Author Topic: M'ach  (Read 13727 times)

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ezok

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M'ach
« on: December 12, 2011, 09:15:22 pm »
M'athchomaroon.
Anha nem hakek ma Justin, ma ray navi m'ezok lekhes Dothraki.
Anha yol mra Texas, vosma anha ajjin thirak mra Oklahoma ma anha ezok mra OSU.
Anha garvok nesataan alikh qisi lekh Dothraki, ma garvok shilolataan san astoki m'ezoki jin lekhi vezhven.

Hello.
I'm Justin, and I've begun studying Dothraki.
I was born in Texas, but now live in Oklahoma and I'm a student at OSU.
I'm looking forward to learning more about the Dothraki language, as well as getting to know other speakers and learners thereof.

ingsve

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Re: M'ach
« Reply #1 on: December 13, 2011, 12:55:11 am »
Hi and welcome.

That's a really good attempt, just a few tiny mistakes here and there. You have obviously studied other languages before I imagine?
"I just need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little" – Samwell Tarly

ezok

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Re: M'ach
« Reply #2 on: December 13, 2011, 10:02:00 am »
I have indeed. And please, correct my mistakes. I must know what I've done wrong! :-P

Qvaak

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Re: M'ach
« Reply #3 on: December 13, 2011, 02:19:53 pm »
Lemme try. I love these kind of challenges.

Even though the basics are starting to be figured out, many particulars are still "maybe wrong" or "probably right". And of some things we still have almost no idea, how they work.

Quote
Anha nem hakek ma Justin, ma ray navi m'ezok lekhes Dothraki.
Following Daenerys' line Ma me nem ahakee ma Rhaego!, I too have toyed with the idea of using that passive structure for "to be called". The translation isn't necessarily literal, though. Our vocabulary has hakelat down as to name. The expression might work anyway, and the vocabulary might not have the whole scope of the word pinned down, but if you want to use an expression we're certain about, go with Hake anni [insert name].

You should use ablative with preposition ma, and if the name is foreign and does not decline, you should use the preposition haji. The line from the show contradicts with this, but Daenerys is not a native speaker and that would be very natural place for her to skip the correct inflection (we know Peterson has intentionally slipped at least a couple of small errors in her lines). Or this might be a fixed expression that breaks the case assignment rule.

We don't have a word navilat, to begin, but now that you mention it, I find it an extremely likely word. You have back-formed it from naviki, I'm sure.

Dothraki should be quite strictly non-pro-drop. We've seen that the pronoun can still at least sometimes be dropped in subsequent clauses, if the agent stays the same (more or less the same way as in english, I guess). I'm not at all sure, what the boundaries are. Can you change the tense and still drop the pronoun? Should your sentence be ...ma anha ray navi...? Perhaps.

That ...m'ezok... construction is either plain wrong or at least somewhat iffy. Were you aiming for "...have begun and am learning the Dothraki language.", trying to tie both verbs to the same object? That might even work (as shortening of "...have begun to learn and am learning the Dothraki language.").
"...have begun with learning the dothraki language." would rather be something like ...ray navi m'ezolatoon lekhes Dothraki, but I think even that would be wrong.
The third interpretation would be "...have begun that (I) learn the dothraki language". But that makes the least sense to me.
...Oh. I get it. "...have begun as a learner the Dothraki language." ...uh. No. Clearly I'm confused.

The safest bet I can come up with:
Hake anni Justin. Anha ray navi athezozar qisi lekh Dothraki.

Quote
Anha yol mra Texas, vosma anha ajjin thirak mra Oklahoma ma anha ezok mra OSU.
We haven't learned much about locatives. Based on sentences like Dalen rhaggati evetha ma ale vekhi she Vaes Seris, and Affin shekh yola she jimma, I'd say all the prepositions should be she, not mra. I think mra has a rather strong sense of withing, inside, while she is much more general on, in, at.

Again, even though both she and mra would assign a nominative here, I think it would be possible to mark the words as fixed foreign expressions and use haji.

Adverbs are usually sentence final. Ajjin is badly placed.

Curiously, considering how many you have skipped elsewhere, here I think the repeat of anha is unnecessary, though of course not an error.

So how about:
Anha yol she Texas, vosma thirak she Oklahoma ajjin. Ma anha ezok she OSU.

Quote
Anha garvok nesataan alikh qisi lekh Dothraki, ma garvok shilolataan san astoki m'ezoki jin lekhi vezhven.
"To hunger for something" is expressed with ablative, not allative, but otherwise I think the syntactically nominalized verb infinites are used correctly here.

Astok for speaker is another nice speculative, yet rather certain word.

Since lekh is in genitive (ie. in other declination than nominative), vezhven should be inflected too: vezhvena.

I guess this might well be correct as:
Anha garvok nesatoon alikh qisi lekh Dothraki, ma garvok shilolatoon san astoki m'ezoki jin lekhi vezhvena.



Uh. Maybe we need ingsve's opinion, too.
Game of Thrones is not The Song of Ice and Fire, sweetling. You'll learn that one day to your sorrow.

ingsve

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Re: M'ach
« Reply #4 on: December 13, 2011, 02:32:30 pm »
Uh. Maybe we need ingsve's opinion, too.

No, I think you hit all the points I was thinking of.

I wouldn't say that astok is speculative though. It's a pretty straight forward application of the agentive derivational morphology.
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ezok

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Re: M'ach
« Reply #5 on: December 13, 2011, 11:41:48 pm »
The m'ezok thing was the third interpretation you mentioned.
I was not aware of haji, and the adverb thing was me neglecting to look it up.
I did wonder about using "hunger for" in the way I used it, and I must have seen the wrong thing or substituted something that made sense to my English-speaking brain.

And I'm rather proud of navilat, honestly.

Qvaak

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Re: M'ach
« Reply #6 on: December 14, 2011, 09:05:48 am »
Quote
The m'ezok thing was the third interpretation you mentioned.
ah, well. Perhaps I dismissed it too hastily. I can see, how that might work. Probably still without dropping the pronoun, but yeah. A bit unlikely but perhaps possible construction.

Quote
I was not aware of haji, and the adverb thing was me neglecting to look it up.
Yeah. We learn stuff from the blog and even from IRC chats with David, so there are always odd bits of information, that are known to some of us, but aren't yet properly documented at the wiki.

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I did wonder about using "hunger for" in the way I used it, and I must have seen the wrong thing or substituted something that made sense to my English-speaking brain.
Yeah. That's a bit surprising. Garvolat was one of the example words when David introduced us to the source class of verbs - so apparently as Dothraki say that a cup is empty from water, so also can they consider you hungry from ice cream. I don't think we've ever seen any examples of garvolat, so we might be mistaken and the source class might just indicate the literal cause of the hunger, like to be hungry from hard day's work. The other examples, I think, support our less literal interpretation.

Quote
I wouldn't say that astok is speculative though. It's a pretty straight forward application of the agentive derivational morphology.
Aye. I was getting on my super-dubious gear. But nit-pickingly speaking I think it is always possible to find surprises in derivational stuff.
  • Speaker, as in speaker of certain language, is such a normal expression, I would expect it to be well established in Dothraki, and if the established word happens to be something different, like shilak or even jerik, I'd imagine astok would carry the same clumsiness knower or talker would carry in English.
  • Sometimes words are so heavily reserved for a special use, that the other uses start sounding at least a bit weird. I don't seem to find any good examples readily in my head, perhaps composer or actor. If astok is reserved for, say, horse whisperer or agitator, using it to simply mean speaker might sound severely clumsy.
Game of Thrones is not The Song of Ice and Fire, sweetling. You'll learn that one day to your sorrow.