tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Apr 13 20:16:28 2014
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Translating the past
On 4/13/2014 9:27 PM, lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh wrote:
Klingon has no tense. Or it has an infinite number of tenses, depending
on how you see it.
What you want to say is that Klingon does not express tense through verb
inflection.
The perfective suffixes have nothing to do with tense.
I want to be clear about this.
Tense refers to the span of time while the action of a verb happens.
This is incorrect. Tense refers to when an action occurs relative to the
time context. Aspect refers to the span of time while the action occurs,
and how that action flows through that span.
The Perfective refers not to the action of a verb, but instead to the
completion of the action of the verb. The action has a duration, but the
completion is an event.
Because TKD's description of "perfective" does not agree with the
dictionary definition of grammatical perfective, I've been careful to
refer to them as -pu' and -ta', rather than "perfective."
What TKD calls "perfective" has been observed in canon to follow several
different sorts of grammar, only one of which is what we'd call
"perfective" in English. Some examples of these types are:
PERFECTIVE ASPECT: qa'ja'pu' (describes an action as an indivisible whole)
CESSESATIVE ASPECT: Dujmey law' chIjpu' (describes an action as having
progressed up to a completion point)
PRESENT PERFECT TENSE: Daleghpu' (describes an action as having occurred
prior to the time context)
The last one has tense involved. Maybe Okrand goofed and didn't realize
it, I dunno. But there are examples out there in which "completion"
isn't what the sentence is supposed to be about. We know {Daleghpu'}
isn't supposed to mean "you completed seeing it; you saw the whole
thing." It just means "you saw it in the past."
Hey, if I'm wrong to interpret phrases like that with tense, please show
me a better interpretation (that doesn't stretch things beyond belief).
So, a verb with a time stamp and without a perfective suffix tells you
the time the action of the verb occurs. A verb with a time stamp with a
perfective suffix tells you when the completion of the action of the
verb occurs.
A verb with a time stamp and without a Type 7 suffix also tells you that
the verb is not completed and is not continuous.
{wa'Hu' yaS qIp puq} CANNOT mean "yesterday the child hit the officer"
as a single act. That would be perfective, completed, a simple whole,
and would require -pu' or -ta'. It CAN mean "yesterday the child hit the
officer [on and off]."
With {-pu’}, the time stamp refers to the completion of the action. Not
to the action of the verb. To it’s completion.
Except in those cases where it's a true perfective meaning, in which
case it refers to the action and its completion as an indivisible whole,
occurring in a single unit during the time stamp.
Completion is a big deal in Klingon. The grammar bends to it, just as
English grammar bends to tense.
This is neither here nor there.
Now, that’s the ideal of how I thought this language should work with no
tense, but with perfective suffixes. That said, I get frustrated with
some canon because it seems sloppy on this point. The language would
have been cooler if the canon had been more precise in this time framework.
So, I think that sometimes, the perfective has been used to express that
at the time stamp the completion of the action of the verb was in the
past. And that makes everything muddier. I don’t like it.
But this isn’t my language, and the guy whose language it is doesn’t
apparently care enough to preserve this cool way the language could have
been.
So, based on canon, it appears that when a verb has a time stamp and a
perfective suffix, the time stamp indicates either a time duration or
event during which the completion of the verb occurs (the cool way the
language could have been precise),
That's what I've called cessative aspect.
or the time stamp indicates a time frame when the completion of the
action is in the past (the sloppy way the language was allowed to
evolve).
That's present perfect tense, and it does occur from time to time.
But the third option is true perfective, which is exemplified by
{qaja'pu'} or {X ben jIboghpu'}. In this case any time context tells
when the action began and was completed, and gives no temporal shape to
the verb.
--
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/
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