tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jun 16 09:10:28 2012

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

De'vID ([email protected]) 

<p><br>
SuStel:<br>
&gt; &gt; **Note that whenever Okrand uses -Daq &lt;pro&gt; to describe the location of<br>
&gt; &gt; a movable object, he uses {-taH}, whereas whenever he describes the<br>
&gt; &gt; location of a permanent object he uses no aspect suffix.**</p>
<p>QeS &#39;utlh:<br>
&gt; &gt; Not quite &quot;whenever&quot;. Skybox card S27 has {-taH} on a permanent object:<br>
&gt; &gt; pa&#39; &#39;oHtaH vaS&#39;a&#39;&#39;e&#39;<br>
&gt; &gt; The Great Hall is there</p>
<p>De&#39;vID:<br>
&gt; &gt; Actually, I believe the translation is &quot;This is where the Klingon Great<br>
&gt; &gt; Hall is located...&quot;</p>
<p>QeS &#39;utlh:<br>
&gt; Yes, but that&#39;s also within a context where the topic of the discussion is<br>
&gt; not the Klingon Great Hall, but the planet of Qo&#39;noS, which is the topic<br>
&gt; of the whole card. &quot;This&quot; is used for emphasis. It&#39;s dangerous to draw too<br>
&gt; much from the English gloss without that supporting context.</p>
<p>No, the English gloss is secondary.  I was just pointing out that that was not the actual translation on the card, because the way you&#39;ve written the sentence pair might&#39;ve given that impression.  I wasn&#39;t suggesting that the English gloss shed any light on the Klingon grammar.</p>

<p>De&#39;vID:<br>
&gt; &gt;  The difference is that a<br>
&gt; &gt; bathroom is a fixed location inside a building, whereas the Klingon<br>
&gt; &gt; Great Hall or a Parliament Building *is* a moveable object within a<br>
&gt; &gt; city or country, even though you might not think of it as one.</p>
<p>QeS &#39;utlh:<br>
&gt; The point is whether Klingons think of it as one. </p>
<p>But surely that changes depending on context.  Also, even if they think of the Great Hall as a moveable object, they may not always refer to it as one.</p>
<p>For example, the call sign &quot;Air Force One&quot; designates any USAF aircraft that is actually carrying the President of the United States.  However, even people who know this refer to a very specific aircraft as &quot;Air Force One&quot; (the one or two presidential jets that he usually flies in).  Maybe the Great Hall technically refers to wherever the High Council meets, but they just happen to always meet in one specific building and has done so for hundreds of years (but may or may not have met in that same building in the distant past).</p>

<p>Maybe it&#39;s like the word &quot;Parliament&quot;.  Or it&#39;s like the capital city of most Earth countries, many of which haven&#39;t changed in hundreds of years.  The label &quot;the capital city&quot; can relocate to somewhere else in principle, even if it usually doesn&#39;t change in practice, or hasn&#39;t in recent memory.  (It&#39;s also interesting that the Klingon capital is called just &quot;the First City&quot;.  Surely, it was not always so called throughout all of Klingon history.)</p>

<p>QeS &#39;utlh:<br>
&gt; I did think of that<br>
&gt; possibility, but the Klingon text of S25 seems to imply that the Great<br>
&gt; Hall *is* considered a permanent structure by Klingons:<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; juHqo&#39;Daq vaS&#39;a&#39; tu&#39;lu&#39;. [poD]<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; The literal translation of the Klingon is closer to:<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; On the Homeworld one finds a Great Hall. [poD]</p>
<p>Why &quot;a&quot; Great Hall and not &quot;the&quot; Great Hall?  The possibility that there is more than one Great Hall, or that another building used to be called the Great Hall in the past, isn&#39;t excluded by this sentence, is it?</p>

<p>QeS &#39;utlh:<br>
&gt; The fact that {juHqo&#39;Daq vaS&#39;a&#39; tu&#39;lu&#39;} stands on its own like it does<br>
&gt; implies to me that the {vaS&#39;a&#39;} is being considered as the building as a<br>
&gt; chunk of the landscape, rather than as the building as the meeting<br>
&gt; place for the High Council.</p>
<p>I don&#39;t get that sense at all.  How else would you say that the building (currently) known as &quot;the Great Hall&quot; is found on the Homeworld?  Also, it&#39;s a completely different context, and the sentence uses {tu&#39;lu&#39;} (has there ever been a canon usage with {tu&#39;lu&#39;} plus aspect?) and so doesn&#39;t involve aspect.  This example doesn&#39;t show that Klingons don&#39;t (or cannot, in a different context) think of the Great Hall as a relocatable label, just that it happens not to be described as such in some contexts.</p>

<p>TKD p.40 says that {-taH} indicates an action is ongoing.  {pa&#39; &#39;oHtaH vaS&#39;a&#39;&#39;e&#39;} means &quot;the Great Hall is (continuous) there&quot;.  Everyone agrees this is what it means, right?  The only question really is *why* the continuous aspect can or would be used to describe the location of the Great Hall.</p>

<p>If SuStel&#39;s assertion that whenever MO uses {-Daq} he uses {-taH} with moveable objects and no aspect suffix with permanently located objects turns out to be wrong, it doesn&#39;t weaken his case.  If it turns out to be right, it would strength his case, but the example is consistent with the definition of continuous aspect either way.  </p>

<p>What would be a counterexample to his (and my) interpretation of the sentence from TKD p.40 about the meaning of a verb when a Type 7 suffix is absent is an instance from canon of a verb expressing a perfective or continuous aspect but which does not have the corresponding suffix. And I don&#39;t think there&#39;s any such example from canon.</p>

<p>--<br>
De&#39;vID</p>

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