Is this a Lakota sentence?

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 6 Sep 2005 jurga at ou.edu wrote:
> I just asked Mr. White Hat for help with this sentence, and his
> translation was:
>
> Younger  brother, we make things good around the world,
>
> or,
>
> Younger brother, we make the world better.

Orignal:

(correcting to yelo from yalo)

"Misun,    oglu    waste   maka   sitomni    yelo!"
[misuN'    oglu'   was^te' makxa' sito'mni   yelo']
 y-bro VOC fortune good    world  all around DECLm

Alfred Tueting comments:
> With all due respect for Mr. W-H's competence, this translation seems to
> be in need of linguistical elucidation, doesn't it?.

I was a little surprised at this comment at first reading.  I don't think
Mr. White Hat's linguistic (speech) competence has ever been faulted by
anyone I know, though some have grumbled about his linguistic (technical)
practice (in orthography, as I recall), if folks will forgive me using the
word linguistic in two different senses in one sentence.  I think,
however, that Alfred meant only that the rendition above needed
"linguistic elucidation," to explain how such a variant translation had
come about.

As far as elucidating the original, I think he and Bruce have essentially
already done that.  I'm still not clear if the sentence is idiomatic,
though idiomaticity must be a variable and moving target in a language as
widely distributed and lively as Lakota.  Maybe some places oglu was^te is
the usual expression for 'fortun(ate)'?

I suspect this alternative approach to rendering the sentence results from
trying to make sense of the unusual aspects of the original sentence
already noted, i.e., the unusual word for oglu for '(good) fortune' and
writing yelo as yalo under the influence of English spelling.  This last
glitch, in particular, adds a causative or verb of motion, if taken at
face value, and I think that leads to the causative in Mr. White Hat's
English rendition.  But, if it's a causative, what is causativized?  In
what person is the resulting construction to be construed and,
pragmatically, translated?  In essence, I think Mr. White Hat is trying to
be faithful "to the letter" of a fairly obscure text.

So, to adapt an old computer science maxim and raise it to the level of a
scientific principle, my explanation of the difference is "Garbled in,
garbled out."