tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Feb 02 10:51:26 1997

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Re: lI'Ha' tera'ngan mu'ghom

beq HurghwI':
>After the recent discussions about "which?" and "only," I decided to look
>them up in the dictionary to see exactly what they mean in English. To my
>amazement, the dictionary proved completely useless. For "which?," it
>defined it as "what one out of a group," or as it should have been, "which
>one out of a group." So "which" means "which." What an enormous
>breakthrough.

You missed the point of that definition completely!  The question word
"which" is exactly the same as the question word "what" with the extra
meaning of specifying "one out of a group".

>And as for "only," it didn't even define "only" when used in
><it is only X>/<it is X alone>. It merely gave the adv, adj, and the
>conjunction synonym for "but."

The "it is only X" construction is a bit problematic.  The word "only"
in a copula doesn't quite fit perfectly into either the adverbial or the
adjectival sense without further context to help decide.  But both the
adverb and adjective forms of "only" are well defined in *my* dictionary
as "And nothing else or more."

-- ghunchu'wI'

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