Os Gangnam (Dothraki Gangnam Style)

[sunquan8094]

I translated "Gangnam Style" into Dothraki. I do not understand Korean, so I used an English translation of the lyrics.
Just to warn you, this is not an exact translation; some words are not in the dictionary.
Someone please check this for grammatical errors:
Nayat fini afazhie ma vos ivezho kash asshekh
Nayat fini shila kifinosi indelat koffi
Nayat fin afazhoe zhor kash ajjalan
Nayat fin me

Anha mahrazh fin afazhie ven yer kash asshekh
Anha mahrazh fin indee koffi hatif meme fishoe
Anha mahrazh fini samvoe zhor kash ajjalan

[Chorus]
Yer zheanae ma laz nem zhili
Sek yer, zhey yer
Elates kash athnakar
Os Gangnam!
Zhey nayat mezahhe!

Nayat fini ish chaki vosma lajie kash me lajie
Nayat fini jahak esina mra qora kash me jila
Nayat fini nemo qemmoe vosma amezahhen nayatoon fini eqemmolat khado
Nayat ven me

Anha mahrazh fin chaki vosma lajie kash me lajie
Anha mahrazh fin yofie kash me jila
Anha mahrazh fin dirge vezhvena mra qora, vo khado

[Chorus]

Mahrazh ovethay oleth mahrazhi lanay.

[Chorus]

[Havazhyol]

Just lol...

[Qvaak]

Alright! Your mostly dependable commentator on the house again. I think this will be less an error count, more ruminations. Half-way done.

   koffi & Gangnam

It fits to the fun factor borrowing and then ortographically integrating "coffee". And Gangnam is a name of a city district, so it's normal to leave it as is*. A problem with loan words is how to conjugate them. In indelat koffi, koffi works as an object. Koffi is not, however, in any kind of normal accusative. If it were an inanimate noun (as it should be, being liquid and thus uncountable), it would end in consonant or in epenthetic -e, so either kof or koffe. As animate noun it would be koffies. Different languages seem to deal with this differently. In English there's a fascinating tradition of borrowing words accompanied with their plurals, and as plurals are pretty much the extent of needed declination, this works pretty well. In Finnish practically all loans are integrated (even on spot) to the Finnish declination system. Dothraki use a different, peculiar approach and use a preposition, haji, to deal with the problem. So indelat haji coffi would certainly be a working solution, perhaps even os haji Gangnam.

*Incidentally, I think as it's written "Gangnam" actually adheres to the Dothraki phonotactics. But as far as I know Dothraki does not have velar nasal [ŋ] as a phoneme (though it still might be an allophone for [n]?) so "Gangnam" would be pronounced gan·gnam (or perhaps gaŋ·gnam).

Nayat fini afazhie ma vos ivezho kash asshekh

Yes. Nayat really is inanimate (if we're not completely mistaken), though that makes my head hurt a little, so fini is indeed the correct nominative version of the relative pronoun... The only problematic part I really can see here is kash asshekh, and even that is more promising than anything that I would likely have come with. With asshekh carrying that inconvinient "today" sense, one would probably need a term like "daytime". Using a sentence-level operator kash (probably good here without pairing, as it is in Ki jini anha astak asqoy hatif Maisi Krazaaji kash shieraki vitihiri asavvasoon.) is a good attempt to push asshekh from an adverb (today) to a noun (day) inside an adverb phrase, but does a single asshekh function well enough as a sentence, or should there be some dummy prepostition structure .. or something.

Nayat fini shila kifinosi indelat koffi

Is shilat a right word for know-how type skills? It's "familiarity", mostly used for knowing people, but also for knowing language (as that's deep intuitive familiarity, where mere intellectual knowledge does not suffice). There's a different word, nesat, for knowing information, but neither of these terms sound really suitable for physical skills, know-how. I'm pretty sure this has been discussed with David, but I have conmpletely forgotten, what we learnt.

Nayat fin afazhoe zhor kash ajjalan

OK. This is an error, if I understand at all, what's going on. Fin is an accusative of fini, so the sentence would be ~"A girl whom the heart warms". So the girl would be warmed by a heart (presumably hers). But I don't think afazholat even takes staight object (for that you'd need affazhat), so this would not even really work, IMO. To make the girl the possessor of the heart, you need ablative as heart is inalienable possession: Nayat finoon afazhoe zhor, ~"a girl whose heart grows warm".
This possessor structure is a good example of garden-pathy (and perhaps even ambivalent) relative clauses. As shown in David's example, Adra fini tih anha arakh, "The turtle whose arakh I saw," the rest of the argument is left as is when possessor fini is fronted. If we're talking about inanimate things and alienable possessions, the accusative is often the same as noun's nominative and fini's genitive is always the same as its nominative. That can bet a bit confusing. It really helps that Dothraki verbs seem to have quite fixed transitivity, so at least you should know, how many arguments there should be. How do you differentiate "A girl whose dog bit the horse" from "A girl whose horse a dog bit"? hrmp. Maybe I should post a very late comment on that blog post.

Nayat fin me

Huh? The translation I'm reading says "A girl with that kind of twist". Is this just an unfinished line?

Anha mahrazh fin afazhie ven yer kash asshekh

I'm pretty sure here the full fin ven afazhie ven yer is in order.

Anha mahrazh fin indee koffi hatif meme fishoe

Hahh. "I'm a man who drinks the coffee before is turns cold" is so much less impressive than "I'm a guy who one-shots his coffee before it even cools down"
Hatif is a bit problematic, because contrary to kash we know it precicely as a preposition. Dunno. I guess it might work, even though there isn't even any word to mark the case it should assign (or could the subject do that?). That me- thingie looks more wrong to me than hatif, though. Translating straight to English, "before that it turns cold" does not sound too terrible, but I remain sceptical.

