Re: "How are you", in different languages?

E. Notagain jarhiosh:

>A few things, first: who here creates dialects, contractions,
>and "uneducated speech" for their conlangs?
I do! Often I will change some feature of Rhean grammar, but I'll still
want to toy with the version I've thrown away. My excuse for that is to
have a dialect in which that feature is still present. These dialects have
become quite diverse: one of them uses reduced forms of "this" and "that"
as sort of definite articles that still retain deixis. And inflections are
still retained in archaic forms in some dialects, or reduced to
agglutinating regularity in others. So I had to decide that "Rhean" itself
is a deliberately standardised language created from the diverse dialects
(and strongly favouring the Mavrius dialect), kind of like German or
Italian in our own world.

>Second: What, in your language (conlang and natlang), is the closest
>translation to the English "How are you" (conversation starter and
>greeting)?
Kiostac'et?
= a contraction of |kiostac' c'et| "are you healthy?"; this set phrase is a
bit like Japanese "ogenki desu ka" in that it gets a yes/no response, or a
|kiostac'em| "I am healthy".

Kunie tali?
= "how are things?"; "things" here being the abstract "matters"
or "affairs". Less formal.

The Ftomarinz are known to say:
Kuni kadrot?
= "how is business?" even though you aren't really asking about their
business or job situation.
This same dialect is responsible for the strange set phrase:
Kuni z'war?
= "how is the tide?" which really asks no actual information about the tide.

Other backwater-sounding greetings:
Sunez anje?
= "is there luck?"
Kiostanje?
= "is there health?"

And in Mavrius the kids are saying:

Kui z'a?
= "what is going?" with |z'a| being a very reduced form of |yura|.

M