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Fog Talking
The title for today’s post comes from the word athastokhdevishizar, which means “nonsense”, but which literally translates as “fog talking”. It was also used in the first Dothraki haiku submitted in response to last week’s post. As it happens, it was authored by ingsve, whose (at the time of writing) birthday it is! Happy birthday, ingsve! Here’s what he wrote:
Anha tokikof?
Athastokhdeveshizar!
Anha dirgakof!
Which translates to (translating loosely):
I’m a big idiot?
Nonsense!
I’m a deep thinker!
You can let me know how close I got to what you were thinking. Ordinarily yes/no questions are preceded by hash, but I think the lack of hash here works to make this kind of an echo question (e.g. “You’re nothing but a lazy daffodil!”, “I’m a lazy daffodil?!”).
Another of ingsve’s is his birthday-inspired haiku:
Kisha vazhaki
Chisen ma at halahis
Lekhmovekaan.
Which is:
We will give
Thirty-one flowers
To the conlanger.
San athchomari, zhey ingsve! I’d coined the word lekhmove for “conlang” previously, but this is the first time I’d seen lekhmovek for “conlanger”. I like it!
I made one correction above: What was halahi in the original should be halahis, as it’s a plural direct object (and halah is an animate noun). And, since it’s his birthday (and I believe we’re the same age), here’s a haiku back, zhey ingsve:
Ma anha vazhak
Chisen ma at halahis
Dirgakofaan.
It’s funny. A lot of times it’s hard to fit large Dothraki words into the slender frame of a haiku, but in both of these, we had to not contract a word in order to get the right number of syllables.
One more of ingsve’s: An ambitious attempt to translate Robert Oppenheimer’s quoting of the Bhagavad Gita. Here’s what he came up with:
Ajjin anha ray
athdrivaroon, drozhak
rhaesheseri.
For those unfamiliar, the quote is, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. If I were to translate the above, this is how I would translate it:
Now I was already
Death, killer
Of worlds.
In order to tackle this translation, one has to come to terms with the English, which, I think most native speakers would admit, is fanciful, at best. If one were to switch out “Death” for, say, “teacher”, one would probably say, “Now I’m a teacher”, or, perhaps, “Now I’ve become a teacher”. The use of “am” is reminiscent of an older form of English where people said things like, “Now I’m come” to mean “Now I’ve come” (if you want to learn more about it, look up unaccusative verb and prepare to have your mind melt). Dothraki doesn’t have anything like that (he said, sweeping under the rug material for potential future blog posts), though, so before one translates the quote, one has to reword it a bit.
It was Qvaak, I believe, who pointed out that I translated something similar for the LCC4 relay. In that text, I translated the line, “The crone turned into a wolf” as follows:
- Yesi nemo ficho mehas venikh veri.
- /crone REFL obtain therefor semblance-ACC wolf-GEN/
- “The crone got unto her the semblance of a wolf.”
That could work, technically, but I get the sense that it would mean something more like, “I took on the semblance of Death”, or, “I turned into Death”, which I think kind of defeats the tone of the thing. It’s more direct as it is, and the translation should reflect that.
So if I had to translate it, I would probably just have it as (not trying to keep to the haiku form):
- Ajjin anha Athdrivar: Ohharak rhaesheseri.
Perhaps one could say “Athdrivaraan” and cast it as the future tense. Depends on how you read it. Nice job, ingsve! Way to push the envelope.
Next, Qvaak did a series of seasonal haiku, which I’ll look at it inverse order. Let me know if I got these right. The first:
Hrazef vos govo.
Chaf ish atthasa okre,
Chiori memras.The horses don’t mate.
The wind maybe fells the tents,
A woman therein.
I made a slight correction (typo: hrazhef for hrazef), but otherwise I think that’s about how it translates. Nice use of the adverbial preposition! Next:
Halah she sorfo;
Negwin nem eyyelie.
Dani vekh hazze.A flower on the ground;
A stone is spotted.
A gem is there.
I have to admit this one sent me to my dictionary. I knew eyel was “rain”, but the verb eyyelilat is something that Qvaak coined for this poem. The verb eyelilat is a stative verb meaning “to be spotted” (like the ground after it’s begun to rain lightly). Qvaak causativized it to produce eyyelilat, which means “to spot” or “to put a spotted pattern on”—then he passivized it! Nice.
