Messages

61

Beginners / Re: Random Translation Help: "Find Your Way Home"

« on: June 09, 2014, 07:10:19 pm »

Depending on what tone you are aiming at, you might want to consider changing ezi to ezas. The former is a strict command, while the latter is more a cordial command, encouragement or wish.

Os is IMO a good word, but yeri needs to go after it.

What ever the word for "home", it should be in allative as it's a destination. So okrenegwin -> okrenegwinaan.

"Home" is a very loaded and not very Dothraki concept, so there's no right answer, probably, and you can deal with it in many ways. In a way okrenegwin, "stone tent", is a good word, as it signifies kind of settling down that's uncommon among Dothraki, but which inevitably signifies that you have decided to call one place a home. On the other hand it signifies a life style foreign to Dothraki and can thus have a connotation of "unhomely" rather than of homely. I'd go with okre zhorre, "own tent". That should be a nicely nuanced, heartful phrase. I'm not absolutely sure about the inflection, but should be okraan zhorre.

So my proposal: Ezas os yeri okraan zhorre.

62

Beginners / Re: A Dothraki pregnancy announcement

« on: May 28, 2014, 04:09:31 am »

You're on some mobile device that makes opening links a pain, aren't you?

Mesik, yes.

so mesliat is inanimate, so the derivation is not pluralized either?

1) Mesilat is a verb (a word of doing), animacy concerns nouns (words for things), so mesilat is generally neither animate nor inanimate.
2) Verbs can sometimes (though rarely) be used as nouns, and then they actually are animate.
3) When you derive words they don't inherit the animacy of the root. The animacy is determined by the type of derivation.
4) Agentive suffix (that /-(a)k/ you added to the word) generates animate words.
Since mesik ends in a consonant, the pluralization is mesiki, as you originally guessed. That's why I said "Spoiler: you will not be surprised"

63

Beginners / Re: A Dothraki pregnancy announcement

« on: May 23, 2014, 11:19:41 pm »

Ya. No surprise pitfalls here. AFAIK the usual trick is the most promising trick, and you got it right, too.

mesilak, or is that mesik?

When you know, what part of the word is suffix and what stem, you'll know which one is right. In the vocab entry this can be seen from the past SG. inflection. Works every time on /-lat/ versus /-at/ problem. Or you could check my previous post on this thread. We discussed mesilat.

Either way, how would you pluralize that? Stick an i on the end?

First you need to know if your newly derived word is animate or inanimate, because if the new word is inanimate, you won't (visibly) pluralize it in any way whatsoever. So look into our derivation page entry on agentive suffix to find out, if we might know what kind of word this is. We know! yay!
Then, if you found out that your word is indeed animate, check the noun declension table (I find the example tables below easier for a quick check, but what ever floats your boat) and if the gods are with you, you'll see, how to pluralize.
Spoiler: you will not be surprised

64

Introductions / Re: Greetings~

« on: May 20, 2014, 09:32:38 am »

Cool. Welcome.

65

Beginners / Re: Happy mother's day

« on: May 08, 2014, 07:25:30 am »

Layafat Maj asshekhqoyi

if you change from *maj to mai you get something like ~ "to be happy a birthday's mother"
"Birthday" is probably not the best word choice overall, I think we've usually used vitteya for celebrations. So "mother's celebration" would be perhaps vitteya maisi and more literal "mother's day" would be of course asshekh maisi - or perhaps as one word vitteymai or asshekhmai.

Then there's the question about what to do with layafat, and if the layaf is a good word choice. We've seen such words as vezhven and davra used for days, but layaf is more antropomorphizing than those. Day and celebration are abstract concepts. We don't really want them to be happy; we want people to be happy during them. That's probably no problem, but could be. I think more often than not these things are just transfered, and happy day is a day that's happy to the people living it. But there are other possibilities. You might speak of a day that's not "happy" but "happyfying" or you might use weather like sytaxes like "day on which it's happy"
Anyway, we have three proven syntaxes, and those are ones you'd expect, too.

