One of my favourite clips is this bit from the audio adaptation of Cold Fusion when we finally get to hear spoken gallifreyan. We don’t get given a translation, but I figured I’d give it a go to try and get some info out of it (though to be clear, I am not a linguist by any means).
In the original novel, this line is given as the following:
Ανδ Ι τυρνεδ αρουνδ ανδ τηεψ ωερε αλλ ωεαρινγ εψεπατχηεσ.
This doesn’t mean anything in greek, but is an english-greek alphabet transliteration of:
And I turned around and they were all wearing eyepatches.
This is a reference to the infamous “Eyepatch Story” that Nicholas Courtney often told at conventions about the filming of Inferno.
I quite like the idea of taking this reference as the literal meaning of the gallifreyan. Patience laughs at it in the audio, so it makes sense to me that the Doctor might be referencing some sort of joke or line from a story that she recognises (in fact, in the original novel Adric describes it as being ‘almost musical’ and sounding ‘like a nursary rhyme’.)
With this in mind, this is my attempt to break down a more direct translation:
Oola ta faroon e pifey mar ta metryon.
I [were] turned around and they all were eyepatched.
I basically got this by breaking down the words by spacing and emphasis in Five’s pronounciation (eg. Oola ta faroon… = And I turned around…) and working around the repeated “ta” sound.
“ta” seems to act as a past-tense modifier when used to prefix a verb.
Indeed, the verbs included are likely given in a present tense on their own, and only rendered into a past tense by the use of “ta”.
Verbs in Gallifreyan probably usually end with “on” (”metry-on”, “faro-on”)
Despite Patience being from ancient Gallifrey, the Doctor is almost certainly speaking in modern gallifreyan, as he doesn’t find out how old she is until later.
Evidence in the series and EU actually suggests that the language back then was approximately the same as that of modern Gallifrey. Despite appearing in his tomb, “Old High Gallifreyan” seems to actually predate Rassilon (who relied on its rarity to hide his foundry in Zagreus). In The Lost Magic, Twelve calls it the language of the Pythia, but a part of me wonders if it even predates them…
We should be careful with the direct translation of individual words. It is likely that translations are not only different when distinguishing between a linear past tense and a personal past tense, but pronouns may also be altered when it comes to speaking about people or incarnations (especially when you throw fluid gender into the mix).
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