Yay
I get to do my thing. Which is, I'll comment on the Dothraki.
Old lyrical text is usually hard to translate. If the original text uses unnatural word ordering, incomplete sentences, dated expressions, subtext or rich metaphores, should the translation strive to replicate that, and how do you make similar effects without just making the translation grammatically broken and patently incomprehensible? It must be admitted, though, that easily translatable text is hard to come by. Natural dialogue with all the incomplete sentences, slang and fixed expressions is hard too. And as far as Dothraki goes, so is anything with modern vocabulary.
Jif ershe okeo vo vineserat
Should old friends be forgotten
Ershe should be fine.
Okeo should be OK too. You could make educated guesses about 'to forget' -
enesalat perhaps - but I like you simply going with
vo +
vinesarat.
Now, with these words "I don't remember old friends." would be
Anha vo vineserok okeoes ershe. Adjective after the noun it modifies (as always), the verb conjugated and nouns and the adjective in appropriate cases (I hope). As it happens, the adjectival agreement is not explicit, and neither is the plural of "friends".
"Old friends are not remebered." is passivized version of the above sentence: the information about who does the not-remembering is discarded. Dothraki does passives in its own interesting way with a particle
nem and with deceptively active-looking syntax:
Okeosi ershe nem vo vineseri. Now the plural is explicit but the verb does not show the negative grade. Fun, eh?
The hard part is the "should". Apparently this is just a rhetorical question. I think we can assume that questions can be used rhetorically the same way as in English. However, simply fronting jif should not work (generally expecting to turn sentences into questions by fronting auxiliary verbs is expecting a lot).
Jif is an auxiliary-verb-esque particle like
nem, and though not too well undertood, serves a very limited role. I think "Old friends should not be remebered." would be
Okeosi ershe jifim vo vineseri. (
jif +
nem is probably
jifim) and turning that into a question would simply require
hash:
Hash okeosi ershe jifim vo vineseri.
vo dirge azhat
no thought to give
I think we can get a lot closer to "and never thought of" (is that a desired translation?) than that, but let's examine it anyway. It's unclear, how this would tie to the sentence above, so we have essentially a sentence fragment, and those tend to be vague. I think the basic idea might maybe work, though.
Vo dirge seems sensible and probably needs no inflection here (accusative is the same as nominative and plural is categorically not marked). Using verb infinite might work too, maybe, but you might need to use it as if it were a noun, IMHO, turning this perhaps into
vo dirge azhataan. That might be interpreted as "There are no thoughts for giving," or something like that. Or something not like that at all. An alternative try would be to use a noun
athazhar instead.
I'd go with
Majin nem dirgi avvos, which should be roughly "And thus never be thought of." There's room for second-guessing my choices on that, but I'd say overall that's a closer and safer direction.
haji ershe kashi
Because of old times
Ya. This should work, I think. Just put the adjective to the right place again and decline
kashi as
haji requires:
haji kashoon ershe.
Followup questions?
