tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Oct 19 06:09:59 1993

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Re: More on Greater Than/Less Than



>ghItlhta' [PaulClegg]:
>>'ejyo'waw' Qaw'ta' la' jaq law'  The bolder commander destroyed the starbase.
>>
>>Basically, simplifying the grater/less structure into simply a statement
>of two quantities. "law'" and "puS" become adjectives of adjectives; they
>>modify the state that an adjective employs, in a way similar to Hom and 'a'
>>are as noun suffixes.
>
>All I can say is, majQa'. The idea that {la' jaq law'} means "bolder commander"
>and can be used as a noun phrase would be gargantuanly useful. However,
>doesn't {la' jaq law'} seem to really mean "many bold officers?" I'd like
>to think your highly employable idea is correct, but considering the
>grammar TKD describes, it seems that the semantic value "many bold officers"
>would reign supreme over "bolder commander." Oops, that should be "many
>bold COMMANDERS" would reign supreme over... This terminal doesn't let me
>back up to a previous line; once I hit return, any mistakes on that line
>are forever written in stone, metaphorically speaking.
>
>The main issue I'm talking about here is how {law'} or {puS} used as 
>comparitive modifiers of adjectives could be distinguished from quantity
>modifiers of nouns, i.e., how can you tell if {law'} in {la' jaq law'}
>is modifying {la'} or {jaq}?????

Well, qatlho'!

I see what you mean.  Except for maybe one thing:  Since, in "la' jaq law'",
"la'" is singular, it would be possibly translated into "many bold commander".
In this situation, at least, it should be pretty obvious that "many" doesn't
apply to "commander", but rather to "bold".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall any example of noun-adjective-
adjective constructions at all within TKD; by this point alone we could make
a case for the above; a "house ruling", if you will, that an adjective only
modifies what comes immediately before.  This may seem a bit prohibitive,
but I don't think so.  For instance:

"Shiny Red Thing"  would be Doch Doq boch.  Literally (according to the
premise above), it would be translated as "thing which is red which is
shiny".  This differs semantically from the English "Red Shiny Thing",
which seems to imply that "red" modifies how it shines.

...Paul




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