tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Mar 12 11:25:10 2002

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Re: KLBC: Higher numbers



From: <[email protected]>
If you have the Coversational
> Klingon audiotape, you should know that one of his statements of time is
an
> outright blunder as he says something like {wa'maH cha'vatlh rep} when he
meant
> {cha'maH wa'vatlh rep}.

Actually, it was the other way round.

> Also note that he has given us no examples of how to speak of time of day
other
> than on the whole hour. By extraction, many of us continue the military
time
> analogy and refer to half past noon as {wa'maH cha'vatlh wejmaH rep}, but
we
> don't really have any canon to back that up.

It's "backed up" in that the Klingon use of 24-hour days and "military time"
is borrowed word-for-word from English.  It's not Klingon in origin.  If
they borrowed the hours part of it, why not the minutes part of it too?
This is a case where canon would suggest that the implications are correct
UNLESS explicitly denied by Okrand, which he hasn't done.

> Meanwhile, with talk about time being so verbose, I
> can see that maybe Klingons just avoid the topic whenever possible.

Is there ANYTHING that you feel Klingons just come out and say?  They avoid
being imprecise, they avoid telling time . . . .

> I find it particularly interesting that Okrand gave us Klingon words for
all
> the numbers that all English-speaking peoples agree on. He did not give us
any
> words for the numbers that Americans use differently from other English-
> speakers.

I'm sure he just said to himself, "'Million' is high enough for this book
which no one's ever really going to use anyway."  I doubt it had anything to
do with avoiding discrepencies in the English way of saying it.

> My suspicion is that a Klingon would never need such large numbers because
if
> the numbers start to get that big, a Klingon would just change to a unit
of
> measurement more appropriate to that scale of measurement. This would
explain
> why we don't have a relationship between a qelI'qam and an 'uj.

No, it's just that he hasn't defined a /qelI'qam/, and an /'uj/ isn't
exactly clearly defined.  With both of those, we could work out the
conversion ourselves.

SuStel
Stardate 2194.9


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