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Hi what's good. I'm tereshkina and I really enjoy translating High Valyrian. I got an ask on tumblr about this recently, so I thought I might as well expand on it and post it here!
Here's how to translate High Valyrian, ish!
❖ First thing to note right off the bat— maybe you've noticed this for yourself already or maybe you haven't— the Duolingo course is total ass, especially for fic-writing purposes. Don't waste your time. Instead, I would highly recommend David Peterson's conlang wiki. The website is admittedly a little shiesty, but that's where all the relevant information is. Here are some links:
❖ Second thing to note is that HV is most unlike english. Personally, I have a bit of prior experience translating latin and ancient greek, and I can attest that HV has a lot in common with both of those. If you're unfamiliar with those or if you've never studied another language before, there's going to be a bit of a learning curve, but that's okay! Here a few key things to keep in mind about HV:
1. HV uses noun cases. Lots of them. Everywhere. All the time.
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What are noun cases? Great question. "Cases" are the different forms that a noun may take, depending on what it's doing in the sentence. If you speak english, you're already familiar with this a little bit!
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Take for example the difference between the words "I" and "me". Technically, they both mean the same thing. They're both referring to the person speaking. However, we use "I" when the person speaking is the one doing a certain verb, and we use "me" when the person speaking is having the verb done to them. "I chase Vhagar" versus "Vhagar chases me." It wouldn't make sense to say "me chase Vhagar" nor "Vhagar chases I". Same goes for the difference between "she" and "her" or the difference between "we" and "us", etc. etc.
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The first noun case is called the "nominative". This is the case we use when the noun is the one doing the verb. "I" is in the nominative case and so is "she," "he," "they," and "we".
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The second noun case is called the "accusative". This is the case we use when the noun is the one recieving the verb. "Me" is in the accusative case and so is "her," "him," "them," and "us".
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Here's the kicker— every. single. noun. in. High. Valyrian. does. that. All of them. They all have different cases depending on how the word is being used. This even includes people's names. And there aren't just two noun cases. The nominative and the accusative are the most important ones to know, but HV also has the genitive, the dative, the locative, the instrumental, the comitative, and the vocative. If you want to know more about what each of those mean in greater detail, click over to the 'harder stuff' chapter.
2. You gotta conjugate your verbs. You have to.
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This is the deal. Whenever you look up a verb in the HV dictionary, it's always going to give you the infinitive first, and you are almost never going to want the infinitive. What does "infinitive" mean? Great question. The infinitive of a verb is like, vague and contextless, mostly. In english, our infinitives come with the word "to" attached to the front. "To run" is in the infinitive, for example. It wouldn't make sense to say "Rhaenyra to surprise Alicent" right? You have to conjugate it! 3rd person singular! Rhaenyra surprises Alicent, goddammit!
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Don't use the infinitive. That's how they get you. Instead, you're gonna want to click on the word, and then expand its full conjugation chart to find the right form. HV has many, many, many conjugations depending on person, number, past, present, future, etc. and then there's the subjunctive, oh boy. More on that in the 'harder stuff' chapter as well.
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You ARE going to want the imperative a good amount of the time. The "imperative" is the form that a verb takes when it's being used as a command. This is especially relevant for dragon riders. For example, when Luke tells Arrax to fly, he doesn't say "sōvegon" (that would be the infinitive and it would make no fucking sense) he says "sōvēs" which is the imperative-present-singular, because he's giving Arrax a command, there's only one of Arrax, and he wants Arrax to do it now. Likewise, when Dany is attacking Meereen and gives the command "fire!" she says "nābēmātās" which is the imperative-present-plural, because she has many trebuchets and she wants them all to fire.
3. HV tends to drop pronouns. Starting sentences with "nyke" is for rubes.
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In english, we use pronouns all over the place. We do this because for the most part, our verbs all take the same conjugation except for the 3rd-person-singular. Like, "I eat," "you eat," "we eat," "y'all eat," "they eat" it's all the same in english. The only way we know the difference is by adding the pronoun. HV on the other hand, does not have this problem. Each person/number has its very own conjugation, meaning you don't have to add the pronoun most of the time, it's fine.
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Here's an example: "ipradan" is the 1st-person-singular of "ipradagon" meaning "to eat". Just by saying "ipradan," it's obvious that I am the one eating. "Nyke ipradan" would be completely redundant. Like yes, obviously nyke ipradan, water is fucking wet, dude.
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Pretty much the only time you're going to need to start a sentence with a pronoun in HV is whenever the pronoun is in the accusative. For example, if you wanted to translate "Do you remember me?" You wouldn't say "Ao yne rūnā?" because "ao" (you) is already included in the conjugated verb "rūnā" (2nd-person-singular of rūnagon meaning "to remember"). By including "ao" you're basically saying "you do you remember me" and that's just too much. You do however need to include the word "yne" (me) which is the 1st-person-singular-accusative pronoun in order to specify that it's me being remembered.
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Isn't that cool, though? It takes four english words to say "do you remember me" but in HV it only takes two: "yne rūnā?"
4. Words in HV sentences have to go in a different order.
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English uses a subject-verb-object sentence structure. For example, "Alicent stabs Rhaenyra". Alicent is the one doing the stabbing, so she goes in front of the verb. Rhaenyra is the one getting stabbed, so she goes after the verb. If we flip their places, the sentence has a totally opposite meaning, right? Cool. HV does not use this structure. HV uses subject-object-verb.
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Consider for example the moment where like, Dany is in Astapor and she reveals that she's been fluent in HV this whole time and she busts out with "zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor" meaning "a dragon is not a slave". The first word in that sentence is the subject (zaldrīzes/a dragon) the second word is the object (buzdari/a slave) the third word is the verb (iksos/is) and that last word is the negation (daor/not).
