InsaneJournal

Zov Nahnodh Ghao Udolzh

Okay, so randomredux pulled through like I suspected and guessed what the Super Mystery Paragraph from the previous post was; the (romanised) Kryptonian translation of everyone's favourite DC-related internet meme, the "Lex Luthor stole 40 cakes" entry from the Superdictionary.  Yes, it was translated by yours truly.  Yes, that means I went out and learnt a fictitious language.  Yes, that is inexcusably nerdy and my licence to exist has now been revoked.  I did it for the pr0n, I swear!

Actually, it wasn't really that hard; it took me about half an hour.  The main reason is that, unlike Star Trek fans, DC fans have apparently spent the last 70 years being pretty lazy; Kryptonian isn't even close to being a 'complete' fake language, which makes it very easy to use as it's missing all the bits that make learning a foreign language difficult.  It has simple, regular grammar.  No-one really cares if you pronounce it 'wrong'.  The vocab list is very, very short, and there are no known idioms.  In other words, you can just Make Stuff Up; it's not as if the Kryptonian Language Purity Council ( klpc) is going to come knocking on your door, now is it?

Anyway, for those of you who are curious, here is how the translation works.  The words in square brackets I had to make up, on account of not being able to find an existing equivalent:

When no-one was looking, Lex Luthor took forty cakes.
Skilorras tandedh tahv shehdahjah, [cherr]ahzh [Lehksh Luthao] w bython [jaodh]o.
When to look (-past) none of the people, to take (-past, simple) Lex Luthor (sentence object identifier) forty cakes.

He took 40 cakes.
[Cherr]ahzh zhod w 40 [jaodh]o.
To take (-past, simple) he (obj.) 40 cakes.

That's as many as four tens.
Nahnodh ghao [zvaolu] w ten [bytho].
To be (-present) it (non-gendered) as many as (obj.) four tens.

And that's terrible.
Zov nahnodh ghao [udolzh].
And to be (-present) it (non-gendered) terrible.

So I made up the verb 'to take' (cherr), the noun 'cake' (jaodh), and the adjective 'terrible' (udolzh).  Those were pretty much just picking random strings of likely-sounding letters out of the alphabet; though I based 'terrible' off the word for 'evil'.  Like I mentioned, the third sentence was the one that caused me the most trouble, since it contained an idiom ('as many as') and the word 'tens'.  Direct translation was too difficult, so in the end I decided to swap idiom for (invented) idiom; thus 'as many as' becomes zvaolu.  This combines the word for 'as' (zvaol) with the collective noun pluralisation for 'many' (-u).  I figured it was good enough for rock and meme.  The other thing I had to think about was how to pluralise a number.  According to the grammar notes I was working off, numbers in Kryptonian, unlike in English, are always written in characters rather than phonetically.¹  Hence the problem about pluralising one.  In the end, I just did it 'straight' (by adding -o) rather than worrying about idiomatic irregularities.  Fuck your idiomatic irregularities.

My nerd.  Let me show you it.

Some things I learnt while doing this:

• The fact that I have never been taught formal grammar made this slightly more difficult than it would otherwise be, due to the strict verb-subject-(w)-object word order.  I think I've got most of the subjects/objects and orderings correct, but possibly not.  I had to look a bunch of stuff up at dictionary.com to figure out what certain words 'counted' as.
• Unless my own accent is getting in the way, Kryptonians cannot pronounce 'Luthor' easily.  I find this highly ironic.  They do okay with 'Lex' – albeit somewhat slurred – but fail utterly on the 'or' sound; there is no equivalent o or u sound, and even their a vowels don't cut it.  In the end, I went with ao, pronounced as in 'cow'.
• The biggest indicator to me that this is a highly ad-hoc invented language is the fact that the prepositions and some of the pronouns are so long.  The word for 'as' is zvaol for Rao's sake!  What's up with that?  There are also no single-or-dual-letter prepositions, which exist in most really-real languages (that I've seen, anyway).  Oh, except for the object marker, which has its own character.
• For no particularly discernible reason whatsoever, conversational Kryptonian sounds absolutely nothing like what you'd expect it to sound like if all you were going off were people's names.  For those of you who missed it, male Kryptonian names are (always?) two hyphenated single syllables, while female names are two syllables followed by two hyphenated single syllables.  This would kinda indicate that the language was short and sharp, with alternating consonant-vowel sounds – a bit like Japanese – when it actually comes out quite sibilant.  Random made up words for the win.

So, there you have it.  Enough concentrated nerd to last you the rest of the year, at least.  And to think, I could be doing some productive.  Hah!

1. So technically bython is 'incorrect' and 40 (pronounced bython) is 'correct', but whatever.  Superdictionary has both in the original text, hence it's preserved here. ^

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