tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Feb 26 10:25:08 1995

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Re: Bucket of tongues

Marc 'Doychlangan' said:
>I know what you meant, but literally I could ask
>"with what are they (the tongues!) filling the bucket?"

Okay, so we use {naQmoH} "cause to be full" for "to fill" in this case.

Someone said:
> Then what <is> the Klingon for "an X-ful of Y" = "the amount of Y that can
> fit into an X"?

We can ask {X naQmoH Y 'ar} "How many Y fill X?"
The answer would be {X naQmoH N Y} "N Y fill X."
We can say {X naQmoHbogh N Y} "N Y which fill X."

Would you translate {X naQmoHbogh Y 'ar} "How many Y which fill X" as a question
or as a quantity of Y?  It's worth considering.

In english, question words often double as "relative clause" indicator words:
which, whose, when....  In Klingon, there's a distinction between the question
words and the relative-clause verb suffixes.  That might tend to keep "how many"
as a question from also being an answer.  But {'ar} is the only "adjectival"
question word, which might give it some special status.

-- ghunchu'wI'

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