Happy Wednesday! I thought I’d do a mini-post on a small question that’s come up a couple times and deserves a tiny bit of fleshing out (hashtag little).
More than a few people have asked how to say something along the lines of either “That’s important to me” or “I don’t care”. Our English verb “care” is a mystery to me. It’s so…squishy, if that’s a linguistic term. I’d fully expect it to have a quirky case subject in some language that’s prone to such things. It didn’t seem verb-worthy in Dothraki, so there is no equivalent verb for “to care”.
So how do you do it? Actually you do it with a prepositional phrase, much like the phrase mra qora which was used in the wine merchant scene of episode 107. The phrase is mra zhor, which means “in the heart”. Thus, if you say the following:
It means either “I care about my mount”, or “I care for my mount”, or “My mount is important to me”. Though it’s an expression now, zhor is inalienably possessed (unless you’re eating it, I guess), so a possessor need not be specified if it’s clear from context. The default context is always the speaker (especially so when you have a possessor like anni right in there). If you want to specify an alternate context (or simply emphasize the one to who cares), all you need to do is add an inalienable possessor to the word zhor, as below:
And that would be “My mount is important to him”, or “He cares about my mount”.
To say something like “I don’t care”, you just have to turn it around a little bit:
That is literally “That isn’t in my heart” and would mean “I don’t care about that”. Conventionally, you could shorten it up and say Vo mra zhor, and you can intensify it by saying Vo mra zhor vosecchi. Also, though it’s not directly related, if you wanted to say “I don’t care anymore”, you’d say Vo mra zhor ajjinoon. Ajjinoon means “anymore” most of the time in negative contexts (or at least that’s how it’s translated into English. It has other uses in positive contexts).
That said, I hope your day is a good one. Why? Hajinaan meme mra zhor anhoon. Me nem nesa.
That's very helpful! I thought *iksa* translated to you, which confused me.
Nope: Simple present is urnēbzi. Aha — so is urnēbis the aorist? With {-is} being the equivalent of
Maybe the question is wether "issa" is used with collective plurals like "valar" or "azantyr" or the
Gah! My faulty memory betrays me! I remembered Jiqui's long, reddish ringlets. I'm so ashamed...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJv5YgADKW0
Too bad there is no thank in Dothraki.
Too bad there is no thank in Dothraki.
Too bad there is no thank in Dothraki.
Why is it |anhoon| in your final statement, rather than |anni|? Wouldn’t |anhoon| imply your heart has been taken from you? And |mra qora| appears to take the allative to specify a possessor.
Because it’s supposed to be. (Cf. this.)
It shouldn’t. Where’d you see that?
I wonder if Zhalio isn’t a bit confused by the ablative being used as the possessor, and not the allative. Especially for inalienable possessions, this is kind of backwards from what you would expect. Perhaps you might want to explain why the ablative is the right choice for the possessor of an inalienable possession.
Thanks, that website certainly clears things up.
I was still going by a PDF version of the grammar that must be outdated by now. There it said there was no “form” for inalienable possessions, and it also contained the sample phrase “Arakh mra qora rakhaan”.
@ Hrakkar: Exactly; I’d find the ablative intuitively appropriate for an alienated possession, as in: “Eat this. Heart from dog.” But it’s certainly realistic for languages not to work in what one would think of the most straightforward solutions.
That may have been a mistake (either on my part or the one who wrote it up). An unfortunate problem for Dothraki is that “allative” and “ablative” share all but one letter in common. Similarly, -oon and -aan are pretty darn similar. I can assure you for that, it’s supposed to be the ablative.
As for your and Hrakkar’s intuition, I have to say, I have the complete opposite. If you were to use the allative, it could be any type of possession except inalienable, conceptually (if something is going towards you, how can it be a part of you? For something to go towards you, by definition it has to be separate from you).
When it comes to defining things by opposition, it seems to me that languages will focus on specific aspects of a construction and attach meaning to it. The genitive is clearly older (not as a case, but as a method of marking possession). With that in mind, how would one specify that something isn’t necessarily one’s possession, but is actually an integral part of one? If you think of the body as the center of one’s physical existence, then various things spring out of it: the nose extends from the face; the face from the head; the head from the neck; the neck from the torso, etc.
You see this kind of conceptual metaphor used with vegetation as well, with trees conceptualized as springing forth from the “torso” of the Earth: the word for “trunk” is the same as the word for “neck” and the word for the leafy part of the tree is the same as the word for “head”.
Sorry if I didn’t explain this, but I kind of thought this was old hat—specifically because I thought I’d done a blog post on alienable vs. inalienable possession. Didn’t I…? A quick search suggests I haven’t. But that can’t be right. I could’ve sworn I went over this…
What I’d find most intuitive is to use the genitive for inalienable possessions and the allative for alienable possessions (much like it’s done in Welsh or colloquial French — «c’est à moi»), but the historic development of Dothraki’s possessives certainly makes sense.
Though I find it rather hard to wrap my head around the concept that one’s body parts (even the innermost ones, like the heart) be grown like branches out of one’s true self, though it’s certainly a nice bit of conculture.
As for the different kinds of possessions being old hat: I wouldn’t be surprised if it had come up before. I’m only a casual dabbler in Dothraki, so no doubt I’ve missed lots of good stuff.
Let’s see if this works: Anha ezo davrakh asshekh. Hash yer movee thagwa, yer eth fichi lamekhoon asshekhi.
Thank you, zhey David, for explaining why you would use the ablative for inalienable possession. I knew you would have a good explanation of this! Better yet, it is easy to remember. I also think its good you didn’t borrow from some existing language idea. That makes Dothraki all that more interesting!
As far as the PDF grammar goes, that is now old and outdated enough that I think it should be removed (Qvaak has made some very useful changes to the wiki grammar as of late). I can ask Ingsve to do this. I’d like to make a better one, but my biggest enemy right now is lack of free time to work on projects