[tlhIngan Hol] expressing first fourteen days

[nIqolay Q]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2020 at 12:02 PM Will Martin <willmartin2 at mac.com> wrote:

> Perhaps context would prevent someone from interpreting this as “I love
> this month’s fourteen first days,” instead of “I love this month’s first
> fourteen days,” but I wouldn’t count on it.
>

Even without context, I feel like only one of those interpretations makes
any sense anyway. If there are two interpretations, and only one makes
sense, it's usually reasonable to conclude that that's the one the speaker
intended.

The trick is, on Earth, in most countries, we agree on the months, though
> that generality might not hold on Qo’noS. We don’t even know that a Klingon
> month has 28-31 days. There is no Klingon known word for “fortnight”.
>

Well, there's always {wa'maH loS jajmey}...

Basically, we can’t be sure that Klingons even have the concept of “the
> first fourteen days of this month”. They might not think of time this way.
> It’s more likely that they’d have an idea like “the past fourteen days” or
> other time periods relative to now. We’re not that sure that they have
> calendars like we do. We don’t know the names of Klingon months, assuming
> that a Month for them is an absolute reference instead of just a relative
> one; a standard group size of days, as opposed to a named, fixed part of a
> year.
>

I think the lack of information regarding Klingon calendars has more to do
with Marc Okrand not wanting to make any definitive announcements about
Klingon that might be contradicted later by the shows, or the show writers
not wanting to commit to a well-defined Klingon calendar, rather than
anything about Klingon approaches to time. In any case, mayqel's question
also applies to non-time-related series. {wa'maH loS SuchwI' wa'DIch} "the
first fourteen visitors", {wej may' wa'DIch} "the first three battles",
etc. This particular phrasing falls into the very broad category of things
that Maltz hasn't commented on one way or another, but I can't think of a
reason to reject it outright, so I'd probably accept it until Maltz says
otherwise. If you want a similar phrasing that doesn't raise so many
questions, you could try something like {jaj wa'DIch jaj wa'maH loSDIch
qubbID} "the stretch from the first day to the fourteenth day".
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