There are 25 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Derivational Affixes
From: Alex Fink
1b. Re: Derivational Affixes
From: Adam Walker
2a. Conscript for English
From: Gary Shannon
2b. Re: Conscript for English
From: Daniel Burgener
2c. Re: Conscript for English
From: Cosman246
2d. Re: Conscript for English
From: Gary Shannon
2e. Re: Conscript for English
From: Adam Walker
2f. Re: Conscript for English
From: David Peterson
2g. Re: Conscript for English
From: Adam Walker
2h. Re: Conscript for English
From: Ralph DeCarli
3a. The Yardish Lexicon
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
3b. Re: The Yardish Lexicon
From: Brian
3c. Re: The Yardish Lexicon
From: Logan Kearsley
3d. Re: The Yardish Lexicon
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
3e. Re: The Yardish Lexicon
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
4a. Re: Creating Fictional Cases
From: Jim Henry
5a. OT: ZBB malware alert
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
5b. Re: OT: ZBB malware alert
From: Padraic Brown
6a. Re: A Quick Question
From: Douglas Koller
6b. Re: A Quick Question
From: Adam Walker
6c. Re: A Quick Question
From: J. Snow
7.1. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Puey McCleary
7.2. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Adam Walker
7.3. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Herman Miller
7.4. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Herman Miller
Messages
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1a. Re: Derivational Affixes
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 9:20 am ((PST))
On Mon, 9 Jan 2012 23:23:50 +0000, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
>Since Ny`spe`ke doesn't need any class-changing derivation, I've been
playing around with some class-mantaining suffixes. Most of them are quite
mundane, like +inhabitant of and +location bought from. Then there's the
slightly-interesting +fruit of suffix, hence:
>
>venenk +a = venenka = the pistachio tree
>venenk +eduk +a = venenkeduka = the pistachio nut
>
>I've been trying to imagine some really quirky ones (I like quirky), but so
far I haven't got anything particularly odd enough. I am rather proud of my
body-lateral suffixes:
>
>ka`nak +a = ka`naka = thumb
>ka`nak +ush +a =ka`nakusha = thumb on one's left hand
>ka`nak +its +a = ka`nakitsa = thumb on one's right hand
>
>Out of interest (by which I mean "in order to save myself the effort of
having to be imaginative") I was wondering whether anyone had come across or
had indulged in any particularly unique / strange / overly specific
derivations. Or perhaps even root words which fulfil the same criteria and
whether they say anything about your conlang or conculture?
Off the top of my head, a favourite is the Nenets odorative "to smell like
N": _xalya-_ 'fish' > _xalyay@-_ 'smell of fish'. If we can't have basic
smell terms I guess this is the next best thing! Another one which I
remember coming up a lot in Whorfy culture-boundness discussions is a
derivation for "to have cold Ns". (But I guess both are class-changing.)
If you want a big stock of things to dig through, I'd suggest looking at
some of the languages of the Pacific Northwest with their inventories of
_lexical suffixes_ (google that). Often they just behave like incorporates
or compound elements or the like, but some of them have interesting and
cleanish potential derivational semantics: I recall things like "pretend to
V" or "have a competition at Ving" or "do the X dance" in there.
Alex
Messages in this topic (4)
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1b. Re: Derivational Affixes
Posted by: "Adam Walker" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 10:24 am ((PST))
On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 11:20 AM, Alex Fink <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Off the top of my head, a favourite is the Nenets odorative "to smell like
> N": _xalya-_ 'fish' > _xalyay@-_ 'smell of fish'. If we can't have basic
> smell terms I guess this is the next best thing! Another one which I
> remember coming up a lot in Whorfy culture-boundness discussions is a
> derivation for "to have cold Ns". (But I guess both are class-changing.)
>
> If you want a big stock of things to dig through, I'd suggest looking at
> some of the languages of the Pacific Northwest with their inventories of
> _lexical suffixes_ (google that). Often they just behave like incorporates
> or compound elements or the like, but some of them have interesting and
> cleanish potential derivational semantics: I recall things like "pretend to
> V" or "have a competition at Ving" or "do the X dance" in there.
