Today is my birthday once again; I’m now 34 years old. Since there are no snappy songs associated with the number 34, I think it’s about time for me to stop announcing my age… (Well, except Charles Barkley’s number was 34 on the Suns). I received a nice gift from a fellow conlanger, Andrew Gerber, whose tales from Mongolia helped to inspire a number of Dothraki terms (including the separate words for wet and dried animal dung!). He sent me a card he wrote in Dothraki…
…and in Mongolian:
Veteran Dothraki speakers might spot a few errors in the first message, but give him a break! He’s still learning. I thought it was pretty good! As for the Mongolian, I have a hard time even pronouncing it (Mongolian’s use of Cyrillic is…unique). Wildly impressed how fluent he became in three years in Mongolia with the Peace Corps!
Now to business. It is time for this year’s Dothraki haiku competition. This year I’ve decided to throw a twist into it. We will have the haiku competition in Dothraki, as usual, where the prize will be the coveted Red Rabbit (Mawizzi Virzeth), won all three years by the amazing Qvaak. Will this be the first year he’s dethroned?! Be interesting to see if we get any from Living Language Dothraki users this year! (Though it’ll be understandable if there aren’t any: It’s only been out about three months.) Anyway, that competition will run per usual (rules at the end of this post). What I’m adding this year is an official High Valyrian haiku competition. It will not be for the Red Rabbit, but for some separate prize of my choosing (I haven’t decided yet). This way the different languages won’t be in competition. There will be separate rules for the Valyrian entries, so pay attention to those at the end. Feel free to submit one of each.
But before all that, here are my haikus for the year. First, Dothraki:
Lajaki laqi
Achrakh ozokhi she yash
Glas rayim rissa.
Words that may not be available in there: yash is “air”; ozokh is the corpse of an animal; and rayim is like ray, but also passive. Now for High Valyrian:
Hūro gō
Tubī kȳvana
Pryjassiksi.
A new word here is kȳvanon, which means “plan” or “strategy”. (And I think tubī works for the meaning I intend. Don’t you judge me! It’s my birthday!)
All right, this year’s challenge words are niqe, “stiff”, for Dothraki (take note of the rules regarding epenthetic vowels below) and gevives, “beauty”, for High Valyrian. Now here are the rules, reposted from years prior:
Guidelines
For the purposes of this contest, a haiku is 17 syllables long, with the syllable counts for each line being 5, 7 and 5, in that order. If you need to fudge, go for it, but I will weight exact syllable counts more highly..
Also (and this is important), since this is Dothraki, we are definitely going by syllable count, not mora count. Regarding syllable-counting, in Dothraki, a syllable is defined as a vowel plus one or more consonants on either side. A syllable cannot contain more than one vowel, which means that a word like kishaan is trisyllabic, not disyllabic.
If it helps, you may or may not contract the various prepositions that contract. So, for example, mr’anha (two syllables) is the usual way of saying “inside me”. For your haiku, if you wish, you can separate the two out, i.e. mra anha (three syllables). You can also drop purely epenthetic e vowels (so the past tense of “crush”, kaffe, can be rendered as kaff’). Feel free to play with word order and drop pronouns, as needed, bearing in mind that such language is figurative, and the reader will still need to be able to figure out who’s doing what to whom.
For Valyrian: Long vowels count as two mora, and a vowel with a coda counts as two mora, but a syllable will not have more than two mora. So a long vowel plus a coda consonant will still be two mora, for the purposes of the poem. If you can’t do the poem using mora, do it with syllables, but I’ll weight those done with mora more highly. This will make it more like a real Japanese haiku. If you need a particular word in a particular number/case combination or a verb in a particular conjugation, please let me know and I’ll give it to you.
Addendum: Rising diphthongs count as two mora (i.e. ae and ao); falling diphthongs count as one (e.g. ia, ua, ue, etc.). Also, word order is certainly freer in poetry than it is in everyday speech, but the rules about adjectives still apply (i.e. you use the short forms if the adjective appears directly before the noun it modifies; otherwise they’d take their full forms). And, finally, word-final consonants are extrametrical. Thus if a word ends in -kor, that counts as one mora, not two.
