[tlhIngan Hol] qovIj ngavyaw' relative size

[Hugh Son puqloD]

> On Nov 27, 2019, at 08:21, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> If you had a {qovIj} which took steroids and grew the size of a small
>> car, how would you say it ?
> 
> Since these are words for a specific animal rather than just for the
> size, I would still use the small er word for the animal, even if it
> grew large.

I agree with this. We don’t have any canon information about whether {qovIj} and {ngavyaw'} are as closely related as are the various types of Terran dogs, which are all the same species despite the dramatic differences in physiology. For all we know, {qovIj} and {ngavyaw'} may even come from totally different trees of life from each other.

DeSDu' and I actually had a conversation about this as we were sitting for lunch a few weeks ago. We were in a food trailer lot and there were a lot of dogs around so we were classifying then as {qovIj} or {ngavyaw'}. We seemed to universally agree that dogs that looked like they weighed more than about 8 cheb were {ngavyaw'}, and less than about 5 cheb were {qovIj}, but disagreed occasionally on dogs that appeared to fall in between 5 and 8 cheb, with me tending to call more of those mid-weight dogs {qovIj} and DeSDu' tending to call more of them {ngavyaw'}.

Until and unless we receive further canonical clarification, I expect this is another one of those things that will be up to the opinion of the individual speaker. My own take on it is that dogs that more closely resemble wild wolves in size and shape are {ngavyaw'}, including varieties that are about as big as a wolf but look different.