>
> Alex
>
Hey, Alex, thanks for those examples. Really interesting stuff there. And
I immediately realized that Graavgaaln MUST have an affix that means "to
have a competition at Ving." The way their culture is, this is an absolute
necessity! Actually I may have just uncovered a whole new class of
morphology thanks to you!
Now to figure out what to do about incorporating a Kabardian-like adverbial
case into Trelkairni.
Adam
Messages in this topic (4)
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2a. Conscript for English
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 10:42 am ((PST))
This falls under the category of conscripting rather than conlanging,
since the idea is to create a new writing system for an existing
natlang. Of course the idea could be applied to any conlang as well.
The writing system is pictographic, but the pictographs represent the
written word in English and are formed as follows:
A dictionary is created wherein each English word is replaced by a
four letter abbreviation. The most common words will use abbreviations
closest to their actual spelling, with four-letter words being
abbreviated with their actual spelling.
The four letters are arranged "artistically" to create a single glyph
where individual letters may be scaled up or down in size, stretched
in on direction or another, or rotated to best fit into the square
aspect ratio of the final glyph. If two words have the same
four-letter abbreviation they can still have different glyphs by
combining those four letters in a different way. The general order of
the letters, left to right and top to bottom should be maintained so
that the four individual letters can still be read in the glyph. It is
this reading of the glyph that constitutes alphabetical order for the
glyphs so that an unfamiliar glyph can be looked up in the dictionary
according to its four letter-components.
Here's a sample of how these three words might be rendered: book,
table, house: http://fiziwig.com/tetraglyphs.png
--gary
Messages in this topic (8)
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2b. Re: Conscript for English
Posted by: "Daniel Burgener" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 11:16 am ((PST))
Very cool looking. What about words that are fewer than four letters long?
-Daniel
Messages in this topic (8)
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2c. Re: Conscript for English
Posted by: "Cosman246" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 11:19 am ((PST))
Except for the fact that it is in Comic Sans MS, it looks cool. It doesn't
seem too readable as of yet, though.
-Cosman246
"Blacker than a moonless night
Hotter and more bitter than Hell itself...
That is coffee."
â Godot, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations.
On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 11:16, Daniel Burgener <[email protected]>wrote:
> Very cool looking. What about words that are fewer than four letters long?
>
> -Daniel
>
Messages in this topic (8)
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2d. Re: Conscript for English
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 1:53 pm ((PST))
Maybe something this for words of 3 to 5 letters: http://fiziwig.com/qbf.png
--gary
On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Daniel Burgener
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Very cool looking. What about words that are fewer than four letters long?
>
> -Daniel
Messages in this topic (8)
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2e. Re: Conscript for English
Posted by: "Adam Walker" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 2:50 pm ((PST))
And all the 1- and 2-letter words? I, at, in, on, up, to, no, if, so, a, O,
oh, ah, an, id, go, do, be, is, am, re, mi, ti, fa, la, qi, ma, pa, he, it,
we, us, aw, ax, ba, bo, by, Ed, eh, El, em, en, oo, op, or, ow, ox, oy, OZ,
and so on. english has a lot of those -- obviously. And how do you deal
with a four-letter abbreviadtion for interdimensionally, or
interdenominationalistically, or antidisestablishmentarianism? Or
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosises?
It's an interesting idea. I'm not panning it. I just wonder if you have
thought yet about how to deal with (admitedly weird) cases like those.
Adam
On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Maybe something this for words of 3 to 5 letters:
> http://fiziwig.com/qbf.png
>
> --gary
>
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Daniel Burgener
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Very cool looking. What about words that are fewer than four letters
> long?
