affinity designer A poem in Language Y

[AdamStanislav]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

La couleur est noire.
La couleur est blanche.

La couleur est noire.
La couleur est blanche.

La couleur est noire.
La couleur est blanche.
La couleur est rouge.

La couleur est noire.
La couleur est blanche.
La couleur est rouge.
La couleur est turquoise.

La couleur est noire.
La couleur est blanche.
La couleur est rouge.
La couleur est verte.
La couleur est bleue.

 

William

 

Do you want a poetic translation or just word for word? If you just want word for word, I will skip any repetitions and go to the last two stanzas (or whatever they are called in English):

Farba je čierna.
Farba je biela.
Farba je červená.
Farba je tyrkysová

Farba je čierna.
Farba je biela.
Farba je červená.
Farba je zelená.
Farba je modrá.

That is from the French you showed.

[William Overington]

15 hours ago, Wosven said:

At first, I thought you were giving us translation exercise

…And I saw the following post.

Perhaps the glyphes don't allow this, but I though about the old songs for children, each time repeating a sentence and adding a new words at the end... I suspect you've got this also, it was probably meant to train memory?

Language Y is a constructed language.

Language Y has no individual words, only whole sentences.

Each whole sentence has a glyph.

Each whole sentence is grammatically independent of each of the other whole sentences.

So Language Y can be used as a pivot language to assist communication through the language barrier.

It has never been claimed that all possible sentences will be encoded in Language Y, so the uses of Language Y are very limited.

However, for some things, such as seeking information through the language barrier about relatives and friends after a disaster, it could be a very useful technique if standardized.

So a balance of a limited number of sentences being encoded with the great application potential of those sentences that are encoded.

William

 

[William Overington]

Here is a localization into Esperanto. Please note the use of the ĝ character, a g circumflex character. Esperanto uses a g for a hard g and a ĝ for a soft g.

An interesting note is that I saw that the reason that Esperanto uses a c circumflex for the ch sound as in the English word 'choice' and an s circumflex for the sh sound as in the English word 'shop' rather than the c caron and the s caron used in a number of central European languages is because in the early days of Esperanto a French typewriter was used, and it had a facility to add a circumflex accent but not a facility to add a caron accent. 

 

La koloro estas nigra.
La koloro estas blanka.

La koloro estas nigra.
La koloro estas blanka.

La koloro estas nigra.
La koloro estas blanka.
La koloro estas ruĝa.

La koloro estas nigra.
La koloro estas blanka.
La koloro estas ruĝa.
La koloro estas turkisa.

La koloro estas nigra.
La koloro estas blanka.
La koloro estas ruĝa.
La koloro estas verda.
La koloro estas blua.

 

William

 

[William Overington]

41 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said:

Do you want a poetic translation or just word for word? If you just want word for word, I will skip any repetitions and go to the last two stanzas (or whatever they are called in English):

Farba je čierna.
Farba je biela.
Farba je červená.
Farba je tyrkysová

Farba je čierna.
Farba je biela.
Farba je červená.
Farba je zelená.
Farba je modrá.

That is from the French you showed.

Thank you for the direct translation.

I would like to see your poetic translation too please. A poetic translation sounds interesting. I am wondering how that will work.

William

 

 

[AdamStanislav]

42 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Esperanto uses a g for a hard g and a ĝ for a soft g.

What does a soft g sound like? I am aware of three different languages that have a different idea of what it should sound like. The Magyars pronounce it as what in Slovak is ď (they even use it in the name of their own language), the Italians as what in Slovak is dž, and the French as what in Slovak is ž (at least I think that is how they pronounce it).

How do Slovaks pronounce soft g? We don’t even have a concept of a soft g. G is a guttural sound, not sure how to soften it. If anything, we might pronounce it as K at the end of a sentence, but I don’t think we would call that soft.

[AdamStanislav]

56 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I would like to see your poetic translation too please.

Oh boy. I am not much of a poet. I would definitely need some time for that. And it would probably only relate to the original in a marginal way.

But the first thing that popped to my mind when I saw that French version were the first four lines of a Czech song that was popular back when I still lived in Czechoslovakia:

Zelená je tráva,
fotbal to je hra.
A ten míč kulatý
věc je záludná.

It is actually about what is called soccer in the US and football in the UK and many other countries. Only the first word in the first verse is the name of a color.

Green is the grass,
football, what a game!
The ball, oh so round,
shall put you to shame.

Not a literal translation, but it captures the idea.

