[Tlhingan-hol] Time and Type 7 verb suffixes

[ghunchu'wI']

(I'm not going to continue discussing the applicability or otherwise of any given example. It's too easy to reach a "no true Scotsman" situation.)


On Jun 23, 2012, at 7:37 PM, "De'vID" <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Now, we could just be both wrong, but as far as I can tell, his claim amounts to "when MO uses the word 'aspect', he really means what linguists mean by that term (even though he simplifies things for a popular audience)".  That's it.  Given that MO is a linguist writing for non-linguists, why is this assumption considered so unreasonable? 

It's not unreasonable on the face of it. 

However, if you look at how TKD actually explains what it means when it says "perfective", I think it matches the general linguistic concept of "perfect" instead. Look at Klingon perfective as describing the present state resulting from a past event (adjusting appropriately for the time context) and see if you don't agree that's in closer agreement with TKD's definition and usage than the idea of describing an entire action from start to finish.

I spent some real effort recently researching and reading about aspect, trying to reconcile the linguistic definition of perfective with what TKD says it means, and with the examples we have of its use. I was surprised to find that David is mistaken when he labels "perfect" as a tense instead of an aspect. He's usually good about accurately relaying the things he studies. However, it's only when one speaks of *past* perfect, or *present* or *future* perfect, that tense gets into it. His error is understandable, as most descriptions I saw speak of it in the context of English, where there is necessarily a tense involved, and call the result a combination of tense and aspect. Other languages (e.g. Greek) have perfect aspect without invoking tense.

Many references mention the confusingly similar names of the perfect and perfective aspects, point out that the wrong term occasionally gets used in grammatical descriptions (even by people who should know better), and suggest the alternate name "retrospective" instead of "perfect". Invoking "what linguists mean by that term" leaves plenty of room for the linguists under consideration to be referring to either concept.

-- ghunchu'wI'