I was trying to figure out what the poem actually means, and what I can guess is that there’s a rock, and there’s actually a gem inside, which you can see sparkling? Reminds me this old thing. The meaning of the flower, though, escapes me.
Edit: If you take a look at Qvaak’s comment below, you’ll see that he meant “ford” when he used dani. “Ford”! I never thought I’d see another person use that word in a million years. The idea is to evoke spring rains and spring flooding.
Next!
Kash shekh vervena,
Kash hranna veltoroe;
Voji virzethi.When the sun is violent
The grass yellows;
Red people.
Yet again, Qvaak coined a word, and it makes perfect sense. Veltor is the word for “yellow”, and veltorat means “to be yellow”, so, of course, veltorolat means “to yellow” or “to grow yellow”. Very nicely done! If only it would have fit the syllable count, I think vervenoe would’ve worked even better in place of vervena.
Now, as for “red people”, I have to ask: Did you mean “sunburned people”? If so, nice try! When I get around to it, there will probably be a different word for “sunburned”. (Virzethoe would also work well, though, again, it’d be one syllable too many.)
Edit: Qvaak intended “People are red” as the translation of voji virzethi, but either translation works.
Excellent haiku, you guys! But, of course, there can only be one “winner” (in the non-contest sense): Only one that can claim the mighty and fearsome Mawizzi Virzeth (the Red Rabbit). And here it is, the first from Qvaak’s seasonal series (and below that an audio file of me reading it):
Vorsa erina.
Ikh dozgosoon anni;
Ahesh sash qisi.
At first I didn’t even read it right, because I thought the verb in the first line was an adjective. But, indeed, it’s a verb. Here’s my translation:
Fire is kind.
Ashes from my enemies;
Fresh snow nearby.
Now that’s evocative! Nicely done! And for penning my favorite of the bunch, you win the “coveted” Mawizzi Virzeth:
This precious award comes with no physical prize. In fact, as the Dothraki don’t value money, it doesn’t even come with a virtual prize. It does, however, come with much respect. San athchomari, zhey Qvaak! And thanks to both Qvaak and ingsve for submitting haiku! I know specific grammatical information on Dothraki isn’t easy to come by even now, and the available lexicon is smaller than the total lexicon, but you took the plunge! And for that, I salute you.
In other news, if you haven’t seen it elsewhere, I’m going to be presenting on Dothraki at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association Conference next month. The conference is being held from February 8th to the 11th, and my talks will be during the day on the 9th, and in the evening on the 10th. The latter is open to the public. So, if you happen to be in Albuquerque, New Mexico, stop on by! It’ll be lots of fun.
Update: Added audio of Qvaak’s poem.
Asshekhqoyi Anni
Today is my 31st birthday, which seems like a much more frightening prospect than my 30th… But at least I have two years until my 33rd. If you’re wondering about the featured image for this post, the explanation is quite simple: Since I’m writing this post before my actual birthday, I don’t have any pictures from my birthday, which led me to go back to photos from my previous birthday, when my wife took me to Vegas, where many hotels featured displays inspired by Chinese New Year (at the time, the Year of the Rabbit), and, as a big fan of rabbits (and topiary), I, naturally, had to take some pictures. And, yes: I do have more pictures. Many more.
I was trying to figure out something fun to do for my birthday, and then…I figured it out. (I couldn’t think of a snappy way to finish that sentence. Then I started writing the last one. And now this…) Back on December 17th, I did an interview with Monique Stander for a South African radio station. The interview was at midnight, and I got a call from a station assistant a half hour beforehand to make sure I was there and ready. Once that had been ascertained, he also asked if I’d write a haiku, since they were talking about haikus on the show that day. I asked him if he wanted one in English or Dothraki, and he said English, so we hung up and I started writing a haiku in English (kind of tough to come up with a good one, but I did my best).
He then called back at 11:55 p.m. and said that, in fact, it was in Dothraki they wanted the haiku, not English. He asked how much time I had, and he said three minutes. So we hung up again, and in three minutes, I came up with this:
Sajo anni ma
Haja ma ivezhofa.
