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Re: A Charyan Brothel Song in Teonaht

From:Boudewijn Rempt <bsarempt@...>
Date:Thursday, May 27, 1999, 6:43
>=20 > I'm trying the Teonaht version. The Charyan original > is a bit more difficult, and also I think a literal > translation would be at least... hm... improper for > the Dr=E1selhadh culture. But I'm not being a puritan > over here -- indeed the song made me realize my > Drasel=E9q dictionary lacked a few *very* important > concepts. >=20
Of course - the Teonaht poem is the exercise posed. I've now got a Dutch translation and will do a Denden one today. As for dictionaries - I once was interviewed on the radio about Denden and the interviewer was thumbing through the dictionary. At that moment I really wished I had translated the lexemes in question into Latin!
>=20 > > lamay-neran.men > > song-stroll.AMA >=20 > What does this mean? I don't get it. What's the master- > subordinate order? >=20
strolling-song, wandelliedje, wanderlied. There's a very fluid transition between compounding, noun-adjective relations, noun-stative verb and noun-verb relations in Denden, complicated by the fact that Denden is the lingua franca of a great many people, and the monuments of Denden that have come to us all exhibit in greater or lesser measure the influence of the authors mother tongue. Generally, though, the order is master-subordinate, while the sentence pattern is SVO.=20 _neran_ is a verb, which is qualified with <-men> AMA: that does not really mean 'lovingly walking', but rather that the speaker is in love with the adressee. _Lama_ means song, the diminutive suffix <-y(i)> DIM is used so often that I have _lamay_ as a seperate lexeme in my lexicon. <snip>
>=20 > _i =EDngiman n=E2vnimbal b=FCnd_ > "the one being sung a prayer to" >=20 > is unambiguous. (_b=FCnd_ =3D 3rd person common gender pronoun, > accusative and relative). >=20
What a beautiful construction! Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt