Learn Dothraki and Valyrian

Learn Dothraki => Beginners => Topic started by: Verak on April 29, 2011, 05:46:21 pm

Title: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on April 29, 2011, 05:46:21 pm
I am going to attempt to write sentences in Dothraki. I will very much appreciate anyone who wants to discuss/correct them. I'm SURE they will be replete with errors.

San athchomari yeraan.

My 9 sheep are quiet tonight.
Qazat oqet anni chakae ajjalan.
Qazat oqet anni chaka ajjalan.

That spider bit me again under my glove yesterday.
Rek qosar save oste anha torga hlak anni oskikh.
Rek qosar save ost anha torga hlakon anni oskikh.
Rek qosar save ost anna torga hlaki(?) anni oskikh.


Sheep’s wool is useful to ill foreigners.
Vafikh oqet(i (gen?)) davrae ifaki shikhaki. (I don't know which case to put on ifaki (or how to form it).)
Vafikh oqeti davrae ifakoa shikhaki.

Lekh Dothraki nroja.  :-\

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on April 29, 2011, 06:15:14 pm
Nice attempts. I'll give it some feedback with how I understand things but I can't guarantee that I'm right.


My 9 sheep are quiet tonight.
Qazat oqet anni chakae ajjalan.
We're not sure what the conjugation of verbs that end in a consonant is so the present tense of chakat might not be chakae. Based on the conjugation of lanat from the new Wired article it seems that the present tense of that verb is simply lana. From this my guess would be that the present tense of chakat would be chaka but that would be 3rd person singular so who knows what the 3rd person plural would be.


That spider bit me again under my glove yesterday.
Rek qosar save oste anha torga hlak anni oskikh.
The past tense of ostat is simply ost. The /-e/ is only added when the stem ends on a disallowed consonant like q, w or g or certain clusters. I'm also not sure whether there might be case changes after certain prepositions. That's something I've been meaning to ask David Peterson about. From some examples it seems that there is an odd case after some prepositions which has been a bit confusing.
 
Sheep’s wool is useful to ill foreigners.
Vafikh oqet(i (gen?)) davrae ifaki shikhaki. (I don't know which case to put on ifaki (or how to form it).)

Yes, it should be vafikh oqeti. The sheep are in possession of the wool. Ya, the case is a bit hard. I don't know the exact rules for when ablative and allative cases are used but they seem to be common so my guess is that "to ill foreigners" would actually be ablative. If ifak is animate (which is my guess since fonak=hunter is animate and has the same /-k/ formation) then the declension would be ifakoa I believe.
 
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on April 29, 2011, 08:24:53 pm

Zhey Ingsve

San athchomari yeraan save.

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on May 01, 2011, 12:04:10 pm

Re:

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me san athnrojari.

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me sekke nroja.

Questions:

  - Are they (both) grammatical?

  - What do they mean?

  - Is one more correct than the other?

  - Is there no word for 'but' yet?



Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on May 01, 2011, 12:18:01 pm

Anha tih meqosar ost allegre ma me drivo.
I saw the spider bite the duck and it died.

Hash me athjilar?

Which animal died?

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on May 01, 2011, 02:22:55 pm

Re:

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me san athnrojari.

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me sekke nroja.

Questions:

  - Are they (both) grammatical?

  - What do they mean?

  - Is one more correct than the other?

  - Is there no word for 'but' yet?

I would translate the sentences as:

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me san athnrojari.

I like dothraki and it much complexness. (Literally is would be "Language Dothraki pleases me and it heaps of complexness".)

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me sekke nroja.

I like dothraki and it is very complex.

I'm a little uncertain of how an adverb like sekke interacts with those built in copula words but I think this is correct. Is there another example of an adverb working on a verb yet?

At any rate I would say the second example is more correct. The second part of the first sentence is a bit strange.

No, there is no word for "but" as far as I can find.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on May 01, 2011, 02:36:16 pm

Anha tih meqosar ost allegre ma me drivo.
I saw the spider bite the duck and it died.

Hash me athjilar?

Which animal died?

Let's see. The literal translation would be: I saw that the spider bit the duck and it died. I guess that means the same thing as your translation.

As for who died that is a bit tricky. That even causes confusion in english doesn't it? Does the fact that we expect the target of a bite to die change the subject from the spider to the duck? If the sentence was "I saw the spider race against a duck and it won" I would think that the spider won. But if it was "I saw the policeman shoot the suspect and he died" I would assume it was the suspect that died. I think usually it is better to be less ambiguous in these types of sentences right?
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on May 01, 2011, 03:29:43 pm

Anha tih meqosar ost allegre ma me drivo.
I saw the spider bite the duck and it died.

Hash me athjilar?

Which animal died?

Let's see. The literal translation would be: I saw that the spider bit the duck and it died. I guess that means the same thing as your translation.

As for who died that is a bit tricky. That even causes confusion in english doesn't it? Does the fact that we expect the target of a bite to die change the subject from the spider to the duck? If the sentence was "I saw the spider race against a duck and it won" I would think that the spider won. But if it was "I saw the policeman shoot the suspect and he died" I would assume it was the suspect that died. I think usually it is better to be less ambiguous in these types of sentences right?

Yes. It is generally better to avoid this kind of ambiguity.

Is drivo correct for "died" in the past tense?

I also wonder if David is doing anything about ambiguity within the grammar. Some languages don't allow or do all they can to avoid this kind of ambiguity. English really doesn't care that much.



Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on May 01, 2011, 04:28:12 pm
Yes. It is generally better to avoid this kind of ambiguity.

Is drivo correct for "died" in the past tense?

I also wonder if David is doing anything about ambiguity within the grammar. Some languages don't allow or do all they can to avoid this kind of ambiguity. English really doesn't care that much.

Yes, I think drivo is the correct word.

As for ambiguity, I know that there are several words that need to be understood in context. Just take a word like me that means both he, she and it so you would need to be explicit if there is a chance there will be confusion.

On the other hand. Have you seen Davids writing guide for english? http://dedalvs.com/guide/index.php (http://dedalvs.com/guide/index.php)
He's very aware of the fact that english is full of strange things and I would guess based on that that he would perhaps want to avoid ambiguity in the languages he creates.

He has also proposed his own spelling reform for the english language. http://dedalvs.com/petersonian.html (http://dedalvs.com/petersonian.html)
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on May 01, 2011, 05:44:43 pm
Yes, I think drivo is the correct word.

Good to know.

As for ambiguity, I know that there are several words that need to be understood in context. Just take a word like me that means both he, she and it so you would need to be explicit if there is a chance there will be confusion.

On the other hand. Have you seen Davids writing guide for english? http://dedalvs.com/guide/index.php (http://dedalvs.com/guide/index.php)
He's very aware of the fact that english is full of strange things and I would guess based on that that he would perhaps want to avoid ambiguity in the languages he creates.

He has also proposed his own spelling reform for the english language. http://dedalvs.com/petersonian.html (http://dedalvs.com/petersonian.html)

I've seen LOTS of the things at his site, but never the things related to English.

Spelling reform is very interesting, but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime due to the fact that it would undermine English’s linguistic dominance in the technology age. Pronunciations have diverged so significantly in Singapore, India, etc. that without the "standardized" spellings a lot of the intelligibility across geographic boundaries would evaporate.

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Finger on May 23, 2011, 12:14:30 pm

Re:

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me san athnrojari.

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me sekke nroja.

