tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 25 14:47:45 2000

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Re: talking about the degree of quality of something



On Sat, 22 Jan 2000 14:06:35 -0500 (EST) 
[email protected] wrote:
> 
> How do I indicate the degree of a quality?  

There is no one way.
 
> For example, how would I ask: 
> "How fierce is the Kro'hgXXXXXX<Qogh>?"
> 
> I tried <chay' qu' Qogh>, but that would be "How is the <Qogh> fierce?"

qu'qu''a' Qogh?

If you ask a yes/no question that includes some reference 
to degree, it opens the conversation to natural commentary 
on the degree.
 
> Would <'ar> work here? 

No.

> Say if I had a noun for "fierceness". 

Possibly, but you are thinking in English where nouns have 
much more signficance than they do in Klingon, where often 
things are spoken in short sentence clusters:

qu''a' Qogh? yInoH! yIDel!

> I thought
> about <Qogh *fierceness 'ar> but that seems to be missing a verb.

It is. Then you have the problem of figuring out what verb 
to use and you'd probably fall to one of the commonly 
overused English verbs. What do you do with fierceness? You 
"have" it. So, you'd reach for {ghaj} and probably be 
speaking in gibberish since you can't be sure that {ghaj} 
covers the kind of "having" that one "has" for abstracts 
like fierceness.

We do have {butlh Daghaj} as a known Klingon sentence, 
where {butlh} is symbolic for an abstract concept, but we'd 
need a symbol for fierceness in order to make sure that 
this works. It is safer to back up and take another 
approach.

> Also, how do I express the ideas "lukewarm", "warm", "room temperature",
> "cool" and "chilly"? 

Others have answered this. I'll just note that it is much 
like Klingon indicates colors. Since Klingon doesn't have 
many color words, they use one to indicate that color is 
what we're talking about (though it would be nice to have a 
word that just means "color"), then the verb {rur} is used. 
Since {SuD} means both blue and green, you can indicate the 
difference with {SuD Dochvam. chal rur,} or {SuD Dochvam. 
tI rur.}

bIr. chuch rur.
bIr. bIQtIq rur.
bIr. loghDaq SuvwI' rur.

loQ tuj. 'Iw rur.
tujqu'. qul rur.

> I have <tuj> "hot", <tujqu'> for "boiling", 

You obviously made that up.

> <bIr>
> "cold", <bIrqu"> for "freezing"

You obviously made that up, too.

> but how do I express the qualities in
> between?  I also have <Hat> for "temperature".

As has been pointed out, we don't have any units of measure 
for temperature, so we can only describe how something is 
hot or cold and what it resembles.
 
> --
> De'vID

charghwI'



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