[Tlhingan-hol] mutually subordinate clauses?

[lojmIt tI'wI'nuv]

I respect your expertise in the language. I appreciate the passion with which you hold your interest in the Klingon language and in language in general.

This is not a personal attack. There are no flames intended here and no disrespect.

In this single area of grammar, I get the sense that your personal, passionate, focussed study into linguistics has connected to an idea about language in general and you've come to a conclusion about the Type 7 verb suffix that simply doesn't fit either the description in TKD or the majority of canon.

The whole concept of having a language without tense that does have perfective -- that perfectly separates the two ideas and is blind to one while invested in the other is one of the cool, alien things about Klingon. It is easy to be lazy or ignorant and confuse the concepts of tense and aspect. You are good to point out that we should not be so careless in this area if we are to use the language well and understand what it really means.

But there's nothing there to differentiate between talking about a single instance of an action vs. a general trend of an action taking place, except, of course, as always, context.

We have tools, like adverbials, like {reH, not, pIj, ghaytan}, or suffixes like {-qa'}, but Type 7 verb suffixes are not as required as you want them to be. They simply aren't.

The word "usually" in the quoted text on page 40 in TKD cannot be ignored, if you want to understand most of the canon Okrand has written. The only time that a Type 7 suffix is required is when aspect is an important part of the meaning of the sentence, and that simply has nothing to do with whether we are talking about a single instance of the action of the verb, or a general trend of the action of the verb to occur as a universal truth.

Without context, {qayaj} can either mean, "right now, in response to the single thing you just said, I understand you," or it can mean "for all the time that I've known you, I generally understand you, and I anticipate understanding you for the rest of our common time on this spiritual plane." The language simply doesn't differentiate between these without further context.

In fact, I'd be more inclined to expect that {qayajtaH} suggests the general trend rather than the single instance. And if I wish to say, "In this instance, I understand you," then it would be difficult for me to find the right aspect suffix to describe it, since {qayajtaH} suggests no end to my understanding you, which I don't wish to suggest, and {qayajlI'} suggests a foreseeable end to the understanding, as well as a goal, which really doesn't fit my intent, and {qayajpu'} suggests that I no longer understand you because the process of my understanding you has been completed and no longer continues, as does {qayajta'}.

So, my point is that while understanding aspect is important, and you've clearly done some outside reading on this topic, the conclusion that you've come to in this single topic is erroneous. Much of what you say is completely correct, but you have made up a connection between the presence or absence of a Type 7 suffix and verbs describing a single instance or event vs. a general trend that simply has no basis. You made it up.

You came to the conclusion based on what may have been a perfect argument in some other context, but here, in Klingon grammar, there is no connection that requires a Type 7 suffix on a verb in order to differentiate an instance vs. a trend.

It's not that you are not being understood. It's that you are wrong.

Just this time.

You are often quite right and you teach the rest of us by bringing important perspectives to the discussion of how this language works. Just not this time.

There is no shame in being wrong now and then. I do it often.

"If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything." I think Edison said that, but I'm not sure. But then, he's dead, so it's not really all that important to him either way. But the point is, I heard it somewhere and it made sense to me, so I still say it often, though it wasn't my original idea. It's just worth repeating.

We do this for fun, and most of us, most of the time, don't really intend to hurt anyone's feelings. In this episode, I definitely don't intend to hurt your feelings.

And I want us to understand the language to the best of our ability, which involves identifying mistakes and resolving them, which, unfortunately, is really hard to do sometimes without making somebody mad, if they are really invested in their mistake.

Time can cool this. 

And repeating the error will not make it true.

qavuvtaH. It may not be obvious, but it is true.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



On Jun 5, 2012, at 11:55 AM, David Trimboli wrote:

> On 6/5/2012 11:45 AM, lojmIt tI'wI'nuv wrote:
>> You are skipping over the word "usually" in your own quote and putting
>> more weight on the statement than it can hold. You are loading it with
>> words like "required" and "cannot".
>> 
>> So, if I write of my wife and say:
>> 
>> pIj jatlhtaH.
>> 
>> According to you, that's a single episode. Never mind the adverbial. I
>> have an aspect marker, therefore I MUST be talking about a single event,
>> right?
> 
> Having aspect doesn't mean the verb must describe a single episode; lacking aspect means the verb can't be describing a single episode in its entirety.
> 
>> Or if I complain that I generally don't get enough sleep because
>> of my bad bed:
>> 
>> QongDaqwIjmo' not jIQongchu'ta'.
>> 
>> Again, you would insist that I'm talking about a specific ocurance.
> 
> No, I wouldn't.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://www.trimboli.name/
> 
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