Passover:The four Questions

[steves213]

Winter may be coming,  but now it's spring, which means that Passover will be here soon.  Has anyone translated the 4 Questions into Dothraki yet?

[ingsve]

Winter may be coming,  but now it's spring, which means that Passover will be here soon.  Has anyone translated the 4 Questions into Dothraki yet?

Nope. Though looking at them it shouldn't take too much work since there are only a few words that are unknown.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

Why is it that on all other nights during the year we eat either bread or matzoh, but on this night we eat only matzoh?

Why is it that on all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs, but on this night we eat only bitter herbs?

Why is it that on all other nights we do not dip our herbs even once, but on this night we dip them twice?

Why is it that on all other nights we eat either sitting or reclining, but on this night we eat in a reclining position?

[steves213]

Some Haggadahs substitute  this other question for the fourth:

Why on all other nights do we eat in an ordinary manner but on this night we dine with special ceremony

Steve

[Hrakkar]

Ultimately, I hope to translate the Bible into Dothraki, but beginning that project is a ways off yet. At least, the setting of much of GRRM's workd should lend much of he needed terminology. (Translating the Bible into na'vi has been a nightmare!)

I am assuming you have seen the website 'The four questions in every language?' Paul Frommer did the four questions for Na'vi, and had to coin a few words to do it. (I would use the fourth question as used there).

The Lord's prayer could be very interesting in Dothraki!

[steves213]

As this was a topic about passover, can someone please start and move the discussion of the Lord's Prayer to another subject

[ingsve]

The topic has now been split...

[Qvaak]

The topic has now been split...

OK. I'll move the relevant part of my post back here, then.

As this was a topic about passover, can someone please start and move the discussion of the Lord's Prayer to another subject

Oh yes. Sorry about hijacking the thread. It was a bit rude.

As for the four questions, I can't tell, if I've heard of them before, but they do seem to be a classical foreign language test/example text. And in that they are interesting. They also discuss such an old tradition, that the concepts present in the text (other than matzoh, of course) would also probably exist in Dothraki culture. The problem is, we can't just translate them, at least not well. We're at the verge of knowing enough to translate such simple-ish texts, but we're not there yet. The Lord's Prayer might actually be even more doable, as it discusses very general stuff, while here we have a good collection of words we just don't have, like herb or leavened. We can speculate and we can ask David for specific words, and then of course we can have a nice accurate translation, but otherwise not so much. I'm happy to comment if someone wants to give this a try.

[steves213]

here we have a good collection of words we just don't have, like herb or leavened. We can speculate and we can ask David for specific words,

I'd been thinking of some lack of words.  There are several real languages that lack say a general word for herbs, and in those cases vegetables is used instead.  Leavened/unleavened often rely on bread/matsa (a guess at  the dothraki spelling) as a loan word.  I found it interesting that Hindi has no general word for bread, and I've been told some rice based cultures have no concept of leaven at all.When it was translated into Na'avi 'hametz' became 'hametsi' so if this were also transliterated into dothraki, then 'khamets' maybe. 

[Qvaak]

I'd been thinking of some lack of words.  There are several real languages that lack say a general word for herbs, and in those cases vegetables is used instead.  Leavened/unleavened often rely on bread/matsa (a guess at  the dothraki spelling) as a loan word.  I found it interesting that Hindi has no general word for bread, and I've been told some rice based cultures have no concept of leaven at all.When it was translated into Na'avi 'hametz' became 'hametsi' so if this were also transliterated into dothraki, then 'khamets' maybe.

Oh yes. Even the English version Ingsve posted lacked the word for leavened.

It's more than likely that Dothraki have a generic word for herbs, perhaps even for leavened, we just don't know them yet. Our vocabulary does not even have a word for bread, though that might be due to some delay in adding the words that have come up in the IRC conversations; I think the word for bread might have been mentioned. We know only some of the words David has created, and he still keeps creating more, so if David does not have a word for - say, "herb" - and he thinks Dothraki should have it, he might even create the word.