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 Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:42 pm
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Unit 11: Comparatives and Superlatives; Attributes
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world.
(William Shakespeare, Richard II)
In English, there are two ways in which we can form comparatives and superlatives, either by means of the suffixes "-er" or "-est", or by the insertion of a modifier: "more", "most", "less", "least" or "as ... as". In general, choosing the correct one depends on the length of the adjective, so that we say "harder" but "more difficult", "hugest" but "most miniscule". Of course, there are a few words which can go either way - for example, you might see either "unhappiest" or "most unhappy" - but in general the rule holds. In Lapine, only the modifier route is permissible. Here are the five words required:
voir - more
voith - most
loir - less
loith - least
rul - the same as, as ... as, equally
These modifiers all precede the verb, and suffixes such as -nyt can be attached. A few sample sentences to give the idea (new verb: yayn, "to find"):
[LISTEN] A nahl lay flay thum embleer flayfath - e lay rul nao preenahlarny! - I'm not eating that embleer grass - it's as bad as laburnum!
[LISTEN] Hlao lay loir-nyt roo Kothen, an Thlaynlé lay voir-ryt nos me - Pipkin is much smaller than Hazel, but Silver is a little larger than him
[LISTEN] Hrairoo, zayn na yayn Dahloi a Brekennion - ai lay u nayltil mon voith hraray - Fiver, go and (lit. "in order to") find Dandelion and Blackberry - they're our fastest rabbits
[LISTEN] Pathun laynt u naylte ethile hray ol hlienes me, kan e laynt u loith tharn - Bluebell was the first rabbit to run from his home, because he was the least tharn
Attributes
What I refer to as "attributes" here are the nouns that pertain to given adjectives - for example "speed" and "sloth" are associated with "fast" and "slow", "intelligence" and "stupidity" are associated with "clever" and "stupid", and so on. Such words are indicated in Lapine by the simple addition of the suffix -alt (without the hyphen), so that "speed" is hrarayalt and "sloth, slowness" is brayalt. You can apply this rule to any adjective you want, so that you can even have words which don't exist in English, such as tharnalt ("tharn-ness"). For example:
[LISTEN] Nayltil ven u Owsla lay drao koi hrarayalt-nyt - Rabbits in the Owsla need (lit. "have to have") a lot of speed
[LISTEN] U brayalt Dahloi laynt kan tharnalt me - Dandelion's slowness was because of his "tharn-ness"
Bonus extra bit!
We haven't had one of these for a while (since Unit 01, in fact!), but as there's a bit of space here, let's learn a few more words:
thyhl - to start, begin
zyhl - to finish, end
kyhl - to continue, to carry on
skuf - to dig
aythi - primrose
Here are a few more sample sentences:
[LISTEN] U Owsla lay tring zayn il thayrte hyaones, Threarah. On lay veth thyhl? The Owsla want to go to the river today, Threarah. Can we start?
[LISTEN] Vao-nyt. Kyhl, Thlayli - Certainly. Carry on, Bigwig
[LISTEN] Nahl nayltil laynt veth skuf ven Efrafa - No rabbits were allowed to dig in Efrafa
[LISTEN] U aythil laynt zyhl - The primroses were over
Notes
a) You'll see that veth serves for both "can" and "may", as "can" does in colloquial English.
b) You might just recognise that last sentence from somewhere! Note that zyhl should be used here, and not zorn, as the latter implies some terrible catastophe. I suppose it might be appropriate if someone had come along and actively destroyed the whole lot of them... perhaps with a zorn-off shotgun? (No, I can't believe I just wrote that either!)
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2002-4. Updated 30/03/04.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:43 pm
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Unit 12: In the Warren; Talking about Rabbits (2)
Rabbit underground, rabbit safe and sound.
(Richard Adams, Watership Down)
Unsurprisingly, there are many Lapine words dealing with life within the warren. One that we've already met is hlienes, "home". This derives from the word for "warren", which is hlien. So the English sentence "my house is my home" would translate as hlien ma lay hlienes ma. Of course, we need quite a few more words to give us anything approaching a useful vocabulary in this department. Some words to describe direction would be handy, too - and I've also included a very useful verb I'd completely forgotten about!
tuhl - hole leading to the outside world
swith - hole within the warren, ie a burrow entrance
flow - burrow, chamber
floroo - a scrape (from flow roo, "small burrow")
flarli - a doe's den (from flow marli, "doe's burrow")
hrayao - tunnel, run, passageway
hrarli - a doe's stop (from hrayao marli, "doe's run")
hristh - down (opposite of up, not Watership etc); floor, bottom; earth, dirt, ground
hlaf - up; roof, top
sith - side
hlang - left
thrang - right
vesth - along; forwards
nesth - backwards
dayn - to come
Notes
a) Quite often, ao at the end of a word will convey the idea of a specific place, either in time or space - think back to words such as hrudao ("year"). So hrayao implies "a place to run".
b) There are no words for "to bring" and "to take" - use "to come with" and "to go with" instead.
c) Note the similarity between some of these words and related prepositions - eg hristh, "floor (etc)" and isth, "under(neath)".
d) Flow is a "false friend" in that it doesn't mean "flow" - liquids "run" (hray) in Lapine, as they can do in English.
e) Remember to put the adjectives (hlang etc) after the noun unless doing the special emphasis thing.
And now it's time for those pesky sample sentences to rear their ugly heads again! Some quite complicated ones here, so pay attention. I've spaced things out a little to help you:
[LISTEN] Ai laynt skuf florooil ven u hristh - They dug scrapes in the earth
[LISTEN] Ven u hlien nayltil thaf u bryhlath, thli laynt si tuhlil, ureth zayn il hrayaoil, a hrair flowil. Eth flow laynt yao Duhreth a Maythennion laynt zyz - In the rabbits' warren on the down, there were two entrance holes, which led (lit. "went") to runs, and many burrows. One burrow was where Hawkbit and Acorn slept
[LISTEN] "Hray voir hraray, u hraithile!" laynt meth Thlayli. "Es hrair, Owsla mon? Frith ven thayrte! Yen, vesth ar il hlienes! Hlang, thrang, hlang, thrang!" - "Run faster, for the thousandth time!" said Bigwig. "You lot, our Owsla? Frith in a river! Now, forward and homeward! Left, right, left, right!"
[LISTEN] Syriénnion laynt dray bray vesth hrayao sith, a fu neorsé, e laynt dayn il u swith u flow Hrairoo - Strawberry hopped slowly along a side run, and before long, he arrived at the entrance to Fiver's burrow
Notes
a) In the last sentence, I've translated dayn il as "arrived at", though its literal meaning, "came to", would have fitted in fine too. Similarly, the Lapine for "to leave" is zayn ol, "to go from". (If you're using the word on its own without "to" or "from", then you can leave out the preposition - so "she arrived" would be simply o laynt dayn, "she came".)
b) In the sentence featuring Bigwig, note the use of ar instead of a to mean "and", to aid pronunciation. As I've said before, it's not strictly correct, but is very common - and I don't imagine that Bigwig spends too much time polishing up his grammar!
c) Note that the plural of floroo is florooil - that's because double final vowels are not removed before adding -il.
Talking about Rabbits (2): Mates and Mating
Mating, of course, is tremendously important to lapine life, so it might be expected that there would be a large number of words to learn on this topic. Well, there are quite a few, but many of them are only used in very specific circumstances which we can ignore for the most part here. In the everyday colloquial language, most ideas connected with the subject can be expressed by means of just one word, émar, which means "mate" as both noun and verb. You will notice its similarity to marli, "doe". Some idea of the versatility of émar can be gleaned from a few examples (new word: mailon, "clover"):
[LISTEN] Hleengar lay u émar Mailon - Holly is Clover's mate
[LISTEN] Hleengar lay émar asith Mailon - Holly is mating with Clover
[LISTEN] Kothen a Hyzenthlay lay émaril - Hazel and Hyzenthlay are mates
[LISTEN] Vilthuril laynt émar asith Hrairoo, a o laynt koi roolil - Vithuril mated with Fiver, and she had kittens
[LISTEN] Ven Efrafa, Hyzenthlay laynt nahl veth émar asith Thlayli, kan e nahl laynt marlao mo - In Efrafa, Hyzenthlay couldn't mate with Bigwig, because it wasn't her mating time
Notes
a) Note the difference in meaning between the first two sentences - it's quite important!
b) I've been gramatically correct this time, using a o instead of ar o in the Vilthuril/Fiver example.
c) In the last sentence, marlao mo literally translates as "her week" (because does are particularly fertile about every seven days) - it's rather reminiscent of the English expression "her time of the month", though marlao mo has a different meaning, and is in no way a euphemism.
Okay then, that's a wrap for today. My original plan for this Unit has grown to the extent that I'm having to split it in two, so I'll see you in a while at the next lesson, where you'll learn something very important indeed to all rabbits. Frithaes!
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2002-4. Updated 30/03/04.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:45 pm
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Unit 13: Frith's Great Blessing of El-ahrairah
'Tis not for mortals always to be blest.
