Sunday, 20 March 2011

Translation exercise

There was a translation exercise on the Conlang List. The challenge was to translate an ambivalent sentence LOVE PEOPLE COOK THEM TASTY FOOD. So where do you put the punctuation? Is it Love people, cook them tasty food; or is it Love people, cook them! Tasty food!

Reminds me of when it was my turn to cook in a shared flat. If it was late people would come up and say Feed me! And I would reply What to? (Hmmm, a language where transitivity must be marked with an embedded tag....)

Anyhow I was away from this terminal while this thread was active. Conlangers are as flighty as elves! I planned to post something here. I'm following a trend established by Mia at Teliya Nevashi on the Conlang Aggregation List.

The first sentence would be: Liamú liudí! Pachú duoní pachí-pachí kapenalhí. Love-IMP People. Cook-IMP good-PL cooked_dishes for_them-ACC.

And the second sentence: Liamú liudí! Pachúlhí! Douní pachí-pachí Love-IMP People. Cook_them-ACC. Good-PL cooked_dishes.

I'm not moving any faster in creating the declensions of the pronouns for this language. It looks like the language uses -lhí as an enclitic for 'them'.

Also there doesn't seem to be a single word for 'food'. I considered using âkuhí which means 'eats'. Then I realised that pachí-pachí which means 'cooked or prepared dishes' would work better.

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