The Dumb Week – Day 4
This is the fourth day of The Dumb Week challenge, which consists of translating grammatically correct sentences that make no sense. Today’s sentence is:
The light at the end of the tunnel would scare any linguist away.
Translate it to your conlang(s) and, optionally, include the IPA transcription, the gloss or other information. Thank you for participating!
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7 thoughts on “The Dumb Week – Day 4”
These crack me up! Still don’t have the vocab for them, heh. But some day.
Hmm… Well, I don’t have a word for “tunnel”, “linguist”, or “scare away”… but I might have ways to construct them! I will ponder.
Actually, I’m not sure if I have that meaning of “any”, either. It might be the tougher nut to crack.
Okay!
So for Beldreeni, I only had kirö, ‘light’ and domo, ‘end’, as content words for this one to start with.
But I’ve now made
kozwira (v) tr. ‘scare, frighten’, from kozu, ‘fear’ plus the causative suffix -ira
chendā (n) ‘tunnel, from chen, ‘earth, soil’ plus dā, ‘road, way’
namai (adv) ‘away’ when it’s away from the speaker – from na, ‘from’, plus mai, ‘here’
natos (adv) ‘away’ when it’s away from someone not the speaker, tos meaning ‘there’
himōrío (n) should be the word for ‘linguist’ if they have any, which I doubt – from himōra, ‘language’, plus the agent suffix -ío. It could mean ‘someone who knows a lot about languages’ and ‘polyglot’. (Knowing up to four languages at least is just normal, so a polyglot would probably have to know at least five, and know them well, to be seen as particularly knowledgeable.)
gul min gul ‘any, anyone’, in the sense of Swedish “vilken som helst” or French “n’importe qui” – but only when applied to a person. From gul, ‘some/any’ in general, and min, ‘person, human being’. For something inanimate, you’d use gul hasa gul (hasa means ‘thing’), and for something animate but non-human, you’d say gul lan gul (lan means ‘creature, being’).
Here is the sentence. It’s in the neutral level of formality, as seen on the verb, and the speaker is placing themselves at the place spoken about, hence using namai and not natos for expressing ‘away’.
Chendā ho domo ho kirö gul min gul himōrío di namai kozwirames.
earth-road POSS end POSS light some person some language-AGENT ACC away scare-SUBJ-PAST.NEUTR
Wow, that was a very productive translation exerice for you, obviously!
It really was! 😀
Wow amazing. Thanks for participating in the challenge!