The Poison Oracle

Note on Translation

THE LANGUAGE OF the marsh-people cannot be translated directly into an English word-for-word equivalent. All the sentences that appear here are paraphrases. I have used archaic word-orders to do this, because the language is somewhat of that nature; colloquialisms do exist, but are used only when speaking to children, or occasionally when wishing to imply that an adult is behaving in a childish manner. For those who are interested, here is a specimen of how the language actually works: The formal greeting on page 52 “Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow” consists of the single word-accretion Kt!urocharha’ygharlocht!in. This accretion has three roots of relationship: -och- comes twice and implies the relationship of property rights, linking in the first case Kt!u which is the locative of K!tu, a wallow, with -ar- which is the first person root unmodified by any clan stop; the -r- in this section is meaningless, a euphony insert. The second -och- links -gharal- (the plural form of garal, a buffalo) with -t!in which is the second-person-singular suffix tinh, modified with a ninth-clan stop and closure. The central relationship of permission is expressed by -ha’y- where the y is a breathed uvular semivowel modifying the normal permissive root -ha//- to show that the permission is not to be taken for granted as this is merely a formal greeting.

I have also translated the Arabic into slightly formal English, as that is how the language is usually spoken in Q’Kut, compared with the rest of the Arab world.