Questions:

  - Are they (both) grammatical?

  - What do they mean?

  - Is one more correct than the other?

  - Is there no word for 'but' yet?

If you take a look here you will see there is in fact a word for BUT: http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Vocabulary#References (http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Vocabulary#References)

vosma conj. but

Actually I don't know for sure if it is much recently, but I am kinda learning all the stuff from that wiki.
(Hope that helps u)  :)
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on May 23, 2011, 01:07:11 pm

Re:

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me san athnrojari.

Lekh Dothraki allayafa anna ma me sekke nroja.

Questions:

  - Are they (both) grammatical?

  - What do they mean?

  - Is one more correct than the other?

  - Is there no word for 'but' yet?

If you take a look here you will see there is in fact a word for BUT: http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Vocabulary#References (http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Vocabulary#References)

vosma conj. but

Actually I don't know for sure if it is much recently, but I am kinda learning all the stuff from that wiki.
(Hope that helps u)  :)

Ya, that was added after these posts. I try to update the wiki continuously when we learn new words.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on May 23, 2011, 07:05:34 pm

If you take a look here you will see there is in fact a word for BUT: http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Vocabulary#References (http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Vocabulary#References)

vosma conj. but

Actually I don't know for sure if it is much recently, but I am kinda learning all the stuff from that wiki.
(Hope that helps u)  :)

Interesting. A literal mashup of "NOT+AND". I'm not sure I've ever encountered that before.  :)

It's very very helpful and I really appreciate your kind assistance and intention to be helpful!!

I need to go read through the dictionary again now that it's current.

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on May 28, 2011, 06:02:09 pm
Graddakh! Zhey chiftik! Hash yer vifoneri, hash torga anni vos nira!
Chakas, zhey ifak! Anha addriv mawizzi.
Mawizzi! Yer vos davrae anhaan. Kishi agarvoki silokh.
Vosecchi. Anha addriv mawizzi vezhveni. Hash yer emi anhaan?
Mawizzi vezhveni? Anha sekke emak yeraan!


I had ingsve already offer some constructive critisism, so this is better than what I could come up with. There are still many dubious thingies. This is, after all, an attempt thread, not success thread.

It should roughly translate as:
Bloody hell! You little s**t! While you roam the land hunting, my stomach goes empty.
Shut up, bastard! I killed a rabbit.
A Rabbit! You are useless. Tomorrow we'll be hungry.
Nuh-huh. I killed some honking big rabbits. Do you like me now?
Big rabbits! I like you greatly!

...and the joke of course is (or was meant to be) that the way the word rabbit was introduced, it did not tell us if there was just one or many lovely bunnies brutally slaughtered. With the adjective vezhveni the speaker did not just reveal that the rabbits were big, but also that there were multiple.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on May 28, 2011, 06:48:28 pm

I'm very impressed and I really like your use of emat for "like".  :)

Is that canonical?

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on May 28, 2011, 10:24:23 pm
Well, emat means "to smile (at?)" and "to approve" and by the way it is expressed, giving is implied. Though actual cultural connotations may wary, the expression has a warmer feel than english "to approve". Within the context of my text I felt "like" wasn' t too far fetched translation. I took some liberties, yes.
Hash yer emi anhaan? is, I think, if we go for a strict translation, Do you approve of me?.
If the sentence were Hash yer vemi anhaan? I guess even the more concrete translation scheme Will you smile at me? might work.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on May 28, 2011, 11:49:28 pm

I'm very impressed and I really like your use of emat for "like".  :)

Is that canonical?

Have you looked at David Petersons talk from the language creation conference. It's one of the uses of the verb class constructions that makes it have that meaning.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Izzi on May 30, 2011, 05:06:56 pm
Oh boy... here it goes. Attempt #1

Anha zalak nesak kifinosi astak "my name is Izzi" she lekh Dothraki.

It's supposed to mean: I want to know how to say "my name is Izzi" in Dothraki. Actually, that would be attempt #2. The first thing I tried to write was "my name is Izzi" but only got "anni hake(es?) Izzi" and I'm really not sure if that sounds right or not lol. What is the word for the verb "to be" in Dothraki?
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on May 30, 2011, 05:22:14 pm
What is the word for the verb "to be" in Dothraki?

There isn't one...   :-\

But that's a FEATURE, not a BUG.  ;)

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Izzi on May 30, 2011, 05:32:52 pm
What is the word for the verb "to be" in Dothraki?

There isn't one...   :-\

But that's a FEATURE, not a BUG.  ;)



Well that's going to make translating Shakespeare (to be or not to be?) in Dothraki a bit difficult. Lol. Holy brain twister!
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on May 30, 2011, 06:04:07 pm
In Japanese it's:

  生きるか死ぬか、それは問題です。
  ikiru ka shinu ka, sore wa mondai desu.
  live   ?  die      ?,  that-TOP question is.

Japanese has "to be" but they translate the actual meaning of the poetry as opposed to the actual words.  ;)

I'm pretty sure that Dothraki has LOTS of tasty words regarding living and dying.  8)
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on May 30, 2011, 07:14:36 pm
Well that's going to make translating Shakespeare (to be or not to be?) in Dothraki a bit difficult. Lol. Holy brain twister!

My guess would be:

Vekhat che vos vekhat... which would roughly translate as:

"to exist or to not exist..." or "to be present or to not be present"

As for general rules to express "to be":

First of all when you place two words next to each other like "man warrior" it translates as "The man is a warror". Think of it roughly as "Me Tarzan, you Jane". Then there are verbs that express the meaning of being in the verb itself. Nrojat means "to be thick", nemat means "to be empty", diwelat means "to be small" etc.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on May 30, 2011, 07:40:12 pm
Oh boy... here it goes. Attempt #1

Anha zalak nesak kifinosi astak "my name is Izzi" she lekh Dothraki.

It's supposed to mean: I want to know how to say "my name is Izzi" in Dothraki. Actually, that would be attempt #2. The first thing I tried to write was "my name is Izzi" but only got "anni hake(es?) Izzi" and I'm really not sure if that sounds right or not lol. What is the word for the verb "to be" in Dothraki?

When you say "I want to know how to say..." you don't need to conjugate know and say. They will be in the infinitive form in Dothraki just like they are in english (to know/to say). Also the preposition ki is used ahead of quoted speech.

I think the sentence should be something like this:

Anha zalak nesat kifinosi astat ki "My name is Izzi" she lekh Dothraki.

So you were pretty close.

To say my name is Izzi you say: Hake anni Izzi. (Literally: "Name of mine is Izzi")

The possessor (anni) always comes after the thing that is possessed (name).
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Izzi on May 31, 2011, 07:42:34 am
Thank you very much Ingsve! I've never been very good with grammar (I can understand the rules individually, their usefulness and all, but putting it all together in my brain... gah! I'm the type of person you can drop in a foreign country and expect to pick back up later and I'd be able to speak the language without knowing too much of the grammar. That's how I learned Italian. I also learned English trough immersion, away from home where we speak French) and really do appreciate the clarifications you provided.


My guess would be:

Vekhat che vos vekhat... which would roughly translate as:

"to exist or to not exist..." or "to be present or to not be present"

As for general rules to express "to be":

First of all when you place two words next to each other like "man warrior" it translates as "The man is a warror". Think of it roughly as "Me Tarzan, you Jane". Then there are verbs that express the meaning of being in the verb itself. Nrojat means "to be thick", nemat means "to be empty", diwelat means "to be small" etc.


