#Dialect weirdness

[halfbakedspuds]

I always forget that the other dialects of English don't do the same weirdness with the word 'now' that South African English does, and the amount of times I've had to go back and edit my writing just because of that is inordinate.

Here's an example of what I mean:

"I'll do it now," - I'm just finishing with something, I'll do it sometime in the next few minutes.

"I'll do it just now," - I'll do it sometime in the next half an hour to an hour.

"I'll do it now-now," - I'll do it in a few hours.

"I did it now-now," - I did it sometime in the last few hours

"I'll do it right now," - I'm dropping everything to do this immediately.

[elodieunderglass]

And one amang, an Iyrysch man,

Uppone his hoby swyftly ran…

WAIT HANG ON - slamming the brakes on drawing this stupid picture - do you nerds even KNOW the etymology of the word “hobby”? The thing you do for pleasure? The thing you have too many of? The thing you spend too much money on and share with your friends? The thing tumblr probably is to you? Those hobbies?

It comes from a now-kind-of-extinct breed of Irish pony-horse. It was called the Irish Hobby. Supposedly the hobby got its name from the Gaelic word obann, or swift. They definitely were. They’d obann your pants clean off.

Fast tough little bastards, built for rough terrain and renowned for their speed and stamina, hobby horses belonged to the Celts, and their highly annoying style of mounted warfare. but their conquerors liked hobby horses a lot, kept them, used them for themselves, and found them useful enough, despite the fact that they also had famously useful things like mounted knights or horse archers. A lightweight Irish warrior, mounted on a hobby horse, was called a hobelar.

Reportedly and in depictions, hobelars rode without stirrups. Or saddles. Or bridles. Or - well - this is all sounding very improbable, because the hobelars COULDNT have just been charging around basically bare-assed on naked ponies, screaming, and somehow in the process undoing the composure of actual mounted armoured knights. Knights who, I remind you, had stirrups. Stirrups are useful! It’s quite likely the hobelars had some gear. And clothes. and weapons. And the ponies probably had some tack - I am picturing a bellyband that you could at least hang a saddlebag on, and a neck rope for catching the bloody thing, even if not a saddle. But the overall impression, somehow created by people on darling little ponies, was apparently quite striking and fearful.

I mean. God Forbid People Have Hobbies.

Anyway after a while, whatever people became the British had eventually conquered all of the rough terrain that hobbies were best at, and horse archers just got sexier, and mounted knights became aristos, and all the bog and forest people had been subdued, so it was time to sunset the hobelars. but WAIT! Hobby horses are still tremendously fun and appealing! They’re so fast! and you can ride them without a saddle! Sure, they’re not up to the weight of a mounted knight, or indeed a lot of guys… but surely we can still find a use for a hobby or two? In the back garden? Somewhere?

At which point an English king decided to keep hobby horses just for fun. No military application. No further development of the technology. Not for fun. Just as expensive, pleasurable, pets. Just for the joy of the thing.

And that is how hobby (activity done purely for pleasure) comes from hobby horse (small horse) possibly from obann (swift.) they’re very interesting and you should look all this up for yourself! because it sure sounds like Elodie doing a bit, doesn’t it?

Today, Irish Hobbies are functionally nonexistent. References for drawing include the Kerry Bog Pony, the Connemara, and (I personally think) Dartmoors and Exmoors. They’re said to have lent their speed to the Irish Hunter/Sport Horse and from there to the Thoroughbred, but every damn horse in the world claims relation to the Thoroughbred, and they can’t be THAT thoroughly bred.

At any rate - you can never have enough hobbies. Just be glad that yours aren’t expensive beasts with minds of their own, eating their heads off in the pasture! …Unless they are. In which case, you’re part of a proud tradition.

