[Tlhingan-hol] Time and Type 7 verb suffixes

[David Trimboli]

On 6/9/2012 10:56 AM, André Müller wrote:
>
>
> 2012/6/9 David Trimboli <david at trimboli.name <mailto: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.

That was a joke, hence the emoticon.

> 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.

Certainly not. And I am not just looking at the 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.

Okrand accepted a correction from our own lojmIt tI'wI' nuv that what is 
described in TKD is emphasis and not topic. Yet Okrand himself used it 
as a topic in Star Trek V: {qIbDaq SuvwI''e' SoH Dun law' Hoch Dun puS} 
"you would be [are] the greatest warrior in the galaxy." With that 
sentence and with the label, the question about {-'e'} remains open.

Okrand has never said anything about "perfective" being an incorrect 
label, and most of his sentences with {-pu'} or {-ta'} work just fine as 
perfective. De'vID has pointed out how perfective may be the dominant 
aspect in a collection of "completed" aspects that {-pu'} could 
represent; this interpretation covers ALL of the examples.

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