Re: RELAY INSTRUCTIONS!!! was Re: new relay

The reason for the glossary in the Relay is simply to give English
equivalents for your conlang's range of meanings for the given word.
Let's look at a previous example, the Kerno word "kenams" - its range
is 'old gnawed bone', 'bone sucked of marrow', 'Christmas Feast',
'knuckle bone', 'cobble stone', 'dice'.

I'd be breaking the rules if I said to the next translator "of these
meanings, the one intended in the text is 'bone sucked of marrow',
even though 'Christmas Feast' looks like it would work much better in
context." I'd be within the rule if I simply listed the range and left
the translator to come up with her own conclusions, even though she'd
probably choose the obvious (but wrong) meaning.

As far as compounds are concerned, very frequently the meaning is
quite different from what one might suspect from putting the two (or
more) components together. You'd be well within the rules to list the
compound as a single word with its various meanings in English. You
can certainly break the compounds down into their constituent bits.
This won't help or hurt the next person. Bardocuclos is composed of
bardo- (bard) and cucullo- (hood); it can mean "official toga worn by
a bard" or "cassock worn by a British priest". It never means "hood
worn by a bard". I'd simply list the word and the two acceptable
meanings and probably not bother with what the two bits mean.

Words that change meaning based on gender can be handled by adding a
gender tag in the glossary. For example, in Brithenig, cas (f) =
house; cas (m) = cheese. The glossary might look like:

        CAS, cheese (m), house (f)

It will be up to the translator to pay attention to the clues given in
the text (what article is associated with the word - lla or ill?) and
in the interlinear. I think it would be unfair in this Relay to leave
out that kind of information. [When we get around to the Rosetta Stone
Challenge, this sort of thing will be fair game!]

Padraic.

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001 bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:

>What would break the rules?
>
>For example, consider a langauge that makes a lot of compound words and
>gives them different meanings according to gender.  First consider the
>compound word situation:
>
>"cupboard".  Today, my wife uses "cupboard" as a direct synonym for what
>I call a "cabinet".  She does not say it to mean "a board upon which cups
>are set", since she has used "cupboard" to refer to things that have
>neiter boards in their construction nor cups in their use.  So, would I
>be breaking the relay rules in my glossary to go:
>
>cupboard:  cabinet
>
>Or would I have to do this:
>
>cup:  small vessel for holding liquids
>board:  plank
>
>But give no meaning for "cupboard", even though it is distinct from the
>agglutinated meanings of "cup" and "board" in current usage?
>
>
>And what if the language is even stranger than English.  Suppose there is
>a language that says that /bav@n&nT/ is "fool" or "trickster" in one
>gender "foreigner" in another, and "someone who worships the Evil Gods
>that arrived here but a generation ago" in yet another?  Am I supposed to
>give all meanings without noting which belongs to which gender?  If I
>noted which meaning went with which gender, would that break the rules?
>