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

From:andrew <hobbit@...>
Date:Thursday, July 15, 1999, 8:24
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.