Re: Challenge to puzzle-lovers: Vampire dialogue from "Blade"

Padraic Brown wrote:
>
> One thing I notice is 3 if clauses that share little in common.
> Either the 'if' element is part of some other part of speech, or
> they do not have if clauses in the way we do (in Engl). Two of
> them seem to have an -AZ element. Perhaps you could work from
> that.
Maybe they use a special "if" mood?

> PROTO is an interesting word, as it seems to have two divergent
> meanings. Perhaps some semantic drift happened, yielding the
> meanings of 'spirit' and 'nation'.
I could see that.  The Spirit of the People.  Or maybe _proto_ means
"blood" or "spirit", and Vampire is _proto lukchano_, with _lukchano_
meaning somethign like "drinker of"?  Or maybe _proto_ means just
"blood" and La Magra is "Redani proto", Redani = God?  Maybe the last
sentence is somethign like:
Redani Proto uchanu,     siznu  praga  umporta, umpanuwa
God    Blood will-awaken twelve of-the spirits
IIRC, this was in a religious setting, so perhaps _umpanuwa_ is a
formulaic word, like "amen"?  Or maybe it means something like
"slaughtered", but was dropped from the s0ubtitles?  (I.e., "The
slaughtered spirits of the twelve will awaken La Magra")

Maybe u-/o- is a plural morpheme (oranta orastu = human politicians?)

> Perhaps UM- for blood? UMFALAT "pure the blood"; UMPANUWA "blood
> deity"?
Could be.  Interesting that they'd use a different form in English than
in Vampiric, e.g., _La Magra_

But, _umfalat_ occurs at the beginning of the sentence, while the -az
element is in the second half.  If _umfalat_ is "pure-blood", then that
would mean that the "if" part of that sentence comes first, which would
mean that -az cannot mean "if".

My guess:

Krat pru chir    -i   busistam-pol prot -o   l-ukcha -n      -o,  Frost
You  are disgrace-acc nation  -dat blood-gen pl-drink-one.who-gen Frost

Yacht-u   spul    -i   lit  -u -a
Peace-gen document-acc break-if-we
Treaty = lit. Peace document?

Ochach planik-a  dura sahaz -do
If     gather-we in   number-[a case]

Mab-o -chach-i   mat-i         a    o- ranta o- rastu      prakaritsa
Our-pl-life -acc difficult-acc very pl-human pl-politician will-make
I don't know why it's not _umati_, irregular form?  Perhaps a suppletive
plural, or Vampiric has more than one way of forming plurals.

Umfalat poskani krat kodobrank -u,  chahaz kalinka paskoldzo
Pure    Race    you  be.part.of-if, to.you this    would-be-clear
Accusative is not used with _kodobrank_, "be part of"

Sik -a -lu    pala   tat     kapro Blade
Have-we-inter enough trouble with  Blade
Accusative is not used with _sik_, "have"

Redan-i   prot -o   uchanu,     sizn  -u   praga   u -mporta u -mpanuwa
God  -acc blood-gen will-awaken twelve-gen of.the? pl-spirit
pl-slaughtered?

I can't figure out a possible translation that would use all those
words, perhaps a word was left out of the subtitle, "The slaughtered
spirits of the Twelve will awaken the Blood-God", or maybe, since this
was, IIRC, in a sort of religious setting, _umpanuwa_ is an archaic
evidentiality morpheme, Modern Vampiric having lost it.

Plural is l- before vowels, u- or o- before consonants, um- before /p/
Genetive is -o, usually, either _yachtu_ is an irregular form, or a
mishearing (or I'm way off ^_^)
-u is "If", I don't know why the third used _ochach_, maybe that's an
alternative, perhaps with a subtle difference.
First person plural is -a
Second person singular has no ending
Third person singular doesn't seem to have an ending
Only one example of third person plural, so its impossible to isolate
any possible morpheme, maybe -tsa
-i is accusative
-pol is dative
-do is an unidentified case
Pronominal possessives are prefixes (or unstressed words)
Krat has a suppletive dative, chahaz
Cases are not always semantically determined
Modifiers generally seem to preceed their heads, except in Redan Proto,
but that may be a fixed form
Word order is pretty free
Two future tenses appear, there don't appear to be any specific
morpheme, but perhaps there's more than one future morpheme, used with
different verbs.

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