Comments on the Pictorial Dictionary?

Tweek · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:11 am **Posts:** 2633

I do actually have an alternative recording of Yeesha's welcome speech from The Cleft. In it the D'ni she speaks at the start goes on longer and she also starts singing in D'ni half way through her speech. It's a shame the D'ni hood recording is so garbled. IIRC it was recorded by Rawa himself.

KathAveara · **Posted:** Tue Mar 28, 2017 10:58 am

I can confirm what Khrees is saying. The only way to decipher a dead language is to have a bilingual text in a known language, or something that is effectively bilingual (i.e. a segment of text you can reasonably guess the translation for). For the former, see the Rosetta stone and Egyptian, for the latter see Linear B.

Talashar · **Joined:** Sun Dec 08, 2013 12:24 pm **Posts:** 91

Once the language in its written form had been mastered, and a rough symbol-sound correspondence established, recordings could help with more precise phonetic details and phonological processes that don't appear in the writing system. Knowledge of the apostrophe's pronunciation certainly comes either from recordings or written D'ni descriptions. The same goes for the pronunciation of unaccented u, for which the natural hypothesis is the [ʊ] of English put (for an i:ee :: u:oo analogy).

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Tweek wrote:

I do actually have an alternative recording of Yeesha's welcome speech from The Cleft. In it the D'ni she speaks at the start goes on longer and she also starts singing in D'ni half way through her speech. It's a shame the D'ni hood recording is so garbled. IIRC it was recorded by Rawa himself.

That's very interesting, Tweek :!:

Back in 2004 it was discussed by the DLF that the German version had more D'ni than the English version:

.rekooahn trekleft preniv legloen b'rem .kodokenen ferem ben tonah b'rish .reahno —

We now know how to say the fourth of the following sentences. "The storm is coming" would be:

.regahrkahl domahlahen

And "The water is flowing …" would be: .reahno doremen …

But it would be nice to know how to say "in from the desert."

Shorah

Tweek · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:11 am **Posts:** 2633

Anyway here is the Ogg file it was from an early build maybe Choru or Ubiru..I can't remember at this point.

http://grey-skies.net/temp/huru/clftYeeshaVision.ogg

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Thanks for this, Tweek

What Yeeshah says is indeed the longer text cited above from the German version, along with shorah at the beginning, of course. What she sings in the middle of the recording is a reprise of the first sentence.

Your are right about the recording from the hood podium. I seem to recall coming across a slightly "cleaned up" version but I cannot find the link right now, if I saved it.

By the way, this is a shot of the book from Revelation that I was talking about: http://pcmedia.gamespy.com/pc/image/alphabet_440_1097730717.jpg

The system displayed seems much more plausible to me as the invention of a literate English-speaker in the late 18th century, than something devised by a university-trained historian in the late 20th century; though I could see the latter using this system if it was the form taken by his primary historical key for interpreting D'ni. And of course, the book in question may have contained more grammatical or lexical information about the language, if it was compiled by Anna or Atrus to aid in learning D'ni.

Shorah

KathAveara · **Posted:** Thu Mar 30, 2017 9:25 am

I'd always supposed that that book was created by Atrus specifically for Yeesha, probably with the Rehevkor (yes, I know that's redundant) as a basis.

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

There is an interesting hint that supports this in the Lost Chapters booklet, where the title page of the “D’ni Language Guide” section includes a montage of these two pages in its lower right corner, suggesting that they were consulted in the composition of the guide. (This does include a chart summarizing the Alphabet base on these pages, though the Pronuciation Guide and actual entries in the Dictionary use a slightly different system, with ai, th, dh, u in place of I, TH, th, uh.)

Facing this title page is a sort of frontispiece with a faded image of six lexical equivalents written in a very old-fashioned cursive handwriting:

Root – nai(n)
Water – Ahno(n)
Book – kor(n)
Eternal – tsahno
Write – sehl(v)
Nature – vog(n)

We can compare this with the corresponding entries in the Dictionary section of the Guide:

Book – n. kor
Eternal (nonliving) – adj. tsah-no
Nature – n. vog
Root – n. nay
Water – n. ah-no
Write (Ages) – v. sel

These entries provide a little more detail and clarify that the parenthetical letters at the end of the “old-fashioned” entries are indications of the parts of speech. Essentially they seem like edited versions that could have been based the older ones. And again there are slight differences in the system of transcription: ai and eh have been replaced by ay and e.

If Kath is correct in thinking that the table in the book seen in Revelation was written by Atrus, then perhaps the older cursive lexical entries were written by Anna. This might be corroborated by the spelling of the name “Gehn,” since Anna would have been the one to teach Gehn how to write English and would have been the first person who attempted to transcribe D’ni using Latin letters.

Shorah

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Getting back to our newly revealed words:

KathAveara wrote:

Regarding tsogal, it looks like it should be a participle of a verb tsog, which could mean "to shine" (thus "sunny" is "shining"). To relate this to tsoid, we'd have two suffices, -(o)g and -id, and a base tso, …

One difference between something tsoidahl ‘glowing’ and things in a place that is tsogahl ‘sunny’ is that the visible brightness or shining is close to the source or on the actual surface of a thing that glows, while the light of the sun shines down on the earth and the brightness is a “distant” effect of the actual shining. Perhaps the idea of an action or process with an effect or result characteristically distant or separated from the subject is what the g suffix in the verb tsog indicates.

Other verbs ending in g are tahg ‘give’ and teeg ‘work’. The first of these could be the prototypical example of this idea, since “to give” means specifically that the subject transfers something (tah ‘it’) to a separate person. The idea in “to work” is probably more metaphoric, but typically (if not necessarily) work produces results in some place separate from where a person resides.

Other verbs ending in g are less certain, since their meanings are speculative. But poog in the phrase mot kopoogen b’ken seems to mean ‘which turned out to be’ or ‘which proved to be’; so that there is a significant sense of “separation” of the subject from the result.

Shorah

EDIT: If tsogahl 'sunny' is indeed a participle, then I suppose that tsogtahv = 'sunshine' and retsogtahn = 'the sun'.

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

The ending id in the verb tsoid ‘glow’ does not have any parrallel in the published corpus of D’ni. But if tsog means etymologically ‘to illuminate something distant or separate’; then tsoid could mean ‘to illuminate something nearby’ or ‘to illuminate oneself’.

This is an iteresting possibility, because we do not otherwise know how to express a “reflexive” idea in D’ni; yet we might expect such a suffix to be similar in formation to the “passive” suffixes ij and in.

We have only one example where ij is used in an finite verb (most of its examples are predicates of the verb ‘to be’) — namely:

.khahpo rezuhnuh rildolgelenij gahth
‘perhaps the ending has not yet been written’.

A use of the reflexive might be something like:

.kahnrad kokroem rekor gopah rilkokroenid
‘I think you moved the book because it did not move itself’.

Shorah

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Another ending that might be a suffix in the same category as ij, in, id is the ending is. This occurs in the following:

ilais ‘power, charge’ (verb)
na’grenis ‘brittle’
nekis-ahl ‘bent, twisted, distorted’
kenen gor khreset b’mahlah winis ‘it is time for us to come [together (?)]’

The key may be in the last example even though we can only infer its meaning tentatively from the context. The sequence win also occurs in the bird-name urwin about which we can at least guess that the first component ur means ‘large’ (since uru = ‘large gathering’). The other thing we know about urwins is that they mate for life; so possibly the root meaning of the component win is ‘mate’ or ‘join’.

If this is reasonable, then it could be that a more literal translation of b’mahlah winis is ‘to come join each other’. This may imply that is is an ending that indicates an action is mutual or reciprocal. To illustrate the parallelism among the suffixes ij, id, is here are examples using the same verb:

.aytrus kovotahren ah yeeshah kheseltahvon
‘Atrus praised Yeesha for her writing.’

.yeeshah kovotahrenij t’aytrus kheseltahvon
‘Yeesha was praised by Atrus for her writing.’

.yeeshah kovotahrenid kheseltahvon
‘Yeesha praised herself for her writing.’

.aytrus g’yeeshah kovotahreetis kheseltahvos
‘Atrus and Yeesha praised each other for their writing.’

Whether the idea of mutuality or reciprocity can be connected with the other words that might contain an ending is I will leave for further discussion

Shorah

KathAveara · **Posted:** Thu Apr 06, 2017 9:02 am

I've always supposed that the names Veovis and Efanis likely contain an ending -is as well, though we don't know the meanings of the personal names.

larryf58 · **Posted:** Thu Apr 06, 2017 7:14 pm

I'll derail this for a moment to share two things I've learned.

First, the word minkata is, and I quote, "some kind of idiom". I asked if it's a single word that expresses a complex concept (which it is), or if it's a compound word (it isn't).

Second, the phrase regaro tiwa is official, not a mistake by fans. Rawa forgot how it ended up that way -- he says there are several possible explanations -- but as a personal thing, he likes the way it flows better than the grammatically correct retiwa garo. His in-character answer is, "It is contradiction to the known rules of D'ni grammar [implying that there are rules we still don't know], but the DRC were never able to find a reason for the difference."

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Just to clarify: the rule RAWA is talking about is stated in the D'ni Language Guide (page 13) as follows:

Quote:

• The adjective is placed after the noun.
Example: ancient = oglahn, so the ancient tree = reter oglahn

That there are rules of D'ni grammar known to the DRC but not yet published seems self-evident, since we continue to learn new things about the language as the years go by

What is interesting to me about this reported remark by RAWA is that there are aspects of D'ni that he feels aesthetically must be true even if he cannot pin down logical reasons why ...

With regard to Minkata being "some kind of idiom," I think that was indicated (if not fully realized) when the literal meaning of the name was first revealed:

Quote:

(05/24 21:07:35) Cate Alexander: We will reverently celebrate its opening as we honor the events of this week.
(05/24 21:08:02) Cate Alexander: How appropriate that the word "minkata" means "heavily scarred".
(05/24 21:08:29) Cate Alexander: May the scars of Minkata be a constant memorial of all we have lost.

Shorah

larryf58 · **Posted:** Thu Apr 06, 2017 10:14 pm

Khreestrefah wrote:

With regard to Minkata being "some kind of idiom," I think that was indicated (if not fully realized) when the literal meaning of the name was first revealed:

The interesting thing to me is that it's a single word that expresses a relatively complex concept, rather than a compound word made out of a phrase the way many other place names are. It raises the question of why the D'ni would have need of a simple word to express it. Was heavy scarring so common among the Ronay or D'ni at some time that it merited a special word?

Comments on the Pictorial Dictionary?

Who is online