[Tlhingan-hol] plural of "comb"?

[David Trimboli]

On 2/13/2012 8:41 AM, Felix Malmenbeck wrote:
>
>> jIb Ho'Du' means "hair teeth" - it's already plural in Klingon and so I
>> don't think it's possible to sensibly talk about {wa' jIb Ho'Du'}.
>
> Unless it's a set expression.

This is similar to English words like "scissors." You have "one pair of 
scissors," not "one scissors." Or you have "the scissors" meaning one 
pair of scissors. If I saw two pairs of scissors I would accept it if 
someone pointed at the two pairs and called them "the scissors."

Does Klingon work that way? Who knows. Lacking any information I'd 
assume that Klingons don't have a special way of talking about "a comb"; 
they can only talk about "hair teeth." Likewise a single hotel is "meb 
pa'mey." But multiple combs are just even more hair teeth {jIb Ho'Du'} 
bound into multiple sets, and multiple hotels are just even more guest 
rooms {meb pa'mey} organized into multiple buildings or companies. If 
you had one comb and called it {jIb Ho'Du'}, then got another comb and 
called the pair of them {jIb Ho'Du'}, I wouldn't have a problem. If you 
wanted to count combs, I'd have a problem (because we don't have 
information on how Klingons count objects that are considered as plural 
entities).

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/