Re: Two Valdyan folk songs (was: Hildegard's List)

This is absolutely lovely, Irina!  Thank you for sharing that with us!
I love the notion of the left hand and the right hand designating
fiction and fact... Valdyan is obviously very developed, and we
would appreciate seeing more of its grammar on your pages
some day.

I really like it when I see you all writing poetry in your conlangs.
I find it very difficult to do in Teonaht, partly because there isn't
enough vocabulary, and I find myself making up "poetic"
alternatives to words that don't fit--whatever rhyme or rhythmic
scheme I've concocted..

Looking through my old scrapbook, I've stumbled upon one
of the only rhyming poems in Teonaht I've written:

Manttef celly hal htamolin        mahn-TEF che-LEE hal THAM-oh-lin
nehhtelralin zydonelnar.            neh-THEL-rah-lin  zee-DOH-nel nar.
Ynnehil hea no to feld               ee-NAY-hil HAY-ah NOO to feld
takkrema trel mrolyzamar.         tah-KRAY-mah-trell  roh-LEE-zah-mar.

Internal and end rhyme:  it means roughly:

        come into, my children,
        (my) fields, forests.
        Here (is) country enough for you
        land of lord of brightness.

Grammatical rules have changed a little bit since then.  I guess
_ynnehil_ means "here," "this";
a poetic word I've forgotten.  It's so marvelous when you rediscover
something you've
forgotten.

I hope my mailer doesn't screw up the composition.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html

Ah Lord, what to do with this great material?
When will these long boards and planks
Become a joined thing of perfect beauty?
                                        "The Shipwright,"
                                        Old Irish poem.


Irina Rempt wrote:

> It actually comes from a little folk song, one of the very first
> things I wrote in Valdyan:
>
> Ni farean dorythe samea na pulay
> Ni salnea dorythe samea na pulay
> Ni parien dorythe brusean na brusay
> Ni lhaye, razie, isamea na trisay.
>
> Don't pick the fruit too green
> Don't pick the fruit too ripe
> Don't smoke the pipe too joyfully
> Don't wantonly, lad, steal the two fruits.
>
> It's meant as a jocular warning to a young man: all things in
> moderation, and hands off the girls until you're sure you mean it.
>
> _Brusen_ "pipe" and _brusa_ "to smoke" are derived from _brus_
> "hemp", the only thing smoked in Valdyas until very recently when
> _faranre_ "herb-south", tobacco, was imported from overseas. Most
> people think _faranre_ is only fit to exterminate lice.
>
> _Lhaye_ literally means "left(-handed)" and is used to express
> something "not for real"; fiction is supposed to be written with the
> left hand, facts with the right, regardless of the actual handedness
> of the writer. The most famous book of folk tales, collected by King
> Vegelin the Great's historian Mailei Halla in her old age, is called
> _Mailei Hallei rainei lhayi gylsin_, "the Book of Halla's Left Hand".
>
> The form of the song is called _hanleni halsen_ "starlings' song",
> after a very old instance of the genre, generally thought to be the
> very first:
>
> Hanleni halsen varyenan laynat
> Daysinen verein idanla le listat
> Havien hinla laziena forat
> Culea rachleni arlea a chalat?
>
> The song of the starlings speaks of heroic deeds
> In the morning rain the heron does its laundry
> In the night the lark worships the stars
> Who sees the true nature of birds?
>
> When I published an article about this song in a a conculture
> magazine, I misspelled the first line as "... varsinen laynat",
> meaning "the song of the starlings says that I'm lying" :-)
>
> The lark traditionally doesn't sleep, but flies above the clouds at
> night. Its name _hinla_ means "high-bird".
>
> _Hanleni halsin_ tend to have a rather plaintive melody, in a minor
> key. It has four lines, usually rhyming aaaa, each with four feet; a
> foot consists of two or three syllables, at least one long and one
> short, at most two long and one short. All combinations of two or
> three long or short syllables within those limits are permitted. A
> syllable is long when it contains a diphthong or a long vowel (only
> in southern dialects; long vowels have been shortened or
> diphthongized everywhere except in the south) or a vowel followed by
> two or more consonants in the same word. The last syllable is usually
> unstressed; this is a result of the SOV-ness of Valdyan which makes
> the last word of a sentence usually a verb with an unstressed ending.
> This rhyme scheme might be very boring if it were not for the
> penultimate (stressed) syllables being different and livening it up.
>
> There is a song about King Vegelin the Great (Vegelin II, the
> greatest king in history) modelled on the _hanleni halsen_. It has a
> great many stanzas (and more are constantly being made up by the
> travelling players who use the song in the folk play "King Valain and
> the Witch", which is about the battle for the throne between the king
> and his sister-in-law) all ending with _duyen anin Valain tay valan_
> "when our lord Valain was king"; _Valain_ is a "familiar" and
> slightly irreverent form of _Vegelin_, showing that the people who
> made the song really liked their king.
>
>    Irina
>
>                ira@rempt.xs4all.nl (mailing list address)
>                      irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
>      http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/frontpage.html (English)
>     http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)