On 4/1/2022 2:48 PM, Will Martin wrote:
When I read the end of this, I thought {ngugh bIpujpu’} could mean something close to {ngugh bIpujHa’choH} before realizing, nope. That’s what {bIpujHa’choH} is for. If you had previously been weak and that status became “complete”, as in, you are done with it, then you are undoing being weak, and the change is worth noting with {-choH}. Using {-pu’} instead would be weird enough to consider wrong.
*-pu'* does imply that some change occurred somewhere, somewhen, but the whole point of perfective is that you're not witness to the internal flow of the action expressed. You're told that it happened in its entirety, but you're not told anything about how it changed or flowed through time. That's what perfective means, and in Klingon, perfective implies a completed action. Not "the action became complete," just "a completed action." Understand the difference between these two, and you understand Klingon perfective. Let's take an obviously active verb to avoid any questions of meaning. If I say *wa'Hu' jIqetpu'*/I ran yesterday,/ I am naming myself as the performer of *qet,* I am identifying yesterday as the point on the timeline that *qet* occurs, and I am saying that *qet* was performed in its entirety. That doesn't mean I necessarily got to where I was going or that I didn't trip along the way or anything; it just means I performed a whole action of *qet.* Importantly, it does NOT express the idea that *jIqetchoH*/I began to run,/ *jIqettaH*/I continued to run,/ or *jIqetbe'choH*/I stopped running./ Those views of this one action have zoomed in to certain... ahem... "aspects" of the action to look how they flow over time. *jIqetchoH* zooms in to the start of the running and expresses it as a change of state from not running to running. *jIqettaH* zooms in to the middle of the running and expresses it as a moment before which the running was already happening and after which the running will still be happening. *jIqetbe'choH* zooms in to the end of the running and expresses it as a change of state from running to not running. It's this zooming in that *-pu'* absolutely prohibits. By definition, perfective is that aspect in which the flow of time of an action is compressed into a single, featureless point. You can't zoom in to it to examine its parts. Perfective exists precisely to enable describing actions in this way. It doesn't describe "coming to an end"... that would be zooming in to the ending to examine it. (And TKD tells us that, in general, leaving off an aspect suffix means a verb is neither continuous nor perfective. If I don't include any "zooming" on the verb, if I just say *jIqet*/I ran,/ it is neither zooming in on any part of the running nor zooming out to compress the running into a single dot on the timeline. It is a formless fact. It might be timelessly true or habitual that I used to run, but without a specific time in which to describe me doing it it can't be put on the timeline. Or it might mean that I'm excluding the entire timeline from my view, able to perceive only the single point that is the current moment, which moment moves along with me as I tell the story.) So now try to apply this to a quality verb. If I say *ngugh bIpujpu',* I'm picking out a specific point on the timeline, /that time,/ and saying that at that time there's a dot that represents your being weak. It's not that you were weak for only a moment; it's that you've zoomed out from an act of being weak and can't view its internal structure. This is not a state; it's an action. If your "dots" on the timeline represent big enough periods of time, you MIGHT get away with expressing being weak as an action performed rather than a state experienced, but it would be an unusual thing to do.
And if you wanted to interpret {bIpujpu’} the OTHER way, to say, “You’ve been working your way toward becoming weak and now the process is complete,” that doesn’t work because the state of weakness is not finished, assuming that you are still weak. That’s more like {bIpujchoHchu’} or {bIpujchoHbej}, depending on the quality/threshold of weakness you are going for.
Yes, *-pu'* does not include the concept of *-chu'.* It doesn't imply that anything was done correctly or completely, just that the action is being viewed as a "completed" whole.
Or maybe {bIpujchoHpu’} could mean that you’ve been becoming weak, and you are no longer becoming weak. You just ARE weak. The beginning of your weakness is complete.
*bIpujchoHpu'* describes an act of changing state from not weak to weak. It is this act of changing state that is being described, not the weakness itself. We've zoomed out from the act, unable to see it flow over time. We can assume the being weak goes on, but the being weak isn't described here; the change is. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name