tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Oct 16 19:21:11 1994
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Re: KLBC: Re: Hoch, et al.
According to Terry Donnelly:
>
> In the beating-a-dead-horse department:
Don't be too hard on yourself. This argument is still open
around the edges, as the details you explore prove.
> Looking back over some recent postings and the article by d'Armond Speers
> in HolQeD 3:3, it seems that there is fundamental agreement that the N-N
> construction expresses *something* more than simple possession (Speers'
> GENITIVE non-possessive); I still think a case can be made for extending
> this to a true attributive, but I'd need lots more canonical examples to
> prove it. So, I'm bowing to concensus on the placement of {Hoch} to mean
> "all", and withdrawing completely my suggestions about {nuq, 'Iv, latlh}
> and {vay'}.
d'Armond dodged this issue altogether, explicitly excepting the
Partitive, which I think this fits, it perhaps a slightly
twisted kind of way.
> But one question: if {Hoch} comes last in a N-N construction to mean "all
> (of)", shouldn't the first noun be plural? Does {yuQ Hoch} = "the entire
> planet" and {yuQmey Hoch} = "all the planets"?
>
> - Terry
I think you have a good point here. While in many cases when
plurality is grammatically clear through other devices, the
plural suffix is unnecessary, in this case the presence or
absence of a plural suffix makes a significant difference in
the meaning of the word pair. I would tend to agree with your
two examples stated here.
charghwI'