Anha astak. Ajjin me samvae. Fini me?
"I speak. Now it is broken. What is it?"
It's a good wording and save for one little thing should be perfectly OK. And that one thing is that as I said earlier, I had doubts about
samvalat. Now that I have had some time to turn these ol' rusty cogs I call my brain, I'm nearly almost absolutely sure that
samva is indeed a very rare irregular epenthesis specimen. The discussion of why and how and what the heck I'll skip for now, and I think the thing is fully explained only in the backlog of IRC conversations, so I'll just recommend you to trust me on this: it's
samvat, not
samvalat, and thus would chance to conjugate back to
samva in the above situation.
Instead, let's explore the text a bit further. If not to make the text better, perhaps just to better understand, what choices are made in the text and what it exactly means. And here we get right back to
samva. There are three closely related verb forms available to us, and all work in one way or another. Above we used the simplest (well, it was the only one not in the dictionary and turned out to be horribly trecherous pest, so the simplicity can be argued, but as a general rule, these statives should be very dependable and easy to use and derive), a stative verb form of an adjective. This gives us "to be broken" in adjective-like sense, a bit the same as "to be green". So
me samva is close in meaning to "it is in pieces". If you think of the English version "it is broken" as a passivized version of "someone broke it", the sense is quite different.
A magician: "I put this glass in this pouch" *puts a glass in a pouch*
"I hit the pouch with a hammer!" *hits the pouch with a hammer*
"And look!" *pours glass shards from the pouch*
"Now the glass is broken!"This is the general pattern in which our sentence works. Change the "I hit the pouch with a hammer" to "I pour green paint in the pouch" and you'll get "now the glass is green" - the syntax works the same because "is green" and "is broken" are the same kind of stative expressions.
Now if we change our sentence slightly: "when I speak, it is broken" the stative would not make sense anymore. The stative does not inform us of any kind of change, does not describe any kind of occurence. It's just a note of a fact. "when I speak, it is green" does not make sense, we'd need "when I speak it turns green" or something similar. And the same goes for "to be broken"; we need to change it to "to become broken", "to break" and this is expressed by the verb
samvolat.
Anha astak. Ajjin me samva. Fini me? works, but
Anha astak. Ajjin me samvoe. Fini me? works too, and only changes the meaning slightly.
But
me samvoe means pretty much exactly "it breaks". That's a bit different from "it is broken". Can you say "it is broken" in the sense that it was used in "When I speak, it is broken"? Yep, you actually can. We have the third verb form,
assamvat, "to cause to break" (which can be in English expressed with just "to break", but this is actually English craziness: don't expect such freedom in Dothraki). So "I cause it to break" is
Anha assamvak mae, and when we remove the
anha and subjectify
me through passivization, we get
me nem assamva, "it is broken". Thus
Anha astak. Ajjin me nem assamva. Fini me? might be a bit clumsy and over-complicated, but it's also probably the most literal translation of how "I speak. Now it is broken. What is it?" is usually understood in English.
