[Tlhingan-hol] Time and Type 7 verb suffixes

[David Trimboli]

On 6/9/2012 9:43 AM, André Müller wrote:
> In linguistics it's also a common practice to make a difference between
> language-specific terminology and "global" terminology. In many
> grammatical descriptions, linguists distinguish them by labeling
> language-specific categories with capital letters.

Okrand does not capitalize "perfective." :)

> So, David, please don't assume that just because a marker is labeled
> "perfective" in a grammar of Klingon, it automatically has to work
> EXACTLY like the theoretical cross-language description of a perfective
> aspect, let alone like the perfective in any natural language such as
> Chinese, Russian or English (which doesn't have a stand-alone
> perfective, as we know).

I don't assume that. I'm certain that the true case is more complicated 
than that, as shown by examples such as {nIn Hoch natlhlu'pu'}. But to 
ignore the global meaning of the term when it was the term used to 
define the suffixes, and when supplemented by the claim that Klingon 
does not express tense (formally), it's obviously wrong to say that the 
Klingon perfective suffixes simply indicate an action that is over and 
done with by the time of the perspective.

> I speak Chinese, but if I were to apply the same rules I use for the
> (capitalized!) Perfective in Chinese also for the marker {-pu'} in
> Klingon, both parties of your discussion would disagree with a lot of
> sentences I'm writing.

Sure. And my claim is that if speakers apply the rules of perfect tenses 
when using -pu' and -ta', Klingons would disagree with a lot of the 
sentences they utter.

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