Forum Home > The Language Room > One sentence in D'ni | ||
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Member Posts: 15 |
In retrospect, I should have joined and posted something about the Unwritten Kickstarter (here)--and the Guild of Linguists reward tier--some time ago. It simply failed to occur to me that you might not have known about it. As it has completed successfully, and since I backed the Kickstarter at the Guild of Linguists tier, I expect to be able to submit a single sentence to RAWA for translation in roughly two weeks' time. I intend to use that sentence to try to fill in some holes in the D'ni grammar. My current candidate sentence is:
This should get us a content question; a comparative; an objective-case third-person pronoun*; the second-person plural genitive pronominal suffix; the indefinite pronoun "anything"; and the verb "to call" (in the appellative sense), along with the structure of its arguments**. Is anyone aware of any other holes in the known D'ni grammar that I could try to fill? More generally, does anyone have any suggestions to improve the candidate sentence? * I suspect one of two things: 1) this will specifically be the masculine animate third person pronoun, or 2) no third person objective pronouns exist at all, and a) a periphrastic substitution such as *mot kahm (that ?man) will be used, or b) nothing at all will be used, and D'ni is simply a pro-drop language in this context. ** The verb "to call" is low priority: it's just something I wanted, and I'm willing to toss it out for the sake of other missing grammatical elements. Other things I would have liked would be "to prefer", "to claim" (= to attest, to state, to aver), "never" (in the dynamic sense, rather than the stative implied by tsanril), and "god" (in the anthropological sense of "some worshipped entity" rather than the D'ni-specific sense of "Yahvo, The Great Maker"). | |
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Site Owner Posts: 381 |
The consensus in the community is that there will be a single 3rd person singular object pronoun, corresponding to the single 3rd person singular subject pronoun. Our most likely candidate is tah, but it would be good to confirm that, or get the correct word. Also, the 2nd person plural possessive pronoun has been on object of speculation for many years, and it will be good to complete that section of the grammar, especially if we can get hold of it before the languages lessons reach that point. I think it would be a good idea to work 'because' in there somewhere, as that is still only a speculative translation. Colours are something that would be nice to know. Colours aside, what you have, plus my request for 'because' would make me very happy indeed. As an aside, we should urge others who selected the Linguists tier to go for words and formulae we do not yet know. | |
-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Member Posts: 160 |
Well, thank you! Unfortunately it seems you're the only one. Maybe you could start the phrase with "Because of these claims then, what more fitting name..." | |
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Site Owner Posts: 381 |
Well, all things considered, it is doubted that the D'ni marked gender on their pronouns, because no other pronoun does. Not even the 3rd singular possessive. That is a real shame That is very impressive. | |
-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Member Posts: 15 |
@Kathryn Aveara:
Is there an attested (presumably emphatic) standalone 3s subject pronoun, or are you referring to the verb ending -en? In the latter case I don't think that's a viable argument for a single 3s object pronoun: most Indo-European languages (including English!) also mark verbs with 3s subjects uniformly regardless of animacy and gender, but still have different object pronouns for them.
All none of them, alas. I'm the only one.
Hmm.
(I would have preferred to use char-black and blood-red, but it might be difficult to separate them out, since neither char nor blood are attested. I suppose the intended semantics are clear enough.) @Korov'ev:
I don't believe that would work for either Kathryn or myself. Because of is distinct from because: the former is a multi-word preposition (governing a noun), while the latter is a subordinating conjunction (governing a full dependent clause). Also, claims (noun) ≠ to claim (verb). | |
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Site Owner Posts: 381 |
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-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Member Posts: 15 |
I see your point. I'm still weakly of the opinion that it's (Watsonian) derived from an archaic verbal construction, or (Doylist) constructed to parallel the verbal endings, with no direct connection between the two. However, a quick Wikipedia survey of languages with pronominal possessive clitics indicates that gender distinction (or its lack) does typically match between possessive clitics and standalone pronouns. This is less true for animacy: Persian's standalone pronouns distinguish animacy, while its posessive clitics and verbal forms don't. (Also, sorry about the vanishing post, earlier; I had formatting issues and decided to rework it.)
