tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jun 09 06:43:34 2012

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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Time and Type 7 verb suffixes

André Müller ([email protected])



<div dir="ltr">David,<br>In linguistics it&#39;s also a common practice to make a difference between language-specific terminology and &quot;global&quot; terminology. In many grammatical descriptions, linguists distinguish them by labeling language-specific categories with capital letters. For instance, the Latin Ablative case works different from the Klingon Ablative case ({-vo&#39;}), because the Latin Ablative has a wider use (more functions). Both Ablatives encompass the globally defined function of an (uncapitalized!) ablative, meaning the movement away from something.<br>
<br>Similarly, the Perfective aspect in Russian works differently from the Perfective aspect marker (了) in Chinese, although both encompass the global definition of &quot;perfective aspect&quot;. It&#39;s now quite common to make this distinction between capitalized and non-capitalized terms, but not everyone does that. And it might not have been as wide-spread decades ago when the TKD was written.<br>
<br>So, David, please don&#39;t assume that just because a marker is labeled &quot;perfective&quot; in a grammar of Klingon, it automatically has to work EXACTLY like the theoretical cross-language description of a perfective aspect, let alone like the perfective in any natural language such as Chinese, Russian or English (which doesn&#39;t have a stand-alone perfective, as we know).<br>
I speak Chinese, but if I were to apply the same rules I use for the (capitalized!) Perfective in Chinese also for the marker {-pu&#39;} in Klingon, both parties of your discussion would disagree with a lot of sentences I&#39;m writing.<br>
<br>pItlh.<br>- André<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2012/6/9 David Trimboli <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:[email protected]"; target="_blank">[email protected]</a>&gt;</span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
On 6/8/2012 10:53 AM, ghunchu&#39;wI&#39; &#39;utlh wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I won&#39;t speak for others, but I make a distinction between what<br>
&quot;perfective&quot; means in grammar textbooks and what TKD says it means<br>
when describing Klingon grammar. I make a similar distinction<br>
between the TKD term &quot;adverbial&quot; which describes a category of<br>
individual words, and the textbook term which I think (after an<br>
admittedly brief study of things like Wikipedia) describes phrases,<br>
calling the individual words &quot;adverbs&quot;.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
A single word is also a phrase.<br>
<br>
What TKD calls adverbials are, in fact, what linguists would call<br>
adverbials. Okrand has used the term exactly correctly here.<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
There are other words used in TKD that have meanings outside Klingon,<br>
but when those meanings are not what I&#39;d consider common knowledge I<br>
don&#39;t rely on them to inform my use of Klingon.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Why? Why would you choose to intentionally ignore the meaning of a word when it was used to define the thing under discussion? Why would you assume that when Okrand says &quot;perfective,&quot; he doesn&#39;t mean perfective? Is he redefining the word? Is he being sloppy? Is he just plain wrong?<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>

<br>
-- <br>
SuStel<br>
<a href="http://www.trimboli.name/"; target="_blank">http://www.trimboli.name/</a><br>
<br>
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