On 3/13/2019 11:37 AM, Steven Boozer wrote:
I don’t find it quite as odd as Sustel does. I read {vIghro' tIQ vIje'ta'meH} as “In order for me to have (successfully) purchased the ancient cat”, although I probably wouldn’t have used an aspect suffix myself. E.g. providing some context: In order for me to have purchased the cat, I would have needed to use a credit card (which I didn’t have with me at the time).
It's not the perfective on the purpose clause I find odd, it's the situation that the sentence is describing that didn't seem to match the perfective. /In order to buy the ancient cat, I sacrificed all my money./ The sentence is being uttered at a point after the money is sacrificed — the wasting is completed. But in the act of sacrificing, the purpose was to buy, not to already have bought, a cat. Hence, *vIghro' **vIje'meH Huch vI'anmoHpu' *(simplified for brevity). Your sentence presents an irrealis: *vIghro' vIje'ta'meH Huch vI'anmoH**pu'*/In order to have bought the cat, I [would have] sacrificed money./ I don't know that this is going to be interpreted as rrealis by Klingons; the only irrealis we really know anything about is formed with *net jalchugh.* You might get it by saying something like *vIghro' vIje'ta' net jalchugh, vIje'meH Huch vI'anmoHpu'*/If I had bought the cat, to buy it I would have sacrificed money./ I think trying to put perfective on the purpose clause here is to attempt time travel, where my current action causes an already-completed action. If you can say *vIghro' vIje'meH Huch vI'anmoHpu'*/to buy the cat I sacrificed money,/ and you apparently can, then what exactly does adding perfective to the purpose clause do? Maybe *vIje'ta'meH* means /so that I close the deal?/ -- SuStel http://trimboli.name