tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Mar 25 14:26:54 1996
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Re: Fractions
According to [email protected]:
>
> In a message dated 96-03-21 21:30:34 EST, you write:
>
> >charghwI' writes:
> >[regarding multiplication]
>
> Before I even saw this post, I had considered 4 x 3 simply as loS wejlogh
> SImDI' wa'maHcha' moj.
The problem is that {wejlogh} is an adverbial, which has no
business wedging itself between a verb and its object. Your
construction with its invisible, generic "it" nearly smells of
Sentence As Subject (which Klingon doesn't support). It isn't
quite, since there is only one main verb, but it just FEELS
like it. A neater grammatical construction would be:
wa'maH cha' moj wejlogh loS SImboghlu'.
"Four, which is calculated three times, becomes twelve."
In this case, {wejlogh} is part of the clause {wejlogh loS
SImboghlu'}, so it modifies the verb {SImboghlu'} and does not
come between that verb and its object. The whole clause is
subject of the verb {moj}.
This is if we keep your words. Meanwhile, {SIm} seems an odd
choice, since it seems overly vague in this setting. My own
version would be:
wa'maH cha' moj wejlogh chel'eghbogh loS.
"Four, which adds itself three times, becomes twelve.
> loS chel wej SImDI' Soch moj (addition)
> wej nge' loS SImDI' wa' moj (subtraction)
> wa'maH wav cha' SImDI' vagh moj (division)
>
> But then, of course, I am the weirdo who proposed using maHvI' for tenths
> (note: that is not wa'maHvI', though twentieths would be cha'maHvI'). I even
> said that one-third could be wa' wejvI' and two-thirds could be cha' wejvI'.
> In truth, since we have not heard from MO how to express fractions and other
> mathematical terms, we are stuck with waiting for his answers.
This is why we must wait for Okrand. I similarly came up with
{maHvI'} as a number-word-segment, but I DID think that "one
tenth" would be {wa'maHvI'} and "two tenths" would be
{cha'maHvI'}. This fits with a general base-ten naming
convention so that 1,234.567 would be:
wa'SuD cha'vatlh wejmaH loS vaghmaHvI' javvatlhvI' SochSuDvI'.
See? It makes for a very unambiguous way of carrying the
10-base numbering system past the decimal place, using the
number-fragment words we already have. Each digit becomes a
word with a suffix describing its power of 10.
Meanwhile, if we accepted your suggestion that {cha'maHvI'} was
"one twentieth", then how would we express "two twentieths" or
"two tenths"? Similarly, "two thirds" and "two and a third"
become a challenge to disambiguate by your suggestion.
I'm sure there are others who think my system stinks and they
have something better. Thus, we need Okrand to decide, or we
have no fractions.
> peHruS
charghwI'
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