Shieraki gori ha yerea! Fonas chek!
Should they be submitted here as comments? What’s the tubis morghot?
Yep!
So pryjassiksi is syllabified as pry-jas-si-ksi? Would pry-jas-sik-si also be admissible?
No. Ts, ps and ks are all onset clusters.
Would one of you Dothraki maesters be willing to check this for mistakes?
Khal vezhven akka
laz drivo ki zisoshi
kash me vos villo.
Blekh! And could someone with admin rights correct the botched formating in that post?
I just noticed I didn’t supply an English translation for that.
Even a great king
could succumb to a mere scratch
when his wisdom failed.
javrath aranas
fansa zin fredrilates
yer chir chafaan
Dothraki newb hoping that’s intelligible!
For the sake of my HV haiku, how do you say “like” in the sense of “similar to”? Also, how do you say “to seem” or “to appear”? Thank you!
Hae is a preposition that means “like” and hēnka is an adjective. As for “to seem”, you use vestragon at the end of the clause with an unstated, impersonal third person singular subject (essentially, the subject is the previous clause). If it needs to seem to someone, use the dative for that argument.
So ‘gevives’ counts as three mora
regardless of the following word? And the wiki says it should be ‘pryjassiksy’, is this correct?
Yes, and no. You never have a final -y like that in the indicative. Those only come after the o‘s and u‘s of the subjunctive.
Does this hold true for all tenses that have an unrounded vowel as the penultimate vowel? Because then I think the wiki has the passive indicative 1pl and 3pl wrong in all cases. I changed the entry for the aorist though.
No, those -y finals are exclusively for the subjunctive. Root vowels don’t affect it at all.
And does this vowel harmony thing apply in the other direciton? E.g. is bardussi or bardussy the correct form?
Again, exclusively the subjunctive.
how do you say “to need” in high valyrian?
Jorrāelagon—same as “to love”.
Looking forward to participating!
Your Dothraki haiku is interesting. Two very different but equally annoying smells!
I am guessing that ozokh is inanimate, but what about yash? (interesting word!) And by passive, rayim would be an auxillary verb that means something like ‘has been’?
I am having cataract surgery in early February, which will create a fair amount of ‘down time’ for me. I am thinking that might be a good time to do some serious work on the wiki and dictionary!
Yash is also inanimate. And, yes, rayim could mean “has been”.
I’m sorry to hear about your surgery.
I hope it goes well!
I have some questions about the intended meaning of your Valyrian Haiku, David. Is it okay to discuss interpreting your haikus here, or should that be done over email or something? I don’t want to spoil the fun of others figuring it out themselves.
Nope! That’s fine. That’s what the comments are for.
Here’s my contribution. I may submit something else in the future, especially if this has any mistakes (if so, please let me know). My goal was to use only three words.
Īlōnde
jorurnessī
geviverre
which should translate to ‘We continue to see ourselves in all beauty”
Here’s my guess at the meaning of DJP’s Valyrian haiku:
Ha! That’s a much fancier translation than I imagined, but it’s actually “the day’s plans” and just “under the moon”.
Incidentally, what’s “sweet” and/or “taste” in HV?
Dōna is “sweet”. Sylutegon is “to taste”.
And what is the syntax? Kesor rōbir dōnirī sylutes? Dōnor? Dōnāpor?
Likewise, if sylutegon is “to taste” as in “to have a certain flavor,” how do you say “to taste” as in “to perceive a flavor” or perhaps “to investigate the flavor of something?” Is it maybe *sylugon?
Maybe the equative? Rōbir dōnāpor sylutes?
Incidentally, if you use the equative to say “as good as Y”, what case is Y in?
http://wiki.dothraki.org/High_Valyrian_Adjectives#cite_ref-2
No, sylutegon is transitive, not intransitive.
So does it mean “to taste (a flavor)”, or does it mean “to have a taste like (accusative complement)”?
Meaning it refers to the transitive English verb “to taste (i.e. detect or sample the flavor of something)”, rather than the intransitive “to taste {like|of} (i.e. to have a flavor similar to something)”?
