#Dutch and Latin not so much but also not so much for me either let's be honest

[linguenuvolose]

I love that I can use my full linguistic repertoire with my boyfriend, like we speak English to each other but he's learning Swedish and most of the time single words in Italian or French are close enough to Portuguese for him to understand so it's truly <33 a big win

[maniculum]

I would say German is actually slightly more helpful in reading Old English, because Middle English has of course gone through more changes since diverging from the common ancestor shared by English and German. However, Old English is substantially more difficult for the modern English speaker to read for... pretty much the same reason, i.e., there have been more changes between now and then. So even if you have the extra help, you still have longer to travel.

In either case, it is indeed helpful to know German, because a number of words that have changed meaning or faded out of use between Old English and Modern English are still present in German -- just because one language drops them doesn't mean there's any reason for related languages to do the same. The same is true of other Germanic languages -- from what I understand, it would really help with Old English if you were fluent in some form of Frisian, but I don't think that's widely spoken outside of a few specific regions.

Middle English is honestly possible for someone fluent in Modern English to read without serious training, but it takes a lot of puzzling things out in order to really get the hang of it. This is why it's possible to skip the textbooks and just throw a student in the deep end -- there's enough familiar terrain that they have something to build on. But because of the way the language changed between, e.g., Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales, German is less of a help... actually hang on a sec, let me expand on that.

So, for anyone who's not up on the history of the English language, here's the deal, simplified for brevity. Old English was the language spoken by the peoples who invaded Britain in the 5th century; it was one of multiple West Germanic languages spoken on the European continent at that time, which also included the ancestors of modern-day German, Dutch, etc. Old English changed a bit over the next several centuries, as languages do, but maintained a lot of similarities with the rest of its language family. In 1066, Britain was invaded by the Normans, who spoke... let's just call it a dialect of Old French, so we don't have to get into the details. This is the end of the Old English period and the beginning of the Middle English period, because the massive societal changes that come from being conquered also influenced the language. Now the ruling class spoke French (and Latin, but that’s not new); English, pushed out of its previous social position, starts developing differently. Over this period, English loses a lot of the features it shared with other Germanic languages (this is when the conjugation and declension system gets radically simplified), and conversely gains a lot of influence from French (including a huge influx of loanwords).

When you're reading Middle English, there are a few different things you have to watch out for.

Word/usage that we don't have anymore just 'cause (this is where German is helpful).

Word that we don't have anymore because it describes something that is no longer in common use (e.g. Chaucer says the Wife of Bath wears a hat that's as broad as a targe -- how many people in the 21st century are going to recognize that as a type of light shield? It's just not part of common knowledge.)

Word that we still have, but spelled in a really bizarre way, sorry.

Word we still have, but with a different usage.

Word that's been taken directly from French.

I'd actually bet that knowing French would be more helpful in reading Middle English -- there are a bunch of French-derived words that didn't stick around to the modern day, or spellings that have significant French influence. I would expect they outnumber the material one can recognize through German. However, I don't have data to back that up, it's just a vibe.

But you don't actually need to know either; if you're good with English, you're probably sufficiently well-equipped that you can go start your Middle English journey ✨right now✨! [teacher jazz hands]

Do you have any books or sources for learning Olde English? I want to write a medieval-based story but I don't know how to write the characters speak the language.

That depends -- when you say "Olde English" do you mean Old English, like pre-1066 English? That's pretty far from modern English and it's unlikely that readers will be able to understand it easily. If that's what you're looking for, the texts I was taught with are:

Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader

Quirk's Old English Grammar

Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader

They're all from a while back -- and, as you can see, some use the now-deprecated term "Anglo-Saxon" -- so you can find older editions free in the public domain. More recent revised editions can generally be found in cheap paperback form. I believe there are some more modern textbooks that are quite good, but I haven't looked at them, and I don't know how affordable they are.

I have also consulted with Zoe (@meanderingmedievalist) on this, and she recommends Baker's Introduction to Old English, as well as the related resource Old English Aerobics:

The reason there are textbooks for this, though, is because you genuinely have to treat it as a foreign language. It's very different from modern English. As a sample, here's the beginning of Beowulf:

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon hu ða æþelingas      ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing      sceaþena þreatum monegum maegþum      meodosetla ofteah egsode eorle syððan aerest wearð feasceaft funden he þæs frofre gebad weox under wolcnum weorðmyndum þah oð þæt him aeghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade      hyran scolde, gomban gyldan      þæt wæs god cyning.

So if you put a lot of it into a story for a modern audience, most of them will be a bit lost.

If when you say "Olde English" you mean "English that sounds archaic and medieval, but is comprehensible to a modern audience", you're probably looking for Middle English.

I don't have any direct references for learning the language there, as I was mostly taught through immersion (i.e., here's a Middle English text, read and translate it, now do another until you get a feel for it), but Zoe recommends Fulk's Introduction to Middle English, so that's a good bet if you don't want to go through that process.

However, I do think the "just read the texts" method also works fine -- especially since, if you're writing a medieval story, you'll want to read some of the literature anyway for inspiration. Here's what you can do to use that method outside of a classroom setting:

Step One: Get a Middle English text with a facing-page translation. Armitage's edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is good for this. Read the Middle English text, referring to the Modern English translation on the facing page whenever you don't understand it. Do this with a pencil in hand, so you can annotate the text with definitions, translations, and notes about how the sentences work.

Step Two: Get a Middle English text for which modern translations exist. Don't get the modern translation. The Canterbury Tales works for this: it's a classic and you should be able to pick up a copy anywhere. The version on my shelves is Baugh's Chaucer's Major Poetry -- which is heavily footnoted with definitions, potentially saving some time with the dictionary -- but it doesn't really matter as long as it's in the original. Read it. Every time you don't know a word, look it up in the Middle English Dictionary (available free online, in searchable form, here) and write it down. Again, best to annotate directly on the page with a pencil. Trust me, it helps to do it that way. Once you're done, get a modern translation and check your work.

At this point, you'll probably have picked up enough of the language that you should be able to write in it to some degree, though you'll want to continue making reference to the Middle English Dictionary to make sure you're employing period-appropriate usage and spelling. If you have access to the Oxford English Dictionary (if you're at a university, you almost certainly do, otherwise check with your local library), use that to check when the words you're using originated -- the OED has that listed, and that'll keep you from accidentally dropping an 18th-century term into medieval dialogue. You can also use their Historical Thesaurus to find period-appropriate equivalents for terminology.

Optional Step Three: Keep reading more Middle English literature with the dictionary open, annotating as you go, to get additional practice. If you can get through Le Morte Darthur in the original (get the P.J.C. Field edition), I think you'll be set in terms of "writing convincing medieval prose". Not because it's particularly difficult -- it's late medieval, so the language is actually more modern than either of the texts mentioned in steps one and two -- but just because it's long, so you'll get a lot of practice working through it. As a bonus, reading Malory will familiarize you with lots of good knightly vocabulary in case that's the kind of story you want to write.

Optional Step Four: Read scholarly articles on Middle English language and literature to get a more in-depth understanding. Again, check with your local library, or if you're at a university, a university library will have a vast amount of resources on this subject you can browse through.

[seasideretreat]

Vernunft

What is the meaning of life? Elevation, said dad. Or at least, that was how he summarized the better things in life. It reminds me, in his diction, of a statement by the illustrious Homi Bhabha, one of the founding figures of postcolonial theory, infamous for his shitty prose: when asked what the point of the humanities was, he answered sartorially: "Interpretation". These are supposedly great minds, luminous stars of the thymocracy. Philosophy is the enterprise where we must seek the meaning of life. Philosophy is religion. But it is not simple. Religion is wrong, in many ways, whereas philosophy is difficult, or challenging. If only we could speak German, or Latin. I wonder sometimes if German is a classical language. Probably not, because so many proles speak it. And what about Dutch? It seems Dutch is just a dialect of German, but if so it is probably akin to Mandarin and Cantonese. For all that, though, Dutch is less beautiful than German, in the sense that it can't communicate our sensibilities. Sense and sensibility. In that title, I find truly the magnificence of English, but also, I am reminded of the terrific poverty of an English world. Perhaps English will die out. It's better than French, and yet French is so much more rich, in some ways, than English. But English is evocative, Lord. It's arcane. Genteel. Lordly. Mystical. Magical. Oh, but if we speak good Dutch, isn't Dutch a great language? It is a very wordy language, special in that it can state things very precisely and hilariously. Hilariously in the sense of being full of fun. So here are three words: ingenuity, vernuft en Vernunft. English, Dutch and German. The last word is poetic, elevating. The second word is precise, clear. The first word is honest. English can be honest. Maybe it is harder to lie in English, harder to bullshit people, but we all know that Latinity can really obscure one's true meaning in English, Latinity or Frenchness, either one works, I think.

Linguistics is depressing, I presume. Literary theory is aggrevating. I studied History, I also studied Area Studies. I suppose we need a set of prejudices to really write, but we also need liberty. If we can let our stream of consciousness flow, things are good. We ought to think for ourselves. Still, there is a social component to theory. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar; sometimes, we have got to say something. That's liberty, also. They talk about this in psychology, deeming true psychology to be peaceful communication. Communication is a very important word. Theory can be a pastime. Psychology can be small talk. Fuck me, the whole idea of writing is faith. Writing is the essence of religion, you only need to consider the sutras, bibles and qurans of the world to see this. The area of faith is an arena where we can find true musicality. Philosophy ought to be music, in the sense that it should be totally abstract, but there is also the aspect of theology, or history. A philosopher should not be a raconteur. Nonetheless, raconteurship is fun, elevating, recreating. It is a hobby. I don't know. I once thought I was a Deleuzian. Today, I still find myself hacking into deleuzianism, becoming decentrered in the creation of concepts, like a philosopher; but that ain't the whole story, there is much to be thought; consistency, systematicity and ideation. But ideation is, in a lot of ways, the essence of deleuzianism; whereas wisdom, sagacity, is the essence of laconicism, or pithiness. Writing in slogans, that was a deleuzian idea. So by history we can mean the self. Does that make you a philosopher? A often said, every man is his own philosopher, but I no longer uphold those words - I doubt them. Doubt, and certainty, are categories. In philosophy, we often encountered the whole release of the mind into wild speculation, or unhistorical thought, but that was never the point. The point was to be like Marx, to write "the point is" and then provide some kind of world-shocking truth, but words fall short. Again, writing is faith. Is writing a faith? In the work of Derrida, you might recognize it as such, but who is Derrida? Who is Deleuze? Who is Winston Churchhill? To ask that final sentence, is almost to insult the legacy of that heroic man, but maybe he was just an asshole. But still, a liberator-asshole. Writing is faith, not a faith, but how can we be sure? How can we not-doubt it? I don't know?

I actually mistyped something. I said I used to say every man is his own philosopher, but I actually said every man is his own historian. Every man is his own self. Every man collapses on himself and becomes schizophrenic. Autistic. Depressed. Who was Leonard Cohen? Can you be a philosopher and a poet? What's wrong with Bob Dylan? Was Leonard Cohen crazy? Is Bob Dylan boring? They were all just men at work. Some people say that history is a craft. Nobody says that about philosophy. My dad said the point of life is elevation. I say it is edification. I don't fucking mean that, or maybe I do. Maybe I fucking do. But then I am still reiterating, obscurely, my father's words, and there is nothing wrong with that, because he was a smart man, probably. And these are all very pragmatic statements, from a philosophical point of view. So in the end, perhaps that is something we must learn to do, to be pragmatic in philosophy. Still, philosophically, that doesn't make much sense. What about using one's mind? Fucking hell.

I want this post to be fun, but I don't find philosophy fun enough, maybe - I always just worked it, didn't enjoy it or play it. I didn't get off on it, or whatever. I wasn't into it. I can't be pragmatic, whilst doing it, and I can't stop thinking. For it to be work, you have to be pragmatic; which is a weird thing to say. But it might be true, just like so many of Socrates' statements. Why are we pragmatic? To stop thinking. Why do we stop thinking in writing? It is a faith. So "I write" is indeed enough. That's my laconic phrase for today.

[oblongblockofsteel]

O'Driscoll Boy 2/5

The O'Driscolls used him, pushed him down to his knees and Kieran will do anything to never go through that again. He treads carefully around the Van Der Linde's, no matter how much he wants to belong, he won't let anyone use him like that again. They're all a bunch of bastards, anyway.

Or so he thought.

The morning brings with it a piercing hunger. Their new guest had hovered around the campfire for most of the night and Kieran hadn’t felt safe enough to walk by and get some food. Dutch and Bill had been there too, laughing and being boisterous and more than a little drunk. He just hadn't had the energy to stand their drunken jabs. Dutch can get particularly nasty when the drink settled on his tongue.

But now he's hungry.

Standing up from the dry bed of leaves he stretches - popping bone and muscle - and quietly creeps his way to the long dead campfire. The camp is silent, the pink morning light still too soft to even be called light at this point. The air is cool and crisp, the grass crunching beneath his sodden boots. He really needs new shoes, he can't remember when his feet hadn't been wet at this point. 

Bill, passed out under a tree, is snoring loud enough to shake the ground. Kieran hesitates a moment to make sure the man is asleep before carefully picking his way over to the cold pot.

Karen is slumped against a water barrel, the Reverend sprawled out by her feet muttering something in Latin. He sounds distressed, like he's battling something in his sleep. No person in this camp has more demons chasing him than the Reverend. Kieran isn't sure if that's appropriate for a man of God, but he can't judge. Weaving his way around their legs and arms, he finally reaches the pot, behind which Pearson is also passed out and snoring. 

Kieran grabs a dirty plate and a somewhat clean spoon.

There isn't much left, and it's become bone dry under the heat from the fire. A moth has managed to land in it. His empty stomach doesn't care, and he quickly scrapes up the little bit there is still left over. Shoveling it in his mouth, he churns the sticky food around his teeth, swallows quick, drops the plate and spoon and scurries back to the horses. Everyone is still asleep, and Kieran sighs with relief that he's managed to slink in and out without -

He stops dead five feet away from the horses.

Just off to the side stands a rustic appaloosa. The little stallion is filthy, its legs covered in dirt and the saddle needs a good cleaning, apart from that the horse looks dead tired. The eyes shut, left leg bent, it’s clearly sound asleep. The brown spots are a pretty contrast against the light cream of its body. 

Kieran stares, “Where the hell did you come from?”

A sharp laugh pulls him out of his stupor.

“Well, well, well,” Uncle says, swaying a little closer. Kieran is vaguely surprised to see the man awake at this hour, or even coherent for that matter.

“Little Gwydion is back.”

