Urth Net
Trivigaunti Terms
Some elucidation on the Trivigaunti language, courtesy of my cousin Bob, who works for Aramco in Saudi Arabia:
"'ishsh" (Get going?) -- not familiar. "khush" means "go in," or "enter"; we use "yalla" for "get going"
"betifham 'arabi" -- do you understand Arabic?
"karbaj" -- kurbaj in classical Arabic means a whip.
"marhaba" -- hello
"boraz" -- "biraz" in classical can mean "excrement" or "contest" or "duel" (this strange juxtaposition because the root "b-r-z" has the basic meaning of "to come out" or "appear" and thus takes on the meaning of "stand out", "surpass", or "excel". I don't know about "boraz".
Names:
"Abanja" -- dunno
"Hadale" -- dunno
"Hossaan" (cognate to Hussein?) -- can be; could also mean horse, if it's a velar "s".
"Lijam" -- bridle or rein
"Matar" -- rain
"Nizam" -- system
"Rimah" -- sometimes a woman's name; "reem" means gazelle; "reemah" may mean an individual female gazelle
"Saba" -- sabah (with heavy aitch) means morning; without aitch, could mean "youth" (abstract noun) or even "east wind"
"Sigada" -- dunno
"Silah" -- dunno
"Sirka" -- dunno
"Siyuf" -- swords
He adds, "Many of the words I give dunnos for could be words I recognize if they are slightly changed. It seems clear the author used Arabic, though."
A little more explanation of the preceding (from me). There is no "official" way to transliterate Arabic into our alphabet. This problem is complicated by the fact that Arabic has sounds that don't appear in English (a whole repertoire of glottal stops and Ks and Q's). Recall the umpty-foo different ways of transliterating Moammar Qaddafi's name when he was in the news a lot. In addition Arabic has (by our standards) a paucity of vowels, just three with long and short versions of each.
-vizcacha
(david_lebling at avid.com)