Davralates asshekhi yeri! - "Your day be good!"
Anha zalak asshekhqoyi vezhvena yeraan! - “I wish for an excellent blood day for you”
The latter is shortened to Asshekhqoyi vezhvena! - which sounds like "Birthday is exellent!" but actually is interpreted more "[have an] Exellent birthday!"

So is layaf works and we decide to approximate "mother's day" with vitteya maisi (I'd like to try with a compound word, but I'm afraid the spelling and irregularity of mai might confuse the declination), we get two pretty sure choices:
Layafates vitteya maisi yeri! [outch. This would actually really ask for the compound]
Anha zalak vitteyi maisi layafa yeraan! [better]
And it's pretty safe to hope that the shortened Vitteyi maisi layafa! might be interpreted in a desired way too. In a way it's even a bit less confusing than Asshekhqoyi vezhvena!, as the genitive case is apparent.

66

Announcements / Re: Planned system outage

« on: May 05, 2014, 04:53:53 am »

Thanks for the heads-up. It's good to know, for a change, beforehand.

67

Beginners / Re: Place to Hear the Words?

« on: May 05, 2014, 12:41:13 am »

Short answer: no, I don't think we have the kind of resource you want.

Generally Peterson's Dothraki blog is the best place for digging audio samples, try searching by tags. DJP has read some Dothraki for various purposes, much much much less Valyrian. Some of his readings are even single word audio clips. Sir_Darcy has extracted some more into a readymade one word clips for a memrise course. But yeah, very little Valyrian (which I'm guessing was the main goal as the post is in Valyrian subsection), and Dothraki is not in any comprehensive package.

68

Beginners / Re: Help!

« on: May 03, 2014, 04:54:49 am »

I can't give any good answers, you'll need to wait for others for those, but I can give you half answers for starters.

- If you don't find a word or any close substitute, you're probably out of luck. The word probably just isn't known yet. Our Valyrian scholars are pretty good at coming up with speculative derivations, but for anything reasonably solid you'll need to a) wait for the word to possibly come up (we're getting words pretty fast now that the season is rolling on and has a fair amount of Valyrian in it, but ascertaining what that all really says will take some time) or b) try asking David (he's really good at keeping himself busy, so don't get your hopes up on that, but he does sometimes answer stuff on both tumblr and twitter).

- I'm not sure how far you think you are on your translation, but it looks you have a long way to go, even ignoring the missing two words. Valyrian has a very different word order and deals with a lot of things with suffixes when English uses words. Just throwing away the words you probably shouldn't translate separately and rearranging the remaining in more Valyrian order gives something roughly like "ours is what that fire blood back take and our enemies screaming die". It's also good to keep a close eye on the sense in which each word is translated in the vocab page. Inkon is a noun, so you should expect it to denote to the posteriori side of a person, so that is unlikely to work for you; arlī is much more promising, as it's marked an adverb and that's the kind of sense you need. Skoros is a question word, so it might be off too. And mixing High Valyrian with Astapori Valyrian with no adjustment is also rather iffy. Though as dos should not be needed, maybe that mismatch disappears naturally.

Welcome and good luck going forward. Learn to love the challenge, because we have that in spades.

69

Beginners / Re: Verbs and Crows

« on: April 22, 2014, 01:28:15 pm »

Hello. Getting responses to Valyrian posts is a bit slow, as our most notable Valyrian expert(s) seem to be reading this forum sparingly. I'll see to it that someone awakes, if they won't do so by themselves soon

As for macrons, ie. dashes above vowels, I usually just cut-n-paste them, since typing them is a bit of a pain. If for some reason I need to write more than a couple, I have an Auto Hotkey script that lets me type them windows_key+character. That's just because I had Auto Hotkey on the computer and already knew how to use it, though. I hear there are many other programs and some operating system tricks to make them easily available. You could also just write two normal vowels istead, like dekurii instead of dekurī. Macrons are elegant and all, but they just mean long vowels. Many languages do long vowels with just doubling and since Valyrian does not usually allow syllabe brakes between two identical vowels, there's no real threat of misunderstanding.

