[Tlhingan-hol] 125,000

[Qov]

At 10:42 '?????' 6/6/2012, David Trimboli wrote:
>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."

I would have pegged you as the sort of child who wanted to know what 
came after that on a pretty much continuous basis. :-) I don't 
remember how high we learned the numbers in class, but of course my 
country went metric in 1976, so we learned metric prefixes and 
scientific notification right off the bat. There weren't as many back then.

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

I'll have to ask one.

>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,"

Are you seriously arguing that Marc might have written "Some of the 
number forming elements" when he was actually giving an exhaustive 
list? I refuse to consider that  "some" would not indicate that there 
are more of them. The missing ones could, however, become more widely 
spaced, or even refer to fractional numbers.

>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.

That's exactly why I said "to an international audience".

>We have no such information regarding Klingons, or any reason to 
>believe they need such clarification.

My point was not that Klingons had a dual system that needed to be 
avoided or clarified but that when we use a form that is not correct 
under either system, and omits the normal words, everyone understands anyway.

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

I would. Just as Canadians who use a more specific labelling system 
can understand in English "a million million" as "a trillion" and, to 
go more primitive,  "one one one"
as three, Klingons who were expecting more specific words can 
similarly do the math. It's not justification of a system that is 
almost certainly incorrect. It's data that shows people can accept 
and understand simplified versions of their own number system for 
communication with people who lack the vocabulary. But you agreed on 
that readily without the data, so yay.

I remember when I was a little kid doing a "project" where I was 
counting pretty much continuously and when forced to stop, would 
write down the number I got to and pick up later.  My father told me 
that after nine hundred came a thousand.  I thought that was the 
weirdest thing ever, but dutifully counted, "nine hundred, a 
thousand, nine hundred and one, nine hundred and two ..."

- Qov