[tlhIngan Hol] thoughts on the perfective {-pu'}

[SuStel]

On 4/5/2022 11:13 AM, Iikka Hauhio wrote:
> I disagree that quality verbs cannot describe events.
>
> If we look at:
>
> *Hogh vorgh jIQongpu'*
> *Hogh vorgh jIroppu'*
> *
> *
> In both cases, I'm looking back to two events: my sleep and my 
> illnesss, both of which I consider as completed wholes, without inner 
> structure. They were two events that happened last week. Sleeping and 
> being ill are both biological conditions that my body has. Both only 
> last for a certain period of time. Both can be described as events. 
> It's a grammatical feature of Klingon that *ghu rop* is accepted and 
> *ghu Qong* is not, but semantically they don't differ much.

Sorry, but no. Having the quality of illness is not an event in the 
linguistic meaning of that term. Sleeping is. Sure, you can describe 
them both as biological functions, but that's not the linguistic meaning 
of the term /state,/ and it's not what we mean when we talk about 
/quality/ in Klingon.

Now, I'm not saying that *Hogh vorgh jIroppu'* is necessarily wrong. But 
what this says isn't that during last week I had the quality of being 
sick. It says that at some point during last week I experienced the 
event of being sick, and that the entire event is described in that one 
sentence. But it remains undemonstrated to me that Klingon allows being 
sick to be an event, and your simply declaring it so doesn't provide any 
evidence. The fact is that we have a notable lack of this in Klingon. 
While that doesn't prove it can't be done, it does prevent you from 
doing anything to prove it other than to declare it to be so.

Who knows? Maybe there's an unambigous perfective quality verb in canon 
somewhere that we haven't brought up.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name
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