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Site Owner Posts: 381 |
You can reformat posts with the Edit tool. And sorry about the clunkiness of the site, but I'm forced to web-host right now. | |
-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Member Posts: 15 |
@Kathryn: I was aware, but I was also afraid that fixing things would take more than ten minutes. ^_^;; I decided to take a stab at glossing the candidate sentence I tossed out in my earlier post, to suss out possible sources of ambiguity. The bracketed Greek letters scattered everywhere match up with footnotes; [English words in brackets] are of course placeholders for the D'ni words. Thanks to Talashar for the convenient reference.
Except for the [ζ], it seems clear. In this respect alone I think it's slightly preferable to my earlier candidate sentence, in which "more fitting name" and "than 'Fool'" might have been unanalyzable due to word-order issues.
Footnotes: α: Talashar has covered the issue of content questions; -eh is a cheerful stab in the dark. β: "can claim", of course, but the use of voohee vs. chahn- is not well understood. (Or at least, not by me.) γ: No particular tense stands out as appropriate for these verbs, although γ.1 seems sufficiently irrealis as to almost demand an auxiliary verb or additional affix. (Then again, I speak English.) If pressed I would use bodol- for γ.1 and the gnomic present for γ.2, but I wouldn't put money on it. δ: These are hapax legomena that I've pressed into service. ε: Assembled from oshahn + -tahv; unattested. ζ: There are several places the bits and pieces of "more than" could go. Mostly I feel confident that "more" would precede "than", but this is still the bit that I'm most worried about being ambiguous. θ: Using kamrov unmarked as an objective-case relative pronoun feels weird due to animacy issues: it's currently attested only as the subject of its relative clause. Kam is used in an almost parallel construction as the object of its clause, but kam is also presumably low enough on the animacy scale that it doesn't seem inappropriate at all. Offhand, I see three possibilities:
All of these should use constructs that we already partially know, though, and none should be difficult to read. κ: See θ concerning the arguments of [call]. This probably doesn't have a preposition on it, but it could—or there could be some sort of quotative marker (à la Japanese to or tte), which worries me a little. But even if there is, I'm pretty sure it would be a separate word, rather than some sort of affix or clitic that might conceal the lexeme for "god". η: I don't know if "merely" will occur clause-initially or clause-finally. I'm pretty sure it's limited to one of those two, though, and I don't think it can be confused with the adjacent lexemes in either | |
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Site Owner Posts: 381 | That looks great! | |
-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Member Posts: 15 |
I would have liked to post this yesterday, but hardware failure struck. I've noted a few surprising things with Greek letters: I've already asked RAWA to confirm that these are as intended, but obviously I don't expect to hear anything until after Obduction has gone to the presses, and likely not even then. The original text was provided in D'niFont (and has here been manually copied from another screen an another computer, where I'm doing a drive recovery). Before the hardware failure, I also performed a semi-automated OTS translation on it (which I then transferred to paper for ease of interlinear translation). Any scribal errors I may have introduced in these fragments should therefore be mostly uncorrelated. The periods in the OTS text are used to separate morphemes where I believe morpheme boundaries exist. I have not been consistent about h-deletion.
The [α]s mark what appears to be either an irregular plural or an error in the transcription: tomahnahtee rather than tomahntee. A quick rundown of the new vocabulary, in occurrence. [β] denotes words with significant departures from known D'ni phonotactics.
We have:
And, finally, the new grammar.
