Re: (CHAT) Re: weekly vocab

>"My god, the duchess is pregnant, and no-one knows by whom."
[Doubled vowels are long. 'c' = /k/. 'y' = (rounded) vowel.]  Veldan doesn't
have a precise equivalent for duchess or most of the rest of the European
noble titles, as the power structure is much flatter.  So, there are a couple
of ways this could be translated:

Diewei! Apraigenet i Tara, ce agnaat uutanys cuidussu.

Or, one might use 'Senserca' (patrician woman) instead of 'Tara'
(highborn/well-placed woman).  Note that both translations unavoidably carry
a slightly different flavor than the English: 'cuidussu' is in the
Prepositional case (the old Instrumental case, still usable independently in
this way), thus the sentence carries the connotation that the lady in
question was the active party, unlike how I read the English, in which the
duchess is passive and has been acted on by someone else.


Cian
http://www.self-owner.org/~cian/conlang/veldan.html