<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Agreeing with SuStel here and trying to help understand the brokenness of saying that perfective aspect with a future time stamp always needs to be future perfect in English:<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Your example is {wa’leS rep wa’maH loS jISoppu’} could be translated as:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Tomorrow at 2:00pm, I will have eaten. (Future perfect)</div><div class="">Tomorrow at 2:00pm, I will finish eating. (Simple future)</div><div class="">Tomorrow at 2:00pm, I will have finished eating. (Future perfect)</div><div class="">[Context: I want to meet with you, but I don’t want to disturb your meal.] Tomorrow at 2:00pm, I will not be eating [because I will have finished eating by then].</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I think the weirdness here is that simple tense always refers to “now”, even when you have a Time Stamp. Perfect tense just tries to mimic the same information, relative to the time stamp. Future perfect is just past tense applied to some future Time Stamp.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Aspect is about the duration of the action of the verb. What part of that duration are you looking at? Are you looking at the start of the action? Are you looking at a time while the action is occurring? Are you looking at the state of the action being completed?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The moment that an action is completed triggers the perfective aspect, and the perfective aspect holds from that moment infinitely into the future.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Real world example:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I’m building a retainer wall. I started it four days ago. I have built this wall for three of the past four days. If I work on the wall for another three days, I will have built the wall for a week. It probably still won’t be completed. I have used perfect tense to describe several stages of the wall construction, but I can’t use the perfective aspect until the wall is done.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">You may argue that I should have said, “I will have been building the wall for a week,” and that might be a more accurate statement, but what I wrote was not wrong in English, though using {-pu’} or {-ta’} would be wrong in Klingon.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Why?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Because in that future, three days from now, the building process of the wall will extend into the past, and the focus of my attention in my statement is on that pastness of the process instead of on the completion of the process. Klingon doesn’t care if the process has any pastness. It only cares about it having completion.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Tense, including perfect tense, is all about which way you are looking in time from whatever time environment you are looking. Aspect is all about specific time markers associated with the duration of the action of the verb.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">SuStel: Is this an accurate description? Can you improve on it, clarifying anything I’m getting wrong?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Luis: Does this clarify the issue at all?</div><div class=""><div class=""><br class=""><div class="">
<meta charset="UTF-8" class=""><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div>pItlh</div><div><br class=""></div><div>charghwI’ ‘utlh</div><div>(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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<div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Mar 1, 2022, at 9:03 AM, SuStel <<a href="mailto:sustel@trimboli.name" class="">sustel@trimboli.name</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/1/2022 7:53 AM,
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:luis.chaparro@web.de">luis.chaparro@web.de</a> wrote:<br class="">
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:trinity-e028b622-8d4e-4898-badb-2dacf64fffae-1646139183610@3c-app-webde-bs27" class="">I
wasn't trying to ask if a certain perfect tense maps to the
Klingon perfective aspect, I was actually trying (that's at least
what I think) to ask the opposite: I was trying to think about
aspect without hanging it to a specific tense. My question was why
*wa'leS rep wa'maH loS jISoppu'* must necessarily fit the English
Future Perfect, and why we couldn't give it another
interpretation, *even though* there is no English tense to express
it:</blockquote><p class="">The key here is not to try to understand it in terms of fitting
or not fitting English tenses. What you need to do is understand
what the Klingon elements <i class="">mean,</i> not how they translate.</p><p class=""><br class="">
</p><p class=""><br class="">
</p>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:trinity-e028b622-8d4e-4898-badb-2dacf64fffae-1646139183610@3c-app-webde-bs27" class="">
instead of forcing it to a perfect interpretation in which the
eating will be completed before 2 pm (*Tomorrow at 2 pm I will
have eaten*), why couldn't we give it, depending on the situation,
a perfective but not perfect interpretation similar to *Yesterday
I ate at 2 pm*, but in the future, where the eating happens at 2
pm and is considered as a completed whole?</blockquote><p class="">English does not have any special markers for perfective
concepts, so it doesn't matter what verb tense you use.<br class="">
</p><p class=""><br class="">
</p>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:trinity-e028b622-8d4e-4898-badb-2dacf64fffae-1646139183610@3c-app-webde-bs27" class="">
In the past you can chose to translate *jISoppu'* with a perfect
tense (e.g
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""> . *I had eaten*) or with a non perfect tense (*I ate*), depending on the situation. Why should we interpret *jISoppu'* in the future always as perfect?</pre>
</blockquote><p class="">Because Klingon perfective includes the concept of being
completed, and to express something as completed, you have to be
looking at it from after it is completed.</p><p class="">In English, we can use the simple past tense to look backward at
an action. We are looking at that action from a vantage point
where its completion can be perceived. If we use the simple future
to look forward to an action, we can only perceive the beginning
of the action. <i class="">I will eat</i> does not imply completion. In
order to take a vantage point that lets us see the future action
as completed, we have to go even farther into the future, to a
point where the action is finished. We can then look backward at
it to see its completion. This kind of expression has a name:
future perfect.</p><p class="">That's why I can't give you a future perfective that isn't
perfect in English.<br class="">
</p><p class="">Again, this is just the way English works. It's more important
here that you try to understand the way that <i class="">Klingon</i>
works, and to do that you need to analyze and understand the
Klingon elements involved <i class="">regardless</i> of how they're
translated into English or Spanish.<br class="">
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
SuStel
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://trimboli.name/">http://trimboli.name</a></pre>
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