(John Armstrong, The Art of Preserving Health)
This is going to be the a long Unit, and quite hard going at times, but if you glance at the title, I think you'll agree that it'll be worth it! That's right, Lapineers, by the end of this Unit you'll be able to say perhaps the single most memorable passage from Watership Down entirely in Lapine - and inflected Lapine at that. But first, some more prosaic stuff: a great barrowload of vocab!
hlal - to catch
hrarail - to chase (lit. "to run to")
fran - to fight
zyhl - to kill (same word as "to finish")
paf - to warn (same word as "to stamp")
kasrah - to trick
natal - empty (of)
vatal - full (of)
vaorah - blessing (lit. "great goodness")
hraeth - all, every(thing/one)
seth - some
ethsi - a few (lit. "one-two")
Notes
a) Notice the very unusual combination ae (previously encountered here only in Frithaes itself) in the word hraeth - this is because it derives from hrair eth, "thousand one", ie "every one".
b) Remember the -alt suffix from Unit 11? Good - then you'll have worked out for yourself that kasrahalt means "cunning", "cleverness", etc. However, there's a slight irregularity to learn here - the same word is also used for the adjectives, rather than (as one might expect) a word such as *kasrahay.
c) One of the few times in colloquial Lapine when you have a genuine choice of words is in translating "everyone" - both hrair and hraeth are usually acceptable, though hraeth is very slightly more formal. Use whichever is clearest, and fits better for the purpose required.
d) Note the -rah ending to kasrah, showing how highly prized trickery is among rabbits.
I'll also introduce here an extremely useful suffix, -essi, which when attached (without the hyphen) to a verb equates to the English suffix "-er". For example, hayessi means "watcher", and is the word used for a lookout: Pipkin was a hayessi in the first visit to Nuthanger Farm. This suffix also explains the slightly irregular hlessi, which comes from hlaf-essi, "top-er" - ie, a rabbit who lives on top of the ground. (You'd think it might be silfessi, "outside-er", but no: that means "outskirter".) If the base verb ends in a vowel (eg hla, "to swim"), then use -nessi instead - so hlanessi means "swimmer".
We're almost ready for the Big One, then. But first, I need to point out that, as part of a traditional tale, the Blessing is usually told in Inflected Lapine (Naylte Éan - "Old Rabbit"), as opposed to Colloquial Lapine (Naylte Hyao - "Today's Rabbit"). What I'm going to do here, though, is to provide the passage in three versions: firstly, the usual English version, then a straightforward colloquial rendering, and finally the fully inflected version, which will include an explanation of some of the grammatical points. I'll provide both Lapine versions with a literal translation, partly to make things easier for you, and partly so that you can see a little of how the inflected language works (beyond what I provided way back in Unit 01).
Two somewhat archaic words you'll need to know for this are ela and blaeth. The first is the singular of elil, but is never used in the colloquial tongue, and even in the inflected version tends to be confined to the older stories such as this one. Blaeth (note that ae combination again - it's less rare in the inflected language) means "whenever". Colloquial Lapine simply uses blair, "when" for this, perhaps because blaeth might be confused with bleth ("what"). Okay then, here we go!
1: Normal English version:
And Frith called after El-ahrairah:
"All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed."
2: Naylte Hyao
[LISTEN]
U Vaorah Frith il El-ahrairah
A Frith laynt meth il El-ahrairah:
"Hraeth lay zayn elil mi, Rah asith Hrair Elil, a blair ai lay hlal mi, ai lay zayn zyhl mi. An ethile ai lay zayn drao hlal mi, skufessi, uthowessi, hrayessi, rah asith u paf hraray. Lay kasrahalt, a koi hrair kasrahil, a nayltil mi lay nahl-nyt zayn zorn."
Word-by-word English translation:
The Blessing Frith to El-ahrairah
And Frith was saying to El-ahrairah:
"Everyone be going enemies you, Prince with Thousand Enemies, and when they be catching you, they be going killing you. But first they be going must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the warning fast. Be clever, and have thousand tricks, and rabbits you be never going destroyed."
3: Naylte Éan
[LISTEN]
U Vaorah ol Frith il El-ahrairah
A Methante Frith il El-ahrairah:
"Laythe hraeth ela mi, Elil Hrair Rah, a blaeth m'hlalthai, m'zyhlthai. An m'draothai ethile hlal, skufessi, uthowessi, hrayessi, paf hraray rah. Laythi kasrahalt, a vatal kasrahil, a laythai nayltil mi nahl-nyt zorn."
Word-by-word English translation:
The Blessing of Frith to El-ahrairah
And it/he-said Frith to El-ahrairah:
"It/he-will-be everyone enemy you, Enemies Thousand Prince, and when you they-will-catch, you they-will-kill. But you they-will-have-to first catch, digger, listener, runner, warning fast prince. You-will-be clever, and full tricks, and they-will-be rabbits you never destroyed."
Linguistic notes:
Well, this version of Lapine looks pretty odd, doesn't it? And indeed it is, by the standards of the language we've been learning in this course. The title is easy enough - the only difference from Colloquial Lapine being the inclusion of ol, which is generally omitted in day-to-day speech. After that, though, things get rather more difficult. The most obvious difference is in the main verb of each clause. Firstly, you'll see that its form varies according to not only the tense (the verb includes (a)nt for past, nothing for present, and (a)th for future), but also the person of the subject (right at the end, after the tense marker, if any).
As it happens, though, the very first part of the speech throws up a complication on this very point. The subject here is hraeth, "everyone" - which you'd think would be a "they" idea, producing an -ai suffix, so making the first word laythai. But it's not - it's laythe. Why? Well, here, "everyone" is being lumped together as a single entity for poetic reasons, as can be seen by the unusual singular ela (and, indeed, the singular "enemy" in the English version). So in this very specific case, "everyone" is an "it", rather than a "they" - hence the -e termination.
The other major change regarding the verbs is in the word order - the verb goes at the start of a clause, preceded by only conjunctions and object pronouns. In all but the first occurrence here, the object pronoun has been shortened to m' because the person (mi) has already been established in the first few words - "all the world will be your enemy". (Another example of this usage is in Watership Down itself - m'saion. Maybe Bigwig does take grammar lessons after all!)
An interesting change from the Colloquial version is the word laythi, which here is indicating a grammatical structure absent from English: a future imperative. In other words, Frith is telling El-ahrairah not just to be cunning and full of tricks now, but in the future too.
The word asith ("with") tends to be avoided in traditional tales, as it's considered somewhat ugly (which I suppose it is, if that sort of thing matters to you) - instead, nouns and adjectives are all lumped together, with word order being used to convey the meaning of the sentence or clause. On which subject, hrair, like other number words, precedes the noun in Colloquial Lapine, but in the inflected dialect it is treated as an ordinary adjective, so goes afterwards. This is why we get Elil Hrair Rah rather than Hrair Elil Rah.
Oh, and yes, m'zyhlthai is indeed a nightmare to pronounce! Still, no-one ever said this was an easy dialect!
Almost time to end this Unit, but let's indulge ourselves by having one more look at Frith's Great Blessing (minus the "and Frith called after El-ahrairah" bit) in all its Inflected Lapine glory. If rabbits had books of quotations, this is the version that would be in there. Do have a go at learning it: I think you'll get a fair bit of satisfaction out of so doing. Yes, it's rather difficult language to understand at times, but so is that of the King James Bible, and most people, whether believers or not, would agree that that book's English has great power and beauty. It's not a bad analogy, actually: the Blessing is, after all, at the very heart of Lapine religion. So, enjoy!
"Laythe hraeth ela mi, Elil Hrair Rah, a blaeth m'hlalthai, m'zyhlthai. An m'draothai ethile hlal, skufessi, uthowessi, hrayessi, paf hraray rah. Laythi kasrahalt, a vatal kasrahil, a laythai nayltil mi nahl-nyt zorn."
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2002-4. Updated 30/03/04.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:46 pm
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Unit 14: Feelings and Emotions; Parts of the Body (2)
There was a depth of feeling to embrace
Thoughts, boundless, deep, but silent too as space.
(Lord Byron, Don Juan)
The whole area of feelings and emotions is always a difficult one to get right when dealing with different languages and cultures... and when we throw in a species divide as well, things can start getting really complicated! Perhaps the most obvious example of the problems a translator faces is the Lapine word tharn - there is simply no way of expressing this in English. Conversely, the notion of romantic love is completely unknown amongst rabbits (though they certainly can bond strongly under the right conditions).
