[Tlhingan-hol] plural of "comb"?

David Trimboli david at trimboli.name
Mon Feb 13 09:18:54 PST 2012


On 2/13/2012 11:56 AM, Philip Newton wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 17:52, David Trimboli<david at trimboli.name>  wrote:
>> 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).
>
> MTE.
>
> SEI: jIQochbe'chu'.
>
> (Though I thought it was "mebpa'mey", one word, though obviously
> derived from/related to {meb pa'mey}.)

Oh, it probably is, but the principle still holds.

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



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