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.

On May 25, 2021, at 7:02 AM, SuStel <sustel@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
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