tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 30 00:51:39 2001
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RE: poH
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Trimboli [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2001 2:34 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: poH
>
>
> From: "Will Martin" <[email protected]>
> > The noun {poH} has not been explained to us very well yet. I'm more
> tempted
> > to refer to the time the attack begins as {HIvmeH poH} in this instance
> and
> > say, {nuq 'oH HIvmeH poH'e'?} Maybe {rep} is a better noun.
>
> /poH/ as a noun seems pretty clear to me. "Period of time."
> Perhaps a more
> explicit phrase would be "span of time." It's not an instant, it's a
> duration.
I would argue that an instant IS a duration. There is no point in time any
more than there is a point in space. If time stopped, it wouldn't be time.
> If you're not convinced, consider /vatlh DIS poH/ "century," from KGT.
> Literally, it's "hundred year period of time." It's not an
> instant, it's a
> duration.
>
> /HIvmeH poH/ would seem to be the period of time during which an attack
> occurs, whether or not the attack takes place over the entire
> period.
Okay. {HIvchoHmeH poH} Adequate?
> What
> we don't have is a straightforward way to speak of the "moment" that an
> attack begins. We might talk of the /HIvchoHmeH tup/ or
> something like it,
> depending on the time scale we're considering. You might even try
> /HIvchoHmeH poH/, where the /poH/ in question is much smaller
> than any other
> /poHmey/ you might be talking about.
Well, I think it does work, because to whatever extent the event is short
enough to satisfy the suffix {-choH}, that's the duration of the event.
There isn't really an instant when the attack begins. Consider the "instant"
when the first weapon is fired. Do we count when the trigger is pressed or
do we wait until the weapon fires, and if we do that, do we count the time
the weapon builds up in response to the trigger? And then, when you slice
time up small enough, there's that sluggish speed of light to deal with...
I suspect that {poH} is a very stretchy term that can be squeezed down to an
"instant" (which is basically a period of time that is short enough that we
don't care if anything is shorter than that) pretty easily.
> SuStel
> Stardate 1653.0
charghwI'