[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: puS

[Will Martin]

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.

charghwI’ ‘utlh
(ghaH, ghaH, -Daj)

> On May 25, 2021, at 7:02 AM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 5/24/2021 11:27 PM, Will Martin wrote:
>> The term “a couple” is two. It doesn’t sound as precise as two, but it really is two.
> Couple means two, but if it turns out to be one or three, you weren't incorrect. Pair and brace (archaic) both mean exactly two.
> 
> 
> 
>> “several” is three or four. Two is already covered by "a couple", and and five is covered by “a handful”.
> In no way do I associate five with a handful. I've never heard anyone say that. To me, a handful is even more vague than several.
> 
> 
> 
>> So, I read {puS} as “3-5”.
> I read puS as significantly smaller than average. If I've got an army of a five thousand soldiers, and yours is only six hundred soldiers, your soldiers are puS.
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://trimboli.name <http://trimboli.name/>_______________________________________________
> 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/20210525/ae993d67/attachment-0015.htm>