However, all is by no means lost: there are a good number of concepts which are basic enough to be shared by both humans and rabbits, and they include a good sprinkling of words which crop up pretty frequently in conversation. Here's the first vocab list for this Unit; as usual, there'll be some explanatory notes afterwards:
lan to know
bral to think, believe
bralvao to hope
bralnao to fear
varu to like
naru to dislike
éveer happy
éneer sad
vahra friend
nalna enemy
Notes
a) Lan can be used both for knowing something, and for knowing someone (compare Welsh, which has gwybod for the former and adnabod for the latter).
b) A handy, and very common, informal word to know is nahlan, "I don't know", from a lay nahl lan.
c) To know of or about something or someone is lan ol.
d) The words for "hope" and "fear" literally translate as "good-think" and "bad-think".
e) The etymology of vahra is interesting. It's actually an extreme contraction of naylte pli a lay varu, "rabbit whom I like". This eventually became nahra, but the tendency to put a v at the start of "good" words has intruded, as it often does (though not in narn) and the varu bit has been transplanted to the front, meaning that the word is now vahra.
f) Remember that Lapine verbs can usually be used as nouns too, so bral can mean "a thought", for example.
g) I'm going to put this note in its own paragraph, as it's VERY important. The word elil is not used in seriousness about other rabbits. Full stop. If you're very sure of who you're talking to, you can perhaps get away with jocular references to certain types of elil (as when Hazel refers to Bigwig as Pfeffa-rah), but even then it's only acceptable if you're on very good terms with the other, and anyone who calls another rabbit elil and means it is in real danger of being killed. It's that bad an insult.
Right, assuming you're all still alive, let's do the sample sentences thing again:
[LISTEN] Hraeth nayltil lay bralnao u elil, an ethsi lay zyhl hray kan hombil, kan ai lay embli a lay nahl veth hray rul hraray mon - All rabbits fear the elil, but [only] a few stop running because [of] foxes, because they stink and can't run as fast as us
[LISTEN] Kothen laynt lan ol Efrafa, an e laynt nahl-nyt zayn thli - Hazel knew about Efrafa, but he'd never been there
[LISTEN] A lay varu-nyt Hlao - e lay u naylte voith varu ma - I love Pipkin - he's my favourite rabbit
[LISTEN] Hyaones, a lay bral, a layth meth ven Naylte - Today, I think that I will speak in Lapine
Notes
a) There is no pluperfect tense ("I had done") in Colloquial Lapine: you have to use the ordinary past and work from context. The second sentence above could also translate as "Hazel knew about Efrafa, but he never went there".
b) "Oi!" I hear you cry, "you said comparatives went before the noun! So what's up with the Pipkin sentence?" Simple: in this example, voith varu, "favourite", is an adjective. So it goes afterwards. Easy.
c) Notice in the final sentence that the English "that" is not translated into Lapine as thum, but left out entirely. (It's usually optional even in English, actually.) This doesn't cause any problems in speech as tone of voice can be employed, but in writing (which doesn't concern rabbits, of course) it's handy to give the reader some guide as to how the clauses split up, and a reasonable convention is to use a comma to indicate this. All these commas make things look a bit German, but there we are... = smile
Parts of the Body
Every time I turn round, it seems, I discover another vital part of Lapine that I've not yet covered... and this is no exception! Not a lot of introductory waffle required here; a lot of words, though, so let's just get on with things, shall we?:
li head
hloli face (from hlow li, "front of head")
hayuhl eye
hay-nyt stare
uth ear
krath nose/to smell
krathuhl nostril
krathlay whisker
flayuhl mouth
tafo tongue/to lick
othra tooth
pel leg
blel paw
zel claw
ohré body
pahyt scut (tail)
mark to lie (down) (false friend alert!)
steth to sit (up)
dihraw to squat
mitéath to stand up on hind legs (like a hare)
nayo to jump, leap
Notes
a) Quite a few of the words end in -uhl - this is from tuhl, "hole", so that (for example) hayuhl literally means a "seeing-hole", ie an eye.
b) Othra, is of course related to thray, "bite". There are words for particular types of teeth, but let's not overcomplicate things at the moment.
c) The word for "scut", pahyt, is from paf hy-nyt, "brightly shining warning". I think that's rather pleasingly poetic, actually.
Time for the last set of examples, then.... you'll need to know that methnos is "a speech", and that nild means "bird". Oh, and keep an eye on the first sentence, as it contains one other rather notable new word!:
[LISTEN] Hraeth ven Efrafa laynt bralnao Stihrath-rah, kan e laynt fran a zyhl hrair nayltil asith u zelil a othril me - Everyone in Efrafa feared General Woundwort, because he had fought and killed many rabbits with his claws and teeth
[LISTEN] Os es lay tring lay ven u Owsla, es lay zayn drao koi krathil voir-nyt vao! If you (pl.) want to be in the Owsla, you're going to have to have much better noses!
[LISTEN] Blair uthow il u methnos u Rah, u rooli laynt mitéath, na hay u nildil ven u preetar - While (lit. "when") listening to the Chief's speech, the kitten stood up on his hind legs, in order to see the birds in the hedge
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2002-4. Updated 30/03/04.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:47 pm
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Unit 15: U Methrah Rooli Roo ao Methain Marli
This blessèd plot, this realm, this earth, this England.
(William Shakespeare, Richard II)
Hello, everyone. The main focus of this Unit will be on the story of Rooli Roo (I don't think we need to translate his name any more), as it's a far longer one than anything we'll have encountered previously; uncharted territory ahoy! So I shan't go into great detail on the vocab list, beyond pointing out (as usual) that there are some very useful words here: just read and learn:
mul - to do
keth - to ask
val - to help
zyzay - lazy; sleepy
methain - poem (from meth-hain, "speak-song")
bralant - to remember
nalant - to forget
bralth - to foresee
Akirith - Honeycomb
blao - a place (in general)
bralrah - to pray
loseer - to rain
atha - heart
u hyaontil - the past (lit. "the yesterdays")
u hyaothil - the future (lit. "the tomorrows")
As well as the above, there are a few more things you'll need to know for the story: firstly, hay vesth a nesth means "to look around" (literally "to look forwards and backwards"). Secondly, sithile, "second", can also mean "(an)other" (u tarlil sithile, "the other bucks"). And finally, you may remember that in Unit 06, I said that a traditional blessing on kittens was lay zayn hray hraray. Actually, in most reasonably formal contexts, lay zayn would be replaced by layth. It's also worth noting that layth in this usage is generally followed directly by a verb, so that "may Frith hear you" is layth uthow Frith ma, rather than the more obvious *layth Frith uthow ma.
All right then, let's get on with the show - 1000 words of Lapine coming up! As usual, there's an English translation afterwards. Because of the length of the story, I haven't got room for an MP3 of the whole thing, so I've done three short pieces - the first section (up to the asterisks) and the two poems.
[LISTEN]
U METHRAH ROOLI ROO AO METHAIN MARLI
------------------------------------
Hyao, ver sie methai, u vahra mon Rooli Roo laynt mark ven u flow me. Vahl, sisi... an um hyao, e laynt nahl zyz! E laynt hahean zyz. Nahl, blair u methrah mon lay thyhl, u naylte roo laynt meth hithra-byt il Maythennion.
"O Maythennion," laynt meth Rooli Roo, "a lay bralnao-nyt um thanléao, blair a lay zayn drao meth u methnos ma il hraeth. E lay u methnos ethile ma, ar a lay nahl lan bleth mul!"
"Nahl bralnao," laynt meth Maythennion. "Hrair nayltil lay bral, u methnosil mai layth nao-nyt. I layth vao. An bralant hay il u Naylte Rah blair meth u Vaorah. A lay bral e layth Hyzenthlay-rah hyaones." (Hyzenthlay, émar Kothen, laynt Rah asith me ethsi Inléil.)
* * *
U thanléao laynt dayn, a hraeth laynt zayn il u Akirith. Hrair nayltil laynt thli, a e laynt hithra than Rooli Roo veth day il u blao yao e laynt zayn meth. Yen, Hyzenthlay laynt meth.
"Vahril ma," o laynt meth, "on lay hli um thanléao kan eth ol mon lay yen hahean éan meth u methnos ethile me il u hlien. A lay lan, hrair laynt tring uthow Rooli Roo hithra-nyt, zoth a layth zyhl meth. Rooli Roo, layth meth vao, a layth uthow Frith mi."
U rooli laynt hay il u Rah me, a thyhl asith um methrooil:
"O Hyzenthlay-rah, a lay dayn asith u Vaorah ol Frith il El-ahrairah, ureth lay meth il nayltil u hyaontil, u hyao ao hyaothil." Fu, e laynt hay vesth a nesth u Akirith, fu il Hyzenthlay sisi, a laynt thyhl meth ven Naylte Éan: "Laythe hraeth ela mi, Elil Hrair Rah, a blaeth m'hlalthai, m'zyhlthai. An m'draothai ethile hlal-"
Yen, e laynt zyhl.
"Kyhl, kyhl," laynt meth Hyzenthlay il me. An Rooli Roo laynt nahl veth kyhl - e laynt nalant u methrooil u Vaorah!
"An m'draothai ethile hlal," e laynt meth sisi, bralvao bralant. An nahl methrooil laynt dayn, ao li me laynt kyhl natal. "O nahlan, nahlan!" laynt meth Rooli Roo, éneer-nyt. "Val ma, O Frithrah, val ma!"
Fu neorsé, e laynt veth uthow Thlayli, meth il naylte sithile, "Frith ven tuhl, hloth lay on drao uthow um silfessil ulé ai lay nahl veth meth Naylte vao?"
