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Re: CHAT: Relays, Link 1

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 22, 2001, 18:53
On Wednesday, August 22, 2001, at 08:53 AM, Jesse Bangs wrote:

[YHL]
>> I for one would *love* feedback on how clear my notes on Czevraqis >> were to Jesse, frex. I have this sinking feeling that either the >> language is still too simplistic, or I wasn't clear enough. Jesse? > > Actually, I thought everything was pretty clear, though I would have > liked more explanations in the vocabulary. You never gave the meaning of > the roots from which some of the verbs were derived, and if I rememer > right most of them were not in the root pattern. (I'm using all of the > wrong terms here, but I hope you know what I mean.) And there was one >
<wry g> Yes--unfortunately, I couldn't figure out a way to give "roots" in the 48 hours I had and still have the translation be possible. (If my turn hadn't come when I was moving out of Ithaca perhaps it would have been a different story.) The main problem is that each morpheme accumulates a "constellation" of meanings. I think of the verb as the "base" meaning, but the *noun* forms can be pretty unpredictable. In a separate post I'll list *all* the constellations for your amusement. Also, I've revised the language since the relay <making a face> so I'll give you the older forms.
> place where the interpretation of a verb depended on the interpretation > of the verb's arguments, which was interesting with an active language. > I think I got it right, though, and it wasn't all that difficult. >
<interested look> There was? Huh.
>> God, yes. I felt fortunate in that Relay 1's text (as I got it) was >> particularly suitable to mashing to fit into the conculture. =^) >> And I was sitting there generating vocabulary like mad. I didn't >> expect to *need* some of those words for a while....<G> > > :-). I think I only had to make up one word, the word for "bargain." > But now, looking at the original texts, I'm not sure how that concept > worked its way in <<chuckle>>. This makes me think of another process > distorting the translations in this game--lack of vocabulary. I only > create new words when I absolutely have to, and so I sort of stretched > the meaning of a few things to fit words that I already had. >
Interestingness! :-) I looked at this as an *excuse* to extend the vocabulary, but then, Czevraqis is relatively "young" in that regard.
> And Irina Rempt wrote: >>> I made a "scribal error" in my part. I accidentally copied a word > from >>> line two in line three, so that instead of saying "I found a word", > it >>> said "I found it in the wilderness". Oops. :-P >> >> That's probably the phrase that I translated as "I am deep in the >> forest" :-) > > Aha! I knew there was something about a forest in the version I got, and > I'm quite amused to see that a "scribal error" is responsible for it.
<rueful look> Actually, Daniel's version (which I got) *didn't* have a wood/wilderness, but it had bunches of stuff about (near as I could figure) an "inhabited realm." However, in adapting the text to the conculture I (re!)inserted a wood, since there is a forest associated with the particular god. STRANGEness! <G> YHL