Internets, do you speak french?

[highlyeccentric]

Because I have here a phrase which I cannot understand in either OF *or* modern French, and I don't think anyone else can either, because my English translations don't look much like the original.

Se je t'en oy parler jamais,
Ja n'i ara fors que t'en fuises.

First line is fine - "if I ever hear you speak of this...". Second line though, I'm stumped. I'm getting "then it will only *fors* that you *flee/had fled*"

The modern french translation I have of the second line is tu n'auras qu'à t'enfuir, which I do not understand either. I thought ne... que was an "only" construction? I don't know what to make of the à+infinitive construction (it's clearly not the same tense as the OF, but what on earth it IS i do not know, and my Coffman isn't telling me). "You will have to flee?" "You will only flee?"

The two English translations I have give variants on "you'll be sorry you didn't run away". Which sounds nice, but I'm not seeing the negation applied to fuises - it's applied to "i ara fors".

Any french-speakers care to explicate the modern french translation for me? If I can figure out what it says, I can probably sort out the OF.

Damn, I need an OF dictionary.

Comments

[frith]

Simonaque! What is that? Creole? Haitian French? It also looks like it was spelled out by ear? Well, I'll take a crack at it.

Ce (que) je t'en ai jamais parlé or Si je t'en ai jamais parlé

[That (which) I'd never spoken to you of] or [If I've never spoken of it to you]

Je n'y aura fort que tu en fuisses or Y'a n'y aura fort que tu en fuisses where "y'a" is slang for "il", as in 'it', not as in 'he'.

[I but strongly suggest that you flee from it] or [There is but strong reason that you flee from it] I think "fort" just provides emphasis, like in 'hot damn!' and 'powerfully shy'.

[highlyeccentric]

It's Old French - Se je t'en oy parler jamais translates as "if I ever hear you speak of this" - "jamais" has suffered from linguistic drift in the last 600 or so years, but in 1280-something it meant "ever" or "ever again". "Oy" means listen, hear - I've actually forgotten the modern French for the same thing, I see the Old so often. Anyway - "je" is the subect of "oy", and what I'm hearing is "t'en parle", you speaking of this, with Se... jamais meaning "if ever".


Je n'y aura fort que tu en fuisses or Y'a n'y aura fort que tu en fuisses where "y'a" is slang for "il", as in 'it', not as in 'he'.

[I but strongly suggest that you flee from it] or [There is but strong reason that you flee from it] I think "fort" just provides emphasis

Thank you! A couple of people over on LJ have pulled the modern french translation apart - apparently it means "you will only have to flee", ie, then fleeing will be your only option (rather than only then will you have to flee), but that renders... weird, and doesn't do anything with "fors" or "en". I like the translation pf "fors" as "fort", although I should check that - it could be a derivant of latin "fers", meaning to carry... could be acting as a modal verb of necessity.

[frith]

Sacré bleue! Wheels within wheels... even with a smattering of joual in my patois, il se peut fort bien that I'm way out of my league. There is someone at work who harks from the Lac Saint Jean area and whose accent and use of idiom makes him very hard to understand. Wading through this Old French is a lot like that.

For the sense of hearing, there is l'ouïe, but the verbs in modern French are entendre and écouter. An infection of the inner ear (de l'oreille) is an otite, both starting with "o". But ringing of the ears is an acouphène.

Have fun wrestling with this Old French. 8^)

By the way, in Firefox, the right column on the page (the one with the tags and calendar) overlaps the reply "field" or "dialogs box" and interferes with it.

[highlyeccentric]

So it does! I shall endeavor to fix that :).

Wading through this Old French is a lot like that. It's a challenge! I end up in bungles because my modern french is quite slipshod - but on the other hand I've been reading Middle English for years, and that seems to help.

il se peut fort bien that I'm way out of my league
You had a remarkably good stab at it! When I was first studying OF I took the Chanson de Roland to a french-speaking Belgian friend of mine, also a medievalist (and a Latinist at that!), and he couldn't make head nor tail of it. I gather, from being in an honours class with French majors, that Old French is weirdly hard for people who are *good* at French - I think several people in my class gave up entirely and relied on translations the whole way through. Being crummy at french gave me an advantage in general comprehension, but it's coming to bite me on the arse when it comes to translation.

Thanks again for joining in!

AHA.

[highlyeccentric]

I solved it!

Thanks for having a bash at it with me :) Helps to have other people willing to pull the sentence apart.

[mrlachatte.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking the second line is something like "you will only flee to yourself" ie. alone, nobody can help you.

[frith]

Nope, fleeing to yourself is recursive and would have to expressed with "tu", "te" or "toi" twice in the same sentence, namely: "you will only flee to yourself" would be Tu ne fuiras qu'à toi-même. The word en in the sentence clearly indicates the action opposes an outside entity and is not a self-directed action.

[highlyeccentric]

The word en in the sentence clearly indicates the action opposes an outside entity and is not a self-directed action.

I can't actually guarantee that it does, in Old French! A bunch of the pronouns and prepositions and adverbs shift around mysteriously, meaning nine hundred different things and sometimes just showing up for fun or emphasis or stress patterns.

[highlyeccentric]

Ahhh... yes. That's possible! *kicks it*