Anha mahrazh fini samvoe zhor kash ajjalan

OK. That's the genitive, alright, but zhor is still inalienable, so finnoon. Note the geminated n irregularity in the animate declination of the relative pronoun.

Yer zheanae ma laz nem zhili

loveable 

Sek yer, zhey yer

more fun

Elates kash athnakar

I see in vocab kash has been listed as having a meaning "until", but I'm more familiar with "while". That "until" might even be a bit off, certainly not well understood. Kash athnakhar for "until the end" does not ring right to me. Perhaps kash athnakharaan might work better? But we have a couple of examples of use of arrekaan for "until", so I'd recommend that (I'm not sure, though, what to do with athnakhar - genitive or accusative I guess). Arrek might even be more promising for other uses of kash you have.

[Qvaak]

Nayat fini ish chaki vosma lajie kash me lajie

Chaka, you mean?

Nayat fini jahak esina mra qora kash me jila

I think the vocab does a bad job on jahak: I think it's not generally "hairstyle", it's just one particular hairstyle. So perhaps jahak esina won't work as well as you thought it might. Mra qora would probably not be my preferred choise of words either, but that can be argued, and if you change the whole expression, it's not an issue. How about Nayat fini asserisa noreth? We know seris only in Vaes Seris (how about that! Still after all this time we seem to have forgotten to ascertain the meaning of that one), so that's a bit adveturous, but ideally would be quite nice wording.
Me jila works, if you wanted "she's right", but should not work for "it's right (time)". In the earlier kash starting adverbial thingies you have, creating a proper sentences "it's night", "it's day(time)" is an obvious alternative, but I did not mention it, because I can't really tell, how these would work. English uses a lot of dummy pronouns, pronouns that are pretty much just syntactic placeholders having very little semantic value. These are mostly used for environmental conditions, "it's early", "it's raining" etc. As English, like Dothraki, is non-pro-drop language, you can't go with simple "is early" or "rains". David commented on these kind of expressions very shortly on IRC when I asked him (a year ago?), and as I remember it, "It's raining" type of expression would be something like me nem eyyela (if I got my "to rain on" right), so more "it's been rained on" than "it rains". Perhaps "it's early" would be "early is it".

Nayat fini nemo qemmoe vosma amezahhen nayatoon fini eqemmolat khado

Your guess on how qemmolat exactly works is as good as mine. Turning it into "negative", it would be eqemmosalat, and thus amezahhen nayatoon fini eqemmosae khadoes. Also note that you missed the animate noun accusative suffix from khado.

Nayat ven me

"A girl like that" should be Ven nayat ven me, IMO. The translation I'm looking at gives "A sensable girl like that" for this line, though.

Anha mahrazh fin chaki vosma lajie kash me lajie

Chaka, you mean? Again, my translation gives "A guy who seems calm but plays when he plays", while the line earlier was "A girl who looks quiet but plays when she plays".

Anha mahrazh fin yofie kash me jila

....

Anha mahrazh fin dirge vezhvena mra qora, vo khado

OK. While this could probably be said in many other ways, the mra qora expression seems appropriate. But how does it work, exactly? You can't throw fin there without giving it a role in the relative clause. I think the sentence reads rougly "...who is big thoughts in the hand". But for an alternative, ...finnoon dirge vezhveni mra qora sounds promising to me: "in whose hand are big thoughts". You'll notice that I also changed the verb into an adjective (which is agreeing with plural). I think the expression's general structure breaks down as x is in the hand and x is y in the hand would be less natural. That lonely vo khado in the end does not seem sound wording, but heck if I know, how to do that any better. Needs probably both more vocabulary and some thought.

Mahrazh ovethay oleth mahrazhi lanay.

Lanay works like an adjective, so it should agree with the non-nominative case, so lanaya.


So, yeah. I can talk a lot, but can't point out many straight out errors. And I might have misunderstood your intention here and there, so correct me if I have wrongfully contested your wording.

[Havazhyol]

Sunqan, your translation just got Qvaaked. 

I'm still amazed by your precision and gramatical knowledge of this langage.

[Hrakkar]

Sunqan, your translation just got Qvaaked. 

I'm still amazed by your precision and gramatical knowledge of this langage.

I'll have to remember that term -'Qvaak'ed'. Could this be a new Dothraki word? 

Seriously though, Qvaak's posts are more amazing all the time!

[Havazhyol]

Something like Qvaakat : to make a precise grammatical analysis/correction of a text/speech/translation.

And Ingsvelat : to be the elder of the keepers of the knowledge.   

Kind of fun though

[Hrakkar]

We very nearly got something like qvaakat last night, meaning something like 'grammar nitpicker'. We also got a word we can use for things like 'Christmas' - vitteyqoyi

[Qvaak]

hehh. If there was some day a Dothraki word based on my nick, I imagined it would be either ~ qvaalat (anha qvaak, yer qvaae), based on the writing form, or ~ kvalat (anha kvak, yer kvae), based on how I the pronounce it.

Yo, Sunquan, is my discussion helpful to you?

[sunquan8094]

Your discussion was helpful, zhey Qvaak. I must have had a couple of mind slips.

[Havazhyol]

Now that I thnik of it, Dothraki don't have a word for billion? Only Dalen ma yor...

PSY dothra ha tihikhaan daleni ma yori ma ale she Youtube.

Sounds good?