Conlang Relay #15 - “Dancing Out Of Time”

Website: http://wiki.frath.net/Conlang_Relay_15

Artificial language translation contest
Hosted by Peter Bleackley
Spring 2008

Ring B:

1. P. Bleackley - Khangaþyagon
2. J. Rhiemeier - Old Albic
3. P. Brown - Talarian
4. J. van Steenbergen - Wenedyk
5. S. C. Anderson - Tauro-Piscean
6. E. Oh - Classical Arithide
7. S. Hlad - Regimonti
8. C. Becker - Ayeri
9. H. Theiling - Terkunan
10. B. P. Jonsson - Mærik
11. J. Henry - gjâ-zym-byn
12. P. Newton - Rhaetian
13. Kinetic - Vetela
14. P. Bleackley - Khangaþyagon

Which is to say, Ayeri is the eighth step in the line of translations. Everyone who has tried Altavista's Babelfish or the Google Translator should know that things become a complete mess when translating back and forth from language to language. Fortunately though we are people with brains and not mindless machines.

1. Scotto Hlad, Regimonti (Ring B):

As you can see, Regimonti is a romlang, that is, a constructed language which is derived from Latin. According to the rules, Scotto had added some grammar notes and a list of words that were used in this excercise in the original email. It was my task to figure out what the text means from Scotto’s notes:

2. Smooth translation

Into German ...

... and also into English to make it more comprehensible to the rest of the world ...

The translation into both German (for me to better understand) and into English are more contextual than literal so as to have a sensible text to translate from. I hope I got right what Scotto wrote, but a game of Telephone (also commonly known as “Chinese Whispers”) without any misunderstandings would only be half the fun after all. So much for humans exceeding machine translation. As you can see, the title seems to have already been screwed with, as the text — at least in the version I got from Scotto Hlad — is about dervishes, but I have nevertheless kept this because who knows, maybe it was in fact intended by the author. The text itself is also a little unconnected sometimes as far as I can tell, so there has probably been some deletion of connecting phrases in between as well.

3. Translation into Ayeri

New words marked with °, extensions to existing words marked by *

And here the morphemic breakdown:

4. Smooth retranslation

5. Vocabulary

This information is copied straight from the dictionary.

Words with an ID can be directly accessed by opening http://benung.nfshost.com/?i=<ID> in a browser, where <ID> is to be replaced with the ID given in the table above. Most other words can be found in the old vocabulary list at http://beckerscarsten.de/conlang/ayeri/dictionary.html.

6. Grammar

All grammar that is up so far can be read at http://benung.nfshost.com/?go=grammar&action=grammar.The grammar notes presented here are rather incomplete in that they only contain things that are most important in order to translate this text.

Typology

• Ayeri has V-A-P-Obl constituent order (Obl = oblique arguments, i.e. non-core arguments).
• Whether it is Nom/Acc or Erg/Abs is not very clear.
• Modifiers (including possessive pronouns) commonly follow their heads.

Nouns

• Nouns are marked for these cases:
  • Agent - Who does something? (also, origin in ditransitive clauses)
    • suffix: -ang (animate), -reng (inanimate)
    • prefixed to a verb to mark focus on that argument: ang (animate), eng (inanimate)
    • prefixed before name: ang (animate)
  • Patient - Who is affected by the action? (also, thing given in ditransitive clauses)
    • suffix: -as (animate), -ley (inanimate)
    • prefixed to a verb to mark focus on that argument: sa (animate), le (inanimate)
    • prefixed before name: sa (animate)
  • Benefactive - Who is in benefit of the action? (also, recipient of ditransitive clauses)
    • suffix: -yam
    • prefixed to a verb to mark focus on that argument: yam
    • prefixed before name: yam
  • Genitive - Who does something belong to? Where is it from?
    • suffix: -(e)na (the ‘e’ is infixed when the stem ends in a consonant)
    • prefixed to a verb to mark focus on that argument: na
    • prefixed before name: na
  • Locative - Where is something?
    • suffix: -ya when the stem ends in a vowel, -ea when the stem ends in a consonant
    • prefixed to a verb to mark focus on that argument: ya
    • prefixed before name: ya
  • Instrumentative - By means of what or whom is the action done? Who helped?
    • suffix: -(e)ri (‘e’ is infixed when the stem ends in a consonant)
    • prefixed to a verb to mark focus on that argument: ri
    • prefixed before name: ri
  • Causative - What is the reason for the action? Who made it happen (on purpose)?
    • suffix: -isa
    • prefixed to a verb to mark focus on that argument: sā
    • prefixed before name: sā
• Nouns are also marked for number
  • Marker: -ye
  • If there is a measurement either implied or given as e.g. “three”, “many” etc. nouns are not marked for number.
• Nouns are by default without any articles
• The closest thing to an indefinite article is mə-, which means “some X” in the sense of something rather general, like German irgendein.
• Some nouns are in plural by default, they have been given in their respective form in the vocabulary list.
• The demonstrative articles are:
  • near: eda-
  • far: ada-
  • "such": da-
• The demonstrative pronoun adanya is frequently used instead of third person pronouns.

