<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">The normal phrasing in English would be, “He ate almost all the pies,” meaning that he started with ten and there are only one or two left. If there were three or four left, we’d say, “He ate most of the pies,” since he ate more than half of the total number of pies, though it wouldn’t be totally wrong to say that even if there were only one or two pies left.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I think that probably is rooted in the human relationship to numbers best expressed in more primitive languages where numbers are counted, “One, Two, Three, Many.” The more pies, the less specific the number, unless you want to explicitly express the number. We have expressions for “a pie” (1), “a couple pies” (2), “a few pies” (usually 3, but maybe 4), and then more vague expressions, like “quite a few pies” (implying more pies than one might expect) and “a lot of pies” (vaguely, subjectively evaluated as more than “quite a few pies”), “a whole bunch of pies” (a kind of emphasis on the number vaguely implying more than “a lot of pies”), and the list goes on, including the use of auxiliary words not safe for mixed company, typically in the form of “a [X]-load of pies” where [X] is a placeholder for the speaker’s preferred expletive. It doesn’t really matter which one.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">If someone said, “He ate almost each pie,” that would be a startlingly odd phrasing, suggesting that perhaps he took a spoon and scooped out the middle of all ten pies, but left the crust around the middle, with maybe a margin of an inch or so of pie around the edges.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">And if he said, “He almost ate each pie,” I’d have the image of an alien lustily approaching each pie, and just before plowing into it, paused and reconsidered and refrained, before deciding that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and eyeing the next pie with piqued interest, repeating the process for each of ten pies.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Does this help?</div><br class=""><div class="">
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan<br class=""><br class="">rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.</div>
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<div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Feb 4, 2021, at 8:14 AM, mayqel qunen'oS <<a href="mailto:mihkoun@gmail.com" class="">mihkoun@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="auto" class=""><div dir="auto" class="">There's something I'm wondering with regards to {HochHom} in noun-noun constructions.</div><div dir="auto" class=""><br class=""></div><div dir="auto" class="">And perhaps my confusion comes from the fact, that I don't understand fully the meaning of the english "almost all".</div><div dir="auto" class=""><br class=""></div><div dir="auto" class="">So I need to ask..</div><div dir="auto" class=""><br class=""></div><div dir="auto" class="">There are ten pies. An alien walks in and starts eating. When he's finished, someone comments by saying "he ate almost each pie".</div><div dir="auto" class=""><br class=""></div><div dir="auto" class="">What does this mean? That, lets say, initially there were 10 pies, and now there only two whole pies left? Or that the alien in question, ate a portion from each one of the ten pies, and in result we now have the leftovers from each one of the ten initial pies?</div><div dir="auto" class=""><br class=""></div><div dir="auto" class="">~ Dana'an </div><div dir="auto" class="">remain klingon</div></div>
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