The Man from Earth now translated into Sambahsa - Is Ghomen

Great news - the movie The Man From Earth has now been translated into Sambahsa thanks to a week or more of solid translating from Olivier. I've written often about how translating this movie would be perfect for an auxlang based on Indo-European, as 1) the main character would have spoken Proto-Indo-European when it was around and so it relates directly to the plot, and 2) the producer of the film has specifically thanked people for downloading and watching the movie, which makes it very easy to distribute with a clear conscience. Those who want to contribute can donate to the movie on its official site.

To get the subtitles yourself go to here on Scribd, and download it as a .txt file but save it as .srt if you plan to use it when watching the movie and not just to study.

So yesterday I took an hour and a half to watch the movie over again with the Sambahsa subtitles below, and it was a rare treat.

The largest reason for this is that Sambahsa has until recently not been very well documented - mostly in French, on a blog until some two years ago when it migrated to a wiki, and even now there is a grammar and some lessons but nothing that really seizes you and demands you take notice. A movie though is an entirely different matter, and watching the Sambahsa equivalents to everything the actors were saying really made the language come alive. There really is something about Sambahsa that grows on you the more you see and use it, and I'm thinking that a really comprehensive course could make the difference between Sambahsa now and a Sambahsa with at least a few dozen users.

One other good thing about having the movie translated: since the movie has been translated into a number of languages already, having it in Sambahsa makes it easy to mine the script for good quotes that would fit well into a phrasebook, and then just go through the script in another language to find the equivalents. Right now I'm working on this with the German script since German is a language where Sambahsa documentation hardly exists, and then we'll go from there.