> >
> > -Daniel
>
Messages in this topic (8)
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2f. Re: Conscript for English
Posted by: "David Peterson" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 2:52 pm ((PST))
I like it! It reminds me of the presentation from LCC3 about an artist who
created both fake Chinese glyphs (i.e. using the same radicals and
combinatorial rules that Chinese employs, but creating glyphs from them that
didn't exist), and who also took English words and stylized them so that they
looked like Chinese glyphs. I forget who the artist was... Ah. Xu Bing. The
presentation was mainly on his Book from the Sky (the fake Chinese glyphs), but
he showed us the Chinese glyphs made from English words (which was a different
project), and they were really cool!
David Peterson
LCS President
[email protected]
www.conlang.org
On Jan 10, 2012, at 1:53 PM, Gary Shannon wrote:
> Maybe something this for words of 3 to 5 letters: http://fiziwig.com/qbf.png
>
> --gary
>
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Daniel Burgener
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Very cool looking. What about words that are fewer than four letters long?
>>
>> -Daniel
Messages in this topic (8)
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2g. Re: Conscript for English
Posted by: "Adam Walker" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 4:08 pm ((PST))
Do you mean something like the Chinese character ai4 æ written using the
Latin letters L O V E with a few extraneous dots? If so, I have seen a few
examples of that, and used to know how to do the example given. It would be
very cool to see a whole presentation. As for writing meaningless but
well-formed Chinese characters, *that* is always a blast. I remember inventing
a few when students would argue with me that since all the letters in their
"word" were English letters, whatever oddment (Janunary Sepertemper and
Nonember all come to mind) they had written must be an English word. One day I
got really extravagant and combined the characters for turtle and spirit into a
single glyph surrounded by a garden -- it was only 44 strokes, but still! what
a jumble.
Adam
Peru esti nil ledji djul Dominu ul su levachu, ed nil su ledji medidad peu'l
dji peu'l nopi.
Saumu 1:2
________________________________
From: David Peterson <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 4:52 PM
Subject: Re: Conscript for English
I like it! It reminds me of the presentation from LCC3 about an artist who
created both fake Chinese glyphs (i.e. using the same radicals and
combinatorial rules that Chinese employs, but creating glyphs from them that
didn't exist), and who also took English words and stylized them so that they
looked like Chinese glyphs. I forget who the artist was... Ah. Xu Bing. The
presentation was mainly on his Book from the Sky (the fake Chinese glyphs), but
he showed us the Chinese glyphs made from English words (which was a different
project), and they were really cool!
David Peterson
LCS President
[email protected]
www.conlang.org
On Jan 10, 2012, at 1:53 PM, Gary Shannon wrote:
> Maybe something this for words of 3 to 5 letters: http://fiziwig.com/qbf.png
>
> --gary
>
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Daniel Burgener
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Very cool looking. What about words that are fewer than four letters long?
>>
>> -Daniel
Messages in this topic (8)
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2h. Re: Conscript for English
Posted by: "Ralph DeCarli" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 6:19 pm ((PST))
On Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:42:33 -0800
Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The writing system is pictographic, but the pictographs represent
> the written word in English and are formed as follows:
>
I can verify that it makes a great cartoon.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1097633/
No, I don't have children. Why do you ask?
Ralph
--
[email protected] ==> Ralph De Carli
The four types of love.
Platonic - I like you,
Erotic - I want you,
Agapic - I worship you,
Aortic - I heart you.
Messages in this topic (8)
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3a. The Yardish Lexicon
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 11:11 am ((PST))
Would it be believable if Yardish verbs and nouns have two different endings
for plurals?
Follow me on twitter
www.twitter.com/greenmellissa
Messages in this topic (5)
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3b. Re: The Yardish Lexicon
Posted by: "Brian" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 11:19 am ((PST))
What's the distinction between the two different endings?
------Original Message------
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
Sender: Conlang
To: Conlang
ReplyTo: Conlang
Subject: The Yardish Lexicon
Sent: Jan 10, 2012 13:11
Would it be believable if Yardish verbs and nouns have two different endings
for plurals?
Follow me on twitter
www.twitter.com/greenmellissa
Messages in this topic (5)
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3c. Re: The Yardish Lexicon
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 11:25 am ((PST))
On 10 January 2012 12:11, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Would it be believable if Yardish verbs and nouns have two different endings
> for plurals?
