[CULTURE] A Talossan Language Contest / Ünă Cumpetaziun da Mocts

[Iac Marscheir]

Really? That's weird, I didn't notice that.  Okay, cool.  Anything else?

EDIT: I'm actually going to assume that one laconic comment comprises the whole of the errors, and remove the warning. If there's anything else, let me know.

I apologize for being late to this, but, while "Ian veneva àl marcă" isn't technically wrong, I still feel that a better translation would be "Ian tent venescu àl marcă."

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Why?  Wouldn't that be "Ian has gone to the store," the present perfect? "Ian went to the store" is a simple past statement.

[Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP]

Why?  Wouldn't that be "Ian has gone to the store," the present perfect? "Ian went to the store" is a simple past statement.

Talossan doesn't strictly separate the two, but personally I think using veneva was perfect fine here.

[King Txec]

I would think for an introductory lesson, we'd not want to make things too difficult. I wouldn't teach some grammar concepts to my students who aren't ready for that level of language.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Why?  Wouldn't that be "Ian has gone to the store," the present perfect? "Ian went to the store" is a simple past statement.

Talossan doesn't strictly separate the two, but personally I think using veneva was perfect fine here.

English is different from a lot of other languages with how it uses those labels. So I don't even know, really! But it does seem like the literal translation here is the one I gave, unless there's a pretty unusual rule that I didn't know about.

Is the alternate translation here actually grammatically better as a translation, or is it just stylistically preferred? If it's the latter, then it's crazy to insist on it in the first lesson, since it would be much more complicated to explain unnecessary change of tense in the translation.

I chose this verb because it's extremely common (useful to know by itself) and it has very irregular conjugation (useful to show the skill of using the translator correctly and separating out different tenses, persons, etc). If it's necessary, I can focus on the grammatical gender skill in the first lesson instead, but I would prefer not to do that because it's downstream of agreement in general.

[Iac Marscheir]

Why?  Wouldn't that be "Ian has gone to the store," the present perfect? "Ian went to the store" is a simple past statement.

Because the two forms of the past tense, "tir + [past participle]" and "[stem] + -eva", are derived from the perfect and imperfect aspects in natural Romance languages, and "John went to the store" would be translated with the perfect aspect in (most of) those languages. Most of them don't distinguish between the simple past and the present perfect.

[Iac Marscheir]

And, personally, I think a better sentence to start with would have been "John is going to the store," because it would've given a chance to demonstrate how Talossan doesn't distinguish the simple present and present continuous like English.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Okay, so it's a stylistic preference.

Well, that would be a really strange thing to emphasize in a language course for beginners.  It relies on a ton of prior linguistics knowledge, it focuses on an arcane aspect of the translation, and it's not easy to understand for someone who has never translated much of anything in their life.

The first language lesson is, like, "hey remember those 'verb' things you learned about when you were twelve?"

[Iac Marscheir]

It really isn't arcane. Aspects, being nigh-omnipresent in any language that uses them, are pretty much the first thing you learn about the past tense in any natural Romance language class (except probably Spanish), even if they don't call it by name.

[þerxh Sant-Enogat]

Why?  Wouldn't that be "Ian has gone to the store," the present perfect? "Ian went to the store" is a simple past statement.

Because the two forms of the past tense, "tir + [past participle]" and "[stem] + -eva", are derived from the perfect and imperfect aspects in natural Romance languages, and "John went to the store" would be translated with the perfect aspect in (most of) those languages. Most of them don't distinguish between the simple past and the present perfect.

In French, "Jean allait au magasin" (imparfait/preterit) et "Jean est allé au magasin" (passé composé/present perfect) have clear different meanings, I assume Talossan works similarly ?

[Iac Marscheir]

In French, "Jean allait au magasin" (imparfait/preterit) et "Jean est allé au magasin" (passé composé/present perfect) have clear different meanings, I assume Talossan works similarly ?

Technically no, the two constructions are stated to be synonymous in Talossan, but I don't think that justifies defaulting to one or the other in all cases.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

It really isn't arcane. Aspects, being nigh-omnipresent in any language that uses them, are pretty much the first thing you learn about the past tense in any natural Romance language class (except probably Spanish), even if they don't call it by name.

As a concept, they depend on knowledge of tenses in general and the concept of declension/conjugation, which in turn depend on the concept of parts of speech. It is an arcane point for a beginner, so there's no sense introducing the extra complexity unless there's a pretty good reason. If my translation is accurate, even if it's not stylistically to your taste, then I'm not going to change it, although I appreciate the advice. Please keep it coming, and definitely keep helping me!

[Iac Marscheir]

Me lavéu las maes d'acest. Petreca-te.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

"I wash my hands of this. You have fun."

Yeah, that does seem like it's for the best.

[Miestră Schivă, UrN]

*groan* Not happy that people are sniping at each other already.

I've previously argued that one of the reasons we find it hard to get more basic Talossan language materials is that the people who speak the language already are linguistic nerds who find it hard to communicate on the level of someone who thinks every foreign language is a code for English, but that's the level we need to start at it. It doesn't help that the designer of the language didn't really know what he was doing from a high-level linguistics perspective either, so you could argue that he "got it wrong" with making the "imperfect" and "perfect" past tenses equivalent.

Nevertheless, the whole Ladintsch community gotta be polite to one another.