tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 02 09:32:29 2001
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Grammar musings for the day - poH mu'mey
- From: Eric Andeen <[email protected]>
- Subject: Grammar musings for the day - poH mu'mey
- Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 10:30:27 -0700
A coworker forwarded me a link to an 11 minute video clip yesterday, and
this got me to thinking about a few things.
The first thing I thought of was "I don't have the 11 minutes to watch it",
which led to an internal debate about the order of numbers and <-meH>
clauses. If a <-meH> clause modifies a noun, and I want to add a number to
that noun, does it go before or after the <-meH> clause? If I'm talking
about four boy's knives, is it <loS ghojmeH taj> or <ghojmeH loS taj>? I
can't come up with a strong rational argument either way, but the second
just seems wrong. So I'll say <... 'ach wa'maH wa' bejmeH tupmey vIHutlh>.
The other thing I noticed is that despite the slew of nice new measurement
words we got in KGT like <juch> and <ngI'>, we don't (yet) have a word for
"have a duration of". This means that to say something is 11 minutes long, I
have to say something like <much bejlu'taHvIS, qaS wa'maH wa' tup>. I
suspect there is a verb meaning "have a duration of" out there somewhere,
but perhaps time is treated differently.
pagh