tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 13 08:53:08 1998
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Re: Comparatives and Superlatives
- From: [email protected] (Alan Anderson)
- Subject: Re: Comparatives and Superlatives
- Date: Fri, 13 Feb 98 11:36:38 EST
ja' Edy:
> Unfortunatly I don't know enough english grammar to comprehend
>all points I want to talk but I hope you can (with some effort) understand
>and help the mistakes. I'm not sure about english, but in portuguese
>we have 3 grades of Comparatives and 2 of Superlatives.
>
> -{ Inferior: less + "Adjective" + than
>Comparatives -{ Equality: as + "Adj." + as
> -{ Superior: more + "Adj" + than
English has these as well.
>In TKD (p.70) we have only 1 formula to Comparatives:
>A Q law' B Q puS:
>la' jaq law' yaS jaq puS - The commander is bolder than officer
>or "The commander is bold be many, the officer is bold be few".
The word-literal translation would be more like "many bold commanders,
few bold officers", if we stretched hard enough. The verbs of quality
come after the nouns, so they can't be translated as full sentences.
But this pattern follows its own grammar, and that grammar corresponds
to an English comparative statement.
>But if I want to say: "The commander is less bold than the officer". ?
>ja' jaq puS yaS jaq law' ???? Can I exchange the order of terms?
Probably not. We've never seen it reversed. KGT gives us some
alternate word pairs to use in place of {law'} and {puS}, but in
each case the "positive" word comes first.
If you want to say "the commander is less bold than the officer,"
you'll have to say intead "the officer is bolder than the commander."
>or (in current discution of equality comparatives) The commander is as bold
>as the officer.
KGT page 127 begins a discussion of similes. While the examples given
are all somewhat figurative, the grammar works well for comparisons of
quality in general. {jaq la'; yaS rur.}
>The same to superlatives:
> {the most + Adj. + of
> {Superior - { The best, the worst, biggest, etc.
> - Relative
> {Inferior - {the least + Adj. + of
>Sup.
> - Absolute -{Analitic{ very + Adj.
> -{Sintetic { with the latin suffixes
>
>
> In Superlative absolute the noun suffix -qu' solve the problems.
>
>How can we use them in klingon?
TKD section 6.6 describes the {law'/puS} construction. At the top of
page 71, it says to use {Hoch} in the B position for superlatives. We
haven't seen any "inferlatives" with {Hoch} in the A position yet, but
some people do it that way and it isn't hard to interpret.
-- ghunchu'wI'