Do you mean one for verbs and one for nouns, or nouns and verbs each
are divided into two classes that have different plurals?
Either way, it's perfectly believable. After all, how many different
ways are there to form a plural in German?
-l.
Messages in this topic (5)
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3d. Re: The Yardish Lexicon
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 12:02 pm ((PST))
Yes, ones for nouns and ones for verbs.
Follow me on twitter
www.twitter.com/greenmellissa
----- Original Message -----
From: "Logan Kearsley" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 2:25 PM
Subject: Re: The Yardish Lexicon
> On 10 January 2012 12:11, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Would it be believable if Yardish verbs and nouns have two different
>> endings for plurals?
>
> Do you mean one for verbs and one for nouns, or nouns and verbs each
> are divided into two classes that have different plurals?
>
> Either way, it's perfectly believable. After all, how many different
> ways are there to form a plural in German?
>
> -l.
Messages in this topic (5)
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3e. Re: The Yardish Lexicon
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 12:07 pm ((PST))
Thanks.
Follow me on twitter
www.twitter.com/greenmellissa
----- Original Message -----
From: "Logan Kearsley" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 2:25 PM
Subject: Re: The Yardish Lexicon
> On 10 January 2012 12:11, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Would it be believable if Yardish verbs and nouns have two different
>> endings for plurals?
>
> Do you mean one for verbs and one for nouns, or nouns and verbs each
> are divided into two classes that have different plurals?
>
> Either way, it's perfectly believable. After all, how many different
> ways are there to form a plural in German?
>
> -l.
Messages in this topic (5)
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4a. Re: Creating Fictional Cases
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 11:12 am ((PST))
On 1/9/12, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews <[email protected]> wrote:
> So verb tenses can be cases instead tenses. What exactlyis a case?
A case is a kind of inflection, typically on nouns and pronouns,
sometimes on other kinds of words that inflect to agree with the nouns
they modify (such as adjectives). It differs from other kinds of
noun inflection (such as number or definiteness) in that it shows the
role the noun plays in the sentence -- subject or object or indirect
object, or more specifically, agent, patient, source, recipient,
instrument, location, etc.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case
Some conlangs with interesting, well thought-out case systems include
Ebisedian, Taruven, and Okuna.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (10)
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5a. OT: ZBB malware alert
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 12:46 pm ((PST))
Hallo conlangers!
Does anyone know what kind of evil did befall the Zompist Bulletin
Board? I get a malware alert when I try to visit it.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Êm, a Êm atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Êmel." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (2)
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5b. Re: OT: ZBB malware alert
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 1:49 pm ((PST))
--- On Tue, 1/10/12, Jörg Rhiemeier <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hallo conlangers!
>
> Does anyone know what kind of evil did befall the Zompist
> Bulletin Board? I get a malware alert when I try to visit it.
Zompist was okay the other day when I visited there. But I get the same
warning page you got. Google says that perhaps some kind of malicious
code has been inserted somehow into their software which might try to
infect anyone who tries to visit the website.
I guess for now, until they can sort things out, avoid Zompist for the time
being.
Padraic
Messages in this topic (2)
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6a. Re: A Quick Question
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 3:39 pm ((PST))
> Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 12:46:13 -0500
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: A Quick Question
> To: [email protected]
> In Sironu, nouns have the 4 basic cases, nominative, accusative, dative and
> genitive. When it comes to the object of a preposition, I use the dative
> case.