“Gwydion?”

Uncle gestures to the stallion, who doesn't even look up at his name. “Trelawny’s horse, the animals always seems ta find his way back to the man.” He chuckles taking a wild swig from the bottle that always seems to be glued between his fingers, “I suppose there’s a bit a magic in ‘im too!”

Kieran has no idea what the man is talking about, he watches as the old man stumbles and sways his way to the other side of camp. Laughing at his own joke which Kieran only caught the tail-end of. He turns back to the stallion. Gwydion needs a grooming, and that's what Kieran does best.

And, if he's honest, where he finds his worth. At least he's good for something.

Coming up from the side, he makes sure to make enough noise for the horse to at least open its eyes a little.

“Hey,” Kieran whispers, low and soft, “You okay with me groomin’ ya, Gwydion?”

Gwydion turns his head a little, eyeing him for a while, then cracks his jaw open in a wide yawn before tossing his head and closing his eyes again. Kieran takes it as a yes and grabs his grooming kit. Either way, if he gets kicked, at least he'll learn quick how to take care of the animal.

He removes the saddle first – it’s so fine and expensive! The leather is soft and intricate and so beautiful. Kieran pauses to run a rough hand over the needlework. He can make out strange symbols and wonders what they could mean. Maybe he can ask the owner. He snorts a little and props the saddle on a makeshift fence. If the man is anything like the men he chose to ride with, Kieran will rather never meet him than even ask him a question. Probably just get teased again, or even worse...

He shudders, shakes his head and grabs the reins to hitch. Gwydion does not have a bit. This surprises Kieran a little, he has heard of people riding without bits, with halters, even without anything like the American Indians on the plains do. Guiding their horses with legs and voices. It must be wonderful. But he wonders how a many can have such a fine saddle and then turn around and buy such a cheap bridle. The rope is frayed, overused and soft. Kieran doubts it could even withstand a single pull from the animal. The reins, though, are fine and soft, a smooth supple leather that's easy on the hands - gloves or no.

He cleans the horse thoroughly, washing the dirt off its coat, using a scraper the remove the water. He untangles the main and rubs the horse down with nice firm strokes to loosen the muscles a little. He'd half expected a dappled Hungarian or even a pitch-black Thoroughbred, one of them fine horses for fine gents. This little appaloosa is almost a contradiction to its owner.

Much like the fine saddle and shaggy bridle.

Must be a strange man.

Kieran grabs his hoof pick and pulls up the leg.

Or tries to.

“Come on!” he pulls again, but Gwydion stands unmoving, droopy eyes barely lifting to acknowledge Kieran. With a sigh he presses thumb and finger into that nerve he knows and clicks his tongue again.

He receives a snort in response.

Kieran straightens with a huff, “Now how do you want me to finish cleaning ya if a I can’t check your feet?”

 “You have to ask nicely.”

Kieran jumps and swings around wildly, his heart high in his throat, hand tight around the pick. Trelawny is leaning heavily on the hitching post smiling at him and holding a smoldering cigarette between limp fingers. Up close he looks even worse, his face is a little swollen on the side, bruises now darker and fiercer in the cool morning light. But even in that state, the man has a sort of sophistication about him. Kieran halfway expects him to have a silver cigar case and a golden watch. 

“Um… what?” very eloquent Kieran, he thinks with a sharp wince. He turns away slightly, waiting for the teasing or reprimand or insult.

But Trelawny smiles, his bruised face spread out into a painful grimace, “Gwydion prefers politeness to brute force, so, you have to ask him to lift his leg, dear boy.”

Dear boy? What an odd man. Kieran glares at him, watching as he takes a long drag from his cigarette. His hands curl up even tighter, his empty palm cut up by broken nails. Since coming here he’s been bullied and humiliated from day one. Why in the world should he trust a word this man says? Most likely just another gag they're playing on him. He glances around, wondering where the others are hiding. Trelawny is still watching him.

Kieran glances at Gwydion, the little stallion has perked his ears and is looking straight at his rider. The dull sleepy expression is not completely eradicated, leaving only a spark of eager happiness. At least the horse seems to like him, if nothing else, one can judge a man by his horse. Then again, animals can be stupid sometimes.

Like you, he thinks.

Kieran takes a deep breath. If it is to make fun of him, better get it out of the way now. So, with a jaw as tight as he can grit it, he bends over places a hand on the leg again asks in a soft voice, “Can you lift this for me, boy?”

And the leg goes up with a light click at the knee. Kieran smiles brightly, the relief of not being teased washed away by the joy of finally getting somewhere. He quickly scrapes the hoof clean - shimmering expensive horseshoes staring back at him - barely needing to hold it up with how nicely the stallion keeps it in position. When he’s done, the horse drops the hoof back down with a soft thud. Kieran straightens and pats him on the neck with a bright smile.

“Thank you, Gwydion!” he laughs, “Good boy!”

Gwydion briefly pricks his ears to him before turning back to Trelawny, stretching his nose out for a scratch; the man is still watching Kieran with a rather peculiar expression. His green eyes shining slightly, they’re almost piercing.

“What’s your name, lad?”

“Kieran,” he replies, “And it’s Kieran Duffy! I aint no O’Driscal!”

“My word!” Trelawny laughs and pulls a small peppermint out of his pocket, “I never said you were!”

Kieran blinks, watching, a little transfixed as the man offers his horse a peppermint. Gwydion crunches it up quickly and sniffs at his hands for a possible second.

“Oh,” Kieran finally settles for. He waits a beat, wondering when the other shoe is gonna drop. He glances around again, but he can't see anyone in the trees.

“Don’t take them too seriously,” Trelawny says, with a soft pat to the spotted neck. “They are a teasing bunch, but they don’t mean any ill.”

“Easy fer you to say!” he says and reaches down for the hind leg, asking again for the horse to bring up the hoof. The leg bends and he continues: “You been here a long time! And with how they greeted ya, I guess they respect ya, at least.”

The laugh bursts out from nowhere, and Kieran drops the hoof to look at the man. Now the grimace is gone, only a fine hearty smile and laugh to be found.

“Respect? Isn’t that a thought!” he takes a long drag from his cigarette and snuffs it out against the hitch “Snake, cockroach, worm, ferret, turn-coat, coward, a well-oiled eel, are all the lovely nicknames they call me when they think I can’t hear them.” He smiles, and pulls out a silver cigar case, shimmering in the rising sun. “Or when they think they have a right to say it to my face.”

“Yeah?” Kieran blinks a little, feeling a sense of something welling up in his chest.

Trelawny smiles again, and Kieran finds he quite likes that smile. It feels honest in its joviality, almost sincere. Morgan sometimes looks like that.

“Yes, to be honest, apart from Hosea, Dutch and maybe Arthur this camp does not care much for me, I believe.” he holds out the cigarette case, but Kieran quickly shakes his head. 

“Then why do you stay?”

Trelawny shrugs, lighting a new cigarette, with a burst of fire that Kieran isn't quite sure where it came from. He can't see a match in the man's hand. His heart jumps hard in his chest, a thrill shooting down his spine. “They accept me for who I am,” he chuckles, slow and deep. “Warts and all. And what else do we want in life, other than belonging?”

The words strike too hard. It’s like a whipping to the heart, a cannonball to the gut. His swallows and turns back to Gwydion, placing a soft hand on the shining rump.

“Yeah,” his voice scrapes raw, weak and wobbly. “What else do we want?”

The silence cuts into the very morning, suffocating the song of birds and gentle sounds of a camp waking up. Kieran keeps his eyes down; he feels a well of emotion so intense it threatens to drown him. Belonging, isn't that a damned thought?

“Mr Duffy –“

“Trelawny!”

They both look up to see Bill Williamson walking over, Kieran ducks his head and quickly shuffles around to put Gwydion between him and the brute.

Bill is snarling, storming over with a fierce intent, his chest puffing and eyes burning above his beard.

“You better run, boy!” he yells, pausing a brief moment to glare at Kieran before turning to Trelawny. His expression softens, but a wariness remains that Kieran knows has got nothing to do with him. “Dutch is looking for ya.”

“Ah!” Trelawny says, voice bright and warm. He flicks his cigarette, spills the ash to the ground, takes a final drag and snuffs it out again. “Then I shall go to him, directly.” He leans off the post with a wince and pats Gwydion lightly on the nose. “Please take good care of him.”

Kieran nods, “Will do, Mr… um, Trelawny?” he pauses suddenly uncertain.

“Oh, where are my manners?” he sticks out a hand, “Josiah Trelawny, my good fellow!”

“Kieran Duffy,” he grips the hand, its's as warm as his voice, “Pleased ta meet ya.”

“Likewise,” and he lets go, taking the warmth with him.

With a final nod, Trelawny walks stiffly over to Williamson and they both start off to Dutch's tent.

“Ya talking to the O'Driscol Boy?” Bill immediately asks when they are together. Keiran frowns, his hand tightens around the hoof pick, but he bites back the retort. No need to bring Bill’s anger down on him.

“I believe his name is Duffy, Mr Williamson.” He hears Trelawny say just as they move out of earshot.

Kieran smiles.

[ravenlesslangblr]

So I did all of the Duolingo placement tests

Related to this post I saw a few requests to post the results of all my placement tests, so let's go! Long post and a lot of rambling ahead! So my friend and I did the tests chronologically (leaving the High Valyrian and Klingon out until the end in case we got too tired), but I'm going to group them up here in an order that makes sense.

Each of the numbers means the number of skills I've tested out of/the number of 'crowns' I got in each language. Since I got to complete the placement test 37 times in total, I could actually find out how it works. It is pretty hard to try and cheat your way through it with a language you don't know, because if the test picks up on a fact that you messed up a 'beginner sentence', it immediately sends you back to the basics. Due to this, some results were a tiny bit upsetting, but later on, I realised that this is just how the test works and is not necessarily reflective on one's language skills. Another thing that is super important - the test reflects your knowledge of the Duolingo course rather than your actual language knowledge. I could actually prove this 'theory' to myself later on with some results.

My 'main' languages aka the languages I did well on and I kind of expected to:

Irish 48 French 42 German 51 Honestly, I was a bit more open not to do so well on French since it's become quite rusty and I'm experiencing some kind of a mental block with it, but I still did quite well! As for German and Irish - I would have been so upset had I gotten a single mistake. And it has not happened in either case.

My native language: Czech 31 This one honestly made me lol, because I have made 2+ mistakes and the Duolingo course is just strange. It called me out on my use of nějaký and některý where I was like 'There's a difference? o.O' and at one point it used the verb 'left' for 'forgot', which I did figure out correctly, but it was yet another sign that the course/placement test isn't very accurate yet when it comes to Czech. Languages I did well on because they are similar to a language that i already speak: Spanish 12 Italian 14 (well, I briefly studied Italian, so some credit there as well) Portuguese 3 (surprising since I mostly guessed) Polish 24 Ukrainian 17 Yiddish 5 (I LOVED the Yiddish placement test! I will definitely try the Duolingo course)

Other languages I have done before: Welsh 3 Esperanto 9 I was quite disappointed in both of these (Welsh broke my heart!) but I think this is just a testament that the placement tests aren't reflective of your language knowledge, but of your Duolingo topics knowledge. I haven't done much of Welsh or Esperanto on Duolingo since I studied them at university. I'm not fluent in either, so it really boils down to what I was taught. More proof are the next languages Dutch 22 Scottish Gaelic 20 These are the two lanuages I have studied almost exclusively on Duolingo only. I also definitely have a better knowledge of Welsh and Esperanto than Gaelic and Dutch. But the tests went much much better for these, because I already knew the topics that Duolingo was going to ask me. And now for the Nordic languages: Swedish 18 Norwegian 16 Danish 7

Honestly, I think it's hilarious that I did better at Swedish than Norwegian, when the only reason I did well at Swedish was because of Norwegian. Also, the articles are still super confusing to me and it was a source of many frustrating mistakes! Speaking of mistakes - I don't think that the test takes into account what kind of mistakes you made. It could be a missing article (which imo is a pretty minor one) or you could pick an adjective for a verb and both of the mistakes will be marked down the same. This one was pretty frustrating and prevented me from doing well on languages that I was actually okay at. Languages I've failed and it was quite upsetting: Korean 0 Russian 0 Latin 0 I have been learning some Korean on Lingodeer (mostly reading Hangul), so I expected to utilise some of these skills on Duolingo. Not the case. My Russian - I can read and understand - just like Ukrainian that I did pretty well on in comparison.... and it all boiled down to me confusing some things and not knowing what 'a horse' was. Boom, 'let's start from the basics'. Same with Latin - I have studied it briefly and was able to understand, but I haven't touched it in a while and completely forgot some minor things, which the placement test picked up on immediately. Also! When you're not doing well, the placement test almost taunts you! They keep giving you the same stuff over and over until you remember it and it feels like there's some hope for you. But no, still back to basics! it's quite mean! haha And here's the languages I have also failed, but it wasn't surprising:

Japanese 0 Mandarin 0 Hindi 0 Arabic 0 Turkish 0 Greek 0 (this is an example of the one I thought I was doing well on) Vietnamese 0 Hebrew 0 Indonesian 0 Hawaiian 0 Finnish 0 (bit sad since I really want to learn Finnish) Romanian 0 (I was super surprised here since I somewhat expected to be able to understand it more) Swahili 0 (again I really enjoyed it! Will check out the course on my actual account) Hungarian 0 (another one i thought I did well on haha) Navajo 0 (also will check out the course!) And the fictional ones - no one's surprised, even though High Valyrian was giving me some hope: High Valyrian 0 Klingon 0 Also, is this a testament of how eurocentric my language interest is? Yep, pretty much. I am quite aware and I'd like to broaden my interests, but then again, it's not that easy. Still all in all, this was so much fun, even though it was a bit tiring and frustrating at times. However, once you find out that there's no point in trying to bs the languages you don't know/recognise anyway, then it gets a bit easier. Let me know if you try and honestly, congrats if you've read up until here, I don't even have the patience to re-read this post :D @dutch-polyglot , @anthropologicle and everyone else who liked/reblogged :)

[stereden]

I was curious how many languages you speak ?

(I find languages super interesting and you reblogged something about the translation sector recently, so I was wondering, sorry if I’m bothering)

Hello! Sorry for being a bit late to answer, you're not a bother at all!

