Am 11.10.2017 um 18:10 schrieb SuStel:
I don't see the difference here, either. Using *vItlh* doesn't relate your sentence to numbers; you're just saying, /that's a lot./ Which is what *law'* is saying with *'ul law'.*
I think the difference, which I just suggested in another message, is that *vItlh* is more general than *law'**. law' *is only about quantity, while *vItlh* is about quantity or size or intensity or whatever it is by which you measure a thing.
All of this is just guessing, so no offense, but I see it acutally the opposite: {law'} means "many" without thinking of numbers, while {vItlh} is used when one can expect an answer in numbers or measure the thing you talk about. Like saying "this thing costs more" or "the price for this is higher".
I know this sounds very vague as well, and I may be wrong. It seems to me that Okrand has avoided to say {Do law'} "a lot of speed" because both speed are "a lot" already: Speed of sound really is {Do law'}. So he wanted to say that the measured amount of the speed is high. That's different from saying that one is faster than the other. It's saying that the number of the speed is higher - not just saying it's {law'}.
Do does not imply fast. Velocity is a neutral term.
If vItlh is meant to indicate that something is measured to be great or high as opposed to being great or high, our definition for it completely fails to convey this.
I think Okrand is just more ready to invent new words than he
used to be, and was about to translate something that sounded
awkward, so he decided to make up something new. He didn't survey
everything he's ever written the way we do, searching for other
times he talked about something being a lot. Check
dictionary—nothing good there—don't remember saying anything
quite like this—okay, make up something new.
And yes, you can also measure electricity, I know, but perhaps that was not important when talking about "it consumes a lot of electricty".
Here's another possibility.
If you can imagine a measurable thing as consisting of bits of
stuff, use law'; if it can't be imagined as bits of stuff,
use vItlh. Electricity is not exactly literally bits of
stuff, but you can imagine that it is and you can imagine a pool
of it in the device that uses it. It has an actual physical
location. But you can't imagine velocity as stuff; you can't
exhaust velocity or move some of it somewhere else; you can't
point to the part of an object that contains its velocity.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name