[Tlhingan-hol] Translating the past

[Alan Anderson]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 9:27 PM, lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh
<lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...The Perfective refers not to the action of a verb, but instead to the
> completion of the action of the verb. The action has a duration, but the
> completion is an event.

I'd like very much that to be the way Klingon perfective works,
However, even if canon didn't give us examples that don't quite follow
this description, there's a minor detail that makes it problematic:
not all verbs describe an "action". What would the completion of a
quality mean? The way I would interpret something like {jIbuDpu'} ends
up being essentially the "happened prior to the time context" idea.

In order to make things come out consistent for various kinds of
verbs, I tend to think of perfective as describing not the completion
event but the resulting state. I'm probably not "right" to think that,
but it usually gets the appropriate meaning through.

-- ghunchu'wI'