superstrijder15

Yeah, it is. I think at the time that we were just starting verbs I wrote it in the dictionary as the word for 'to cut', which now turns out to be incorrect. Such is the work of a linguist deciphering an alien lanuage I suppose XD. And this is a pretty simple one at that, mad respect for people actually deciphering actual ancient texts.

Ah, I read over the first line of that section. It is quite a bit more elaborate than my dictionary so I thought those were KSK's own notes on it. I think some stuff like the numbers never came up before... Maybe I should go to bed now...

This is gonna be a long one folks, a lot of translating and commenting on my reading: Thank you so, so much for writing this all @KSK, I very much enjoyed reading it. Perhaps I should sub your new fictions on spacebattles, I haven't been on there in ages. and I ran out of likes before catching up, as is tradition. EDIT: @LordOfTheNorth The full download had a bit of weirdness going on with the index/contents list, having the parts 1, two, three and three. EDIT 2: Hey, you took that from my dictionary! (Although now obsolete, it is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0eDcf2dWf6_HwHZTgiDGwFXxOZ7Qxv-LyD2Jgpj8u0/edit)

Ah nooo! somehow I stopped recieving mail updates! Well, guess I need to read the finishing chapters now... I'm sorry for making anyone who was looking for them wait for translations guys, will be there shortly EDIT: It seems I wasn't the only one with this problem, @mstachowsky had it too. I wonder how many people suddenly dissapeared because of that...

Interesting... As we have seen before, proper nouns are typically the same in Old Kerba and in modern English. However in earlier cases as far as I remember they were always words that seemed to have started as Old Kerba and kept as a name. However Leviathan is very, very different from any other word in Old Kerba so far, so it must be from later. Of course this instantly gives us new vocabulary: Pilla: Thruth Manaliant: great beast. man- indicates 'biggest', aliant seems to be a proper noun for beast soathraban: -aban means past tense, -r means he, soath would logically by flight/to fly djaldaban: -aban indicates past tense, djald remains, seemingly first person singular, or it could be avoiding aa and be They instead, which makes more sense mahomr: it go. -r denotes 3rd person singular, mahom seems root of verb 'to go' dja: and (suprised we didn't need it so far) orbdaban: this convinces me the -daban is for 3rd plural past time. Root verb orb meaning 'to name' Manaliant occurs again, but this time the translation leaves out the greatness of the beast. This shows the translation is not exactly literal. We now have one word left: onkerbal This word is annoying. I seem to have misplaced the -al suffix, but even if we just use kerbal as a species name, like human, it still doesn't make sense. on- is for dependance on. Thus onkerbal ought to be 'dependance on the kerbals', while the stated translation is 'All the people' or plausibly 'All the kerbals'. We do not at this moment seem to have an 'all' classifier or a way to make one, but if I needed a word, at this point in the story, to describe all kerbals, I'd go with 'Kerbinada': Inhabitants of Kerbin. There are only two possible answers to this pressing question: What happened with this translation? 1. We are dealing with an unrealiable narrator 2. Edit: Oh, let me not forget to plug my terrible amazing Old Kerba dictionary: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0eDcf2dWf6_HwHZTgiDGwFXxOZ7Qxv-LyD2Jgpj8u0

Warning! This post contains a TvTropes link. Proceed at your own risk, preferably when you don't have anything to do for the rest of the day. I caught up yesterday and removed the 'new post' mails from my 'Story Update' folder. Those were literally half the mails in my story update folder! I should come here more often.

21 hours is pretty good relative to my track record! Half the time in the last year I read the chapters people release a month late or more!

Yeah, it could be great, but on the other hand my laptop already has trouble now, which is one of the reasons I barely play anymore, and this will obviously not help in that department.

I got likes from LordOfTheNorth too! Already pretty far in he is, I'm interested in what he'll think by the end of it EDIT: This like has now taken me back to the era of when I first commented in this thread, and you mention Fire in the Sky, which made me think of this song:

Ooh, the Kerm will get to talk to another? I'm very interested to see if they can think of a faster communication protocol after they telegrammed with each other for a while, I think for a Kerm there must be a more efficient way to compress information than English New Kerba telegram by morse code

Noooo! Not the space program! How can you do this!

slight error here: is are

TM©®

So I forgot whether this was maybe already mentioned once, but copper is very, very straight. It looks suspiciously like you could attach an engine module on the front and pull the entire thing around the system. Is it going to be a huge mothership for some far mission?

That seems like a good idea. I'll also try to upload my programs to a drive folder, so others can try to do stuff with it.

