Re: TRANS: Happiness

In a message dated 10/20/01 2:32:45 PM, alrivera@ALUMNI.SOUTHERN.EDU writes:

>I, for some unknown reason awhile back, found myself on another mailing
>list
>with short quotes or whatever daily translated into many languages at once.
>And was thinking, may as well do some translations for translations sake.
>And then someone wanted to know why there wasn't any translations anymore.
>So spurred, here's some translations of yesterday's line:
>
>"To find happiness, one should not seek it."
In Eloshtan:
ese wiyify we egzefyec. /'ESE 'wIjIfj wE 'EgzEfjEs/
happiness seek.NEG.INF in-order-to find.INF.DAT.3
(to not seek happiness, in order to find it)

wify is "to seek," -fy being the infinitive ending (which is seeming like the
right way to
express proverbial statements like this). -iy- is the negative infix here.
egzefy is "to find", and just for some lost etymological reason, you have to
say "find to it" instead of "find it," so that's why the object is expressed
with the dative ending.

(Incidently, I'm thinking of doing away with all capital letters in Eloshtan,
as in Inuit [at least as it's presented in one book I have], that's why the
sentence above has none.)

Hmm... just realized an ambiguity! "Happiness" could be seen as the subject
here, since I didn't specify its role, to mean "happiness should not seek, in
order to find itself!"
To be more clear you could insert "joc," the accusative postposition, after
"ese."

Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html