[pseudophan]

sometimes, a lot more often than necessary i would say, dan and/or phil will say something and everyone will go ?? that's how british people pronounce that word ???? and you have to realise that a lot of the time the answer is no. they don't. dan and phil do, because there's many things wrong with them, but that doesn't always mean it's like.. normal

[theokusgallery]

Another MS Paint doodle page and there is a Lot going on there woops

Close-ups of some of my favorites:

We have:

- Green's sona with a KtS(aWtG) snake Janus;

- 2 Basil OMORIs;

- 2 DLB!Virgils;

- 2 KtS(aWtG) Virgils and 3 more of his "pet snake", once in god form;

- A DLB!Janus;

- A DLB!Remus (dog boy!);

- LC Virgil and Janus (happy pride to these two in particular);

- and finally, DLB!Patton! :D

Dead Level Best is an AU made in collaboration with @greenninjagal-blog; the KtS(aWtG)!AU belongs to her also!

[sunlight-shunlight]

putting it into an ask because I don't want to derail your post sorry

As someone who's culture lost their last L1 Speaker around the time they were born. This!! So much this!!

It is EXTREMELY difficult to learn endangered languages, and from experience the people who do know how to speak some of it are extremely protective of it even to others from that same culture! (something that makes me even more attached to the dalish as a peoples sigh)

I would die for the chance to speak my tribes original language but even if I could jump through the hoops to do it, a decade is decisively not. enough. time. to do so. Yet alone to adopt the native cadence of the language. Again even if I wanted too! Which I desperately desperately do!

Lavellan would have to jump through so many hoops that by the time she might be ready to start speaking it regularly (in the context of ancient elvhen) that Veilguard would probably be on the horizon already. That's also given the idea that there are even universities willing to put aside discriminatory behavior twords the elves to provide classes on such specific subjects. AND putting aside the whole 'wow that's straight up the herald of andraste in my Sociolinguistics class' with the problems that would cause.

I mean, I know its a fantasy universe and I'm really projecting on it here but like hear me out- I have a dictionary and a book of stories translated by scholars I will never meet, and a series of audio-files that I myself had to copy convert to a format I could have on my phone and listen to. I'm untrained and uneducated on how to go about it sure but even with my available tools it feels like an uphill battle with every new word I pick out to practice. I sing songs from that book fully knowing Im butchering it the whole time, and try my best to feel connected to something i know I cannot fully understand. And that's beautiful! That;s fantastic! There's something to truly love there! And veilguard doesn't even let us try to explore that idea!

The fact that we don't get to choose whether or not we drank from the well makes this so extremely frustrating. The game gives both the Inquisitor and Moriggan the benefits of the well without ever allowing our input. Because to me the only way that Lavellan could become even partially fluent in ancient elvhen would be if she drank from the well. But then Moriggan is also allowed all types of unlocked knowledge from her deus-ex-inner-mythal shes suddenly alright with having been provided from her mother despite her horror in DAI.

It takes away a huge part of what I think Solas really liked about a romanced Inky, as she was always so curious and open to learning new things about the past- Even when they would clash on certain subjects. It takes away this really lovely concept that even if they are going into the torment nexus together that he could at least be teaching her the language in there on top of it all. He would love her broken annunciations and he awkward cadence, and respond in kind ;w;

I'm super biased about the torment nexus ending because I love the mythological tragedy of it but there should have been so many more choices ugghh. While I would still choose this ending regardless I think the idea that the inquisitor should have been able to have at least an on screen spat between her and Solas, There is absolutely good reason for it all considering.

She should have had moments where she slips in and out of what she had learned from the ancient dialect, Where she goes from in canter to out because of how passionate she might be in that moment. Going from trade to elvhen and back. It would be glaringly obvious that she practiced what she did want to say to him in the final battle and he would be able to tell. It would mean so much more to him than her just magically understanding it all at once.

we could have one of his stupid chuckles with tears welling in his eyes and everything like damn you bioware *shaking fist at cloud*

At least give me some kind of 'a romanced inquisitor convened with spirits to learn' kind of explanation if you're going to magic it into her knowledge I mean please!

Anyway sorry for the ramble, I wouldn't have the confidence to share this if it wasn't for your posts so thanks for all of your lore-dives and analysis posts I do genuinely enjoy all of them.

