My part of the translation relay: Padraic to Christophe

        So that's the poem I received from Padraic (along with an
interlinearization and a little crash course of Kernu):

y h-uchelcoises in ceint le tenne
li peidn l'ardhea im mys la munzien
y ghreidhes li uesvri in guthlych l'alodea
la canta =91na oreil lor ndeuor?

        And that's how I destroyed it :) (kidding of course):

Linsin kufan lezu,
Jemnon sejfibo-lag nesaj izu|lebi ge,
Lezulinan Dodapa djolaj,
Lezedun plisesif ezve|si ige.

        And sent it to Josh Roth (who got problems to understand Moten :) ). I a=
m
the one who changed the question in an affirmation (well, not really an
affirmation, rather a supposition). A 'smooth' translation in English (at
least as smooth as my English is) would be:

When the little bird sing with greatness,
When the "artist of the river" clears its feathers in the mist,
When the songbird glorify the Even Star,
Maybe the "reigners" can hear their song.

        "Artist of the river" (jemnon) is a metaphor for some kinds of birds wit=
h
long legs that live near rivers and lakes. "Reigners" (plisif) is another
metaphor that applys to gods or celestial beings. 'Jemnon' is an everyday
metaphor (it's really the way you name most big waterbirds in Moten).
'Plisif' is created for the poem. In fact, there are no simple ways to na=
me
gods or God in Moten, it just lacks the words. So many metaphors are used=
,
depending on which nuance you want to give.

        Here are the comments I sent him:

        Just some comments about Moten (if you read my translation of the Babel
text, I think you don't need much help):
        - the word order is consistently SOV, but OSV is not unfrequent.
        - verb conjugation is periphrastic, with the use of two auxiliaries
        (agem:  to have, and atom: to be).
        - declination consists of three cases: nominative, accusative and=20
        genitive, which are used also with impersonal forms of verbs to make the=
=20
        conjugation.
        - don't forget the rule of non-redundancy. As it is not easy to explain,=
=20
        just tell me if you didn't understand what I said of it in my other=20
        post.
        - Moten is written with the roman alphabet, with only four new letters:
        |s and |z, which are the affricate counterparts of s and z, and |l and
        |n which are the palatilised counterparts of l and n. The other letters
        have their IPA values.
Don't forget it's a poem, and poetic licence is strong in Moten (for
instance, using nominative instead of accusative for the object of a
sentence, if the subject is already put before it, or lack of 'atom' as a=
n
auxiliary,or concatenation of a substantive and it's postposition - alway=
s
showed by the presence of a hyphen - , or personification - when a word
becomes a proper noun, the definite article disappears-).

        And some interlinearization and vocabulary:

        A little interlinearization to see what is what. My abreviations are:
Nom: nominative,
Acc: accusative,
Gen: genitive,
S: singular,
P: plural,
e: definite infixed article,
Inf: infinitive,
Par: participle,
Rad: radical of a word,
pref: prefix,
vaux: auxiliary verb.
pres: present tense.

Linsin kufan    lezu,
NomS   pref-Rad Rad

Jemnon sejfibo-lag nesaj izu|lebi ge,
NomS   Rad-Rad     NomPe Inf-Nom  Rad of vaux

Lezulinan Dodapa djolaj,
NomS      NomS   pref-Inf-Nom

Lezedun plisesif ezve|si ige.
AccSe   NomPe    Par-Gen pres-vaux

        NOTE: genitive participle + agem =3D may, maybe

I used many compound words, creating them poetically (so their meaning is
not always transparent) or metaphorically. I let you guess their meanings
(the context of the Poem should help you). The following list contains th=
e
radical of the words (and not of the compound words but of their componen=
ts):

apa: star
di-: temporal prefix (moment with the nominative, duration with the
accusative,
        frequency with the genitive)
dod: evening, night
ezet: to hear, to listen
ge: to have (auxiliary verb)
ibo: air
jem: brook, river
ko-: means prefix ("with", "by means of")
lezu: to sing, song, to chant, chant
linan: bird
melag: inner part ('in' as a postposition)
naj: feather
-non: artist suffix (example: esesi: poetry -> esesinon: poet)
ola: to glorify
plis: to reign, reign
sejf: to confuse, confuse
-sif: actor suffix (roughly equivalent of the -er suffix in English)
-sin: diminutive and affective suffix ("little", "dear little")
zu|leb: to clear up, clearing

        Well, that's all. Just tell me if you want more explanations (I know the
poem in Moten is pretty ambiguous, but that's exactly what poetry is in
Moten).

                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.ht=
ml