HOW _______ IS IT?
Here's a fun thing about languages. In English, we have suffixes for two degrees of superiority beyond the standard:
-er for comparatives and
-est for superlatives.
In Inuktitut, a language that has suffixes for (seriously) just about everything, there are six degrees of superiority beyond the standard (
big): comparative (
bigger), superlative (
biggest), exclamative (
very big), excessive (
too big), extra-excessive (
much too big), and outrageous (
bigger than is normal or decent). It's true that we can express these ideas in English, of course, but we don't have a simple suffix for them. It's the presence of the last one, in particular, that pleases me greatly. :-)
I'm back in school, incidentally. Could you tell?