In theory, I know 7 languages, though 1 is a dead language and I can barely ask for directions in another, so it's more like 5 xD

I currently speak, by order of acquistion/learning:

- French (mother tongue, fluent spoken and written, C2)

- Luxembourgish (first language I learned in the luxembourgish kindergarden and primary school, semi-fluent - can speak it without much trouble and am getting used to writing it again now that my work requires it, but that language was very much not made to be written so i always doublecheck, either with my colleagues or through spellchecker.lu if I have to write any communication in Luxembourgish - B2 hovering to C1)

- German (learned in luxembourgish primary school where all my classes were in German, but then I switched to the French High School and lost a lot. Conversational spoken, can read it without problem, don't ask me to write in it because I've lost the 'ear' when it comes to declinations and I never understood the French way of remembering declinations. I technically have the C1 diploma, but my actual level is probably closer to B2, though my current job has me using it again so hopefully I'll gain some fluency back)

- English (learned in secondary school, minored at Uni, then went off to study in the UK for a year - Fluent spoken and written, C2 - though I originally learnt it mostly by reading, which means that my accent can be... interesting [in my defense, English pronunciation makes no freaking sense whatsoever when you look at how the words are written!])

- Latin (dead language, but I guess it counts? Took six years of it in secondary school, remember enough of it to kind of understand stuff written on old houses or temples, not enough to actually try and translate or write anything)

- Spanish (took two semesters at Uni, somehow passed the class [barely], can kind of understand it because of similarities to French and Italian, can ask for directions and that's about it. Probably around A1, let's be honest here)

- Italian (I lived in south Italy for a year for a volunteering and had evening classes to learn the language. Conversational, can kind of read it, writing is a pain in the ass because its similarities to French make my brain go 'stop butchering the French language and spell that word properly!!!' whenever I try xD. Between B1 and B2, and trying to continue learning it/practicing it)

French, German and Luxembourgish are the national languages of Luxembourg, so they're all taught in primary school already.

I can kind of understand Flemish/Dutch, due to their similarities to Luxembourgish, but don't ask me to actually speak them xD I can also somewhat understand Danish, as long as they speak very slowly and keep to simple words, because of the similarities to German.

I'm currently trying to learn Japanese in order to prepare for a trip there in a couple of years, and I'm also thinking of trying to learn either Welsh, Scots Gaelic, or Gaelic (Irish Gaelic) as I find those super interesting!

If you're interested in languages, I'm going to shamelessly tag @aibhilin-atibeka who is awesome at languages and knows a LOT of them!

[meichenxi]

Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law: part 1 - Indo-European background

OR: how ‘cannabis’ and ‘hemp’ are actually cognates

tldr: sound change is cool and this great series of videos can explain it better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aal9VSPkf5s. this is going to be the first of a few posts on sound change in German and English. I originally wanted to explain the second sound shift, but quickly realised that it doesn’t make sense without any of the historical context, so please bear with me

What makes a language Germanic? Imagine for a moment that you’re an alien a la Matt Haig, newly arrived to Earth and presented with a sample of the world’s languages - or specifically, part of Eurasia’s. Some languages look very similar to each other; some very different. How would you go about building a hypothesis about which languages were related to each other, and which weren’t? How would you then test this hypothesis? And how, presented finally with data that shows your languages are related, would you explain how these changes came to happen in the first place? 

Before we go on to Germanic, though, let’s talk about Indo-European today. You guys probably all know that IE is a large language family that stretches from Icelandic to Hindi; Germanic is one of the sub-groupings of this wider IE family. Within the sub-family itself, there are divisions: German is more closely related to Dutch, Norwegian to Swedish, Icelandic to Faroese and so on. This seems all fairly obvious to us now. 

Way back when many centuries ago (not that many centuries, and certainly long after the Bible began), the idea of a language family spanning English to Russian to Farsi was a little less obvious. For much of the 17th century, people (esp a bishop dude called John Wilkins) sought to prove that English was related to Hebrew - this was an important endeavour at the time, because it would lend the language religious authority, especially in its translation of the Bible. Fast forwarding to the 18th century, a man named Sir Williams Jones who lived in Bengal realised - on account of his classical education and extensive contact with Indian languages - that there were much greater similarities between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit than anybody had previously realised. He wasn’t the first to think it, but he was one of the first to make such a definitive statement. The following quote is probably one of the most famous in historical linguistics, so I apologise for quoting it in full: ‘The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have spring from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit, and the old Persian might be added to this family.’

He was wrong in a lot of ways - he excluded some languages that do belong in this family and erroneously included others. He also wasn’t the first to come up with this idea. This quote, more than anything, marks the beginning of people’s interest in the ‘common source’: how could such a thing ever be proven, if we didn’t have access to the language itself?  Part of the building ground for Indo-European historical linguistics was the desire to prove that linguistics was an empirical science much like any other, with laws that held universally and hypotheses that could be tested and demonstrably falsified. This rested on two principles both promoted by the Junggramatiker, or Neogrammarians, a Leipzig based group of scholars. Firstly, that sound change - the process by which sounds change, arise and disappear - was a highly regular process that held universally and obeyed certain rules. Secondly, that languages that exist today are structurally and in principle no different from languages that existed thousands of years ago - that is, we have no reason to assume that processes existed in the past that don’t exist today. This is called the uniformitarian principle. 

If both of these things are true, that means that it would be possible to not only determine how exactly these languages were related, but also reconstruct an earlier version of the language once spoken by all Indo-Europeans!! (I hope you agree that this is immensely cool.) 

Reconstructing these rules is important, because it allows us to better understand structural similarities between languages. There are some similarities which are surface deep: it’s easy to compare English cold and German kalt or warm and - well - warm, and say that they look alike. Pfad and path is a little harder, but when you compared Pfeffer and pepper it’s clear, ok, there’s a <pf> / <p> alteration going on there. Leaving the Germanic family behind, though, things get a little more tricky. 

How exactly is venue cognate with come? What about English quick and Latin vīvus? And how can sister and Hindi bahan possibly be cognates??

Some of the most meaningful observations are structural; they are not surface deep, and they’re not immediately available for study. This is because, quite simply, the time depth since Indo-European was spoken is vast; there have been extensive sound changes in all of the languages concerned. 

And that’s exactly what Grimm’s Law is. It’s a sound change that happened specifically in the Germanic branch of Indo-European, so it’s common to all Germanic languages, and nothing else. It’s one of those diagnostic criteria that an alien would use to determine that Norwegian and Dutch were related: it’s present, apart from where further sound change has obscured it, in every Germanic language - and it’s not present, apart from in borrowed words, in any non-Germanic language. That’s what we mean by diagnostic. 

Let’s have a look at some examples! We’ll explain it in more detail next time, but this might whet your appetite. Don’t worry if you can’t read the phonetic description; it’s the consonants that are important at the moment (don’t, please, ask me about vowels. just please don’t).

(nb: where I use an asterisk *, this means that this form is reconstructed, not actually attested: we don't have any records of IE. > just means ‘goes to’ or ‘becomes’ in the various daughter languages. Also <these> brackets are talking about spelling, and /these/ brackets are talking about phonemes, or actual sounds. Also, the little ‘ means aspiration - we’ll talk more about what that means next time)

*p > f (no later shift in German, though /f/ is sometimes spelled v):

Engl. brother, Germ. Bruder (cf. Lat. frāter, Skt. bhrā́tā)

Engl. full, Germ. voll (cf. Lat. plēnus, Skt. pūrṇás)

*t > *þ (Engl. th) > Germ. d

Engl. three, Germ. drei (cf. Lat. trēs, Gk. /trê:s/, Skt. tráyas) Engl. thin, Germ. dünn (cf. Lat. tenuis, Skt. tanús)

*ḱ, *k > h (no later shift in German):

Engl. hundred, Germ. hundert (cf. Lat. centum, Gk. /he-katón/, Skt.

śatám)

Engl. horn, Germ. Horn (cf. Lat. cornū)

*kw > *hw (Engl. wh) > Germ. w:

Engl. what, Germ. was (cf. Lat. adjective & relative quod, Skt. kád)

*d > *t (Engl. t) > Germ. z:

Engl. two, Germ. zwei (cf. Lat. duo, Gk. /dúo/, Skt. dvā́)

BRUH. ISN’T THIS COOL!! AND THERE ARE MORE!

You can see here already by looking at the German and English that both have sometimes subsequently undergone sound changes, like English */hw/ to /wh/ and then finally to /w/, which becomes German <w> or /v/ - these sometimes obscure things. And if you really want to find out why German is different to English, well, we’ve got quite a few sound changes to get through before we get there! 

Melissa, you might be saying, I know for a fact there’s something yucky and not-worky about Grimm’s Law. What about cases where it doesn’t seem to apply? What’s that? Also, I swear some Danish dude had the idea first but just didn’t publish...

Well. You’re not wrong. But this post is long enough already. Next time, we’ll go over what exactly it is, where exactly it manifests itself, and how it didn’t seem to work 100% of the time...and I suppose I still haven’t answered how ‘hemp’ and ‘cannabis’ are cognates...you’ll just have to stay tuned! 

Bis zum nächsten Mal! 

[gullethead]

Writing In Eternian

Hey! I made a post about a little season 5 easter egg yesterday (not linking it here because for some reason it blocks the post from showing in the tags)and while I was poking through the tags, I noticed that a lot of people want to learn how to use First Ones writing! Writing and orthography are actually things I'm really interested in, so I decided to make this guide for people. It's a bit more in-depth than the official press release, so if you just want to use that, feel free!

Here’s the original tweet from the She-Ra Twitter account, which has more examples: twitter. com /dreamworksshera/status/1055474341553623040

Here we go! Putting it under a break so it doesn't eat up your whole screen.

THE SOUNDS OF ENGLISH & THE IPA

So first of all, we need to start with a brief introduction to the IPA. (If you’re already familiar, you can skip to the next big heading.) Lots of languages use a lot of different letters or other characters to represent certain sounds, but when you're working with linguistics, you need to be able to say exactly what you mean. So, we made the International Phonetic Alphabet. This is a long list of individual letters and markings that represent very specific sounds, and you use them by placing them between slashes, like /d/, and sometimes to distinguish, you place the actual writing between corner brackets, like <d>. So for instance, /t/ and /h/ make the same sounds that <t> and <h> make in English, but <th> (usually) makes either the /θ/ or /ð/ sounds. These change based on where you live, but in general the consonants are the same for all English speakers.

Knowing this is important, because something I love about the First Ones alphabet is that it isn't just a letter substitution! Many "secret language" alphabets I've seen in kid's series (like Artemis Fowl, for instance) are just simple one-to-one substitutions for the Latin alphabet we use. But First Ones writing is actually very different! It uses the actual sounds made in the word. So if you wrote "cat" in the First Ones script (which I'm gonna call Eternian, after Eternia from He-Man, which flows better than "First Ones script"), it would actually look like "kat", because the letter c can be used for the sounds k or s, so it doesn't translate.

The alphabet we're using right now was created for the Latin language, derived from the Greek alphabet, which itself has a very long history behind it. English is NOT descended from Latin - it's a Germanic language, and the Germanic family is only kind of related to the Romantic family that developed out of Latin. However, a lot of our vocabulary has a Latin infusion because of mixing with Old French in the 1000s-1100s, and even before that, we used the Latin alphabet because it was the most common. This means that in order to express all the sounds we have, English speakers writing English had to combine different letters together; this, plus over a thousand years of different spellings and dialects, means that our orthography - our way of writing the sounds we say - is FUCKED. The Eternian alphabet is actually a much more efficient way of writing these sounds!

This is the total list of English consonants:

A few notes here:

To make sure you're not lost, /ŋ/ is <ng>, /j/ is <y>, /θ/ and /ð/ are <th>, /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are <sh> and <zh> (the French <j>, not usually distinguished in English writing) respectively, and /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are <ch> and the English <j> respectively.

Most consonants can come in voiced and unvoiced versions (although, because English is weird, these are called "fortis" and "lensis" because we pronounce them with different amounts of energy). /b/ is /p/, but pronounced using the vocal chords. Only the nasal sounds, the "approximants", and /h/ don't have pairs in English, although /h/ DOES actually have a common voiced pair, and you can technically pronounce the others voiceless in some languages although it's very rare.

The /x/ sound, famously the end of the Scottish word "loch", is only found in Celtic accents (Scottish, Irish, Welsh) and in the South African accent (because of influence from Dutch). Other English speakers realize it as /k/.

The /r/ sound is weird. What /r/ technically represents is a trill, like in the Spanish <rr>. However, in English, that trill is very rare; what we use <r> for is called a "postalveolar approximant", [ɹ̠]. However, it is usually easier just to write the letter r, so that's how we transcribe it for English's IPA.

English also sometimes has what are called "syllabic consonants", which are consonants that can act as the center of a syllable in the place of a vowel. In English, these are mostly /l/, /m/, and /n/. For instance, the word "bottle" is technically pronounced [ˈbɑɾl̩] in General American English, and the same goes for words like "rhythm" and "button"; however, because this would complicate things a lot, phonologists consider it to include a very small vowel, so with the example of "bottle", it would be /ˈbɑtəl/ instead.

The vowels are a bit more weird than the consonants. Our alphabet was originally created for Latin, which only has ten vowel sounds, long and short a, e, i, o, and u (although technically the short vowels are /a ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ/ instead of /a e i o u/, because fuck it I guess). However, we have a MUCH different vowel "inventory" in English - instead of the uniform 10 paired Latin vowels, in General American English we have anywhere from 11-13 vowels depending on your interpretation along with three diphthongs (combinations of two vowels used as a single vowel):

If you look at the British (Received Pronunciation) chart it's much different from that, which is why the accents are so distinct; however, Eternian is made with GA English in mind, so I'm just going to focus on that.

More notes:

/ə/ (a schwa, like in "uh"), /ɜ/ (very similar and hard to distinguish in writing), and /ʌ/ (something between an "uh" and an "ah"), are all very close to each other and sometimes interchangeable, especially between the first two.

/oʊ/ is usually simplified to /o/, and /eɪ/ is sometimes simplified to /e/, since the normal versions of those sounds don't show up so we don't have to make the difference clear.

A lot of accents in North America make /ɔ/ sounds (similar to "aw" or "au", like in "caught") into /ɑ/ sounds (the o in "hot").

Now, let's move on to the alphabet!

ETERNIAN GLYPHS & SIGILS

The "letters" of the Eternian alphabet, in my opinion, are better described using the more general term "glyph". This is because, while they are distinct shapes that mean specific sounds, they are used kind of artistically and variably within one large interconnected word-shape called a "sigil", much different than we would consider letters in the English alphabet. These glyphs are organized in words by lines starting at the basic shape of the sigil and stringing them together in order.

Eternian glyphs are split into two major categories that differ by shape: consonants and vowels.

