Tense and Aspect (was Re: Wow!...) Saul Epstein Fri, 5 Dec 1997 16:14:27 -0600 From: Rob Zook Date: Friday, December 05, 1997 2:49 PM >I've been looking over the lexicon and I think my deixis terms seem >superfilous now. The Lexicon has: [snip] Laid out together like that, I agree. But I think the idea of a temporal equivalent to the "this/that" prefixes for spatial relationships is worth pursuing. The ZC as it stands has an infix system lumping together all three kinds of distinction one can make in describing an action/state: tense, aspect, and mood. We have no infix - timeless no beginning or end This seems an almost literal infinitive, a way of referring to an action/state as a class rather than an instance. As such it has no tense, no aspect, no mood. infix mu - occurs now, no specific end or beginning infix tsu - occurs now, will continue indef. infix kse - occurs now, will end soon infix zo - occurs in past continues thru present These, pardon me for saying so, seem like hardly necessary variations on the theme of present tense, progressive aspect. But I suppose one could say that -mu- is a present tense unmarked for aspect, while the others are three different kinds of present progressive -- continuous, terminal, and "vanilla." The problem is that by defining them so narrowly, we lose the option of speaking, for instance, in the past tense with a progressive aspect, despite having three different ways of doing so in the present tense. infix pe - past action terminated Here's a straightforward past tense perfect aspect. The action/state began and ended within the past moment described. This is apparently the only way Vulcans can describe past events, which I find unlikely. infix dja - future action intended infix dju - indeterminate future action And here, two futures apparently unmarked for aspect, but marked for mood -- determinate (or intentional) and indeterminate. There are more of these in a separate section of the ZC grammar -- though they aren't all infixes. Now, it may seem from the way I'm talking about these that I disapprove of their inconsistency, one being only a tense, one being a tense and an aspect, one being a tense and a mood. Actually, though it's awkward to learn, it strikes me as very natural or at least solidly within the zone of natural possibility. (After he's thought about it, Rob will decide that it's not logical enough, and we can reform it for Certain Mode. ;-,) What I'd like to do, though, is devise some kind of auxiliary system for indicating aspect or mood when using infixes that aren't marked for them. And something like those deixis-modeled particles would serve very well. I'll need to contemplate the situation a bit before I make any concrete suggestions, and frankly I'd like to get the lexical generator going first. >And in my quote had: > >va'num s'at s'thai, s' kalkal'vna'lu: qa s't'ya > >"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please" >-- Mark Twain > >I'm not so happy with this translation anymore. So I would modify it to: > >s'at cta va'num ongo s'kalv,djuna s'deelu > >s'-at cta va'num ongo >you-possesive fact find and-sentence conjunctive > >cta s'-kalv.-dju-na >you-distort(1)-indeterm. future-distort(2) > >s'-deelu >you-like > >find your facts and you may distort (equal/as) you like What about va'numka cta'ehi; kalvnama s'at deeluha find-! fact-PLUR; distort-PERM thou-GEN pleasure-DAT >Where cta replaces my made up word s'thai which one could easily confuse >with some word "thai" plus the pronoun "you". It DID bear an unfortunate resemblance to a likely word "s'thya" -- "yourself." > I also invented a new >conjunctive which allows one to join sentances in the same manner as >"and" in English. We need such things. In certain mode, though, would it make sense to surround clauses with parentheses particles and then attach -ong to both "expressions?" >I would postulate that we could also add, aja - or, sentence conjunctive >to match the existing, uks - but sentence conjunctive. > >Then I retained kal'vna, but modified it to kalv,na where the . indicates >the syllable seperation (we have too many damn ' as it is). Yeah. As ' seems to be emerging, the former spelling would have been been pronounced with three syllables, ka-l-vna. >Finally, I originally extracted what would be a verb root t'ya "like" >from the word t'hai'la "friend". However, I read in the novelization of >ST:TMP that t'hai'la refers to a friend/brother/lover. Which seems >a more likely action root might have been "lightly join/bond". > >So I completely made up the word deelu for "like". Or "be pleased by..." -- from Saul Epstein liberty*uit,net http://www,johnco,cc,ks,us/~sepstein "Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi suraketca'." -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at