I was looking at the verb "to be present" and wondered if it could be used in that context. Man I love learning new languages. Just for gaining a new perspective on things and people and really make you think about what you're trying to say and the right way to say it.  ;D

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Izzi on June 05, 2011, 10:15:52 am
Sek! Anha char qisi yer.
Shafka lajakes vezhven.
Yes! I have heard about you.
You (are a) great warrior.

Me vos zhavvors.
Vorsa vos addriva zhavvors.
He no dragon.
Fire (does) not kill dragon. (I have a feeling something is missing here. I wonder if we'll be given a word for the verb "to do".

Feedback is appreciated. :)
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Verak on June 05, 2011, 10:33:03 am
Sek! Anha char qisi yer.
Shafka lajakes vezhven.
Yes! I have heard about you.
You (are a) great warrior.

Me vos zhavvors.
Vorsa vos addriva zhavvors.
He no dragon.
Fire (does) not kill dragon. (I have a feeling something is missing here. I wonder if we'll be given a word for the verb "to do".

Feedback is appreciated. :)

Is the rs of zhavvors allowed as a coda? Wouldn't it have to be zhavvorse?

I haven't taken the time to learn all the phonology rules yet. Where are they, by the way?

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Izzi on June 05, 2011, 10:50:06 am
Quote
Is the rs of zhavvors allowed as a coda? Wouldn't it have to be zhavvorse?

I haven't taken the time to learn all the phonology rules yet. Where are they, by the way?

Yeah, I'm not too sure. I was looking at the epenthesis page http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Epenthesis (http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Epenthesis) and how to form an accusative nouns for inanimate nouns http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Noun_Cases (http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Noun_Cases)
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on June 05, 2011, 11:51:27 am
Sek! Anha char qisi yer.
Shafka lajakes vezhven.
Yes! I have heard about you.
You (are a) great warrior.
A couple things here. First of all to hear about someone is said using the "topic verb class". http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Verb_Classes (http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Verb_Classes) . This is formed by putting the object in the genitive case instead of the accusative. So the sentence should be:

Sek! Anha char yeri.

I think David said that using verb classes to express something comes higher on the priority list than using a preposition. I'll have to look that up from his talk.

Secondly. When you express that something is something you don't use the accusative. The formula is that X-NOM Y-NOM means that X is Y. What this means is that you simply have both words in the nominative next to each other and that is what expresses "is". So the sentence should be:

Shafka lajak vezhven.

Me vos zhavvors.
Vorsa vos addriva zhavvors.
He no dragon.
Fire (does) not kill dragon. (I have a feeling something is missing here. I wonder if we'll be given a word for the verb "to do".

Feedback is appreciated. :)

Same thing here. In the first sentence you don't put zhavvors in accusative so it should be:

Me vos zhavvorsa.

I think the second sentence is almost correct. It's more common to express negatives in English with "to do" but Dothraki just uses vos. What you got wrong is that addriva should be addrivo since it's a negative sentence. So (I think) it should be:

Vorsa vos addrivo zhavvors.

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on June 05, 2011, 11:56:18 am
Sek! Anha char qisi yer.
Shafka lajakes vezhven.
Yes! I have heard about you.
You (are a) great warrior.

Me vos zhavvors.
Vorsa vos addriva zhavvors.
He no dragon.
Fire (does) not kill dragon. (I have a feeling something is missing here. I wonder if we'll be given a word for the verb "to do".

Feedback is appreciated. :)

Is the rs of zhavvors allowed as a coda? Wouldn't it have to be zhavvorse?

I haven't taken the time to learn all the phonology rules yet. Where are they, by the way?

Yes, it seems like /-rs/ is an allowed ending.

David wrote this on the Dothraki FB-page:

Vorsa laz addrivo vosecchi zhavvors! Viseris vos zhavvorsa. Fire could never kill a dragon. Viserys is not a dragon.

As for phonological rules, we don't know everything yet I think. There are the things on the epenthesis page and then there is the vowelsound change after q but other than that I don't think we have anything.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on June 09, 2011, 11:53:30 am
Izzi ast ki:
Quote
Anha zalak nesak kifinosi astak "my name is Izzi" she lekh Dothraki.
A challenge! In how many ways that might be both idiomatic and grammatically correct can you express the idea of "My name is X."

Hake anni Qvaak. / Qvaak hake anni.
My name is Qvaak. / Qvaak is my name.
I guess the former of these two is more probable, but the latter doesn't seem particulary wrong either.

Anha Qvaak. / Qvaak Anha.
I'm Qvaak. / Qvaak is me.
The Tarzan way is not a bad way, but now the latter variation might seem a bit too existential.

Anha nem hake ma Qvaak.
I'm named Qvaak.*
Hakelat + ma -> NOM? is stolen from Dany's speech.

Astos anni ki Qvaak.
Speak of me by saying Qvaak.
a bit more creative solution, just to try the boundaries of quote-introducing ki

*Sidenote: Even with ray serving as a way to introduce a perfect, I can't help but wonder, if dothraki imperfects should sometimes be translated into perfect or even present in english. I have an ill-informed inkling that in general different languages use tenses rather differently (english and modern finnish use them rather similarily, so this must be based in some vague hearsay).
Maybe Peterson has already said something clarifying on the matter? From what I read, the regular past tense is commonly used - story telling seems to be consistently in imperfect. [Should the tense even be called imperfect, or is it better called just past tense ('general past tense')? Verb conjugation page never mentions imperfect. I'm not sure if Peterson ever does either.]
Man, I'm good at vague doubts.



Ingsve ast ki:
Quote
I think David said that using verb classes to express something comes higher on the priority list than using a preposition. I'll have to look that up from his talk.
LCC4 paper has that tidbit:
Quote
Hierarchy: Canonical case role >> noncanonical case role >> object of preposition >> subordinate clause.
Use a subordinate clause only if nothing else really works; use a preposition only if the case system falls short. I'm not entirely sure about canonical/noncanonical distinction.



..Aaand some further comments on my past writing attempt:
Quote
Graddakh! Zhey chiftik! Hash yer vifoneri, hash torga anni vos nira!
Chakas, zhey ifak! Anha addriv mawizzi.
Mawizzi! Yer vos davrae anhaan. Kishi agarvoki silokh.
Vosecchi. Anha addriv mawizzi vezhveni. Hash yer emi anhaan?
Mawizzi vezhveni? Anha sekke emak yeraan!
We know now it should be vo(s) niro and vo(s) davrao.

I don't think we know, if there are verbs that can't be used without object. To my knowledge nirat might easily be a verb for being full of something, and to be just generally full would need something else, a different derivation maybe.

I should have (but failed to) put a couple of mawizzi into accusative: Anha addriv mawizze (or is it mawiz? Don't we know all the irregular nouns we know?). I think I copied from "Ogi loy mawizzi.". Dunno if that's just a mistake. More likely loy or ogat assigns - or can assign - a genitive.

I wonder how tightly dothraki hold on to their subject pronouns. When the verb suffix reveals the subject, finns often drop the pronoun away. The text might be more natural and fluid as:

Graddakh! Zhey chiftik! Hash yer vifoneri, hash torga anni vos niro!
Chakas, zhey ifak! Anha addriv mawizze.
Mawizzi! Yer vo davrao anhaan. Agarvoki silokh.
Vosecchi. Anha addriv mawizze vezhveni. Hash yer emi anhaan?
Mawizzi vezhveni? Sekke emak yeraan!
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on June 09, 2011, 12:37:41 pm
Regarding canonical case role vs non canonical: I take that to mean the cases as typically defined vs the role they have with verb cases. So something should be expressed using accusative, genitive, ablative or allative if possible before you try to find a verb case formation instead.