> Is that grammatically acceptable, or should I create a new noun case
> altogether? What you should or shouldn't do here is up to you. Why *not* the
> dative case? For Géarthnuns, I took the prepositional case from Russian, as
> I understood it at the time, made it the postpositional case, and use it as
> the only case for postpositions. For a language that gets so anal retentive
> about the whole whither/where/whence distinction, Géarthnuns gets quite
> devil-may-care with its locative case. In response to "Chau teshers la
> cher-ha hömal?" ("Where is the cat?"), "Chö béöbsöv." could feasibly cover
> "in the house", "at the house", "on (top of) the house", "under the house",
> "next to the house", "behind the house", "glommed onto the side of the
> house", etc., if context is clear (and with a verb like "come", you could
> include "to the house" and "from the house"). But if you feel the need to get
> specific, as one so often does, you opt for the postpositional. Since other
> cases don't help out with distinguishing ablative, locative, and allative
> functions, there are whole wheelbarrowfuls of postpositions like "out from
> under", "au-dessus de", "par dessus", as well as stuff of the "according to",
> "at the behest of", "on the behalf of", "by dint of", "in spite of" ilk. Kou
Messages in this topic (16)
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6b. Re: A Quick Question
Posted by: "Adam Walker" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 4:43 pm ((PST))
________________________________
From: Douglas Koller <douglasko
________________________________
From: Douglas Koller <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 5:39 PM
Subject: Re: A Quick Question
"glommed onto the side of the house", etc.,
Can't. Stop. Laughing. Ow! It hurts! Oh, my abs!
Adam
Messages in this topic (16)
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6c. Re: A Quick Question
Posted by: "J. Snow" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 7:44 pm ((PST))
Well, after reading through the topic, I decided to simply create a new noun
case. This case encompasses the objects of prepositions- not just
neccessarily "to" and "from" like the ablative case, but all prepositions.
Since I
don't know what to call it, I simply call it the "prepositional case". Here is
all of
the nouns cases Sironu has, as well as the IPA sounds. >>>
http://sonarsnow.deviantart.com/art/The-Sironu-Constructed-Language-
Nouns-and-IPA-278774916
Messages in this topic (16)
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7.1. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Puey McCleary" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 5:03 pm ((PST))
Hi gang! Ive been meaning to get back into this
conversation before we all forget about it, but, alas, other things have
gotten in the way. Ive been resurrecting my novel (this required
lightning) and trying to teach myself strategy for tnúpa the chess-like
analogue for my novel (this required an extra brain). So Ive been hanging
around cemeteries and mad scientists with funny hair.
Looking at what what Zamenhof actually translated, I am
utterly amazed and delighted. What dedication he put into his art! What a
variety of pieces! Thanks for sharing the link, Jim!
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkoj_de_L._L._Zamenhof
I dont know whether others are willing to say that
Esperanto is a masterpiece, but I am utterly inspired by what Zamenhof did.
I realize that many of us are working on languages which are more difficult
for translation than Esperanto is, but I feel like we certainly have a
model to follow, a Da Vinci of sorts unto whom we can all aspire.
Im not saying that we should all translate the same things
or even that much stuff, but perhaps in our own small ways we can do
something similar a variety of translated and original works, that is.
One work of Esperanto which has caught mine eye is the
_Fundamenta Krestomatio_. One doesnt have to know Esperanto to see the
variety of works therein: poems, fables, mathematics, history, linguistics,
a bit of Hamlet, and a whole book, it looks like, of The Iliad! I know we
all wont be able to do so much translating into our languages, but this
really is a wonderful accomplishment:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8224/pg8224.html
It is true that we should also be writing original works,
but, at least for me, dedicating some time to translating established works
should be a stepping stone to writing original stories in the language.
It is true, though, that not all of us can or want to write
fiction. When I first joined the list I believe I wrote to some of you
concerning some of the stories that I thought were implied by your grammars
and lexicons. To me, it is quite natural to conceptualize an imaginary
language (or an imaginary board game) as related to story. Perhaps we
could set up an exchange program. Some of us can write stories (in
English) in some of our fictitious worlds to be translated into another
language
well, that may be a terrible idea on second thought.
Im very impressed that Zamenhof did translate all the
Hebrew Bible. This does bring up the topic of how those of us with
imaginary worlds and cultures could approach translating a passage of the
Bible. Should one imagine that (lets pretend) a Jesuit came into our
worlds, learned the language, and then produced something? What if that
doesnt really work in our stories? Perhaps someone had a dream about a
Bible story. Should one transliterate Biblical names, or actually
translate their meanings, or just use local names?