Rooli Roo laynt drao hay il u Naylte Rah me, a meth, "U methnos ma lay zyhl, Hyzenthlay-rah. A lay lan, nahl layth bralant me. An a layth meth um: hyaoth, a layth dayn hli sisi, blair a layth meth methnos u voith vao i aisi Kothen aisi u hlien layth uthow!" A fu, e laynt hray silf.
* * *
Silf, thaf u bryhlath, e laynt loseer - loseer-nyt. Rooli Roo laynt silflay neorsé, an than hithra u los laynt hray vesth u flayfath, u hristh, u efathil... ao thlay me. E laynt voir a voir éneer.
"Hloth laynt i meth thum il Hyzenthlay-rah?" e laynt bral. "A laynt tring-nyt meth u methnos ma vao, an... a lay nahl veth meth vao, a pli lay zayn uthow il roolil pli lay nahl ulé meth Naylte vao? Bleth lay veth a mul?"
Rooli Roo laynt dray bray ven. E laynt nahl tring zayn il u flow me, zoth e laynt dray vesth hrayao hling ol olme. Fu neorsé, e laynt thyhl uthow meth - meth marli, meth Thethuthinnang. O laynt meth methrah il u roolil mo. An nahl... nahl methrah; e laynt methain. Rooli Roo laynt uthow:
[LISTEN]
Ven u hlien,
Hrayntai bralvaoil ma vesth u hrayao.
Roolil mon,
M'haynton hayuhlil hy ven u léao.
An lungeth
Laythai hrayessil, uthow methrahil?
Kan u hyao
Nayothe il mai, vatal u elil.
Rooli Roo laynt nahl meth Naylte Éan vao-nyt, an e laynt lan um methain. E laynt "U Methain Marli", eth u methainil nayltil u voith éan. E laynt bralrah marli il Frith hay u roolil néan mo.
Rooli Roo laynt dihraw ven u hrayao, nahl the, u atha me hrarail. U methrooil marli laynt hray a nayo ven u li me. E laynt nahl veth Thethuthinnang (aisi nayltil sithile) hay me, zoth e laynt dray bral ol mo, a zayn sisi il u flow me. Thli, e laynt zyz.
* * *
U hyaoth, u rooli laynt zayn hay Dahloi, pli e laynt lan a varu hithra. Dahloi laynt silflay hristh u preenil mar. Rooli Roo laynt tring keth me bleth mul.
"Frithaes, Rooli Roo," e laynt meth. "Bleth lay mi tring?"
"A lay tring lan, lung i lay mul blair i lay meth methrahil, Dahloi?" laynt meth Rooli Roo. "Nahlan hloth, an yen a lay bral éveer-nyt ol u methnos sithile ma um thanléao... an a lay drao koi seth methrooil ol mi ol thum. I layth val ma?"
"Vahl-nyt," laynt meth u naylte sithile. A e laynt thyhl meth il u vahra néan me...
Fu hithra-byt, Rooli Roo laynt zayn sisi il u Akirith. E laynt hay Thlayli ao Owsla hlow u nayltil sithile. Rul u hyaont, e laynt hay il Hyzenthlay, a, rul u hyaont, e laynt thyhl meth u Vaorah. An hyaones, e laynt bralant u methrooil. Éveer, e laynt meth il u Rah me:
"Laythe hraeth ela mi, Elil Hrair Rah, a blaeth m'hlalthai, m'zyhlthai. An m'draothai ethile hlal, skufessi, uthowessi, hrayessi, paf hraray rah. Laythi kasrahalt, a vatal kasrahil, a laythai nayltil mi nahl-nyt zorn!"
E laynt hay vesth a nesth u Akirith, rul-nyt e laynt u hyaont, an hyao e laynt lan, hraeth layth vao. "Yen," laynt meth Rooli Roo, "a lay drao meth voir. An nahl methnos: methain! A lay an naylte néan a nahl kasrahalt-nyt, zoth e lay ven Naylte Hyao, an a lay bralvao, es layth varu me." A e laynt thyhl:
[LISTEN]
"U naylte Rooli Roo lay ma,
U hlienes ma preen isth.
A lay varu zyz ven u flow
Mark hithra thaf u hristh.
U nayltil sithile lay meth
A lay rooli zyzay,
An blair vahril ma lay drao koi
Il mai layth a hraray!"
Rooli Roo laynt hay vesth a nesth, a hay u hlolil éveer u vahril me. E laynt mul me!
Hyzenthlay laynt meth, "vahl-nyt, Rooli Roo. I laynt vao - thum laynt methnos vao-nyt. A vahl, hraeth layth bralant me hithra-nyt. A, a lay yen meth, i layth u Methainessi Roolil mon ven um hlien!"
U ZYHL
The Story of Rooli Roo and the Doe's Poem
------------------------------------
Once upon a time, Rooli Roo was lying in his burrow. Yes, again... but on this day, he wasn't asleep - he'd slept enough. No, when our story starts, the little rabbit had been talking for a fair while to Acorn.
"Oh Acorn," said Rooli Roo, "I'm really frightened about this evening, when I'm going to have to make my speech to everyone. It's my first speech, and I don't know what to do!"
"Don't worry," said Acorn. "Every rabbit thinks that their first speech will be awful. You'll be fine. But remember to look at the Chief Rabbit when saying the Blessing. I think it'll be Hyzenthlay this evening." (Hyzenthlay, Hazel's mate, had been Chief alongside him for a few months.)
* * *
Evening came, and everyone went to the Honeycomb. A lot of rabbits were there, and it was a long time before Rooli Roo could get to the place where he was going to speak. Suddenly, Hyzenthlay spoke.
"My friends," she said, "we are here this evening because one of us is now old enough to give his first speech to the warren. I know many have wanted to hear Rooli Roo speak for a very long time, so I'll stop speaking. Rooli Roo, may you speak well, and may Frith hear you."
The kitten looked at his Chief, and began with these words:
"Oh Hyzenthlay-rah, I come with Frith's Blessing to El-ahrairah, which speaks to rabbits in the past, the present and the future.". After this, he looked around the Honeycomb, and began to speak in Old Lapine: "All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you-"
Suddenly, he stopped.
"Go on, go on," said Hyzenthlay. But Rooli Roo couldn't continue - he'd forgotten the words of the Blessing!
"But first they must catch you," he said again, hoping to remember. But no words came, and his head remained empty. "Oh I don't know, I don't know!" said Rooli Roo, terrbily unhappy. "Help me, oh Lord Frith, help me!"
After a little, he could hear Bigwig saying to another rabbit, "Frith in a hole, why do we have to listen to these outskirters even when they can't speak Lapine properly?"
Rooli Roo had to look at his Chief Rabbit, and say: "My speech is over, Hyzenthlay-rah. I know that none will remember it. But I will say this: tomorrow, I will come here again, when I'll give the best speech you or Hazel or the warren will hear!" And then, he ran outside.
* * *
Outside, on the down, it was raining - raining a lot. Rooli Roo silflayed for a little while, but before long the water was running along the grass, the soil, the plants... and his fur. He was more and more unhappy.
"Why did I say that to Hyzenthlay-rah?" he thought. "I really wanted to say my speech well, but... I can't speak properly, and who's going to listen to kittens who can't even speak Lapine properly? What can I do?
Rooli Roo hopped slowly underground. He didn't want to go back to his burrow, so he hopped along a run to the left of his own. Soon, he began to hear a voice - a doe's voice, the voice of Thethuthinnang. She was telling a story to her kittens. But no... not a story; it was a poem. Rooli Roo listened:
In the warren,
My hopes ran along the run.
Our kittens,
We saw their eyes shining in the dark.
But how many
Will be runners, listen to stories?
For tomorrow
Will leap at them, full of danger.
Rooli Roo didn't speak Old Lapine very well, but he knew this poem. It was "The Doe's Poem", one of the oldest poems of rabbits. It was a mother's prayer to Frith to watch over her young kittens.
Rooli Roo squatted in the run, unmoving, his heart racing. The doe's words ran and leapt in his head. He didn't want Thethuthinnang (or other rabbits) to see him, so he hopped slowly away from her, and went again to his burrow. There, he fell asleep.
* * *
The next day, the kitten went to see Dandelion, who he'd known and liked for a long time. Dandelion was silflaying beneath the tall trees. Rooli Roo wanted to ask him what to do.
"Hello, Rooli Roo," he said. "What do you want?"
"I want to know, how do you behave when you tell stories, Dandelion?" said Rooli Roo. "I don't know why, but now I feel really happy about my second speech this evening... but I need some words from you about that. Can you help me?"
"Of course," said the other. And he began to speak to his young friend...
After a fair while, Rooli Roo went once more to the Honeycomb. He saw Bigwig and the Owsla in front of the other rabbits. As on the day before, he looked at Hyzenthlay, and as on the day before, he began to say the Blessing. But today, he had remembered the words. Happily, he said to his Chief:
"All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people shall never be destroyed!"
