[Tlhingan-hol] Aspect, etc

[De'vID]

Who on the mailing list speaks a language with aspect (I mean, other
than Klingon)? I wonder what other aspect-language-speakers' intuition
about this is.

I'm a native Cantonese Chinese speaker, and like all topolects of
Chinese, it has aspect but no tense. It's sort of strange when this is
pointed out to me, because I grew up bilingual (Cantonese and
English), and the fact that one language has aspect but no tense while
the other has tense but no aspect never bothered me. It's not
something I normally even notice unless it's explicitly pointed out.

Every time the topic of aspect in Klingon comes up, I mentally switch
into translating from Klingon to Cantonese then to English, instead of
Klingon to English directly, to activate my "aspect intuition", if you
will. We've had this conversation before (on this mailing list, I
mean), and I came away with the conclusion that aspect in Klingon
does, indeed, work just like how I intuitively expect aspect to work.
(The aspect markers in Cantonese are richer than in Klingon: there are
four different aspects for indicating that an action is completed,
perfective (咗), completive (完), exhaustive (哂),
and experiential (過), so there's not a one-to-one mapping between the
Cantonese perfective and the Klingon one.)

SuStel's attempts to explain aspect reminds me of my attempts to
explain tense to my grandparents while I was growing up. They
immigrated to Canada as adults and spoke almost no English. They could
never understand that tense actually makes a difference to the
meaning, was not optional, and was not a matter of emphasis.

In Chinese, you'd say [he eat], and it could mean "he ate (past)", "he
is eating (present)", or "he will eat (future)".

On the other hand, if someone had just had dinner, you couldn't just
say "he eat". You'd have to say "He eat-perfective". If you just said
"He eat", it would mean he's a person who eats dinner generally or
something like that. It means something else.

I have cousins who were born in Canada who learned Cantonese as a
second language. They could never understand aspect. So there would be
conversations where, for example, my grandmother would ask, [you
eat-perfective dinner] (i.e., "have you had dinner?"), and my cousin
might answer [I eat], which is wrong. She should've said, [I
eat-perfective]. But my grandmother understood her anyway.

André Müller:
> In Russian and many Southeast Asian language, which also have aspect (and
> the latter usually don't have tense), it is possible to say something like
> "I killed him, but didn't kill-him-to-the-end.", basically referring to an
> attempted but failed murder. In the same way, it's possible to say "He was
> dying, but didn't die.", meaning that the person or animal did survive after
> all. That of course is possible in Klingon, too: {vIHoH(-taH), 'ach
> vIHoHpu'be'.} (I'd use {-taH} or even {-lI'}, but am not 100% sure that it
> has to be used here).

With a single victim, the example is hard to understand, but with
multiple victims, it's easier.

In Cantonese, you can say, for example:
1. [I kill them, but I not kill-completive them] which means "I killed
(some of) them, but I haven't finished the job" (the implication being
that the speaker intends to do so)
2. [I kill them, but I not kill-exhaustive them] which means "I killed
(some of) them, but not all of them" (the implication being that some
of them managed to escape, or were expected to be present but weren't,
or something like that)

You can also say:
3. [I kill-perfective them] which would in most contexts simply be
translated as "I killed them" or "I've killed them", but could also
mean "(at some future point) I will have killed them"; this can be
translated as "I will kill them", but it means something very
different than "I will kill them" without the perfective. [tomorrow I
kill them] is a statement of fact, whereas [tomorrow I kill-perfective
them] might be a threat.
4. [I kill-experiential them] which means "I have experienced killing
them, I've killed them in the past" (like, "they're not so tough")

Without any aspect marker, [I kill them] would normally mean "I will
kill them". (It could, in theory, also mean "I killed them" or "I am
killing them", but in practice "I killed them" would have one of the
above aspect markers, and "I'm killing them" would have the
progressive aspect marker (緊) which is like Klingon {-lI'}. I think
the fact that certain tenses are correlated with certain aspects is
one of the main reasons that some people have such difficulty
understanding the difference between tense and aspect, because they
often look the same.)

If you've watched any gangster movies from Hong Kong, none of the
above sentences would be out of place. It would also be clear that the
aspect markers are not optional, because they change the meaning of
the sentence. On the other hand, English is perfectly capable of
translating each of the sentences despite not having aspect.

Since Cantonese "perfective" aspect is finer-grained than Klingon,
{chaH vIHoH 'ach chaH vIHoHpu'be'} doesn't map exactly to one of the
above, but I'd understand it as something like "I killed (some of
them), but I haven't finished the job / I didn't kill all of them".

As far {ghaH vIHoH 'ach ghaH vIHoHpu'be'}, it wouldn't make any sense
to me unless the victim was a vampire or a zombie or something like
that.

-- 
De'vID