I mean, in not every language is the latter intransitive! Cf. Latin Hoc fīcōs sapit, Canadian French Ça goûte les figues “This tastes like figs.”
Given its etymology, a meaning like this just wouldn’t make sense.
Given rȳbagon “to hear” > ryptegon “listen to”, I guess sylutegon would have to mean “to sample”, whereas sylugon is “to perceive a taste”. We still don’t know how to say “the fig tastes sweet”, although I guess rōbir dōnāpor syluks could work…?
Oh, and is daor allowed to count as one or two syllables, given its different possible pronunciations?
Oh, I guess if you’re doing syllables, rather than mora, yes, absolutely. Whatever you need to make it fit!
D’oh, I somehow thought it would reduce to a single mora, but the diphthong remains in any case. Too bad.
Another question: If I’m addressing an entity in the collective, and I’d like to speak of one of its properties, what possessive pronoun do I use? Aōha or jema? (Please say jema!)
*jeva
Actually, meanwhile I’d rather use the 2sg pronouns with a collective addressee…
Aōha.
No problem! I used the paucal instead of the collective after all.
Okay, so Zhalio’s translation and the response largely answered my questions about the meaning of the haiku, I think. My current interpretation is as follows:
Sort of “plans of mice and men” sentiment. I know this is not at all a pretty translation, but do I have the meaning basically right?
Previously, I was erroneously thinking that pryjassiksi was exclusively second-person, and thus meant something like “we strike!” This made it quite hard to figure out what was happening to the plans…
I’m still uncertain, though, why pryjassiksi is passive? Is it just to make it four mora instead of three? Or is there a difference in meaning that you wanted to bring out?
I actually rather love the use of locative in tubī. It imparts a clarity of meaning that the genitive would not have (“day’s plans” in the sense of “plans from the day” rather than “plans that the day made”).
Lastly, and more simply, I missed what a coda is in this context. Are they just those word-final t’s that tend to be dropped in spoken Valyrian?
Apologies for the lengthy post.
Thanks a bunch!
Well, I thinks it’s passive because the plans are the ones being broken. It’s probably something like this:
Under the moon
the day’s plans
are broken
Ahhh, yes, of course! My mistake. My understanding of passive voice was flawed – I knew what it sounded like, but had somehow missed something about how it affects the meaning of the verb. So, I’m pretty sure your translation is accurate. Thank you, Joel!
Alright, in the absence of answers from either David or Justin, I worked around my questions and came up with a slighly less-elegant-than-intended but hopefully legal double haiku in HV:
Qringevives
yne sȳngus daor,
Rōbrissi!
Relgot ñuhot
Dārenka jeme
ynot kessi.
If anyone sees a grammatical or metrical issue, please tell me.
And the corresponding English haiku:
Your unsightliness
Doth nothing to deter me,
O figs, fruit of gods!
Upon my palate
adorned in kingly splendor
you shall seem to me.
Of course, I had to make up a lot of extra things to say to fill out the English version. There is maddeningly little room in a HV haiku!
So… I’m pretty sure this is unusable in a haiku, but I’d love to know if it’s the correct word for the intended meaning:
jorrāeliarzājun
My intent is that this be the Paucal Substantivized Superlative of the Aorist Passive Participle of jorraeligon, and thus mean something like “those few whom I love most.”
Assuming I derived this correctly, how many more is this word? I get between 9 and 12, depending on how I count, but the consonant clusters, the “āe” sequence, and recognizing codas and when syllables begin are throwing me off…
It is indeed correct, and it is indeed 9 mora. Wow! I never would’ve thought of using a comparative or superlative with a participle (I couldn’t think of a reason), but there it is! Very clever!
Looks about right. I count 9 morae.
Could you give us some HV interjections (to use like Japanese kireji)? Say, something that works like “alas”, “oh”, or “ay”?
I don’t know what you’d need, so I really can’t anticipate. Vējose means “by fate”. That’s a thing. You could always put whatever you want in the vocative. That’ll take you a long way; plenty of things to invoke.
