Asian Language Help for a quick translation

Factual Questions
1

Greetings. In the book The Illuminatus! Trilogy the phrase Ewige Blumenkraft (I may have spelled that wrong) is oft repeated, though attributed to the Illuminati it originally came (AFAIK) from The Principia Discordia, or, How I Founf the Goddess and What I Did to her When I Found Her by some jokers in California.

At any rate, the translation of said phrase, I am assured, is “Eternal Blooming” or “It Blooms Forever.” I am simply wondering how to say this in some of the Asian languages, preferably Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese, but beggars can’t be choosers and I’d settle for some Korean or basically anything.

Obviously the symbols can’t be displayed here, but if the phonetic sounds (along with the rising/falling nature of them) could be reasonably typed out I would be much obliged.

2

yong yuan kai hua
is literal for eternal blooming. There may be a saying that fits better but I don’t know it.

3

My girlfriend’s response to this was “it doesn’t exist in Japanese.” Some folks just don’t have the creative spirit.

Eien ni saku literally means “eternally bloom”.

–sublight.

p.s. I think Astroboy14 might take exception with your description of Korean as something to “settle for”. :wink:

4

Like Astroboy should complain … Vietnamese didn’t make the list of settle fors. I don’t know if there is an “official poetic” way to say eternal bloom, but here’s something close to what China Guy said:

Luôn luôn có hoa

5

Thanks for the help here. “Settle for” was merely to imply that I would prefer these languages for reasons of my own, not that any language was actually better. I work with someone who is Chinese and one who is Japanese, that’s why those took the cake (not native chinese, however, so the language is sort of “incomplete”). However, all the Asian languages fascinate me so I’d “settle for,” as I mentioned, everything. :slight_smile:

Ok, onto pronounciations…
China Guy, is this equally applicable to multiple dialects?
Yong yuan kai hua → Yong (like tong) yuan (you on’) kai (like eye) hua (who’ ah)
Yeah?

Sublight, interesting girlfriend response. I had someone else ask someone who spoke Vietnamese who said exactly the same thing (come on, eternal and bloom are such uncommon words???). As for your phrase (which I assume is Japanese)
Eien (eye’ en) ni (knee) saku (sa’ koo)
Yeah?

Greg, so is that Vietnamese, then? And I am sorta lost on the “hoa” sound… ho’ ah? And is “luon” almost like one syllable?

Thanks again everyone!

6

erislover, Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!, I got some news for you. “Ewige Blumenkraft” does not mean ‘blooming forever’. It means ‘Flower Power Forever’. (Kraft is German for ‘power’; Blume means ‘flower’.)

This phrase started as just an in-joke with Robert Anton Wilson and his friends, apparently. Remember, the Illuminatus! trilogy was spawned out the craziness of the 1960s and it’s filled with countercultural references from that era. Does anybody remember the hippie mantra “Flower Power”? First there was “Black Power” and then what with the flower children going to San Francisco being sure to wear flowers in their hair, the urge to make a rhyming slogan was irresistible.

Also, Wilson being a great James Joyce fan, he sprinkled in allusions to Ulysses. The name of Joyce’s hero in Ulyesses was Bloom, a quasi-Yiddish translation of Virág, which means ‘flower’ in Hungarian.

In Latin, it would be semper floripotentia.

In Sanskrit, it would translate as nitya phûlashakti. There’s an Asian language for you.

7

you’re pronunciation is reasonably close. As for it working in other dialects, it’s really hard to say. It’s a direct translation versus a colloquialism, so most Chinese probably say the same thing. Chinese dialects are much more akin to the romance languages, for example like Tuscany Italian versus Basque Spanish would be something like Shanghaiese versus Cantonese.

8

Close. Eien is pronouced like the letters A-N. And yes, it’s Japanese.

–sublight.

9

“kekuasaan bunga selamanya”

– Beruang Biru Besar

10

All words in Vietnamese are one syllable, although sometimes that’s a bit of a stretch, e.g. “nguyen”. Hoa is pronounced like “hwah” (more or less). Luon is like “loon”, but with more of a French “u” thing going. Co is as spelled, but said with a rising voice, just like a question.

