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Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :

I dug up "Statistical Probabilities" (DS9) and listened to the scene where we hear Weyoun's "Dominionese." He says (here I'm using the vowel system of most Italic European languages), "Hizhano mano hova, bali zhen korada sento." This corresponds to the English sentence, "On the balance, we are giving up more than you."

"Hizhano mano hova" seems to be the phrase translated to "on the balance." The latter isn't commonly found in English; most people just say "in the end," or "all in all." I'm guessing the universal translator chose the longer phrase because the Dominionese phrase is about that length. Unfortunately, since the English translation is colloquial, we can't really do further analysis.

When Weyoun says the next part of the sentence, he uses some helpful hand gestures. It goes, "bali" (points to himself), "zhen korada," and then "sento" (pointing to whomever he's negotiating with). Now, the translation is, "we are giving up more than you," but Jack makes a big deal about how the original sentence uses the "passive voice transitive." Sentences using the passive voice have the receiver of the action as the subject ("I hit the ball" is active, whereas "the ball was hit by me" is passive). Transitive sentences have an object as well as a subject, which I suppose would be the noun in the by-construction in English. So, a more accurate rendering of the sentence in English must be "more would be given up by us than you." Or, due to the order according to the gestures, "by us more would be given up than you." So, the correspondence must be, "bali" means "by us," "zhen" probably means "more," "korada" means "would be given up" (assuming the conditional is preserved, and it should be), and "sento" is "than you."

Breaking it down further, "korada" seems to be a coherent, inflected word, since Weyoun doesn't seem to say the syllables as separate words. From this, I'm assuming that Dominionese is largely inflecting, although this is just an assumption. "Bali" might be two words, but going with the inflectional model, it would be "us," in either nominative or accusative case, or maybe some special case. "Sento" is thus "you" in the comparative case.

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[This message has been edited by The Shadow (edited June 07, 2000).]

Posted by Vacuum robot lady from Spaceballs (Member # 239) on :

What kind of sentence is "You have way too much time on your hands

"? Passive Transitive? Whatever?

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[This message has been edited by Ultra Magnus (edited June 07, 2000).]

Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :

It's a standard active sentence. NYAH! :P

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Posted by Fructose (Member # 309) on :

Well, if we look at it word by word, we may not get to far because one word has many forms. Like the verb to be can take many forms such as "was", "is", "were", "am", etc. And we also have to think that this was just a bunch of writers coming up with a foregin sounding sentence just to make it sound good on tv. So any analysis you make is just a waste of time.

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

The whole show is something made up by writers. Any discussion we have of it on any of these boards is a waste of time. But, then, if you didn't have time to waste, you wouldn't be here, would you? :-)

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :

As far trying to make an analysis of a language the only one you can really do is Klingon since Marc Okrand went to a great lenghts to make it alien but also close to a real language. Whatever Weyoun says is just a bunch of words made up by the writers.

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Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :

Although if we show the Trek PTB that we are watching such little details, they might just try to keep some sort of coherence...

HA!

Andrew

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Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :

Frank, I think the first word might be Izjari, he sort of rolls his r...

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[This message has been edited by AndrewR (edited June 08, 2000).]

Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :

Hobbes: Go spoil someone else's fun. :P

I'm fairly certain there's no r in the first word...

Posted by Fructose (Member # 309) on :

I was getting at the whole language thing. The only 'real' language that was ever used was Klingonese. All other ones are just what sounds good at the time.

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It doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing as long as you look good doing it.

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

fructose: Um... Yes. So?

Besides, even Klingon wasn't consistent. Okrand may have made a dictionary for it, but the writers didn't use it always. If they just needed a single word to toss in, they'd make something up if they didn't feel like looking it up.

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"I know the whole bible! The New and Used Testaments!"
-Thurgood Stubbs, The PJs

[This message has been edited by TSN (edited June 09, 2000).]

Posted by Fructose (Member # 309) on :

I meant analyze something worth analyzing. One sentence of a language doesn't provide anything close to a glimpse of what a whole language is like. Also, english is a language and can you say it's consistent?

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It doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing as long as you look good doing it.

Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :

Well, define "consistent."

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

fructose: Would it help if we called it an "analysis of the single known example sentence of Dominionese"?

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"I know the whole bible! The New and Used Testaments!"
-Thurgood Stubbs, The PJs

Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :

Ahhh Frank, but how else would he make that "gutteral" noise at the end of the first "word" with out it being too harsh... a slight, one roll "r" would work.

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"chocolate cherries allamanda" - Datura, Tori Amos

Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :

I'm not sure if I hear a gutteral noise...there does seem to be a nasal, though...

Posted by Fructose (Member # 309) on :

When I say consistent I mean where ever you go, every word means the exacy same thing and is used exactly the same everywhere. And to me this analysis is like looking at a nail and trying to determine what the building looks like that it came from. I'm not harping on you guys, it's just that what you picked doesn't exactly lend itself to analysis.

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It doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing as long as you look good doing it.

Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :

Well, if the nail has green paint on its head, maybe the building is painted green! See?

[This message has been edited by The Shadow (edited June 10, 2000).]

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

fructose: No-one is attempting to reconstruct the entirety of the Dominion language from this. It's just an analysis of what each word in this sentence probably means.

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"I know the whole bible! The New and Used Testaments!"
-Thurgood Stubbs, The PJs

Posted by Fructose (Member # 309) on :

Ok, have a blast. Didn't mean to spoil the fun.

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It doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing as long as you look good doing it.

Posted by Jim Phelps (Member # 102) on :

This is the sentence as rendered in the script:

WEYOUN
Eee-ja maa'na hoo'va-baa'li
jen'ku'rada sen'to.

Boris

Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :

Wow. Thanks.

That seems to be phonetic, unfortunately, with the triple e's at the beginning and so on.

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

*listens to the audio again* There's definitely an extra syllable between the first two words there. An 'n' plus a vowel...

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Posted by Jim Phelps (Member # 102) on :

The actor seems to have forgotten that only "maa'na" is supposed to have a na at the end, and not "Eee'ja" also. Looks like a case of unconscious rhyming which the director didn't want to correct (and why should he?).

We could explain this by postulating that whenever Eeeja is followed by a word that ends on na, the pronounciation is changed to Eee'ja'na. Sorta like the French "nous" which is usually pronounced without the "s" -> "noo", but not when the following word starts with a vowel (as in nous allons, where nous sounds like "noose").

Boris

[This message has been edited by Boris (edited June 12, 2000).]

Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :

This is a bit off topic, but did anyone else find it odd that Weyoun, genetically engineered to be the perfect diplomat, would not also be designed to be a natural linguist? I would think that being able to converse with your counterpart in their own language would give you tremendous advantages.

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Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :

Bad eyes, good ears, no aesthetics, & no flair for linguistics. Heh...

Maybe everything Weyoun would say in English without the translator would be heavily tainted by his accent & thei render him idiotic-sounding. Y'know...kinda like people from Arkansas going to Belgium & asking where "oon piss-wahr" is.

Heh...the Vorta: "Redneck trash of the Dominion!!"

Oh, yeah: they sure as hell like their apostrophic glottal stops. Wonder if that's the Founders' native tongue or some kind of "Dominion Esperanto" they devised in case someone noticed the language similarities to the "changleings of lore"....

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :

I don't think the Founders have a native spoken language. Why would they?

And that situation, Shik, is sort of what I'm talking about. Surely the Dominion has the expertise to make the Vorta perfect polyglots?

Posted by Fabrux (Member # 71) on :

Actually, Boris, it's more like "nooz" in "nous allons"

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