Sometimes Ive pondered the idea of translating a book of
the Bible into Khlìjha, but I do despair on what I could do. Which book,
for instance? I prefer stories over laws. Perhaps the Diatessaron would
be a good substitute for the Gospels. (The Diatesseron is a 2nd century
Gospel Harmony, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatessaron). However, I
would be sorely tempted to localize the stories for my world. So the
Twelve apostles could be twelve aliens, the fishermen of course sail in
zeppelins to catch the sky fish, and the Savior rides a triceratops into
the holy city. Such localizing would only end up offending everyone, so I
think Id stay away from the scripture of any religion.
So, this only makes me admire Esperanto all the more.
Alices Adventures in Wonderland is definitely a good
candidate for translation, at least in my case. Carrolls book has in its
favor a wide variety of styles, both narrative and poetry, as well as bits
of history and mathematics.
Did we ever learn what a conlang masterpiece is? Im not
sure, but there sure was some interesting conversation in this thread, and
I certainly learned a lot more about Zamenhof than I did before!
Messages in this topic (52)
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7.2. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Adam Walker" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 5:59 pm ((PST))
On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 7:03 PM, Puey McCleary <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hi gang! Ive been meaning to get back into this
> conversation before we all forget about it, but, alas, other things have
> gotten in the way. Ive been resurrecting my novel (this required
> lightning) and trying to teach myself strategy for tnúpa the chess-like
> analogue for my novel (this required an extra brain). So Ive been hanging
> around cemeteries and mad scientists with funny hair.
>
I work with a couple of those guys. But I have the funny hair.
> Im very impressed that Zamenhof did translate all the
> Hebrew Bible. This does bring up the topic of how those of us with
> imaginary worlds and cultures could approach translating a passage of the
> Bible. Should one imagine that (lets pretend) a Jesuit came into our
> worlds, learned the language, and then produced something? What if that
> doesnt really work in our stories? Perhaps someone had a dream about a
> Bible story. Should one transliterate Biblical names, or actually
> translate their meanings, or just use local names?
>
> Zamenhoff's out put certainly is impressive, but I don't want to do *that*
much translating in any of my languages. I have done Bible passages in
several of my conlangs and am slowly working toward a complete Bible in
Carrajina. One of my languages, for which I produced a Bable text, gave me
fits with just the question you ask about names. It has none of the
standard phonemes, well discounting trilled-r and a couple of other
reasonable common trills. the consonants were all trills and clicks and
"precussives" and the vowels were all whistles. So what to do with
Shinar? It lacks an initial trill, a vowel that I can't whistle and no
final click. I never did decide what to do. As far as translating
Biblical texts into alien languages, I always assume a missionary
translator, though an alien anthropologist could make the attempt as well.
> Sometimes Ive pondered the idea of translating a book of
> the Bible into Khlìjha, but I do despair on what I could do. Which book,
> for instance? I prefer stories over laws. Perhaps the Diatessaron would
> be a good substitute for the Gospels. (The Diatesseron is a 2nd century
> Gospel Harmony, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatessaron). However,
> I
> would be sorely tempted to localize the stories for my world. So the
> Twelve apostles could be twelve aliens, the fishermen of course sail in
> zeppelins to catch the sky fish, and the Savior rides a triceratops into
> the holy city. Such localizing would only end up offending everyone, so I
> think Id stay away from the scripture of any religion.
>
> Well, I have quite a bit of contact with Wycliffe Bible translators, one
of their headquarters is only a few miles from my house, even fewer from my
work and mere blocks (albeit long ones) from my church. Translation issues
of the type you are talking about come up rather frequently in real life.
If you're dealing with a culture that has no sheep and no exposure to sheep
what do you do with the Lamb of God -- spend a couple of pages of foot
notes explaining what this strange animial is and why it's important to
Ancient Jewish culture? Choose an animal used for sacrifical purposes in
that culture? Choose the animal that looks most like a sheep? Just say
"an animal"? And if they have no riding animals? Or domestic animals? I
heard about one real world translation, (and I was trying to look up the
language in question, but time is of the essence) in which the Lamb of God
was translated as the Pig of God, for cultural reasons. I sort of cringe
at that and wonder what happens when it's time to translate the Old
Testament with all its references to pigs as unclean and as symbols of
spiritual filth, etc. But some pretty radical things have been done in
real life. And then there is the Cotton Patch version.