Regarding verbs that can't be used without an object: I'm not sure exactly what you mean but we do have a slight distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs. For example samvolat is used when something simply breaks (Arakh samvo). But when someone is doing the breaking you instead use assamvat which is the transitive version of the same verb and I would guess that assamvat can't be used without an object.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ValekLost on June 13, 2011, 11:30:00 am
First attempt to translate something starting from zero.
I try also, with this couple of sentences to clarify some doubt I've.

Version 1 - simple negation

This is the blood of my blood and for this (reason) it's Dothraki blood.
The Lands of Andals won't drinkt it.  

Jin qoy qoyi, majin Dothraki qoyi.
Rhaeshi (plur) Andahli oindeo/ondeo (see below) mae.


Version 2 - Emphatic negation

This is the blood of my blood and for this (reason) it's Dothraki blood.
The Lands of Andals will never drink it.  

Jin qoy qoyi, majin Dothraki qoyi.
Rhaeshi (plur) Andahli, oindeo/ondeo (see below) vosecchi mae.




Doubt:

to drink > indelat
present: inde- ...? the form for presente is -e ..so it become "indee"? "inde"? Or is there some epenthesis I missed?
future negative: I was wondering about "oindeo" but I found in a part of script "vos ondeo" (present negative of "ondelat" - to wear)...so..can I assume that the future negative of indelat and the present negative of ondelat could match in the written form and so it is "ondeo" and not "oindeo" for help the pronunciation?

Sorry in case I've done some basic mistakes or I've written some non-sense, but I slept only 2-3 hours and my mind it's not so present <,<
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on June 13, 2011, 12:26:48 pm
First attempt to translate something starting from zero.
I try also, with this couple of sentences to clarify some doubt I've.

Version 1 - simple negation

This is the blood of my blood and for this (reason) it's Dothraki blood.
The Lands of Andals won't drinkt it.  

Jin qoy qoyi, majin Dothraki qoyi.
Rhaeshi (plur) Andahli oindeo/ondeo (see below) mae.


First of all, "blood of my blood" is an epithet that refers to a person that has that specific title. You are using the phrase to refer specifically to blood which makes it a bit strange. The final part is also a bit mixed up. First of all in this situation your main word is blood. Dothraki is just used as an adjective here (or something like that) so it should come after the word blood. You are also missing the word "it". I think what you are trying to write is something like:

Jin qoy qoyi anni, majin me qoy Dothraki. Which would be something like "This is blood of my blood, consequently it is blood of the Dothraki."

Here I spelled out "blood of my blood" completely to set it apart from the epithet which is a shortened version of what I wrote.


Version 2 - Emphatic negation

This is the blood of my blood and for this (reason) it's Dothraki blood.
The Lands of Andals will never drink it.  

Jin qoy qoyi, majin Dothraki qoyi.
Rhaeshi (plur) Andahli, oindeo/ondeo (see below) vosecchi mae.

Doubt:

to drink > indelat
present: inde- ...? the form for presente is -e ..so it become "indee"? "inde"? Or is there some epenthesis I missed?
future negative: I was wondering about "oindeo" but I found in a part of script "vos ondeo" (present negative of "ondelat" - to wear)...so..can I assume that the future negative of indelat and the present negative of ondelat could match in the written form and so it is "ondeo" and not "oindeo" for help the pronunciation?

Sorry in case I've done some basic mistakes or I've written some non-sense, but I slept only 2-3 hours and my mind it's not so present <,<

Yes, the present tense of indelat is indee. It is pronounced with two separate e-sounds after each other (in-de-e).

The future tense of verbs that begin with a vowel is to add a /v-/. So third person future would be vindee and the negative of that would be vindeo.

As for your sentences. They are almost correct apart from the conjugation of indelat.

So it should be (I think)

Rhaeshi Andahli vindeo vosecchi mae.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ValekLost on June 14, 2011, 03:04:08 am

So, firstly thank you for help and corrections :P

For "qoy qoyi" I've totally forgotten about the "title", and I took it as a general idiom.  :P
So, "qoy qoyi" is only for the title, while if it means "son/daughter" it needs also the genitive pronoun.

Ok.

Next..I've a doubt about the future tense, negative.
In the wiki, there is:
Quote
In the negative grade the future tense is changed from /a-/ to /o-/. So the sentence "I will not ride" would be Anha vos odothrok.


So that's is ONLY for verbs that starts with a consonant, like it's writen.
I don't know why, but I've extendend the rule also for those which starts with a vowel. ???
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on June 14, 2011, 03:28:41 am

So, firstly thank you for help and corrections :P

For "qoy qoyi" I've totally forgotten about the "title", and I took it as a general idiom.  :P
So, "qoy qoyi" is only for the title, while if it means "son/daughter" it needs also the genitive pronoun.

Ok.

I'm not sure if the Dothraki would even use a term like that to refer to a son or daughter. It's pretty much used for expressing the special relationship between a Khal and his bloodriders. Sort of like a blood oath.

Next..I've a doubt about the future tense, negative.
In the wiki, there is:
Quote
In the negative grade the future tense is changed from /a-/ to /o-/. So the sentence "I will not ride" would be Anha vos odothrok.


So that's is ONLY for verbs that starts with a consonant, like it's writen.
I don't know why, but I've extendend the rule also for those which starts with a vowel. ???

Well, this is because the verbs agree with negation rather that being marked by it. Agreement is a weaker form of connection than marking so this means that you won't always see on the verb that there is a negation. You have the same thing with the verb conjugations that end in an /-i/, that they are the same for positive and negative.

Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on June 14, 2011, 03:33:46 am
Quote
I'm not sure if the Dothraki would even use a term like that to refer to a son or daughter. It's pretty much used for expressing the special relationship between a Khal and his bloodriders. Sort of like a blood oath.

Ya. I think 'blood brother' would be quite close approximation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_brother (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_brother)
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ValekLost on June 14, 2011, 08:30:35 pm
Quote
I'm not sure if the Dothraki would even use a term like that to refer to a son or daughter.

I'm not sure too, though I was using it in a more literal way than the "blood of my blood" that we usually use in our world, like "I've my blood and then my son/daughter has my blood too" in the simplest way.
Btw, maybe it's more correct to use rizh and nothing more, but I don't know if there is a female corrispective.


Today (06/15) there is a total ecplise of moon, visibile from Europe and also Italy.
I was wondering if there is a way to say it in Dothraki  ;D
It would be nice to nerding around.

I try with:
shekhqoyi > total ecplise of sun > jalanqoyi > total ecplise of moon (?) they're a similar phenomena and sometimes the moon, during the eclipse phases has a bloodish-reddish colour <,<

So..

"Today there will be a total eclipse of moon"
could be
Asshekh avekha jalankqoyi?

I took "vekha" from
Quote
-Drogo: Nevakhi vekha ha maan. There is a place for you.

somthing like "it's present .." given that the dictionnary says: -vekhat - to be present.
But I'm not so sure neither about "vekha", nor about "avekha" as tense to use in this context. Better the present tense?
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on June 15, 2011, 02:06:01 am
Quote
I'm not sure if the Dothraki would even use a term like that to refer to a son or daughter.

