tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 14 13:35:48 1995
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Re: mu'tlhegh Dun
>Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 16:36:27 -0500
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>According to Alan Anderson:
>yotlhDaq vIHbe'taH SanIDpu' law' Hommey chIS.
>Even here, {SanIDpu' law'} is stretching established grammar,
>since we have no examples of adjectivals used on numbers,
>unless they are being used as nouns, which is not the case
>here. It may be better to pick an arbitrarily huge number,
>better fitting the example concerning how many throats can be
>slit by a running man, and the statement that a Klingon may be
>inaccurate, but he is never approximate, as given on one of the
>audio tapes.
>"Countless thousands" similarly should be recognized as an
>idiom and become replaced by {SanID law'}.
Actually, {*SanID law'} is iffy as well. I haven't heard of any evidence
that the number-forming elements could stand alone without a number in
front of them (can you say "?maHmey" for tens? I don't know. We certainly
know that 10 is wa'maH and 1000 is wa'SaD). Even the space in "loS SaD" in
the phrasebook doesn't really do it for me, since for me the difference
between strong and weak compounds is pretty fuzzy in Klingon.
~mark