[tlhIngan Hol] Perfective with qualities / perfective and perfect

[luis.chaparro at web.de]

I've been reading the last threads about perfective with interest and (of course!) I still have a couple of questions.

1. I know now that there's no significant canonical example of qualities with *pu'*. That's a fact I'm not discussing and I'm ready to accept it without problem. Unfortunately, since we make in Spanish a difference between qualities in perfective and imperfective tenses, it's very *unnutural* for me not to use perfective in some situations. I just want to give an example of this and if you say: *Ok, maybe that's possible in Spanish, but in Klingon we don't do that*, then I won't do that in Klingon :-)

In Spanish there is a big difference between:

*La conversación era muy desagradable, así que decidí irme* (*The conversation was very unpleasant, so I decided to leave*) - Imperfective: The situation is presented to the listeners as not completed, as an open box into which they can go and look, so they are put *in medias res*, in the middle of the narrated situation (in their imagination they see the speaker in the middle of an unpleasant conversation and then leaving *before* the conversation was finished).

*La conversación fue muy desagradable, así que decidí irme* (*The conversation was very unpleasant, so I decided to leave*) - Perfective: The situation is presented to the listeners as completed, as a closed box they are looking at from the outside and into which they cannot look (in their imagination they see an unpleasant conversation finished and the speaker leaving *after* that).

By the way, how can I say *the conversation was unpleasant* in Klingon? *naH ja'chuqtaHghach*? Supossing this is correct, would it make any sense in Klingon to distinguish between *naH* and *naHpu'* in this context?

2. *wa'Hu' rep wa'maH cha' jISoppu'* could have two interpretations, right?: *Yesterday, I ate at 12 pm* (perfective) or *Yesterday, I had (already) eaten at 12 pm*. Is context (or maybe adding something like *wejHa'*) the only way to distinguish these meanings?

3. I discussed this in another thread, I only want to be sure I understood it correctly: Although the sentence in 2 has for the past those two interpretations (perfective not perfect and perfective perfect), for the future (despite the fact this could be otherway in other languages) there is in Klingon only a *perfective perfect* interpretation (not a *perfective not perfect* one): *wa'leS rep wa'maH cha' jISoppu'* can only be *Tomorrow, I will have eaten at 12 pm*, right?

Thank you for your patience!