[AdamStanislav]

6 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said:

Zelená je tráva

And here I found the original song on YouTube: 

 

[William Overington]

29 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said:

What does a soft g sound like? I am aware of three different languages that have a different idea of what it should sound like. The Magyars pronounce it as what in Slovak is ď (they even use it in the name of their own language), the Italians as what in Slovak is dž, and the French as what in Slovak is ž (at least I think that is how they pronounce it).

How do Slovaks pronounce soft g? We don’t even have a concept of a soft g. G is a guttural sound, not sure how to soften it. If anything, we might pronounce it as K at the end of a sentence, but I don’t think we would call that soft.

First of all. I am not a linguist. I am interested in languages, and I know some bits about some of them, but just at a general level.

A soft g in English is like as in the word 'general' or 'gentle'.

A hard g is like in 'golf' or 'got'.

So the Esperanto word 'ruĝa' is pronounced, as best I know, like, in pseudo-English roo-jaah.

The Esperanto word ĝardeno, which means 'garden, is pronounced in pseudo-English as 'jar-den-oh'.

The Esperanto j is like an English y whereas the Esperanto j circumflex like the j in the French word 'je', which mean 'I' in English.

William

 

[William Overington]

Farba je čierna.
Farba je biela.

Farba je čierna.
Farba je biela.

Farba je čierna.
Farba je biela.
Farba je červená.

Farba je čierna.
Farba je biela.
Farba je červená.
Farba je tyrkysová

Farba je čierna.
Farba je biela.
Farba je červená.
Farba je zelená.
Farba je modrá.

 

[AdamStanislav]

10 minutes ago, William Overington said:

First of all. I am not a linguist. I am interested in languages, and I know some bits about some of them, but just at a general level.

A soft g in English is like as in the word 'general' or 'gentle'.

A hard g is like in 'golf' or 'got'.

So the Esperanto word 'ruĝa' is pronounced, as best I know, like, in pseudo-English roo-jaah.

The Esperanto word ĝardeno, which means 'garden, is pronounced in pseudo-English as 'jar-den-oh'.

The Esperanto j is like an English y whereas the Esperanto j circumflex like the j in the French word 'je', which mean 'I' in English.

William

 

Thanks. The Slovak j is also like the English y, as was its original meaning. It was created during the Renaissance to replace the consonant i in Latin words, such as maior. The Italians still refer to it i lunga (long i).

[AdamStanislav]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

I would like to see your poetic translation too please.

Well, since you said it was based on something children might recite, here is something I came up with. It does not make much sense, but it is very rhythmic, so children would probably like it:

Čierny kotlík, biela kaša,
farba nášho mecenáša.
Keď sa dobre napapkáme,
potom si aj pospinkáme.
Biela, modrá, červená,
kam sa skryla zelená?

Translation? Well, the online services failed royally on this one, so here is just a literal translation:

Black cauldron, white porridge,
our patron’s color.
After we eat well,
we shall sleep.
White, blue, red,
where did green hide?

For the record, white, blue and red are the colors of the Slovak flag (also used by most Slavic countries).

[Alfred]

48 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said:

Translation? Well, the online services failed royally on this one, so here is just a literal translation:

Black cauldron, white porridge,
our patron’s color.
After we eat well,
we shall sleep.
White, blue, red,
where did green hide?

Google Translate and Bing Translator did rather poorly, and the Yandex version isn’t much better, but the DeepL version isn’t too bad.

Yandex:

Black Cauldron, white porridge,
the color of our benefactor.
When we get well drunk,
then we'll go to sleep.
White, blue, red,
where did Green go?

DeepL:

Black pot, white porridge,
the color of our patron.
When we've had our fill,
then we'll have a good night's sleep.
White, blue, red,
Where's the green?

[AdamStanislav]

6 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Black pot

Yes, I saw that and stopped after seeing it called the cauldron a pot. What next? Calling the kettle black?

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said:

Yes, I saw that and stopped after seeing it called the cauldron a pot. What next? Calling the kettle black?

That’s a very fair point, Adam! I’m afraid I downgraded the Yandex effort because of the odd bit about getting “well drunk” but at least it got the cauldron right (and it didn’t invent something about the quality of the sleep).

[Wosven]

In the list theme, this is a nursery rhyme (not the one I forgot, but the same idea), in Occitan.

For the lyrics: https://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Comptines/Jean_Petit_qui_danse  or https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=fs&p=491 . The first link is easier to read, but the lyrics are in Gascon, that is slightly different from Occitan.

