[98394] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Translating the past
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (SuStel)
Sat Apr 12 22:57:52 2014
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 22:57:25 -0400
From: SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
In-Reply-To: <CABSTb1evmZ6Q==zLh2oQEj3+WNNUVZuYRpak1cRo=R13r-Ws4A@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: tlhingan-hol-bounces@kli.org
On 4/12/2014 10:43 PM, Bellerophon, modeler wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 6:23 PM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name
> <mailto:sustel@trimboli.name>> wrote:
>
>
> Klingon -pu' and -ta' have examples showing both PERFECTIVE and
> PERFECT aspects. They can mean either of these things. TKD calls it
> "perfective," but the definition is not strictly correct. What most
> people believe, incorrectly as I see it, is that these suffixes
> indicate what is correctly called perfect aspect.
>
>
> Could one not say {wa'leS ghaH HoHlu'pu'}, indicating that by
> tomorrow he will have gotten himself killed? This sentence uses
> perfective but not in any past sense, Klingon cultural attitudes toward
> counting one's chickens notwithstanding. If grammar allows such a
> construction, it would divorce -pu' and -ta' from any connection with
> the past, except insofar as the past is more somewhat more certain than
> the future.
It could certainly be used for that. -pu' and -ta' are not connected to
the PAST, they are connected to TENSE, in that their perfect usage tells
us that an event occurs prior to the time context. In your sentence the
time context is "tomorrow," and the killing takes place prior to
tomorrow. That's tense, even if it's not PAST tense. It's future perfect
tense.
I can't think of a way that this would make sense with a perfective
aspect, since as of today tomorrow's killing is not completed as a whole
unit.
--
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/
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