Taccuino di traduzione

"Più la storia s'avvicina ai nostri tempi, e più alle fusioni di due civiltà attraverso la carne si sostituisce quella attraverso la carta. Alle invasioni le traduzioni." Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: 1940, 11 gennaio

26/04/2006

A note on the Udmurt language

There are many reasons not to learn Udmurt, and most of them are obvious. Nevertheless, the language adds a few extra arguments against itself through its extraordinary complexity. Those who studied German in school will recall getting annoyed at the language’s four grammatical cases. Udmurt has many more: eight cases for animate objects and a full fifteen for inanimate ones. But that’s not all: nouns also change their endings for their first, second and third forms, and for their singular and plural forms. Thus inanimate nouns have about two hundred possible endings for the speaker to juggle with.
As for verbs, Udmurt has six past tenses alone. Three of these have the curious function of indicating that something might have happened, but the speaker can’t say for sure, as he didn’t see it himself. Also intriguing are the special ‘fictitious’ suffixes that mean pretending to do something or, on the other hand, pretending not to. I’ve always thought English could do with some of those. Meanwhile, the word ‘not’ conjugates rather like a verb, and the verbs used with it have special forms. The only concession to simplicity is that there is no concept of gender. There aren’t even separate words for ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it'. But that isn’t simple: it’s just confusing. Do people really speak this language?

Da: Daniel Kalder, The Lost Cosmonaut, pagina 257.

Qui informazioni più chiare e scientifiche sull'udmurt.