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The main thing to take away here is that in HV, the verb always comes last. Always always always, unless there's a negation. This is why the words "issa" and "daor" have stuck in people's minds so well, because "issa" is the 3rd-person-singular of the verb "to be" and "daor" is the general negation word, meaning whenever they show up, they always have to come last.
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There's also a bunch of word order shit to keep in mind about adjectives, but that's all in the harder stuff chapter. Don't worry about it.
❖ Let's translate a sentence together!
Okay here's how I translate my HV sentences. It's a lot like solving a puzzle, it's really fun!
Let's take the english sentence "My sister cuts the fruits with a knife."
The best way to start, in my opinion, is to re-arrange the sentence in its proper HV order first, and then go hunt down each word in the dictionary. For our example sentence, that would look like:
(My sister) (fruits) (with knife) (cuts).
Always easiest to start with the verb, just to get that out of the way. Ctrl+f in the dictionary for the word "to cut" which gives me "nektogon". However, this is the infinitive. I don't want the infinitive. It's my sister who's doing the cutting, meaning I want the 3rd-person-singular. I click on the conjugation chart, I look for 3rd-person-sing, and that gives me "nektos."
Cool. Now our sentence looks like this:
(My sister) (fruits) (with knife) nektos.
Next we're gonna find the subject of the sentence. The subject is the entity that is performing the verb. In this case, that word is "sister". Again, ctrl+f in the dictionary for "sister" and it turns out there's actually two different words depending on whether she's my older or younger sister, I'm gonna go with "hāedar" (younger sister) since it sounds cooler than "mandia". My sister is the subject of the sentence and there's only one of her, meaning I want the nominative-singular, which, wouldn't you know it, is just "hāedar".
Very cool.
(My) hāedar (fruits) (with knife) nektos.
There's an adjective attached to "hāedar" and it's a possessive adjective (my) and those are kind of a minefield at first, not gonna lie. I'd recommend keeping the possessive adjective chart on speed dial (you gotta like scroll and click the dropdown that says "High Valyrian possessive adjectives" to see all of them).
Anyway, adjectives have to match their noun in several respects: case, number, and gender. The word "hāedar" is aquatic gender, and we're using the nominative-singular, meaning we're gonna go to our possessive adjective chart and look for first-person aquatic ("ñuhor"). If we needed any other case besides nominative-singular, we'd then click on that word and find the full declension chart, but we're lucky and we don't need to do that.
Here's where that brings us:
Ñuhor hāedar (fruits) (with knife) nektos.
Fruits is next!! Ctrl+f in the dictionary for "fruit", that gives us "gerpa". However, just plain "gerpa" is nominative-singular. The fruits in our sentence are the object, they're the things being cut, meaning we don't want the nominative, we want the accusative. Accusative-plural to be precise since my sister is cutting more than one fruit. We click on "gerpa" we find accusative-plural on the inflection chart, that gives us "gerpī".
Awesome. Now we have:
Ñuhor hāedar gerpī (with knife) nektos.
Knife is our last word, and it is neither the thing doing the cutting nor is it the thing being cut, rather, it is the instrument by which the cutting is performed. This means we want the instrumental case. Ctrl+f for "knife" gives us the nominative-singular "egry" so we navigate to its inflection chart and find the instrumental-singular "egromy".
And we don't need to add the word "with" because we're already using the instrumental case, meaning "with" is baked-in. Handy, right? Our fully translated sentence now is:
Ñuhor hāedar gerpī egromy nektos.
Ta da!!!!!!
❖ Random quick tips
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HV doesn't use definite articles. "Definite articles" just means like, the word "the". HV doesn't have that. Neither does Russian. (Sidebar, this is why native Russian speakers who learn English often say things like "get in car" or "we go to beach" because their native language doesn't have any definite articles. Presumably, the same phenomenon would show up for characters who grew up speaking HV, like Larra Rogare would absolutely talk like that.) HV does have demonstrative adjectives, at least. (This, that, these, those)
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Be aware of the difference between "issa" and "iksos". They're both 3rd-person-singular of "sagon" (to be) meaning they both mean "is" but issa is indicative whereas iksos is subjunctive. You'd use iksos if the speaker is like, expressing a wish or a possibility or an opinion. You'd also use iksos if it's about to be negated as well. "iksos daor" gets used waayyy more often than "issa daor". It's ultimately up to your artistic discretion though, go nuts.
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Don't leave out the macron. That's the little hat that shows up on vowels sometimes in HV. Not only are macrons sexy as hell, they also change the meaning of the word! Like okay, "iemnȳ" means "inside" but if we deprive the letter y of its cute little hat, we get "iemny" which means "stomach". Different word.
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Be careful with translating the word "there". If you look it up real fast in the dictionary and you're not paying attention, you'll get "konīr" which means "there" but only in a spacial sense, as in "over there". If you want to say like, "there exists this thing" the word you're looking for is "ilza" which is the 3rd-person-sing of "ilagon". (And it's a verb so it has to come last!!)
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Get familiar with drējī. Drējī is my beautiful wife. She means really/truly/exactly. I love her. She's so versatile. She has two graceful wonderful handmaidens as well, there's mērī which means only/just and gierī which means completely/all.
❖ Charts to keep on speed-dial
(For each of these links, you're gonna have to scroll down and click the 'expand' button next to the title of the chart)
❖ Letters with hats, for ease of copy-pasting:
Ā ā
Ē ē
Ī ī
Ō ō
Ū ū
Ȳ ȳ
Ñ ñ