Messages

361

Dothraki Language Updates / Re: Animate or inanimate nouns.

« on: May 20, 2011, 10:37:45 am »

Speaking of animate versus inanimate, could it be that some pronouns inherit animacy from the words they denote to? I tried to puzzle why '...ast chiori fini zirisse oggoes dorvoon...', but 'Mawizzi Fin Zal Kemolat ma Yesisoon'. Fini and fin seem to serve very similar role, and the best explanation for the difference I can come up is that mawissi is an inanimate noun (as we indeed suspect) and thus fini takes an inanimate form.

If that were true, we would have one more indicator for determining animacy.

362

HBO: Game of Thrones / Re: Dothraki dialogue from the TV series.

« on: May 13, 2011, 05:35:46 pm »

So... the language sounds wonderfully real (at least to my extremely unprofessional ear). Sometimes it might have a slightly over articulated feel, some other times a wee bit unnecessarily mumbled, but I think most of that is just in my head (or, at least, I wouldn't know the difference). Almost anything sounds fake if you try hard enough to listen if it sounds fake or not.

It's sad Dothraki might in practice lack a couple of harder to pronounce phonemes. If the language at the show has so much ambiguity that even a hypothetical fluent speaker couldn't navigate the sea of vague homophones, that's certanly a loss. It's also rather unideal - if also completely understandable - that people improvise dialogue changes and additions on a language they don't know. Isn't it a great tradition among TV series to brutalise foreign languages - the few times we actually get to hear or read them?

I like it that Jorah seems to speak the language a bit awkwardly. I view Jorah as a guy who is content when he's understood, while Daenerys certainly wants to be integrated. I wouldn't be surprised if Dany would soon be more fluent than the knight. I also like it that pillow talk is pretty much just a grunt and mumbling to oneself while watching a fight is a bloody untranslatable mystery.

-Rakharo: Chiftik Cricket

How should this be understood? Mild swear word? Insult to Viserys?

The final added expression "Hash tih?" does not make sense. It was added by the production in the belief that it means "Do you?". It instead means something like "Do eyes?"

I bet David Peterson has at least some ideas on how the grammar typically deteriorates in informal and lax (or tense?) situations, and if he says it doesn't easily fit, then it doesn't, but for all I know Hash tih? doesn't seem particulary strange. Dothraki don't seem too keen on keeping verbs in every sentence, no copula and all, so it might be just rough version of Are there eyes?, or it might be just their way of emphasizing a word, something like Eyes, yo?.

363

HBO: Game of Thrones / Re: Dothraki dialogue from the TV series.

« on: May 05, 2011, 04:40:53 pm »

Super. Thanks from me too.

hash me nem ejervae nharesoon.

Hash tih fikishi nahre yeroon?

This nhare / nahre is probably the same word meaning head.

Hash shafka zali addrivat mae

Khaleesi vos zalo meme nem azisa

Khaleesi salameme adakhat sina ajjalan

And with these zalo meme seems to be the same two word expression as salameme, meaning something like to want. Meme seems to be a separate word (if not a big suffix .. or two words: "it-it") as zali is probably the same word as sala and zalo.
Maybe this approximately zalo is actually a bit on the degree side on want. At first glance Rakharo seems to ask Do You want to kill him?, and either because of the words or because of the culture this seems to translate into Do you want me to kill him for you.

There isn't parenthesis in Rakharo's kill / ear removal discussion. Is it confirmed? Why would it be and food discussion not? I want the food discussion! It is, I think, the most flawless and textbook example like exchange in Dothraki so far.

Khaleesi salameme adakhat sina ajjalan. Oge loy mowesi.

Khaleesi wants-to eat something-different tonight. Slaughter some rabbits.

Could adakhat be in a future tense? Should the word be dakhat in the dictionary? Mowesi looks a lot like plural. Wouldn't that make rabbits animate? I guess we should expect them to be.

Vo mowesi gojina

No rabbits ?here?.

