[Tlhingan-hol] Translating the past

[SuStel]

On 4/12/2014 10:53 AM, Robyn Stewart wrote:
> Ah that is useful to me.  I don’t have a cassette player anymore. I hope
> my CK cassettes still work.
>
>
> So why do you think Marc Okrand uses the perfective so much more than we
> do?  There can easily be something special about hunger and thirst.
> Maybe it’s specifically because the time stamp is there in those
> sentences that the perfective isn’t used. English has the same rule, in
> fact.
>
>
> I have eaten.
> I ate at five o’ clock.
> *I have eaten at five o’clock.
>
> The last one can be used, but only in a context like “I have eaten at
> five o’ clock in the past, but usually I eat at eight.”

Think about the rule. It's exactly what I've been describing. "I have 
eaten" means AT SOME POINT PRIOR TO NOW I ate something. Present 
perfect. This is one of the meanings of -pu'.

"I ate at five o'clock" treats the eating as a simple whole without 
structure. The eating is viewed as a moment in time without shape. We 
aren't told anything about how you started to eat, or how long it took 
you to eat, or whether you ate a bit, rested, then ate a bit more. This 
is perfective aspect. Specifically, you've used the past perfective, or 
preterite.

But Okrand's sentence wasn't about eating, it was about being hungry. He 
said {wa'Hu' jIghung} "yesterday I was hungry" which, I'm sure you'll 
agree, means that during some unspecified, non-instantaneous time 
yesterday, I felt hunger. That is, we're not treating being hungry as a 
simple whole without internal structure as we did with eating. This 
sentence is fundamentally different in meaning, and so follows different 
rules. {wa'Hu' jIghung} and {wa'maH Soch vatlh rep jISop[pu']} have 
inherently different aspects whether you think it deserves a -pu' or not.

wa'Hu' jIghung.
I was hungry yesterday.
I was hungry during some unspecified period yesterday, and I'm not 
describing the hunger being completed.

wa'maH Soch vatlh rep jISoppu'.
I ate at five o'clock.
I began eating at five o'clock, and I finished eating, but I'm not 
describing the temporal characteristics of my meal.

Aspectually completely different.

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