Re: A personal curiosity

On Fri, 2006-06-23 at 15:03 -0300, Israel Noletto wrote:
> Greetings everybody
> A personal curiosity:
> How do you say Jehovah's Witnesses in your conlangs?
The religions on the conworld where the Veldans "live" are utterly
different from Terran religions, but if the Veldans ever were to
encounter the JWs, a literal translation the name would be:

Dyeho^vava Sweide^te:i

or:

Dyeho^vasi Sweide^te:i

...depending on whether the Veldans took the sounds of the end of the
name Jehovah literally (and thus as a female name) or understood it to
be a male name and wedged it thus into the language by changing it to an
-as nominative.  BTW, the agent from "see" (sweide-) just means "one who
sees something," thus "witness."  It does not carry the English
connotation of "seer."  (One might also find Sesweide^te:i, a past-time
agent, if the witnessing were understood to be entirely in the past.)

[^ = long vowel with the stress accent; : = unaccented long vowel; exact
letter values are available on the "standard orthography" page linked
from the URL in the signature]


Cian Ross
cian@cox-internet.com
http://crlh.tzo.org/~cian/conlang/