Re: Once upon a time

Jamets the curious wrote:

>A correspondent recently asked me how one would write 'Once upon a time...'
>in Jameld; as yet, I haven't settled on a suitable idiom.
>
>Are there equivalent expressions in your conlangs (or natlangs, e.g.
>Norwegian «Det var en gang» ['there was a time'])?
As with the "c'era una volta" in Italian, I think I'd translate that
as "there was once ...", since "once" = "one time" = "en gang". If
"gang" were our subject, we'd expect a sentence structure like:
"There was a time when...". But what we're actually expecting is
something like (I'm mixing my Scandinavs here): "Det var en gång en
pojke, som...", "Es war einmal ein Knabe, der...", "There was once a
boy who..."

As for Géarthnuns, it goes for the "mukashi mukashi" form of
Japanese. "Irfust" means "once" referring to a time in the past (eg:
"There once was a man from Nantucket..."). "Ferü", a synonym, means
"yore, once". Thus, "írfust ferü" (/irfust' fEry'/), "once once" has
become the Géarthnuns formulaic equivalent of "once upon a time".
There is also a "transcendent" tense marked by the auxiliary "lü"
which would mark the first sentence of such a story, followed by the
past tense for a while, but then reintroduced at the storyteller's
discretion (in written form, it would probably be the first sentence
of new paragraphs) to continue giving the story an "eternal" feel.
You couldn't use "lü" in absolutely every sentence; to a Géarthçins,
it would feel like putting an exclamation point at the end of every
sentence, and life is rarely that exciting. (There was once a man! He
was wearing a green hat! He walked down the street! He bought a
newspaper!" (See what I mean?) So to go back to our original example,
in Géarthnuns:

Irfust ferü sö zotöbs lü...
once once a boy did...
Once upon a time there was a boy who...

Wow, one of the few times the Géarthnuns is actually shorter than the English.

Kou