tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 15 07:51:27 1996
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Re: KLBC:fractions
According to Alan Anderson:
>
> nuqHm writes:
> >What's wrong with wej wavta' wa' (or even wejwavta'wa') for 1/3 ?
>
> The big problem is that it's not a number, it's a sentence. The first
> small problem is the suffix {-ta'}. "One intentionally divided three?"
> The second small problem is that it's backwards.
>
> I've seen a couple of tries using the word {wav}, and they aren't very
> intuitive. I suggest a different approach: "one third" is one part of
> three parts. I come up with {wej 'ay' wa' 'ay'}. I tried the slightly
> simpler {wej 'ay' wa'}, but I think I'd translate that back as "section
> one of three" as easily as "one of three sections".
>
> -- ghunchu'wI' batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj
My attempt at this back when David published his article in
HolQeD was something like {wa' naQvo' wej 'ay' wa'}. "One of
three sections from one whole". All of the constructions are
awkward and we can thrash around for years, but until Okrand
really tells us what to do with fractions, I don't see one
expression of them being so clearly good that we can all agree
on them.
This is also a wee bit of a sore topic for me as well, since in
an effort to avoid egocentricism, I published to this list an
article on math in response to David's article. I wanted
feedback to polish the ideas before they were released to the
larger audience in HolQeD. Instead of being able to then offer
a better article to the larger audience than I could have
produced without the cooperation of my peers here, I was
rewarded by censorship from HolQeD because such an article
could not then be reviewed anonymously by anyone who had seen
it on this list.
The result is that the only article on math in Klingon in
HolQeD is David's. While I have deep respect for David and for
the initiative he showed in publishing the article, I do not
think his article was as good as what we could have
collaboratively produced here, and the larger community of KLI
members never got to see those ideas.
The timing was bad. The rules for peer review were in place
before they were clearly explained here, so the article did
not get published, even though there are certainly many
articles published in HolQeD which are never subject to peer
review, such as anything written by Krankor, who openly
identifies himself in every article he publishes.
I have no problem with Krankor having that right. He has earned
it through his pioneering efforts with the language. He's my
mentor.
Meanwhile, because of this episode and others where the wrong
draft of an article was published and I suffered the
embarrassment of a substantial quantity of open criticism for
errors I had already corrected (but the corrected version of
the article was not published) I no longer seek publication by
KLI. That does not mean that I am not fully supportive of
HolQeD and other KLI efforts. It has simply been more
personally costly than rewarding to write for that publication
and I don't see any reason to think the future would be all the
different from the past.
I'll let this community do with numbers whatever they choose to
do, since what I write here is eventually forgotten and the
stash of HolQeD volumes to which we can repeatedly refer will
not contain my work, except by indirect collaborative work
initiated by others. That I enjoy this language and the
community of those using it is enough. I don't need to publish
articles in HolQeD. There are enough other writers to fill that
need.
Perhaps some proverb will tell us how to handle fractions and
math.
charghwI'
--
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