I think what leoboiko was hoping for was a bunch of innocuous one- and two-mora words that could be used to fill out an almost-full line in a haiku. It’s exceedingly difficult to find something below three morae. It’s how I ended up with all these redundant personal pronouns in my haikus!
Yeah, exactly. Japanese haiku have these words that are almost contentless, except that they just add emotion—comparable to English “alas!” “oh!” “ah!” and so on, or even to punctuation (they’re often “translated” as colons or em-dashes, and are sometimes described as “pronounced punctuation”). These work very often as filler-words, to complete moraic counts. But, now that I thought again about it, perhaps the whole concept is just too un-Latinate to apply to HV. I’ll just work harder in coming up with something properly valirianesque, and simultaneously reminiscent of Japanese haiku poetics (season-words; cæsura; juxtaposition of “elegant, literary, ancient” and “wordly, clever, here-and-now”; cultural allusions, et cetera).
It may not be so Latin, but it’s VERY Greek.
I just have a question about changing a verb to an adjective.
How do I change the verb ‘iderēbagon’ which is to choose/to select into the adjective ‘chosen’? I am trying to say ‘it is chosen’ so it will from what I’ve gathered be ‘____ issa’.
Thanks!
Just turn it into a participle (see here). I believe it’d be iderēpta, right?
Thank you! That certainly looks right.
Do you think you or someone else could further explain to me how to count the moras?
This is my haiku thus far, without counting the moras and modifying it to fit the rules:
Gevives aōhon
Iderēpta issa
Ābrar Bē.
Assuming I’ve done it right, that should translate to:
The beauty of yours
It is chosen
By the people.
Thank you!
Danny: These lines have 7, 8, and 5 morae, respectively.
Aōhon and iderēpta don’t agree with gevives; they should be aōhys and iderēptys.
Bē governs the genitive, so it should be ābraro. In any case, ābrar bē might be misleading — it could be read as “by the women” by default…
Oh, in this case, I’d just use the passive, not a passive participle. It’d be iderēbaks (or, for the aorist, iderēbiks).
But shouldn’t iderēpta mean that the people chose something for the beauty, rather than the beauty itself?
Oh wait, I stand corrected:
—I had thought that the subject of iderēbagon in the passive was the beneficiary of the selection, but only just now I notice that Aeri is not, in fact, the subject. Duh.
I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work… on the wiki, it says “+acc: the person for whom the thing is selected (this applies even in the passive)”. So who is the subject of the passive form? The thing selected, after all? Or would you have to add the oblique applicative a second time to shift the dative object into the accusative role so it can be targeted by the passive…? Rōbir Aeri jiderēbaks “A fig is selected for Aerys”?
Well, I just edited the wiki right after posting it. I don’t think you can add an applicative prefix more than once, unless the verb has been entirely relexified, which does not seem to be the case here.
Now, our examples only show us Vala rōbrȳti Aeri iderēbza and Aeri iderēbaks, but yes, now having realied my previous error, I would in fact assume that if the subject is explicitly stated, it would be Rōbir Aeri iderēbaks. That is, the recipient of th selection is in the Accusative in both the active and the passive.
But you’re right, there is a problem still, namely that iderēbagon takes the dat of the thing selected, and the acc of the recipient selected for. This would be why I got confused and thought it was *Aerys rōbriot iderēbaks. But unless there has been a catastrophic copying error somewhere along the line, this does not appear to be so.
These are my haikus… Feel free to tell me if you find mistakes in grammar and/or mora count.
Laehossa
bantī gevives
jēdro gō.
The other ones are:
Iosr’ issa
se sōnar māzis.
Skoriot ilā?
Vīlīpti
nēdenkirī.
Ērinti.
Se pikīptan
Raqan lua tembī
Se geviar udra.
Translations:
Your eyes,
beauty in the night
under the sky.
It’s cold
and winter is coming.
Where are you?
We fought
bravely.
We were victorious.
And I read
The pages I love
And beautiful words.
NOTES:
∙I don’t know if elision (iosr’) is allowed in High Valyrian, but it’s poetry so let’s say it works.
∙I didn’t use gevives in the second and third haiku… But that’s just the challenge word, right? Right?