He looked around the Honeycomb, exactly as he had done the day before, but this time he knew everything was right. "Now," he said, "I must say more. But not a speech: a poem! I am only a young and not very clever rabbit, so it's in Colloquial Lapine, but I hope you will like it." And he began:
The rabbit Rooli Roo am I,
My home the trees beneath.
I like to sleep in the burrow
Lie a long while on the earth.
The other rabbits say
I am a lazy kitten,
But when my friends have need
To them I'll be fast!
Rooli Roo looked around, and saw the happy faces of his friends. He'd done it!
Hyzenthlay said, "excellent, Rooli Roo. You were right - that was a wonderful speech. And yes, everyone will remember it for a very long time. And, I now declare, you will be our Kittens' Poet in this warren!"
THE END
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2004. Updated 30/03/04.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:48 pm
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Unit 16: Weather and the Environment
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow.
(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 90)
As is the case for any wild animal, weather and conditions in the "outside world" are of vital importance in lapine life. A very basic example of this is in knowing what humans would refer to as "points of the compass" - in Lapine, the position of the Sun is of prime importance:
léeth - north
freth - south
fuleth - east
theth - west
The -eth termination on each of these words comes originally from sith, "side", though the i has become an e. The literal meanings of the words are, respectively, "night-side", "sun-side", "dawn-side" and "evening-side". Note that léeth should be pronounced as two distinct syllables, to rhyme with the archaic English word "sayeth".
Another important factor to rabbits is the weather, which governs life to an extent almost unimaginable to urbanised humans. There are any number of words available here, but it would seem sensible to restrict ourselves for now to a smallish collection of the most common - remember that -nyt and so on can be used as modifiers wherever useful. Some of these words we've already met, but I'll put them in for convenience:
Frith - the Sun
Frithyeer - sunny
hral - cloud
hraleer - cloudy
los - water, rain
loseer - wet, rainy
yera - snow, ice
yereer - snowy, icy
nahlay - fog, blindness
nayeer - foggy
anisth - wind, breath
anistheer - windy
Notes
a) Be careful not to mix up Frithyeer ("sunny") and Fritheer ("summer"). If you prefer, you could say Frith lay hy ("the Sun is shining") instead.
b) Note the secondary meaning of nahlay (originally from nahl hay, "not seeing"). This word is used in the phrase Nahlay Hy, "White Blindness", ie myxomatosis.
c) Anisth can also be used as a verb, meaning "to breathe".
All right then, time for those lovely sample sentences once again... two new nouns, and handy ones too: nayilf means "hare" and rowf means, as you might have guessed, "dog".
[LISTEN] Homba laynt hray u léeth u Bryhlath - A fox ran [along] the north [side of] the Down
[LISTEN] Os e layth Frithyeer hyaones, on layth zayn yayn dahloil - If it's sunny today, we'll go and find dandelions
[LISTEN] A lay bralnao, u Efrafanessil layth dayn sisi blair e layth nayeer I'm frightened that the Efrafans will come again when it's foggy
[LISTEN] U Rah nahl laynt éveer-nyt, u nayilfil laynt hay me... kan rowf nos laynt hrarail mai! - The Chief wasn't very happy that the hares had seen him... because a large dog was chasing them!
Notes
a) Remember the -essi suffix from Unit 13? You can use this to indicate residents of a particular place, too, as here with Efrafanessil, "Efrafans". The Watership rabbits are Bryhlathessil, "Downers".
As we're on the subject of weather, let's round things off for this Unit with a rather well-known saying on the subject - it's a very old one, and therefore in Naylte Éan:
[LISTEN] Brale'th hral etheth - One cloud feels lonely
A little bit of explanation is probably necessary here. The word etheth, meaning "alone", "lonely", "solitary" etc, is straightforward enough, as is hral itself, but what of the first word? Well, as this is Naylte Éan, it's likely to be an inflected verb, which it is. Bral, as we already know, means "to think, feel". We're in the present tense, so no tense-marker is required, but as "one cloud" is an "it", we need the -e person marker. The word for "one" is of course eth, but that would give us the slightly awkward phrase Brale eth, and this being Naylte Éan aesthetics tend to override straightforwardness. Thus, the words are run together as Brale'th, which creates a "balanced phrase", with two syllables on either end "pivoting" about the central word (both literally and figuratively) hral. Actually, the whole phrase trips off the tongue rather easily, doesn't it?
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2003-4. Updated 30/03/04.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:48 pm
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Unit 17: The Passive Voice; Reporting Speech
Speech is the small change of silence.
(George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel)
We're going to get a little more advanced this time, by introducing a couple of concepts which aren't actually required to produce correct Lapine, but which will allow you to come across as more fluent and natural in the language. First, we'll look at the passive voice, a very useful device for adding a bit of variety to your Lapine. And it's very easy to form, too. Explaining why it happens is a little involved, but doing it in practice is not at all hard. Let's have an example - the same idea expressed first in the normal active voice, and then in the passive. Remember from Unit 12 the special word hrarli, meaning a doe's stop (not to be confused with the ordinary verb "to stop", which is of course zyhl). Here's the sentence:
[LISTEN] U marli laynt skuf hrarli - The doe dug a stop
[LISTEN] Hrarli laynt skufant ol u marli - A stop was dug by the doe
Let's have a look at what's going on here. Firstly, as in English, you can see that the word order has been turned about. Also, ol, "of", can also mean "by". That's easy, and so are the first two words - hrarli laynt literally means "(a) stop was". Then it gets a little more complicated, because when you form the passive, again as in English, you have to "shift back" one tense."Was dug" is actually one tense "back" from "dug". In English, we say "I dig; I dug; I have dug". The difference is more obvious in some other verbs, for example: "I sing; I sang; I have sung".
So, "A stop was dug..." is one tense "further back" than "The doe dug...". But we're already using laynt, and as there are only three real tenses in ordinary Lapine, what can we do? Well, we borrow (in a much simplified form) something from Naylte Éan. In that dialect, the past tense is marked by adding the suffix -nt to a verb, together with various "person markers", so that "the rabbit saw" is haynte u naylte while "the rabbits saw" is hayntai u nayltil. However, we don't need to worry about the "person markers" at all in the colloquial language, but simply add -nt alone. Hang on a minute, though...
There's a slight problem here. Doing that would give us *skufnt, which is not exactly easy to pronounce! Luckily Naylte Éan comes to the rescue again - in such a case, you simply add an intervening -a- before the -nt, so what we end up with is, as it should be, skufant. In general, the -a- is used when the base word ends in a consonant other than Y. This is maybe not the easiest idea to explain in grammatical terms, so let's press our beloved sample sentences into service once again. Two new words - silisi, "snake", and nildel, "hawk":
[LISTEN] Duhreth laynt hrarailant ol Thlayli - Hawkbit was chased by Bigwig
[LISTEN] U ithé éan laynt thraynt ol u silisi nos - The old man was bitten by the big snake
[LISTEN] U nildro laynt zyhlant ol u desthile pfeffa, nahl u sithile! - The blackbird was killed by the third cat, not the second!
[LISTEN] U rowf roo laynt flaynt ol u nildel nos-nyt - The little dog was eaten by the huge hawk
Notes
a) When a word ending in a vowel is followed by one starting in the same vowel, as with ithé éan in the second sentence, you might hear them run together into something like ithéan. However, it is strongly recommended that you avoid this as it tends to cause a lot of confusion.
b) Note the changed word order in the third sentence - as we saw way back in Unit 01, adjectives move from following to preceding the noun when special emphasis is required (and, remember, embleer always appears before the noun).
Reporting speech
Note, reporting, not reported. The latter is something like, "Acorn said that he was fast," (which is Maythennion laynt meth, e laynt hraray), whereas here we're using direct quotes. Okay then. Up till now, except when we've been using Naylte Éan, we've always stuck with the basic form for quotes, so that we have something like this:
[LISTEN] Hrairoo laynt dayn ven. "Vahl," e laynt meth - Fiver came in. "Yes," he said
There's nothing at all wrong with this, and in everyday speech it's what you'll hear. But it's maybe just a little cumbersome to have to put in that e laynt meth time after time - in the average story, it'll turn up again and again and again. Luckily, you don't actually have to, as there is a special form of meth reserved exclusively for this sort of thing. If you know Welsh, then it is done in a fairly similar way to the Welsh word meddai. All you have to do is use the word methant, which is the "base" inflected past form of meth. (No, you don't need to understand all that; just trust me on this one!) So our example sentence could just as well be written as:
[LISTEN] Hrairoo laynt dayn ven. "Vahl," methant.
Much tidier, eh? Here's a rather longer example:
[LISTEN]
"Frithaes, Thlayli," methant Kothen. "I lay éneer?"
"Vahl," methant Thlayli. "Um hlien lay nao-nyt."
Kothen laynt hay vesth a nesth. "Hloth?" methant.
"Nahlan," methant Thlayli. "An a laynt meth il Thlaynlé hyaones, ar e laynt meth il ma, e laynt éneer asith."
"Frithaes, Bigwig," said Hazel. "Are you unhappy?"
"Yes," said Bigwig. "This warren is terrible."
