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

From:jesse stephen bangs <jaspax@...>
Date:Monday, October 2, 2000, 23:27
> "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