tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jul 09 11:37:13 1996
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: partitives...
- From: Alan Anderson <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: partitives...
- Date: Tue, 9 Jul 96 13:09:10 EST
~mark writes:
>What about "mangghom" for "army"? That's a partitive with the quantifier
>AFTER the noun, not before as Glen claims. I think it's pretty clearly a
>partitive.
I disagree; it doesn't look partitive to me at all. If I interpret
{mangghom} as a noun-noun I see it as a kind of {ghom}, not a modified
{mang}.
I would like to point out a minor observation I made about the recent
use of things like {Hoch SuvwI'} in TKW: the phrases are translated
using the word "every", not the words "all of". This might be
completely unimportant, but the {no'lI' Hoch yabDu'} "all of your
ancestors' brains" insult parses better for me if I treat {Hoch} as
modifying {no'lI'} by coming after it, and it *does* use the partitive
translation "all of". The Skybox card {HochHom} example does quite
unambiguously place the word after what it modifies, and it is also
quite unambiguously translated as the partitive "most of", not as a
simple (existential?) "most".
And I do think "the 23rd century's near-entirety" is a partitive. It
might not use the usual english grammar for such a meaning, but it is
clearly quantifying a *part* of something.
I'm not quite linguistically savvy enough to be able to point to the
difference between "every" and "all of" the way Holtej did with "few"
and "a few", but maybe this will help us figure things out.
--------------------------------------------
Alan Anderson Delco Electronics
{ghunchu'wI'} Remanufacturing Services
Test Equipment System Software Group