Re: TRANS: Happiness

On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 14:41:32 -0400, Muke Tever
<alrivera@...> wrote:

>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 Tirelhat: "Dimavai mè maviat da kezatakai mi."

dima  -vai    mè  mavi -at   da keza-ta  -kai mi
locate-INTENT OBJ happy-ness *  seek-DEON-NEG it-OBJ
"If one intends to locate happiness, one should not seek it."

*da is a sort of topic marker used with conditional clauses.

That's how it would be translated in the current version of Tirelhat. But
I've been redesigning the syntax and morphology, and I don't know where
it's going to end up. Perhaps something more like this:

mavi -at   m -dima  -va,    m -keza-ta  -ka -i
happy-ness it-locate-INTENT it-seek-DEON-NEG-IRR

(DEON: deontic, IRR: irrealis)

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