Re: a King's proverb

In a message dated 6/15/01 8:55:20 AM, Guy.Wade@QTIWORLD.COM writes:

>This just came to me yesterday while listening to a news blurb about the
>US/Russian summit.  It fits perfectly with the story I am evolving:
>
>"Before you choose your enemy, speak his language."
>
>The surface meaning is practical.  Of course, this proverb is also full
>of
>deeper meaning: Choose your enemy wisely, understand him first, don't make
>an enemy that should have been an ally.  I haven't come up with the
>Canotaean translation yet, but I thought I'd throw it out for you all,
>if it
>pleases you to translate.  :-)
>
>Guy
Good advice! In Eloshtan:

Tec cafo mentelenes rri mrewenes tes mologosanoc.
(Speak his language, then choose him to be your enemy)

te.c    cafo   mentele.ne.s rri  mrewe.ne.s   te.s  mologosa.no.c
POS.3 language speak.SUB.2 then choose.SUB.2. POS.2 enemy.SUB.3

POS=possessive particle, agrees with possessor
2=2nd person
3=3rd person
SUB=subjunctive, used to make imperatives, as with the verb mrewefy, and it's
used on mentelefy because its just a hypothetical situation (which
imperatives are considered to fall under also)

"Rri" is used for if-then sequences and also before-after ones, with the
first chronological item placed before it, and the next one placed after it -
so I had to reverse the order of the English sentence.

"Mologosa" is the word for "enemy", a noun, but any noun in Eloshtan can be
used as a verb meaning "to be _noun_," among other things. Because of this,
possessives can occur before verbs - "tes mologosafy" means "to be your
enemy."

This translation looked simple at first, but then I found a problem - it
didn't seem right to talk about "your enemy" before this person actually
exists, since s/he hasn't been chosen yet. So I though I would just say
"speak an enemy's language, then choose him" (mologosa tec cafo mentelenes
rri mrewenesic) wthout using the word for "your," but that didn't sound right
either, because I was still talking about speaking the language of *someone*
who doesn't exist, or on the other hand you could even interpret it as
talking about a real enemy, but then you would wonder what you'd be choosing
him/her for - certainly not to be your enemy, since s/he already is.... So
anyway my final version starts out talking about "his/her language" - whose,
we don't know - but then we find out later, since we use the 3rd person
marker -c again to refer to the potential enemy. There is no ambiguity that
the enemy might be a different person then the s/he with the language, since
if it were it would have the 5th person marker -ll. (Cafo, "language" is the
fourth person.) So basically I got around talking about a hypothetical noun
by making it into a verb, which, unlike nouns, can be put into the
subjunctive.

Josh Roth
members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html