How many nouns can be thrown next to each other?

Started by N'wah, January 04, 2014, 11:03:21 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

N'wah

I tried to translate    "Our Na'vi Language Teacher is called Paul"
I wanted to throw a bunch of nouns together like the English one;  once I had written it I had seen how confusing it was.  Anyway this is what I came up with

"leNa'via lì'fyayä karyur(u) awngeyä syaw fko Pawl"

le'Na'via lì'fyayä karyur(u)  <- Teacher of the Na'vi language (dative)

syaw fko Pawl - one/they call Paul


Eana Util gave a, in my opinion, better way by changing the translation to "who teaches the Na'vi language"
"Karyur(u) awngeyä a kar lì'fyat(i) leNa'vi fko syaw Pawl"

This is much easier to read, I was just wondering if the top one is grammatically incorrect  :-\.

Cheers!

Tìtstewan

I know this following way looks confussing, but I think I should mention it too.

"Our Na'vi Language Teacher is called Paul"

lì'fyayä karyur = language teacher
leNa'via lì'fyayä karyur = Na'vi language teacher
awngeyä leNa'via lì'fyayä karyur = our Na'vi language teacher
syaw fko Pawl = call Paul

LeNa'via lì'fyayä karyur awngeyä syaw fko Pawl
"Our Na'vi Language Teacher is called Paul"

LeNa'via lì'fyayä karyur awngeyä syaw fko Pawl.
Lit.: One call to our teacher of the Na'vi language as Paul.

The basic comes from this:
[Oeru] syaw fko ___
Lit. One calls to [me] (as) ___


One call to our [Na'vi language teacher] as Paul.
One call to our [teacher of the Na'vi language] as Paul.
[German: Man nennt den Lehrer der na'vi'schen Sprache Paul.]

So, I hope I didn't confuss something...

-| Na'vi Vocab + Audio | Na'viteri as one HTML file | FAQ | Useful Links for Beginners |-
-| Kem si fu kem rä'ä si, ke lu tìfmi. |-

N'wah

Alright cool, that's what I thought it was, I just wanted to check  ;D

Plumps

No worries, that's totally fine ;)
It seems to be confusing at first but actually the case endings of the words help to get the meaning. When I read the topic I thought you wanted to put nouns without case endings together which is of course not possible.

Your second sentence could be misunderstood as 'of us who teach the Na'vi-language'. Of course, context would make that clear. But to avoid that I'd put awngeyä before karyur ;)

N'wah

Hehe, I kinda browsed through all the grammar available in Na'vi in a Nutshell a couple of years ago and have been keeping up with Naviteri.  The case endings aren't too bad at all since they, at present, seem very similar to Japanese.  I think I read somewhere that he based a lot of the early grammatical rules on Japanese, but I can't remember if that's true or not.  I wish the Japanese section of the board was active, I think the last post was almost 3 years ago  ;D. Anyway, I've decided it was time to use what I had been reading instead of treating it like a fun puzzle!  Ha irayo seiyi ma Tìtstewan ma Plumps-sì!