Re: Trivial Translation Exercise

Christian Thalmann wrote:

>Inspired by a poster ad for cosmetics, which undoubtedly
>stole it from somewhere else:
>
>"You can't add more years to your life, but you can add
>more life to your years."
>
>Of course, this only works in languages where one word
>is used for both the content and the span of a life...
Yeah and I went and made that distinction in Rhean, which leaves me stuck. I
guess the same idea could be said with something like "you can't add years
to your lifespan, but you can add vitality to it", but that loses the play
on words:

U lai z'umu z'ulin de noc'an jamak ret.
to your lifespan-DAT years-ACC NOT life-ACC add-INF can-2SG

(de is a conjunction that negates what comes before it -- "X de Y" means
"not X but Y")

To keep the word-switching trick intact, you'd have to use the verb "living"
as a noun. Luckily the Rhean infinitive works that way:

U z'umaku z'ulin jamak mu ret, ak' u z'ulit o z'umak jamak ret.
to live-INF-DAT years-ACC add-INF NEG can-2SG , but to years-DAT OBJ
live-INF(-ACC) add-INF can-2SG

... which works and is grammatical but sounds very awkward for some reason.

M