[Tlhingan-hol] 125,000

[David Trimboli]

On 6/6/2012 4:03 PM, Qov wrote:
>
> 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 was. I enjoyed saying "nine hundred ninety-nine octillion, nine 
hundred ninety-nine septillion, nine hundred ninety-nine sextillion, 
nine hundred ninety-nine quintillion, nine hundred ninety-nine 
quadrillion, nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine 
billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine 
thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine."

I would also like to point out that Thunderbird's spell checking marks 
octillion, septillion, and sextillion as possible errors, but accepts 
all the others. Even programmers have their limits, it seems.

>> 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?

No, just the opposite: it sounds like he said "some" to mean "there are 
more, but I haven't given them in this dictionary."

>> 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.

Then let me rephrase that and say "I wouldn't use a comparison with 
English to justify presuming that it is formally correct in Klingon." 
Would it be understood in the same way as "thousand million"? Sure. 
Taught to Klingon schoolchildren as "the way to count"? No evidence, so 
I won't make that leap.

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