tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jun 27 05:34:18 1996
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Re: oops
ghItlh [email protected]
\ Did I say I was thirty years old?...oops!
No, you said {maHwej}, which is incorrect and thus ambiguous. I
interpreted it as 13; our esteemed Beginner's Grammarian saw the
components and the fact that they'd been attached to form a single
word, and interpreted it as 30.
You were close, but not quite right. {maH}, by itself, doesn't mean
"ten" - it's closer to the "-ty" in English "sixty", "seventy", etc.
The difference is that in Klingon it works for all numbers, as if in English
"ten" were "onety", "twenty" were "twoty", etc. So the way to say the number
"ten" is {wa'maH}. (And as ghunchu'wI' pointed out, "thirty" is
{wejmaH}.)
For numbers that aren't even multiples of ten, you just put the name for
the ones place after the name for the tens place, with a space. Again, this
is not so different from English ("twenty-five"), except that there's
no hyphen, and it also works for all numbers, so instead of "eleven" you
say "onety-one", or {wa'maH wa'}. Thus "thirteen" is {wa'maH wej}.
-marqoS
--
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