A lonely little snowflake
Drifting to the ground
Begins the Christmas season
And brightens all the town
Happy smiling faces
On people passing by
To do their Christmas shopping
And dream of pumpkin pie
The childrens happy smiles
As they gather in a throng
Raise the spirits of all people
For they sing a joyful song
A candle in the window
And a tree aglow with light
Welcome friends and family
In from the snowy night
So raise your glass of cheer
As you read my little rhyme
To a lonely little snowflake
And a joyous Christmas time.
It might be a nice gesture for the Talossan-speaking community to translate perhaps a verse or two of this?
Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on December 15, 2024, 05:59:17 PMIt might be a nice gesture for the Talossan-speaking community to translate perhaps a verse or two of this?
I approve of the idea
Very nice poem! Well done!
This is a wonderful poem!
As Metrefieir Laureat, I approve and encourage everyone to share their poetry in Talossa(n)!
My Talossan is quite poor, but I did my best. I also did what I think would be actually useful for others to learn: talking through my translation as I did it. If someone notices something I did poorly or that they dislike, please let me know.
A lonely little snowflake. The word for snowflake is fioc. It's masculine, so the appropriate indefinite article is "ün." It will need the singular masculine form of the words for "lonely" and "little," also. In Talossan, as in most Romance languages, the adjective usually follows the noun (unless it's the number of something, like "twelve snowflakes"). So:
Ün fioc solatïeu pechein
Drifting to the ground. This form of the verb is called a gerund or present participle, and Talossan doesn't use them very much, according to my book. So I am going to just translate it as the simple present tense, since I think that captures the sense of it: amonteira. This creates problems in the next verse, but since I don't know any better what to do, everyone will have to deal with my plans there. The preposition describing something going in a direction towards something else is à, and then ground is tzară with the feminine article la.
Amonteira à la tzară
Begins the Christmas season. Okay, so now I'm going to do this simple present verb as an infinitive (the "dictionary form," as we called it in Latin class). This means that literally it's more like "the snowflake drifts to the ground to begin the season," but the preposition and infinitive don't share their form like they do in English, so that's okay by me. "Season" is årstið, and it takes the masculine article el, but that gets elided like in French to l'årstið. I don't get get how "Christmas" works, since it's a noun and not an adjective, so "of Christmas" it becomes.
Començar l'årstið del Natal
And brightens all the town. "And" is "es" in Talossan, and then we have another infinitive. But wait, I vaguely recall something weird about expressing "all of" something in Talossan. It goes in front, I think? Let's go with that. It's a weird-looking adjective: "toct i." It goes between the word for town ("stavour") and the definite article that the masculine words use ("el").
Es isplendidar el toct i stavour.
Ün fioc solatïeu pechein
Amonteira à la tzară
Començar l'årstið del Natal
Es isplendidar el toct i stavour.
A lonely little snowflake
Drifting to the ground
Begins the Christmas season
And brightens all the town
Ha ha, that was terrifying. I pressed what I thought was the "quote" button but was in fact the "quick edit" button as I have moderator privileges here and deleted AD's post. Masha'llah the Back button on Firefox works!
Anyway, what I was trying to say is that: as a recent contest shows, the Baron is definitely in the top 5 Ladintsch in this country; linguistic proficiency is relative, especially in a conlang, and unnecessary modesty leads to not trying at all, or even worse, trying to get ChatGPT to do it.
I agree - the Baron's translation was quite good. I can use L'Oversteir but I struggle with conjugations and such.
Quote from: Barclamïu da Miéletz on December 17, 2024, 04:30:50 AMQuote from: King Txec on December 16, 2024, 01:52:48 PMconjugations
I'm sure L'Översteir has those.
It does! You just click the "book" icon next to the dictionary word.
Screenshot 2024-12-18 at 08-23-55 L'Översteir.png
I should be more specific. English doesn't really have masculine and feminine so I struggle to do conjugations while also remembering to add gender. However, with some time and guidance, I can manage. Languages are not easy for me, but history...super simple!
Ha ha, believe me, I translate French->English for a living and I have a problem remembering grammatical gender