tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Oct 19 13:53:35 1993
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Re: More on Greater Than/Less Than
- From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: More on Greater Than/Less Than
- Date: Tue, 19 Oct 93 16:26:47 EDT
On Oct 19, 9:20am, [email protected] wrote:
> Subject: Re: More on Greater Than/Less Than
>
> >ghItlhta' [PaulClegg]:
...
> >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".
This is an invalid assumption. Please read TKD, 3.3.2., page 21.
> 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
> -- End of excerpt from [email protected]
I believe that recently we decided that this was valid until proven
otherwise. While there is no specific example in TKD, nothing bars it and it
is completely unambiguous in this example.
-- charghwI'