[Tlhingan-hol] Perfective translations

[David Trimboli]

On 12/4/2011 7:45 PM, Qov robyn at flyingstart.ca> wrote:
> It wasn't my thesis. I was just providing an explanation of the Latin
> thing. I have been told that Marc went out of his way to make Klingon as
> unexpected as possible in comparison to Earth norms, in many ways.
> Translations of sample text in TKD makes it seem as though -pu' was
> originally a tense marker, though. Or maybe Marc was never that hot at
> languages with aspect, either.

I no longer think this. I believe the problem is ours: a misapplication 
of the term "perfective" 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfective_aspect> to mean "perfect" 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_(grammar)>.

We have often described -pu' and -ta' as telling us that an action is 
completed as of the time context. For example, {wa'Hu' Daleghpu'} "as of 
yesterday you had seen it." This isn't perfective aspect; it seems more 
like perfect aspect (they're different).

-pu' is described as "perfective." Perfective aspect means the event is 
viewed as a completed whole, without internal temporal parts. The event 
is to be looked at as something begun and finished all in one word. 
Thus, {wa'Hu' Daleghpu'} means "you saw it yesterday," in that the 
seeing started and finished yesterday, and we aren't expressing that the 
seeing had any internal process that can be detailed. You saw it, and 
the seeing was finished, all in one go. This is perfective.

The trouble is, English doesn't make this distinction easily; to do so 
you have to use complicated locutions like the ones I used in the 
previous paragraph. "You have seen it" and "you saw it" are both 
approximately correct translations of {Daleghpu'}, but neither really 
captures the precise perfective flavor.

And when we get {vIneHpu'} "I wanted them" and {qaja'pu'} "I told you," 
the English looks like it's in the simple past tense, but that's only 
because English can't get away from tense. The translations are simply 
close enough (and we get these particular translations because they come 
straight from the script of Star Trek III).

And since we are told in TKD 4.2.7 that the absence of a Type 7 suffix 
means the action is not completed and is not continuous, not just that 
we have chosen not to mention the aspect. ALL Klingon verbs make their 
aspects clear, even if that aspect is "not-completed and 
not-continuous." Unfortunately, it seems Okrand subsequently forgot 
this, because much of his later work ignores the rule (or maybe he's 
come to believe our own erroneous interpretation of perfective, if we've 
said it to him often enough).

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/