[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: puS

[SuStel]

On 5/25/2021 10:12 AM, SuStel wrote:
> On 5/25/2021 9:59 AM, Will Martin wrote:
>> I was with you 100% until that last detail of your interpretation. I 
>> don’t get 5,000 out of “be few, be several, be a handful”, regardless 
>> of context. I quite honestly think you’ve gone to one extreme at 
>> least as far as I went to the other, and I doubt there’s anything 
>> like justification for that extreme interpretation in either canon or 
>> conversation with Okrand.
>>
>> That’s not claiming that I’m right and you are wrong. I’m merely 
>> stating that I am nothing like convinced that 5,000 of anything could 
>> be {puS} in anything but a comparative grammatical construction. 
>> Outside of that very fossilized construction, it quite sincerely does 
>> not feel like the right word.
>
> You have misread my message. I said I have 5,000 soldiers, you have 
> 600 soldiers, and your 600 soldiers are *puS.* Yes, your 600 are few 
> only in comparison to my 5,000, but that's my point: the word doesn't 
> only mean three to five.
>
> On the other hand, if I have 600 soldiers assigned to guard a single 
> prisoner, there is no way you can call them *puS.* It's relative and 
> context-dependent.
>
> *puS,* like /few,/ is one of those words that only has a definite 
> meaning in context. Another is *law'.* How many soldiers are *law'?* 
> That depends on what you need them for and what they're up against.
>
Here, by the way, are the canonical, non-comparative uses of *puS* that 
I'm aware of:

*pIpyuS pach DaSop DaneHchugh pIpyuS puS DaghornIS.
*/If you want to eat pipius claw, you'll have to break a few pipiuses./ 
(TKW)

*qagh, ro'qegh'Iwchab, targh tIq Sop 'e' lungIl Humanpu' puS.
*/Few humans dare to eat gagh, rokeg blood pie, or heart of targ./ 
(Skybox S21)

*veymey puS neH chenmoHlu'pu'
*/Limited Edition/ (Klingon Monopoly)

The first of these is very vague. You could break three to five pipiuses 
to eat pipius claw, but then again, you could break two or six. The 
*puS* is there to tell us that you probably won't want to break just one.

The second one doesn't mean that only three to five humans have dared to 
eat these things. It means humans who dare to eat these things are rare. 
Compared to the total number of humans, the number of those who dare to 
eat these things is relatively small.

In the third case, I'm pretty sure they made more than three to five 
copies of the limited edition Klingon Monopoly. The *puS* is telling us 
that, compared to a normal print run, there are only a small number of 
copies of this edition.

That's what *puS* means. It means more than one, but significantly less 
than an average amount, whatever "average" means in the given context.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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