Re: Korahamla lives!

En réponse à Amanda Babcock <langs@...>:

>
> That's Babelfish for you :)  In Azak, they translated "-oj" as "-
> agenda"...
>
?!!! :))

>
> Hmm, if you're not paying attention and drop a syllable you could be
> off
> by a power of ten - bringing the dangers of the written form to the
> spoken...
> and imagine someone trying to say "1,000,000,000" and getting lost in
> the
> zeroes :)
>
No danger, because there are suffixes for tens, hundreds, thousands and ten
thousands. So for instance 1523 (example taken straight from my webpage :) ) is
rendered by the suffix: -um-idud-ush-epas-ud-ipes: -3-10-2-100-5-1000.

>
> :(  Babelfish is not very helpful :(
>
I would have been surprised of the contrary ;))) .

> In the section on overdeclination, it has stuff like:
>
>               lineva|n mojesu  : the leg of the bird.
>               linevea|n  : celui/celle of the bird.
>               bvaj linean  : your bird.
>               bveaj  : the tien/la holds.
>               koga ipe|laj itos linean  : the bird which I see.
>               koga ipe|laj iteos  : celui/celle/ce that I see.
>
> which does not make much sense :(  I don't think it can handle /'s :(
> Does it mean that by adding the definite particle to a genitive, you
> get
> "the something of the X", like when we say "mine" for "my thing"?
>
Exactly! 'linevea|n', for instance, means simply: "the one of the bird", "the
bird's one", and 'koga ipe|laj iteos' means "the one I see". Indeed, the fourth
example parallels your comparison: 'bveaj' adds the definite article to 'bvaj',
the genitive of 'ba': you, and thus means 'yours' (le tien/la tienne in French.
Strange that Babelfish cannot even translate this basic vocabulary...).

Of course, those nominalised forms are inflected for their case in the
sentence, so there you see the appearance of the overdeclination (for instance,
the accusative of "yours" would be 'bveda|n', accusative being marked by a '-d-
' in front of the last vowel and a '-n' at the end of the word, and the
sequence '-jn' becomes '-|n' /J/, while its genitive - yes, why not? ;))) -
would be 'bvevaj', genitive being marked by the infix '-v-' in front of the
last vowel and the suffix '-i' which disappears after 'j'. Of course, this
genitive can be further nominalised by adding the definite article, giving the
form 'bveveaj': "the one of the one of you" :)) . There's no limit to
overdeclination in Moten!).

> Further down, I particularly like Babelfish's translation "The
> prefixes
> Mo and di- get busy to specify the space or temporal direction cases."
> :)
>
LOL. Strangely enough, I'm under the impression that the quality of Babelfish
*decreases* with the years :(( .

> (Then after the bivolugen, Babelfish just gives up...)
>
Its only right decision ;))) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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