Messages

DJP's Dothraki book is semi-recent and big news. Nizzy01 trying to start a conversation thread (http://forum.dothraki.org/beginners/conversations-in-dothraki/) is kinda recent too, and might not yet be dead - do try to participate! Old faces are fairly quiet, and wiki does not see much progress at Dothraki side currently, but when new people kick off some action, things do start happening.

[Sōpagon]

Sōpagon is an uninflected High Valyrian word for to laugh. Thirat atthiraride is an uninflected Dothraki expression for to dream (more literally "to live a false life"). We might suspect that this isn't very serious attempt at creating text. That being said, given the Dothraki zero-copula syntaxes, the sentence
Sōpagon thirat atthiraride.
could be taken as a person telling in Dothraki what sōpagon means. If we replace Valyrian with Latin and Dothraki with English, we get
'Rirendi' is 'to dream'.
Viewing laughing as a delusional and foreign thing to do cuts close to home, considering GRRM's world.

Ya. I feel Sunquan likes to keep their tutorials fairly compact, and in doing so both accidentally and maybe even intentionally brushes under a rug some irregularities, uncertainities and corner cases. A lot of geminated word endings actually go CCV -> C, like jedda -> jed, I actually can't quickly find a known counter-example.

G'day, zhey Caroline.

Welcome. If-n-when you do feel you've learned enough to give a stab at an actual conversation in Dothraki or Valyrian, there are stickied threads in both language beginners sections. It's a new thing we're trying, because, frankly, a conversation level reading/writing is a challenge to absolutely everyone.

M'athchomaroon.

Hey, join our conversations in dothtaki thread. It's the current new thing here trying to kick some life to our small, slow n' quiet community. And I'm afraid it might not have the critical mass of conversationists. Well, maybe the critical mass is two. I'm not sure, if nizzy01 is still going to write, or if Khal Esizigo will participate. ...or if everyone has just lost the thread when it got stickied...

I'm pretty damn sure, that the answer is very simple:

If you build the accusative of an inanimate noun, which ends on consonant + consonant + vowel, you short it to just the first consonant.

Isn't true. CCV ending inanimate nouns have typically an accusative with just vowel stripped off, so CC. Sometimes -e is added because certain CC does not fit into a word ending syllable coda. Sometimes -e is added for more vague reasons, but that's kinda another discussion.

There might be some irregular noun that is shorted to just the first consonant, but that is the exeption, not the rule. Where did you get this rule from? I checked the wiki (which is generally not error-free, since it's maintained in part by sloppy people like me) and Peterson's book (which should be the most definite source) and neither of them seem to have anything strange here.

Neato. Congratulations to them. ...Says I here where DJP will probably not hear. Given the nice people they are, I sadly expect no early development experiments with conlangs o_O

Yer asti k'athjilari. Atthirar laz ittee vojis k'athostari fini gera atherinaroon. Anha zalak melekh dothraki adavrae yeraan. Ezolat lekhes vilajero esina, majin me'sh azha athmithrar.

Earlier: Hiya. I'm so-and-so. I've left myself sitting, and so am a mercenary. I'm trying to find out how I feel about trading. That is all new to me. Let's talk about you. How are you doing?
Work related vocab is scarce. I even suspect one of the few words we have, thikh, is actually just misrecorded tikh. Much of the meanings we'd need in modern framework probably just don't exist in Dothraki culture. I appreciate the option for bracketed English words, but nevertheless feel it's better for me to find ways to say things within the vocab we have where at all possible. This does lead to some added complexity in sentences, though, which can be kinda bad - or maybe even good?

M'athchomaroon! Anha ishish. Anha nemo anneva, majin anha chafak. Anha kis ezok kirekosi frakhok haji athjeraroon. Ei jini meshi anhaan. Astolates yeri. Hash yer dothrae chek?

M'athchomaroon, zhey Niz.

Ya. That's a good idea. It's not a new idea and it's not even promising much success, but certainly worth an attempt. If we're lucky, there's another new active around here and add old faces me and perhaps Hrakkar, and we could have a critical mass for such experiment to actually run. How about you throw a thread in Learn Dothraki / Beginners section with a headline along the lines "Conversation in Dothraki - Participate" or something. Start a conversation. I promise to answer

It might be prudent to create another thread for corrections and use tags like [corrections welcome] and [heavy corrections welcome] on the main thread, because otherwise corrections might well take most of the space on the thread and I don't want to go full Qvaak-grammarian mode unless someone actually asks for it.

