A Gzarondin lament

Hi guys,

I took my old conlang off the shelf this week. Actually I'm trimming it down,
curbing some wilder or unneccessary excesses and reducing the wordlist to
those that I like best. My latest version of the documentation is seven and a
half pages instead of ten, so I've snipped a fair bit.

I haven't read any conlang messages since the web version stopped being
updated (around the time of the egroups/yahoo merge), and I won't be sticking
around much now, but I thought I'd set my subscription to MAIL just for a
few days, to see how things are going.

What I really want to say is that I've composed a song in my conlang! The
beauty of it is that it's completely untranslatable, but I'll have a go.
Here's the first Gzarondin song, a lament for an unspecified departure.

  Renakk zeq, renakk zeq,
  Renakk zeq, renakk zeq,
  Ranyakk zeq, renakk zeq,
  Ronyakk zeq, renakk zeq.
  Ranyac zeq, ranyac zeq ot yy hlema?
  Ronyac zeq, ronyac zeq ot yy hlema?
  Ranyac zeq ot yy hlema? Renakk zeq.
  Ronyac zeq ot yy hlema? Renakk zeq.

Pronounce: r  = [r]
           kk = [X] (or maybe [x]: [X] is the wider, no?)
           eq = as in "air"
           c  = [S]
           hl = welsh ll (actually a seperate letter in alphabet)
           yy = as in "ye"

RENAKK ZEQ = "the going", feminine past singular vocative. A feminine abstract
noun derived from a verb refers to the /completion/ of the action, so this
phrase is a declaration that "the going" is complete, that it's over.

RANYAKK ZEQ is masculine, and refers to the beginning of the action. It is
also what can roughly be regarded as past perfect; essentially it's in an
earlier past. Likewise RONYAKK ZEQ is animate, and refers to the action as a
whole.

OT YY HLEMA = "when" (lit: at time what).

Thus, a reasonable translation:

  The going is happened, the going is happened,
  The going is happened, the going is happened,
  The going had begun, the going is happened,
  The going had occurred, the going is happened.
  The going had begun, the going had begun when?
  The going had occurred, the going had occurred when?
  When did the going begin? The going is happened.
  When did the going occur? The going is happened.

I think this shows that you can write a song even in the simplest conlang.
It's also obvious that the Gzarondin version is far more compact and elegant
than the English.

Adrian.

(Personal news: (1) I've moved house so I'm living by myself now, (2) I'm in a
development team at uni designing a graphical interface for a CVS system.)