tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Aug 12 00:44:17 1996
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Re: existence
- From: "A.Appleyard" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: existence
- Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 08:43:45 GMT
- Organization: Materials Science Centre
- Priority: normal
"A.Appleyard" <[email protected]> wrote:-
> For "X exists" we have been advised to write {X tu'lu'}, on the grounds that
> "X's existence can't be known of unless someone has found it". But to say
> "Theory shows that X exists, but nobody has yet found it"? This construction
> occurs referring to a very important central matter in a story that I have.
"Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]> replied advocating {tu'lu'}
here as an idiomatic use. But in the story, a planetary population of hundreds
of millions had been looking desperately for the X for thousands of years and
had not found it. In such circumstances {lu'} looks inappropriate to me. This
is one of the residuum of cases where "exist" can not be easily fudged by some
other expression Z from which a reader can deduce "Z, therefore X exists".
(In the end a visiting stray Earth astronaut found the X for them.)