#Austen's Aldish Abomnination

[forumkedis]

can July 29th also be "what is laerfhel and uvhao day?

Laerfhel is from Interior Emanations and appears to be a spread made of lard and garlic. I could have s w o r n that uvhao was an alternative name I came up for it for out in the boonies but I cannot, for the life of me, find anything on my thought process about it in my notes, which is pretty damned weird. I have a lot of those things sketched out in the drafting document for the Abomination, because, as I've sometimes mentioned, the original plan was to linger way, way longer on that holiday and really carve into the cultural differences between these rich city ghersit and even their best rural equivalents as well as the ones between the haves- and have-nots within Orafine itself, because I thought that was interesting, but most of it got axed.

Related pivot to several completely different topics under the cut.

For example, Anne is bilingual, just like the good and proper city ghersladies, but she would rather die than speak to them in it, because she's super, super uncomfortable doing so. She can understand it spoken somewhat slowly and/or pick out enough to get the gist spoken well, and she can read and write (we'll get back to that) in it, but it is a very, very second language to her. Artur is fluent, but he speaks with a heavy, heavy accent, and Aloysius is sort of somewhere in between - more than survival, less than conversational, probably gonna have to repeat himself sometimes for the accent and errors. Lettie has the strongest Continental in Orafine other than Brother Srebron at this point, just because she's the only one who uses it. Right behind her would be the other Srebrons, with Frederic Sr. at the lead and Harma and Fred jostling somewhere behind him*. But It's still Lettie's second language, and she has a strong pidgin tendency**, which is why when she went to meet with Lady Martin Miss Blaire reminded her to watch it - Tainish also has formality indicators, so it reminded Lettie to use the highest levels of formality, which at this point in her life simply includes the code-switch to textbook Tainish, much like an English speaker might switch to elocutionary recieved pronunciation if they were in certain high society settings.

Also, Anne can write! The Grises are one of the most upper-class families in Orafine, so they have more use than most in the town. The Srebrons get pretty much all of the travelers coming to see them, and ship hounds all over the country, so ditto. Anne is also extraordinarily intelligent and a good study - she's the model of the life Lettie can best hope for in Orafine. Most of the other women in town probably really can't, and those who can are going to mainly be the upper-class girls. Being able to write would also be a great way for, say, a three girls of uncertain-suspected-efghersit parentage and dishonourable matrilineage to end up in extremely respectable marriages***. The schoolhouse puts to good use ladies who can write, but having a personal in-home tutor for their children is a massive boon for any man whose family is reliant on the skill. And, to be frank, the village's gene pool could use a little more efghersit input - especially in those best-off families.****

Anyway, the food culture is super different in Orafine and central Durlyne city, but so are the actual culture-cultures, and I was largely going to play with that in relation to all the festivities, but then... stuff happened and I had to shift a major chunk of the actual plot that was needed for that section to later (though I do think it'll be more gratifying there anywayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy so fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine) so some of that has temporarily fizzled out to be picked up later in a different way. Lettie's also acclimated, largely, to Durlynian urban culture, because she's been at school for a couple years. While we sometimes get peeks into her earlier experiences with that, Anne still had her job of illustrating the dissonance more fully for us to see, even if the full arc has changed trajectory. But because all this info was cut, a lot of it still exists in drafting, so I can go look at it and be like, okay, this is something they refer to in Tainish while the Durlynians refer to it in Continental or are translating a known Continental name for it into Tainish or are like can you please be more goddamn specific (munakhiwellul which is literally just "fermented stuff" but can be contextually used to specifically refer to a local apertif), while this other thing has a name in Orafine that is specifically just its name (like simolaa, and I could have sworn this was the category uvhao fell into), or this has a name in Durlyne that is specifically just its name (laerfhel), or this doesn't have a special name, it's just called what it is, so it doesn't matter how that gets written (stuffed pig, sweet potato dumplings)

* Then Artur, then most of the other town businessmen, then Al, then Anne, then the schoolhouse ladies, then, like, everyone else in reverse age order

** So do the Durlynians, but in reverse. Lettie, when speaking Continental, is pretty comfortable tossing a Tainish word out if she needs to say something she doesn't have the Continental for and just moving on, because she comes from and is in a predominantly Tainish-speaking society. Everyone around her knows Tainish, and if she's speaking Continental in a group for one of the few who don't, someone will either fill in the non-speaker, they'll catch it from context, or someone will helpfully supply Lettie with the word at next opportunity. They may or may not judge her for doing it, but it simply isn't a notable impediment to communication. The Durlynian Silvers, though, use something more akin to a full Creole, blending Continental grammatical constructions into their Tainish, using Continental words as slang that is sometimes divorced from its native-speaker meaning and/or connotation, and Tairet-ifying Continental words to create new Tainish ones. The difference is like an English speaker in their language class forgetting the Korean word for being well-spoken and just throwing out "uhh... charismatic" before moving on (Lettie) whereas the other is an entire vocabulary of whatever the the K-pop sphere means when they say "charisma" because it definitely isn't "ability to speak engagingly". But, because they are an urban population, they're also going to be able to code switch depending on their audience to either include or freeze out outsiders - this even happens occasionally to Lettie, who usually reacts by thinking about something else or finding an opportune way to circumvent the issue, like shoving cake in her mouth. There's even an additional dynamic available to urban Silvers who aren't from a high-falutin' ~society~ rank, which has briefly come up before and will probably come up again in a less fraught but more direct way later - both times with David, because he isn't from that ghers.

*** Anne and her sisters are not of high-class parentage, but they were somewhat-ostensibly ghersit (no one was inclined to waste the resources to check with them all being girls anyway, particularly because the truth could, rumouredly, have instead turned out to be any number of perfectly upstanding non-efghersit men and their legally-assumed father wouldn't involve himself in the controversy and then promptly died), so they still got to go to school. Anne really, really lucked out with Artur; her sisters less so. Anne and Artur also largely married for love - Artur asked for her and was able to use a lot of her personal merits as rationales to argue his case, they weren't a made match - and Anne's incredibly affluent marriage and subsequent hardcore fulfillment of it largely secured her younger sisters' upward betrothals, too.

**** It's significant enough a problem that that's literally Artur's role as a ghers elder, and as a result, he's one of the most powerful men in the entire town now. That was what Frederic Srebron and his father and his father's father also did in their seats, and they were so influential because of it (and being the town's most notable market producer) that the only thing preventing Artur from unquestionably being in that same position is a semi-absentee elder who just shares their name.