Sek. Me nem nesa.
Which is (approximately): “My horse is / Strong and fierce. / Yes. It is known.” It’s not Bashō, but at least it has the right number of syllables in the right places (something I wasn’t sure of when I went on the air!).
Since we’ve got all the time in the world here on the internet, I thought a Dothraki haiku might be a fun (and relatively manageable) translation challenge! So the gauntlet is cast. If you’re interested, write a haiku in Dothraki. 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.
So, there it is! Good luck! Feel free to post responses in the comments to this post, or e-mail them to “dave” at “dothraki” dot “com” (feel free to include audio!). I’ll discuss the responses in a future post, and will possibly give my favorite some sort of (likely virtual; definitely rabbit-related) prize. If you need any help, head over to Dothraki.org, and you should find what you need.
Fonas chek!
Ours Is the Fury
A week or so ago, Crown of Gold asked in a comment on a previous post how one would translate the words of House Baratheon into Dothraki. The words are: “Ours is the fury.” I might’ve responded to the comment directly, but the question is actually much more complicated than one might think.
Starting just with the English, “Ours is the fury” is an instantiation of what appears to be a rather bizarre (or at least crosslinguistically rare) construction. I think an English speaker has the sense that “Ours is the fury” means something fundamentally different from “The fury is ours”, but it’s hard to characterize that difference. As I see it, it’s not simply a difference in focus. It’s kind of like in the first one, the idea is that the fury is inherent in who we are—it’s part of what defines us (here, the “us” is House Baratheon, of course). In “The fury is ours”, it sounds like we just obtained it—or purchased it.
Personally, I always think of Captain Planet. When he said, “The power is yours!“, it always sounded to me like he was either giving us the power, or informing us that we now had the power (and perhaps always had it). Had he said, “Yours is the power!”, it would have been something quite different—more of a reminder that we have it within us to put an end to pollution and poaching and the like.
(By the way, I invite English speakers to comment on what they think the difference between these two might be. Do you get my sense, or something different? Or do they sound the same to you?)
Anyway, so before translating it into Dothraki, I needed to figure out what the heck it means in English. And since I was on IRC at the time, I asked ingsve and Qvaak what they thought. It turns out in Swedish and Finnish, there’s no equivalent for “Ours is the fury” (you’d translate it as “The fury is ours”). Part of that has to do with the fact that neither language actually has a distinct possessive pronominal form. English, on the other hand, has a full complement of them, as shown below:
| Possessive Adjective | Possessive Pronoun | |
|---|---|---|
| 1st Person Singular | my | mine |
| 2nd Person Singular | your | yours |
| 3rd Person Singular (Fem.) | her | hers |
| 3rd Person Singular (Mas.) | his | his |
| 3rd Person Singular (Ina.) | its | its |
| 1st Person Plural | our | ours |
| 2nd Person Plural | your | yours |
| 3rd Person Plural | their | theirs |
| WH-Word | whose | whose |
Like Finnish and Swedish, Dothraki also makes no distinction between the possessive adjective and the possessive pronoun: All there are are the pronouns in the genitive (or the ablative, as the case may be [no pun intended (but enjoyed, nevertheless)]). Even so, there are situations in which a genitive pronoun will be interpreted as a possessive pronoun. Consider the two sentences below:
- Hazi hrazef anni. “That’s my horse.”
- Hazi anni. “That’s mine.”
However, you can’t turn that around:
- #/? Anni hazi. “Mine is that.”
Okay, that sentence may be infelicitous for other reasons, but this one makes sense in English:
- #/? Anni athhajar. “Mine is the strength.”
I can’t even characterize how bizarre that looks… I can’t say for certain that it’s ungrammatical, but it just doesn’t look or sound right. So one couldn’t translate “Ours is the fury” straight up into Dothraki (the way you can, more or less, in Spanish).
