satākken

sataakken

satākken

The first sentence of the 15th Conlang Relay Text:

sere majjārien mo ritākken cī;

ritākken is the 2nd person inflection of the possessed noun meaning “attention, notice, focus”. “Experience with your attention the dancers” would be a decent mostly literal translation. “Pay attention to the dancers” would be better English. The original first sentence was se jatākken mo majjārien cī; which had attention as a regular noun, so whose attention was ambiguous. Also, by having the dancers be the beneficiary, it adhered too closely to English syntax. In the sentence “Look at the dancers”, the dancers are obviously* the object of se: “Experience with your eyes the dancers”. It only makes sense to have the same structure for “Pay attention to the dancers”, despite the fact that English doesn’t do that. But then, that is one of the challenges of having four relationals instead of thousands of verbs.

*Obvious to me, anyway. 🙂