CONSONANTS

The system of glyphs for Eternian consonants is actually very easy to remember, once you get the shapes down! Let's go back to the voiced/voiceless pairs. English has eight pairs of these, four plosives (made by quickly starting and stopping air with your mouth) and four fricatives (made by constantly moving air through your mouth). These eight pairs - along with another pair for /r/ and /l/ even though they aren't voiced/voiceless, because they're also closely related - make up most of the sounds in English and most of the consonant glyphs in Eternian. In each of these pairs, the voiceless (and /l/) have a basic, empty polygon shape; the voiced pair (and /r/) use the exact same shape, but with a dot in the middle. Like so:

Outside of this, English has four more vowels - /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, and /h/ - and two "semivowels", which can be used either as a vowel or a consonant. One of these semivowels, /j/ (the English y), is used as a vowel in Eternian, while the other, /w/, is treated as a consonant. Except for /w/, these remaining consonants are all marked by the fact that they’re solid color; they also all use the same basic shapes as many of the others, but aren’t related to the sounds which share their shape:

Pretty simple once you get the hang of it! Excuse the messiness; if you want a more precise rendering, you can reference the original release at the top.

I'm pretty sure this is all accurate, but there's one thing that seems weird to me. In English, <th> can be used to express either voiceless /θ/ or voiced /ð/. However, in Eternian, they gave us a "dh" glyph. I assume that this is meant to represent /ð/. However, in Wrong Hordak's "Smooch The Chef" apron, "the" is spelled with the glyph used for /θ/. But honestly I'm just assuming human error on that one, especially because /ð/ is very rare at the beginning of words except for articles or pronouns like the and these, most cases of <th> at the beginning of a word are /θ/ like in "thorn".

Now, for vowels!

VOWELS

Like I said earlier, this bit is much more complicated to get than the consonants, but luckily, this is actually much better for English than Latin letters!

Eternian vowel glyphs are divided, seemingly at random, into two subsets with a single exception. First are line-glyphs, which are formed by altering the connective line between two geometric glyphs. The others are circle-glyphs, the ones used for /ɛ/, /i/, /u/, and /o/. These function in the exact same way as the consonant glyphs, except that they are all circles where none of the consonants (except /n/) are.

There's a few issues here with transcribing words, but they mostly come out of simplifying English's horrible vowel fluidity. For instance, there's no distinct letter for writing the schwa /ə/, but it can be folded into the letter for /ʌ/. That, and combining /ɔ/ with /ɑ/, simplify 16 sounds into 13 letters. The last letter, /j/, is the other semivowel I mentioned above; <y> in English can be used for either /j/ or /aɪ/ and /ɪ/, but this letter specifically represents the /j/ sound like in "yes" or "yak".

BRINGING IT TOGETHER

This is where things get very interesting. Let's start with the basics, walking through how to write the word "Adora".

Eternian, as a writing system, is much more artistic by design than Latin, and words and sentences can be constructed in many ways which are all read the same way. Eternian words - better called "sigils" - are read right-to-left, like Hebrew, Arabic, or traditional Japanese and Chinese. We form the sigils starting with a line sloping down in that direction book-ended with dots. The exact angle and length doesn't matter, but the right side is always noticeably higher than the left, like this:

We then add two additional decorative lines built off of that base, which end in dots:

These flourishes can be curved, geometric, or a mix of both, and often inform a lot about the "personality" of both a sigil and its writer, and can distinguish one sigil from another. They're like the sigil's signature. They can be any shape or length, but never overlap with themselves or other lines.

The next step is to begin adding the sounds. Much like the flourishes, these are constructed differently for every sigil, although again they are all read from right-to-left and the symbols are placed with that in mind. These are strung down from the sigil's base, connecting with straight lines. Let's start by placing the a-sound in "Adora" near the right-side edge of the line (this is the /ʌ/ line-glyph, like the u in "fun"):

Because the /ʌ/ glyph is a line, it replaces the normal connecting line. Let's finish this syllable line with the /d/ glyph:

...and then add another line with the glyphs for /orʌ/:

Generally, when a cluster ends with a line-glyph, it connects back to the base line. Clusters not at the end cannot end on a line-glyph (though I'm not sure about what to do for line-glyph-only words like "I" or "a" - perhaps the base line is changed, the line curves in an arc, or it ends at the changed portion?). Additionally, line-glyphs are always turned in the direction they're going - the beginning and ending /ʌ/ glyphs are flipped from each other, because the ending glyph is turned upwards going towards the base line while the beginning is stemming from it.

The important thing to remember is that sigils can be formed in a variety of ways - the flourishes, line angles, how you structure the syllables, all of these are dependent on the writer, so long as they follow those general rules. I constructed that sigil “AD.ORA”, but it could just as easily be “ADO.RA”, and in larger words there’s much more potential for structural changes.

Sigils in a sentence are connected through lines which meet the word next to each of the flourishes, and which bend to fit the shape of the sentence. Sentences are not read in any specific direction, but words are clustered in aesthetically pleasing ways and sentence order is shown by these connecting lines. However, The initial word in a sentence only has a line connecting on its left side, the final word only has a line on its right side, and words in between connect to the previous word on their right and the next word on their left.

Let's try extending this to a simple sentence - "Adora is She-Ra." We already have the She-Ra sigil from canon, so we just need to connect them with the word "is".

First, let's write the next word, below and to the left:

And connect the two with a line:

And then repeat with the "She-Ra" sigil.

...and finally...

There we go! You've officially written a sentence using Eternian glyphs! I hope you have fun with it! If you have any questions feel free to shoot me an ask. Thanks for reading!

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 26 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics! I'm Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: And I'm Lauren Gawne, and today, we're getting enthusiastic about palatalisation. That is to say, “What the heck is going on with G and C?” But first, thanks to everyone for your enthusiastic recommending during our November Recommend-A-Thon.

Gretchen: Yes, thanks so much for all your tweets, and posts, and shares, and all of the new people that you've brought in with you to listen to Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: We will be thanking every one of you who made some kind of public declaration about their love of Lingthusiasm. We'll give you until the end of the month to add yourself to that esteemed group of people, so we can thank you all in our annual anniversary post.

Gretchen: Yes, so you have till the end of November 2018 to be part of this year's Recommend-A-Thon thank you post, which will live in perpetuity on our website. Last year we thanked 100 people. This year, I think we can thank even more. I'm really excited by what we've seen so far.

Lauren: I'm feeling very confident about that. And of course, you can continue to recommend us to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life any time of the year.

Gretchen: I also want to thank everybody who came out to the live shows.

Lauren: Yay! I'm not gonna lie, we're recording this before the live shows.

Gretchen: So we're really hoping people actually come.

Lauren: We are just going to have to assume that they were an absolute rolling success.

Gretchen: We're recording well in advance at the moment to make sure that we have episodes for when Lauren's on leave. We're very excited about those live shows. I assume they were great. Thanks so much to everyone who came out in Melbourne and Sydney. It was so fun to get to see those cities. We also want to remind you that if you're thinking about getting Lingthusiasm merch for any linguists or language enthusiasts in your life, if you want to get someone a scarf with the International Phonetic Alphabet, or tree symbol diagrams on them, or a tie with the IPA on it, or various baby outfits, or T-shirts that say, “Not judging your grammar, just analysing it,” or many other things, now is a great time to place an order so that arrives towards the end of the year.

Lauren: Remember, it's also totally okay to use this as a list of suggestions for other people to buy you, or if you enjoy doing a bit of holiday shopping for yourself, we're not gonna stop you.

Gretchen: We definitely noticed from last year that RedBubble typically runs some sales this time of year, so hopefully, you can take advantage of those to get you and/or your friends and family some great Lingthusiasm swag.

Lauren: Speaking of the holiday season, it's a very important holiday season coming up that's the Northern Hemisphere winter conference season, which I'm usually excited about. Not doing so much travel this year.

Gretchen: Well, the Australian Linguistic Society is also having its annual meeting in Adelaide in December, which I'm going to be at because I'm still in Australia. Our latest Patreon bonus episode is all about the academic conference circuit and how to make it work for you.

Lauren: I had a lot of fun in this episode. This is all of mine and Gretchen's favourite survival tips for navigating academic conferences. If you've never been to one before, or you've only been to a couple, they're lots of fun, and they can be even more fun.

Gretchen: Yes, so you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to check those out, or lingthusiasm.com/merch for the merch. We’ll repeat those links at the end of the episode, so you don't have to write them down now.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, G and C are really weird letters because they're these two letters that, in a whole bunch of languages, often come with multiple sounds. You have the sounds in their names like /dʒ/ and /s/, and then you have other sounds like /g/ and /k/, and then even more sounds. These letters are so weird.

Lauren: I'm not known for being the most reliable when it comes to a spelling bee, and I feel like it's often letters like G and C that trip me up because they have so many different pronunciation disguises that they put on.

Gretchen: They really do. They especially do that in different languages. You can do a brief sample of this through different languages' words for “cheese.”

Lauren: Ooo, let's do a cross-linguistic cheese platter!

Gretchen: Cross-linguistic cheese tour! First, we have the Latin “caseus” (/kaseʊs/) meaning “cheese.” And this gives rise to a whole bunch of other words for “cheese” in different languages. You have English “cheese” (/tʃi:z/), you have German “Käse” (/ke:zə/), you have Spanish “queso” (/keso/).

Lauren: Yeah. Because I was like, “Well, in Italian you have ‘formaggio,’” which is like a completely different historical word. But then I remembered that my favourite Italian pasta from Rome is cacio (/katʃo/) e pepe and that's – the Italian-Latin word for “cheese” is still hidden in that very excellent pasta dish.

Gretchen: And then because I started thinking about this, I was looking up other languages’ word for “cheese,” and I saw the Dutch “kaas” (/kɑːs/), which, I don't speak any Dutch, but there's one Dutch word that I know which is “pindakaas,” and “pindakaas” literally translates as “peanut cheese.”

Lauren: Oh. Oh, hang on. Like peanut butter?

Gretchen: Yeah, so the Dutch word for “peanut butter” is literally translated as “peanut cheese,” which at first seems like, “This is maybe an interesting dish,” but then you're like, “Is ‘peanut butter’ really any better as a term for it?” Because it's still a dairy metaphor.

Lauren: Yeah, because I was like, “That's a weird choice,” but actually, it's not that different.

Gretchen: It's really not that different at all. Especially, if you think of a cream cheese, which is like a creamier cheese, maybe? Peanut butter is kind of creamy sometimes.

Lauren: I'm still gonna eat it no matter what it's called.

Gretchen: Then you have Irish “cáis” (/kɑːʃ/), which is also from Latin “caseus”. “Caseus” is spelled with a C and an S. They're pronounced /k/ and /s/.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But “cheese” takes that initial /k/ and makes it /tʃ/. “Käse” and “queso” and “cacio” keep that initial /k/ sound at the beginning, but “cacio” changes the /s/ into /tʃ/.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Dutch keeps it the way it was. And then Irish also changes the second one into “cáis” (/kɑːʃ/). Different languages have taken this one word that seemed like it had a fairly straightforward pronunciation and altered it in slightly different ways.

Lauren: I was trying to make a cheese metaphor about things, like, fermenting and going funky with age, but I guess this is why we’re a linguistics podcast and not a food podcast.

Gretchen: “Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a food podcast about linguistics.” And this is all this weird stuff that C gets up to between different languages, historically, and in different languages in the modern era. G does the same type of thing. If you were a kid, you might have learned about hard G and soft G, or hard C and soft C.

Lauren: I really struggle with the idea of hard C and soft C, and hard G and soft G. Just to help other people who might as well, hard G is the /g/ sound and soft G is when it's used more like /ʒ/.

Gretchen: Yes, /ʒ/ or /dʒ/, which is one of the reasons why this terminology is not generally linguist-approved.

Lauren: Yeah, I just – I think about, for example, when I was chatting with Suzy Styles on the work we do about how we have this cross-sensory idea and “hard” and “soft” as a metaphor just don't work for me for those sounds. Apologies if I leave Gretchen to do all of the explaining the difference between them today.

Gretchen: Well, I don't think I'm really going to use the terms either. I'm just gonna mention the specific sound because you see when it happens cross-linguistically, there's a lot more going on than just that. These are two letters that both have that hard-soft thing going on. We don't talk about “hard Q” and “soft Q,” or “hard P” and “soft P.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So why do these letters come in hard and soft versions, even if you can't remember which version is which? To do this, we need to also go back to the Romans.

Lauren: Yes, there were simpler times back in Old Latin.

Gretchen: The Latin alphabet comes from Greek, as a lot of people know. But this is one of things that always puzzled me as a kid – because I was a kid who was into the Greek alphabet – I was like, “Look, the Greeks have this letter, kappa, which stands for the K sound, and it looks like a K, and it's where we get the modern K. And they have this letter, gamma, which was very clearly supposed to be a G. Who invented the C? Why is it there, and why does it cause me so much trouble?”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: It turns out that this is explained by the Etruscans, who were people that didn't make a distinction between the /g/ sound and the /k/ sound, like the sound in “gamma” and the sound in “kappa.” They borrowed the Greek alphabet for their language, which we don't know very much about, but we know that they didn't care about the difference between gamma and kappa because they just borrowed one, which was gamma, and they used it for both because it didn't really matter for them. Then, the Romans actually didn't initially borrow their alphabet from the Greeks. They borrowed it from the Etruscans.

Lauren: Because the Etruscans were living on the Italian peninsula, so they just borrowed it from the locals.

Gretchen: Yeah, so they just borrowed it from the locals.

Lauren: I do love an ethically locally sourced alphabet, personally.

Gretchen: Nice, locally sourced alphabet. We have fragments of pottery from the Etruscans, but we don't know a whole lot about their language. We know it wasn't Indo-European because all the Indo-European languages do distinguish between the gamma and the kappa sounds. So the Romans borrow it from the Etruscans, and then they're left with like, “Oh, geez, we actually do want to make this distinction between these two sounds that we have, but the Etruscans don't have.”

Lauren: And so someone invented the letter G.

Gretchen: Like an actual person?

Lauren: Apparently. I mean, I'm quoting from Wikipedia.

Gretchen: Do we know their name?

Lauren: Apparently, his name was Spurius Carvilius Ruga, which definitely doesn't sound like a spurious name at all.

Gretchen: That's a really spurious name. So he invented the letter G?

Lauren: Yeah, so at this point the letter C was the third letter in the alphabet, still, and he was like, “Well, look, we have this /k/ sound.” K wasn't cool anymore as a letter to represent /k/. They were all using the rounded – what we think of as C now. He was like, “We need to make more of a distinction.” And so apparently – there are people who disagree with this, but I like this story about young Spurius – created the letter G and was like, “Now, we can make the distinction again.”