I'm not sure too, though I was using it in a more literal way than the "blood of my blood" that we usually use in our world, like "I've my blood and then my son/daughter has my blood too" in the simplest way.
Btw, maybe it's more correct to use rizh and nothing more, but I don't know if there is a female corrispective.


Today (06/15) there is a total ecplise of moon, visibile from Europe and also Italy.
I was wondering if there is a way to say it in Dothraki  ;D
It would be nice to nerding around.

I try with:
shekhqoyi > total ecplise of sun > jalanqoyi > total ecplise of moon (?) they're a similar phenomena and sometimes the moon, during the eclipse phases has a bloodish-reddish colour <,<

So..

"Today there will be a total eclipse of moon"
could be
Asshekh avekha jalankqoyi?

I took "vekha" from
Quote
-Drogo: Nevakhi vekha ha maan. There is a place for you.

somthing like "it's present .." given that the dictionnary says: -vekhat - to be present.
But I'm not so sure neither about "vekha", nor about "avekha" as tense to use in this context. Better the present tense?

Well, that might be possible. We would have to confirm it with David Peterson though [Edit: David confirms that it is jalanqoyi.]. We already have jalan qoyi which means moon of blood which is their word for a harvest moon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_moon. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_moon.) But perhaps when you form it as a compound word it can have a different meaning.

As for your sentence then that sort of works I think. But perhaps it needs a word order change. Vekhat means "to be present" or can also work as "to exist". I think I would write it as:

Jalanqoyi avekha asshekh. "A total eclipse of the moon will exist today."
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ValekLost on June 15, 2011, 04:05:24 am
Yep!
It sounds also better.
Thank you as always :D
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Ruben on June 18, 2011, 05:11:09 am
Ok, i'm a complete newbie to this, so please bear with me. I'm trying real hard to learn the grammar, but my brain is starting to hurt.

I want to write something for my girlfriend, and so far i've come up with this:

Anni khaleesi lain, anni erin chiori.

Which should be something like "My beautiful queen, my kind woman".

It's probably a very literal translation, but i did try to read up on the grammar, but was lost in translation right away.

Can you please help me? Before i lose my mind, lol.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on June 18, 2011, 04:37:36 pm
Quote
Can you please help me? Before i lose my mind, lol.

With pleasure. Trying to puzzle out other's attempts is nearly as good training as creating one's own attempts. Ingsve will probably tell you anyway, what I corrected wrong :)

Adjectives follow nouns and possessives follow them, so the word order would be somewhat different for both parts.

There are two words for beautiful, lain and zheana. The former is reserved for inanimate nouns (to highligh the difference, you might think of it as "aesthetic" rather than "beautiful", I think) and the latter for animate. Generally inanimate nouns are for stuff like a shovel or a cupboard. Humans are usually described by animate nouns, and khaleesi is indeed quite assuredly an animate noun.

A long sidenote:
However, I can't fault you, if you really did some research and thought otherwise. We have marked khaleesi just a noun (I'm adding the animate mark now). Animacy of many nouns has not been certain, and we know there are lots of exeptions to the general rule that living running things in general and humans in particular are denoted to with animate nouns. We learn more and more, but updates are often dragging slightly behind (this is not very big community and everything that is done must be done by someone).

We have some rules for determining animacy: http://forum.dothraki.org/index.php/topic,72.0/topicseen.html (http://forum.dothraki.org/index.php/topic,72.0/topicseen.html). I'm not entirely sure, how well they'll work in practice, but as they're from Peterson, they should be essentially correct.

Two of the rules actually suggest khaleesi might be an inanimate noun. 1) Diminutives are supposed to be inanimate and marked by /-i/. Unfortunately dothraki use /-i/ for myriad different things. It seems some nouns end with 'i' just to follow the trend. 2) Khaleesi has a background of compound noun. Peterson has said it is derived from khal+yesi. Compounds seem to be consistently inanimate, but this isn't really a dothraki-modern compound, just has an etymology of one, so this is not a strong clue.

Of course you can often determine animacy based on how the word declines and how other words around it function:
Lekhi ha khaleesisaan? <- HA! Animate noun, because inanimate allative would be khaleesaan.
Zhey chiori zheana! <- HA! Use of zheana means chiori is an animate noun.
...ast chiori fini zirisse oggoes dorvoon... uhh. I think "fini" should be for inanimate nouns and "fin" for animate. But hey, my understanding is still rather limited.


Back to the topic:

I think
Khaleesi zheana anni, chiori erin anni.
would be pretty much what you were looking for.

Nearly all words inflect in dothraki, so usually you would not get them right by just picking them from dictionary. These are all in dictionary form, so if you didn't check further, you were lucky or chose a cleverly easy text for a first try.

Nouns inflect, but mostly as plurals and objects. Here the dictionary form, nominative, is just right. Adjectives inflect, but to my knowledge just for plurals, so they are right too. Pronomines are actually inflected as they should be (anni instead of nominative anha), but you'll find some person pronouns redily inflected on the dictionary. Had you wanted to say eg. "Khal's beautiful khaleesi..." knowing, how to decline khal would have been paramount:
Khaleesi zheana khali, chiori erin khali.

Of course it kinda helped, that the text wasn't yet a full sentence. But then again, remove the comma and you have a full sentence:
Khaleesi zheana anni chiori erin anni. "My beautiful khaleesi is my kind woman."
This is of course the special dothraki zero copula sentence, X-NOM Y-NOM - "X is Y" (Lets call it just "NOM NOM"?). I think the existence of this structure might push the meaning of your sentence ever so slightly off. Because of the confusing similarity the dothraki might not recognize your structure of concurrent arguments. They might just ignore the comma and go with a fact statement. The distinction isn't big, but nevertheless it exists... dunno. For example should you address your girlfriend by
Zhey khaleesi zheana anni, chiori erin anni.
Or should you try something like
Zhey khaleesi zheana anni, zhey chiori erin anni.

...?
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on June 18, 2011, 07:13:41 pm
I have nothing to really add. Qvaaks fix is correct as far as I can see. As for the use of zhey at the end, that's unclear to me as well.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ValekLost on June 19, 2011, 12:45:35 am

Hi Ruben!
Don't worry. Here we are all learners, and neither we run to win the title of "the best", nor this forum it's a class and everyone who make a mistake, gain a bad mark and a lot of homework to do at home :P
Trying and compare ourselves with others, I think is the best way both to understand and learn :D



I was wondering about the use of "zhey", just a couple of days ago, while listening to the dialogues in the episodes.
And it's not cleart to me too.

In ep 9 for exemple, Qotho speaks often to Daenerys, but "zhey" is rarely said (or at least, I think it is so. Maybe I didn't understand well).
On the other hand, he says it to Mirri Maz Duur when they're inside the tent. "yer jin, zhey maegi" (You did this, witch.)

