[tlhIngan Hol] Using -ta' during -taHvIS

Daniel Dadap daniel at dadap.net
Mon Feb 25 14:44:52 PST 2019


> On Feb 25, 2019, at 15:30, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> Incorrect. Omitting a type 7 suffix on a verb explicitly means the action is not continuous and not perfective. It doesn't add optional meaning; if you are describing a completed action, you need a perfective suffix on it.

I’ve seen you make this claim a number of times, but without providing a reference. Could you point out where aspect suffixes are described as non-optional? I’ve tried looking for it myself, and the closest thing I’ve found is in TKD 4.2.7 which says:

> Klingon does not express tenses (past, present, future). These ideas come across from context or other words in the sentence (such as {wa'leS} <tomorrow>). The language does, however, indicate aspect: whether an action is completed or not yet completed, and whether an action is a single event or a continuing one.
> 
> The absence of a Type 7 suffix usually means that the action is not completed and is not continuous (that is, it is not one of the things indicated by the Type 7 suffixes). Verbs with no Type 7 suffix are translated by the English simple present tense.

I don’t take that to mean that a verb must necessarily take the appropriate Type 7 suffix it it happens to describe an action that is completed or continuous. The “usually” seems to leave room for the omission of Type 7 suffixes under unspecified circumstances. I also don’t think that the sentence about verbs with no Type 7 suffix being translated by the English simple present tense means that they always have to be translated that way. That could just be a description of the translating convention used in the dictionary or in the examples that immediately follow that description.

It seems a bit strange to me that plural markers would be optional for things which context makes clear are definitely plural (and even for things where context leaves things ambiguous) but aspect markers would not be optional. Then again, Klingon was intentionally designed to be strange. Also, the fact that a verb can’t take an aspect marker when it takes a sentence as its object means that there are definitely cases where the absence of an aspect marker is required, even if the verb exists in a context that otherwise indicates a completed or continuous aspect. Perhaps the cases that fall outside of the “usually” in the second paragraph quoted above fall entirely within the confines of “verbs taking sentences as objects”, but it doesn’t quite add up to “aspect markers must be used for all completed or continuous actions” for me.



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