In order to try to approximate the flavor of the original, then, I had two ideas: (1) Fix it so that the word order could be preserved, or (2) try to translate the sense I get, regardless of word order and lexical items. So instead of giving “the” translation, Crown of Gold, I’ll give you two. Not sure which is best (interlinears given in lieu of translations, as we know what the translation is):
- Kishaan athostar. /1PL.ALL fury-NOM/
- Athostar dothrae mra kisha. /fury-NOM ride-3SG in 1PL.NOM/
I think each translation has its own merits. The first preserves the word order and simplicity of the original English, but it implies the same thing that “The fury is ours” implies, in my mind—that is, the fury is somewhere outside of us, and it’s coming to us.
The second should be somewhat familiar, as it parallels Daenerys’s quote from A Game of Thrones: Khalakka dothrae mr’anha, “A prince rides inside me”. She’s referring to her unborn child, of course, but I thought that it really accurately describes the sense I get from “Ours is the fury”. I think it works! Though I did just think of a possible alternate:
- Athostar dothrae kishi. /fury-NOM ride-3SG 1PL.GEN/
So literally, this would be something like “Fury rides with us”, or “Fury rides beside us” (reminiscent of that scene from Tombstone). I think that’s a pretty good approximation of “Ours is the fury” done Dothraki-style!
Sorry for the late response, Crown of Gold, but that one made me think quite a bit. It was a good one! Always nice to work through a new translation. Oh, and as for athostar, it derives ultimately from ostat, which means “to bite”. It’s an animalistic type of anger which I thought better suited the English word “fury” than any other term referring to anger. “Fury” itself is kind of an odd word as it exists in English. It doesn’t just mean “anger”: it implies violent action. That’s what I got from athostar (which has been around for a while), so I thought it’d work for this translation.
Thanks for the question, zhey Crown of Gold!
Update: Matt Pearson suggested an alternate for the first translation that uses the ablative, instead of the allative:
- Kishoon athostar. /1PL.ABL fury-NOM/
That’s another option to consider. I think it sounds even more aggressive than “Ours is the fury”—more like, “Mess with us, and taste our wrath!” What do you think?
2011 Conlang Card Exchange
For the past three years, a number of conlangers have participated in the Conlang/Concultural Card Exchange. I participated the first year with Kamakawi, but missed the deadline the next year, so I wanted to be sure to participate this year (though I still almost missed the deadline). For this year’s exchange, I decided to use Dothraki, and I thought this would be as good a place as any to post the translation info for my card.
First, here’s what the front of the postcard looks like:
Click to enlarge.
And here’s a shot of the back of the postcard:
Click to enlarge.
(Note: That’s the LCS’s address, not mine. Don’t send mail there unless it’s accompanied by a $35 membership check made out to “LCS” [by the way, with the holidays around the corner, why not give the gift of LCS membership! Okay, plug over].)
Now, when I made these up with Costco, they gave me a character count, and I swear I came under that character count! But, as you can see, the text got cut off—literally. In fact, there was one more line after what you see there (I’d signed it Devvo ki Drogosi. Oh well). So you don’t have to go squinting, here is the entire text (plus the missing line):
Aheshke ray jad, majin anha vazhak yeraan azh, hajinaan m’anha chomak yeraan sekke. Jin vezh hrazef avervenanaz drogikhoon anni. Yer laz tihi mae mra jerve she hatif. Me drozhak! Tihas vorsaes tihoa ma charas tem fogoon! Ma me lana ven chaf! K’athjilari: Vo cheyi ven mae vekho vosecchi. Ma me yeri! Vezhof gora ha yeraan. Me nem nesa.
Fonas chek!
Devvo ki Drogosi
Now, I don’t want the card recipients to jump through too many hoops, so here’s an interlinear (though this won’t be pretty. Does CSS do small caps yet…?):
/winter already come.PST and 1SG.NOM FUT-give-1SG 2SG.ALL gift.ACC because COMP-1SG.NOM respect-1SG 2SG.ALL very. this stallion horse SUP-wild-SUP herd-ABL 1SG.GEN. 2SG.NOM can see-2SG 3SG.ACC in cage at front. 3SG.NOM killer! see-IMP fire-ACC eye-ABL.PL and hear-IMP thunder.ACC hoof-ABL! and 3SG.NOM run-3SG like wind! truly: NEG bay-GEN like 3SG.GEN exist-3SG.NEG NEG.EMPH. and 3SG.NOM 2SG.GEN! horse.god charge-3SG for 2SG.ALL. 3SG.NOM PASS know-3SG./
/hunt-IMP well!/
/Dave by Drogo-GEN/
Or better yet: Have they made a WordPress plugin for interlinears yet? Any conlangers out there who are big into WordPress and coding? (Think that’s what we need to get this done…)
Anyway, there you have it! Translation shouldn’t be tough (remember that the ablative expresses inalienable possession and that it’s only optionally expressed). Feel free to post your translation in the comments, and I’ll tell you how you did.
