Second verse.

I wrote:

> Dindi nu cumi sa daden.
> Derksed i, Utt-trisin,
> Gernadia madin,
> mazin evret Uret,
> Uttrediay
>
> Would you say it has any poetic merit, or what?
Evidently not. But now I have revised the second one too, and it came
out as follow:

Nankedi geven Gernada.
Given zingi sivi.
Furus aje frurat.
Farmut bedur i sa,
Uttrediay.

Nomagian-nom.pl kill-3p.past Karnantos-acc.sg
return-3p.past warrior-3p.nom defeated-pl
fear-stat.part.nom see-3s.past well-abl.sg
prominent-comp father-nom.sg be-3s.past 3s.gen

The Nomagians killed Karnantos.
The warriors returned defeated.
Fearful he saw it from the well.
He had a more prominent father,
Uttrediay.

In the 19th century, European trends had made a profound impact on
Urianian peasant poetics and end rhymes were becoming common. But
since Urianian unlike other western European languages maintains a
lot of inflectional endings, the end rhymes did not gain predominance
so easily, and especially in old songs you would still find some
remains of ancient poetics. And this song is very old, with
alliterations and internal rhymes as its main instruments. The
original dactylic meter is kept only in the first line, while the
others are reduced due to loss of syllables with the changes in the
language over the centuries.

I'm still not sure if I have the final version yet. Maybe I have some
revision yet to do before I can arrive at the version that Huizenga
collected. But it would be nice anyway (please!) to hear any comment
on how good and how plausible this sounds and looks.

LEF