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Re: (CHAT) Re: weekly vocab

From:Cian Ross <cian@...>
Date:Saturday, April 6, 2002, 20:54
>"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