70

Introductions / Re: Hello!

« on: April 22, 2014, 01:15:19 pm »

M'athchomaroon, zhey Arcix.

Welcome. Active learners are always welcome, appreciated addition to our ranks.
I hope to see some creative attempts, and if you allow, promise to give them the merciless appraisal I'm famous for.
Perhaps soon you'll be helping on developing the wiki.

71

Beginners / Re: Some phrases I've made

« on: April 14, 2014, 11:17:21 am »

Can you explain why you assigned ablative?

I think I can. I already gave a bit of an aswer in Words for genitals thread (of all the places):

There's no magic. At the most basic level [ablative and allative] are equivalent of from and into/onto. So for a word meaning "cart" (rhaggat), you'd basically use ablative when you'd say in English "from a/the cart" (rhaggatoon) and you'd use allative when in English you'd say "into/onto a/the cart" (rhaggataan). But there is half bajillion uses for ablative and allative that are outside that basic use, and they are pretty much all fixed "it's just done this way" stuff that just has to be learned. Intuition may help a bit, but the use is not elective.
For example "I hit him with a whip." is said Anha loj mae ma orvikoon. The ablative case does not really add anything to the meaning of the sentence other than it clarifies that ma is used in the sense "with". That's just a rule: whenever ma is used as a preposition meaning "with", the noun following the preposition is in ablative. All prepositions assign the case of the following noun this way, and the case does not always mean much anything.

...so basically you simply go to http://wiki.dothraki.org/Prepositions and choose the correct case. Or go to http://wiki.dothraki.org/Vocabulary and use the case given after the arrow.
As for why ma happens to demand ablative for the "with" use, I think the source class gives a good hint. Or maybe it might be the continuation of the "growing from the source" theme that's behind the inalienable possession. But since we don't know terribly much about etymology, the more exact development can only be guessed.

I see I also have left one part of your Summertime Sadness still without commentation. I meant to go through the whole translation, sorry. Maybe I'll get back to it now.

72

Beginners / Re: Help me make a cool collar for my service dog please

« on: April 11, 2014, 07:00:20 am »

The Dothraki version could be
Anha afichak reki anni ma vorsasoon ma qoyoon, ma mori fini vazzisi yera adrivoe k'athawazari.
There tends to be a little bit of uncertainity, since we don't know everything DJP has about Dothraki, ans since we are erring humans, but this is fairly solid text, I'd say.

There's also the question of how to translate. It's never completely straightforward. To give some idea on the word/syntax choices, here's a differrent/more literal translation back from Dothraki:
I will retrieve what is mine with fire, with blood, and those who will hurt you will die screamingly.

I can also make some attempt on writing this down, as I'm not completely hopeless with callighraphy n' stuff. What kind of style are you aiming at? There's no in-world writing system for Dothaki (and no realized in-world writing system for Valyrian, for that matter), so the most sensible choice is probably some mediaval-ish fraktur style or even more primitive crude majuscule. Do you want easy legibility for a modern reader or can the font have some more exotic qualities?

73

Beginners / Re: A Dothraki pregnancy announcement

« on: March 28, 2014, 03:56:45 pm »

Your suggestion looks like "Maybe when they have found their sixteenth year" ("Maybe when they're sixteen" as a non-literal English translation, Mayhaps when they’ve had six-and-ten namedays in ASOIAF-style archaic English)

Maybe asshekhqoyi (birthday) instead of firesof (year) - I don't see why not.

Note that it's not "sixteenth year" in Dothraki, it's "sixteen years". "Sixteenth" would be said differently. And the way I constructed the sentence zhindatthi firesof is a straight object, so it's in accusative, so if you change firesof to asshekhqoyi, it'll be assekhqoy.

74

Beginners / Re: A Dothraki pregnancy announcement

« on: March 28, 2014, 11:11:37 am »

Is it a proper use of zhey to get their attention here?

Absolutely. Or at least very much so. Well, kinda. Anyways, yes. 

