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I saw your conlang translation post !! :3

"The local leadership has really outdone themselves with this celebration!" is one i got recently !!

Thank you for the submission! I am translating it into my current project, Luːna ᵑgʷi, also known as MoonTalk. It is the protolanguage for my current worldbuilding project, a lingua franca spoken by a human-alien hybrid species on future lunar colonies. Your submission didn't have an intuitive translation, but it was very fun to do!

The Translation:

/suɰiːwui d͜zai bi, iasiː lisa mui ⁿdau ɡauⁿd͜zua lu ɡʷai du ɸa ⁿd͜ʑuːra/

celebrate ᴄʟ ʙᴇɴ, lead ᴄʟ ᴄʟ ᴀᴅᴇꜱꜱ hope ᴄʟ 𝟣ꜱɢ ɢᴇɴ ᴀᴄᴄ exceed

LIT: For the festival, the committee around the place exceeded my expectations!

"The local leadership has really outdone themselves with this celebration!"

Phrase-by-Phrase Breakdown:

/suɰiːwui d͜zai bi/

celebrate ᴄʟ ʙᴇɴ

Nouns in this language are formed via classifier constructions. Classifiers mark that a word is being used as a noun (without one it is assumed to be an adjective or verb depending on the syntactic context) while also indicating some semantic properties. Here, a verb meaning "to celebrate, celebratory" is modified by a classifier used to refer to periods or places in time to suggest a "festival" interpretation. The benefactive is also used here to show that this is a topicalized adjunct, not the subject.

/iasiː lisa/

lead ᴄʟ

This is a verb meaning "to lead, to oversee" paired with a classifier for groups of animates, used in reference to the festival planning committee that would have put the celebration together.

/mui ⁿdau/

ᴄʟ ᴀᴅᴇꜱꜱ

Classifiers can also be used on their own as pronouns. That's why I don't really consider them affixes. In this case, /mui/ is a classifier that refers to places and locations, which when put in the adessive implies something like "near/around the place, local"

/ɡauⁿd͜zua lu ɡʷai du ɸa/

hope ᴄʟ 𝟣ꜱɢ ɢᴇɴ ᴀᴄᴄ

You get the idea on classifier constructions. A verb meaning "to hope, to desire, to look forward to" combines with a generic abstract classifier mean something like "hope/expectation". /ɡʷai du/ is a nonfamilial first person pronoun put in the genitive case to mean something like "my", all of which is put in the accusative.

/ⁿd͜ʑuːra/

exceed

This is just a verb that means "to exceed, to beat (as in a game)". Nothing too complicated here

Bad structural diagram for the sentence structure:

Some notes on this diagram:

NPs are just going to be Like That. Yeah I probably could have done them as DPs as in this instance the classifiers are arguably determiners but that analysis falls apart once adjective shenanigans start happening. I'm treating them like compound nouns and not fucking worrying about anything more detailed. Also I'm lazy and didn't want to DP-internal hypothesis this one. The classifiers are based on the classifier situation in Kuuk Thaayorre and iirc the analysis for NPs in that language are still up in the air

Arguably the verb moves up to T but tense marking just isn't really a thing in this language anyway so until I figure out how modals work for future descendants let's just say it moves (does functionally nothing in the surface realization).

I am a ling student, not a linguist. It is going to be shit and mildly unscientific.

Breakdown of the writing shown at the top:

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