“Meat-for-brains here…

…just tried to hijack a starship that he has no idea how to pilot by pointing a gun at the head of the immortal guy who doesn’t need a body. This is only a very tiny step on the smart side of, say, hyperlocal nuclear brinksmanship with the antideuterium cryocels, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d like him on the outside of the airlock before the sheer density of stupid kills us all.”

– cut from tonight’s piece-of-writing-in-progress

The word which is commonly translated as “Imperials”…

… referring to any of the Empire’s citizen-shareholders, is valmiríän in the original Eldraeic; curiously, it is not cognate at all to that nation’s formal name. From its roots, it could have the meaning either of “ordered self” or of “self that sets in order”. When asked if one translation or the other comes closer to the intended meaning, the valmiríän, infuriatingly, always answer “Yes.”

— The Great Powers and Their People, University of Eö Press, 7387

Watching sci-fi shows gives me linguistic ideas.

sarvanattar:

I was in the middle of a Stargate SG-1 marathon when I decided I needed a particle for Síntári that makes an imperative more urgent.

It would work in the same way that English, Latin, and Greek all use go!, ite!, or ἴθι! plus another command.

The particle is kri. This is perhaps unsurprising if you’re familiar with the show XD.

So while lainttiskuas means “(You [sg]) write it!,” lainttiskuas kri! would be more along the lines of “Go write it (now)!”

I’m also thinking of deriving it from a verb krije, but I still have to figure out what that verb means. Probably something like “to pay attention to.”

You too, huh? 🙂

Back in the older versions of Eldraeic, a terminal krí (long-vowel marker on the I to make that sound right) in a sentence was how you converted a requestive into an imperative. Of course, ever since I caught delusions ambitions of publication, that’s had to be kicked out of canon for fairly obvious reasons, but it used to be there…

(via fyeahconlangs)

WE ARE HUMANS AND WE ARE FROM EARTH

fyeahconlangs:

Wahawafe is the name of my multilingual translation project. It was begun on 18 June 2011. The website was launched on 9 July 2011. “Wahawafe” is an acronym of “We are humans and we are from Earth.”. The aim of this project is to collect translations of this sentence in as many languages as possible. It celebrates the linguistic diversity of the Earth. Translations in all languages are welcome!

This site includes many natural languages and also accepts lots of conlang translations!

Finally got around to doing this in Eldraeic:

valdar hyúmanár; cap valdar hanatár ir-ei téra.

Notes, word by word:

valdar
“We” – or to be precise, “I and others (not you)”

hyúmanár
There isn’t actually an Eldraeic word for “human”; humans, in their universe, are an undiscovered species somewhere out beyond the Periphery. On the other hand, standard Contact rules offer a few guidelines with regard to “call them as close to what they call themselves as we can get”, hence hyúman, with Eldraeic phonology for the “man” being close enough, but requiring the long u to be explicitly marked and an extra y inserted to do what English does naturally.

The ár, on the other hand, is the predication affix that turns it into a “verb” – the way you say “we are humans” in Eldraeic is to say, in effect, “we are humaning”

cap
It’s not quite “and” as we know it; Eldraeic doesn’t have a simple connective, and arguably a native speaker would just say valdar hyúmanár; valdar hanatár ir-ei téra (“we are humans; we are from Earth”). I’ve chosen instead to use the logical connective cap, which means “logical and”, or in this context, asserts that both the connected predications are true as a set.

hanatár
“are from” is hard to say in Eldraeic, because it lacks the broad sense of the verb “to be” – technically, it only has that in the sense of “to exist” – that lets you glom it together with arbitrary prepositions. hanat is the word for “home” at its most generic, or perhaps “domicile” would be better. So, with the right case tag, “domiciled at”… which is one possible meaning of the original from, and one quite likely to be used by humans who aren’t on Earth right now.

ir-ei
Two words here to introduce the argument of hanatárir is the case tag for location, therefore equivalent to “at” in this context; and ei is the “name descriptor”, indicating that what follows, the argument, is a proper name, not a description or other possible word.

téra
Again, there is no name for “Earth” in Eldraeic, so I’m using the concultural Contact rules. “Terra” is commonly enough used – without being a non-proper noun in a major planetary language (which class by my imaginary interstellar standards probably means English and Mandarin among Earthly languages, sharing the 1 billion speakers plus set) – to be a plausible candidate for their pick, and phonological transliteration takes us here.

Now to think about submitting it to the actual site!