does anyone speak Chinese?

[BeccaPrice]

The "magical" language I'm using is based on Mandarin Chinese. I'll looking for a way to say "Heal" as an imperative, or "grow" or "live" or words like that. It doesn't have to be perfect, and I'm not even going to try to imply tonality, but I want something a bit more than Google Translate can give me.

[ATDrake]

I freely admit that my Cantonese and Mandarin are both extremely rusty (and never all that good to begin with, TBH), and probably someone else can explain it a lot better, but I'm getting the impression that you may be expecting a 1-to-2-word imperative the way that English does it (i.e. Leave! or Wake up!), while Chinese instead tends to do these multi-word imperative sentences (for conversational use, at least), which often end with word-particles (啦 lā in Cantonese, 吧 ba in Mandarin), usually include an object or adverb along with the imperative verb (or use what amounts to a conceptually compound verb to express a single action), and sometimes include a pronoun as well.

So for a Mandarin-ish feel, perhaps make your commands multi-word and consistently end them with the same particle.

(Also, I highly recommend Mark Rosenfelder's The Language Construction Kit for useful tips on creating your invented language, and Wikipedia has a decent summary write-up on Mandarin grammar which may be of help to you.

Of course, if you really want to give it a consistent accurate basis, one of the best real-world concise explanations of Mandarin, IMHO, is the Routledge Grammar series' Chinese: An Essential Grammar volume by Yip Po-Ching & Don Rimmington (linkage to Amazon, where you can browse the Look Inside previews), which you may be able to obtain via your local library.)

Hope this helps.

[BeccaPrice]

actually, I want long, involved sentences - things like "I restore you to health" and "you have been healed" - or some approximation of those.

[crich70]

You might find it of use to post your question over at the NaNoWriMo website as well Becca. People from all over post questions to the reference forum there. Click

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

actually, I want long, involved sentences - things like "I restore you to health" and "you have been healed" - or some approximation of those.

Okay, in which case, you definitely want to use the pronouns and particles and extras (and technically, the examples of what you want are declarative indicative statements, not imperatives; sorry, amateur linguistics geek ).

The general patterns for an imperative sentence which expresses a command (approximate Cantonese examples, since I've got the reference textbooks* for it lying around and I'm marginally better at it than Mandarin and while there are differences, the grammars are close enough and I'm assuming you'll be using made-up magical word equivalents) go thusly:

(NB: I've hyphenated words that go together as one conceptual unit)

1. The general imperative order (e.g. equivalent to "heal! or you become well!"):

2ndPRONOUN + VERB-PHRASE + IMPERATIVE END-PARTICLE

Leih hou-faan la (you improve wellbeing [hou-faan, if I'm parsing it correctly is actually "good + VERBAL PARTICLE indicating situation change that is a return"])

You can make it fancier by adding in some adverbial expressions:

2sg + ADVERB + V-P + I-END-P

Leih faai-di hou-faan la (you faster improve wellbeing)

And even fancier by adding in a reinforcing coverb and use a longer phrase for getting well:

2sg + ADVERB + COVERB 1sg + V-P + I-END-P

Leih faai-di tuhng ngoh fui-fuhk gihn-hong la (you faster on my orders ["for me"] recover health eh!)

2. A 1st-person-oriented imperative (i.e. "let me heal you!") goes thusly and can be modified in the same ways as above (minus the variant with the coverb, IIRC, because it would be a form of redundant reduplication which would make no sense):

SUGGESTION-PARTICLE + 1sg + V-P + 2sg + I-END-P

Dang ngoh gan-jih leih la ("gan jih" means to heal by fixing the root cause of the illness)

3. A 3rd-person imperative (i.e. "let him get well soon!") goes thusly (I think you can use the coverb modification with this):

SUGGESTION-P + 3sg + V-P + I-END-P

Dang keuih hou-faan la

Incidentally, the standard set expression for "(Wish you) get well soon" in Cantonese is "Jūk léih jóu yaht hōngfuhk".

You may also want to have a look at Omniglot's "Get Well Soon!" multilingual phrase listing.

* The ones from Routledge by Virginia Yip & Stephen Matthews, which are excellent and recommended, by the way.

[BeccaPrice]

Thank you - that gives me exactly what I need!