tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Mar 20 10:13:21 1997

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Re: tlhab ja'qu'ghach

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>Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 05:42:59 -0800 (PST)
>From: Marian Schwartz <[email protected]>
>
>Message text written by "David Trimboli"
>>It's not the *translation* I do not accept, it is the *concept*.
><
>
>You're right, sorry.  But what about "minor everything?"  It *is* canonical.

I was thinking about this last night.  There's an interesting difference at
work here, an asymmetry.  A "minor everything" is not too hard to see as
something that's not quite as great, important, large, etc. as a regular
"everything", an everything that falls short: almost everything.

But "minor nothing"... is that a nothing that falls short of being nothing
in that it's not nothingish enough?  It's got too much something to be a
regular nothing?  That's how you're using it, for "almost nothing."  But
it's just as reasonable to say that it's a nothing that falls short, it's
not even enough to be a regular nothing, it's somewhat LESS than a regular
nothing!  You'd have to say "pagh'a'" for your meaning, then: a nothing
that's bigger, greater, and has more than a regular nothing.  This
ambiguity, I think, doesn't exist in most people's minds with HochHom.

This has to do with the way -'a' and -Hom are on ends of a scale, as are
Hoch and pagh, and it's not completely clear if -'a' and -Hom should modify
the extent along the scale or if they have a more absolute meaning.  That
is:

  pagh <--------------------------------> Hoch

One way to look at things is that -'a' moves the meaning farther towards
the extremes, and -Hom moves the meaning closer to the center, making the
meaning less intense.  However, the meanings of -'a' and -Hom are related
to those of pagh and Hoch; maybe they work on the same scale.  In that
case, -'a' would tend to move meanings to the right, and -Hom would move
them to the left.  That wouldn't change the interpretation of HochHom any,
but makes paghHom unstable.

Besides, there's puSqu'...

~mark


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