[Tlhingan-hol] Translating the past

[SuStel]

On 4/12/2014 10:43 PM, Bellerophon, modeler wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 6:23 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name
> <mailto:sustel at trimboli.name>> wrote:
>
>
>     Klingon -pu' and -ta' have examples showing both PERFECTIVE and
>     PERFECT aspects. They can mean either of these things. TKD calls it
>     "perfective," but the definition is not strictly correct. What most
>     people believe, incorrectly as I see it, is that these suffixes
>     indicate what is correctly called perfect aspect.
>
>
> Could one not say {wa'leS ghaH HoHlu'pu'}, indicating that by
> tomorrow he will have gotten himself killed? This sentence uses
> perfective but not in any past sense, Klingon cultural attitudes toward
> counting one's chickens notwithstanding. If grammar allows such a
> construction, it would divorce -pu' and -ta' from any connection with
> the past, except insofar as the past is more somewhat more certain than
> the future.

It could certainly be used for that. -pu' and -ta' are not connected to 
the PAST, they are connected to TENSE, in that their perfect usage tells 
us that an event occurs prior to the time context. In your sentence the 
time context is "tomorrow," and the killing takes place prior to 
tomorrow. That's tense, even if it's not PAST tense. It's future perfect 
tense.

I can't think of a way that this would make sense with a perfective 
aspect, since as of today tomorrow's killing is not completed as a whole 
unit.

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