tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Aug 22 09:00:06 1999
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Re: KLBC: Conjunctions for Numbers
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 11:55:20 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
>
>On 22 Aug 1999 03:05:27 -0000 [email protected] wrote:
>
>> We don't know; I personally don't have much problem with, say {cha' cha,
>> wej ghap vIbaHta'} (I fired two torpedos, or three).
>
>I wish I felt better about this myself. To me, it sounds like
>saying, "I sent you three data yesterday." Then again, maybe it
>works like, "There are four people waiting outside," in which
>case it is fine. Or maybe, since you don't have to indicate
>plural on a noun which is preceeded by a number, we should say
>{wej peng} instead of {wej cha} (I changed the number to three
>to make it a less confusing example).
Agreed; the irregular plural makes this a little less than comfortable.
But I was answering in terms of the use of {ghap} with the numbers. I
probably should have used {peng} instead of {cha}; maybe that's a hair less
controversial (since Klingon singular nouns can at least usually also be
plural). Even so, that wasn't the main point of the question or the
answer.
~mark