[tlhIngan Hol] Using -ta' during -taHvIS

[De'vID]

On Mon, 25 Feb 2019 at 23:45, Daniel Dadap <daniel at dadap.net> wrote:

>
> > 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.


It's interesting that aspect and tense are things that languages can have,
but some languages have one and not the other, because they're handled in
similar ways in natural languages. Imagine the analogous situation where I
told you that the absence of something indicating past or future tense
usually means that the verb is in the present tense. This is a (very
simplified) version of how English and most Indo-European languages work.
There *are* situations where a verb is in the present tense but describes
an action in the past or future, such as if you're telling a story where
the narrative tense is present but it actually takes place in the past (or
future), but these are special cases. The word "usually" indicates that
something is a rule, but that there are (i.e., "unusual") exceptions.


> 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.
>

As someone who natively speaks one language with tense and not aspect
(English) and another with aspect and not tense (Cantonese Chinese), I'll
say that the fact that each language requires the expression of something
that the other doesn't just means that something has to get dropped when
going from one to the other. It does *not* mean that the thing that's
frequently dropped in translation is *optional* in the original language.

One common stereotype Americans have of (typically older) Chinese people
speaking English is that they drop tense, so they would say things like "I
go [instead of went] store yesterday". The stereotype also exists in the
other direction: Chinese people think Americans and other native English
speakers learning Chinese drop aspect, so they say things like "I go
[instead of go-completed] store yesterday". I don't know how much
experience you've had teaching English to Chinese speakers (or vice versa),
but it genuinely is difficult to convince people not to forget to include
the thing that normally isn't included in their native language. I mean,
how important can tense be if it's *never* expressed in my own language?
And yet, if you drop tense in English, it just sounds wrong to someone who
speaks the language.

I see something similar happening with Klingon where people try to convince
themselves that the rules doesn't actually say what it says, because it
goes against their *English*-based intuition of what needs to be expressed
in a sentence. People claim that it's okay to omit aspect markers if what
they indicate isn't "important". But what's important in a language isn't
entirely subjective, but rather governed by the rules of the language
itself. Objectively, tense isn't important in English. There have been
proposals for a reformed simplified English which drop all sorts of things
like tense. And clearly, since other natural languages don't express tense,
English doesn't need to, either. And yet "usually" when you omit tense when
a verb should actually be in past or future tense, it's just wrong.


> 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.


But there's a logical difference between them. Plural markers are optional
because you can otherwise be unambiguous, either by using prefixes, or when
that is insufficient, by using a number such as {wa'}. The plural
indicators in Klingon are exhaustive: things are either singular or plural
(there are no nulls, or duals, or other, as some languages have). The
Klingon aspect system uses the absence of aspect markers to indicate a
particular range of aspect (namely, actions which are neither completed nor
continuous), so the aspect markers are *not* exhaustive. If aspect markers
were optional when the action is completed or continuous, it would leave
the language with no way to unambiguously specify an action that is
neither. It would be like if English were to treat the absence of tense as
optionally indicating future or past: it would leave the language no way to
unambiguously express present tense. (If aspect markers were optional in
Klingon, then it would need an explicit aspect marker for "not completed
and not continuous".)


> Then again, Klingon was intentionally designed to be strange.


While Klingon is strangely put together, most parts of it taken in
isolation actually exist in natural Terran languages. The way it handles
aspect is consistent with how it's done in natural languages like Chinese
(which has many more aspects than Klingon expresses).


> 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.
>

The sentence used to introduce this restriction in TKD is: {yaS qIppu' 'e'
vIlegh}.

This sentence didn't appear in Star Trek III, but was something with this
grammar actually spoken in the movie which forced Okrand to make this
restriction? Otherwise, I think the restriction was put in place to prevent
contradictory aspects between the two sentences in a SAO construction.
There are other ways of doing that, but outright banning aspect on the
second sentence accomplishes that goal (even if it's kind of overkill).

In Chinese, when you have the analogous thing to a SAO construction,
certain combinations of aspect markers become impossible. Maybe Okrand just
wanted to keep things simpler in Klingon by banning them outright instead
of specifying the legal combinations, but he apparently forgot the rule
himself while writing the text for the SkyBox cards:

{juHqo'Daq vaS'a' tu'lu'. ngoch luchermeH 'ej wo' San luwuqmeH pa' ghom
tlhIngan yejquv DevwI'pu'. DaH che' ghawran. yejquv DevwI' moj ghawran 'e'
wuqta' cho' 'oDwI' Dapu'bogh janluq pIqarD HoD.}
"On the Homeworld, there is a great hall where the leaders of the Klingon
High Council meet to determine policy and decide upon the fate of the
Empire. Gowron currently presides, named leader of the High Council by
Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who was acting as Arbiter of Succession."
(SkyBox card #25)

{moj 'e' wuqta'} contradicts the rule stated in TKD 6.2.5.

{DuraS tuq tlhIngan yejquv patlh luDub 'e' reH lunIDtaH DuraS be'nI'pu'
lurSa' be'etor je. ngoQvam luchavmeH ghawran maghpu' be'nI'pu'. woQ
luSuqmeH jIjpu' chaH romuluSngan'e' je.}
"The sisters of the House of Duras, Lursa and B'Etor, are constantly
seeking a higher standing for the House of Duras within the Klingon High
Council. To this end, the sisters have acted against Gowron, going as far
as to work with Romulan factions in order to gain power."
(SkyBox card #26)

Same for {luDub 'e' lunIDtaH}.

-- 
De'vID
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