tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 03 12:29:34 2010
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Re: Philosophical plurals...
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Lieven Litaer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I do not really wish to contradict my admired Master of Ca'non, but here
> I must. We have had this same question quite recently, and we came to
> the result that {-pu'} only works with body-PARTS, not the body itself.
>
> So living or not, they are definitely {lommey}.
>
> Quvar.
>
>
Shouldn't that be -Du' only works for body parts? You wouldn't say ghoppu'
(unless maybe it's a giant talking hand).
I've always thought of -pu' as being flexible. If a speaker believes a noun
can use language then that they would use -pu', there isn't a hard and fast
list of nouns that can only take -pu' IMO.
To me lompu' may refer to zombies or some other kind of conscious corpse. If
I can (or think I can) converse with it, then I will use -pu' on it.
qurgh