On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 11:27 PM Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:
But it bothers me that it says “be few” instead of saying “be a few”.
To me “be few” just feels very, very different.
“I have a few apples” is just a statement about having three or four, or less commonly five apples.
But “I have few apples” loads the statement with a disappointed expectation. One might expect me to have a bunch of apples, but nope. I don’t. I have few.
Try not to base your intuition about the words' implications on how they present themselves in English. They're not acting with the same grammar. "A few" is a quantity. "Few" is an adjective. In Klingon, the unspecified quantity is {'op}, and the verb expressing a quality is {puS}. To recalibrate your "feel" for the word, use it as a verb. "My apples are few." That might express disappointment, but it might just be a simple contrast with "my apples are many." Without context, I don't think it implies anything in particular.
In other words, does {puS} = {law’be’} or {law’Ha’}?
Since it's a word in its own right, I don't think it needs to *equal* anything, but I think it's closer to {law'Ha'} than to {law'be'}. -- ghunchu'wI'