bias. As Voragh has pointed out, tense is a concept
completely irrelevant to Klingon grammar.
>Question is, what does it imply if there is no context, and it's stand
>alone...
Then it could mean any of these things, and in any tense; without context,
you just can't pin it down to one time. Anyway, no conversation exists in a
vacuum. There's almost always *some* sort of disambiguating context to go
by.
>If the only klingon phrase was "i want you" would it be still
>appropriate to use "qaneH" without a suffix?
Absolutely.
>That's my question, because the suffixes do imply tenses,
No, they don't. Context is what implies the proper English tense to use. You
don't just stroll up to someone and say {qaneH}; there'd be something
leading into or out of that phrase that tells you how to position the action
in time.
{Qu'vamvaD qaneH, 'ach DaH Qu' pIm Dunob voDleH}
"I wanted you for this mission, but now the emperor is giving you a
different mission."
>but lack of tense... is some what vague and isn't always enforced.
Just because the aspect suffixes often coincide with English sentences in a
particular tense doesn't mean that they necessarily "imply" that tense.
Ultimately, it's a matter of shedding English perceptions, like the idea
that grammatical tense is particularly necessary. Mandarin, !Kung and many
other languages get by fine without it, and invariably, there are other,
more lexical ways of positioning an action in time; in Klingon, these
include time stamps, and verbs with {-taHvIS} and {-DI'}).
QeS 'utlh
tlhIngan Hol yejHaD pabpo' / Grammarian of the Klingon Language Institute
not nItoj Hemey ngo' juppu' ngo' je
(Old roads and old friends will never deceive you)
- Ubykh Hol vIttlhegh
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