Leeroy Jenkins! My (pitiful, maybe disastrous) attempts to create imperative sentences for use in my story!

[malolosgreencat]

So, uh, yeah.

I haven't even gone through the entire Volume 1 of Athenaze. I haven't memorized the rules and rely on the charts and what I transcribed (as in literally wrote by pencil into my note book straight from Athenaze vol.1. Have stopped for now at meanings of Middle Voice verbs. I'm now somewhat practiced at manually writing Attic Greek.)

And I got high grades in English mostly because I read a lot of English novels and stories and English language newspapers so I have a sense of how a sentence is supposed to be spoken like, and just remembered the basic grammatical terms, but makes mistakes at the...fancier levels of grammatical terms.

But I really need to somewhat move from just writing and reading to starting to practice, and I really need to start moving on my story. So...Leeroy Jenkins! Charge forward!

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Ok. So first sentence I need to translate is "May an oval shield as tall as me appear on my back!"

The verbs would be in the imperative, no? In the context of the story, it's not a wish but an order verbally given to a magical trinket so...I guess its imperative.

So, so far, I got the following words from Woodhouse (https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/Woodhouse/)

Oval Shield = Thureos (Noun, Nominative, Direct Object)

Tall = Hupselos (Adjective)

Myself = Emauton (Pronoun, Reflexive)

Appear = Phainesthai (Verb, Middle Voice? Indicative? Deponent Verb? 3rd person?)

My = Emos (Adjective)

Back = Huptios (Dictionary says substantive and adjective and "On one's back") or Noton.

I'm not going for a translation of "May" because I suspect I should be using the imperative of the verbs here. So...

Thureos is the Direct Object, I think. So...To thureos?

Now, the next are the adjectives that I'm gonna use on (To thureos?). Tall...I think high is the better word so...Hupselos. Which I think is already declined. And myself, which is Emauton. My plan is to go attributive position here, since that is what makes sense to me. So...

To Emauton Hupselos Thureos...maybe?

Now, moving on to the verb. Phainesthai...looks like a middle voice verb. I most assuredly am using it in a reflexive manner, so I do want a middle voice verb here. But in the charts from Athenaze, its look-alike are in 3rd person. I should need a 1st person here, no? Also, its look-alike is in infinitive, while I should need an imperative if I'm creating an imperative sentence. So...supposing that the imperative and indicative form 1st person are one and the same, and the stem is Phain...Phainomai? So the sentence up to now would be...

To Emauton Hupselos Thureos Phainomai, maybe?

And as to where...my back. But...hmm...I got 2 possible word to use in regards to back. Huptios already means "On one's back" but its placement in the dictionary entry, as one of the options coming after pl. which should mean plural, haunts me. Noton however, is singular. Hmm...Noton, maybe, I guess?

And as for my....the person being instructed to say the sentence is a female. So, use the feminine of Emos...Eme? So...Eme Noton?

So the whole sentence would be...To Emauton Hupselos Thureos Phainomai Eme Noton?

...can anyone please grammar check this? Please?

...egads. It took me an hour to do this sentence.

[bedwere]

There are many problems, but the main one is that you are not ready for this exercise. Why don't you start with something both easier and more useful like

Sidgwick’s First Greek Writer
First Greek Writer Key

Also, you may want to type in Polytonic Greek Unicode. I use TypeGreek, but your favorite word-processor supports some form of it.

[malolosgreencat]

There are many problems, but the main one is that you are not ready for this exercise. Why don't you start with something both easier and more useful like

Sidgwick’s First Greek Writer
First Greek Writer Key

Also, you may want to type in Polytonic Greek Unicode. I use TypeGreek, but your favorite word-processor supports some form of it.

Ok.

Uhm...did I get anything right? How did I get the other things wrong?

[seneca2008]

I think that this approach is simply not going to succeed.

First of all you can't look at an English sentence and then try to translate on a word by word basis into Greek that's not how it works. You need to think about the structure and grammar of the whole sentence.

Crucially your sentence is not an imperative sentence at all. May... you do x. is a wish and one would use the optative mood to express it. If you want an imperative you need to formulate it as one and not write a wish and say its an order.

As tall as me is a comparison and requires a particular construction.

The possessive agrees with the gender of the thing possessed not the person who possesses.

ὕπτιος "on ones back" has this meaning as in laying on one's back.

I think all this suggests that you are trying to run before you can walk. if you had spent your hour learning Greek it would have been more useful to you.

I dont mean to be discouraging but you need strong foundations before you can attempt what you want to do.

[jeidsath]

"May an oval shield as tall as me appear on my back!"

θυρεός is "oval shield" in the New Testament. Not a Homeric style shield, assuming that's fine for your purposes.

"As tall as me" could be expressed ἴσος ἐμοὶ τὸ ὕψος, or "equal to me in height." ἴσος is masculine nominative to agree with θυρεός, the thing being compared is the dative, ἐμοὶ, and the metric is an accusative, τὸ ὕψος. The reflexive is not needed because the shield is the subject of the sentence, not you.

I don't think that φαίνεσθαι works well for "appear out of nothing". I would say εὑρεθήτω, "may it be found", the third person imperative. I assume that it's some sort of command and not a "I wish there were a shield on my back statement"?

On my back ἐπὶ τοῦ νώτου μου

Putting it all together: εὑρεθήτω θυρεὸς ἐπὶ τοῦ νώτου μου ἵσος ἐμοὶ τὸ ὕψος!

[bedwere]

I'd use γενέσθω/γένοιτο (command/wish).

[jeidsath]

I felt that γενέσθω made me think more "have someone put it there". Not sufficiently a command to a genie/daemon, as I took the original to mean. What would you think of γενέσθω ἐξ οὐδενός?

EDIT:

It's γενηθήτω φῶς in the Septuagint, for whatever that's worth.

[malolosgreencat]

Ok.

Thanks for the translation everyone. I finally have something to write in that long awaiting section. Also...back to the textbooks.

*Sigh*

[jeidsath]

Using my translation? No, please don't. My Greek isn't good enough, for one thing. It was just meant to be a demonstration of one way you can think about translating out of English.