Yeah. Sorry this took a moment. Sometimes it takes much longer than this, though, especially if a response can't be thrown in a short passing notion.
Also, I've been giving the good vs well a thought and I figured, what if chek, even if it means well or "nicely" as you said, could also be used as a response to "I made some pancakes". The question is, what does the English "good" mean when we reply with it? And more importantly, what could a Dothraki chek mean? What if instead of "I made some pancakes" - "That is a good thing", we are actually saying "things are well" / "all is good", as in stating your current change in overall satisfaction. I think a word that means "well" could be used for that.
Yeah. That's pretty much what I was trying to say. In English
That is good. is IMO the dominating interpretation, but that does not need to mean Dothraki would work in the same way.
Chek might garner widened use just because it seems adjective/noun based alternatives seem to turn heavier.
So what if I moved it to the phrases level and kept the exclamation mark? Let me know what you think.
Either way sounds good to me. Drop the exclamation mark and keep on the Everyday Words or add a capital letter start and move to Phrases.
Adjectival verbs:
In Dothraki some verbs work as adjectives. In the following levels you will learn some words that are nothing more than verb forms of the adjectives that you have learned in the previous level.
I think the first sentence isn't right, and isn't needed either. Just start with "In the following [...]" and IMO you'll do good.
Now if you've been learning any grammar yet you might have already learned that adjectives come after the words that they describe. Let's put our two words together and from a sentence. There are two ways we can do this:
Qevir zhokwa - Big forest.
Qevir zhokwae - The forest is big.
In the first sentence we used the adjective zhokwa to describe the forest.
In the second sentence we used the word zhokwae which is a conjugated form of the verb zhokwalat - to be big.
"Big forest" isn't a complete sentence - and
qevir zhokwa is neither as far as this discussion goes. That's a major wrinkle in this explanation, but how to tackle it? My brain hurts. Maybe just vaguefy:
Let's put our two words together. There are two ways we can do this:
Qevir zhokwa - Big forest.
Qevir zhokwae - The forest is big.
In the first sentence we used the adjective zhokwa to describe the forest.
In the second sentence we used the word zhokwae which is a conjugated form of the verb zhokwalat - to be big.Noun animacy:
Because Dothraki is not a finished language, animacy has not yet been determined for every noun. In this case the noun will have (/) next to it.
This isn't exactly right. I'm pretty sure mr. Peterson knows the animacy of every noun he has created. He just haven't told *us* animacy of every noun we have found.
There are roughly five kinds of words in Dothraki
1) Words we know fairly well, words that we have discussed with David at least in passing or that David has otherwise introduced to us properly. We know what ever crucial "meta data" is needed: animacy, stem, epenthesis etc. And we also know enough about the meaning to be confident at least about some core use of the word.
2) Words that we haven't met, really, but which can be derived through so stable productive pattern that they can be considered known, with only a small reservation.
3) Words that have cropped up in some text David has made, be it dialogue from the show or some external source like conlang relay. These words are often very narrowly understood. Sometimes some information like animacy can be inferred (eg. because of the case in which we met the word), but often not.
4) Words that David has created, but haven't intoruced to us at all and haven't used in any publicly available text (probably in no text at all).
5) Words that are in-world supposed to exist, but which David has not yet created.
Maybe you could say "Because Dothraki is not publicly available in it's entirety [...]"
