[Tlhingan-hol] Aspect, etc

[Will Martin]

I’m really trying to grok your version of how the perfective works in Klingon. It’s not easy. Maybe you are 100% correct here. I’m trying not to perpetuate the argument. That would be far easier. All I’d have to do is not listen to you and plow on, as we often do here.

So, trying to explain how I understand this, I’ve seen a verb without a Type 7 suffix as if it were a dot on the time line. The action of the verb happens. That’s the dot. Maybe it also happened at some points before and after the dot. We don’t care. We’re just noting that at least a dot of activity happens within the time setting of the statement. {wa’Hu’ jIyIt.} I walked yesterday. I probably didn’t walk all day long. I probably took more than one step at a walking pace. Somewhere between these extremes, walking happened, and I was the perpetrator.

A strict interpretation of “If there’s no Type 7 suffix, then…” would conclude that there can’t be any other activity beyond the dot. It’s a dot, not a line segment, because the whole point of Type 7 is to describe the line segment. Actions typically do not happen without starts, continuations and endings. The question is, what is it about the action we want to comment on in terms of start, continuation, and stop? If those aspects of the action are not important to our statements, then we don’t use Type 7 suffixes. It doesn’t mean the action is not a time line segment. We simply don’t care enough to note what KIND of line segment the action is on the time line.

Add {-taH}, and the action becomes a line with a vague start and a vague end. It goes in both directions farther than we are looking. The focus is on it being a line segment with no noteworthy start or stop within the time context of the statement. {wa’Hu’ jIyIttaH.} I walked all day yesterday.

Add {-choH} and it starts at a point and continues off into the future farther than we are looking. We don’t care how far it goes. We’re noting that the dot is the starting point. It’s a line segment with a known beginning and an ending or absence of ending that we don’t care about when we make the statement. {wa’Hu’ jIyItchoH.} I started walking yesterday. 

Okay. I get it.

The perfective refers to the endpoint of the action in the same way that {-choH} points to the beginning of the action. {wa’Hu’ jIyItpu’}. Yesterday, I stopped walking.

While this makes sense to me, if that’s how it works, Okrand did a piss poor job of explaining it in TKD. Nowhere do we get a translation that fits this model of what the perfective means. {vaj Daleghpu’} is not translated “Thus you stopped seeing it.”

If {-pu’} is the flip side of {-choH}, indicating that completion (and cessation) of the action occurs in the time context of the sentence, then that should be a valid translation. Instead, we get, “Then you’ve seen it,” which falls back to my sense that the completion occurs in the time context of the sentence OR BEFORE.

I believe the difference between {-choH} as a beginning and {-pu’} as an ending is that {-choH} marks the time that the action begins, while {-pu’} merely indicates that completion has occurred. It doesn’t peg the timing of the completion the same way that {-choH} pegs the beginning.

You think that it DOES peg the timing of the completion the same way that {-choH} pegs the beginning of the action, right? Am I understanding you correctly?

And if I am understanding you correctly, then why isn’t “Then you stopped seeing it” a valid translation of {vaj Daleghpu’}? Or is it a valid translation? And if it is, why haven’t there been any examples of it being done this way?

I know this sounds like I’m in your face, challenging you. That’s honestly not my intent. I’m not sure how to word it better. I’ve always had the sense that {-choH} is of a fundamentally different character than {-pu’}, that {-choH} is the dot at the beginning of a vector, while {-pu’} is more like a shape than a point. Vague start, definite stop, the combined shape together, not a focus on the point, alone.

As I look at it in my mind, your model (if I’m understanding it) is cleaner. My model is probably contaminated by having Okrand tell me that {-pu’} was originally intended to be past tense, and one of the famous botched lines made him change the grammatical function, and once it was changed, he liked it, but somehow it has retained some shading from its origin as past tense. This, perhaps explains some inconsistency in canon.

I don’t know.

My little head hurts. Make it stop.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Dec 3, 2015, at 2:37 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 12/3/2015 2:12 PM, Will Martin wrote:
>> I’m trying to wrap my head around this.
>> 
>> The issue of time context is messy, since most forms of time stamp
>> involve a duration as well as a time anchor. {wa’Hu’} is not a specific
>> instant, but any of an infinite number of instants between the dawn with
>> today’s date and the dawn with one less than today’s date, or it can
>> refer to any duration within that larger duration, including the entire
>> duration.
>> 
>> Even the instant specified by {DaH} is squishy, since, depending on
>> context, it can mean the duration of the expression of the word (which
>> is still full of an infinite number of instants), to a vague, larger
>> duration moment in time that includes the instants that involve the
>> expression of the word.
> 
> All this is true, but this is how languages work. In the case of perfective, if you specify an elongated time context, then the action is completed some time during that time context. Because perfective expresses an action without an internal temporal description, you're not saying how long the action lasted, just that it occurred and was completed.
> 
>> I have always assumed that the perfective supplements the temporal
>> information given by the explicit or implied time stamp, and that
>> expressions that are timeless are exceptional. They exist, but they are
>> relatively rare. Timelessness with the perfective seems even more
>> exceptional.
> 
> A perfective verb is not timeless, but its time may be unspecified and/or merely understood. There is a difference.
> 
>> It seems like if you want to say that Kruge “DOESN’T SAY WHEN THIS
>> HAPPENS”, then there’s no reason to exclude the future. He could just as
>> easily mean, “Thus you will complete seeing it twenty years from now.”
>> If there’s no time reference, then there’s no time reference. An absence
>> of time reference does not imply past tense, which is what you are
>> suggesting.
> 
> Except he clearly doesn't mean that. "Then you will have seen it twenty years from now" would be a silly thing to say, so that's obviously not what he meant. Therefore we know that he means it already happened.
> 
>> Valkris tells him that he will find it useful to the mission.
> 
>   Qu'vaD lI' net tu'bej
>   one finds it useful for the mission
> 
> Notice there's no time stamp here, but we KNOW she means the part of the mission that's still to come, not the part of the mission they've already accomplished. How do we know that?
> 
>> She doesn’t say, {jIyajpu’}. Is that to suggest that her understanding
>> is incomplete, or habitual, or general, and not referring to any
>> specific thing that he has said? No. He has said something, and she has
>> understood what he said.
> 
> It's general. She's not finished understanding. She's describing her state of understanding. This is not a perfective, or even perfect, concept.
> 
>> I honestly believe that canon fails to conform to the clear and explicit
>> statement in TKD that the absence of a Type 7 verb suffix implies that
>> there is no continuation or completion of the action. In practice, these
>> suffixes function more like optional helper words in English. You
>> include them when their added meaning are noteworthy, and you omit them
>> when they are not.
> 
> I think we can take TKD at face value in this for most cases, and I can demonstrate it over and over; you have to invent new rules "like optional helper words" to find a way to justify grammar that explicitly contradicts it. Which is simpler?
> 
>> It’s noteworthy that the completion of the action of seeing the Genesis
>> Project is complete. It’s not noteworthy that the action of
>> understanding what Kruge just said is complete. It actually IS complete,
>> but that’s not as important as expressing that she understood what he said.
> 
> No. The seeing of the Genesis data is complete. The understanding of the consequences is a general state that has no completion.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://trimboli.name
> 
> 
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