∙As for the geviar in the fourth haiku, I decided that instead of using gevives I would just use the adjective it came from (assuming I’m right), gevie. Is that cool/correct?
In the fourth haiku, that lua should be lī, which breaks the mora count. So yeah, forget that one!
Yes, gevie is indeed the correct adjectival form! Nice!
How would you say “to look” (as in looking at something intentionally at a given moment) and “to loose” or “lost” in HV?
Jurnegon for “look at” or “regard”. “To lose” is ojughagon.
Hi! I will dress up as a Targaryen warrior at our pre-school-leaving ceremony. On that day, we wear costumes and march along the thown, we call this event: graduating of fools (or something like that, in Hungarian: bolondballagás). So I tried to write a short speech is Valyrian, and I want to know if it is correct. I won’t show you first the translation to see how understandable is it. (Sorry for my bad English
Here it is:
Nyke Aegon hen oktiot Westerot iksan. Blénon bé mázitan sesír jemo naejot ióran, zóbrié se melé gelté Lentro Targário. Tubí mittyro gero tubis issa, tolvys hae mitty’ keson lenton mázílis. Kesor jédar ílo syt kelíles, sepár qopsa jéda rhaenilza, qopsys tubin mázílzi, konys ílva ábrari verdilzi. Yn sír, biarví manaerátás, kirimví emátás!
Thank you and greetings from Hungary!
I made some corrections according to my abilities (no guarantees that it’s correct though):
This is how I interpreted your text:
The only speculative and/or controversial part is ābrenkāves, which is think is think is more fitting for ‘humanity’ in an abstract sense, since ābrar means something closer to ‘humankind’ as a collective of people. We have nākostōbāves attested in HV (with the final vowel of the adjective lengthened) and pihtenkaves (< *piktenkāves) in AV, with the final vowel preserved (in contrast to HV gevives < *gevie). But it could just as well be ābrenkaves or ābrenkves.
Best of luck with the speech!
Actually rhaenagon means “to meet,” so I would expect sepār qopsa jēda īlōn rhaenilza, “And a hard time will meet us (will begin).” Otherwise, it’s great! Good luck with the speech!
Good that you pointed that out! Though the one example we have is Sūbroma tubis rhaenin, which literally means “I meet my day with tea”. This makes me think that saying sepār qopse jēde rhaenili, literally “and then we will meet hard times”, is the more idiomatic way of saying it. But maybe it can be both.
Thank you for your help, you have tranclated it very well!
Here is the meaning of my Hungarian speech in English:
I am Aegon from a city of Westeros. I came upon the mountain (our secondary scool is on a hill), and now I stand (I’m standing) before you, in the balck and red helmet of House Targaryen. Today is the day of the fools’ walk (or march) , everyone will come in this building as a fool. *
This year will end for us, and a hard time will begin. Some hard days will come and determine our life (future – I mean hear the final exam).
*But know celebrate, be happy (and have a good time)! *
*This is our last day here, with our mates (brothers) and teachers (masters).
*We have to be brave, carefully, wise and have to work hard.
*Enjoy your time before the great mission (task)!
The lines after the asterixs are extra sentences, just come in my mind, but I can’t translate it. And as you can see it, I had some problems to express things like school, dress, march, colour, exam…. and I feel the paraphrasing make the whole thing a bit ununderstandable.
Hey! Is there anybody?
Do you know any phrases for exam, school, clothes?
Okay, seems I misunderstood one of your sentences. This should be a more fitting translation, with the vocabulary we have:
Qopsys tubin māzīlzi se īlvon māzilarior glaeson iderēbilzi.
Some hard days will come and determine/select our coming life.
The other sentences:
Kesy īlvys tubis mōrī issa, raqirossi āeksyssī. Nēdenka sagon se kostōbirī jollōragon īlo bēvilza. Īlve jēde manaerātās rōvo gaomilaksrio gō!
This is our last day here, with our friends and masters. We have to be brave and study determinedly. Celebrate your time before the great mission!
These are all my own coinages, i.e. non-DJP approved.
