I don’t really have a theme for Vocabruary this year (particularly since it wasn’t invented until late last night), but there are a few translations I’ve been working on for the purpose of terrorizing the internet with random quotes and bits of text in various conlangs, so I’m just using words that come up in the course of those translations. Today I translated the line (from a poem): “His voice makes vinegar from wine.” The poem is referring to a deity, but I changed it around a bit so that it could be interpreted as an insult if read by someone who was determined to be insulted by something.
There’s nothing particularly interesting about the word vina-kisu itself – and in case you’re wondering, Syd Chrysanthi, the in-world creator of Europic in the late 21st century, is me, and I did indeed start off with a discrete root for ‘vinegar’ before I decided I didn’t care that much, and the Me-metatu (the notorious and funless “Deployment Committee”) is jaded future me from this morning, removing anything vaguely enjoyable from the language – but the interesting thing here is actually the word blivede ‘to cause to become; to turn (something) into (something else)’, which is a ditransitive verb that’s actually the causative form of the inchoative verb. Blivede always takes a direct object (na) and an indirect object (da), so “blivede na X da Y” is your basic pattern for ‘turning X into Y’.
The original line from the poem has a different structure: “His voice makes vinegar from wine” translates more readily to something like Ra vlostu derte na vina-kisu fra vinu. Here, the verb is derte (the long form of de, the causative, i.e. ‘to make’) with the direct object being the vinegar rather than the wine, while the wine takes the preposition fra ‘from, out of’.
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