As far as I can find, there are no clues about that gojina. Or could jin be the root of the word/expression?

Ezas loy alegri h'anhaan. Mori allayafi mae, jin alegra.

?Find? some ducks ?right?-to-me. Them please zher, those ducks.

I'd think it's likely ezas doesn't mean literally find. It could as well be something like search. What should be our gender neutral pronoun for as-literal-as-possible translations? I find s/he rather ugly. I guess h' could be pretty much anything - and probably it's just preposition helper. What would anhaan mean there without it? Into me?

Chiori tih lo alegri shivikisi? Vo mowesi, vo alegre. Hash tih fikishi nahre yeroon? Hash tih?

Woman seen some ducks ?I-wonder? No rabbits, no ducks. Do seeing ?manage? head from-you? Do see?

Apart from Vo mewesi, vo alegre I'm at loss here. Lo is probably the same as previous loy and it would probably mean something more like some  than any. Shivikisi seems superfluous. Tih is a mystery. Is it just to see, tihat? Is it a verb at all?

Ma jin jano. Anha rek tih san jani

Then this dog. I them see many dogs.

Fine. Apparently san means quite exactly just many, but it's fun to think of it as heaps-of. Ma seems like an exellent little word. A wide range of uses, but seems like easy enough to grasp.


uuuh. Sleep for me now. Sorry for bad english. I'm no linguist, just a curious person. I'm much more into puzzles than into languages. If all the words and grammatics would have been published, I probably wouldn't even try to unlock them - it would seem like too big task to even begin - but now that the information is scarce, this is fun mystery to muse about.

364

Beginners / Re: No word for thank you?

« on: April 30, 2011, 09:38:36 am »

Speculation! Yay!

You might take Jorah as an expository device, who conveys more truthful and informative tidbits about Dothraki culture than realistically would be likely. You might also see him as a one eyed man leading a blind. Jorah is hardly integrated into Dothraki society and he is hardly the a lecturing type even if he is. That he says Dothraki don't have a word for "thank you" might mean they don't seem to be thanking each other much - or even that Jorah thinks there isn't a "thank you" appropriate for the situation.

Dothraki seem to have some tradition in throwing "respects" around and it goes to figure something along lines of "Yo! respect!" would be a natural way to try express gratitude for a gift or help or whatnot. And, not suprisingly, Peterson tells us as much: You could try "San athchomari yeraan."

There certainly are differences in ways to express gratitude across cultures. Somewhere it might be difficult to get honest gratitude through because thank-yous are so ritually necessary they are taken to mean pretty much nothing. Somewhere else you go through crazy "oh no you shouldn't have" "No I insist, it's nothing" routine for anything more than passing a salt shaker. Even a hearfelt thank you might leave thanked feeling they must have missed some hidden sarcasm and that a thing which was meant to be freely given has suddenly been stolen from them. In single culture language like Dothraki it is easy to imagine any expression of direct "thank you" might be near inexistent just because it is not used in a correct protocol of accepting gifts or favors.

Of course it wasn't very helpful of Jorah to just deny the existense of "thank you". "Just be humble and respectful. You are not supposed to say anything. If you desperately need to express your gratitude aloud, you might compliment the gift, but I wouldn't really recommend even that." might have been much more useful. My theory is that Dothraki have some small talk stinks -attitude [which as a Finn I can appreciate: we have some strong tradition of sitting in a comfortable silence] and that they also have rather rigid idea of respect implied by default.

I would guess that if Daenerys would have managed to say something akin to thank you in Dothraki, that would have
1) awkwardly indicated her as weak, uncertain and generally unworthy for disrespecting the situation by unnecessaty blather. She certainly seemed weak and uncertain anyway, but there surely was no need to underline the fact.
2) extremely awkwardly indicated that she doesn't consider Khal Drogo respectful and capable by default and thus pretty much mocked Drogo for being generally worthless weakling for whom to be able to procure a horse is out of character.