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

On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, J Matthew Pearson 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.

I would say KRAT is the 2nd person pronoun.

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 like the sound of LUKCHAN- for 'Vampire'; thus PROTO LUKCHANO
for 'nation (of) vampire(s)'.

Perhaps -A for a 1pl termination?

Perhaps UM- for blood? UMFALAT "pure the blood"; UMPANUWA "blood
deity"?

Just some thoughts... Good luck with it!
Padraic.

>  Krat pruchiri busistampol proto lukchano, Frost.
>  "You are a disgrace to the vampire nation, Frost"
>
>  Yachtu spuli litwa...
>  "If we break the treaty..."
>
>  Ochach planika dura sahaz do...
>  "If we gather in numbers..."
>
>  Mabochachi mati a oranta orastu prakaritsa.
>  "The human politicians will make our lives very difficult."
>
>  Umfalat poskani krat kodobranku, chahaz kalinka paskol(d)zo.
>  "You would understand this, if your blood were pure."
>
>  Sika lupala tat kapro Blade?
>  "Don't we have enough trouble with Blade?"
>
>  Redani proto uchanu, siznu praga umporta, umpanuwa.
>  "The spirits of the twelve will awaken La Magra [the Blood
>  God]"
I take it "La Magra" is _not_ in the same language as the Vampires
are speaking? They seem to use UMPANUWA for this deity.

>
>I have a couple questions:  First, does this resemble any
>natlangs you might happen to know?  I suspect that Prof. Fromkin
>did not base the vampire language on a pre-existing language, but
>I could be wrong.
>
>Secondly, does anybody want to take a stab at doing a
>morpheme-by-morpheme analysis of these lines?  I notice a couple
>potential repeated words and word-chunks here and there ("krat",
>"proto", "um-", "-ahaz", "-ni"), but so far these snippets seem
>pretty opaque.  If anybody has any ideas, let me know.  (Note
>that I'm not necessarily trying to reinvent Prof. Fromkin's
>original language.  I just want to come up with an internally
>consistent analysis of these lines, upon which I can base the
>language for the sequel.)
>
>Cheers,
>Matt.
>