Re: CHAT: TRANS: something slightly more deep (was: TRANS: flutes)

On Sun, 6 Feb 2000 14:57:30 -0500, Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:

>yl-ruil wrote:
>> And God said "Let there be light"
>
>Ku fasagátas tiDikáu "Tisafáil pizikaffá"
>Ku  fa-saga'-tas   ti-Dika'u "Ti-safa'i-l                 pi-zikaffa'"
>And past-say-3SRat G1-God     Opt/Imp-come.into.existence G8-light
>
>Pizikaffá means light in the abstract, an actual light itself is waziká.
>
>Took me a while to figure this out, since there's no verb for "to be",
>but then I remembered safái.  Among the Kassí, the Deity is considered
>female, hence the use of the female gender, ti-
In Tirelat, I didn't yet have words for "God", "be", or "light". Clearly,
the absence of "light" is just an oversight that I hadn't got around to
needing yet, and it would have been easy enough to just make up new words
for all three concepts. But then I got to thinking that one of the more
interesting things about conlangs is not only the unique words they have
(like "tezn", a transparent plastic ball for small animals like gerbils to
run around in), but also the deliberate *gaps* in their vocabularies. It
should certainly be possible to write about God without using the word
"God". I could probably come up with a phrase that would be suitable for
this particular sentence. But really what I need is a phrase that would be
appropriate everywhere that "God" is used in the Bible. That constraint
makes this a bit tougher as a translation exercise.

For now, I'll assume that "nairunajahr" ("everything-create-person") will
do as a translation of "God".

Te se nairunajahr ladalan, "Gavikai me hriv!"
[tE s@nai4una"Zar_0 lada"lan  gavi"kai m@"r_0iv]
te  se  nai-       runa-  jahr   lada-la-  n    gavi- kai me  hriv
and AGE everything create person say  PERF NARR exist may PAT light
..., and the creator of everything said, "May light exist!"

This would be a good opportunity to point out some relatively new
developments in Tirelat syntax:

What used to be, tentatively, the nominative and accusative cases, are now
definitely Agent and Patient cases. Intransitive verbs are divided into two
categories, one that takes agents and one that takes patients. In other
words, Tirelat is an "active" language, or in Thomas E. Payne's terminology
it exhibits "split intransitivity".

Tirelat also now has obligatory evidential marking. In this case, clearly
no one was around to observe whether or not there was a being matching the
description of God who said those words (since, according to the story,
humans were created later). So it's not direct observation, hearsay, or
even inferential, which leaves ... ? I decided that Tirelat needs a
"narrative" form, which basically makes no claim one way or the other
concerning "truth", but presents the sentence as "fact" for the purposes of
the story.

--
languages of Kolagia---> +---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
      Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
   (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
   moc.oi @ rellimh <-/  there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin