[Tlhingan-hol] Time and Type 7 verb suffixes

[André Müller]

2012/6/9 David Trimboli <david at trimboli.name>

> 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." :)



Yes, because he doesn't use this practice in his book. Maybe it wasn't so
common back in those days or he simply decided against them, because the
book was designed for non-linguists.


>
>
>  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 wouldn't say so. It's far from obvious. Okrand does not apply this handy
capitalization difference, so just from the word "perfective" we can't know
if Okrand means the global meaning of "perfective" or the language-specific
one ("Perfective"). The context usually tells us, but we cannot conclude
the full range of meanings just from a description like "The suffix {-pu'}
marks the perfective aspect in Klingon."; we HAVE to read on his
explanation and check the examples to see if the explanation suffices. Just
because Okrand calls something in a certain way, doesn't mean the global
definition applies for Klingon.



>
>  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.


Yes, same thing. I agree that it's certainly not identical with the English
perfect tense. But because I didn't follow the entire discussion and
haven't made up my own opinion on the Klingon Perfective aspect yet, I
don't assume any position in the argument. I just wanted to mention that we
cannot know the usage and exact meaning of a grammatical category just from
looking at its label.
I noticed the same sometimes happening with the topic marker {-'e'}. Okrand
explained its usage pretty well and we have a lot of examples. He decided
to call it a topic marker (it would get capitalized in some other
linguists' grammars). Yet there are people who judge from the label only
and believe they could construct an entire OVS clause after a noun marked
with {-'e'} (meaning for instance "As for crew, everyone trusts the
captain."). This works with topic constructions in Chinese and perhaps
Japanese, but certainly not in Klingon. I don't want to raise this as a new
topic (of discussion, I mean), but it's the same thing: people judge from
the label and construct ungrammatical sentences.

- André
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