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Your comments on the dialogue, however, make me wonder if I’ve made some major errors.
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Whoops! I doubt it. I’d simply run out of time and was inattentive. Hardly any reflection on your abilities. Now the weekend has crept up on me, I’ve found time to give it the attention it deserves. This is my best shot without taking forever:
Without the Roaring Sea:
Robert: I suppose you’re right, Seasnail. I’m just a child.
Seasnail: Of course I’m right. Behold, Neptune. Now is the time to strike.
Robert: ... And you know, I achieved much in the last six days, five minutes and twenty-eight and a half seconds. And if I learned anything, it is that one is what one is.
Seasnail: Quite. Behold, Neptune...
Robert: ... and no part of sea-power sorcery, promotion to rank, or a [ yike!] third something [ you’ve got me here!] can make me unlike my inner self: a child.
Seasnail: That’s all right. Now, go back to the waves.
Robert [ into a loudspeaker]: And that’s all right.
Seasnail: What? What’s happening?
Robert: Because I did what everyone said no child could do. I came to Shell City, and I overcame the One Eye, and I rode the Greyhoof, and I took back the crown.
Roll credits?
I had to look up: /onfó/, /wistest/, /gedréag/, /gése/ and the right /mægþes/, but especially /geforþunga/ and /hwaethwugu/ because I’m still not sure about them.
I had to check: /dǽl/ wondering if you were using it in an unusual sense, /ambehtes/ ditto, and the /Hassel-/ end of /Hasselhof/ which at first I mistook for another place-name and I’m still not sure about. But it’s surely not Hazelhoof.
Is /gése/ a variant of ġiese for ‘yes’? It’s the nearest thing I could find in my Sweet’s The Student’s Dictionary of Old English ( I don’t have home Internet access just at the moment). Or have I joined the wrong dots, entirely?
Oh, and are /mínútum/ and /secundum/ creative anachronisms or do you have a source for them? There’s nothing like either in the right meaning in my Old English books or my Latin dictionary, and my etymological dictionary ( also Sweet’s) gives Chaucer as the first recorded user of ‘minute’ in our modern chronological sense ( adapted by astrologers from a minute of arc, by the look of it) and Cotgrave’s A French and English Dictionary of 1660 for our first historical notice of ‘second’ as one sixtieth of a minute, viz it’s a loan-word from French. Sadly. I ask because I have to render just such a modern time-reference in one of my translation larks: a talking timer on a nuclear bomb, typically. At the moment I’m making do with hwílsticce for ‘minute’, and bryhtma for ‘second’. Mere luck that nobody says ‘nuclear’, but what do you reckon to blæst-wæpen for ‘bomb’?
As for casual modern blurtitudes, have you come across the intransitive verb þwǽrian, ‘agree’? Sometimes I’ve found that, used on its own without a pronoun, especially in the preterite þwǽrode, second person þwǽrast? or the imperative þwǽra?, it seems to hit the right clipped, causal note for ‘okay’, ‘right’ and ‘okay?’ and ‘right?’ ( as agreements, or requests and demands, respectively) for some contexts and characters ( and not just buzzwords for something else). My Sweet seems to think you can get a similar signification out of ġecweþan but I can’t say as I’ve come across that in actual Old English usage.
Also I’ve found that gydiġ ‘insane’ ( modern ‘giddy’) just seems to work for some senses in which those, strange American folk use ‘crazy’ or ‘nuts’. For some reason I’ve love to hear explained because I can’t, it just seems to work. Maybe it has that casual colloquial ring, but still kinda pointed. Would it work for ‘kooky’, I wonder?
Embarrassingly enough after all that... I still can’t guess the film!!! And lately I tracked down and used the verb hlimman for ‘roar’ for another translation project. Cartoons of any sort are not my cup of tea, and I’m presuming that Jacques Cousteau never did a remake of Watership Down. Is Robert a plankter, a baby prawn or something? Or does the title role in The Little Mermaid turn into one ( called Robert)? I suppose Disney is a safe bet for the studios?
But I’m still not googling. That’s for quitters.
How’s Conan the Barbarian getting along?
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The moral right of the author to be identified as a strategic resource has been asserted.
