a translation challenge involving my conlang

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socio4016
rupestrian
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Joined: 02 Jul 2022 02:32

a translation challenge involving my conlang

Post by socio4016 »

one thing about my conlang; bayerth is that it inflects its verbs for modality; but one of the modalities works in such a way that if you translate it literally; you lose the point; more verbose translations are possible and more accurate to the true sense however. this modality is called "The characterizive modality" and it expresses that an action is consistent with the general character of the noun; without saying anything about it specifically happening. while it literally translates as “would”; it is more a comment on the general nature of the subject then a claim of any specific action. The characterizive modality is marked with the “ghomp” suffix.

an example sentence using it is:-

"Sul gulvonita egteldinslivzathtenghomptetushisogulthu shengo bryogildot"

literally: 'the criminal would kill his [own] brother'

that sentence is not in and of itself (absent other context) a claim that the criminal I am talking about has actually killed his own brother; just a claim that he is perfectly willing to kill people and has few red lines. the characterizing modality is not talking about something that has actually happened just what is consistent with the general character of some noun.

the individual sentence has little significance; you may recast the sentence into something else more relevent in your conlang; the core idea of a very simple statement with a transative verb like this is the core thing; i would love to see or hear how such sentences would be rendered in your conlang; it needs to specifically encode the general character not specific action thing; (bayerth has other modalities that indicate "would" in other senses); the two bellow examples should show you how much more verbose it is to translate the sense of the above sentence into english as they capture its meaning better then a literal translation:-

'Killing his [own] brother is the type of thing the criminal would do'

'the criminal is the type of person who would kill his [own] brother'

how simple or verbose is it to express this type of thing in your conlang? please provide literal translation and/or gloss to go alongside its actual wording in the conlang.
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lsd
greek
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Re: a translation challenge involving my conlang

Post by lsd »

3SDL (3S Deductive Language (1Sense=1Sign=1Sound))

fMSf[KOf[âfāĂR
(man killing men and maybe men of his family...)
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