Zhavvoki is a created name that my partner and I came up with as a sort of family/tribe name for us. Its  derived from Zhavvorsa and Okeo, so kind of like friend of dragon..

ach. A bit on the opaque side, but since it's a name, if it's cool for you, it's cool.

Why the inclusion of zhey?

I was thinking that you wanted to say ~"Cheers, my new allies."
Addressing is not a grammar-free thing. Sure English and many other languages do it very straightforwardly, but Dothraki uses zhey to facilitate the function.

so the "anha astak asqoy" makes it "I speak an oath/vow, in front of my ancestors beards"?
so even though vow is both a noun and verb in english, with dothraki asqoyi is only a noun? therefore it needs the Astok to precede it?

yes.

[Shirane]

I've joined a dead forum. havent I?

Relatively, yes; in absolute sense, no never, just occasionally very quiet. Unfortunately it's too slow quiet for many of the newcomers. What are the chances that you ever read this!

insight as to wether this may be something the people of the dothraki sea may say, culturally speaking.

Yea. Idiomatic expressions can end up being pretty much what ever (even ungrammatic!) and these beardy ones certainly have no friction agaist Dothraki culture. However, since the hair-braids are the definite big manly prowess thing, I would find this kind of idioms about beards a bit odd near miss.

review it for me for grammatical accuracy

The accurecy is good. You certainly have used the grammar, not just the words.

"Ki shiranesi kimoa anni" when surprised.

Shirane is marked inanimate on our vocab (and since pretty much everything even a bit mass-wordy is inanimate, this should be right). The genitive would thus be shirani, and plural never explicit in the noun itself.

"Anha asqoyi hatif  (maybe "ki" instead of "hatif") shiranesi kimoa anni" when solemnly attesting  to one thing or another.

The same thing about shirane, of course.
Asqoyi is a noun. Dothraki is nowhere near as flexible as English in zero-deriving words from one word class to another. And if you managed to get a verb, you'd need to conjugate it. As it is now, it reads pretty much "I am an oath in front of my ancestors' beards." Anha astak asqoy is how the show did it (asqoyi is in accusative, thus the missing i).

[Zhavvoki]

Hello from me too. Obviously I'm not the most frequent around here right now, but I'm still around, and if you need grammatical assistance on the Dothraki side of the site, I may be of some help.

M'athchomaroon!
Anha Khal Esizigo ha khalasar zhavvoki.
San athchomari yeraan chosh kemiki anna.

Not bad at all Zhavvoki is puzzling. Is it a misspelling or misderivation from zhavvorsa? Or is it some kind of queer really ambitious derivation from zhav like "true lizarders"? Or a word I have just missed?
Skipping that, a quick correction run yields
M'athchomaroon!
Anha Khal Esizigo ha khalasaroon zhavvoki.
San athchomari yerea, zhey kemiki chosh anni.

[Tikhisir zinay losha lekhes haji English, vosma kishi laz rhelaki shafka qisi jini ... hash mori nem zigeree ki shafki, hash voji fini essinae lekhis mra qora.]

I'll try:
Tikhisir zinay losha lekhes haji English, vosma kishi laz rhelaki shafka qisi jini ... hash mori nem zigeree ki shafki, hash voji fini essinae lekhis mra qora.

To translate was surprisingly challenging concept. I would presume it has come up somewhere by now, but anything even close to that was hard to come by. My "interpretation services" is "people who make languages change", and even there the causative form was made up on the spot.
How to translate "program" depends on what it is. Is it perhaps a leaflet, or a TV broadcast? I went with "a group of deeds/acts", which of course was also derived ad hoc.
I used mra qora expression for to have and felt for you would be awkward and/or iffy anywhere I thought to put it, so I went with "...needed by you" to get somewhat similar effect.

Close translation to give a feel how the sentences flow:
Remaining program contains Engish language, but we can help you about that ... if they are needed by you, we have people who change languages.

Even closer:
Program remaining contains language regarding English, but we can help You about this ... if they are needed by You, then people who change languages are had.