Gretchen: If you look at a capital G, it just looks like a C with an extra stroke added on to it, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: A gamma is like a right angle in the top left corner (Γ), and then you can curve it to make a C, and then you can add an extra stroke to make the G.

Lauren: So that's where the Romans got to. And he popped it in the alphabet in the seventh position, which is originally where a little Greek letter known as "zeta" used to live.

Gretchen: So is he responsible for the demotion of zeta as well?

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, well, no, Z also wasn't cool anymore, because the Romans didn't need it, so they never really borrowed it from the Greeks. Because, again, they got all their alphabet from the Etruscans. So the Romans weren't really down with –

Gretchen: Oh, that’s it. Okay.

Lauren: – zeta. They kind of had it there. He's was like, “Well, let's just drop that letter out, and we'll add this cool, new G thing that I invented.”

Gretchen: So he kicked out zeta and replaced it with G?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: That's great. I love that. Latin actually pronounced – all of their C’s and G’s were /k/ and /g/.

Lauren: Imagine doing a Latin spelling bee. It would be so great. I mean, I guess that’s why they don’t have spelling bees in most languages that have regular orthographies.

Gretchen: Yeah, so easy! You know, you have your classic Latin phrase "veni vidi vici" (/weni widi wiki/) “I came. I saw. I conquered.”

Lauren: I like that you’ve used the original Latin pronunciation there, so you sound a little bit ridiculous.

Gretchen: I'd always pronounced this /vɛni vidi vitʃi/, but then I had a Latin teacher who told me, “No, no, it's actually /weni widi wiki/," and it just sounds so foolish.

Lauren: Yes, every time I hear it. So that "vici" is the C – what we think of as C – being pronounced as /k/, as in the word for “cheese.”

Gretchen: Then, in Late Latin, everything starts to go wrong. And by “wrong,” I mean “great.”

Lauren: For the Empire as well as the language.

Gretchen: Yeah, the Empire was a bit messed up. But also the language started fragmenting and becoming all these different versions. In many of the different areas, people started pronouncing the C and the G in a different way, sometimes.

Lauren: I love the “sometimes” bit. We talk about the environment that sounds are in can make them change, adds a bit of context. And that's really where the fun and the messiness of language can really play out, when you have language changing over time.

Gretchen: Yeah, we need to talk about a particular area of the mouth. This is the roof of your mouth. I'm touching it right now, but you can't see me, because it's inside. This isn’t gonna be a very useful demonstration.

Lauren: If you have clean-enough hands, and you don't mind looking a bit ridiculous in public, you can turn the tip of your finger up to the ceiling and press it into the roof of your mouth or use your tongue.

Gretchen: This is the back part of the roof of your mouth. Not the front bit right behind your teeth, but the back bit by your molars. There's kind of a little lump there. This is known in linguistics as the “palate.” There's a whole bunch of sounds that involve the palate and involve some sort of constriction at the palate, the back part of the roof of your mouth.

Lauren: It's a big chunk of space. You've got that soft bit further towards the back that you might not want to prod if you have a sensitive gag reflex.

Gretchen: Yeah, we don’t advise that.

Lauren: And you have that hard bit closer to the teeth. There's a lot of space to play with there.

Gretchen: Yeah, so there's a lot of space. You can drop your jaw and let a lot of space happen there. What's crucial about the palate is it's a space where you can make both vowels and consonants. You could make an /i/ sound, and your tongue will be towards your palate. You can make a /j/ sound, and your tongue will be towards your palate. You could make a /ʃ/ sound, and your tongue will be towards your palate.

Lauren: I'm just sitting here quietly going “sh, sh, sh” to myself.

Gretchen: I was teaching a roomful of Intro to Linguistics students about the palate, and I was saying, “Okay, we're gonna make a distinction between where S is produced, which is towards the front of the roof of your mouth –" and we don't call that the “palate,” we we use the “palate” just refer to the back part of the roof of your mouth – “and the /ʃ/ sound, which is on the palate or near the palate." I was getting the room to say “sss,” “shh,” “sss,” “shh,” back and forth. Then, I was like, “You guys thought you were enrolled in Intro to Linguistics, but you're actually enrolled in Intro to Parseltongue.”

Lauren: The very “sss-shh”-y sounds of the snake language of Harry Potter, for the three of you out there who aren't familiar. If you don't feel like making these sounds, or you want to see what other people's tongues are doing, as always with these episodes, I'm linking you to one of my favourite websites, which is where they stuck a bunch of phoneticians in an MRI machine, and you can see their tongues doing all these things, if you just click on the column of sounds called Palatals.

Gretchen: That's great. I like that website so much. So the palatals, and the /dʒ/ sound is also towards the palatals. At least it's a lot more similar to the palatals than /k/ and /g/.

Lauren: In contrast, /k/ and /g/ are made a bit further back from the palate, closer towards the back of the mouth.

Gretchen: If you’re just thinking about these palatal sounds, the thing is that because there are both vowels and consonants that can be palatal, and you have a vowel that's produced near the palate, and a consonant near it, the vowel tends to attract the consonant and make it more palatal and make it more similar to each other, because humans like to be efficient about these things.

Lauren: Even if you don't remember any terminology, and you certainly don't have to, the takeaway here is that our mouths are very good at being lazy, and they will strive to do as little moving as possible. It's like, “If I'm already there for the vowel, why am I taking myself all the way to the back of the palate? I'm just gonna hang here.” I'm always happy to celebrate laziness.

Gretchen: These palatal vowels, these vowels that are produced near the palate, tend to pull certain consonants with them. This is what happened to the /k/ and the /g/ sound.

Lauren: And it didn't necessarily happen the same way in all the different languages that descend from Latin.

Gretchen: Right, so in French, which is probably the most familiar to English because we borrowed a lot of words from French – so, sometimes you have /k/ becoming /s/ in English from Latin, sometimes you have it becoming /tʃ/ in English from Latin. You have things like “caseus” becoming “cheese,” but also something like “circus" (/kirkus/) becoming “circus” (/sɝkəs/). All those /k/’s get pulled more towards the roof of the mouth.

Lauren: But only if the vowel is luring them there, right? If the vowel isn't near that palatal bit, if the vowel is already back where the /k/ is, then it just stays there.

Gretchen: Yeah, so that's the thing. In a word like “circus” the /k/ is before an I, which was pronounced /i/, /sirkus/, whereas, the second C is before a U and that one stays /sirkus/, not /sirsus/.

Lauren: I like how I’m like, “/sirkus/ sounds completely normal. /sirsus/ sounds very wrong.”

Gretchen: Yeah, /sirsus/ is just like, “No, that didn't happen.” So, /i/ and /e/, which became I and E in English, are the ones that tend to pull the consonants towards them. Whereas /u/ and /o/ and /a/ are the ones that let the constant stay where they want to be.

Lauren: Which solves a mystery of – I mean, spelling bees are entirely mysterious to me, as I think we've established – but it solves that mystery of spelling bees, because I was always like, “Why would you ask...” – because you can ask in a spelling bee the origin of a word. And so if you ask like, “I have to spell the word 'circus.' Please, spelling bee master, tell me the origin of the word.” If I know it's a Latin word, like, “Well, that means it probably is C-I and not K-I, because originally it was probably /kirkus/”

Gretchen: Yeah, because you don't have K's in Latinate words because all of their C's changed when they were in front of an I or an E.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: This also explains why there's some disagreement about how to pronounce the word “Celtic.”

Lauren: Oh, yeah, there's a really great post by Stan Carey that goes into the history of this, but – I don't know. I have to think really hard if I say /kɛltɪk/ or /sɛltɪk/. But I think I say /kɛltɪk/.

Gretchen: I definitely say /kɛltɪk/, but there's some sports team that's correctly pronounced /sɛltɪk/, because that's what people say when they talk about the sports team?

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: I've definitely heard people say /sɛltɪk/. This is one of those ones where if you're obeying the Latinate rules, you're like, “Well, C-E, that must mean that the C is pronounced like an S.” And yet – because when Irish and Scottish Gaelics borrowed the Latin alphabet, it also hadn't had this sound change happen yet. All the C's were still pronounced like /k/, so all of the C's in Gaelic are hard. And so “Celt” /kɛlt/ is – there's no K in Gaelic. The C's are all pronounced /k/.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So if you use the Gaelic pronunciation, then it's /kɛlt/, but if you're looking at it, and you're like, “Well, but I thought my rule was the C gets pronounced like S," then it's /sɛlt/.

Lauren: Which brings us to another major scandal in terms of how words are pronounced, which is, of course, the word that I say as /dʒɪbəɹɪʃ/ (gibberish).

Gretchen: And the word that I said on a previous episode as /gɪbəɹɪʃ/ because – I don't know. Why not say it that way?

Lauren: Yeah, I – to be honest – had not paid much attention to your pronunciation, but we had quite a few people draw attention to the fact that we have different pronunciations for this word.

Gretchen: Yeah, and this is the same thing like with /dʒɪf/ and /gɪf/ (GIF) where –

Lauren: Which is definitely not a major argument at all.

Gretchen: No, no one cares about that one on the internet. I've never heard any argument about it. With the G's, when we get a word from French, or from Latin, or from Italian, or sometimes from Spanish – but generally, Spanish, that's its own thing – we tend to pronounce that G as a /dʒ/ or a /ʒ/ like in “rouge.” But when we get it from a different language, we often pronounce it as a /g/ instead.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So of course, when we get it from an acronym like with GIF, all bets are off, really. There's no statistical bias in either direction.

Lauren: We have been talking exclusively about C and G, but they are not the only letters that cause me grief with spelling, which is fundamentally about palatalisation. There are other sounds in English that are also very attracted to the palate.

Gretchen: Yeah, and these are both /t/ and /d/, T and D, and /s/ and /z/, or S and Z. They're pronounced more towards the front of the palate, but, again, if they're in front of an /i/ or an /e/ sound, they tend to get pulled back towards the palate instead of pulled forward. They all get pulled toward the centre of the mouth.

Lauren: The palate is like the black hole at the centre of the mouth universe.

Gretchen: It's got gravity pulling everything towards it. Yeah, it's a very attractive place. I think it's also kind of a very easy place to say because it's just right there in the middle. So it could be anything. You don't have to go to a lot of effort to make it happen.

Lauren: Yeah, the tongue is just kind of going straight up from its neutral spot. What kind of examples do we see with these letters?

Gretchen: There's some ones that are really old that are embedded into English spelling, words like “station” and “ratio” with that T-I-O-N ending. They were at one point pronounced like /statiʌn/ and /ratio/.

Lauren: Again, would have made spelling tests a lot easier.

Gretchen: Way easier, /ratio/! The Romans said this. But /ratʃio/, /io/ gets shortened into /raʃio/ or /steʃiʌn/ and eventually gets /steʃʌn/ and /reʃio/, and other words like that. Then there's also some that are super new, and they're not even reflected in standard English spelling. They're only in representations of informal speech. That's the words like "didja?"

Lauren: As in, “Didja find out any good facts about palatalisation? Yes, I did.”

Gretchen: Yeah! If you have “did” and “you” – well, “you” can become “ya,” obviously. Then that "ya" sound, the Y at the beginning, it's also palatal, so it can pull the D towards /dɪdʒə/. I went to . a really great restaurant when I was in New York City a couple months ago, which was pointed out to me by someone on Twitter as a linguistically interesting restaurant that I should go to. It is called “Jeet Jet.”

Lauren: “Jeet Jet?”

Gretchen: “Jeet Jet,” spelled J-E-E-T J-E-T.

Lauren: Oh, as in, “Did you eat yet?”

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: “Jeet Jet.”

Gretchen: “Jeet Jet?”

Lauren: That was great. Everything is just lapsing into the palatal centre.

Gretchen: So palatal! It's a palatal palace of food.

Lauren: This is why we're not a food podcast.

Gretchen: Every so often when I used to mark linguistics papers for Intro to Linguistics, you’d get somebody who would write – instead of “palatal,” they'd write “palatial.”

Lauren: Did you draw a little palace?

Gretchen: It sounds like it’s a little palace! But also, why is it not “palatial” because “palatial” is actually the palatised version of “palatal?”

Lauren: It makes sense. We might have to let the language kick on for another couple of centuries to let that process happen.

Gretchen: What's really cool about palatals is that they keep going with the trajectories of the language. In French and Italian, the C's and G's became /dʒ/and /ʒ/ and /ʃ/ and /s/, and that's pretty well-established. In Spanish, they did this other thing. The Spanish C in front of E or I went to /θ/ in Spain, like "cerveza" (/θerbeθa/), and to /s/ in South America like /serbesa/. The J, and G, and also the X – they’re now like a /h/ sound, like in "Xavier” (/havier/). But they stopped for a while at a /ʃ/ sound. For a while, this X in Spanish was pronounced /ʃ/.

Lauren: Hmm, just hung out there for a while?

Gretchen: Yeah, you can see that trajectory happening. It happened at a very specific point in Spanish history, because this point when X was being pronounced /ʃ/ also happened right around when the Spanish conquerors were first coming in contact with Nahuatl speakers in Central America. In Nahuatl, there was a sound /ʃ/, and the Spanish speakers were like, “Well, we have a letter to represent /ʃ/. It's an X. We're going to use the X to represent /ʃ/ like we do in our own language.” They transcribed certain Nahuatl words, like the word “Mexico” – /meʃiko/ – perfectly reasonably.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But then Spanish kept changing, and not a lot of people spoke Nahuatl, and so /meʃiko/ became /mehiko/, because the X sound was shifted from /ʃ/ to /h/.

Lauren: And so “Mexico,” did the pronunciation of it – just went with it even though it was meant to be /ʃ/?

Gretchen: A representation of the Nahuatl word.

Lauren: Ah, there you go.

Gretchen: Other languages looked at it – like English looked at the spelling of this word and said, “Well, you have an X there. We have an X.”

Lauren: “We pronounce it /ks/."

Gretchen: “Here's how we pronounce the X.” And this is where we get /mɛksɪko/, but it's actually an attempt at representing this Nahuatl sound, but then Spanish changed out from under it.

Lauren: It reminds me of when “Beijing” was updated from the older word, “Peking.” We still have “Peking” in “Peking Duck,” and you have that /k/ there in the “-king.” When it was updated, it becomes “-jing,” because over the centuries since it was originally written down, palatalisation has occurred in Mandarin Chinese.

Gretchen: Oh, that's so good! I just thought the Europeans are really incompetent at transcribing things.