Also, I ordered 10 cards, since I thought that’d be a good round number, but I have three leftover. I thought I’d have a contest and give away the remaining three, but that would involve you giving me your address, so I thought I’d better make it voluntary. So! If you would like a card, and if you’re comfortable giving me a mailing address you have access to, e-mail me at “dave” at-sign “dothraki.com” and let me know. I’ll send them out to the first three people that e-mail me with addresses, and I’ll personalize them somehow in what little space there is left on the card.
Fonas chek, zhey lajaki!
Update: All the cards have been claimed. Perhaps there will be more next year, or for some other holiday (do the Dothraki celebrate Flag Day…?). Who knows? These, though, are being sent out to stud. But let me tell you: If there is a next time, ain’t nothing getting cut off—I’ll make sure of that!
What’s Said Is Said!
Thanks for all the responses! I was quite pleasantly surprised to see how quickly everyone (pretty much) either hit on the right translations, or hovered right around them. Now I’ll go through them and make some comments.
First, big ups to ingsve, who responded with almost perfect translations only 26 minutes after the post went live. Nice job!
House Stark: “Winter Is Coming”
The unofficial tagline of Game of Thrones, and probably the most famous house motto of them all. Those who follow my Twitter will note that I tweeted this translation way back on December 14th of last year (or at least I think it was last year. They don’t seem to list a year on tweets…). I think ingsve took note of this on the Dothraki Wiki, and he also got the exact translation: Aheshke jada.
Some others that were offered:
- Qvaak added an interesting take on it with Aheshke zin jada, which he translated appropriately as, “Winter is still coming”. Personally, I like to think of zin as the counterpart to ray. It can mean “still”, but it also emphasizes that an action is being viewed internally as incomplete. I think Aheshke jada is the more appropriate translation, but you could say Aheshke zin jada, if you were, say, looking at winter, and it was charging right at you.
- Laura (hi, Laura! Nice to meet you!) and Daenerys each offered the same translation with a version of jadi rather than jada. Here jada is appropriate if you think of “winter” as a third person singular argument. Since aheshke is an inanimate noun, though, Aheshke jadi is grammatical: it just means something like, “The winters are coming.” Perhaps one might offer Chafi aheshke jadi, which would mean, “The winds of winter are coming.”
House Greyjoy: “We Do Not Sow”
I knew, of course, that ingsve had taken House Greyjoy’s sigil as his personal icon, but I had completely forgotten that I had already pretty much translated House Greyjoy’s motto for him (or at least created the words, and I think ingsve did the rest). So ingsve’s Kisha vo velaineroki is correct. Daenerys came up with the same translation, which is also correct. Nice job!
After that, both Laura and Qvaak came up with an interesting variant using a postpositive negative particle. Qvaak’s is based on a well-observed pattern: Kisha velaineroki vosecchi. I like it! It’s rather emphatic. Laura’s translation used vos postpositively, which is something I haven’t done myself before, but I really like it. After all, if you can have vosecchi, it seems like you ought to be able to have vos. So, for example, the usual negation pattern would be the ordinary version; using vos postpositively would be emphatic; vosecchi would be really emphatic; and the double negation (which is also possible) would be really emphatic (i.e. Kisha vo velaineroki vosecchi!).
House Tyrell: “Growing Strong”
This was one of the toughest. The word is obvious enough (since Dothraki has that inchoative, if hajat is “to be strong”, then hajolat is “to grow strong”. Nice and easy!), but it’s up to interpretation how “Growing Strong” works in English, and then how it should be rendered in Dothraki. Here were the options:
- The first offering was ingsve’s hajoy, which is, indeed, the active participle of hajolat, and means, roughly, “growing strong”. In English, our active participle is identical to our gerund, so, for all intents and purposes, the difference between the two is rendered trivial. In Dothraki, though, the participle form of the verb cannot be used as a noun, which would make hajoy look very strange standing by itself. One would see it and wonder, “Where’s the noun?”