I thought it could be a sort of "insult" to Dany because of she's a stranger, or something linked to this, but "zhey" is simply related to the vocative, it's not a sort of courtesy form, also because I don't think he would have said "zhey" to the maegi and not to his queen :P

So, I still not understand how "zhey" works :(
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Ruben on June 19, 2011, 04:46:31 am
Qvaak, thanks so much. It made much sense to me, and the sentence looks really good. I'll read more on how to put the words in order. English is not my native language, so learning a third language through a second language is quite a challenge, but eventually i'm sure i'll get the hang of it.
But thank you very much anyway, it was really helpful :)

Heh, thanks for understanding ValekLost, i have asked newbie questions before in other forums, where one would just be shot down for being, well, a newbie, so it's a really warm feeling to be welcomed as much as i have already, and been taken seriously as well.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ValekLost on June 19, 2011, 05:21:29 am
English is not my native language, so learning a third language through a second language is quite a challenge, but eventually i'm sure i'll get the hang of it.

I'm in the same situation, and not only me :D
It's quite a challenge but..nothing's impossibile!  8)

Quote
Heh, thanks for understanding ValekLost, i have asked newbie questions before in other forums, where one would just be shot down for being, well, a newbie, so it's a really warm feeling to be welcomed as much as i have already, and been taken seriously as well.

I believe this is the best way to discourage a community to grow.
Everyone has learned, no one is born with the knowledge. So..why shot down who's trying to learn like they have done before?  :o

I think I can say we're not that kind of community, so, feel free to try and to make mistakes ;P
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Ruben on June 19, 2011, 06:21:23 am
I hear ya, i'll keep lurking and learning. Then maybe one day i'll be able to assist a person newer to this than me.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on July 21, 2011, 01:58:51 am
Once again I offer attempts to be crushed under your sharp eyes. This time I found myself wondering, how would you say all the basest simple and general life saving things in dothraki. I found no useful list on the net in ten seconds, so I made my own 10 item list of things you'd better know how to say on any relevant language in primitive surroundings. These aren't dothraki culture specific. Dothraki despise both foreigners and weakness, so many might actually be rather hasardous to be uttered before a group of dothraki warriors. Then again, the situations may vary. You might encounter women or slaves, you might even find that even though the people you met aren't dothraki, the only language you share is theirs.
More than anything this was a stress test on our (my) limited vocabulary and fragmentary grammar. The sentences are certainly abound with errors - and full of unnatural structures even when tecnically right. You should never try to learn correct dothraki from sentences created by your peers, but maybe proving me wrong and doing better by yourself might be a good excercise.

1.) Please do not kill me!
Vos addrivos anna, zhey chomak!
 ~ Don't kill me, sir!

2.) I come in peace.
Anha jadak ma athchomaroon ei atthiraraan.
 ~ I come with respect towards all life.

3.) Please help me!
Zhey vichomerak, erinas anhaan!
 ~ Sir, show me kindness!

4.) I am very thirsty. Can you give me some water?
Anha sekke fevek. Hash shafka laz azhi loy eveth?
 ~ I'm very thirsty. Can You give me some water?

5.) I am very hungry. Can you give me some food?
Anha sekke garvok. Hash shafka laz azhi loy hadaen?
 ~ I'm very hungry. Can You give me some food?

6.) I don't undersand what you're saying.
Anha vos charok astikh shafki.
 ~ I don't understand the things You are saying.

7.) I am a foreigner. I understand only very little dothraki.
Anha ifak, majin kash anha charak lekhes dothraki, kash anha charok loy as disse.
 ~ I'm a foreigner, and thus when I hear dothraki, I understand only some words.

8.) Do you speak westerosi?
Hash shafka shili lekhes andahli?
 ~ Are you familiar with the language of andals?

9.) I'm travelling to Westeros, but I'm lost. Can you show me the way?
Anha verak Rhaeshaan Andahli, vosma vos nesok os rekaan. Hash shafka vidrie anna?
 ~ I travel to the land of andals, but don't know the way there. Will you guide me?

10.) I want to have sex with you.
Anha zalak sajat yeraan.
Anha zalak m'anha nem asajak ki yeri.

 ~ I want to mount you.
   I wish that you would mount me.

laughably long and meandering comments:
1.) Simple Vos addrivos anna! might well be the safest choice, but I think a bit of coating with respect is probably just appropriate. Depends on situation. I use the informal imperative. I have a feeling the meaning reaches easily from commanding to simply asking. That's the way it seems to usually work in languages I've met. If it retains the air of command (like the formal imperative very likely would), couple of the sentences are already severely off on that account.

2.) I don't think we've yet met a word for 'peace'. Dothraki might not even have a word for overall state of peace, though I'm sure they have many words around the concept. Athchomar athiraraan is based on the idiom Athchomar chomakaan. Sure, the stucture might not be generalizable. Or maybe I should have done something with the ei.

3.) No 'help' known either. Kindness was best I could come up with. Even more, I use almost certainly intransitive verb with an object (in allative). It seems some intransitive verbs can have non-standard uses with objects in specific cases. We don't know that this verb would, but repicient class would fit it so nicely, I decided to roll with it. I still try to accomodate "please" with "o respectful one". Dunno. It just seems appropriate.

4.-5.) These might have no major problems, I think. Somehow I'm a bit doubtful about garvolat and fevelat. Do I use them right? Are they even analogous to each other in their use? Garvolat seems /-o-/ kind of verb while fevelat seems just to happen to end it's stem with e. How about hadaen? A strange word I don't think I've ever seen in use. Even eveth might turn out to be animate and thus wrongly declined. And how about loy? Can you use it with uncountables like water?

6.) Why not just Anha vos charok as shafki, why try to create a possible word that might have just slightly more fitting meaning? Hell if I know.
I think I'm beginning to understand the meaning of /-o-/. It seems to be used to rise the activity level of the verb. I think Peterson said as much, but it took some time and comparative analysis before I think I really get the gist of the situation. With stative verbs the change seems to be pretty staightforward: statives tell you that something is in a static state. The /-o-/ version tells that the thing reaches the state in question. "The fabric is ripped" becomes "the fabric becomes ripped" (or better: "the fabric rips"); "I know that" [Yeah. Not all statives are of the type "to be"; not all of them are intransitive either] becomes "I'm learning that" (or more literal: "I learn that"). Some words aren't stative, but nevertheless passive actions, so the subject can still take more active role in the action: "I hear you" becomes "I understand you". Even with kemat, the main action is between the main and the secondary object, so to my thinking kemolat has more actively participating subject. There are couple of dubious cases, but none I can see that really challenges the theory.
Now let me sidetrack myself into a rant: Natural languages aren't nice and logical. They are dodgy and stupid. That's wonderful. English is full of homonyms, homographs and homophones and nearly every common suffix is the same /-s/, sometimes written with apostrophe, but pronounced quite the same. Finnish has at first glance less homonyms, but the same stem can have hundreds - techically even thousands - of inflections, so words starting very different can end up homonyms when inflected. This is much less a problem than any sane universe would allow. The homonyms have radically different meanings and cases/conjugations are usually different too, so the context and syntax tell us quite clearly, what the sentence should mean. People creating puns have a field day, but that's just a bonus. So when every third suffix in dothraki is /-i/ and words still also often end in i, I just chuckle and go "So true to life! Sooo true!". But then there are word pairs like charolat and charat and the line seems to be crossed. Both of these seem like transitive verbs, so syntax shouldn't be a big help; the difference in meaning between them is slight but relevant, just so that it should be hard to tell from context, which word was used... And when you conjugate them, they become the same: Vos charok! I dont understand! And this doesn't seem to be a singulary event, but quite regular result of dothraki derivational morphology. It's hard to believe this kind of difference would just be lost, but where I'm I going wrong? Should I just try believing harder?

