User:Nicomega/Borgestlön
Not strictly translating, but paraphrasing, jotting down notes.
Southern hemisphere
There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache. There are only: impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) of adverbial value. There's no word that corresponds to the noun 'moon', but there is a verb 'to moon'. So the sentence "The moon rose above the river" would be:
- hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö
Lit.: hacia arriba detrás duradero-fluir lunó || upward behind enduring-flowing it mooned.
Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.
The text mentions that the literal translation is in the exact order, so we must assume:
| Tlönian | Spanish | English |
|---|---|---|
| hlör | hacia | towards |
| u | arriba | up |
| fang | detrás | behind |
| axaxaxas | duradero-fluir | enduring-flowing |
| mlö | lunó | (it) mooned |
Northern hemisphere
Here the primordial component is the monosyllabic adjective, not the verb. The noun is formed accumulation of adjectives. One doesn't say 'moon', one says 'aerial-clear over dark-round' or 'orange-dim-of the sky' or any other addition.
There are plenty of ideal objects in the literature of this hemisphere, assembled and dissolved in an instant, according to poetic needs. There are objects composed of two terms: one of visual character and one of auditory character: the color of the rising sun, and the remote cry of a bird. There are some made of many:
- the sun and the water against the swimmer's breast
- the faint tremulous pink that one sees with the eyes shut
- the feeling of letting yourself be carried away by the river, or slumber.
Those second grade objects can be combined with others, the process, by way of some abbreviations, is practically endless. There are famous poems composed of only one huge word. This word becomes part of a poetic object created by the author. The languages of Tlön's northern hemisphere possess all the nouns of the IE languages, and many more.
Other words
Secondary objects are created, for example, when two people look for the same object. If the first person finds it without saying a thing, the second person can find a second object not less real than the first, but closer to the second person's expectations of the object. These secondary objects are called hrönir and are a little longer. The hrönir can be of first or second grade, as in, hrönir derived from another hrön, or from the hrön of a hrön, and so on. Stranger and purer than any hrön is sometimes the ur: the thing produced by suggestion, the object elicited by hope.
These three words are:
- hrön, pl. hrönir
- ur
They seem to be similar in form with the languages of the southern hemisphere, although it is funny that they are used and treated as nouns, yet no language in Tlön admits them. This might have been a slip-up.
| I grade | II grade | III grade | IV grade | V grade | VI grade | VII grade | VIII grade | IX grade | X grade | XI grade | XII grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cruder form, little longer |
exaggerate
the aberrations |
worse than
II grade |
almost
uniform |
confused with
II grade |
purity of line
not found in original |
start
to decay |