The Dailies. October 22
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you’ve already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?
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2 thoughts on “The Dailies. October 22”
I managed to translate a full decently complex sentence into Dab Vi Suxi Kidap today. Which, given that I’m a year out of practice with it, and that the documentation is inconsistent and incomplete and mostly in the form of chat logs, I think is impressive. The goal was to say “Let’s see if I can translate this sentence.” in DVSK, and the result is “Xu gixu ipi paxu kasuk kaxa uxu vi ivasa fiti vi puxib vi suxi kidap.”. And now that I look at that I realize that <x> is the most common consonant in that, making up 10% of the letters. Broadening my sample a bit brings the voiceless stops in line with its frequency though.
Anyways, I believe that’s the longest sentence ever written in DVSK at this time.
The pronunciation is: /ʃu ˈgi.ʃu ˈi.pi ˈpa.ʃu ˈka.suk ˈka.ʃa ˈu.ʃu vi ˌi.vaˈsa ˈfi.θi vi ˈpu.ʃib vi ˈsu.ʃi ˈki.ðap/.
My extremely rough gloss (which I used to check that my translation was accurate) is:
Xu gixu ipi paxu kasuk kaxa uxu vi ivasa fiti vi puxib vi suxi kidap
FUT.INC sense SERIAL COND move me this many MOD word to MOD RCP MOD OBJOF speech
[I] will sense if [I] move these words into DVSK.
The ‘I’s are in brackets because there’s only one 1p pronoun in the sentence, and I’m not actually sure exactly how serial verbs work, so I’m not sure if the ‘I’ would go in the overall subject or the relative clause’s subject for the English back-translation. The other one would be unstated. If it’s the first position, then there are some odd pronoun binding issues with that sentence, because I was working off the idea that it was the second one.
The English sentence also has a hortative framing (let’s) which I dropped in the translation. It doesn’t really affect it that much, but I thought I should mention it, especially since DVSK does have an imperative particle: ixu. But the imperative particle isn’t quite flexible enough to be a hortative, I don’t think.
DVSK has the odd grammatical feature that almost all modifiers must be attached with a particle of some kind. Noun phrases are joined together with vi, and serial verbs with ipi. Because it’s so isolating, you end up with a lot of vis in any given sentence.
Just because, I decided to do the same thing for Firen, which is much better-developed and in which I have much more practice:
“Ponnamsi vanfu kallaosudu met skommotif firentifče.”
/pónːam.si βán.ɸu kálːaʊ.sú.du mét skómːo.tif fí.ʀén.tiɸ.tʃe/
This seems to be a much more straightforward translation than to DVSK, which makes sense since Firen is a much more grammatically rich language. You might also note that the Firen imperative mood is used here, because it’s very flexible and can be used as a hortative. Here’s a much more professional gloss for this translation:
Ponnamsi vanfu kallaosudu met skommotif firentifče.
see:IMP=A1pI can:COND translate:SBJ=A1pI=P3pD DEM.D.PRX idea Firen=ILL.
Let’s see if I can translate this idea into Firen.
For this, I had to coin two new words: skommotif, “idea”, which is an obvious derivation from skomma, “to think”, plus the -e/-o noun form (which semi-consistently means “a discrete entity of”, which can probably be analyzed as deriving from a past suffix but which in the modern language is just a vague pattern), and kalla, “to trade, to exchange, to translate”.
I love your work here! And nice new words!