♥🤝

yeah!! i very much agree. i'm very mildly bilingual (not good at it ahaha) and like... that language is not endangered in the least, half my family still speaks it, and it's still just hard to re-learn on a basic level! and to me there's always that degree of self consciousness and feeling a bit bad about not knowing, when it's a language i feel like i "should" know, as opposed to a fully second language that i'm just learning from scratch. and personally i get stressed and actively worse at it when people expect me to be fluent and get disappointed when i'm not. the social pressure alone removes some linguistic ability, haha.

so i found it sad that lavellan - regardless of the well - gets pushed into suddenly being 100% fluent. she can still be dalish and not good at it! or just not the type of person who'd think to speak in it in front of random people (everyone else standing there fdhjdgd). i thought of my inquisitor as a city elf who was adopted into the clan as a child, and tried REALLY hard to learn elvhen afterwards bc she wanted to fit in. but it's not "natural" to her to slip into it for longer or more complex ideas. and arguably if a lavellan got "woe, fluency be upon ye" from the well, they might actually be LESS likely to use it in speaking, bc it is also a bit of a mind control symptom at that point...

and imo it's actually really sweet that solas falls in love with someone who - at least in dai - is really different from him! on top of being a cringe fail mortal from the world he initially hated, and from a culture that doesn't like him, lavellan does not have to be very in tune with the language or culture as he knows it. he goes for their ~rare and marvelous spirit~ rather than anything else, and is happy to share with them, but it's never like a mandatory thing.

I mean, I know its a fantasy universe and I'm really projecting on it here but like hear me out- I have a dictionary and a book of stories translated by scholars I will never meet, and a series of audio-files that I myself had to copy convert to a format I could have on my phone and listen to. I'm untrained and uneducated on how to go about it sure but even with my available tools it feels like an uphill battle with every new word I pick out to practice. I sing songs from that book fully knowing Im butchering it the whole time, and try my best to feel connected to something i know I cannot fully understand. And that's beautiful! That;s fantastic! There's something to truly love there! And veilguard doesn't even let us try to explore that idea!

and this is exactly it!! i think that experience of slowly picking up things and figuring out how much you can learn is really important, and they just skipped over that entirely to "lavellan is now suddenly fluent in elvhen. yay!" which kind of elides how much work that is, how or why they would've done that, whether they would've wanted to...

like that's a whole character arc that seemingly just gets skipped offscreen and made mandatory! and it's not bc the writers are saying anything really deep and meaningful about cultural reconnection, but bc i think they were likely not ever in the position of having to think about those types of decisions themselves, and uncharitably, were like "ok. solas is super elfy, right. so to make it more romantic, make lavellan super elfy as well! yay! Problem Solved :)" when that was never a problem. ;-;

[ahfucknuggets567]

I was thinking about my little funny fan community for Transformers and I had the dumbest and hilarious thought

Imagine when the Decepticons crash and into earth. They have seekers and the triple changers. They can scout the entire planet to figure out where the fuck they are at. They barely know this place. An organic planet far off their own galaxy. They don't even know the language.

So Starscream dispatches his trine and the other available flyers to fly to all planet's corners. He stays to deal with the nemesis.

Through the use of internet, they learn more and download the most common language on the internet; English. Then the scouts come back, speaking wildly different languages. Skywarp's speaking Japanese and the only thing they know coming from Lugnut's russian is Megatron's name. The only con who knows English is ThunderCracker but he sounds like a hick it's driving Starscream insane. The other seekers and the triple changers do learn English not without the cause of the fact that with their first languages bleeding into English. Essentially, only Starscream doesn't have an accent in the midst of German Blitzwing, Greek Sunstream, and Italian Octane.

[sesamenom]

Various inhabitants of rivendell

(inspired by @thesummerestsolstice here and here)

[stars-irises]

I recently found the program I got from a Swedish production of The Play that Goes Wrong, which I saw when I was like ten, so here are a series of facts about the Cornley Drama Society written in the program:

Character facts:

Chris has played roles such as:

The cat in "Cat"

A brother in "Two sisters"

The second messengers friend in "Hamlet"

Jonathan is a hand model on an international level.

Robert's most challenging role in all of the Cornley drama society's productions was his role as "paralysed horse".

Sandra has quote on quote "worked in theatre since a very young age, since her mother played pregnant woman number 4 in an episode of a tv-show"

Max has seen the movie "Three suns" 27 times. I googled this movie and collectively the opinion on it seems to be that it's really bad and boring. Also he studies discreet mathematics and technical mystery.