Lauren: I mean, the Europeans were pretty incompetent, and I'm sure that was part of the problem. But you actually have that palatalisation happening in Mandarin as well. It's not just an Indo-European phenomenon.

Gretchen: Oh, so there's just a sound change happening in Mandarin as well at the same time. That's so good.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: There's also a really interesting historical example of other languages doing palatalisation, because once you can spot palatalisation, you can find it everywhere. It's in so many languages. I'd be honestly more surprised to find a language that had never done any sort of palatalisation – that hadn’t done it – than I would be surprised to find it in another language. Bantu languages, which are spoken in a wide swath of Africa, they have a set of prefixes that go at the beginning of certain nouns and verbs to indicate which category the nouns belong to, in a very, very simple explanation of that. One of these prefixes is used before a noun to make it the language related to that noun.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So you have things like – in the Congo, the language that’s spoken is Kikongo.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: In Rwanda, the language that’s spoken is Kinyarwanda. In Botswana, the language that spoken is Setswana. What's really interesting here is that this prefix, you can tell it's started out as /ki/, but in some languages it's become /tʃi/ or /ʃi/ or /si/ or /se/. You can tell that's because this palatal vowel has brought it more towards the vowel. So you have Kiswahili, but isiZulu or isiXhosa], or Tshivenda. Some of them still have the /ki/, some of them have changed it to /si/ or /tʃi/. You can see this relationship because they all have the same prefix, but it's changed differently because the sound changes have happened differently in the different languages.

Lauren: Exactly the same set of changes as we get with our cheeses of Europe.

Gretchen: The same cheese-changes. I have a very vivid memory about when I first learned about palatalisation. This was when I went to Scottish Gaelic summer camp when I was 10 or 12?

Lauren: The thing is we don't have summer camps in Australia. So I find all summer camps mysterious. I'm like, “Of course, you went on summer camp for Gaelic. Like, that's that weird thing that North Americans do. They go on summer camp.”

Gretchen: It is not very common to go on summer camp for Gaelic. Most of the other kids that were there, were there to learn, like, fiddle, or step dance, or something, which is still fairly rare. Most people go, like, canoeing or something.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: But I was a budding linguist, and I wanted to learn Gaelic. So when I was learning Gaelic, they told me about this distinction between broad vowels and slender vowels. This is super important in Gaelic and in Irish as well, because a whole bunch of consonants in Gaelic change the way they're pronounced depending on which vowels they’re next to.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So you end up with all these silent vowels where the vowel itself is silent, but it's just being used to tell you how to pronounce the consonant that it's next to.

Lauren: This is a bit like when I realised the reason you don't hear, in Spanish or in English – the word “guitar,” you don't hear that U – is because Spanish uses U in the same way there, to indicate that it should be a /g/ and not a /ʒɪtɑɹ/.

Gretchen: Exactly, it means the same U that's in, like, "Guillaume" to indicate that that is a /g/ – or in “guerre,” “guerrilla,” for “war.”

Lauren: Yeah, it was a complete revelation for me when I was like, “I'm not meant to – the U is just there to help me, not to hinder me.”

Gretchen: Yeah, it's to help you according to a completely different system that you only understand incompletely.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: This is the same thing for Gaelic. If you have a word, “fáilte,” which is the word for "welcome," and the last two letters are T-E, the way you know that that T is pronounced like a /tʃ/ is because there's an E next to it. Or if you have names like “Sean,” or “Sinead,” or “Siobhan,” the way that you know that that S is pronounced like a /ʃ/ is because it has an E or an I next to it.

Lauren: Just, like, “Come with me towards the palate.”

Gretchen: This is the kind of thing that they teach you in Gaelic 101. They’re like, “Here's the broad vowels. Here's the slender vowels. Here's why they're so important,” because they tell you how to do this with all your consonants. And yet, afterwards, I was like, “But English also kind of does this. Because if you have a word like “circus,” the way that you know how each of the C's is pronounced is based on the same distinction between what Gaelic traditionally calls “broad” and “slender” vowels, but we can call “palatal” or “non-palatal” vowels. The slender vowels in Gaelic are the same thing as a palatal vowel, or a front vowel to use the proper linguistic term. All of those are the same class of things that all cause the same types of sound changes. The “broad” vowels, or the “non-palatal” vowels, or the “back” vowels are all the same category of stuff that doesn't cause the sound change. And that totally rocked my world when I figured it out the first time.

Lauren: I think the thing is, given my general spelling issues, even though I have trouble with spelling, I really appreciate that palatalisation makes pronouncing things easier. In many ways, it's really great that the writing system we have captures this history of how these sounds were all the way back to Latin, all the way back to our friend Spurius, and they're there to help us.

Gretchen: Yeah, it makes certain connections easier to see. A word like “electric,” “electricity,” the C is still there, and when you add an I on to it with the “-ity” ending, you can see it change pronunciation. You can see the connections between those words more straightforwardly. Whereas, if there was a K at the end, you wouldn't necessarily know that it was one that was going to change its pronunciation if an I was added to it. I think what fascinates me about palatalisation is it's one of the ways in which linguistics lets us peer deeply into the soul of a language, or into history of a language, and into the connections between languages, and lets us think of these things that we think of as messy and anomalous as actually a unified part of our shared anatomy across all of the spoken languages that we have this in common, which is that we all find it easier to pronounce things in a certain area of our mouths the same. That makes us part of this really big human story in what seems to be just annoying ways to spell things.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. We're also now on Spotify, so if you use that, you can find us there. You can follow us at @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. And you can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include: hyperforeignisms, multilingual babies, homonyms, and how to have a good time at academic conferences. You could help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. Can't afford to pledge? That's okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. Especially this month, we're doing our special anniversary round to help the show grow.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are A.E. Prévost and Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, Our production assistants are Celine Yoon and Fabianne Anderberg. Our music is by The Triangles. Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[pamphletstoinspire]

Novena to Saint Pancratius

Recited from: May 3rd through May 11th Feast Day: May 12th

it name from the Latin word “novem”

meaning “nine.” A novena can be either a private or public devotion in the Catholic Church to obtain special graces.

NOVENA TO SAINT PANCRATIUS

The Benefits of praying this Novena are: 1. good health and productive work; 2. success in work; and 3. being free from adversities and ill-intentioned persons.

Novena Prayer (Said daily before beginning novena prayers)

Act of Contrition:

Jesus, my God, how often have I offended Thee and, despite my firm promise never to sin again, how many times have I left Thy sweet company to follow the path of sin! Dearest Lord, I am sorry for my past negligence's. I regret this weakness of mine. I would be ashamed to promise again that I will not sin were it not for the confidence I have in Thy love and Thy mercy. I kneel in Thy presence, hopeful that despite so many past violations of Thy commandments, notwithstanding so many failures to correspond with Thy grace, I can still repent. I know that there is time to make a new beginning. With Thy aid I will strive to be faithful to Thee, with Thy assistance I will do my utmost to serve Thee faithfully - and always. Do Thou, dear Jesus, help me. Amen.

First Day

Our hearts have been created to love. It is God Whom you have to love most, more than all beings, more than all riches of the world, and in this way you will avoid many disappointments. St. Pancratius did it so and by it he obtained many favors from God. Ask him fervently for this grace, you will live peacefully and will obtain his protection in all your needs.

Prayer for each day to the Blessed Trinity, to whom St. Pancratius was greatly devoted.

1. Prayer to the Eternal Father:

I believe, Heavenly Father, all that Faith teaches, and in that faith I wish to live and die; through the intercession of St. Pancratius grant us good health to fulfill our duties.

Our Father... [Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.]

Hail Mary... [Hail Mary, Full of Grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.]

Glory be... [Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.]

2. Prayer to God the Son:

O good Jesus, grant me the virtue of Hope in your promises in the same measure that St. Pancratius always trusted in your Providence, so that I may, through his intercession, obtain work and success in all my undertakings.

Our Father... Hail Mary... Glory be...

3. Prayer to the Holy Spirit:

Grant me the virtue of Charity that I may love God above all things and my neighbor for the love of God, as St. Pancratius did. Through his intercession I hope to obtain this grace and that of being free from adversities and from ill-intentioned persons.

Our Father... Hail Mary... Glory be...

4. Concluding Prayer:

O glorious St. Pancratius, I beg thee to obtain for me all the graces that I need, but especially health and work, so that I may appear before thee to thank God for the favors I received through your powerful intercession. Amen

Second Day

(Novena Prayer above)

It is the law of God to love our neighbor, but only in as much as this love does not hinder us from loving God. St. Pancratius gave us the examples, thus leading many souls in the right path to heaven. Let us ask him from the depth of our hearts to give us the grace to love our neighbors as ourselves in order to love God better; in this way we shall obtain many graces from the glorious St. Pancratius.

(Prayer to the Blessed Trinity as on First Day above)

Third Day

(Novena Prayer above)

St. Pancratius possessed such a kind heart that he always sympathized with the poor and the unfortunate; for this reason he obtained so many graces from heaven. You too, should imitate this virtue and thereby obtain, through his intercession, many favors from God.

(Prayer to the Blessed Trinity as on First Day above)

Fourth Day

(Novena Prayer above)

The glorious St. Pancratius not only tried to be good himself but also strived to lead other souls to heaven, and for this reason God bestowed on him such a great power in behalf of those devoted to him. You too, should try to spread this devotion and to lead others to heaven. In this way you will gain many graces, especially those that you like to receive in this novena.

(Prayer to the Blessed Trinity as on First Day above)

Fifth Day

(Novena Prayer above)

There are many persons in the world who due to human respect, fail to serve God wholeheartedly. Be not one of them, but rather imitate St. Pancratius in defending always the truth and the good, for the sake of God. In this way, you will obtain all that you need through the intercession of St. Pancratius who is always ready to hear your prayer.

(Prayer to the Blessed Trinity as on First Day above)

Sixth Day

(Novena Prayer above)

One of the hardest things for the heart is to forgive those who have injured us. Ask St. Pancratius to obtain for you this grace when someone has offended you, since he forgave even those who martyred him. Be sure you will then be more at peace and will obtain for yourself and for your family graces that grow more than you can hope for.

(Prayer to the Blessed Trinity as on First Day above)

Seventh Day

(Novena Prayer above)

In this world, great patience is needed for everything, for more obstacles always come in our way than we expect. Imitate St. Pancratius who always conforms his will to the Holy Will of God, and thus succeeded in living happily and becoming a great saint amidst difficulties. Ask him fervently to help you, and he will grant you this grace and many others.

(Prayer to the Blessed Trinity as on First Day above)

Eighth Day

(Novena Prayer above)

Just as you treasure the picture of your parents and other dear persons, so also should you treasure the image of St. Pancratius, assured that from heaven above he sees you as you kneel before his altar. The greater the fervor with which you do it the more he will intercede for you before God that he may grant you the graces you want to obtain in this novena, for you as well as for your family.

(Prayer to the Blessed Trinity as above)

Ninth Day

(Novena Prayer above)

Now that you are ending this novena, you are encouraged and you feel a greater desire to love St. Pancratius and by it to make yourself worthy of attaining heaven where you will keep his company. Be sure that he waits for you there, and you will fulfill your duties faithfully, leading the life of a good Christian; and thus obtain his protection for yourself and for your family.

(Prayer to the Blessed Trinity as on First Day above)

Short Biography about Saint Pancratius

Saint Pancras was a Roman citizen who converted to Christianity, and was beheaded for his faith at the age of just 14 around the year 304. His name is Greek and literally means "the one that holds everything". From an early stage, Saint Pancras was venerated together with Saints Nereus and Achilleus in a shared feast day and Mass formula on 12 May. In 1595, 25 years after Pope Pius V promulgated the Tridentine Missal, Saint Domitilla was added also.

Since 1969 Saint Pancras is venerated separately, still on 12 May. He is, traditionally, the second of the Ice Saints.

The Ice Saints is a name given to St. Mamertus, St. Pancras, and St. Servatius in Flemish, French, Dutch, Hungarian, German, Austrian, Poli sh, Swiss and Croatian folklore. They are so named because their feast days fall on the days of May 11, May 12, and May 13 respectively. In Flanders St. Boniface of Tarsus is counted amongst the Ice Saints as well; St. Boniface's feast day falling on May 14. The period from May 12 to May 15 was noted to bring a brief spell of colder weather in many years, including the last nightly frosts of the spring, in the Northern Hemisphere under the Julian Calendar. The introduction of the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 involved skipping 10 days in the calendar, so that the equivalent days from the climatic point of view became May 22–25.

In Poland and the Czech Republic, the Ice Saints are St. Pancras, Saint Servatus and St. Boniface of Tarsus (i.e., May 12 to May 14). To the Poles, the trio are known collectively as zimni ogrodnicy (cold gardeners), and are followed by zimna Zośka (cold Sophias) on the feast day of St.Sophia which falls on May 15. In Czech, the three saints are collectively referred to as "ledoví muži" (ice-men or icy men), and Sophia is known as "Žofie, ledová žena" (Sophia, the ice-woman).

In Sweden, the German legend of the ice saints has resulted in the belief that there are special "iron nights," especially in the middle of June, which are susceptible to frost. The term "iron nights" (järnnätter) has probably arisen through a mistranslation of German sources, where the term "Eismänner" (ice men) was read as "Eisenmänner" (iron men) and their nights then termed "iron nights," which then became shifted from May to June.

Because he was said to have been martyred at the age of fourteen during the persecution under Diocletian, Pancras would have been born around 289, at a place designated as near Synnada, a city of Phrygia Salutaris, to parents of Roman citizenship. His mother Cyriada died during childbirth, while his father Cleonius died when Pancras was eight years old. Pancras was entrusted to his uncle Dionysius’ care. They both moved to Rome to live in a villa on the Caelian Hill. They converted to Christianity, and Pancras became a zealous adherent of the religion.

During the persecution of Christians by Diocletian, around 303 AD, he was brought before the authorities and asked to perform a sacrifice to the Roman gods. Diocletian, impressed with the boy's determination to resist, promised him wealth and power, but Pancras refused, and finally the emperor ordered him to be decapitated on the Via Aurelia, on May 12, 303 AD; this traditional year of his martyrdom cannot be squared with the saint's defiance of Diocletian in Rome, which the emperor had not visited since 286, nor with the mention of Cornelius (251-253) as bishop of Rome at the time of the martyrdom, as the most recent monograph on Pancras's texts and cult has pointed out.

A Roman matron named Ottavilla recovered Pancras's body, covered it with balsam, wrapped it in precious linens, and buried it in a newly built sepulchre dug in the Catacombs of Rome. Pancras’ head was placed in the reliquary that still exists today in the Basilica of San Pancrazio.

