tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Sep 17 12:56:23 1993
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Fractions
- From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
- Subject: Fractions
- Date: Fri, 17 Sep 93 13:34:23 EDT
[for expressing 111.14]
> What about using:
>
> wa'vatlh wa'maH wa' ej wa'maH loS wav vatlh
>
> or
>
> wa'vatlh wa'maH wa' ej vatlh wav wa'maH loS
In the first place, "'ej" combines sentences and a number standing on
its own is not a sentence. It is a noun (TKD 5.2) Next, saying that fourteen
divides hundred or that hundred divides fourteen doesn't really carry the
meaning of fourteen hundredths. For that, my first guess was:
wa'vatlh wa'maH wa' wa'maH loS vatlhvI' je
Yes, it's ugly, but anything else is speculation. That's the only way I
know to express the number. I initially thought that having the conjunction
follow the two numbers gives the potential for MAJOR confusion, but when I
tried coming up with an example, most of what I thought was ambiguous wasn't.
Then again...
110.01 and 100.11
wa'vatlh wa'maH wa' vatlhvI' je
Maybe if you just kinda paused a little before or after the wa'? Even
then, it sounds a lot like 111% followed by "je". That's when I realized that
I was stretching the meaning of "vatlhvI'" to mean "hundredths", since it
means "per cent". Then again, "per cent" is a rather strange concept for a
language lacking fractions.
Anyway, we are weak on fractions. Half and Percent seem to be all we are
told how to express, so how do we measure thousanths? Maybe Klingons just
change to a smaller unit of measure? qelI'qam is the only unit of distance
measure I've ever heard a Klingon use, and who knows how far THAT is or how
many other measurement units they have?
Ultimately, I feel like this is an area where we are left without proper
tools. TKD doesn't tell us how fractions are used, yet we have two fractional
words in the dictionary. We are even making an assumption to say "wa' bID
je", since TKD does not tell us how fractions are used. Klingons might just
as well say "bID wa' je" and saying it the other way would sound as strange
to them as "half and one" sounds to us in English.
If we are to stick to Okrand's work, we have to simply avoid use of
fractions until further notice, while using creative means to work around the
problem.
-- charghwI'