Re: Daily translation 9/28/2000 - catching up

> "In quarelling about the shadow we often loose the substance."
I haven't done any of these yet, so I figured it was time for me to get on
with it, since it is a very good exercise.  I'm having to make up
virtually all of the words for this one (I hate trying to build
vocabulary), but here's the idea:

Lupaweon thokosa anielu ala namawa nieru.

Lupa-w-e-on        thok-osa    a-ni-elu
Fight-HAB-INF-ABL  relate-DAT  GEN-the-spirit

ala nama-w-a      ni-eru
we  lose-HAB-ACT  the-flesh.

Lit:  By fighting (habitually) about the spirit, we lose (habitually) the
flesh.

Interesting stuff:
The phrase "by fighting" is rendered as an infinitive in the ablative case
(which has instrumental usage), and the preposition "about" is a so-called
"compound preposition" in Yivrindil.  The compoud prepositions are formed
with the dative case of a noun followed by a genetive noun, where the
genitive noun is the "object".  I used "spirit/flesh" instead of
"shadow/substance" for this translation because to have translated it
literally would have resulted in a non sequitur for Yivrindil speakers,
since "shadow" and "substance" wouldn't seem to contrast.

>
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"All for the sake of paradise, the tyrants of our generation stacked
bodies higher than Nimrod stacked bricks, yet they came no nearer heaven
than he did."  --J. Budziszevsky