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Member Posts: 15 |
(... the random orange text in the transcription was failed forum formatting; please ignore it.) | |
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Site Owner Posts: 381 |
The passage in RTS: .kamrov teshemtee voohee belen roo tsahnril kobolkeebahen ze neegesh gopah tomahnahteeomee gahmoodenteeomee gahtsotoyteeomee kokeneet t'peychahvo gahgopah kosofegueet zo'e'os gimit iney r'ets'dey oko gahroodsh okhze kamrov kofoosaheet rebahreltahn hahzah gahtrel
This will make it easier for me to read. I'll analyse this in a minute. Congrats on getting such a rich array of new words! | |
-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Site Owner Posts: 381 |
Some initial thoughts. kobolkeebahen should probably be kobolkeebahem kosofegueet should probably be kosofegutee gahroodsh should probably be gahroodesh kofoosaheet should probably be kofoosahtee New vocab plus some musings. belen - claim (v) kobol- - seems to be a subjunctive marker keebah - obey ze - a 3rd person object pronoun, contrasting with tah? neegesh - merely, thus: neeg - mere gopah - because. Well now I need to think of something else for oyn. tomahnah - home. Perhaps contrasted with tomahn - house? -omee - at last, the ever-elusive 2nd plural possessive pronoun! And preserving my neat D'ni phonotactics. mooden - fortune tsotoy - child. Maybe deriving from tso and -oy? peychahvo - danger sofegu - fear (v) zo'e - loss gimit - immediate iney - more than. Perhaps this is a particle meaning 'above'? ets'dey - retribution oko - black rood(e)sh - red foosah - call, name (v) bahreltahn - god. Bahreltahn as an epiphet of Yahvo seems to have been lexicalised as 'god' in addition to 'creator' hazah - white trel - blue | |
-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Site Owner Posts: 381 |
Oh, Orz, would you be able to come to the AGM in Moula on Saturday? I'll bring this up during my announcements, and I think it'd be good to have the man of the moment with us. | |
-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Member Posts: 30 |
Lots of good stuff! It's nice to have those paradigm gaps filled at last. One odd thing that hasn't been mentioned is that voohee precedes the verb here rather than following it as in all our previous examples. | |
-- Talashar Geltahn; Ki 183867 An overview of D'ni grammar | My books
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Site Owner Posts: 381 |
I think this could be riddled with odd things, like the apparent lack of a second vowel in roodsh. | |
-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Member Posts: 160 |
Holy Mackerel! I can fill some blanks in the Notes For thoroughness’ sake, here are the NTS and UCSUR versions: .kæmrov tešemtí vúhí belen rú canril kobolkíbaen ze nígeš gopa tomanatíomí gamúdentíomí gacotótíomí kokenít t’péçavo gagopa kosofeguít zo’e’os gimit iné r’éc’dé oko garúdš oxze kæmrov kofúsaít rebareltan haza gatrel
Maybe ón means lastly: | |
-- 46116 — D’ní notes – Fonts – Goodies
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Site Owner Posts: 381 |
No, oyn is definitely a conjunction. | |
-- Moula KI: 00005310
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Member Posts: 15 |
Kathryn Aveara wrote: > gahtsotoytee should probably be gahtsotoyteeomee But it is! (The remainder are as I received them, though they looked odd to me, too.) > Oh, Orz, would you be able to come to the AGM in Moula on Saturday? I'll bring this up during my announcements, and I think it'd be good to have the man of the moment with us. Probably not, largely due to aforementioned hardware failure. Talashar wrote: > Lots of good stuff! It's nice to have those paradigm gaps filled at last. One odd thing that hasn't been mentioned is that voohee precedes the verb here rather than following it as in all our previous examples. Wow, I completely missed that. I can confirm it's not a scribal error on my part. It could be related to the fact that all our other examples use kehn-...? Korov'ev wrote: > .kæmrov tešemtí vúhí belen rú canril kobolkíbaen ze nígeš gopa tomanatíomí gamúdentíomí gacotótíomí kokenít t’péçavo gagopa kosofeguít zo’e’os gimit iné r’éc’dé oko garúdš oxze kæmrov kofúsaít rebareltan haza gatrel It looks like it matches my other autotransliteration, for what that's worth. | |
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