Re: Not, I repeat, this is Not a Translation Exercise...

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Padraic Brown wrote:

> Now that I have your attention :) a fellow conlanger, who is not
> subscribed to the list, has asked the Latinists and Romanticists of this
> August Body to give a go at translating the following:
>
You have my attention, but I want it back when you're finished with it!

> "You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float on his
> back, you've got something."
>
North of Brechelch they say something like this:

Yno pod duger yn cafal a ll'ag,
One may lead  a  horse to the-water,

mai se yno pod ffagerllo a ffluthar ingwers,
but if one may make-him  to float   on-one's-back,

yno a-* alch gos.
one has some thing.

I couldn't find a suitable idiom for the last line despite an afternoon
spent browsing through the dictionaries so I defaulted for the tried and
true.  This possibly fits acceptably into Brithenig as a calque of Welsh
'mae rhywbeth'.

* I decided that Brithenig needs a consonant to break up vowel clusters
like these but I haven't decided which one it's going to be.  I favour
using '-dd' in Brithenig because there is a little used sound change rule
that intervocalic yod can become -dd-.  Possibly using '-t' or '-d' would
be more natural for Brithenig's origins and history.  So I'm seeking
opinions.

- andrew.
--
Andrew Smith, Intheologus                       hobbit@earthlight.co.nz

        Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
        Light dies before thy uncreating word:
        Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
        And Universal Darkness buries All.
                        - Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book IV.