Hazel looked around. "Why?" he said.
"I don't know," said Bigwig. "But I was talking to Silver today, and he said to me that he was unhappy too."
Notes
a) The person speaking goes after methant, so that "he said" is methant e, and not *e methant. Note that this is the other way around from the usual speech form - e laynt meth etc.
b) Note that I didn't use methant inside Bigwig's inverted commas. That's because it is (in Colloquial Lapine, anyway) almost exclusively a written form, and would just look silly in speech.
c) Remember a couple of handy colloquialisms from earlier on: hay vesth a nesth is "to look around", and nahlan is a contraction of a lay nahl lan, "I don't know". Think of it as roughly equivalent in effect to English's "Dunno" and you won't go far wrong.
d) If the person speaking is already known, as in the third line, you don't even need to mention them again, but can just use methant on its own, as you can see. It's not incorrect to say methant e in this case, but it's not necessary.
Bonus extra bit!
Ooh, I am spoiling you today. But it's a useful bonus, so listen up. We already know the Lapine for "father" (tarli or parli) and "mother" (marli). "Child" is the same as "kitten" - rooli. But it'd be handy to know a few of the other words for relations. And so here we are:
rooliti - son
roolimi - daughter
rusati - brother
rusami - sister
rusasi - sibling
Notes
a) The etymology of brother/sister/sibling is straightforward. A brother is someone who shares your parents, in other words a "same-parents-buck". That literally translates as rul-sarlil-tarli, but being such a common word it's been compressed a great deal (cf vahra), and so has achieved its present form. Much the same applies to the other words
b) The words for "son" and "brother" are always spelt with Ts, even by rabbits who say parli for "father".
c) To add a generation, you simply use the familiar emphatic suffix -nyt, so that, for example, "grandson" is rooliti-nyt, and "great-grandmother" would be marli-nyt-nyt. Theoretically you could have up to four -nyts (any more wouldn't be distinguishable from each other, the number being stuck at hrair), but in practice more than two is exceptionally unusual. To make out that something was a very long time ago, you can say ven u hyao marli-nyt-nyt, "in great-grandmother's day".
One other comment about this - you might have seen in Appendix 1 the saying u vahra ma, rusati [rusami] ma, ven atha ma, meaning "my friend, my brother [sister], in my heart". This is not a casually uttered saying, as it implies the other party is, or has become, the speaker's "heart-brother/sister" (rusatitha/rusamitha). It's a great honour to be considered a heart-brother/sister, and the responsibilities that go with it are to be taken with the utmost seriousness.
Right, folks, that's all for now. It's been a bit of a slog, but I think it's been worth it. Next time, we'll be taking a look at a slightly esoteric, but quite interesting topic: the little differences between the Lapine of various warrens. And yes, Woundwort's Efrafa looms large among them! =:O
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2003-4. Updated 06/05/04.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:49 pm
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Unit 18: Dialectal Variations
Most of their discourse was about hunting, in a dialect I understand very little.
(Samuel Pepys, Diary)
As can be seen by the examples of the hutch rabbits and, particularly, Blackavar, in Watership Down itself, rabbits from one warren have no real difficulty understanding those of another, but nevertheless there are some notable differences in their speech, which I thought it might be interesting to consider here. I intend to use the speech of Watership as our "base" dialect, and compare aspects of Watership Lapine to that of the other warrens encountered in the story.
1. Sandleford (extinct)
Of course, as almost all the Watership rabbits (excepting only Strawberry) are originally from Sandleford, it's unsurprising to find that there are very few differences between the speech of the two warrens. However, the resolutely old-fashioned nature of the Threarah's society led to the preservation of one somewhat archaic feature - the use of the plural forms to, by and about the Chief Rabbit, eg:
[LISTEN] Layth i dayn asith ma, Kothen-rah? Vahl, a layth dayn - Will you come with me, Hazel-rah? Yes, I'll come (Watership)
[LISTEN] Layth es dayn asith ma, Threarah? Vahl, on layth dayn - Will you come with me, Threarah? Yes, I'll come (Sandleford)
[LISTEN] I laynt hay u Rah? E lay thli - Have you seen the Chief? He's [over] there (Watership)
[LISTEN] I laynt hay u Rah? Ai lay thli - Have you seen the Chief? He's [over] there (Sandleford)
This idea closely parallels that of the "Royal We" in human societies, but is subtly different, in that the reason for its use is not the superiority, real or imagined, of the Chief - the "-rah" suffix takes care of that - but because he is considered to be the personification of all the rabbits in the warren.
2. Cowslip's Warren
The most notable feature of this warren's language is the almost taboo status of the word "where?" and the concepts relating to it, because of the unspoken pact amongst its rabbits never to mention the shining wires. However, as will be apparent with a little thought, there are occasions, generally trivial, for which the word is necessary - and, as Strawberry himself mentions, there are tightly defined areas - stories and poems - where the proscription does not apply (except, of course, insofar as only certain types of story are welcome in the first place).
All this means that there are in fact three forms of the word "where?" that may be encountered in Cowslip's warren. Firstly, the ordinary word, yao, which is extremely unwelcome in any context, and generally met by a complete non-sequitur in response:
[LISTEN] Yao lay Hrairoo, Kranahl? - Where's Fiver, Cowslip?
[LISTEN] I lay varu flayrah yen? E lay narn-nyt - Would you like some flayrah now? It's very tasty
Secondly, for stories and poetry, the word thyao is employed. This is a deliberate corruption of the archaic word yaoth, meaning "wherever". Yaoth is to yao exactly as blaeth is to blair - see Unit 13. An interesting point here is that while elsewhere yaoth is used only in Naylte Éan, in Cowslip's warren the terror of using the ordinary word means that thyao is used for any type of story or poem, no matter how trivial - even the simplest stories of Rooli Roo:
[LISTEN] Rooli Roo laynt hay vesth a nesth. "Thyao lay ma?" methant - Rooli Roo looked around. "Where am I?" he said
Of course, using this word safely requires a very distinct pronunciation of the th- prefix, and so rabbits tend to shy away from it altogether in casual speech. In fact, poets such as Silverweed are often judged as much on their diction as on their imagination, and if any one word could be said to be a shibboleth in this regard, then thyao is it.
Lastly, there are some occasions on which asking about the location of something is harmless - for example, asking where the sun is in the sky, for assessing time. Again, however, the word yao is forbidden, and instead a roundabout method is employed using the phrase blao vao,"right place":
[LISTEN]
Frith lay ven u blao vao? - Is the Sun in the right place?
U sith thanléao, hrow u preetar - The evening side, behind the hedge
It is perhaps a little surprising that "place" is allowed while "where" is not, but this does seem to be the case. However, even this usage is absolutely not permitted to be used of rabbits, and doing so can be extremely dangerous.
3. Hutch rabbits
Watership Down mentions that Clover and her fellow hutch rabbits - two Himalayans and two Angoras - spoke in "slightly strange but perfectly intelligible Lapine". All domestic rabbits are the same species - Oryctolagus cuniculus - as British wild rabbits, so this is not that surprising. Given that they are domestic breeds, it seems very unlikely that they had ever spoken to a wild rabbit before Hazel and Pipkin arrived, and so their language had presumably developed in isolation, passing down the generations from the time when their ancestors had run free.
Very little is imparted to us in WD about exactly how the hutch rabbits' Lapine differed from that of Hazel's band, but we know that they "had learned a great deal about elil from some soure or other" (ch. 24), so the words for such creatures, which might have otherwise been lost, were presumably well known - pfeffa of course being a special case, as the farm cat had been known to come and stare at them through the hutch's mesh. However, despite this, it seems reasonable to assume that concepts such as long-distance reconaissance would mean little to them.
Overall, though, two points stand out: the hutch rabbits' almost total ignorance of Naylte Éan, and their accents. The latter are the most notable things about them, in particular a tendency for the ao diphthong to become simply a throughout - so that "evening" is pronounced as thanléa, and "tomorrow" becomes hyath. The word u ("the") is also very often dropped completely - which means, of course, that ao as a word ("and the") also becomes just a.
4. Efrafa
As might be expected of a warren kept under such rigid discipline and where contact with other rabbits is largely confined to violent confrontation, Efrafan Lapine developed several unique aspects under General Woundwort's rule. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the -fa suffix, as seen in Owslafa and of course in the name of the warren. In fact, the name "Efrafa" is itself an invention of Woundwort's. He chose it as being reminiscent of the words eth-fran, meaning "one-fight". The idea behind eth was that Efrafa should be considered not as a warren of individual rabbits, but as a single entity under a single, unquestioned command. The fran element of the name referred to both the militaristic nature of Efrafa and to the never-ending fight against the worst and most dangerous of all elil - man.
Woundwort liked clearness and order, and so it seemed to him obvious that his subordinate groups should be named logically. Like any other warren, there was an Owsla. However, there was also a small group of experienced rabbits who worked as a sort of "Cabinet". These were the Council, known in Efrafan Lapine as the Owslathaf or "above the Owsla". Off to one side, as it were, came the justly feared Council Police, of which Vervain was the head. These were the Owslafa, which can be roughly translated as "fighting Owsla". Of course, in Woundwort's Efrafa, all Owsla officers had to be determined fighters, so the term also carries with it the sense of their being the warren's "enforcers".