Noun phrases and topic marking

• The topic of a sentence, which comes closest to the Subject of IE languages, is marked by omitting the case marker of an NP’s head noun and putting it in front of the verb as an anaphora to the NP.
• Topic marking does not work with objects of participles.

Verbs and Verb phrases

• Verbs can have a very high information load in Ayeri.
• Focus markers are always the first element of a verb phrase. They are anaphora to the argument of the sentence that is in focus (see above).
• After that (if present) follow preverbal adverbs: Words like ming have been classified as adverbs in this grammar, though not undisputedly so. They are derived from regular verbs, so they might as well be regarded as auxiliaries — except that they are not inflected for anything because the content verb carries the inflections instead.
• The verb stem itself can be further modified by the tense prefixes as well as suffixes for mood and person agreement with the agent of a transitive clause or the only argument of an intransitive sentence, which may be both an agent or a patient.
• The word manga can also be put in the place of preverbal adverbs in order to indicate progressive aspect. It is not as widely used as in English however.
• When the agent (or the single argument of an intransitive clause) of a sentence is expressed as a pronoun, this pronoun attaches to the end of a verb word, replacing the person agreement with a case-marked form of it.
• Adverbs of degree and measure are always appended to the end of a verb phrase, usually hyphenated.
• Adverbs of manner always follow the whole verb complex, temporal adverbs often precede it.
• The copula yoma-, ‘to be, to exist’, is usually omitted, except when the context explicitly requires TAM marking.
• Tense markers:
  • Present: Ø-
  • Near or immediate past: ka-
  • Past: ma-
  • Remote past: va-
  • Near or immediate future: pa-
  • Future: se-
  • Remote future: ni-
• Mood markers (preceding vowel is always deleted):
  • Indicative: Ø-
  • Imperative: -u
  • Subjunctive: -ong
  • Habitative: -asa
• Participles following modal verbs are formed by marking a verb with the benefactive case ending, e.g. verb tuyayam, ‘verb dancing’ or ‘verb to dance’.

Adjectives and Adverbs

• Adjectives and adverbs always follow their heads
• They do not show agreement with their heads, except in some very old-fashioned styles

Pronouns

• Ayeri has got a lot of personal pronouns, which are irregularly formed due to the unmarked person agreement clitics having merged with the case markers over time
• 
  

  	Agent	Patient	Genitive	Benefactive	Locative	Instrum.	Causative	Person agreement/ Unmarked
  1s	yang	yas	nā	yām	yā	rī	sā	ay
  2s	vāng	vās	vana	vayam	vaya	vari	vasa	va
  3s masc	yāng	yās	yana	yayam	yāy	yari	yasa	(-i)ya*
  3s fem	yeng	yes	yena	yeyam	yea	yeri	yesa	(-i)ye*
  3s neut	yong	yos	yona	yoyam	yoa	yori	yosa	(-i)yo*
  3s inanimate	reng	raley	ran	rayam	raya	reri	rasa	ara
  1p	nang	nas	nana	nyam	nya	ni	nisa	ayn
  2p	vāng	vās	vana	vayam	vaya	vari	vasa	va
  2p hon	vayang	vayas	vayena	vayyam	vayea	vayeri	vayisa	vay
  3p masc	tang	tas	tan	tyam	tya	tri	tis	(-i)yan*
  3p fem	teng	tes	ten	teyam	teya	teri	teys	(-i)yen
  3p neut	tong	tos	ton	toyam	toya	tori	toys	(-i)yon
  3p inanimate	teng	ratey	ten	ratyam	ratya	ray	ratas	aran

  
  *) when suffixed to verbs, ‘i’ is inserted when the preceding morpheme ends in a consonant.
  
  
• Reflexive pronouns are formed with sitang- plus the respective pronoun.

Relative clauses

• The relative pronoun is s(i)-, or si when it is directly following the NP that is described by the relative clause
• The relative pronoun can be marked for its head’s case in order to disambiguate. The head is in the matrix clause. The relative clause is usually a complete clause in that it contains at least an agent/patient and a verb. It can be used as an attributive clause as well (i.e. like an adjective).
• It can be double-marked to derive forms like “of which”, e.g. sangena is the relative pronoun marked both for agent and for genitive.

Prepositions/postpositions

• Ayeri usually has prepositions, although for example kaivay ‘without’ is usually a postposition. The number of such words is very small though.
• Adpositions are technically nouns, though they already include the ‘of' that would be necessary in English, e.g. ling Xya = top_of X-LOC, i.e. ‘on X’. Dependants of locatives must be marked with the locative case. When there is no adposition but only an NP marked for the locative case, the adposition is implied by semantics. It is usually ‘in’ or ‘at’.
• The word manga put before an adposition denotes moving along the path that is defined by the preposition: manga ling Xya = MOT top_of X-LOC, i.e. ‘over X’

7. The original, unmangled text (Peter Bleackley)

8. Original and Outcome

The text changed from this riddle about bees:

To this account of a magical dance spectacle: