[Tlhingan-hol] Qualification

[Will Martin]

Others have explained this differently enough that I feel a need to give a more core-accurate reply.

Klingon doesn’t have tense. It’s not really true that it “uses aspect suffixes to accomplish something akin to tenses”. It uses aspect suffixes to accomplish something akin to aspect. There are only two things that convey tense in Klingon:

1. Context.

2. Time stamps.

Typically, context is established with time stamps, though it can also be normal, obvious context. 

wa’Hu’ qayaj. I understood you yesterday.
DaHjaj qayaj. I understand you today.
wa’leS qayaj. I will understand you tomorrow.

If you speak about a topic with an obvious time reference, that establishes the tense of everything you say, until you either obviously change contexts with another obvious time setting, or you use a time stamp to establish a new time reference, whereupon any new thing said will take that anchor for the time setting, until some other context or time stamp changes the time reference.

Klingon doesn’t lose much for it’s lack of tense, since that only gives you three very vague time references to now, before now, and after now. Klingon has a much richer set of temporal references, and once those are established, there’s no need frittering away your time and effort keeping track of what tense you should be using. The sort of arguments English speakers have with each other as to whether or not you should have used a particular tense for a particular verb is the kind of thing one would be killed for on Qo’noS.

So, Klingons don’t have anything to do with tense. It’s a stupid waste of time and brain power. Early Klingon linguists who tried to introduce tense into the language were filtered out of the gene pool.

As for why one would say, {nepwI’ Daba’!} instead of {bInepba’taH!}, why does ANYBODY choose one phrasing over another. It’s just the way he wanted to say it that time. Don’t try to put too much weight on it.

Maybe he just wanted to use {Daba’} because it’s one of the few examples of a Klingon word that could have two radically different meanings. Either “You obviously behave in the manner of X” or “You sit it.” The second example doesn’t immediately make a lot of sense to me, but it COULD be a poetic way of describing something about nostrils.

Perhaps in his region, {nepwI’} is a common insulting term and he likes using it. He’s not asserting that you simply are lying now, or have, from time to time, lied, but instead prefers to make a statement about the core of your being, the defining feature of your identity, and the ethical foundation of your every act.

Or not.

The problem is, most canon examples from Okrand lack context, which is pretty ironic considering how often he reminds us of the importance of context.

Which is why translations appear to be so arbitrary in terms of tense. We get a brief translation with no context from which to know what the tense should be, so the translator has to just make one up; choose one at random.

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Oct 22, 2015, at 11:08 AM, qunnoQ HoD <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> in hol.kag.org <http://hol.kag.org/>,as well as in TKD,on qualification the following examples are given :
> 
> jIyajchu' I understand clearly (yaj understand)
> baHchu' he/she fired (the torpedo) perfectly (baHfire [a torpedo]
> 
> i would like to ask why in the second example the translation is given in the past tense,while in the first example the translation is in the present tense.
> 
> 
> secondly,in hol.kag.org <http://hol.kag.org/> on the same subject, the following example is given :
> 
> nepwI' Daba' he/she is obviously lying (nepwI' liar,Da act in the manner of, behave as). 
> 
> the meaning of the sentence {nepwI' Daba'} is given as <<he/she is obviously lying>>. but as it is described,the literal meaning would be closer to <<she is obviously behaving as liar>> wouldn't simply {nepba'} be much closer to the <<he/she is obviously lying>> ?
> 
> qunnoQ
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