7.) This was another hard one to translate to the limited vocabulary. I just couldn't find any words that would mean anything like "small amount" or "little". Even if I could create some passable adjective through negative comparison, I'd still need to find a noun to attach it to. Pretty much everything seemed highly speculative or super clumsy.
Well, even with all the complaining in the last paragraph and all the clumsiness of the structure, I quite like the juxtaposition between charak and charok here. You may also notice that this time I was content with as instead of astikh. Still no real reason.

8.) Peterson has said, I hear, that dothraki prefer shilat instead of nesat when speaking about knowing a language. Makes sense to me, actually. Nesat seems to be rather narrowly defined word for knowing information, and if you don't speak about encyclopedic knowledge about the use, history etc. of a language, then you wouldn't use that. Shilat seems to be pretty close to "to be familiar with". Languages are not usually intellectually known, you just can kinda magically speak them: if you know it well, you don't knowingly weave the syntax together, attach suffixes, translate words... To dothraki this should be even more so. The most advanced teaching process for foreign languages is probably "X is said Y, repeat Y." You repeat and repeat and then just know.. and there knowing is more of a familiarity or ability than intellectual knowledge.
Engish "to know" has a very wide scope. I like to, again, compare to finnish. I think we use mainly three words on the area of english knowing: tietää (to have knowledge of), tuntea (to be familiar with) and osata (to know how to). For knowing a language I'd use "osata" rather than "tuntea", but almost certainly not "tietää" (though I'd prefer a structure with "to speak", as I did in the original english line. That just seemed to open too many other problems). Finnish is again at least somewhat in sync with dothraki. Nice.

9.) This was actually relatively easy to approximate, I think. I don't think we have seem a word rekaan (or even rekoon), but that is probably one of my most conservative made up words. I'll be a bit surprised, if there is no such word or if it would not fit at least approximately in the context.

10.) Oh yes. Sex. Just had to throw that in the list. Primitive needs and all. But of course even in a racy series like GoT good words for such important activity are scarce. I went with sajat+allative. Vezh fin saja rhaesheseres uses sajat with accusative, but I'm not even sure if that is meant to be mounting in the sexual sense. Daenerys uses allative, if ingsve's transcript holds, and it might have a bit less permanent state setting feel.
One other big problem, though, was the gender divide of dothraki society. Of course a woman might well just use the sentence. Daenerys sure straddles Drogo: men mount women like horses mount horses, women mount men like men mount horses, eh? But for the people wanting to embrace the feel of medieval style repressed gender, I made an overtly submissive version.
Having used the passive (ha! of course) in the second version, I must wonder, if you can translate specific verb class into passive. The object is normally in nominative there. Can it be in other cases?
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on July 21, 2011, 03:40:52 am
3.) Please help me!
Zhey vichomerak, erinas anhaan!
 ~ Sir, show me kindness!

One way to get around using a direct object with a stative verb could perhaps be to use a proposition. I imagine that might work. Something like Zhey vichomerak, erinas h'anhaan! perhaps. Or it might just be that stative +abl/all is an example of some verb class as well.

4.) I am very thirsty. Can you give me some water?
Anha sekke fevek. Hash shafka laz azhi loy eveth?
 ~ I'm very thirsty. Can You give me some water?

5.) I am very hungry. Can you give me some food?
Anha sekke garvok. Hash shafka laz azhi loy hadaen?
 ~ I'm very hungry. Can You give me some food?

7.) I am a foreigner. I understand only very little dothraki.
Anha ifak, majin kash anha charak lekhes dothraki, kash anha charok loy as disse.
 ~ I'm a foreigner, and thus when I hear dothraki, I understand only some words.

Me and ValekLost discussed this on IRC yesterday. It seems that genitive might also indicate partitive concepts so it might be that when you use loy you should also mark the noun with genitive.

Example: Ezas loy alegri h'anhaan.

Garvolat should probably be seen more as "to grow hungry" just as  haqolat means "to grow tired". "To be hungry" is probably just garvat. Hadaen was a word that Richard added I think. It might have come from twitter or something like that.

Other than that I can't find anything to comment on. Well done.

As for the various speculations, your guess is as good as mine.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ValekLost on July 21, 2011, 11:04:07 am
So can we say "loy + noun (gen)", as one of the ways to express "partitive", at the end or still we need the ultimate truth from David?


2) No known 100% sure term for "help", but in the dialogues Mirri Maz Duur says "I can help the great rider with his cut"
Ingsve transcribed it with "Anha laz ovlak dothrak vezhvena ozisoshan mae". So "to help" could be "ovlat".
Qotho reply with "The Khal needs no help from slaves who lie with sheep" - "Khal zigeree vo rahelehar safroon fini govi oqet." so..if "rahelehar" is the right term, whatever it could means, it is used as "help" (noun).  ???

BTW, beyond the grammatical accuracy of the sentences, I think it would be funny to guess what way is the better one to express a concept through the Dothraki culture.
Example:
Are we sure that asking a Dothraki to "show kindness" is a good idea? :D

For all the rest, I'll read it with more attention tomorrow:D
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on July 21, 2011, 02:04:23 pm
So can we say "loy + noun (gen)", as one of the ways to express "partitive", at the end or still we need the ultimate truth from David?

We still need to confirm it I think. There can be other things going on that we don't know about.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on July 21, 2011, 11:53:31 pm
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One way to get around using a direct object with a stative verb could perhaps be to use a proposition. I imagine that might work. Something like Zhey vichomerak, erinas h'anhaan! perhaps. Or it might just be that stative +abl/all is an example of some verb class as well.

Goshdurnit! I absolutely should have thought about prepositions. I seem to keep forgetting about them. The version you offer is much more likely grammatical than my dubious recipient class scheme.

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Me and ValekLost discussed this on IRC yesterday. It seems that genitive might also indicate partitive concepts so it might be that when you use loy you should also mark the noun with genitive.

Example: Ezas loy alegri h'anhaan.

humm.. maybe. We have three examples from the series:
Ogi loy mawizzi. — Kill some rabbits.
Ezas loy alegri h'anhaan. — Find some ducks for me.
Hash yer ray tih loy alegra? — Have you seen any ducks?
I think this is very inconclusive evidence. Mawizzi is in either nominative or genitive, alegri seems to be in genitive, alegra in nominative. Loy might designate a different case when meaning "any", or it might have the same meaning in all three sentences and the difference between "some" and "any" might be just due to translation. Might be a verb thing and have nothing to do with loy at all.
Nah. You're probably right anyway. San jani seems to translate into "lots of dogs", loy alegri translates probably the same way into "some of ducks". Do these determiners decline, then? Can you say "I stabbed at some (of the) dogs": Anha vinde loyaan jani.
I guess this too had slipped through without close examination. Not that "any" instead of "some" would be a big miss, but right now it seems accusative might mean nothing sensical at all or even something entirely else. "Can you give me the little water you have?" for example would not do.

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Garvolat should probably be seen more as "to grow hungry" just as  haqolat means "to grow tired". "To be hungry" is probably just garvat.

Oh yes. I'm sooo stupid. Didn't I, in the same post, write a ponderous paragraph on the very topic of /-o-/ verbs being state changers, "active". In the LCC4 paper Peterson list fevelat and garvolat side by side on the same "source" class and translates them as "to thirst" and "to hunger". I'm guessing, despite of the name of the class, that rather than Anha garvok athezhiraroon! translating to "This dancing makes me hungry!", it translates to "I hunger for dancing!" (and, if there isn't figurative depth available, that probably makes no sense at all), so "to hunger" and "to thirst" might be contextual translations, and more generic translation might indeed be "to grow hungry" and "to grow thirsty. This would mean we have no inkling on "to be thirsty"..

