Re: [glosalist] Translati de Qo Akti

At 08:06 PM 6/26/03 -0600, Gary Miller grafo:

It is difficult to answer your question about which language influenced my translation into Glosa. ….. (The fact that Marcel has found two errors in my translation may have some bearing here too, but I prefer not to think about it.)

• Thank you Gary for this valuable insight into the translation process, and how the landscape of the mind influences it.

….. I believe in rhetoric, the idea that language is simplified when we all try to follow set patterns.

• I have noticed this trend towards formularisation in the translation process, and have tried to counter-act it. But my linguistic landscape is fairly bare, with English and Glosa plus school-boy French.

In recent years I have had a few lights directing me in my use of language, and also in my hopes for Glosa: I am continuing to develop a “feel” for language; and I believe that all language has a usually unseen rhythm. Then, of course, I have always believed in the power of the sub-conscious and of intuition. And, for any of our group, who, up to now, believed that language was a fairly logical, mechanical thing, I urge you to branch out and listen for messages from the right hemisphere of your brain. To practice the art of communication I have written letters to the editor of the Australian Financial Review .. and have had a hit rate of about 30%. And, for the study of rhythm and feel in language, I have attempted writing songs for political activism. My progress in learning Glosa took off when I started writing the children’s stories. I did not translate them from English-language versions: I retold them from memory. I was a severe critic of the work, and rejected any sentence that did not sound pleasant, and was not immediately understandable - when read aloud.

While Ron’s advice to me was to … ‘play with the language’ … I did not quite know what to do with it. The idea of RETELLING children’s stories was my own idea. I recommend, to you all, the retelling, from your own minds, of the stories of your childhood. Needless to say, after the big decision has been made, and Glosa is adopted as the world’s auxiliary language, it will be nice to pick up a book that is used in primary schools all around the world, and see in it a story that you have written.

One element of this rhetoric or style in my Glosa translating is that I like Hogben’s idea of the “verboid” and sentence order. I don’t use them perfectly, but you will see a lot of words like akti and gene in my translating. Otherwise, I very much try to imitate what I have already seen in Glosa.

• At one stage, I did try to bring the verboid and the auxilliary verb into my discussions on Glosa, but most people are usually so distressed at a language that appears to have no written set of instructions, that “verboids” and “auxilliaries” seem completely off the Glosa learner’s map. Actually Hogben seemed to plan the ‘verboidisation’ of almost all words, whereas Ron and Wendy cut it right back to the small group of about twenty general-purpose verbs that readily formed compound verbs - through the addition of post-fix auxiliaries. EG ki-ana = ascend

Considering that I have just spent the day in going through Qo Akti, I have no time left to budget for the Glosa translation of the above.

Saluta,

Robin Gaskell