[tlhIngan Hol] to roar in crescendo with verbs

[Will Martin]

Keep in mind that in languages that lack tense, like Klingon (or American Sign Language, or many Asian languages), once a time stamp is established, it remains the context for everything that follows it until some new time stamp is presented. There are no sentence boundaries for a time stamp.

"Tomorrow, I go to the store. I buy food. I drive to the gas station. I buy gas. I drive home."

All that happens tomorrow.

"Yesterday, I go to the store. I buy food. I drive to the gas station. I buy gas. I drive home."

All that happened yesterday.

In a language that has tense, you’d say: "Tomorrow, I will go to the store. I will buy food. I will drive to the gas station. I will buy gas. I will drive home."

"Yesterday, I went to the store. I bought food. I drove to the gas station. I bought gas. I drove home."

This is because in a language that has tense, you are required to set the time as now, before now, or after now for every action. You can be more specific with a time setting, but you can’t drop the ball on stating whether the actions that are linked to that time stamp are now, before now, or after now. It’s a kind of temporal redundancy that is not required in languages that lack tense.

The tiny advantage of tense is that in utterances that have no other time stamp, you can indicate whether the action is now, before now, or after now. Meanwhile, languages that lack tense can do that easily and with greater specificity with a single time stamp.

Once you’ve established a time context, tense becomes a useless pain in the butt for non-native speakers to keep straight in order to stop the native speakers from wagging their fingers at them for saying something that is grammatically incorrect. Meanwhile, tense provides absolutely no meaningful addition to the meaning of a sentence once the time context has been established.

The only reason we think that tense is a good feature for a language is because that’s what we learned with our native language. We are familiar with it, and working without it is strange.

pItlh

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)




> On Feb 19, 2022, at 10:27 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ...
> However, since in the {'a qaStaHvIS yInDaj DISmey, DI'onmeyna'Daj 'agh 'aghqu' 'aghchu'} the thing repeated is a verb instead of a noun, one could wonder whether each {'agh} applies to the {qaStaHvIS yInDaj DISmey} or not.
> 
> --
> Dana'an 
> https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/ <https://sacredtextsinklingon.wordpress.com/>
> Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστίν, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ
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