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Happy mother's day

Started by Hrakkar, May 08, 2014, 12:10:06 AM

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Hrakkar

Is this a fair attempt?

Layafat Maj asshekhqoyi - Happy Mothers Day

Or should Layafat be simply Layaf here?
Don't tell Khal Drogo I am here ;)

Qvaak

QuoteLayafat Maj asshekhqoyi
if you change from *maj to mai you get something like ~ "to be happy a birthday's mother"
"Birthday" is probably not the best word choice overall, I think we've usually used vitteya for celebrations. So "mother's celebration" would be perhaps vitteya maisi and more literal "mother's day" would be of course asshekh maisi - or perhaps as one word vitteymai or asshekhmai.

Then there's the question about what to do with layafat, and if the layaf is a good word choice. We've seen such words as vezhven and davra used for days, but layaf is more antropomorphizing than those. Day and celebration are abstract concepts. We don't really want them to be happy; we want people to be happy during them. That's probably no problem, but could be. I think more often than not these things are just transfered, and happy day is a day that's happy to the people living it. But there are other possibilities. You might speak of a day that's not "happy" but "happyfying" or you might use weather like sytaxes like "day on which it's happy"
Anyway, we have three proven syntaxes, and those are ones you'd expect, too.

Davralates asshekhi yeri! - "Your day be good!"
Anha zalak asshekhqoyi vezhvena yeraan! - "I wish for an excellent blood day for you"
The latter is shortened to Asshekhqoyi vezhvena! - which sounds like "Birthday is exellent!" but actually is interpreted more "[have an] Exellent birthday!"

So is layaf works and we decide to approximate "mother's day" with vitteya maisi (I'd like to try with a compound word, but I'm afraid the spelling and irregularity of mai might confuse the declination), we get two pretty sure choices:
Layafates vitteya maisi yeri! [outch. This would actually really ask for the compound]
Anha zalak vitteyi maisi layafa yeraan! [better]
And it's pretty safe to hope that the shortened Vitteyi maisi layafa! might be interpreted in a desired way too. In a way it's even a bit less confusing than Asshekhqoyi vezhvena!, as the genitive case is apparent.
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