![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
in which i amuse myself
In "Asylum," Fraser speaks Inuktitut to Dief, right? Yes. The whole joke is that he says a really short sentence means "Fetch the knife from the hood of that car and apply it to the ties that bind us," and a really long sentence means "hide."
So I played the scene nine or ten times and wrote down what I heard him saying, and then it occurred to me that the folks with the scripts might have what he actually was saying (and thus I wouldn't have to count on my judgment of where the word boundaries are), and I poked through my books trying to translate it all.
First, Fraser says:
Savik. Aklhunaaq.
(The 'L' sound is actually a sort of a sideways-hissing sound, made by putting your tongue where it goes for the 'l' in 'lake' and then making the sound 'h' instead. Similar, I think, to the sound spelled with a double-l in Welsh. I've spelled it 'lh' here because HTML won't allow me to make the character I really want, which is a lowercase L bisected crossways by a wavy line.)
The script has "altuneat" for the second word, but (1) I hear the hard sound before the 'L' sound; (2) on the script page the Inuktitut stuff is flagged as having been handwritten, "misspellings and all;" and (3) the word under their spelling isn't in my dictionary here, but under my spelling it is. Spelled my way, the whole thing means:
Knife. Rope.
[grin]
Then , he says:
Tuaviinnaaluk ullaniaqquht nuqqattailiutiiu kisiani tikiutiguut ijiksimavittavanunit qanuqunatit.
What I got when I listened to that was 'uavinaluq ulaniakutit nukataililuqtilu kisiau vikiu tikuvit iksimavit tiavannit kannuiku mapit,' which goes to show (1) some not-very-interesting things about how carefully actors pronounce things in languages they don't actually speak (and how accurately others of us hear things in languages we don't actually speak, of course) and (2) some moderately-interesting stuff about how, as a native speaker of English, I really really want words to max out at about three or four syllables.
The first word has to do with a hurry or a rush; the -aaluk suffix means something I'm not familiar with.
=->edited to add: am so. i knew it looked familiar. it's a reinforcer.
The second word has me stumped -- but if I'm right and the script-transcriber is wrong (i.e., if it ends in -utit instead of -uht, which is a reasonable way a person might misread someone else's handwriting and which makes sense since there's no 'h' in Inuktitut), then it's a second-person singular intransitive verb. (Makes sense. Fraser's talking to Dief.)
The root of the third word is mysterious to me as well, but the -taili- in the middle there means "avoid" and it's possible the -uti is reciprocal -- so whatever nuqqat- means, whoever it refers to doesn't want to do it to each other. :-)
The fourth word, kisiani, means "only."
The fifth word is another one I can't find; more precisely, I can find it but I can't find a translation of it. However, the ending -iguut marks the verb as first person plural intransitive: by this point Fraser's talking about himself and Ray. (I just don't know what he's saying, exactly.)
The beginning of the sixth word, ijiksimavit, means "you are hidden." I'd guess the rest has to do with mood and/or aspect in some way.
qanuq means "how." The rest of the word looks like a verbal affix and some other verbal paraphernelia; possibly "how you are" or "how you're doing it." Yielding:
Hurry! You verb pronoun avoid verb each other (?) only we verb you hide ? how you do it.
Clearly, this demonstrates the need for better Inuktitut-English dictionaries.
So I played the scene nine or ten times and wrote down what I heard him saying, and then it occurred to me that the folks with the scripts might have what he actually was saying (and thus I wouldn't have to count on my judgment of where the word boundaries are), and I poked through my books trying to translate it all.
First, Fraser says:
Savik. Aklhunaaq.
(The 'L' sound is actually a sort of a sideways-hissing sound, made by putting your tongue where it goes for the 'l' in 'lake' and then making the sound 'h' instead. Similar, I think, to the sound spelled with a double-l in Welsh. I've spelled it 'lh' here because HTML won't allow me to make the character I really want, which is a lowercase L bisected crossways by a wavy line.)
The script has "altuneat" for the second word, but (1) I hear the hard sound before the 'L' sound; (2) on the script page the Inuktitut stuff is flagged as having been handwritten, "misspellings and all;" and (3) the word under their spelling isn't in my dictionary here, but under my spelling it is. Spelled my way, the whole thing means:
Knife. Rope.
[grin]
Then , he says:
Tuaviinnaaluk ullaniaqquht nuqqattailiutiiu kisiani tikiutiguut ijiksimavittavanunit qanuqunatit.
What I got when I listened to that was 'uavinaluq ulaniakutit nukataililuqtilu kisiau vikiu tikuvit iksimavit tiavannit kannuiku mapit,' which goes to show (1) some not-very-interesting things about how carefully actors pronounce things in languages they don't actually speak (and how accurately others of us hear things in languages we don't actually speak, of course) and (2) some moderately-interesting stuff about how, as a native speaker of English, I really really want words to max out at about three or four syllables.
The first word has to do with a hurry or a rush; the -aaluk suffix means something I'm not familiar with.
=->edited to add: am so. i knew it looked familiar. it's a reinforcer.
The second word has me stumped -- but if I'm right and the script-transcriber is wrong (i.e., if it ends in -utit instead of -uht, which is a reasonable way a person might misread someone else's handwriting and which makes sense since there's no 'h' in Inuktitut), then it's a second-person singular intransitive verb. (Makes sense. Fraser's talking to Dief.)
The root of the third word is mysterious to me as well, but the -taili- in the middle there means "avoid" and it's possible the -uti is reciprocal -- so whatever nuqqat- means, whoever it refers to doesn't want to do it to each other. :-)
The fourth word, kisiani, means "only."
The fifth word is another one I can't find; more precisely, I can find it but I can't find a translation of it. However, the ending -iguut marks the verb as first person plural intransitive: by this point Fraser's talking about himself and Ray. (I just don't know what he's saying, exactly.)
The beginning of the sixth word, ijiksimavit, means "you are hidden." I'd guess the rest has to do with mood and/or aspect in some way.
qanuq means "how." The rest of the word looks like a verbal affix and some other verbal paraphernelia; possibly "how you are" or "how you're doing it." Yielding:
Hurry! You verb pronoun avoid verb each other (?) only we verb you hide ? how you do it.
Clearly, this demonstrates the need for better Inuktitut-English dictionaries.
no subject
no subject
I wonder who wrote the ON dialog. And how you get to be that person..
no subject
No, really. Icelandic is a deliberate attempt by the Icelanders to preserve as much Old Norse as possible, so the languages are quite similar. There are non-Icelandic scholars of Old Norse, of course, but it'd be cheaper to hire an Icelandic person than find a proper translator.
-- Lorrie
no subject
no subject
...grammatically, though, you're right; Modern Icelandic hasn't changed all that much-- they lost the dual, or in the case of the pronouns lost the plural and extended the dual, and they lexicalized a lot of the grammatical markers, but that's about it.
Getting an Icelander to write the dialog and Dane as your dialect coach would probably be the best way to go. Though the ON on this week's Buffy didn't sound either ON or Icelandic to me-- "Aud" hasn't ever been homophonous with English "odd", though there is a male name "Odd" which is cognate with the English word...
--Ellen, rambling on at way too much length