Comments on the Pictorial Dictionary?

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

A thematic presupposition behind several of the latest entries in the "Pictorial Dictionary" seems to be that broad humour is somehow universally meaningful. I can only recommend the D'ni aphorism:

.r'meoor medoo kenen trepo'okh r'reestahn

Shorah

KathAveara · **Posted:** Thu Sep 15, 2016 1:06 am

Yeah, I wouldn't've made that connection at all. The first thing that springs to my mind for that picture is something akin to falling.

larryf58 · **Posted:** Thu Sep 15, 2016 1:10 pm

As I mention frequently, the easy words were all done in the first series of illustrations. I'm struggling to find effective ways to illustrate many of the words in the second series, and I'm not all that happy with some of them. I had to settle for "close enough" in several cases.

As for the humor? Yes. I go for humor, drama, or just plain "cute" when possible. Not because it necessarily illustrates a word better (although sometimes it does), but because humor and drama are entertaining. If the pictures aren't entertaining, there's no incentive for people who are not students of the language to keep paying attention.

larryf58 · **Posted:** Fri Sep 16, 2016 12:25 pm

In the illustration of "speak", the D'ni text is an in-joke of sorts.

Acorn1 · **Joined:** Sat Jan 12, 2013 8:46 pm **Posts:** 985

will you please provide a translation, Larry?

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Acorn:
http://www.eldalamberon.com/dni_dict.htm#sehkh

Shorah

larryf58 · **Posted:** Fri Sep 16, 2016 8:38 pm

It's the line from Khreestrefah's link that starts with sehkehm shokhootee. The joke is who said that line originally, and to whom and why.

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

The word merk ‘poisoned water’ is interesting, because it looks like it might be related to the phrase b’mer khe ’to watch for’ perhaps in the extended sense ‘be wary of, try to avoid’. There might be a slight difference in meaning from ahno miro ‘toxic water’, with merk being specifically harmful to people if they drink it. On the other hand, there might also be an etymological relation between miro and merk, given the m and r that they share.

Shorah

larryf58 · **Posted:** Sun Sep 18, 2016 12:35 pm

I think merk is interesting also, but from a different viewpoint. It's always notable when a concept is so important to a given group of people that they have a single word in their language to describe it. In real life, volcanology has adopted Hawaiian as an official language for their terminology, because Hawaiian has more words for precisely defining different forms of lava than any other language on Earth.

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Exactly why it is important to distinguish D'ni merk from ahno miro if you want to learn the language; just as in Hawaiian it is important to learn different words for 'lava'.

Shorah

larryf58 · **Posted:** Sun Sep 18, 2016 11:07 pm

I'm not sure that applies in this case; it's not that "poisoned" and "toxic" have much difference in this usage. Both imply that you'll get sick and maybe die if you ingest it. However, it's true that the concept of bad water was important enough that they had one simple word for it that would be easy to shout in an emergency.

Regardless, as I mentioned in my note, I only wrote "toxic" because "poisoned water" was a little too long and would have made the text run up the sides of the image too far. The change was for artistic reasons.

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

I was talking about the difference in meaning between the D'ni word and phrase, not the difference between the English translations of these -- a commonly confused pair of notions (meaning vs. translation) among beginners studying other languages.

By the way, English "poisoned" and "toxic" do have different usages, though these may overlap in some contexts.

Shorah

larryf58 · **Posted:** Mon Sep 19, 2016 11:59 pm

I've changed the illustration for Morpa / Queen to a picture I like better.

Talashar · **Joined:** Sun Dec 08, 2013 12:24 pm **Posts:** 91

By the way, with regard to Gehn's speech to Cho, I'm pretty sure he's saying sekem shokhooteeom, with the possessive suffix. (Compare his teegtahvom in the imager speech, which has a similarly open vowel in om.)

larryf58 · **Posted:** Wed Sep 28, 2016 2:15 pm

Forgot to post a notice here.

There hasn't been a new illustration for the last couple of days because the latest major update to Windows 10 trashed my ability to start up my computer; it ruined the Windows registry after it failed to install properly. Restoring the registry from backups didn't fix the problem. I'm currently in the process of performing a clean installation of Windows on my computer as I write this.

Of course, that's the easy part. After I'm done with the basics, I'll have to restore all my programs, and that will be a pain in the backside. Still, I should have everything in working order by the end of the week, and I'll resume making word illustrations when my image editor and plugins are restored.

Comments on the Pictorial Dictionary?

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