School: jollōrion, literally ‘study place’
Clothing: ñepety, lierally ‘a sewn thing’
A march (as in walking): memennon (< memēbagon)
Exam: could be likened to a trial, which is iderenne/iderennes/iderennen (it is not known which).
That last sentence would be better as:
Rōvro gaomilaksrio gō īlve jēde manaerātās!
Here’s another entry for the HV contest. Corrections more than welcome!
Ñuh’ ērina —
Dōnykta ynot
Rōbrirzi.
“Oh my victories —
how much sweeter is your taste
than all the world’s figs.”
Actually, let me avoid that unsightly elision and the merely speculative ērinon. How about this instead:
Ērinagon
Dōnykton ynot
Rōbrirzi.
“Hard-won victory
How much sweeter is your taste
Than all the world’s figs.”
Actually, given that the verb stem is ērin-, I guess the noun may be ērinnon rather than ērinon, which would make for an even better first line than ērinagon (if it were correct).
It could also be ērinarion, in parallel to obūljarion. The mora count works out either way.
It is, indeed, ērinnon.
Just out of curiosity, why not obūnnon (obūljagon + -non) or onnon (< *oba + -non) then?
I don’t know. Why anything? The fun thing about High Valyrian is that there are a variety of ways to say the same thing. Any time that happens in a language, the various meanings are used variously. Why “takeoff” and “landing”? Why not “taking off” and “landing”, or “takeoff” and “land”? For whatever reason, one sticks and one doesn’t. The difference between High Valyrian and English is I get to decide what sticks.
If more people use it, that’ll change, the way it does with language, but I like obūljarion; I don’t like obūnnon. Plus, it makes more sense, since the basic meaning of obūljagon is “to bow”.
Trying out some new ideas… How would you say “both” (as in ‘it’s both good and bad’) in HV?
Well, Latin uses et bonum et malum, and at least in some cases the Romance languages have followed suit. Perhaps HV allows se sȳrior se qubor issa? (Of course Latin actually has a huge number of other ways to phrase that, and it would be cool if HV had multiple options as well.)
You’d use the double coordination strategy (i.e. se plus the final-vowel lengthening of the second element).
So, more like τε καὶ, except the other way around!
Thanks a lot! I would need another phrasing for my haiku though. What I’d actually need is ‘both’ in a context where the parts of speech (in this case, adjectives) being coordinated are already mentioned, and therefore just referred to. Also would be really helpful to get a way to express ‘either’ and ‘neither’, both when the “cooordinatees” (not familiar with the grammatical term) are explicit and implicit. What I’m aiming for is to say ‘perhaps it is both, or neither’.
My best sketch right now (it’s the second haiku of three) is
Gīmin daor
Kostilus lantra
iā daorun
i.e.
I don’t know
Perhaps it is (both) the two (qualities)
or nothing/none (of the two)
Oh, and please say iā is two morae and not three! It is a falling diphtong after all…
No, there’s nothing that’s three mora, and iā is one syllable, as a falling diphthong.
The way you did it (with lantra) is good. However it looks like you’re missing an “is”, aren’t you?
Hm, iā being only one mora is troublesome for me. I know it’s a falling diphtong, but wouldn’t it be pronounced with a long a? It seems strange that to me that e.g. ā is two morae but iā is one mora.
But if this is simply the way it is, could I get away with lengthening the last syllable of the following word for coordination? E.g. below iā perzenkā? Or is there some compound with iā and another conjuction I could use, similar to sepār? I’m quite pleased with it as it is, so I’d like to avoid completely rewriting it.
Anyway, here is the whole thing, with a non-haiku translation in English.
Zaldrīzero bē
Parklōñe
iā perzenka;
skorion issa?
Gīmin daor
Kostilus lantra
iā daorun
Yn otāpan
lo mirre drēje;
gevivāzmus!
On Dragonkind
Like flesh
or like fire;
which is it?
I don’t know
Perhaps both
or neither
But I think
if either is true:
what great beauty!
Oh, and I omitted the copula not one but two times. Let’s call it poetic licence?
Based on this exchange I believe that iā is two morae.
I said one syllable, not one mora.