And, for the history part, since it's sometimes astounding to know where some song come from, especially this nursery rhyme: “Joan Petit was a peasant who, in 1643, in the south of the Massif Central, in Villefranche de Rouergue, led the peasant revolt against Louis XIV. When he was caught, he was condemned to the ordeal of the wheel. And the song says that when they broke his finger, he was dancing with his finger, etc.”

 

 

[William Overington]

Here is a challenge if some readers want to try.

Use an Affinity product or products of your choice, and the Localizable Sentences 977 font

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/LOCSE977.TTF

and the document

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse027.pdf

to produce a display of a poem in Language Y that is influenced by the diagram in the following section of a wikipedia page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms

and post an image to this thread.

William

 

 

[Alfred]

5 hours ago, William Overington said:

Use an Affinity product or products of your choice, and the Localizable Sentences 977 font

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/LOCSE977.TTF

and the document

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse027.pdf

In the ‘Colours general’ section on page 4 of the above document there is a glyph whose right-hand end is derived from the conventional heraldic hatching for purpure (purple). The English translation in the PDF file refers to ‘magenta’ rather than purple, but magenta is not the same as purple (or violet, as purple is usually called in relation to resistor colour codes). Magenta can be described as an ‘extraspectral’ colour, since it doesn’t exist as a single wavelength of light and therefore doesn’t occur in the spectrum of colours which is obtained by shining white light through a single prism.

[AdamStanislav]

47 minutes ago, Alfred said:

In the ‘Colours general’ section on page 4 of the above document there is a glyph whose right-hand end is derived from the conventional heraldic hatching for purpure (purple). The English translation in the PDF file refers to ‘magenta’ rather than purple, but magenta is not the same as purple (or violet, as purple is usually called in relation to resistor colour codes). Magenta can be described as an ‘extraspectral’ colour, since it doesn’t exist as a single wavelength of light and therefore doesn’t occur in the spectrum of colours which is obtained by shining white light through a single prism.

Wait, it is magenta now? I actually had to look it up in my dictionary. I always assumed magenta was what we call fialová in Slovak, but that is purple in English, or perhaps violet. But magenta is purpurová. Hmmm... I guess I learn something every day.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, AdamStanislav said:

Wait, it is magenta now? I actually had to look it up in my dictionary. I always assumed magenta was what we call fialová in Slovak, but that is purple in English, or perhaps violet. But magenta is purpurová. Hmmm... I guess I learn something every day.

Hmmm… I guess I do, too!

Magenta is also called fuchsia, but I don’t know if that helps or hinders. Anyway, if you superimpose two spectral spreads so that the red end of one overlaps the blue end of the other, you’ll see magenta at the overlap.

http://biotele.com/magenta.html

[William Overington]

Perhaps the English localization will need to change.

But not the glyph.

So is a different glyph needed for magenta?

And what about turquoise and cyan?

Another glyph needed? Should the existing glyph be for turquoise or for cyan?

Any others?

I seem to remember somewhere suggesting a glyph for light blue, and possibly for mint (light green) and lavender (light purple).

William

 

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

I seem to remember somewhere suggesting a glyph for light blue, and possibly for mint (light green) and lavender (light purple).

If you’re going beyond the seven heraldic colours, how far do you want to go? There are sixteen basic HTML colours (or seventeen if you include orange).

HTML Colour Names.afdesign

[AdamStanislav]

5 hours ago, Alfred said:

Magenta is also called fuchsia

Well, according to Wikipedia, fuchsia is a quintary color 7.5° away from magenta on the color wheel. I mean, I know where magenta is on the wheel, I just never knew what it was called in Slovak. 

[Alfred]

10 hours ago, AdamStanislav said:

Well, according to Wikipedia, fuchsia is a quintary color 7.5° away from magenta on the color wheel. I mean, I know where magenta is on the wheel, I just never knew what it was called in Slovak. 

Fuchsia and magenta are barely distinguishable for me when I see them next to each other on that page, and completely indistinguishable when I see them in isolation. The same goes for cerise and deep pink.

[Ali]

@Alfred I can see a clear difference (viewing on a laptop). The second of the pair in each case is more intense than the first.

[Alfred]

20 minutes ago, Ali said:

@Alfred I can see a clear difference (viewing on a laptop). The second of the pair in each case is more intense than the first.

On my iPad I can see a clear difference between phlox and magenta, and between deep pink and rose, but the colours from magenta to deep pink look like two different colours rather than four.