tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Oct 15 13:24:28 1995
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"Most of..." and Hoch
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: "Most of..." and Hoch
- Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 16:24:25 -0400
I don't have much time to be online today, so I can't read through all my
mail just yet and respond to each post as I should; that will have to wait
until Wednesday. Just one thing I wanted to mention.
In the Skybox cards reprinted in HolQeD, we are given the answer to a
question that's been bugging us for a while, as well as a very important
(and non-intuiticve, to me) idiom.
Look at S15. We have the sentence "tera' vatlh DIS poH cha'maH wej HochHom
lo'lu'taH" (it's not punctuated as an independent sentence, but if you read
closely you'll see it is). This corresponds to the translation's
"...remained in use for most of the 23rd century." We already have seen
how "tera' vatlh DIS poH" is used for centuries in the Terran reckoning in
other cards. But what's the "HochHom"? Hoch is "all", we know, and it's
got... a diminuative! Yes. Okrand is using this whole phrase as a
timestamp (we would use qaStaHvIS on it, but he is more comfortable with
longer unmarked time-phrases; you can see them in other cards too). So
what's HochHom? "Most." Really. "tera' vatlh DIS poS cha'maH wej
HochHom" is "most" ("almost all"/"the 'little all'") of the 23rd century.
Yes, it's counterintuitive, but that really seems to be how it's being used
here.
In addition to answering how to say "most of", this also settles the "Hoch"
question. Okrand here has unambiguously used "Hoch" *after* the noun it
modifies, as some had proposed, and not before, like a number. (I *can*
think of an alternate reading, but it seems to mean "In the 23rd century,
most of them were used" which really doesn't seem to translate right). So
there's another tidbit we have...
~mark