Hee.

[sanura]

I like English. I like it a lot. Among other things. Like foreign languages and cheesy eggs. My English assignment is sentence patterns. This is the only opportunity for creative writing we have all year, and she gives us bonus points if we have a story connecting the patterns. Thus, I am summarizing the Saga of the Ailurian Throne for English. Actually, I might post the things up here if y'all wanna see where you're going in the story (cause I certainly haven't written any more on 'Rarae).

Speaking of Rarae, my Wyverns' ticket got cleared today, so the new stuff should be showing up soon. I fixed up the messes in the chapters of the Saga, and added Nia's Legend. Oh yes, Nia.

To say something such as "three-headed dog" is somewhat of a difficulty... I think we'd have to extend it to "dog of three heads" or "three-heads dog", unless I make up some kind of suffix to sub for the English -ed (which is very versatile, by the way; you can say four-legged, doubted, untouched, all kinds of different functions on that thing). Maybe I'll do that... lessee, I have to go get my... oh, wait, I think I have a suffix that means with, or containing, or something, like -que in Latin. Yeah, lemme go get my dictionary.

Hmm. No, nothing like that. I thought I had one. Hmm. But the relationship between verbs and nouns in my language is so different anyway that I think I can get away with just making up a verb out of a noun like we do in English... "to leg" is like to have a leg, so if you're "legged", you have legs, subjunctively. Now I have to make up a word for leg. Or was it head? Three-headed dog. I have a word for head. Kapes, long a, long e. Like KAh-payss. A Latin plagiarism. So Kapesare would be "to head", which is already a real word, because it has to mean to lead, because kapes can also mean chief or leader. Hmm. Well, -headed means two things in English, maybe I can be lazy and let it be ambiguous in Ailurian. They're hard to confuse, contextually.

Glah, I'm sure you don't really want to know all the details of my agonizing over three little words so you can translate them in the way you want.... You want it to be a kind of nice mythological title, or a weird-sounding anomaly, kind of condescending? Like the difference between "Dog of three heads" and "three-headed dog". Why am I asking? I don't even have a word for Three. Two is as far as I got: uan, duan, .... 3? They fit nicely with the noun/adjective "n" convention, because I used double in Ally's poem, or twofold or something like that, an adjective of 2. Well, it shouldn't rhyme, could be confusing in conversation, if the numbers all sound like each other. So. Three. Hm. I'll keep it Latin-descended and easy to remember, so it needs to relate to Tres and three both. I dun have enough th's, so it'll start with that, but the resemblance can't be too similar or I won't feel very creative. Lessee. howbout thaun, with a voiced th? Sounds just like English Thou, with an n. Yeah, then Thau is triple ( which we'll use instead of three, because three is used as an adjective in this case). Hee, grammar rules are fun.

So we have one word of the three (pardon the accidental pun). Back to "headed". Hmmmmmmmmmm. I guess I'll be lazy and let it have two meanings. So, headed is kapesn, because the subjunctive ending is -n, and the verb is kapesare. so, we have thau-kapesn "dog", and we're to the easy part. We already have noun and adjective for wolf, which is not, I think, what you want, so we'll just get generic and do "canine" because we dun have house dogs (or cats) in Lupaua or Ailuria. Hmm. I already have a word that could be generic for the inhabitants of the dog continent; I made it up for Nia's poem (which she must go comment on). However, Lupona sounds bad when you put it with thau-kapesn, plus it's plural (I'm not sure if it always is or if it's the same as singular), and I dun wanna mess with it. SO. We're going to have a generic word for canine, preferably photogenic and memorable. Kenare is already a verb, so we can't start with ken as the root.... the most interesting thing to do with vowels, which I don't do nearly often enough, is to stick ae wherever you can. Thus, kaen. Which is nice and nouny with an n on the end. Happy now.

The short answer is "thau-kapesn kaen". Which is somewhat of a mouthful (s to n always is). Thou-kah-paysnh kine. Now, may I ask why you wanted that?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you! That's a really cool word. ^^ I needed a good name for a three-headed dog that just got introduced into the comic-notebook thing... you know, the same one with the infamous tic-tac-toe fight. This will do quite nicely.