tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 26 16:36:14 1997
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Re: lut tlhaQ
>Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 23:49:25 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>
>
>On Stardate 97652.3 muHwI' wrote:
>
>> > Qu' wa': cha'vatlhben HIq HIvje' naQ DatlhutlhnIS.
>> What does {cha'vatlhben} mean?
>> maybe {cha'vatlh ben}?
>> Then it would mean "two hundred years ago liquor"...
>
>Actually, KGT expands the definition of {ben} to include "years old." You
>still can't use it to describe your age, but you can use it to describe the
>age of some specified noun.
>
>cha'vatlh ben HIq
>two hundred year old ale
I like to think of this as follows (and I've used this since we first heard
of cha'vatlh ben HIq): {ben} is a noun referring to a year or time some
years ago. Similarly, {cha'vatlh ben} is a noun meaning some chunk of time
(or the year) two hundred years before the present. {cha'vatlh ben HIq} is
then a normal noun-noun construction: liquor "of" that time two hundred
years back. This works well with the definition of {ben} as "years old",
but given as a noun.
~mark