Tìngäzìk: a Retrospective – ep. 23 “Lì’fya leNa’vi”

Lì’fya leNa’vi #lena’vi #conlang

Expected solvable difficulty

• nohint+: experienced solvers
• keywords+: most solvers

Level design

The second question on Na’vi is to translate a sentence from Na’vi into English. Due to the nature of translation where multiple answers could be valid, the choice of sentences are thus limited to only famous and popular quotes.

With the fact that Na’vi being a synthetic language, it could be difficult to extract the base word from all the prefixes, suffixes and infixes, to look up in the dictionary. For example, the word yomtìng feed, can be derived as yomtäpìlmuyìng (formally) just have fed myself, which can be broken down as yomt‹äp›‹ìlm›‹uy›ìng literally meaning feed‹reflexive›‹close past perfect›‹ceremonial›. Despite it being difficult to search, there’s actually no need to dive into the language and learn all of it. Fortunately, Dict-navi.com is smart enough to extract out the base word and tell you the meanings of it and all the infixes as well.

Here is a detailed explanation of the sentences appeared in the questions.

Note: all these sentences are translated by me, and are not guaranteed to be fully correct.

R‹ìyev›ey	fu	t‹iyev›erkup.	Tì-pawm-it	tsa’u-l	lu.
Live‹subjunctive future›	or	die‹subjunctive future›.	(To noun-)ask(-patentive)	that(-agentive)	is.

Oe-l	fpìl,	tafral	oe-l	fkeytok.
I(-agentive)	think,	therefore	I(-agentive)	exist.

Tì-omum-ìri	tswal-ti	lu.
(To noun-)know(-topic)	power(-patentive)	is.

Oe-l	nga-ti	kam‹ei›e.
I(-agentive)	you(-patentive)	see‹amelioration›.

Expected thought process

Look up the words in the question in a Na’vi dictionary, and translate it into English.