[Tlhingan-hol] Translating the past

[Bellerophon, modeler]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 10:57 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:

> 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.


TKD states that -pu' and -ta' denote aspect, which I presume means that if
they happen to indicate tense as well, it is due to context. Since having
begun to distinguish between tense and aspect (thanks to MO), I have always
thought these endings do not locate an action in time, but only indicate
its completion--ordinarily in the past, though one expects some actions to
be completed in the future: hence the future perfect tense in English. It
seems that the aspect of an action completed in the setting spoken of in
the sentence is perfective, irrespective of the time in which the sentence
is spoken. But perhaps I am confusing the concept of perfective aspect with
relative tense.

How about a case where subjunctive mood might be called for? {Sop jabta'pa'
vutwI', laHDaj wInoHlaHbe'}

~'eD

-- 
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