We’ve been translating English into Talossan — but what about the other way around? Let’s translate some Talossan into English.
This is going to be tricky, since we’re not going to be able to just look up the words in L’Översteir, usually. Instead of the dictionary form, we’ll see the word the way it’s been used with the relevant endings. For example, instead of “coriar” (“to run”), you’re more likely to see “coriarha” (“he will run”).
As you begin to recognize endings and roots, it will get easier. You might not know what coriarha means, but you’ll recognize the root of “cori-,” and that will help you look up the forms. In time, you’ll even be able to just automatically recognize common endings.
Let’s start with a short sentence.
Els lapins pastürent.
To begin with, we should figure out which part of speech each word is. You won’t always have to do this, but it’s a smart thing to do when you get started. Since you don’t know a lot of words, you want to narrow down your possibilities by figuring out what each word is doing.
So what would you fill out in these boxes?
| Els | lapins | pastürent. |
| ? | ? | ? |
Answers
| El | lapins | pastürent. |
| Article | Noun (being used as the subject) | Verb |
How did you do?
Let’s get translating! We’ll start with the verb, pastürent. As you know, the ending tells us the person and number and tense of the verb. Honestly, you should really end up memorizing the basics. It won’t take that long, and it’s much easier than constantly looking the same information up. But for right now, here’s the endings for the present tense (the tense that pastürent is in):
| Singular | Plural | |
| First | -éu | -ent |
| Second | -ás | -etz |
| Third | -a | -ent |
For right now, we’re going to just use that to identify the ending in our verb, pastürent. We’re looking for the root of the word, since we want to look up the meaning of the word. If you break it down, you can already see it: pastür + ent.
Okay, now we have the root of our word. The last step before we look it up is figuring out the dictionary form. For most words, it’s as simple as adding the ending “-ar.”
Try it now. Add -ar onto our root, and then look it up in L’Översteir. What does our word mean?
Answer
That’s right! And so now we know the whole sense of pastürent, since we know the person (third), number (plural), and tense (present).
Okay, let’s move on. Let’s take a look at our chart so far.
Chart so far
| El | lapins | pastürent. |
| Article | Noun (being used as the subject) | Verb |
| ? | ? | (they) graze. |
The article might help us out a little, since we can see it’s a plural definite article: “els.” If it was a singular noun, then it would be “el.” English doesn’t have plural definite articles (it’s “the car” and “the cars”), but Talossan does. “Els” must mean that it’s a plural noun. (We already kind of knew this, since our verb is a plural verb. A plural verb must have a plural noun as the subject.)
Okay, here’s the bad news about pluralizing a noun in Talossan: there’s a lot of different ways to do it. The way you pluralize a noun depends on the ending, and there’s five different “declensions.”
Here’s a fun chart!
| End of the Noun | Pluralizing |