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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 5/25/2021 9:59 AM, Will Martin
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:94DEC356-514C-4897-92FC-EE9133EBA3F3@mac.com">
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>You have misread my message. I said I have 5,000 soldiers, you
have 600 soldiers, and your 600 soldiers are <b>puS.</b> 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.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if I have 600 soldiers assigned to guard a
single prisoner, there is no way you can call them <b>puS.</b>
It's relative and context-dependent.<br>
</p>
<p><b>puS,</b> like <i>few,</i> is one of those words that only has
a definite meaning in context. Another is <b>law'.</b> How many
soldiers are <b>law'?</b> That depends on what you need them for
and what they're up against.<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
SuStel
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://trimboli.name">http://trimboli.name</a></pre>
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