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.

You have misread my message. I said I have 5,000 soldiers, you have 600 soldiers, and your 600 soldiers are puS. 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.

On the other hand, if I have 600 soldiers assigned to guard a single prisoner, there is no way you can call them puS. It's relative and context-dependent.

puS, like few, is one of those words that only has a definite meaning in context. Another is law'. How many soldiers are law'? That depends on what you need them for and what they're up against.

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SuStel
http://trimboli.name