Re: A personal curiosity

Israel Noletto wrote:
> Greetings everybody
> A personal curiosity:
> How do you say Jehovah's Witnesses in your conlangs?
> Thanks
> Sraelisk - Jehovas Widnen
That would be hard to get across to Azirians. Even in Minza it's not an
easy concept to express. I had to go to the online American Heritage
dictionary to check the various definitions of "witness". The most
appropriate one was 5a. "One who publicly affirms religious faith" (5b.
is "A member of the Jehovah's Witnesses", which while appropriate is not
of much use in translations).

So I should be able to build a Minza word for this sense of "witness"
from the luakíri (word-components) in my vocabulary. The key component
of this word is "ġis" [Gis], which has a general meaning of "trust",
"confidence", "faith". I think "ġistunše" would be appropriate for
"witness" (in this sense), parallel to "vištunše" for "adviser" and
"nentunše" for "reporter". The plural of "ġistunše" is "ġistunšeri".

As far as the name "Jehovah", there are a number of approaches. It could
be read as a Latin name, /jehowah/ (did Latin speakers pronounce the
final -h?) or as English, /dZ@'hoUv@/. The main difference would be in
the initial consonant, since [w] is typically borrowed as /v/. So
"Jehovah's" could be Žexovat, Žexovaxat, Jexovat, or Jexovaxat.

In short, the version I prefer is Ġistunšeri Žexovat. In the
ASCII-representation for those who can't read Unicode, it would be
Ghistunsheri Zhexovat.