The verb is mesilat, to be pregnant. I'm not sure if the stem is mesi or mesil; infinitives ending in lat often seem to be confusing like this. If I assume the stem is mesi, the third person singular is mesie, which just sounds weird, so that's why I assumed the stem is mesil and thus the third person singular is mesile.

The guess was legitimate, but wrong. The third person singular is indeed mesie. Better get used to weird sounding vowel sequences as they are common in Dothraki. When in doubt, go to internet and to the Wiki's vocab page (http://wiki.dothraki.org/Vocabulary). You'll usually find that a word like mesilat has a line saying something like "past SG: mesi". Past singular is either the bare stem or the stem + epenthetic /-e/. From that you can easily deduce the rest. Unfortunately our pdf dictionary does not offer this (yet).

I make sure to not drop the pronoun 'me'.

Drop? The English line does not have any pronoun to be dropped, so I guess you try to think independent from English. Or is your native language something else and both English and Dothraki translated from there?. You could say "Doreah, she is pregnant." in English, and I guess you might manage to use a similar construction in Dothraki: "Doreah, me mesie." But that's iffy.
The simple way is simple. Doreah is the subject of the sentence. You don't need to worry about dropping the pronoun, just never add it: Doreah mesie. - Doreah is pregnant.

Hash Doreah ma akemoe Harvest? – Will Doreah marry Harvest?

OK. I'll give you some right-ish answers and you can then wonder why the heck they work the way they work
If we accept Harvest to decline as a Dothraki word:
Hash Doreah akemoe ma Harvestoon? - Will Doreah marry Harvest? (Harvest and Doreah are the spouses)
Hash Doreah nem akema ma Harvestoon? - Will Doreah be married to Harvest? (practically the same question as above, a bit different wording)
Hash Doreah akema Harvestes? - Will Doreah marry Harvest? (Doreah officiates the marriage, Harvest is one of the spouses, the other is not mentioned - there is a lot of iffy stuff in this one)
But we probably should not accept Harvest to decline as a Dothraki word. It seems Dothraki don't like to assimilate foreign names. This is why these probably should go like this instead:
Hash Doreah akemoe haji Harvest?
Hash Doreah nem akema haji Harvest?
Hash Doreah akema haji Harvest?

Using her name, do I need to use a third person pronoun as well?

Hey, you did ask about that! No. Names are basically nouns. You don't usually say in English "Doreah she killed her Irri." or "The warrior he killed him the foreigner." You just say "Doreah killed Irri." and "The warrior killed the foreigner." Just the same way you say Doreah addriv Irries. and Lajak addriv ifakes.

Is the question word 'hash' enough to convey the sense of 'will she?'

Hash and the future tense. Yes. Should be.

Can I simply use the number word to refer to the age?

I have no idea. My guess would be no.

Is affin the right form of 'when' here?

Maybe if you rearranged the sentence. Maybe not anyway. It's basically (but not completely) a question word, and you probably are not interested in knowing when they are sixteen.

As with my last sentence, is the question word hash enough to convey it as possibility rather than a definite statement?

Too much. I think you're just asking "Are they sixteen, when?"

How did you end up with zinthi? Sixteen is zhindatthi everywhere where I look... oh. Except on the pdf dictionary.    damn, damn, damn. Gotta get to Hrakkar on that.

How about Kash mori ray hezhahi zhindatthi firesof, ishish. ... to use the newly found old hezhahat  And no, I don't know how to use tense in that kind of sentence. Ray + present tense conjugation is a gamble.

75

Beginners / Re: What these Dothraki sentences look like in Dothraki alphabet?

« on: March 22, 2014, 12:29:18 pm »

Dothraki are illiterate. There's no in-world writing system for the language. We use roman alphabet and Peterson's ortography. There are a few alternative writing systems developed - two actually by me - but they don't have much weight behind them. There isn't even any one definite unofficial system, let alone an offial one. http://www.dothraki.com/2012/07/a-dothraki-alphabet/ is AFAIK the only complete one that's not based on any real-world writing system.