[tlhIngan Hol] could we say 'op puS ?

[Will Martin]

Good question. Unless the Canon people have an answer, this is one of those areas where Houston, we have a problem.

TKD and every other official source of Klingon vocabulary collectively fail to indicate whether specific nouns that imply a number are singular or plural, and English is very arbitrary about this.

Everybody is singular. Doubt that? “Everybody wants to be happy.” Sounds right. “Everybody want to be happy.” Sounds wrong. Is wrong. See?

All are plural. “All want to be happy.” 

{Hoch} can be translated as “everybody” or as “all”. So, is it singular or plural?

Zero are plural. “Zero want to be sad.” Yes. In English, any number other than one is grammatically plural, so the word “zero" is grammatically plural in English. So, is {pagh} plural?

Some are plural. “Some want popcorn.” Does Klingon follow the English convention? Maybe, but this is hardly given, until it is explicitly given.

And, there is the possibility that Klingon is simply internally inconsistent. If Canon people find examples of these words used inconsistently, then maybe it’s regional, or slang, or simply something that never calcified within the grammar. Maybe it's squishy.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On Dec 13, 2019, at 12:12 PM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ok thanks.
> 
> But out of curiosity.. 
> 
> Does the {'op} on its own, need to be treated as grammatically singular or plural ?
> 
> Do we have any Ca'Non on this matter ? Or is it one of those "ask qeylIS" matters ?
> 
> ~ mayqel qunen'oS
> tlhIngan Hol naDjaj Hoch
> _______________________________________________
> tlhIngan-Hol mailing list
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
> http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20191213/f77d63c1/attachment.htm>