- Qvaak, Laura and Daenerys offered the present tense form of the verb in the first person plural, which I thought was clever. It’s basically a statement that means, “We grow strong” or “We are growing strong”. I like this, but it wasn’t what I had initially imagined. (By the way, Laura’s conjugation mistake was, in fact, my fault. Remember how I remarked on how the stem should be separated from the infinitive suffix in a previous post? Yeah… I didn’t do that. Oops! If you know the verb hajat, the stem of hajolat is easy to guess, but if you’re just looking at it, it’s easy to mistake the stem as being hajol rather than hajo. My bad!)
Actually, the translation I was thinking of was simply: Hajolat. When I see “Growing Strong”, in English, I think of it as a self-contained, nominal concept. To me, hajolat seemed like the most obvious translation. But this is why it’s so interesting to see other translations: You get different interpretations.
Update: Oh, you know what? There’s one more I forgot to list: Athhajozar. That also seems to work.
House Mormont: “Here We Stand”
This one was probably fairly straightforward. Laura, ingsve and Daenerys came up with the same translation: Kisha kovaraki jinne. That’s pretty much, “We stand here”.
To the extent that you think of the “here” as being emphasized in the English, I could see fronting the word jinne, which is exactly what Qvaak did: Jinne kisha kovaraki. I think I prefer this translation, though it is possible to emphasize jinne in final position. Qvaak also suggested the order of the subject and verb might be flipped. Here’s what he wrote:
I almost flipped the word order to VS, too, while I was at it, but then I felt that the phrase sounded more solemn than lofty, so I left it simple[.]
I wanted to quote this because I have to say I think exactly the same thing! I don’t know if I would’ve put it into those words beforehand, but when I read it, I thought, “Hey, yeah! That’s exactly how it feels!” Nice observation!
House Tully: “Family, Duty, Honor”
I thought this one would be the simplest, since, as ingsve, Daenerys and Laura did, you could just translate it word for word: Rhojosor, atthar, chomokh. There’s nothing wrong with that translation. The words in English are separated from usual English syntax (after all, you’d expect an “and” in there, too, if it were a part of a sentence), so it stands to reason that they might fall outside the usual syntax in Dothraki as well.
Qvaak elected to insert the “and”, giving us: Rhojosor ma atthar ma chomokh. However in order to do this properly, it would need to be Ma rhojosor ma atthar ma chomokh (it wouldn’t work without an initial ma—in fact, it might sound like “Family is duty and honor” without it).
House Lannister: “Hear Me Roar!”
This was the most challenging one by far, because there are different ways of rendering the sentence, and they’re a little tricky. Here are the translations with comments:
- The first is ingsve’s Charas m’anha zorak! (as Qvaak pointed out, it’d be m’anha not meanha). Daenerys also offered a version similar to this. The literal translation would be, “Hear that I roar”, which is close. To me, it puts a little bit of distance between the hearing and the roarer—kind of like, “Take note of the fact that I’m roaring”, rather than, “Listen to me, and note that I’m roaring”.
- Qvaak’s translation fixes the above: Charas anna fin zora! The odd thing about it is the relative clause attached to the first person pronoun. I mean, you can do that, but is it just me, or does that sound a little funny? Think about this one in English: “Talk to me, who is/am from California.” Should that be “is” or “am”? And why do both sound wrong? Weird! The translation does work, though.
- Believe it or not, Laura’s translation was exactly what I was thinking of. It is literal, but it works: Chari anna zorat! Note that she used the formal imperative, which seems appropriate for a house motto. Anyway, this structure is grammatical, as it is in English. It’s probably not how you’d always do it, but it serves for this.
Actually, I rather expected someone would come up with my other preferred translation: Chari athzorar anni! or “Hear my roar(ing)!” It’s not an exact translation, but I think it serves—and it neatly avoids subordination. Great translations!