This -fa suffix came to be applied quite widely within the warren. For example, flayfa was food reserved for those officers training for battle or Wide Patrols. The Patrols themselves were hrayfil (singular hrayfa), literally "fighting runs", and an officer was simply known as a naylfa, a contraction of naylte fa. Perhaps most chillingly of all, ordinary does were referred to as marlifil (singular marlifa), here having the sense of "does of the struggle" - in other words, rabbits whose only functions were to assist the military ambitions of Efrafa by producing litters and providing recreation for the Owsla. Does who were considered unsatisfactory in either of these areas might expect a visit from the Owslafa, and in some cases this might be the last event of their lives.
On a less unpleasant note, the accent of Efrafa is also worthy of mention. Blackavar's accent, as we see in Watership Down, becomes noticeably more pronounced when he is feeling under stress, and the same phenomenon occurs throughout Efrafa. Its most obvious manifestation is a tendency to use the object forms of personal pronouns universally, so that we might see:
[LISTEN] Ma lay uthow il mi! - Me am listening to you!
[LISTEN] Mon laynt zayn il u preen - Us went to the tree
The defeat of Woundwort and his replacement as Chief Rabbit by Campion left the warren's language somewhat in a state of flux. The Owslafa were abolished, and the Owslathaf reformed, but the name "Efrafa" itself was kept, although now with more of a sense of lapine solidarity than war. Campion himself, of course, had held high office under Woundwort, and the warren remained rather more rigid in both its social and linguistic structures than Watership; with the hrayfil, for example, being retained. (Vleflain, incidentally, took linguistic elements from both sides, but in general tended to err on the side of Watership as the victorious warren, which is why I have not treated it separately here.)
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2003-4. Updated 06/05/04.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 7:50 pm
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Unit 19: Conditionals; More Plant Names
If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing.
(Henri Poincaré)
Now, I know what you're about to say here, which is this: "Oi, Loganberry! You keep saying that Lapine doesn't have a conditional tense!" And indeed you're right - but that isn't to say that such ideas cannot be expressed in the language; we just have to use other means. Consider the following pair of English sentences:
I will go if you come with me.
I would go if you came with me.
As you can see, in the first sentence we use "will" and "come", whereas in the second one we use "would" and "came". Now, there's no way of saying "would" in Lapine, but there's no problem at all with the past tense, and in fact this is the method used to express conditional structures in Lapine. Now then, it's time for those wonderful sample sentences to make their appearance once again. Let me hear you say, "Yay!" = razz
[LISTEN] A layth zayn il hlienes os i layth asith ma - I'll go home if you're with me
[LISTEN] A layth zayn il u hlien an os Stihrath nahl laynt thli - I'd only go to the warren if Woundwort weren't there
[LISTEN] Dahloi lay veth hray hraray-nyt blair e lay éveer - Dandelion can run very fast when he's happy
[LISTEN] Os e laynt fu Inlé, Kothen-rah laynt nahl veth zyz silf - If it were after moonrise, Hazel-rah could not sleep outside
[LISTEN] On layth flay hli os thli layth flayrah - We can eat here if there is flayrah
[LISTEN] Thum marli layth Rah os o laynt voir nos - That doe could be Chief if she were bigger
Notes
a) In the first sentence, what uses the present tense in English ("...if you are with me") requires the future (layth) in Lapine, as what's actually meant is "...if you will be with me." (Note also the necessary il to express movement towards something.)
b) Why use layth in the fifth sentence? Simply because the idea being expressed here is in the future - what's actually meant is "We will be able to eat here if there will be flayrah." It can't mean "We are able to do this eating now as there is flayrah," because then the conditions would be known, and it would be kan rather than os. Context is the key, folks! =;P
c) It's important to realise the difference between the fourth and sixth sentences. In the former, we are considering something happening in the past, in other words using "could" as the past of "can", and so we use laynt throughout. In the latter example, though, the idea under consideration is not a past event, and so we need to use layth the first time around.
All the above might take a little while to become second nature, but in fact it is considerably simpler than English once you get used to it, as there are only three possible words to use anyway (lay, laynt and layth), and there is generally only one way to arrange the words that is correct, whereas in English there's often a choice. This also makes Lapine-to-English translations considerably easier.
Now, time for a little more vocab, I think, starting with some plant names, the first couple of which may be somewhat familiar to you!:
zethin - campion
vreka - vervain
sairoola - cabbage
sainosla - lettuce
blefath - onion
thlayath - carrot
dangath - potato
marath - parsnip
tarath - turnip
daynith - bring
vaynith - give
zaynith - take, steal
plat - try, attempt
lavatal - clever
lanatal - stupid
os varu - please
vaoril - thanks; to thank
Notes
a) Blefath is a contraction of embleer efath, ie "stinking plant." This is a reference both to its strong odour and to the fact that onions are unpalatable to rabbits.
b) The phrase os varu, literally "if like", is very reminiscent of the French s'il vous plaît, while vaoril (which has no singular form, incidentally) comes originally from vaorahil il mi, "blessings to you."
c) "Please" and "thank you" are used less freely in Lapine than in English, and it would be thought rather odd to say os varu every time one asked a small favour, for example. Rabbits generally don't use these words unless there are quite strong emotions involved or unless they're being respectful.
d) Note that the -ath suffix for vegetables generally indicates a root of some kind. The generic word for "a root" is venath.
And a few sample sentences to end with:
[LISTEN] Plat nahl flay u blefathil, roolil lanatal! - Try not to eat the onions, you stupid kittens!
[LISTEN] Thlayli, zyhl blel ma, os varu - a lay Duhreth, nahl elil! - Bigwig, stop cuffing me, please - I'm Hawkbit, not elil!
[LISTEN] El-ahrairah laynt zaynith u sainoslil u Rah ven u methrah - El-ahrairah stole the King's lettuces in the story
[LISTEN] O Frithrah, on lay vaynith u vaoril mon ol u hlien mon - O Lord Frith, we give our thanks for our warren
[LISTEN] Zethin laynt naylte lavatal pli rah hrair Hrayfil na zaynith venathil. E layth nahl nalantant ven u hlien mon - Campion was a clever rabbit who led many Wide Patrols to steal roots. He will not be forgotten in our warren
Notes
a) The word blel, literally "paw" is used to mean "cuff."
b) In the fourth sentence, "for our warren" is better thought of as "about our warren" than "towards our warren", and hence ol is better here than il.
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2004. Updated 06/05/04.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 8:09 pm
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Dictionary - Lapine to English
This is primarily a dictionary of colloquial Lapine, so only a few words from the inflected language are included - broadly, those which are relatively common in everyday speech, such as hyaont, "yesterday" (see Unit 03). Remember also that this is simply a word list, not a grammar - for example, brek ("bramble") is listed, but not brekennion ("blackberry"), as the latter is formed in a regular way (see Unit 07). Similarly, most attributes (speed, tharn-ness etc) are not listed, as they can easily be formed by the addition of -alt, as explained in Unit 11.
Notes
a) The native Lapine alphabet does not contain the letters C, J, Q or X. C is occasionally found in words, such as hawock, "pheasant", which are borrowings from other languages.
b) É is a separate letter, and comes immediately after E. However, for the sake of simplicity, I have observed this distinction here only for the initial letter of words, so lendri comes after léao.
c) G and W never begin a word (very rare archaisms such as glanbrin aside), and are only encountered in the combinations NG and AW/OW respectively.
d) Double-letter combinations (HR, TH etc) are treated as two separate letters for the purposes of this dictionary. (Unlike Welsh, where NG comes straight after G!)
Key to abbreviations
adj. adjective
adv. adverb
conj. conjunction
excl. exclamation
n. noun
npl. noun found only in plural form
nsg. noun found only in singular form
obj. object
pl. plural
pref. prefix
prep. preposition
pron. pronoun
prop n. proper noun
sg. singular
subj. subject
suff. suffix
v. verb
A
a conj. and
a subj. pron. I
ai subj. pron. they
aisi conj. or
Akirith prop. n. Honeycomb
an conj. but
anisth n. wind, breath
anisth v. to breathe
anistheer adv. windy
ao conj. + adj. and the
ar conj. = a
asith prep. with
atha n. heart
aydir n. pike
aythi n. primrose
B
blair adv. when
blaeth adv. whenever (Naylte Éan only)
blao n. place
blel n. paw
bleth pron. what
bral v. to think, believe
bralant v. to remember
bralnao v. to fear
bralrah v. to pray
bralth v. to forsee
bralvao v. to hope
branant v. to forget (uncommon variant of nalant)
bray adj. slow
brek n. bramble
bryhl n. hill
bryhlath n. down (eg Watership Down)
-byt suff. fairly; quite
D
dahloi n. dandelion
dayn v. to come
des n. three
desthile adj. third
dihraw v. to squat
drao v. to have to, must
dray v. to hop (rabbit-style, not on one leg!)
duhreth n. hawkbit
E
e subj. pron. he; it
efath n. plant
El-ahrairah prop. n. rabbit folk hero (from elil-hrair-rah, "prince with a thousand enemies")
eleer n. winter
ela nsg. an enemy (archaic; poetic use only)
elil npl. enemies of rabbitry
embleer adj. stinking; also used as a swearword roughly equivalent to "damned"
embli v. to stink
es pl. subj. pron. you
eth n. one
etheth adj. alone, lonely, solitary
ethile adj. first
ethsi adj. a few
É
éan adj. old
éath n. valley
éathyhl n. combe
émar n. mate
émar v. to mate
éneer adj. sad
éveer adj. happy
F
flarli n. doe's den
flay n. food; drink
flay v. to eat; to feed; to drink
flayfa n. food reserved for officers, Wide Patrollers etc (Efrafan)
flayfath n. grass
flayrah n. particularly appetising food, eg carrots
flayuhl n. mouth
floroo n. scrape
flow n. burrow, chamber
fran v. fight
freth n. south
Frith prop. n. the Sun; chief god of rabbit pantheon
Frithaes! excl. hi!; bye!; all right!
