Adjectives

[Maegi]

Hello!
I've just started to learn Dothraki using the video lessons and I've got some questions.
First of all, the lesson Zero was about epenthesis and in the lessons 8-9 we see "Ko laja zhavvors", "Zhavvorsa imesh zhila zhavvors ershe". Should the Accusative form be zhavvors instead of zhavvorse?
Secondly, about the adjectives. There are many examples of present tense, but how to say something like "My son is not strong, but he will be strong"? Rizh anni vos hajo vosma me ahaja? Can we conjugate adjectives like usual verbs?
Thanks,
Maegi (Lyna).

[ingsve]

Zhavvors is the correct form. /rs/ is not a consonant cluster that is disallowed. You can probably hear it when you try to pronounce it that it is pronounced without difficulty while words like alegr or kendr are not easily pronounceable which is why they get an epenthetic /e/ at the end.

With regards to adjectives it's a bit special the way it works in Dothraki. Every adjective can be turned into a verb that means "to be ..." so the adjective haj means strong and that forms the verb hajat which means "to be strong". So when you want to conjugate it you are in fact conjugating the verb and not the adjective.

[Qvaak]

First of all, the lesson Zero was about epenthesis and in the lessons 8-9 we see "Ko laja zhavvors", "Zhavvorsa imesh zhila zhavvors ershe". Should the Accusative form be zhavvors instead of zhavvorse?

Good question. The short answer is ... maybe.
The epenthesis lesson is a bit outdated/simplified. You can find a bit more detailed look on epenthesis at http://wiki.dothraki.org/Phonotactics#Epenthesis, but even that discussion is mostly phonotactical. How epenthesis actually works is kinda complicated (see eg. my original post at http://forum.dothraki.org/language-updates/on-a-and-b-classes/) - so much so that it's mostly best learned with the words. The ending consonant cluster -rs does definitely fit in the coda of a syllable, so in that sense the -e should not be needed. Our wiki's vocab page offers the accusative as zhavvors, but I can't find corroborating example in Peterson-created text corpus, so that might be just an educated guess (probably made by me before I even knew any reason to suspect I might be wrong).

This particular situation stems from compound creation, and for that we have a good blog post: http://www.dothraki.com/2012/02/just-for-fun/. From that we get "If the second noun ends in a vowel (regardless of what noun it used to be), the resultant compound will likely be an inanimate noun of Class B (sometimes it will be Class A)." So I guess the epenthetic -e is actually likely - even more so since vorsa is animate and thus the ending -a is a bit more ...erm... "stem-locked".

Secondly, about the adjectives. There are many examples of present tense, but how to say something like "My son is not strong, but he will be strong"? Rizh anni vos hajo vosma me ahaja? Can we conjugate adjectives like usual verbs?

We tend analyze the situation so that the words hajo and ahaja there are conjugations of a stative verb hajat; It's not an adjective conjugated like a verb, it's a verb. There can't really be a proper adjective without a corresponding verb, so whether you like to speak of adjectives as separate words or as special way most Dothraki stative verbs can be used is an academic conversation, I feel.
It must be said, though, that the adjective - verb transition can be irregular. This is rare but possible. I might be mistaken about the word, but think the adjective samva, for example, has the corresponding verb samvat, not *samvalat. This is more epenthesis nastiness and knee deep in exeption of an exeption territory.
And to add to that, there are some adjectives that aren't actually proper adjectives but half calcified examples of Dothraki participle. Thus the verb corresponding with chilay is AFAIK actually chilat the verb phrase corresponding with navvirzethay is actually nem avvirzethat.

edit: I missed Ingsve's reply, so there's some repetition. Sorry.

[Maegi]

Thank you very much!

[Hrakkar]

All this said, how much 'wiggle room' is there in applying or not applying an epehthetic /e/?

Some people, especially speakers of languages other than English might have no problem pronouncing something that English speakers would append an /e/ to. There would be no agreement between these two people on whether or not the /e/ is really needed.

[Qvaak]

Dothraki has it's own phonotactical rules (though they are a little murky and not fully known to us). Comparing to what English might feel easy to say is far from definite rule on what goes and what does not.

There might be some wiggle room, but that's unclear too. Even in the illiterate, uneducated, homogenic culture like Dothraki, there should be difference between careful, eloquent speech and haphazardly mumbled or hastily spouted speech. I can tell from Finnish, that we do a lot of "swallowing the ends of the words". It's not for just any word ending, but we tend to drop some inflectional word ending vowels, even going against what regular Finnish phonotactics would allow. It's somewhat dialectical thing, but I think it still compares, more or less. Another instance where words tend to be shortened in Finnish is lyrical tradition. In songs and poems where syllabe count and weight outweight the need for easy pronunciation, the shortening crops up again. And we already know that this can happen in Dothraki too. In haiku instructions David specifically said that purely epenthetic /-e/'s can be dropped.

[Hrakkar]

There was a movement earlier in the last century among scientifically literate English speakers to 'modernize' English by dropping some of these epenthetic letters. For instance, 'modernize' would become 'moderniz'. Although I got used to it, reading their writings was annoying at first.

[Maegi]

There was a movement earlier in the last century among scientifically literate English speakers to 'modernize' English by dropping some of these epenthetic letters. For instance, 'modernize' would become 'moderniz'. Although I got used to it, reading their writings was annoying at first.

It's like ё instead of final e in Quenya (and not only final, for example, the name Ёarendil) - as a Russian native speaker, I would never read [irendil] instead of [earendil] - but it is necessary to add, because Tolkien was an English speaker)