[1773] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: More on Greater Than/Less Than
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Oct 19 21:02:30 1993
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.east.sun.com>
From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy)
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.east.sun.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 10:59:04 +1000 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <9310191757.AA14126@uva.pcmail.Virginia.EDU> from "Will Martin" at
Oct 19, 93 01:42:31 pm
We are being hindered by our mother tongues here. Klingon is
not supposed to be Terran, let alone Indo-European!
We should perhaps look to languages that do not have such
words as "more, less" nor clear comparatives as distinct
from superlatives.
Chinese has two ways:
1. the Klingon way we know: "this [is] big, that [is] small" =
"this is bigger than that"
2. "this compare[d with] that [is] big"
The Austronesian languages I know mostly say:
"This is big, surpasses/beats that"
or "This is big, leaves/abandons/quits that"
If Klingons were anything like Autronesians, I bet you
they'd use "jey" and if they were anything like me,
they'd say
bIrchugh qul jey bIQ
or:
bIr'e' qul jey bIQ
or perhaps again:
bIr bIQ qul jey
(Yes that last one. Being so terribly lazy myself, the
fewer sounds I must utter, the better)
That said, alas, we all know that Klingons are not so much
like Austronesians or me as like .... Klingons!
Semitic has only one inflected form for adjectives which
covers our comparative and our superlative (both absolute
and relative), e.g. Arabic kabir "great/big", akbar "greater,
greatest, very great". They use in place of our "than"
a preposition that usually doubles up as "from", thus:
"This is bigger/biggest/very big [measured] from that"
Note that the comparative/superlative is redundant. The meaning
would be conveyed quite adequately by just "This is big from that".
