On Wednesday, August 22, 2001, at 08:53 AM, Jesse Bangs wrote:

[YHL]
>> I for one would *love* feedback on how clear my notes on Czevraqis
>> were to Jesse, frex.  I have this sinking feeling that either the
>> language is still too simplistic, or I wasn't clear enough.  Jesse?
>
> Actually, I thought everything was pretty clear, though I would have
> liked more explanations in the vocabulary.  You never gave the meaning of
> the roots from which some of the verbs were derived, and if I rememer
> right most of them were not in the root pattern.  (I'm using all of the
> wrong terms here, but I hope you know what I mean.)  And there was one
>
<wry g>  Yes--unfortunately, I couldn't figure out a way to give "roots"
in the 48 hours I had and still have the translation be possible.  (If my
turn hadn't come when I was moving out of Ithaca perhaps it would have
been a different story.)  The main problem is that each morpheme
accumulates a "constellation" of meanings.  I think of the verb as the
"base" meaning, but the *noun* forms can be pretty unpredictable.  In a
separate post I'll list *all* the constellations for your amusement.

Also, I've revised the language since the relay <making a face> so I'll
give you the older forms.

> place where the interpretation of a verb depended on the interpretation
> of the verb's arguments, which was interesting with an active language.
> I think I got it right, though, and it wasn't all that difficult.
>
<interested look>  There was?  Huh.

>> God, yes.  I felt fortunate in that Relay 1's text (as I got it) was
>> particularly suitable to mashing to fit into the conculture.  =^)
>> And I was sitting there generating vocabulary like mad.  I didn't
>> expect to *need* some of those words for a while....<G>
>
> :-).  I think I only had to make up one word, the word for "bargain."
> But now, looking at the original texts, I'm not sure how that concept
> worked its way in <<chuckle>>.  This makes me think of another process
> distorting the translations in this game--lack of vocabulary.  I only
> create new words when I absolutely have to, and so I sort of stretched
> the meaning of a few things to fit words that I already had.
>
Interestingness!  :-)  I looked at this as an *excuse* to extend the
vocabulary, but then, Czevraqis is relatively "young" in that regard.

> And Irina Rempt wrote:
>>> I made a "scribal error" in my part.  I accidentally copied a word
> from
>>> line two in line three, so that instead of saying "I found a word",
> it
>>> said "I found it in the wilderness".  Oops.  :-P
>>
>> That's probably the phrase that I translated as "I am deep in the
>> forest" :-)
>
> Aha!  I knew there was something about a forest in the version I got, and
> I'm quite amused to see that a "scribal error" is responsible for it.

<rueful look>  Actually, Daniel's version (which I got) *didn't* have a
wood/wilderness, but it had bunches of stuff about (near as I could figure)
  an "inhabited realm."  However, in adapting the text to the conculture I
(re!)inserted a wood, since there is a forest associated with the
particular god.  STRANGEness!  <G>

YHL