[Tlhingan-hol] Aspect, etc

[De'vID]

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:
> I think that you would be right, if Klingon worked the way it says it is supposed to work, but in reality, I think it’s sloppier than that.
> [...]
> But I don’t think Okrand or Paramount or even the people on this list actually speak a language that does that.

The way that SuStel (and André and others) have described how aspect
works is more or less how aspect works in Chinese and a number of
other languages, so that's at least a sixth of the Earth's population
that speaks a language like what TKD describes in the section on
aspect. Actually, Klingon has a rather simple set of aspect markers.

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:
> 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.

She doesn't say {jIyajpu'} because it would have been wrong for her to
say that in that context. In the context of that conversation, {jIyaj}
means "I understand" (or, more colloquially, "Understood", which I
believe is how it's translated in the subtitles). {jIyajpu'} would
mean something like "I have understood" (to use the imprecise
convention of translating Klingon into English established in TKD).

{yajpu'} means that there was a completed act of understanding. It
does not imply anything about whether that still holds. If a professor
asks a student if she's ready for the exam, she might say (of the
subject matter) {vIyajpu'}. That is, she was studying a difficult
subject, and it finally clicked. There was a completed episode of
understanding of the subject matter, with the implication she's ready
for the exam. Or maybe she says {wa'leS vIyajpu'} "I will have
understood it by tomorrow", with the implication that she's not quite
ready yet, but will be ready before the exam next week.

Maybe there's a second exam a couple of months later, and the
student's forgotten the earlier material. She does badly on this
second exam. The professor says to her, {'ach Dayajpu'!} "But you had
understood the material before!" He's referring to an earlier
completed episode of her understanding. But clearly, she doesn't
understand the material any more.

{yajpu'} means that understanding is completed (which might be in the
past or future). It implies nothing about whether the understanding
continues past the point of completion.

It would literally make no sense for Valkris to say {jIyajpu'}, in the
same way that it would make no sense for her to say "I have
understood" (or "I will have understood") in that context. It implies
nothing about her present understanding of the situation. (This
reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke: "I used to do drugs. I still do,
but I used to, too.")

On the other hand, {vaj Daleghpu'} makes sense, because there was a
completed instance of Valkris seeing the Genesis Data.

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:
> 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 that the bulk of the canon, and especially the early canon,
conforms to the prescription of aspect given in TKD. Okrand very
deliberately chose aspect over tense to make Klingon un-English-like.
It might be that he later forgot this or was sometimes sloppy about
it, but at least TKD records his intention.

I don't believe that aspect markers can be optional, because they
genuinely change the meaning of verbs, so their absence matters. Or,
to put it another way, if it were true that they were optional,
Klingon would become much more imprecise, because some pairs of
related verbs which are different words in English but expressed by
the same base verb and differing aspect markers in Klingon would
become conflated. Some examples that I can think of are: {chop} "bite"
and {choptaH} "chew", {'uch} "grasp" and {'uchtaH} "hold on to", {jun}
"avoid" and {juntaH} "evade". A more technical pair is {lol} "be at an
attitude (for an aircraft)" and {loltaH} "maintain an attitude".

(Aside: There is at least one concept which I expect to be expressed
with aspect which is a separate verb in Klingon, namely, {chergh} and
{SIQ}. But I like this about Klingon. The fact that it's not so
clean-cut as other constructed languages makes it feel more natural.)

If {-taH} were optional, then one cannot easily express "bite". One
would have to say {chop 'ach choptaHbe'}, because {chop} by itself
would be ambiguous.

I think you think of aspect markers as optional because the concepts
they express are optional *in English*, just like how many Chinese
speakers learning English seem to think that tense is optional
(because the concept tense expresses is optional in Chinese). But
there's no evidence that aspect in Klingon doesn't mean aspect in
exactly the way that linguists understand it, nor is there any hint
anywhere that type 7 verb suffixes are any more optional than any
other type of verb suffix.

-- 
De'vID