> So, this only makes me admire Esperanto all the more.
>
> Alices Adventures in Wonderland is definitely a good
> candidate for translation, at least in my case. Carrolls book has in its
> favor a wide variety of styles, both narrative and poetry, as well as bits
> of history and mathematics.
>
> Did we ever learn what a conlang masterpiece is? Im not
> sure, but there sure was some interesting conversation in this thread, and
> I certainly learned a lot more about Zamenhof than I did before!
>
No. I don't think we got any closer than recognizing that some of us would
like to have criteria by which a conlang could be so judged, while others
of us find the very idea anathema. which is de riguer.
Adam
Messages in this topic (52)
________________________________________________________________________
7.3. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Herman Miller" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 7:17 pm ((PST))
On 1/9/2012 8:50 PM, Puey McCleary wrote:
> Herman, I completely sympathize with problems of localizing
> Alice into an alien planet or dimension. If you like, youre more than
> welcome to join us on the Alice-conlang mailing list, where we can talk
> about specific passages of Alice.
>
> http://lists.conlang.org/listinfo.cgi/alice-conlang.org
Well, I don't know how far I'll end up getting with the translation (I
don't even have any full sentences yet), but it'll be interesting to see
how things work out.
> Personally Ive been surprised of what has and what has not
> proven to be the most difficult. I had assumed that the puns would be the
> biggest problem, but as it is, finding slightly different puns in the
> target language has ended up easier than figuring out whats the equivalent
> of a puppy dog or a trial or bathing machines.
I'd like to work in some kind of reference to the Conlang Relay 6 text
in the part of the book where they're talking about water-wells and
treacle-wells. Relay 6 is the one that started something along the lines
of "all stars can be divided into three kinds" and ended up by the time
it got to Tirelat as "all wells can indeed be broken into tiny bits".
> I love the idea of playing croquet with Tirelat dragons.
> In
> my version Princess Alixhlìnye is using a phororhacos. And the Suzerain of
> Blood (Queen of Hearts) actually was supposed to have black roses, so her
> servants were painting red roses with what might be blood (the blood of her
> people being black of course).
>
> Whether or not you join us, Ill take a look at Tirelat. It
> sounds like a nifty language!
It does have some interesting features. One of the things that makes it
interesting, unfortunately, tends to cause problems for translations at
every step, and that's the mandatory evidentials. That is, tense is
fused with evidentials, so that it's impossible to specify tense without
at the same time specifying whether an event is from personal
experience, inference, or hearsay.
I really need to update my web documentation one of these days. The best
documentation of the language that's available online at this point is
probably the notes that I wrote for the relays, along with some ancient
posts to the Conlang list, but I couldn't find a copy of Relay 6 online.
The others may be just as hard to track down. I'm not even sure if I
have an original copy of the Relay 6 text myself; I've adapted all the
relay texts over the years to the current versions of Tirelat....
Messages in this topic (52)
________________________________________________________________________
7.4. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Herman Miller" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 10, 2012 7:43 pm ((PST))
On 1/10/2012 8:03 PM, Puey McCleary wrote:
> Im very impressed that Zamenhof did translate all the
> Hebrew Bible. This does bring up the topic of how those of us with
> imaginary worlds and cultures could approach translating a passage of the
> Bible. Should one imagine that (lets pretend) a Jesuit came into our
> worlds, learned the language, and then produced something? What if that
> doesnt really work in our stories? Perhaps someone had a dream about a
> Bible story. Should one transliterate Biblical names, or actually
> translate their meanings, or just use local names?
At one time, it seems everyone had translations of the Tower of Babel
story into their langs. I probably have one or two of those lying around.
Messages in this topic (52)
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