Re: The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

Hey!

On Wednesday 18 August 2004 21:59, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:

 > First of all, I made a mistake [...]

:-/ You're not the only one. I discovered some mistakes and
a simpler way to express the "begins with" thing:

1. The subject to translate

     The man who removes a mountain
     begins by carrying away small stones.

2. The translation

     Ayonang sang le mangaiyà lorivanon,
     le pahiyà yelangieon ecivoye ciunanea.

3. The interlinear of the translation

     man.A REL TRG:P:ian move.3SG a:P.mountain.TRG:ian,
     TRG:P:ian remove:3SG stone.PL.TRG:ian PAT:ian.small.PL
     beginning.LOC

          A   = agent; ani = animate
          ian = inanimate; LOC = locative
          P   = patient; PL  = plural
          REL = relative pronoun; SG  = singular
          TRG = trigger

4. A rough translation back into English

     Man who moves a mountain,
     removes stones small in the beginning.

5. How to prounce the translation

     [ajo"nAN sAN le mANga"ia lo"4ivanOn
     le pa"hia je"lANgjeOn eki"voje "kiunAnea]

6. Conclusion

The solution with "in the beginning" is admittedly not as
elegant as using a verb, but it makes things lots easier to
translate. BTW, I used completely different words for "to
move" and "to remove". The first one means "to take
something to another place / to change the place", the
second means "to take away something". I am still not sure
if I should better write "yelangieon ecivoye mangasara" --
"mangasara" means "away", but as an adposition it would
require the locative case. Woohoo, so theoretically I would
either have to say "yelangiéaon" (stones.locative.trigger)
or change the marker on the verb, "le", to "léa" which
indicates that the triggered noun is both, locative and
patient. In Jörg's terms this is called "Suffixaufnahme",
isn't it? Another more favourable solution would be to
decide which marker is stronger -- the patient or the
locative marker. Up to now, I tended to give more power to
the second marker. This would leads us to "ea" instead of
"le" or "léa". This way, you would still know that "small
stones" is the patient of the action because IMO and AFAIK
locative objects cannot be agents, or more precisely,
cannot be in control of an action. So if I decide to
restrict the meaning of "pahao" from "to take away" to "to
take", the sentence would most probably render as "Ayonang
sang le mangaiyà lorivanon, ea pahiyà yelangieon ecivoye
mangasara ciunanea". I hate that Ayeri is (nearly) as
synthetic as Latin. Now that I understood how the relations
between languages develop, I think in a future offshoot
I'll make the language simpler and more analytic. Thanks for
reading all this rant.

And now I must correct my dictionary, too :-( Usually, I
forget to use the inanimate articles with inanimate nouns,
so I made this mistake in the dictionary as well.

Carsten

--
Eri silveváng aibannama padangin.
Nivaie evaenain eri ming silvoieváng caparei.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince