CBB Conlang Relay XIV - IT BEGINS (late signups accepted)

[Mándinrùh]

I noticed that ring 1 ended up with several extra instances of "sitting" or "standing," which I take responsibility for. In Atili, intransitive verbs with animate subjects take an obligatory positional marker that indicates that the subject is sitting, standing, lying down, falling, moving quickly, etc.


I also take responsibility for adding a moral add the end. The Teremi nobility (whose dialect of Atili I focus on) object strongly to frivolous stories, so there needed to be some lesson to be learned from it.

It comes from Mandinruh's text: "kavóÿk!", glossed "onomatopoeia for an animal roaring". Presumably they added this for reasons of colour and narrative interest?

Partly this, and partly that Atili stories tend to lean heavily on onomatopoeia and ideophones. It clarifies that the animal is roaring, and not making some other manner of loud noise, like yelling, screaming, exploding, or crashing.


Finally, for anyone interested, a recording of me reading my translation in Atili and my complete translation notes.

[Lorik]

Some highlights from Ring 2:

The ferry

Spoiler:

"the ferry is technically still at port"
> "there was in fact one boat remaining in the harbour"
...
> "There was one boat on the jetty, with the owner in it"
> "The owner of a boat stood on this raised platform"
> "people from the boat stood on the high field"
> "the people's boat remained in the steep fields"
> "the boat's crew stayed on the steep meadow"

I'm not sure where the owner of the boat came from. Still, I find it funny that I ended up flipping "people from the boat" into "the people's boat", and right after that Jackk flipped it back into "the boat's crew".

Outside

Spoiler:

I'm not sure where "outside" came from, but it took some interesting turns in the subsequent texts:

> "outside"
> "outside the house"
...
> "away from their houses"
> "far away from the homeland"
> "in the homeland"
> "people"

The last jump from "homeland" to "people" occured because in Lohdan, the noun tûr can refer to both "people" and "land", "homeland".

Businessmen

Spoiler:

"businessmen"
> "merchants"
...
> "they didn’t sell him anything"
...
> "the homeland that they haven’t sold"
...
> "who weren't selling anything"

The noun "businessmen" eventually became a verb, with the negation coming from "neither [...] nor" in the previous text. It's interesting how eventually instead of not selling anything, it was the homeland which wasn't sold. In the final English text, this reverts back into not selling anything.

[Salmoneus]

FWIW, I knew that a bunch of the positionals weren't "meant" to be there (and I excluded a bunch iirc); but since I didn't know WHICH weren't meant to be there, and some of them seemed to assist the narrative, I wasn't sure which to remove and which to translate.

[Johnathan_4]

Yeah I definitely went off track with a lot of the translation! The old woman starts to think; “I would prefer a nice cush life than to the life I have now!" Maybe next time I'll get better at this :)

[Backstroke_Italics]

Amazing. Did not disappoint! I'm not sure which ring I enjoyed more, but I will never feel quite the same way when I hear a cow moo.

[Man in Space]

Is “show mercy to my head” like an idiom for excuse me?

That’s exactly what it is, yes.

[Mándinrùh]

Does anybody know when the next one will start?

[spanick]

Does anybody know when the next one will start?

Relays tend to occur 1-2 times a year. They’re not really scheduled or anything. Usually a user just starts one.

Since we just had a relay and that relay went pretty long, I imagine there won’t be another for several months, unless someone gets the bug to start one.