Devotion to Pancras definitely existed from the fifth century onwards, for the basilica of San Pancrazio was built by Pope Symmachus (498-514), on the place where the body of the young martyr had been buried; his earliest passio seems to have been written during this time. Gregory the Great gave impetus to the cult of Pancras, sending Augustine to England carrying relics of that saint and including his legend in Liber in gloria martyrum. In medieval iconography, Pancras was depicted as a young soldier, due to his association with the paired soldier saints Nereus and Achilleus. By the mid-nineteenth century, pious embroidery set Pancras's martyrdom in the arena among wild beasts, where the panther refrains from attacking and killing him until the martyr gives the beast permission.

The basilica of San Pancrazio fuori le Mura was built by Pope Symmachus (498-514), over the Catacombe di Ottavilla, where the body of the young martyr had been buried. In the 17th century, it was given to the Carmelites.

In Spain St. Pancras is referred to as San Pancracio. He is popularly venerated as the patron saint of jobs and health. He is offered parsley.[5] His image in statue form can be found in many bars, restaurants and other businesses.

Some of his relics found their way to England, which is why many of the nation's churches are dedicated to him; St Pancras Old Church is believed to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England.

Pancras is normally invoked against cramps, false witness, headache, and perjury. He is a patron saint of children.

Another Account of the Life of Saint Pancratius

Martyr; one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. According to tradition he was born in Phrygia, brought to Rome, and, professing his Faith, was beheaded on the Via Aurelia, when only fourteen, but in what persecution is doubtful. He is the avenger of per jurors. Numerous monuments to him exist throughout Europe, among them the church built by Pope Symmachus, c. 500, over his tomb. The first church built at Canterbury by Saint Augustine was named in honor of Saint Pancras as were many ancient churches all over England. The London borough of Saint Pancras gives its name to a railroad terminal in London. Relics in his own church at Rome, destroyed in 1798, head in the Lateran Basilica. Feast, Roman Calendar, 12 May.

Click below for:

Novena Pamphlet to Saint Pancratius

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/a84285_de1a989ed82f44ee9a93270b234168df.pdf

All Novena Pamphlets:

www.pamphletstoinspire.com/novenas

[pollenallergie]

Dualism: A Hemlock Grove Fanfiction by yours truly

Chapter Two

Can I Watch?

based on Hemlock Grove's second episode of its first season, which is called "The Angel"

part six/final part:

   "What?" Sawyer asked in disbelief.

   "What you did out there, that was you finally utilizing your powers and finally realizing that you even possess such powers," Their grandmother explained before coming to sit in between the two siblings on Sawyer's bed. The siblings simply sat there in silence, shell-shocked by what their grandmother was telling them, by what she was suggesting to be the truth, their truth. Their silence unintentionally served as a cue for their grandmother to continue, so she did just that.

   "They surfaced when you were thirteen, as most witches' gifts do, but your father, ever the naive disbeliever, forbid your grandfather and me from telling you about them; chalking our genuine concern up to dementia and out-dated superstition," Their grandmother said, beginning her long-winded explanation.

   "I've always struggled with keeping your gift a secret because, as a witch myself, I know how important the first years of womanhood are for a witch. Your grandfather, however, understood your father's naivety, explaining to me that it was of no one's fault but our own," Their grandmother continued before Sawyer finally piped up and asked a question.

   "What do you mean?" Sawyer asked causing Luke to scoff.

   "Don't tell me you're seriously buying into all of this. You're not, right?" He questioned aloud while internally questioning both his grandmother's and his sister's sanity.

   "Well," Their grandmother began, ignoring her grandson's doubts, "your father's grandparents, my mother, and father, died while I was a child, so they were never able to inform him; and as for your grandfather's parents, they were just as naive as your father. You see, they too believed that my belief in witchcraft was just the result of my belief in whatever seemingly-absurd, foreign superstitions I had been learned as a child growing up in Holland, so they weren't able to inform him either. This left all the pressure of educating him about my family's history on our shoulders, which wouldn't have been a problem normally, but it was for us."

   "Why's that?" Sawyer asked growing intrigued.

   "Don't entertain this bullshit," Luke warned his sister causing their grandmother to send a glare in his direction.

   "Well, We had planned on waiting to tell your father of the family's hereditary heirloom when he had children of his own rather than when he became of age, this is because we felt that it wasn't important for him to know at that time." Their grandmother explained.

   "Why not?" Sawyer asked causing her brother to roll his eyes out of annoyance.

   "Dear, that was because he's a male and my family's form of the genetic mutation only affected females. Also, because he was an only child with no sisters and because there was never any chance of him meeting his female cousins and aunts from my side of the family seeing as they all lived back in Holland. So, because of this, we held off on telling him and planned to do so for a while, well, that was until your mother told us she was pregnant with your brother, David. You see, we had always planned on telling him when he was expecting his first born, however, we got scared of how he would react and failed to inform him. Although, we were somewhat okay with our failure because we knew, from the sonogram pictures, that your parents were expecting a son. So, we decided that we would hold off a little while longer, just until he had a daughter. We had even gone so far as to plan that we would tell him on our deathbed, should he never have had a daughter, so that he could inform his children before they had any of their own. We were quite content with this plan so we stuck it, and six years later when your mother told us that she was pregnant with you, we had planned to abide by it; however, our fear once again held us back from doing so the night you came into the world. So we never did, and just one short year later, it overpowered us once again, preventing us from informing your parents when your brother was born, that's you, my dearest Dempsy," Their grandmother explained causing Luke to grimace as the sound of his birth-given name.

   "So when did you tell him?" Sawyer inquired.

   "Yeah, and does our mom know about all of your kooky, dutch-folklore-based, wizardry bull?" Luke asked, self-censoring as to not offend his grandmother more than he already had at that point.

   "I told him on the eve of your thirteenth birthday, but by then it was no use. You see, your grandfather and I were already of old age at this point and we had even both been diagnosed with a moderate form of dementia, which is quite common for seniors like myself to have, so you're father rationalized it all to being a figment of your grandfather and I's old minds, which he knew were prone to playing tricks on us and making us believe other forms of foolish nonsense to be the truth, and, thus, chose not to believe us," their grandmother said, responding to Sawyer's question first and then pausing shortly before responding to Luke's, "Also, to answer your brother's question, no, Dempsy, your mother does not know, she was already long gone at that point, as I'm sure you know; and it's not wizardry, dear, its witchcraft."

   "So you admit this witch stuff is both foolish and nonsensical?" Luke asked, referring to how she had said her old brain had made her believe, previously, that 'other forms of foolish nonsense' were true.

   "Of course it is, but it is still the truth nevertheless," Their grandmother replied.

   "If you don't believe me, then take a look for yourself," Their grandmother said, filling the silence that had loomed in the moments preceding her previous reply. She then handed Luke a worn, old book with a leather cover and a shiny gloss painted on the outer ridges of the pages inside, making it appear as if the pages were made of gold when really they were just normal, now faded pieces of paper, as one would discover when they opened it.

   "What's this?" Luke questioned.

   "It's a book, a family heirloom," Their grandmother explained.

   "What does 'puer salutem pythonissam' mean?" Sawyer asked, repeating aloud what was engraved on the front of the old, leather cover.

   "It means 'the life of a young witch' in Latin. This book was your great, great, great grandmother's Book of Shadows, well actually, it was her first one, she had many, each of them have different names that coincide with the contents written within them. She chose to title this one 'The Life of a Young Witch' because it served as her Book of Shadows during the beginning of her life as a witch, which, like with most, began when she was only thirteen," Their grandmother explained.

   "What's a Book of Shadows?" Sawyer asked.

   "Its like a witch's diary and personal spell-book all in one; a place where she can track her time, write of her day-to-day life, take notes on what she learns about the craft, as well as write down new spells, theories, or even tips and tricks that she comes up with during her lifetime," She explained.

   "Dempsy," Their grandmother began before being cut off by Luke.

   "I prefer to go by Luke," He reminded her.

   "Right, well, Lukas," she began once again and Luke grimaced at the sound of his middle name being used in place of the nickname it provided for him, the name Luke, which he always opted to go by over all else, "let Diana," it was now Sawyer's turn to grimace as the sound of her own birth-given name, " read it first, it's more important that she reads it right now, seeing as we need to make up for five years worth of lost time. Oh, and, Diana, please give the book to your brother when you have finished reading it."

   Their grandmother then got up and began to leave the room before suddenly stopping just a bit short and turning around to face the two siblings once again.

   "Neither of you will be going attending for the rest of the week. I'll call the office in the morning and tell them you'll both be staying home due to illness," She told them.

   "Why?" Luke asked as if he wasn't already being forced to miss school due to an actual illness.

   "So that I can teach you all about our family's history and begin to teach you the craft before your father gets home this weekend," Their grandmother explained.

   "You're going to teach it to both of us?" Luke inquired.

   "Yes."

   "Why?"

   "Because although the hereditary gifts only reside within the females of our family, the men being carriers of the gene but not actually honing the gifts, you, Lukas, can still be a witch. You can learn the teachings of the craft, practice them, and eventually become a witch yourself, it will just take you longer to become as powerful as your sister," She explained.

   "How much longer?" He asked.

   "Well, each witch is different, but on average it usually takes non-hereditary male witches ten years to reach the level of power that a hereditary female witch can reach in just over a year. However, you shouldn't lose hope, it shouldn't take you more than a few months to learn, practice, and eventually master essential magik, which is all it takes to be a true witch," Their grandmother explained.

   Their grandmother then sighed before saying, "That'll be enough, for now, my lovelies. The two of you, along with myself should be heading to bed, we'll need our rest for tomorrow, the first lesson tends to be quite challenging for a young witch, it'll certainly take a lot out of you."

   With that, the siblings' grandmother exited the room, going to her own bedroom and beginning to ready herself for bed, leaving the two teens back in Sawyer's room, alone in with their thoughts.

   "I'm gonna go take a melatonin supplement, like hell I'm gonna be able to sleep without one after all the shit she just told us," Luke said as he got up off the bed.

   "You want one?" He asked after making his way towards the exit, now leaning up against the door-frame.

   "No, I'm good, I'm probably not even gonna sleep; I might just stay up and binge-read whatever the fuck our witchy ancestor was up to a couple centuries ago," Sawyer said.

   "Oh, but, dearest Diana, young witch's must get plenty of rest before their first lesson, it can take a lot out of you," Luke said teasingly, mimicking their grandmother and causing Sawyer to laugh.

   "I wouldn't mess with her, you know. She might put hex you," Sawyer teased.

   "Ooh, I'm so scared," Luke replied sarcastically before exiting and walking down the hall towards the narrow, steep staircase, walking down it before making his way to the small closest just outside of their tiny yet quaint kitchen where their father keeps all things medicinal.

   In the meantime, Sawyer changed into her pajamas and turned off her bedroom lights, all except for lamp that sat on her bedside table, which she left on because she planned on using the dull light it admitted to help her read.

   "Goodnight," He called out to his sister as he walked back up the stairs and down the hall to his bedroom shortly after taking the tiny, little, white pill that was the melatonin supplement and washing it down with a glass of water.

   "Goodnight," Sawyer replied before making herself comfortable in her bed and beginning to read, spending only a little over an hour reading it before she had dozed off, sleeping soundly with the book cradled in her arms.

-

taglist: -no one yet-

[sazandorable]

tagged by @jaegerfker420 ~ i’ve done hundreds of these but this one still has cool fresh new questions

rules: answer 21 questions and tag 21 others yeah not gonna do that either. tagging uuuuhhhhh whoever my brain is broken today

nickname: “aza”, “saz” is slowly starting to catch amongst the discord people, and i get a few variations on my given name such as “so” or “soso”.

zodiac: gemini goat uwu unsurprising i think?

height: 167 cm / 5′6″

last movie: ..................... gods i think i STILL haven’t watched any movie since Kimi no Na wa ... almost a year ago?? i’m not much of a movie person

last google: “friendship ended with mudasir” i needed to check the exact phrasing ok.

song stuck in my head: half of The Mechanisms’s Once Upon A Time (In Space) album (GO LISTEN TO IT RN IT’S EXACTLY WHAT THE TITLE SUGGESTS)

other blogs: irrelevant

do i get asks: ye, and it’s been ages since i got any hate now!

blogs following: i’m following 324 and i’ve no idea who at least half of those are by now

amount of sleep: naturally, about 7/8 hours, but from ~1 to ~9. usually I actually get 5-6 because cass keeps me up :(

lucky numbers: 6 & 7 /boring

dream job: honestly i already have the it uvu (public librarian in a small but dynamic place). i wanted to be a writer, archaeologist, archivist/librarian at the British Museum, or a circus artist, but now I think I’m happier with my job that I would with any of those.

dream trip: Japan but like, 6 months and with unlimited money

favourite food: most Asian cuisines (I’m not a fan of sushi or Indian stuff that’s too spicy though, but I wish I could live my entire life on curries and bowls and noodles and soups and pakoras and —). Also the Thursday food truck fish burger&chips.

do I play any instruments: I learned the piano in my late teens but i stopped in uni. next time I move i’ll get my piano back and try and return to it ><

languages: french (native), english (accent hard), flemish dutch & japanese (conversational-ish / can struggle through it), and i used to be a strong conversational in german but i completely lost it. i’ve learned latin, greek, babylonian akkadian and hieroglyphic egyptian, but lost that almost entirely too.

favourite songs: lol. ok right now let’s go with — La Mauvaise Réputation (Georges Brassens)

aesthetic: water & air (sea, rain, clouds, snow, wide open spaces, mermaids & bird women, ...), things fading away, reaching out, fluffy comfy stuff, hufflepunk, rainbows and brights colors, childish & girly things, fuck-you-i’m-a-strong-independent-woman, and obnoxious glittery pink & rainbow unicorns with inspirational and/or rude quotes

[dilfhakyeon-moved]

Les amis hcs about... idk... languages they speak??

oh man there’s a lot of amis

Enjolras is a walking encyclopedia… but for languages, yknow ? he just knows so much

well he’s an educated guy from a well-off family, not knowing how to speak other languages would’ve been problematic

not like he cares but it’s also easy for him to learn

even latin and ancient greek bc that’s what prissy french people learn ( i’d know my grandmother learnt latin and so did i except he speaks it fluently and not me )

he refuses to speak these languages though. it’s not useful

Grantaire speaks italian.

fluently.

Enjolras has only admitted to liking hearing him speak italian when they were alone

Joly ended up hearing of it but he never bothered Enjolras with it

doesn’t really want conflict

speaking of Joly he’s really good at dutch and german

he’s often met with baffled stares when he speaks either language

because uh, stereotype of german sounding so rough and ugly

but he makes it sound so nice ?

also they often think he’s speaking german but he’s just speaking dutch and it’s funny to see them try to recognise words

and go like “hey you didn’t say it like that last time !”

