[Tlhingan-hol] Time and Type 7 verb suffixes

[Robyn Stewart]

At 11:23 '?????' 6/7/2012, you wrote:

So what would you do with this one:

chorI'lI''a'? puchpa'Daq jIHpu' .

or

chorI'lI''a'? puchpa'Daq jIHtaH

The person wants to know if they missed a hail while they were in the 
bathroom. The point isn't that they were in the bathroom and 
completed that event at some time now past. The point is that they 
continued to be in the bathroom throughout the time while the 
possible hailing was in progress, but now they're back at their duty station.

I'm looking for an instance where I look at something you'd write and 
think that it doesn't make sense like that.  I'm often happy with or 
without a perfective, where you'd prefer one, but then when I write a 
narrative in English I often don't indicate that actions are 
complete. "I load the airplane. There are seventeen bags of 
potatoes." And so on.

I'd prefer to have a model of the perfective that embraces all the 
examples in TKD than to have to handwave and say that Marc hadn't 
quite worked out -pu' when he wrote those. It's more consistent 
overall, as he hasn't strenuously contradicted that canon elsewhere 
since. Your {wa'maH ben boghpu'} point is strong. Conduct gymnastics 
to explain it, or re-envision the framework such that it sits easily there?

I guess I'm addressing SuStel, but I certainly want to see what 
others have to say. What I'm edging towards here is that despite the 
vehemence of the arguments, when it actually comes down to writing a 
narrative that others understand and accept, there isn't a huge 
difference between the camps.  It's okay to explain something a 
different way if we understand one another's tlhIngan Hol, right?

- Qov