HAZ No141
No one for one translation:
Most of Hanian does not have one for one translation and quite a bit of it is made up of words for whole new concepts that do not exist anywhere in contemporary society.
A lot of that is due to cultural differences. Hanian doesn’t translate well into English because there are a number of things commonly spoken about which are very foreign to most people who aren’t Hanian. This would take too long to give in examples, you’ll have to see it for yourself. There are over 500 words that have no real equivalent in English but that are very useful for a Hanian to know. Strangely, some of them we *should* have but we don’t. Think of things such as gno ; zu – vegetating or falling to sleep while watching Tv / being on a device. How about nen ; zal – every place is made near by technology such as planes. Or even e ; ti ; zal – going to and fro like ants crawling around the place. See the modern words as well as unique word listings for these and plenty more examples.
Now as if that was bad enough it gets worse for the one wanting to learn muv ; ta. The lack of one for one translations and the oddity in it continues as it’s extensively used for stories and gaming. When found in art and entertainment, it’s usually not the nice guys that are using muv ; ta as their speech. That of course filters through with at times interesting effects as well as tends to lead to a number of crazy concepts that suddenly need obvious defining. Calling your boss a slave driver takes on a whole new dimension when you actually understand the subtle and often quite nasty undertones of it all. Just like pha ; tarn isn’t meant as a figurative can of worms kinda concept but rather something any Klingon would delight in having on his plate!
Insulting your boss is actually rather easy…. thanks to very scummy cultural vocabulary that was added to help make the post apocalyptic world of chaha : shattered more real.
Its’ done by the word shrab ; zo by the way, if you want to have at him for his inability to set proper deadlines or being a completely unreasonable scum-bag and low life. Then follow it up by muttering something about unreasonable workload using a line about quotas (pla ; ka pla ; ka vo ; re ; tu). Follow that with an insult on his person by saying he can’t count (she ; varth) to complete the grumbling line of insults. In other words not only is he being unreasonable treating you like an actual slave, but he is utterly unable to see that he’s asking too much of you. Thus he’s screwing everyone over in the process; cause it’s not like you can’t do the work. Rather it’s that you hate being micromanaged, he’s being entirely too greedy and what’s worse is that he’s the one who can’t count. That incidentally in the chaha story universe is a worse insult than we can imagine, even in contemporary society. You’re telling someone that he can’t count, something every child would learn first.
Request a membership down the road to see more of the language use in chaha, via the haz and yara word lists. Then prepare to shudder as you sit there whimpering and wondering why would anyone need a word for that multiplied by a hundred more times as you realize one simple truth. The low life antagonists of the stories weren’t nicknamed scum for nothing they got the vocabulary and culture to back that up!
All of it together make muv ; ta a language where you’ll find only half of it translated word for word. The other half gets a lot more complicated than that. Take ko ; dir (category word used to say big lizard things) and gli ; yar (concerning cats and dogs together) as two great examples. Then realize that the related kli ; var is actually something much more cool than simply saying “big furry cats.” Though stated as such for simplicity’s sake in the vocab lists I’ll leave that up to you to discover on your own what one would be talking about when referring to a fur face!
To really get into Hanian as a language and to see the many cool (as well as some really freaky scary things) we’ve defined with it get your site membership and take a poke around.
Unique Word Lists – one – two – three – four – five (There a little over 70 so far)
Menu after getting your membership
More coming soon!