I'm not mentioning any Dennis facts right now since they are either in the PPGW program or make him sound so much more professional (I love you Dennis, but your constant state of confusion is very relatable to me and I want it to be acknowledged)

Trevor has the second highest score in Sweden on Candy Crush.

Literally the whole of Annie's description is just complimenting her and saying that she's very talented and that she is behind a lot of the groups success.

Bonus fact:

They describe Murder at Haversham Manor as "a murder mystery so skillfully written that some in the ensemble still haven't figured out who the killer is."

[maerossi]

🥛🐄🥛

[kisforkerosene]

gave one of my friends an aneurysm today by using "y'all" and "innit" in the same sentence

[randomwriteronline]

I don't know how to call the AU:

All six of the Toa Hordika have started getting bad migraines. Mata Nui, wanting to help them find the source, reads their coding, magic, biology, and so on. He doesn't do more because he doesn't want to accidentally mess something up. But the contact does something. Or rather, activates something that was there before.

One of the consequences is that they're becoming able to use their mask powers as Toa Hordika. Not that they notice that at first. :D

This might have to do with my AU where being chosen by Mata Nui has side-effects on them.

first thing this idea conjured for me was mata nui waking up, looking around somewhat frantically for a while and then going (calm yet increasingly panicked) "i fucking lost vakama"

wonderful news! the animal grandparents have their powers again! horrible news! they are awful little bastard beasts with a penchant for new and exciting ways to fuck up the law even when theyre trying to abide to it and once they realize they have them back they will use these abilities for evil -> Advanced Cat Shenanigans

sometimes they dont even mean to, like the example above with vakama or when its a bit dark and whenua wants to help mata nui read something so he fucking flashbangs him on accident. matau and nuju def mainly use their mask powers for trouble and mayhem tho the absolute assholes. onewa is surprisingly well behaved with mind control (hes still protecting the pack and its very convenient to just blast FUCK OFF into the mind of whoever comes in and have them comply immediately) and nokama is just happy to Know Things All The Time Again. including swears. shes learning so many swears. she is stashing them away to unleash them when the time is right. she could cuss you and your next four generations into the grave with the most heavily constructed curse youve ever had the displeasure of being positively annihilated by. no one can stop her. no one can match her mastery of the art. shes too powerful

how DOES mata nui unlock that. hm. i have the idea that he is connected to takanuva via code (got too excited about the little guy being made to help him and accidentally left a bit of himself in the coding when he snuck off to see it) so maybe something similar, just dipping into the connection he has w the metru through having chosen them. hes deleting things that could bother them and doesnt notice he enabled mask powers on again. whoops.

stressed toa hagah voice WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHOOPS--

[m0th-t33th]

sometimes i think about adding scottishisms (???) to my. Typing Online. but then i get scared ill be bullied so i dont

[khomabrutalist]

so does anyone else spend like an unreasonable amount of time thinking about antivan as a language

[velkleyaenjoyer]

one of the things they don’t tell you about hrt when you start it (they do tell you a lot of things, shout out doctor charles you were very sweet) is that in place of the reduced libido (which they also do tell you about) you will instead yearn to an almost inconceivable degree. not even about anything or anyone just yearning like it’s your profession. the unstoppable emotional tide of want.

[childaintit]

Subaru only sent it to Otto and Garfiel

[handweavers]

it's fun explaining to other sikhs that my family has lived in malaysia since the 1870s so i think we missed a lot of the changes made to sikhi - including just the way sikhi is defined, understood, positioned, etc - by the singh sabha movement as well as changes to punjabi as a language and 'ethnicity' and similar things that have occurred since, if we understand that none of these things are static and rather elastic over time. i don't think we missed it entirely, my family has kept in contact with extended family in punjab and i know my grandparents spent a lot of time there and i know family who have taken pilgrimage to harmandir sahib but i've learned there are a lot of aspects of the way we do things that mainland sikhs find like... particularly antiquated or unrefined, including the dialect of punjabi spoken by my family which has been described to me as 'very rough and low class and old in a bad way' lmfao.