11

*Here’s another Asian language translation: in Tamil, it’s enraikkum pûvalimai.

12

*Beruang the Bear translated correctly the meaning of ‘Flower Power Forever’ in Malay.

You other Asian blokes translated the OP’s misunderstanding of the phrase. Yong yuan kai hua means ‘Forever open flower’. To say ‘Flower Power Forever’ in Chinese would be Hua Dongli Yong Yuan or something like that.

13

Bahasa Indonesia is based on Malay and thus there is a great deal of overlap. Let’s just say the phrase translates identically into both languages. Cool.

– Beruang

14

As you just showed, not all words in Vietnamese are composedof only one syllable. “Nguyen” is two, Sau vat (produce) is two, Lo ra (divulge) is two, Chung toi (we) & chung ta (we) are two, etc. (English translation in parentheses in the words preceding this; I also left out the diacriticals). When I studied Vietnamese at DLI back in 1983, that was one of the first myths the teacher dismissed.

15

So what is the translation for “Flower Power Forever” in the other Asian languages?

Beruang, Bahasa Indonesia is the Malay language. It’s one language with 2 names.

16

Well, I know a couple hundred million Indonesians who might disagree. And probably not a few Malaysians. But let me check my Bahasa Indonesia books when I get home.

– Beruang

17

Originally, there was just Bahasa Melayu. This language is native to the Riau Islands and a small area on the coast of Sumatra, but became widespread as a trade language all around the region. The rest of Indonesia spoke a number of different native languages.

Then Indonesia became independent and had to choose a national language. They chose the trade language that was understood widely all around the archipelago: Bahasa Melayu. They adopted it with some local expressions current in Java & Sumatra, and renamed it Bahasa Indonesia to foster nationalistic feelings. Meanwhile Malaysia became independent and chose the predominant language in Malaysia. Again, it was Bahasa Melayu, but now they renamed it Bahasa Malaysia to foster nationalistic feelings, and adopted it with some local expressions current in places like Selangor or Kelantan.

The original Bahasa Melayu had been written in the Arabic alphabet (tulisan Jawi). The main difference between B. Indonesia and B. Malaysia was the romanized spelling (ejaan Rumi) that was influenced by Dutch spelling in the one case and English in the other.

In 1972 the two governments got together and agreed on a unified reformed spelling, so now their versions of the language look the same. There is now less difference between the two than between British English and American English*. So what is the basis for saying they’re different languages? Are English and “American” two different languages?

They speak the same language in Brunei, you know, but saw no reason to rename it “Bahasa Brunei” so they just call it by its original name, Bahasa Melayu. Would you say that’s a third language?

[sub]*H. L. Mencken titled his work The American Language, a deliberately nationalistic gesture, but everyone takes it as just another way of saying “American English.”[/sub]

18

There have previous threads that have circled around this same point – what defines a “language”? Well, I am not a linguist, nor do I play one on TV. However, Dr. Liaw Yock Fang of Singapore (whom we might assume is reasonably objective in these matters) treats Indonesian and Malay as separate languages in his Speak Standard Indonesian: A Beginners Guide.

Educational Services Corp., in their Language/30 series on Bahasa Indonesia, calls it “a major language of the Malayo-Polynesian language family, and… closely related to Javanese and Tagalog… Indonesian is based on Malay…”

This site:

http://www.expat.or.id/info/bahasa.html

sponsored by the Australian Foreign Language Association, says, “Based on the Malay trade dialect, Bahasa Indonesia is the national language of the Republic of Indonesia.”

And finally my Sundanese girlfriend, born, raised, and lived on Java for more than 3 decades, and who, she assures me, is always right about all things (and she emphasizes, ALL things), says:

“Malayan and Indonesia language are similar, just like the German and Dutch. Yet we speak differently, we use the phrase differently and we are influenced also by our local languages (javanese, sundanese, …)”

On the other hand, the Nelles Guides volume on Indonesia supports the “same language” story, though puts the date of the split at 1928.

– Beruang

(who, despite owning all these books, STILL doesn’t speak the language)