It should of course be gīmion daor. Thanks for the clarification on iā.
What is the meaning of *pikagon (or the root pik- seen in pikībagon)? Also, what is the etymology of AV pihtenkave (HV piktenkāves, probably)? Are both questions as related as we anticipated? Thank you!
What is the word for ‘crown’ in HV? Thanks!
Pāletilla.
Also, in case I haven’t noted it before, all words that end in -illa are aquatic, not lunar.
You have, and it has aroused much curiosity. The fact that pāletila looks like it’s from pālegon is interesting. Is the r of averilla historically a t as well?
Does -illa perhaps mean “product made by {verb}ing something?”
Avero is “grape”, if that helps.
So then do we say *tōmilla “elderberry wine,” *prūbrilla “cider?”
Just a random thought: if pāletegon is the eventative of ‘to turn’ in the sense of physically turning something, the maybe it could mean ‘to smith’, since turning and folding the metal over and over is a big part of smithing. So pāletilla would essentially mean ‘a wrought thing’.
That seems very far-fetched. I would rather think that pāletegon is “to twist”, and pāletilla simply means “wreath”.
But how does that work? Would it decline with -illr- in all forms, or would ll be deleted with compensatory vowel lengthening, giving -īr-? Or is it -irr- or even -illar-?
The accusative singular for example: pāletillri, pāletīri, pāletirri or pāletillari?
I just realized that there is pēlar, which I suppose would decline as pēlr- since you haven’t said anything else. So if I have to guess, it’s probably the first option.
What? No, it ends with -a; it declines just like vala. It’s aquatic, though, so it takes aquatic agreement (with adjectives).
Oh, I see! That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the quick replies
While in the spirit of asking a lot of questions, is there a way to express movement into something in HV? I guess you’d use va, but what case would the noun be in?
I started working immediately on new haikus. Hope you like these ones. If you find any mistakes in grammar and/or mora count, let me know!
Embro gō
Embar kesir
Dekossa rizmot
Vūjissis
Gēlenkon
Embār glaeson
Dōnon ynot
Vestris hae
Dōnot averoti
S’ynot morghon
Tolmiot jagon
Se morghūljagon.
Kesir jaelan.
Kirine iksan
Yn iosre tolī
Embro gō
Yn skoriot iksan?
Kempr’ iēdro gō
Gīmion daor
Yn sparos iksan?
Zōbrȳr embro
Gō nyk’ ilan
Ñuhor lōgor
Ojūdan embrot
se qrimbughen.
Translation:
Under the sea
This sea
Kisses my feet
In the sand
Like silver
A life in the sea
Would be sweet for me.
It seems like
Sweet grapes
And death to me
To go far
And to die.
That’s my wish.
I’m happy
Although too cold
Under the sea
But where am I?
Under this heavy sea,
I don’t know
And who am I?
I lie
Under this dark sea.
I lost
my ship in the sea
And I sink/drown.
Notes:
∙I missed copulas here and there. But, yeah, poetry. Nothing to add.
∙Once again, elision (nyk’, s’, kempr’) is common.
∙I don’t know if my use of vestragon as “to seem, to be like” is correct. Feel free to correct me
∙I used ojūda- as the perfect stem of ojughagon. Is that correct?
.Qrimbughegon means “to sink” of “to drown” in this poem. Pick whichever you like the best.
Oh. The first kesir should be kesor.
These are really quite nice, makes me think of this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMBTvuUlm98.
Just quickly: Yes, the perfect stem you have for ojughagon is correct. Also I’m adding qrimbughegon to the dictionary as “to drown”. Nice word!
“Qrimbugheta Vala” voktys hen Āegenko Tegoti issa.
«Sparos», limā,
«Rōbir angotas?»
— Nyke gōntan.
«Who», I hear thee wail,
«did bite this fig, mine by rights?»
— ‘Twas no-one but I.
How does one say “to turn into”? I don’t suppose pālegon works for that? Is there perhaps a word massagon, maziksan, etc.?
Valar iāris
hae jesot jelmiot
keso glaeso.
All men must needs fly
like dust in the fickle winds
of this vengeful life.