[Tlhingan-hol] Time and Type 7 verb suffixes

[David Trimboli]

On 6/17/2012 12:55 PM, ghunchu'wI' wrote:
> On Jun 17, 2012, at 11:37 AM, David Trimboli <david at trimboli.name
> <mailto:david at trimboli.name>> wrote:
>
>> A "canonical translation" simply means it's the translation that
>> appears in the book; it doesn't mean that anything in an English
>> translation that includes a present participle must have come from a
>> Klingon continuous suffix.
>
> The lack of a Klingon continuous suffix in this example is the whole
> point! The idea expressed would not change if the suffix were present.
> That's what was asked for, right?

How does that address what I just said?

Klingon --> English =/= English --> Klingon

Given the Klingon sentence {nughoS jagh}, a perfectly reasonable 
translation is "the enemy is approaching us." So is "the enemy 
approaches us." The former has the benefit of being acceptable 
colloquial English; the latter does not. Any published translation of 
the introduction to CK will be using colloquial English, not a 
translation designed to allow you to back-translate exactly.

De'vID did not ask for an example where the *translation* expressed 
continuous aspect; he asked for "an instance from canon of a verb 
expressing a perfective or continuous aspect but which does not have the 
corresponding suffix," i.e., of a *Klingon* verb expressing aspect 
without the aspect suffix. When you brought up this sentence, he gave a 
(to me) very good argument as to why the sentence may not be referring 
to any kind of continuous aspect, and thus leaves off an aspect suffix 
(and indeed may have been specifically modified from a pre-existing 
example that *had* such a suffix).

Now, you may not agree with his analysis, and that's fine, but address 
your doubts about that by replying to *his* message. My point is that 
you cannot base your knowledge of Klingon grammar on the colloquial 
English used to translate it.

Do we all understand that there's a difference between what a 
Klingon-speaker expresses and what the English translation expresses? 
The former is determined by context; the latter is determined by English 
grammatical rules. In the case of aspect, the two expressions *always* 
mean different things; only context can make one mean the same thing as 
the other. To determine exactly what a Klingon sentence is expressing, 
therefore, you *must* look to the context in which it is spoken. The 
English translation can only guide you to what the speaker has in mind, 
unless that translation has been carefully and awkwardly constructed to 
include everything in the original and to exclude everything not in the 
original.

For instance, {nughoStaH jagh} *exactly* means "The/an enemy or enemies 
or the enemies were/are/will be approaching us before the time in which 
we consider them, were/are/will be approaching us during the time in 
which we consider them, and were/are/will be approaching us after the 
time in which we consider them." Who talks like that? Yes, it means "the 
enemy is approaching us," but that's not *exactly* what it means. That's 
just how you'd say it in English, and you've lost a lot of the meaning 
in the translation.

How you'd say it in English is never *exactly* what it means in Klingon. 
Therefore you can't use an colloquial English translation to determine 
the correct rules of Klingon, and certainly not to definitively 
back-translate to the original Klingon.

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