Don't think I do understand anything! I could try to find the verb and noun first, but that would require a completly different approach from what I have now. Let my try to explain what my program does: I take the input string, cut it into words at the spaces(1), then try to parse each word. With each word, I start by comparing its beginning to each verb root(2). If I find the right one, I take out the root and add it to output, then see if the next fits any of the verb endings, and add its translation to the output as well(3). Then it does step (2) with nouns again, and then it tries to find prefixes and suffixes. The program also saves whether we already found a verb or noun in this word, for purposes of negation of pre and suffixes. Using this and the technique from (2), the system then tries to find any prefixes. All these steps are repeated until after a full attempt there is no change, then the remainder is put into output is tagged as untranslatable and we continue to the next word(4). for example: "Jebediah ebad belonmansatha" (1) ["Jebediah", "ebad", "belonmansatha"] (2) "akhat" == "ebad" -> False. "akh" == "eba" -> False. ... "eb" == "eb" -> True: output = output + "to be" (3) "da" == "ad" -> False. ... "ad" == "ad" -> True: output = output + "(we)" (4) we tried everything on "Jebediah", but nothing worked. So output = output + "<Jebediah>" It could also be possible to write a program that tries to fit those nouns and verbs to each bit of a word, but that would require making a thing with nouns only instead of 'everything nounlike'. Let's see if I can get that working... You seem to know more about this. Do you know how languages are usually parsed by computers?

Aah, my division might be a bit different than that of a proper linguist. For my program, a verb is something that is conjugated via the standard conjugation scheme(s), a root which has a number of possible endings which carry slightly different meanings in a standardized way. A prefix or suffix is something that can typically only exist attached to a root word, whether verb or noun, it is the equivalent of the adjectives in English. A noun is a catch-all for stuff that can occur as the root of a word but isn't conjugatable. In this scheme, things that cannot stand on their own would typically be a prefix, but then again they can apparently also be conjugated so they are a verb. Annoying things these.

-<Jebediah> --to be(I) --accomplisher of-<ad> --dependence on-biggest-deed or task-(plural) It interprets bel as a noun, because it isn't in the database as a verb. After adding it as 'to accomplish', I got this: -<Jebediah> --to be(I) --to accomplish(we) --dependence on-biggest-deed or task-(plural) The translations aren't even near google translate in 2015 levels yet, but I think it looks at lot at the way writers write the way a new translater still learning a language would talk, which is nice too. And indeed, this is all fresh from my google docs document, which has a tiny issue of not being updated with things you updated in chapters, and missing information if I didn't copy everything diligently.

Alright guys, I think my code works. Now I need to test it for further errors or stuff that the database misses (and maybe make the output sound more like English). For example I think that I miss quite a few words in "Erbabar-beldaonerba ebda berot pilla", since it comes out as "-<Erbabar> --accomplisher of-<daonerba> --to be(they) -<berot> -<pilla>" Also, here is the translation of "Jebediah ebad belonmansatha:": "-<Jebediah> --to be(we) --accomplisher of-dependence on-biggest-deed or task-(plural)". Pretty close to the "Jebediah, we are the persons on which the biggest actions depend" that was meant, right?

Don't get too excited! By now I have: * Loaded my current lists into python dictionaries. My original format was pretty inconsistent so I had to write a converter. The converter has built-in warning messages though! * Seperated the input into words. It seperates at each space, hypen, newline and tab character. * An attempt at translating individual words, starting by trying out all pronouns until none fit, then trying out all nouns and verbs (it even find the right person), then continuing to try all suffixes until none fit. This procedure isn't perfect, as your mention of Boladakhat demonstrates: The output comes out as -place of accomplishing-<adakhat> It gets stuck when there is a suffix in the middle (or possibly Bol is used as a verb here, but since it already took that as a noun it doesn't even look, and it isn't in my file) Edit: the <> means that this part was untranslatable

Alright, let's go. (Yes, the answer is right below it, but who cares): BTW I've done a bit more coding now and I feel like making a program that attempts to interpret Old Kerba. It'll be pretty naive at the start, but good practice on coding weird things.

As always, this was added to my document*, togehter with the new verbs. But a nice note: I was worried for a moment that 'multiple af' and 'afa' would be indistinguishable. Then I noticed that the multiple of any (at least 1) is actually many/multiple. So it actually works! *https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0eDcf2dWf6_HwHZTgiDGwFXxOZ7Qxv-LyD2Jgpj8u0/edit?usp=sharing

I'm gone from this story for just half a year, and then this happens? I guess the change in title did draw me back in, so that is good.

I'm gonna be honest here: I have no idea what on the 5 moons of Jool happened in this battle or why it was fought. Seems like it has been far to long since my last foray into Kermol politics... More sentient trees is good though.

Same: I never go on the KSP forums anymore except to look at the stories I have an email subscription for