Re: Insult (jara: Weekly Vocab 8)

* Jan van Steenbergen said on 2003-05-23 16:12:13 +0200
>  --- John Cowan skrzypszy:
>
> > My favorite insult:  "Your parents were brothers!"
> > ObConlang: in Lojban, that's "lo rorci be do cu bruna lo te rorci be do".
>
> Mmm, not bad. In Wenedyk I would say: "Twie parze~cie jara~ wraczy!"
It wouldn't be much of an insult in any of my concultures... hard
to find good insults for them, but here goes:

You: sounds like an insult directed towards one person, singular 2nd person:
    û: 2nd person singular

Parents: it's an insult, so no point in using the polite or endearing forms,
    thus |faì|. The species of the insulted is unknown, so it is safer
    to use the paucal/default plural than the dual, thus we get
    faìin: parent -paucal

Brothers: few words have any form of implicit gender in Taruven.
    "Sibling" is |þan| or |nan|, male kan be marked with |du-|, so
    duþanan: male- sibling -dual                                or
    duþanin: male- sibling -paucal                              or
    duþanen: male- sibling -true plural... nah, can't be right

And now for the hard bits: parenthood is an abstract concept, but the parents
themselves certainly aren't, so I'll probably get away with:
    û te faìin: you with your parents, you and your parents... better:
    faìin te û: same as above but emphasizes the parents more...

Ugh, "x is y", I'll chicken out (semicolon: short pause):

faìin te û; duþanin     "those parents of yours, brothers!"

or even

faìin; duþanin          "parents, brothers!"

or maybe, with a vocative

ÿû; faìin; duþanin      "hey you! parents, brothers!"

Conculturally speaking, if one of the parents was a herm or a
chooseable herm it is perfectly possible that they were, in fact,
brothers. Incest (though more between full-siblings than half-
siblings) is frowned upon, but homosexuality isn't, generally.

If the parents in question were "hadara", a sub-species of the
Gven, them being brothers would explain why the insulted person
was one of an even amount of siblings, as hadara-'males' has
children in fours (unless tragedy strikes), while the 'females'
has them singly or in fives, usually. Weird lot, the hadara.


t.