[Tlhingan-hol] 125,000

[David Trimboli]

On 6/6/2012 11:17 AM, Qov wrote:
>
> I see that TKD says "some of the number forming elements for higher
> numbers are ..." and stops at 'uy'. Clearly there are more we don't
> know. That suggests to me that there is one for each place up as high
> as Klingons need to count before whatever their scientifix notation
> is cuts in.

When I was a child, schoolchildren in my area didn't typically learn any
number-words higher than "trillion." The implication wasn't that
scientific notation cut in (a concept that wasn't taught until much
later) but simply "that's too high to worry about."

In this day of gigabytes, petabytes, and someday exabytes, perhaps
children are learning higher number-words.

For all we know, there are other number-forming elements in Klingon that
were "too high to worry about" putting in TKD. Okrand *does* say "*Some*
of the number-forming elements for higher numbers are..." If these
"some" aren't "all," there really are additional number-forming elements
beyond a million we haven't been given.

> But just as people who want to be clear when talking to an
> international audience avoid words like billion and say "a thousand
> million" or "a mllion million," I imagine 423,198,765,432 could be
> understood as loSbIp cha'netlh wejSaD wa'vatlh HutmaH chorgh'uy' Soch
> bIp javnetlh vaghSaD loSmaH wejmaH cha'.

But the phrases "thousand million" and "million million" are used
because different countries define "billion" differently. We have no
such information regarding Klingons, or any reason to believe they need
such clarification.

I have no doubt that what you propose would be understood, but I
wouldn't use a comparison with English to justify it.

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