tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Dec 06 13:24:48 1995
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Re: Colors? What colors?
>Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 10:46:38 -0800
>From: [email protected] (Bill Willmerdinger)
>We do have {vatlhvI'} meaning "percent", though. Since {vatlh} is 100,
>my hypothesis has been that {*-vI'} is a suffix similar to "-th" in
>English. Although I have never used them, I would speculate that
>"tenth" would be {*maHvI'}, "thousandth" would be {*SaDvI'},
>"tenthousandth" would be {*netlhvI'}, and so on. The decimal number
>would then be enumerated the same as a whole number: 3.14159 would
>become {wej wa' *maHvI' loS vetlhvI' wa' *SaDvI' vagh *netlhvI' Hut
>*bIpvI'}.
This has been suggested before, but I don't trust it. You simply can't
generalize from a single example in a natural language (cf. the suggestion
someone recently made that "-la'" be a suffix like "-ghach" for bare
verbs, since we have Qap/Qapla'). Captain Krankor responded to the earlier
suggestion, I recall, by using the example that an English student might
think of "percent" and know that "-cent-" is a root used for "hundred"
(century, etc) in other English words, and thus decide that it must also be
okay to say "perquart" or "perfour" for "quarter", etc. Or compare my
example of the much stronger case in English for prefixing "to-" to nouns
of time to mean "this." We have "today" for "this day", and "tonight" and
even "tomorrow" (recall that "morrow" means "day after" and so "to-morrow"
is the "morrow" that's associated most closely with the current time). But
you can't say "toafternoon", "tomorning", or "toThursday." You just can't
make that generalization, not without more evidence.
~mark