My Dorhraki Translations

[Jaqqa]

I have noticed that many people here seek advice for their Dothraki translations.

My only attempt for now: "Nihzosi kazga qoyi vovethi she asavva ma ei mahrazhi adrivoe."

I'm not sure whether nihzo or mahrazh are animate or inanimate; whether I should have used mre or she; and whether or not using ma is okay for a cause-&-effect clause.

Help will be appreciated.

[Qvaak]

I have noticed that many people here seek advice for their Dothraki translations.

Ya. Seems to be working pretty well - at least this "you ask, qvaak qvaaks" approach.
I'd like to see more people questioning my assessments. I'll probably fight back, if I wasn't simply utterly & plainly wrong, but that's how we get discussion I learn plenty simply dissecting these attempts, but as I'm not even close to being a liguists of any kind, my perspective has limits. I compare to Finnish and English, maybe read a bit of Wikipedia, but mostly I just ponder a lot.

This sentence attempt looks mostly solid to me.

I'm guessing you are aiming at "Black ravens of blood will fly on the sky and all men will die."

Nhizo and mahrazh are both animate nouns. We mark animates "na." and inanimates "ni." (and unknown animacy simply "n.") in both our pdf dictionary and our wiki's vocabulary page.

I might be mistaken about what you're trying to do with qoyi. I think it works, though seems a bit iffy, sounds like "blood's black ravens" (would that even be that bad?). Be careful with English "of" structures, as they do many things, and don't always translate well to genitive. See comments on http://www.dothraki.com/2012/11/possession/ for a bit more direction.

She asavva is almost certainly the way to go. She is Dothraki's "neutral" preposition. Mra is pretty much just for the "inside" sense of "in". "Fish in a barrel" or "dog in a house" is clear mra, but I'm not even sure, if "swimming in a lake" type of situations would be dealt with mra, or would it still be she.

Ma does not ring right to me. If nothing else, I'd probably at least throw the leading ma in (I tend to try to cram paired conjunction everywhere). There are many alternatives for this, but one is simple and strong: majin. That's a seeing a good deal of use in story telling (cf. http://dedalvs.com/relay/previous/lcc4results/17.html) and such, and has perfectly fitting sense of "and thus", or "consequently".

So my proposal for corrections would be: Nhizosi kazga qoyi vovethi she asavva, majin ei mahrazhi adrivoe.

[Jaqqa]

Thank you. It seems that I've done a pretty good job, then.

I'd like to see more people questioning my assessments. I'll probably fight back, if I wasn't simply utterly & plainly wrong, but that's how we get discussion  I learn plenty simply dissecting these attempts, but as I'm not even close to being a liguists of any kind, my perspective has limits. I compare to Finnish and English, maybe read a bit of Wikipedia, but mostly I just ponder a lot.

If you mean that you compare Dothraki with Finnish and English, than I can say the same, only about Russian.

I'm guessing you are aiming at "Black ravens of blood will fly on the sky and all men will die."

Yes, and no. My initial wording was "black ravens of blood shall fill the skies, and humanity will perish." Now obviously, I have to adapt to Dothraki's lexicon, so that's the "yes."

I might be mistaken about what you're trying to do with qoyi. I think it works, though seems a bit iffy, sounds like "blood's black ravens" (would that even be that bad?). Be careful with English "of" structures, as they do many things, and don't always translate well to genitive. See comments on http://www.dothraki.com/2012/11/possession/ for a bit more direction.

From what I've read there, it seems that qoyi is probably the only way. I should have probably chosen "death" instead of "blood," but I guess it's (mostly) irrelevant. "blood's black ravens" does sound bad, but I believe that's exactly how it would be in Finnish or Russian, but then again, both these languages use the genitive like English (I think, since I don't speak Finnish).

Ma does not ring right to me. If nothing else, I'd probably at least throw the leading ma in (I tend to try to cram paired conjunction everywhere). There are many alternatives for this, but one is simple and strong: majin. That's a seeing a good deal of use in story telling (cf. http://dedalvs.com/relay/previous/lcc4results/17.html) and such, and has perfectly fitting sense of "and thus", or "consequently".

I would argue with you on this one, but the meaning of majin is exactly the one I've been looking for. I've even contemplated using it, but opted for ma instead, for some reason.

[Qvaak]

If you mean that you compare Dothraki with Finnish and English, than I can say the same, only about Russian.

Ooh. Russian should be a neat reservoir. You should eg. have some insight on how copulaless syntaxes can flow. Things are not the same in different languages, exactly, but I think it's still worth having a good gut feel on something similar.

and humanity will perish.

This reminds me of one problem I initially missed: mahrazh does not have the same extension to "person" as English "man" has. See comments on: http://www.dothraki.com/2011/12/merry-goatmas/ ...so voji would probably work much better than mahrazhi.