I think it would be nice for a general chat the be kept....

[Qvaak]

Athchomar chomakea.

I'm the usual Finnish ever-so-slightly depressed do-no-good chap in my early thirties. Sometimes active. Likes to talk grammar and speculate. Thoroughly amateur, no linguistic knowledge outside of random Wikipedia adventures, no language skills to speak of. A bit of a left-wing hippie. Dothraki are interesting because they have such a pessimistic perpective flawed culture. They allow for a great deal of grey area discussion.

[Halahhi]

quite happy to do a dictionary in other languages any way to help. would just live everyone talking

Qvaak nice to hear from you i love finland very beautiful country lovely in the winter

[Hrakkar]

Zhey Niqqo ma Havazhyol, I have put in a request to the dictionary backend keeper, for the mechanisms to create the Dothraki dictionary in French and Spanish. I'll let you know when I hear something!

[Havazhyol]

Awesome
I already started working on a printed version of the actual dictionnary.

Shieraki gori ha kishaan

Edit : I'll be working with the vocab section of the wiki too.
Edit 2 : Since we've been talking about translation of the dictionnary seriously, I launch a topic for the french one, I leave the spanish to you, zhey Niqqo

[Havazhyol]

Since it's been in the news during the past few weeks (and it came to me while working on the dictionnary) I thought about movie title :

Shierak athvilajerari :

- Athzalar imesh

- Rhaesh shierakoon elza

- Jedi athessazari

Ingsve : your avatar sentence is the first thing that came to my mind when I heard the news...

Back to work now.

Hajas!

[Havazhyol]

Anha zalak ha yeraan vittesqoyi davra, zhey ei voji.

Hope it's good.

Hajas and don't over drink!!!

(question : since vitteya is inanimate, I suppose vittesqoyi is also, isn't it?)

[ingsve]

Anha zalak ha yeraan vittesqoyi davra, zhey ei voji.

Hope it's good.

Hajas and don't over drink!!!

(question : since vitteya is inanimate, I suppose vittesqoyi is also, isn't it?)

Vitteiqoyi is inanimate since all compounds are inanimate.

[Havazhyol]

M'atchomaroon, zhey ei voji.

I had an idea, maybe some already thought of it (but I didn't read records of it on the forum (or maybe did I missed them).

I thought about one of the most geeky ornament nowadays (got 72 differents myself... and now that I write it down I figure out I may have too many of them... anyway):

T-shirts (about the wiki or the forum and the language)

Not with pictures, but with sentences, all made up (like Anha lekhak Dothraki or Anha laz astak ma Khal Drogo) in roman or cyrillic calligraphy

The thing is : I'm not sure it could be done without breaking some copyrights HBO may possess though...

Anyone could help on this one?

Dothras chek!

[Qvaak]

It's a mystery, what you can copyright. Crazy things have been copyrighted, for sure, but what do you exactly copyright, when you copyright a language? I think with Dothraki a lot between Petterson and HBO is about goodwill: David won't try to circumvent the legally grey area of their agreement and instead follows the spirit in which the agreement was made. I'd like to do the same. I'm not keen on getting cease and desist letters, but I'm more worried about what's cool with David.

I think what we know about vocabulary or grammar is quite fair to use for our original text. Legally probably only selling the whole corpus or a big part of it might be a problem. Perhaps this was already discussed in the context of dictionary app on this week's IRC chat? It's probably worth the trouble to ask David. Even if he does not go with "yes" or "no" answer, we might at least get "I guess you can" or "I'd rather you didn't" - perhaps both  .

If it comes to that, I'm a half decent typographist/calligraphist; might certainly manage to design something.

[Hrakkar]

The T-shirt idea is athdavrazar and I would probably take a couple of them.

Asking David is essential. I never want to see any harm come to David because of anything we do.

The phrase needs to be something we created, and what Havazhyol has suggested, I think, fits that category.

We can either just make these up and distribute (with costs recovered of course) among ourselves (least legal hassles as well) or sell a few here at minimal cost to raise some money for our host, LearnNavi.

According to Marc Okrand of Klingon fame, the interesting thing si you can copyright a language as an entity, but you cannot copyright the words of a language. A rather interesting interpretation!

[Havazhyol]

One of the things that might enter the copyright is to use names (such as Khal Drogo).

[ingsve]

Anha lekhak Dothraki

I'm not really sure what you are trying to say here. We don't have the word lekhat as far as I know and my guess would be that the verb would probably mean something like "to lick". Or are you forming it as an agentive of lekh i.e. lekh-ak? That would mean something like languageer or perhaps one could use such a word to mean linguist.

I think a better way to say it is simply Anha astak lekhes Dothraki = "I speak the Dothraki language" or even Anha nesak lekhes Dothraki = "I know the Dothraki language". Or perhaps it would be better to use shilat or knowing a language. I have a vague recollection that that might be the case.

[Havazhyol]

My bad, I ran too fast...

[Hrakkar]

Anha lekhak Dothraki

I'm not really sure what you are trying to say here. We don't have the word lekhat as far as I know and my guess would be that the verb would probably mean something like "to lick". Or are you forming it as an agentive of lekh i.e. lekh-ak? That would mean something like languageer or perhaps one could use such a word to mean linguist.

I think a better way to say it is simply Anha astak lekhes Dothraki = "I speak the Dothraki language" or even Anha nesak lekhes Dothraki = "I know the Dothraki language". Or perhaps it would be better to use shilat or knowing a language. I have a vague recollection that that might be the case.

You posted what I would have posted if you hadn't!

I think nesak is the best word here because shilat is for knowing people specifically.

I very much like Anha astak lekhes Dothraki, but Anha nesak lekhes Dothraki is just as good. I thought about whether or not you really needed lekhes in the sentence. It can be omitted for bervity or readability on a T-shirt, but is otherwise fine.

[Qvaak]

Seems all discussions deteriorate into grammar/vocab nitpickery. I like it   

I think nesak is the best word here because shilat is for knowing people specifically.

I'm quite sure Ingsve remembers right and David has specifically said that knowing a language is expressed with shilat. Might be worth corroborating. I would have thought this has been discussed more than once, but if Ingsve remembers only just and Hrakkar not at all, it's probably been discussed only on some random IRC meet and well over a year ago. The translation on the vocab/dictionary would probably be better changed from "to know (a person)" to "to be familiar with".

I think Finns use neither information knowing (nesat (Finnish: tietää)) nor familiarity (shilat (Finnish: tuntea)) but know-how (devolat? (Finnish: osata)) when speaking about knowing a language. Nevertheless, if the general attitude is similar, you "nesi" the rivers of Germany when you can name then on the map; you "shili" the rivers of Germany, when you have kayaked them up and down a couple of times. You "nesi" a language when you can give a nice overview of it's phonotactics, word order etc.; you "shili" a language when you can effortlessly express yourself with it.

...so at least for me "nesat" would probably be exactly the right word. I'm not really even trying to get to "shilat" type of relationship.