Feuilly speaks very good english and he often uses it

and of course

he speaks polish

( Gavroche gets really excited when he does so because he thinks it sounds really fun )

Lesgles speaks spanish and catalan and it’s very important to me that you know that it’s literally the only fucking information you need and you know exactly why I decided so

Jehan Prouvaire is trying his best to learn all the romance languages

because they’re Pretty Languages

he’s right to do so

for some reason he’s best at portuguese so far

don’t ask he just is

Bahorel proves to be really good at… russian

he literally can’t register a word of english but russian is totally his field

Courfeyrac and Combeferre decided they’d make up their own language to spite the others and boy did it work

they let Gavroche in eventually

now they all speak that weird language that has no roots and means nothing to the others and it’s just great

Marius is… he knows english but isn’t that good at it

his accent is great but his vocabulary and knowledge of grammatical rules are a bit sad to hear

Bonus:

Eponine is rather fluent in spanish but she’d rather know italian

she tries to get Grantaire and Jehan to help her with it and it usually works

at least works better than asking Enjolras

at first

but eventually he accepted to help as well

as for Musichetta I honestly need to make my research for that because I don’t know enough about Africa and its countries’ cultures to make proper headcanons yet I don’t wanna bullshit it tbh

so if anyone more fit to make proper and respectful headcanons on that is willing to help

u can like

totally add to this post

it’d be greatly appreciated

I could make her know other languages too and since she’s supposed to be literary I’m sure she knows at least english and perhaps dutch or spanish or italian or any other language tbh but I don’t want to take her culture away either and maybe I’m overthinking it but you get me

does the fandom even hc her from any place in particular ?? I’m not deep into the fandom

but it’d be nice if she had like. Known Roots and thus a first language that isn’t European Unless Your Country Has Been Colonised^TM

I shouldn’t be adding that on this post bc it has nothing to do with it but

yeet !

[itsalburton]

The only reason Antifa is needed in the US is because being a Nazi is legal there

That’s one of the many things that irk me about people’s responses to Charlottesville: that they want to tack blame on another group for either provoking the Neo-Nazis to commit acts of violence or for making the Neo-Nazis feel the need to go out and protest with torch-mobs and hateful chants to begin with.

Some people are saying that ANTIFA threw the first punch and that’s what got the Neo-Nazis violent, causing the vehicular slaughter of an anti-racist protester by a Neo-Nazi protester.

Some people are blaming BLM or even the very insistence of Black Civil Rights Groups wanting civil rights for the Neo-Nazis’ counter-protesting and thinking Whites’ rights are at risk---saying that because civil rights groups identify as black and want more things, the Neo-Nazis formed to counter it in self-defense.

Some people are even going all over the place to lay blame on everyone BUT the Neo-Nazis for a Neo-Nazi protest that became violent, killing three and wounding over a dozen in a car-related attack on anti-racist protesters: they say Obama’s very election “made everything about race”, that the “cancerous feminism” and “leftist violence” (which they make claims of, but never prove) are to blame for the Neo-Nazis’ very presence and actions against innocents.

For me as a historian and future teacher personally, this is complete bullshit. The Ku Klux Klan (also in attendance) existed to attack Blacks long before the NAACP and BLM, the Nazi ideology existed long before Obama’s election and the modern-day Syrian Refugee Crisis, white supremacists wanting to ban all immigration existed well before 9/11 and the influx of undocumented Latin immigrants to the US (going back to late 1800′s Industrial Era Americans not wanting Irish or Italian immigrants, even as far back as the Founding Fathers like Ben Franklin not wanting Germans or Dutch in America). Nothing was done by any of those groups or people other than exist, but that hatred and/or greed within the White Guys just wouldn’t let them exist.

What these “both sides are wrong” people are doing is blaming acts of white supremacy on the very existence of non-white protesters---or even their existence, period. They really are blaming the victims and chosen targets of Neo-Nazis and Klansmen for the Neo-Nazis and Klansmen.

Imagine if 80 years ago, America looked at Nazi-occupied Poland and saw the injustice of the Nazis segregating Jews, the inhumane slum conditions of the Warsaw ghettos, Krystallnacht and the beginnings of the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps. Imagine them looking into the face of every Jew and telling them “you’re just as much a part of the problem”.

Imagine the home fire-bombing and assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the police crackdowns of 1950-1960′s civil rights protests---attack dogs, water cannons, men and women being assaulted and dragged out of restaurants (just because they were sitting there). But now imagine the Americans telling Blacks “if you weren’t out there protesting and talking about what you want from white people, this wouldn’t be happening”.

But this isn’t a new concept. It’s been in America, surrounding plenty of other issues. People talking about the Orlando Pulse massacre were honest-to-God saying “maybe if that couple didn’t do a public kiss, the homophobic terrorist wouldn’t have gunned-down 50 gay people”. Every school massacre has some Republican or NRA spokesperson saying “maybe if the teachers and students had guns, those children wouldn’t have been killed”. For every Black man (unarmed and being arrested for non-violent and/or minor offenses) being viciously beaten or shot dead, someone always pops-up and says “well, he shouldn’t have resisted the police”.

The very reason we’re all talking about the vehicular assault on the anti-racist protesters by a Neo-Nazi specifically is because so many far-right and anti-BLM/LGBT/NoDAPL people make memes about running-down protesters for blocking a street---but states are making laws to immunize the driver if they do drive right into a protest---and telling injured victims or killed victims’ families “if you weren’t blocking the street, you wouldn’t be hit”.

[jellalfernandezz]

The Origins of Fairy Tail Characters in the Real World Part 1: Team Natsu and Family (Possibilities)

So there’s this one thing that has been kind of bothering me recently. Where do the characters of Fairy Tail come from if they were from the real world? Feel free to insert any of your own opinion. 

So let’s get started.

By the way, this post is not 100% accurate, and may contain spoilers

I’m using this website called “Behind the Name”. If anyone wants to check their name origins, I highly suggest this.

This is only part one, and took a long time to make. So part two may take even more time.

First of all, I think we should start off with the main character, Lucy.

Lucy Heartfilia

The name “Lucy” comes from the word “Lucia”, used as a name since the middle ages in England. This name has become a common name in North America and western Europe.

The first part of “Heartfilia”, is fairy simple. Just like in English, it meas heart. 

The name “Philia” is similar in sound to “filia”, the latter part of Lucy’s last name. Philia comes from Greece, meaning love. This name also appears in England, after the 17th Century. 

So, to sum it all up, the origins of the name “Lucy Heartfilia” came from England. However, the English took filia from the Greeks. 

Lucy is most likely to be English.

Layla Heartfilia

Heartfilia is already explained above, so I won’t bother explaining again.

Layla is a name with Arabic origin, meaning “night”. It has then been adapted into an English name, ranked 30th and 35th of England, Wales, and the United States of America. 

At the time of choosing the name, Layla most likely has been completely utilized as an English name.

Thus, Layla would also be English.

Jude Heartfilia

Again, Heartfilia is explained above.

Jude is both a masculine and a feminine name, but since this particular Jude is a male, I’m only going to analyze the masculine part. 

Jude is a biblical name that derived from Judas of the Apostles (The one that betrayed Jesus for 30 silver coins). Since Jesus was Jewish at the time, Jude can be concluded to be likely a Jewish name as well

However, Jews are spread around the whole world, with a central location of Israel. Jews could be anywhere around the world.

Therefore, Jude may have been a Jew that has taken the Heartfilia name.

Natsu Dragneel

“Natsu” is Japanese. As a lot of you already know, Natsu means summer in Japanese. But what does “Dragneel” originate from? Obviously it wouldn’t be Japan like his first name, but then what ethnicity would he be?

Natsu’s name is very complicated. We first have to separate “Dragneel” into two different parts. “Drag” and “Neel

The name “Drag” is not actually a name, so thus we have to see what names are similar. “Drago” and “Draga”. These two name come from “Dragus”, meaning precious. Dragus comes from Slavic countries, and is a Croatian, Serbian, and a Slovene name. 

“Neel” however, is a Dutch name, short for Cornelius or Cornelia. But since Neel is part of another name, this explanation doesn’t make sense.The name Neel is also part of an Indian language, meaning Blue. This causes even further confusion, as it does not fit with the rest of the name. The other origin of Neel is from Nordic countries. This is much simpler as it the origin is closer to the origin of “Drag”.

Natsu = Japanese, Drag = Slavic, Neel = Nordic

Natsu Dragneel may have been from Eastern or Central Europe that has adopted a Japanese name

Zeref Dragneel

Now I have no choice but to go on to Zeref because I don’t want to explain the whole “Dragneel” thing again.

The last name is already explained above.

Now, I only have to explain the “Zeref” part.

A lot of you also know that “Zeref” sounds like Seraph. So I decided to trace back the origins of Seraph. Seraph’s origins come from Latin and Greek, but has been adapted to Judaism and Christianity. It has been used more often in Hebrew, with the plural being Seraphim.

So Zeref is confusing too, but if we take the same route as Natsu’s name, we can guess that it is an Eastern or Central European name, with Zeref being either Christianity or Judaism. More likely Judaism.

Gray Fullbuster

There isn’t really much that has to be said about Gray’s name. It’s all in English. But which English-speaking country? 

After conducting some research AKA going on behindthename.com (Seriously, it’s a good naming website)

Both “Gray” and “Buster” are American names, which leaves Full left undetermined. But since two-thirds of the name’s origin is already determined, let’s just say that Gray is from the United States of America

Erza Scarlet

For the sake of the manga, I’ll do research on both “Scarlet” and “Belserion”

But Erza is the first name, so that comes first. The name “Erza” isn’t actually a popular name. But it does sound similar to “Ersa”. “Ersa” is a word coming from the Ancient Greek. It could also come from “Ursus” or “Ursa”. Both of which are Slovene. 

Scarlet, however, is an English word. But if we trace back to the origins to the word Scarlet, we would find “Scarlata” being present in Latin. Latin, of course, is an old Italian language.

We could just end her name analysis here by saying she came from Southern Europe, but since her real name is Belserion, we have to analyze that too.

The closest name that I can find to “Belserion” is “Belserin”. Belserin apparently came from around Germany, as some people with the last name “Belserin” are currently found to be in Germany. 

Therefore, we can guess by saying that Erza is a South European that came from Germany, similar to how Irene/Eileen came from Ishgar to Alverez. 

Irene/Eileen Belserion

Again, I don’t want to explain family last names again, so here’s Erza’s family.

Irene is an English name, but has been adapted from the Greek. It has seen more usage in England and English speaking countries

Eileen came from both Ireland and England, so that clears up a lot.

Add on the description of Belserion, and we can estimate that Irene/Eileen would be from Western Europe

Wendy Marvell

Well, Wendy is a common English name, used the most in the United States of America. It originated from England, just like a lot of the above characters. There isn’t really much to say about popular English names, so... sorry for the disappointment

Marvell is similar to marvelous, with only four letters different. So I traced back the origins of the word marvelous, and resulted with the English and French hybrid of the word. But Marvel is also an African-American name. 

The most common Origin of both Wendy and Marvell is English, so we can guess that was where the name originated from.

Afterthoughts

I spent so much time of the long weekend to make this post. I haven’t even done any homework yet and it’s stressing me out. Thanks to you guys, I eased my stress a little. The homework is due tomorrow T^T

THANKS FOR YOUR TIME!!!

[nylonsandlipstick]

K but what if Ben Barnes is part Hispanic? I'm a quarter ethnic Russian and I don't get offended if I see non-ethnic Russian actors playing ethnic Russians. It's acting, that's literally what you do. You act as someone else. That's like saying I can't play a Sami girl because I'm only a quarter Norwegian, not full. I get your point and please do correct me if I'm misunderstanding but it's just acting? You can choose to be offended or you can choose not to be offended.

Also I don’t mean to hate on you at all and I hope this doesn’t get taken that way, but what about the Caspian in the BBC teleseries? I don’t think he was Latino…

It’s no worries! It’s a sincere question from what I gather and there’s no need to be afraid to ask.

So the problem with having the Telmarines be portrayed as Latinos (as essentially that’s what they were going for) is that it was a conscious decision made by the film-makers and they didn’t follow completely through with it. Ben isn’t some guy who’s part Hispanic. If he were Hispanic, I would have applauded him and the directors for casting an actual Hispanic or Spaniard for the lead Telmarine. The books never stated what ethnicity/race the Telmarines were so it’s all up to the imagination which is why the BBC Caspian is non-Latino white. The film-makers imagined Spaniards/Hispanics/Mediteranneans for the Telmarines and that’s what they should have given us. Ben Barnes has stated that he’s very English and his only outside blood being Dutch. Never has he stated that he’s from Latin America.

And the fact that Ben is very much not Latino is upsetting because us Latinos don’t see ourselves represented anywhere and when we are, we’re either represented as stereotypes or if we’re represented in a good light, it’s very rarely played by an actual Latino. It’s not about “well, I don’t like that this non-Latino is playing a Latino”, it’s that I don’t like that the job that a Latino could have had was given to a non-Latino. It’s no secret that Hollywood purposely omits most races and ethnicities from the big screens and when they’re included it’s as offensive stereotypes or they’re heavily sidelined for the main white characters. To see an actual Latino on screen is rare, to see them representing themselves is even rarer, as many of us that are light enough to pass as white or Afro-Latino are just written off as white or black. Which is why it angers me that the film-makers decided to cast many Mediterranean, Spanish, and Latino actors to play the supporting Telmarines yet the lead Telmarine is a non-Latino white man in a tan and an accent. That’s why Latinos have been forced to keep to themselves and are very rarely able to break through Hollywood and have to remain in productions for Telemundo or for local films.

This all comes from Hollywood’s long history of erasing Latinos and acting like we’re drug lords, maids, prostitutes/sex symbols, and gang members. If we had been properly represented from the beginning and we had seen ourselves constantly represented, I definitely would have let it slide, especially since Latinx/Hispanic is an ethnicity such as Sami, Russian, Sicilian, etc and race is a different thing. But we’ve had a history of being misrepresented/under-represented which is why we need more Latinos in non-Latino films to be portrayed properly and by actual Latinos. I mean, we make up 27% of moviegoers, we deserve to be able to look at the screen and be able to say “Hey, that actor is from the same city my abuela grew up in.”

I hope I explained this well! If you still have questions you’re more than welcome to ask only please do so politely, although you seemed to do so just fine in your asks :)