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As for the various speculations, your guess is as good as mine.

Doesn't stop me from guessing :)

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No known 100% sure term for "help", but in the dialogues Mirri Maz Duur says "I can help the great rider with his cut"
Ingsve transcribed it with "Anha laz ovlak dothrak vezhvena ozisoshan mae". So "to help" could be "ovlat".
Qotho reply with "The Khal needs no help from slaves who lie with sheep" - "Khal zigeree vo rahelehar safroon fini govi oqet." so..if "rahelehar" is the right term, whatever it could means, it is used as "help" (noun).  ???

Yeah. We can hope that we'll soon know, how you say "help" in dotraki, but the unaffirmed transcripts are so vague source, I didn't really even really think about picking new words from there.

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BTW, beyond the grammatical accuracy of the sentences, I think it would be funny to guess what way is the better one to express a concept through the Dothraki culture.
Example:
Are we sure that asking a Dothraki to "show kindness" is a good idea? :D

I commented on this in the start of the post already, but ... yes and no, I'd say. I don't like to think of the dothraki as an entirely homogenous mass of cruel cardboard copy barbarians of ultimate badassery. There are different kinds of dothraki, women, men, old young, succesful, outcast...
On the other hand the culture is kind of single mold culture, so the differences aren't that big: One set of truths, one set of values, one role to play, one goal to aspire to... Even if women have a different "one role", most of the things are the same. Meet an old poor dothraki woman and she still will likely despise you for being a foreigner, and she will probably think you worthless, if you are weak and pleading for help.

Views of dothraki culture often flow into our language conversations. I have had an idea of creating a discussion thread dedicated to conversation about dothraki culture; I have even considered creating dothraki culture hub on the wiki research and analysis section (underused and unupdated now that most attention is on the learning section), where most insightful, educated and deep dothraki culture related discussion threads could be linked from sites like Westeros.org.
Not that I would do any such thing. It's just a nice idea.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on August 02, 2011, 07:27:32 am
A new month, a new crah-zee sentence attempt.

Rek odriva fin vil chila annakhmenaan, ma kash firesofosorof nem veshilae, kash sekke athdrivar laz adrivoe.

Nothing much there that isn't questionable or just pretty certainly wrong. When I learn more, I'll try to fit it in a meter and rhyme, too :)
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on August 02, 2011, 08:33:19 am
A new month, a new crah-zee sentence attempt.

Rek odriva fin vil chila annakhmenaan, ma kash firesofosorof nem veshilae, kash sekke athdrivar laz adrivoe.

Nothing much there that isn't questionable or just pretty certainly wrong. When I learn more, I'll try to fit it in a meter and rhyme, too :)

That was a though sentence to translate.

"That is not dead that manage to lie down to the unstoppable and while the Great Years are forgotten then death itself could kill."

That's probably wrong since it doesn't make any sense.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on August 02, 2011, 01:27:15 pm
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"That is not dead that manage to lie down to the unstoppable and while the Great Years are forgotten then death itself could kill."

That's probably wrong since it doesn't make any sense.

I wouldn't say wrong. Not exactly what I was trying to say, but mostly close enough considering how much had to be guesswork. For Cthulhu Mythos / Lovecraft fan that would probably be enough to be able to recognize the line I was aiming for: "That is not dead which can eternal lie; and with strange eons even death may die."

You probably noticed that rek and jin are animate and singular. The writing is about a god (not from Martin's mythos, of course, but as Martin has quite open references to Cthulhu Mythos, this resonates strongly with the Drowned God), so I felt this is approproate.
odriva is meant to be a stative verb version of negative of supposed adjective driv, "dead". I guess you got it right as you didn't use future, even though I thought that would be pretty hard to intuit / decipher.
Rek odriva is thus supposed to mean quite exactly "That is not dead", but on the "He is undead" side of the meaning.

I used vil instead of laz mainly because I didn't want to use the same auxiliary-thing twice and I knew "may" would turn in my limited skill to laz. The exact scopes of the words are still very fuzzy and "that which manages to eternally lie" was to my thinking anyways pretty close to the original intent.
My guess would be that chilat (if such word even exists) is a stative, so I'd think vil chila is more "manages to keep on lying" or "manages to be lying" than "manages to lie down".

Annakhmenaan is, of course where my speculative derivational morphology began to go over the top. Nakhmen as an adjective "endless" is quite probable word. I needed a temporal endlessness, eternity, so I threw in the temporalifying /aCC-/ prefix. Of course there was the problem with the same /aCC-/ meaning "to cause to". Neither "unstoppable" nor "eternity" is likely to be grammatically correct derivations and it is even less likely that they are real (diegetical) words. The bright side of this is that if one is a real word, the other probably still isn't.
Thinking about this now, I think I would have had much higher chances with avvosaan. We know that avvos is a word for "never", but as far as I can remember we don't know, how ablative and allative work with it. "Until never" might well turn into "forever", though "nevermore" is I guess more probable.

Firesofosorof is, I think, a nice construct. Not that it would likely exist as an established word. I meant "A big bunch of years." (it could of course as well be "A bunch of exceptionally great years.")
I would have put that in plural, too, but, alas, the word ended up inanimate. Firesofosor could mean anything from "bunch of years" to "lifespan", and even to "roundabout millenia", so firesofosorof, if it really meant just a larger span of time, could mean anything from "many years, like twenty or something" to "the entire timespan of the universe". Still, pretty good, eh?

Then there is veshilae. The word I started with is of course shilat, which is marked (as I'm quite certain it should be) to conjugate as shil/-at/. It means, more or less, "to be familiar with", so if there is a negative, eshilalat, that should to my thinking be something like "to be strange to" or "to not comprehend" - something stronger or more specific than just "to not be familiar with", as that would not need an own word.

The end isn't that interesting. I didn't know, where to put the sekke or if it would really work anywhere the way I wanted it to.
The only clear error at the translation, I think: adrivoe is a future 3rd person singular of drivolat, "to die". "To kill" is addrivat. [I haven't paid attention to this earlier, but the "to cause" versions seem to be usually built of stative rather than active versions of the words.]

In short: That/(he) is.not.dead/(is.undead) which/(who) can/(manages to) lie(supine) "forever", and when aeons/(great.many.years) are.strange/(are.incomprehensible), then even/(itself) death may/(can) die/(will.die).
Many connotations might be perfect in the lovecraftian framework.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ingsve on August 02, 2011, 01:59:49 pm
Ya, the die vs kill was just a sloppy mistake. And I think I was a bit hasty with forgotten as well. Forgotten would more be the negative of remember rather than to know.

An interesting attempt overall though. It really stretches the things we know very far to fit the intended words.
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: Qvaak on August 18, 2011, 03:30:39 am
Ei ki: "Os!"
Ko ki: "Ai."
... Ko ez os ma me em ma me an.


Using ei all by itself is rather unlikely to be grammatical. Maybe it should be Ei at.. ...everyone! HAH!
Title: Re: Sentence Attempts
Post by: ValekLost on August 22, 2011, 02:44:17 pm
OMG XD
You're totally crazy, you know? XD