| Smooth translation: |
When the little bird sings with greatness,
When the "artist of the river" clears its feathers in the mist,
When the songbird glorifies the Even Star,
Maybe the "reigners" can hear their song. |
| Interlinear |
Linsin kufan lezu,
NomS pref-Rad Rad
Jemnon sejfibo-lag nesaj izu|lebi ge,
NomS Rad-Rad NomPe Inf-Nom Rad of vaux
Lezulinan Dodapa djolaj,
NomS NomS pref-Inf-Nom
Lezedun plisesif ezve|si ige.
AccSe NomPe Par-Gen pres-vaux |
| Glossary/mini dictionary |
apa: star
di-: temporal prefix (moment with the nominative, duration with the accusative,
frequency with the genitive)
dod: evening, night
ezet: to hear, to listen
ge: to have (auxiliary verb)
ibo: air
jem: brook, river
ko-: means prefix ("with", "by means of")
lezu: to sing, song, to chant, chant
linan: bird
melag: inner part ('in' as a postposition)
naj: feather
-non: artist suffix (example: esesi: poetry -> esesinon: poet)
ola: to glorify
plis: to reign, reign
sejf: to confuse, confuse
-sif: actor suffix (roughly equivalent to the -er suffix in English)
-sin: diminutive and affective suffix ("little", "dear little")
zu|leb: to clear up, clearing |
| Grammar notes |
"Artist of the river" (jemnon) is a metaphor for some kinds of birds with long
legs that live near rivers and lakes. "Reigners" (plisif) is another metaphor
that applies to gods or celestial beings. Jemnon is an everyday metaphor (it's
really the way you name most big waterbirds in Moten). Plisif has been created
for the poem. In fact, there are no simple ways to name gods or God in Moten, it
just lacks the words. So many metaphors are used, depending on which nuance you
want to give.
Just some comments about Moten (if you read my translation of the Babel text, I
think you don't need much help):
- the word order is consistently SOV, but OSV is not unfrequent.
- verb conjugation is periphrastic, with the use of two auxiliaries (agem: to
have, and atom: to be).
- declination consists of three cases: nominative, accusative and genitive,
which are used also with impersonal forms of verbs to make the conjugation.
- Moten is written with the roman alphabet, with only four new letters: |s and
|z, which are the affricate counterparts of s and z, and |l and |n which are the
palatalised counterparts of l and n. The other letters have their IPA values.
Don't forget it's a poem, and poetic licence is strong in Moten (for instance,
using nominative instead of accusative for the object of a sentence, if the
subject is already put before it, or lack of atom as an auxiliary, or
concatenation of a substantive and its postposition - always showed by the
presence of a hyphen - , or personification - when a word becomes a proper noun,
the definite article disappears -). |