House Arryn: “As High As Honor”
This translation showcases a feature of Dothraki which is different from English except in this very construction, in which it’s identical. Both ingsve and Laura got the translation: Ven yath ven chomokh. In Dothraki, both ven’s are obligatory, unlike in English (i.e. “High as honor” also works). Not only that, but all coordinators double in Dothraki in most situations (as we saw above with ma). There are some that can occur by themselves, but only in very specific grammatical contexts. For usual situations, coordinators appear before both elements being coordinated.
Qvaak mentioned that he thought it was strange to compare two words from different classes, but, in fact, that happens all the time and is perfectly normal in Dothraki with ven.
So, that’s it! Thanks to those who participated. You all did great! Also, props to Laura for attempting a translation of “Say your right words!” I’d offer my own translation, but I can’t quite figure out how it works in English… Maybe Asti as jili yeri…? It’s quite a quaint version of English, though, so I’m not sure if the quaintness would translate correctly.
And for those who haven’t figured out the bonus still (even with today’s title and the picture shown below), the title from our last post referred to one of my all time favorite movies: Labyrinth!
Click to enlarge.
Labyrinth is an incredible movie that stars my personal hero David Bowie, along with a number of charming puppets (as well as, of course, a very young Jennifer Connelly). When Sarah (Jennifer Connelly’s character) is reciting from her book The Labyrinth, she says, “Say your right words!” (quoting the goblins). She threatens to say the words to have the goblin king (David Bowie) take her baby brother away, since he’s annoying her. Later the goblins do come and take the baby away, and when David Bowie appears before her, she recants, saying she wants her brother back. David Bowie’s response is, “What’s said is said!”
Oh, and, by the way, in the movie, David Bowie’s character performs some contact juggling using see-through “crystals” (plastic or glass spheres). The title from the last post is the word “fire” from the blog magnified through my own glass sphere which I bought in order to master contact juggling just like the goblin king many years back. I, uh…never got too far with it.
Say Your Right Words…
A couple posts back I noted that a poster at the Westeros forum had probably asked for Dothraki translations for each Westerosi house’s words, rather than just me pronouncing the names of each house in Dothraki-accented English. My bad there.
Anyway, I’ve already translated the words of House Targaryen (“Fire and blood”), but there are loads more. Rather than translating them, I thought it might be fun to see if the readers of this blog can translate them themselves. Consider this the first of (perhaps…?) many translation exercises to come.
So here’s what I’ll do. There are way too many mottos that have been revealed to deal with in one post, so I’ll just grab a few of them, and provide what extra vocabulary is necessary (for the rest, go check out the vocabulary list at the Dothraki Wiki).
First, the words (though one of these I know I’ve already translated somewhere):
- House Stark: Winter is coming.
- House Greyjoy: We do not sow.
- House Tyrell: Growing strong.
- House Mormont: Here we stand.
- House Tully: Family, duty, honor.
Those should be fairly manageable once you have the vocabulary. Now here are a couple that might be more challenging:
- House Lannister: Hear me roar!
- House Arryn: As high as honor.
Now here’s the vocabulary you’ll need (at least the vocabulary that I don’t yet see over at the the Dothraki Wiki):
- aheshke (ni.) winter
- atthar (ni.) duty
- chomokh (ni.) honor
- hajolat (v.) to grow strong
- kovarat (v.) to stand
- rhojosor (na.) family
- yath (adj.) high
- zorat (v.) to roar
The notations (ni.) and (na.) above refer to inanimate and animate nouns, respectively (see the page on noun animacy at the wiki). The only place where noun animacy would be relevant is in assigning noun cases, but you won’t need any noun case other than the nominative for the nouns, so no worries there! You may need a case other than the nominative for the pronouns, though, so go here for the wiki page on pronouns.
Aside from that, these wiki pages may prove useful as well:
I was looking for a page discussing coordinating particles, but didn’t find one… Oddly enough, the relevant translation itself might provide a clue to their use.
Happy translating! I’ll post the first correct translations (along with the translator) up on the blog after everything’s been translated (which, now that I’m looking at it, I suspect won’t take very long…).
P.S.: Bonus points for whoever gets the title reference. The photo associated with this post on the main page is a clue (should you need it).
