Again, ages since I've posted.
But, good news! The dictionary's done! (where "done" here means that every entry has a rough, best-I-could-do translation of the French, and most of the entries have the French written in too) But still - I'm quite proud of myself. That's 2660 words. You can see it here.
So now I'm in the fun part of this process, where I'm trying the language on and translating and stuff.
Mostly, I'm working with a guy named Travis McKenzie, who is writing a book called Magickless which is being published soon (he's got a blog about his writing here: magickless.blogspot.com). He has an idea of including Solresol in his book as a language of magic and spells, so he asked for some help with translating stuff. It's great practice working with the language and seeing how to phrase things. I think that the only way to really learn a language is through taking in lots of material and using it a lot. Since there isn't really any decent material in Solresol, I'll have to resort to creating it - so short phrases that have a specific purpose are great to work with.
Also - the google group thing for Solresol is doing well (mostly cause Travis is spurring conversations and I finally finished my dictionary (and Matt, another member, is really great too)). But we need more activity, so feel free to stop by or make conversation and whatever :)
(Also, I should point out that through my hours of toiling away at Sudre's dictionary, I became converted to an ardent Sudreist and threw Gajewski out the window. Metaphorically. And really only his vocabulary.)
This post was inspired by Travis McKenzie, who reminded me that I have a blog :)
Showing posts with label Translation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Translation. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
A short update on progress...
I realize I haven't posted on here for a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything with Solresol!
Upon compiling all of Gajewski's vocabulary into one file with all the possible Solresol words in it, I realized how much was actually missing. Sudre, however, has defined every SRS word with 4 syllables or fewer, in a fairly complete and logical way (as far as I can tell). Filling in the gaps with Sudre's words and keeping Gajewski's would completely disrupt the logical order of both of their grammars, and thus completely disrupt the learnability and logic of Solresol in general.
As a result of this, I have decided to ignore most of Gajewski's definitions and go with Sudre's complete dictionary. It's simply a matter of translating French, which isn't that hard, and his dictionary is so much more complete it would be silly to do anything else. I think, once I get it all translated, that I will take the liberty of redefining / updating his dictionary to remove what I perceive as redundancies or to include things that are left out. I can only do this once I'm done, of course, and have a complete, searchable database of his language.
On that note, I've been working on translating all of Sudre's dicitonary and putting it into an Excel file for useability's sake. I am currently done with all two- and three-syllable words, and am a little over 1/7 the way through the four syllable's (i.e. I'm done with all the 4-syllable words that start with "Do", and have started into the ones starting with "Re"). This is actually a LOT of words, and I'm quite pleased with my progress.
I feel like it'd be cool to actually publish a book form of this dictionary, along with an introduction and guide to learning and using the language. Of course, really I just want to be able to use it, but it seems I might as well put all this work into something tangible at some point...
Also, on the note of Sudre's definition vs. Gajewski's, the main point of conflict lies in the two-syllable words. Gajewski's words, overall, seem much more logical and practical (Sudre includes words like today, tomorrow, and yesterday, as well as both the masculine "Mister/Sir" and feminine "Mrs./Ma'am" (which can be expressed by one word with masculine or feminine accent), and he leaves out words like "with", which certainly deserve a place in the "little" words. I'm torn. I overall want to go with Gajewski's two-letter definitions, but one word in particular, "Sido" has me torn even more. Gajewski defines it as "Same" (opposite of "Dosi" (other)), whereas Sudre defines it as "How", which is a much more useful word, a word which Gajewski completely neglects. Right now I'm considering going with Gajewski's two-syllable word definitions except for Sido, which seems a bit illogical, but which might actually make the most sense. Of course, for Solresol to be useful as a comunication device, it seems to me that one should be aware of the words with multiple definitions and what they are, in case one runs into someone else who speaks a different "dialect". Which is kind of weird and awful, especially since one of the main ideas of SRS is to eliminate homonyms.
Oh well.
Bye for now, I'll try to get that dictionary up here whenever I get it done, which might not be for quite a long while. But look forward to that, imaginary audience :)
Upon compiling all of Gajewski's vocabulary into one file with all the possible Solresol words in it, I realized how much was actually missing. Sudre, however, has defined every SRS word with 4 syllables or fewer, in a fairly complete and logical way (as far as I can tell). Filling in the gaps with Sudre's words and keeping Gajewski's would completely disrupt the logical order of both of their grammars, and thus completely disrupt the learnability and logic of Solresol in general.
As a result of this, I have decided to ignore most of Gajewski's definitions and go with Sudre's complete dictionary. It's simply a matter of translating French, which isn't that hard, and his dictionary is so much more complete it would be silly to do anything else. I think, once I get it all translated, that I will take the liberty of redefining / updating his dictionary to remove what I perceive as redundancies or to include things that are left out. I can only do this once I'm done, of course, and have a complete, searchable database of his language.
On that note, I've been working on translating all of Sudre's dicitonary and putting it into an Excel file for useability's sake. I am currently done with all two- and three-syllable words, and am a little over 1/7 the way through the four syllable's (i.e. I'm done with all the 4-syllable words that start with "Do", and have started into the ones starting with "Re"). This is actually a LOT of words, and I'm quite pleased with my progress.
I feel like it'd be cool to actually publish a book form of this dictionary, along with an introduction and guide to learning and using the language. Of course, really I just want to be able to use it, but it seems I might as well put all this work into something tangible at some point...
Also, on the note of Sudre's definition vs. Gajewski's, the main point of conflict lies in the two-syllable words. Gajewski's words, overall, seem much more logical and practical (Sudre includes words like today, tomorrow, and yesterday, as well as both the masculine "Mister/Sir" and feminine "Mrs./Ma'am" (which can be expressed by one word with masculine or feminine accent), and he leaves out words like "with", which certainly deserve a place in the "little" words. I'm torn. I overall want to go with Gajewski's two-letter definitions, but one word in particular, "Sido" has me torn even more. Gajewski defines it as "Same" (opposite of "Dosi" (other)), whereas Sudre defines it as "How", which is a much more useful word, a word which Gajewski completely neglects. Right now I'm considering going with Gajewski's two-syllable word definitions except for Sido, which seems a bit illogical, but which might actually make the most sense. Of course, for Solresol to be useful as a comunication device, it seems to me that one should be aware of the words with multiple definitions and what they are, in case one runs into someone else who speaks a different "dialect". Which is kind of weird and awful, especially since one of the main ideas of SRS is to eliminate homonyms.
Oh well.
Bye for now, I'll try to get that dictionary up here whenever I get it done, which might not be for quite a long while. But look forward to that, imaginary audience :)
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