Re: Simple translation exercise?

I started out with the translation of the first line of a poem - getting in at
the deep end, I suspect - GK Chesterton's Confessional:

Now that I kneel at the throne, O Queen,

E liyhita, ara naatai eyatnaa teia itay taap-harenai.

The word |liyhita| - "midwife" translates "Queen", but then Lakhabrech are a
matriarchy - with women about 6 foot plus, and men about 5 and a half feet
plus, a la crocuta crocuta (spotted hyena) - so I figured it all came out
even.  "kneel" was translated |naatai eyatnaa| - "I bend my knee"; |teia| is
before, and it is a stative preposition, it doesn't take the |-ti| (dative
plus whatever else) ending, because that |-ti| usually indicates movement;
"throne" came out as |itay taap-harenai| with the second person singular
possessive suffix, |itay| being the usual suspect for "house", "dwelling" and
|taap-hare| representing "ancestor", "beneficial spirit" - the "ancestors'
house". the "spirit house" is the centre of the village and for the Liyhita
serves as the seat of judgement, as well as the place to propitiate the
postulated anger of ancestral spirits and - occasionally - to appeal to the
Sun and the Sister-Sun for aid in case of famine or plague.

It was all downhill from there - scrub and patch, patch and scrub, until I had
a fair idea of how they would've spoken.

Wesley Parish

On Sat, 14 Jun 2003 15:06, you wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 21:48:53 +0100, Ian Spackman
>
> <ianspackman@...> wrote:
> >I am hoping within the next few days to be at the point at which I can
> >begin writing some simple sentences in Early Modern Holic.
> >
> >The weekly translation exercises, however, would be a but ambitious to
> >start with, it seems to me.  Does anyone have any simple texts (basic
> >vocabulary, nothing terribly complex syntactically) I might try to
> > translate?
> >
> >(I can of course always make something up, but it occurred to me that such
> >a thing might have already been useful to someone on this list.(
>
> I usually start out with things like "The cow jumped over the moon" or "The
> quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
--
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."

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