WW #33: Shining brightly

When doing the Syntax Test Cases for a new language, I find an early stumbling block in sentence number 8, “The sun shines brightly”. This sentence is clearly designed to test the language’s handling of manner adverbials, but instead I spend more time figuring out how to translate the words themselves.

The problem is that “shine” and “bright” are basically the same concept, and are often represented by the same word. Further, in Kharulian, most adjectival meanings are expressed by stative verbs; instead of an adjective “bright”, it would have a stative verb “to be bright”, i.e. “to shine”. So it seems like a faithful translation would be awkwardly repetitive, something like “the sun shines shiningly”.

Instead, I appealed to a collocation. I created the word khiamúa, whose literal meaning is “to fill”, but which is also used to describe strong sensations, like a bright light or a loud noise. Putting khiamúa into a converb form and using this to modify “the sun shines” gives the following Kharulian sentence:

It ankhiamaraa árnaghiam.

Effectively, this says “the sun shines fillingly”.

I maintain a page listing all the Kharulian test cases here.