Order of Texts: Sandic -- Smooth English of Sandic
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Well, it’s that time again. It’s been another year, and now I’m thirty-three. It’s been a heck of a year. I presented at TED and El Ser Creativo, did a really epic season of Game of Thrones that got totally shafted by the Golden Globes, the first season of Defiance, Thor: The Dark World, and picked up a couple new projects. What I didn’t do was get to 4,000 Dothraki words. Things have really slowed down on that front. Having a bunch of stuff to work on is outstanding, but it does mean that I’m not able to expand the languages as much as I’d like to, or give them as much attention as I’d like to. I haven’t forgotten about anything, I can assure you, it’s just going to take more time for me to get things settled.
Consequently, there’s not a lot of new material to work with for this year’s Dothraki haiku competition—which begins right now! I’ve thought a lot about expanding to include Valyrian, so here’s what I’ll say. I will allow Valyrian haiku, but they won’t compete directly with the Dothraki haiku. If there are a sufficient number of submissions, I’ll make Valyrian a permanent member of the haiku competition. For now, though, Valyrian is an expansion language, and Valyrian compositions will not be accepted for the coveted Mawizzi Virzeth.
Now, let’s see if I can come up with something of my own:
Vezh chak karlina
Ma frakhoki vash kashi
Eya kishoon.
Okay, that should be figure-out-able, but I won’t lie: it’s a little tricky.
This year’s challenge word is noreth, “hair”. Because I like it. Again, the challenge word is not required, but if you wanted something to give you a jump start (in case you can’t think of a theme ex nihilo), try using the challenge word. It’s got kind of a strange shape (and was likely inspired by the Moro word ndreth, which is the plural of ereth, which means “clothes”).
And here are the rules, reposted from last year:
Guidelines
For the purposes of this contest, a haiku is 17 syllables long, with the syllable counts for each line being 5, 7 and 5, in that order. If you need to fudge, we’ll set up a separate category for haiku that are 17 syllables, but maybe don’t hit the right line numbers.
Also (and this is important), since this is Dothraki, we are definitely going by syllable count, not mora count. Regarding syllable-counting, in Dothraki, a syllable is defined as a vowel plus one or more consonants on either side. A syllable cannot contain more than one vowel, which means that a word like kishaan is trisyllabic, not disyllabic.
If it helps, you may or may not contract the various prepositions that contract. So, for example, mr’anha (two syllables) is the usual way of saying “inside me”. For your haiku, if you wish, you can separate the two out, i.e. mra anha (three syllables). You can also drop purely epenthetic e vowels (so the past tense of “crush”, kaffe, can be rendered as kaff’). Feel free to play with word order and drop pronouns, as needed, bearing in mind that such language is figurative, and the reader will still need to be able to figure out who’s doing what to whom.
For Valyrian: Long vowels count as two mora, and a vowel with a coda counts as two mora, but a syllable will not have more than two mora. So a long vowel plus a coda consonant will still be two mora, for the purposes of the poem. Try doing this with mora, instead of syllables, and see how it goes. This will make it more like a real Japanese haiku. If you need a particular word in a particular number/case combination or a verb in a particular conjugation, please let me know and I’ll give it to you.
Addendum: Rising diphthongs count as two mora (i.e. ae and ao); falling diphthongs count as one (e.g. ia, ua, ue, etc.). Also, word order is certainly freer in poetry than it is in everyday speech, but the rules about adjectives still apply (i.e. you use the short forms if the adjective appears directly before the noun it modifies; otherwise they’d take their full forms). And, finally, word-final consonants are extrametrical. Thus if a word ends in -kor, that counts as one mora, not two.
Shieraki gori ha yerea! Fonas chek!
The first two sentences in Gary’s list are:
Now, for me, the difference between the two sentences is that the first is in the habitual and the second is in the progressive. OK. No problem. sodna-lɛni makes that distinction:
1. loho logɨdiya evna.
2. loho logɨdiya evi.
logɨdiya is the class IV noun meaning ‘light, rays of light’ in the motile plural. It’s the subject of both sentences.
loho is the class II noun meaning ‘the sun’ in the motile singular. It acts as the source or point of origin for the subject. It can be motile because class II nouns are higher up in the animacy hierarchy than class IV nouns.
evi is the verb in use. It means that its subject is moving out in all directions from a grammatically required point of origin. In the first sentence evi is in the iterative, and in the second, the imperfect.
In Kēlen, the two sense are conflated and the easiest way to express the concept is in the sentence:
1|2. la anlōki;
Since I last posted on December 16, 2011, I have moved house, settled into a new job, and created a new language. Yes, me, the “one conlang is enough for me” woman, has created a new conlang. What can I say, these things happen.
This is how it happened: I read a blog post online about brain imaging, and then thought about having a language that expressed motion better than Kēlen does (which admittedly can’t be that hard, Kēlen doesn’t really express motion very well at all.) What I ended up with is a language that talks about direction and journeys between endpoints and makes extensive use of path metaphors. The appendix of this document has the original email exchange with David, version 1 of the language (now called sodna-lɛni), and a short history of the development of the language. Under Future Developments, I wrote:
More vocabulary. Think about modality, quantifiers, adjectives. Work through Gary Shannon’s list of sentences.
So that’s what I am going to do here: work through Gary’s sentences. In sodna-lɛni, and maybe in Kēlen, too. To that end, I am changing the name of this blog to something more generic.
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Herakles as a boy strangling a snake. Marble, Roman artwork, 2nd century CE Public Domain, from .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules |
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U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt depicted as the infant Hercules grappling with the Standard Oil Company Public Domain, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_in_popular_culture |