Fritheer n. summer
Frithyeer adj. sunny
fu prep. after; afterwards. fu Inlé after moonrise. fu Frith morning (lit. "after sunrise")
fuléao n. dawn
fuleth n. east
G
glanbrin n. a mythical creature (archaic)
H
hahean adj. enough
hain n. song
hain v. to sing
hawock n. pheasant (borrowed from hedgerow talk)
hay v. to see; to watch; to look
hayessi n. watcher, lookout
hay-nyt n. stare
hayuhl n. eye
hehlant n. speedwell
hithra n. a long while
hla n. to swim
hlaf adj. up; roof, top
hlal v. to catch
hlang adj. left
hleengar n. holly
hli adv. her
hlien n. warren
hlienes n. home
hlessi n. a rabbit living in the open, without a hole
hloli n. face
hloth adv. why
hlow prep. in front of
hoi! excl. hey!
homba n. fox
hombeer n. autumn
hraeth n. all, everything, everyone; world
hrair n. thousand. U Hrair The Thousand (collective term for elil)
hraithile n. thousandth
hral adj. cloud
hraleer adv. cloudy
hraka nsg. droppings. Hraka! a fairly strong swearword
hraray adj. fast
hrarayil v. to chase
hrarli n. doe's stop
hray v. to run
hrayao n. tunnel, run, passageway
hrayfa n. Wide Patrol
hristh adj. down (opposite of up); floor, bottom; earth, dirt, ground
hrow prep. behind
hrudao n. year
hrududu n. car; tractor; train; any motorised vehicle
Hufsa prop n. rabbit who tried to betray El-ahrairah; sometimes used as a (strong) insult, rather as we might say "Judas"
hy v. to shine
hyao n. day. hyao, ver sie methai once upon a time (lit. "once, so they say")
hyaones n. today
hyaont n. yesterday
hyaontil npl. past
hyaoth n. tomorrow
hyaothil npl. future
I
i sg. subj. pron. you
il prep. to(wards)
Inlé prop. n. the Moon; god of death
Inlérao n. month
ir conj. = i
isth prep. under, beneath
ithé n. man, human in general
K
kan conj. because
kasrah v. to trick
kes n. four
kesthile adj. fourth
keth v. to ask
kimthile adj. last; final
koi v. to have; to posess
kothen n. hazel
kranahl n. cowslip
krath n. nose
krath v. to smell
krathlay n. whisker
krathuhl n. nostril
kyhl v. to continue, carry on
-kyt suff. nearly, almost
L
lan v. to know (so./sth.)
lay v. to be; is
laynt v. was
layth v. will be
léao n. night
léaones n. tonight (present)
léaont n. last night
léaoth n. tonight (future)
léeth n. north
lendri n. badger
li n. head
loir adj. less
loith adj. least
los n. water
loseer adv. wet, rainy
loseer v. to rain
lung adv. how
lungeth adv. how many
M
ma obj. pron. me, my
mai obj. pron. them; their
mailon n. clover
mar adj. long; tall
mark v. to lie (down)
marlao n. week; mating time
marli n. doe; mother
marlifa n. rank-and-file doe (Efrafan)
mayth n. oak
me obj. pron. him; it; his; its
mes pl. obj. pron. you
meth n. talk; saying
meth v. to talk; to speak; to say; to tell
methain n. poem
methnos n. speech
methrah n. story
methroo n. word
mi sg. obj. pron. you, your
mitéath v. to stand up on hind legs
mo obj. pron. her
mon obj. pron. us; our
mul v. to do
N
na prep. (in order) to
nahl adv. no; not
nahlarny n. poison
nahlay n. fog, blindness
nalant v. to forget
nalna n. enemy
nang n. leaf
nangeer n. spring
nao adj. bad; poor
narn adj. nice (to eat)
naru v. to dislike
natal adj. empty (of)
nayeer adv. foggy
nayilf n. hare
naylfa n. officer (Efrafan)
naylte n. rabbit. Naylte Lapine
nayo v. to jump, leap
néan adj. young
neorsé n. a little while
nesth adv. backwards
ni- pref. mid-. ni-Frith noon
nild n. bird
nildel n. hawk nildro n. blackbird
nInlé n. midnight; "the middle of the night"
noroo adj. middle-sized
nos adj. big
-nyt suff. very
O
o subj. pron. she
o! excl. oh!
ohré n. body
ol prep. of
olma n. mine
olmai n. theirs
olme n. his; its
olmes n. yours (pl.)
olmi n. yours (sg.)
olmo n. hers
olmon n. ours
on pron. we
os conj. if
Owsla prop. n. a group of favoured rabbits who protect the Chief Rabbit and his doe and exercise authority
Owslafa prop. n. "Council Police" (Efrafan)
Owslathaf prop. n. "Council" (Efrafan)
othra n. tooth
P
paf v. to stamp, warn
pahyt n. scut (tail)
parli n. = tarli
pathun n. bluebell
pel n. leg
pfeffa n. cat
pli pron. who
preen n. tree
preenahlarny n. laburnum
preetar n. hedge
R
Rabscuttle prop. n. rabbit folk hero; companion to El-ahrairah (etymology unknown)
rah n. chief; lord; prince; leader
-rah suff. honorific, applied especially to Chief Rabbits. Thlayli-rah Chief Bigwig
roo adj. small
rooli v. kitten (rabbits only)
roolimi n. daughter
rooliti n. son
rowf n. dog
rul adj. the same as, as...as, equally
rusamitha (also -i) n. heart-sister; a rarely used and very powerful word of deep friendship.
rusatitha (also -i) n. heart-brother; see above for notes on usage.
rusami n. sister
rusasi n. sibling
rusati n. brother
-ryt suff. slightly; a little
S
sai v. to meet
sarli n. parent
sayn n. groundsel
seth adj. some
si n. two
silf n. outside
silfessi n. outskirter
silflay n. a feed above ground
silflay v. to go above ground to feed
silisi n. snake
sisi adv. again
sith adj. side
sithile adj. second
skuf v. to dig
steth v. to sit (up)
Stihrath-rah prop. n. General Woundwort
swith n. hole within the warren
syrién n. strawberry plant
T
tafo n. tongue
tafo v. to lick
tar adj. fat; wide
tardrayn n. buckthorn
tarli v. buck; father
thaf prep. on (top of)
than prep. before; beforehand
thanléao n. evening; dusk
tharn adj. stupefied by terror
Thaynlé prop. n. Silver (the rabbit, not the colour)
thayrte n. river
the v. to move
theth n. west
thlay n. fur
thli adv. there
thrang adj. right
thray n. bite
thray v. to bite
threar n. rowan
thrennion n. rowan berry
thum adj. that, those
thyao adv. where (Cowslip's warren only)
thyhl v. to start, begin
tring v. to want to
tuhl n. hole leading outside the warren
U
u adj. the
ulé adj. even (when)
um adj. this, these
ur adj. = u
ureth pron. which
uth n. ear
uthow v. to hear, to listen
V
vahra n. friend
vahl adv. yes
vair v. to excrete
val v. to help
vao adj. good
vaorah n. blessing
varu v. to like
vatal adj. full (of)
veheer adj. having the gift of second sight
veheer n. a rabbit with the gift of second sight
ven n. in(side)
vesth adv. along; forwards
veth v. to be able to
voir adj. more
voith adj. most
Y
yao adv. where
yaoth adv. wherever (Naylte Éan only)
yayn v. to find
yen adv. now, immediately; suddenly
yera n. snow, ice
yereer adv. snowy, icy
yona n. hedgehog
Z
zayn v. to go
zel n. claw
zen n. dew
zorn adj. destroyed; annihilated; exterminated
zoth conj. therefore, then, so
zyhl v. to finish, end; to kill
zyz v. to sleep
zyzay adj. lazy, sleepy
Copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2002-6. Updated 29/10/06.
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