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 hanatár; ir 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!