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3liza · 2 years ago

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I feel very defensive about the "goth is bougie" shit because it is historically incorrect, yes, but also and more personally, because it just erases the generations of goth kids who grew up in trailer parks and project housing or just straight up homeless, helping each other out.

it's specifically such a supportive subculture for poor and neglected kids and I really fucking hate that this has been revised and erased. juggalos and goths are very culturally close and many subcultural people are both, and juggalos have the same (and, I would argue, even better defined) culture of collective support. the Skids in Letterkenny are not made up for the show, that's just a real type of rural subcultural person. this has also been forgotten in the interim but in the 90s and 00s we didn't even really refer to OURSELVES as "goths" very much except in a joking way. goths had regional endonyms (like "skids" or "trenchies") even if they could all go to a convention or a club in a city and in that context be all called "goths" together, once they went back home they would go back to being whatever the locals called them or whatever they called themselves. this is a whole linguistics and sociology subtopic that's out of scope for a Tumblr post but is sort of related.

my point is that people who wore actual rags, and sharpie instead of nail polish, and wet n wild eyeliner instead of black lipstick, and dyed their hair with markers or food coloring or kool-aid, were and are the core of the goth scene. the majority of the pictures the mallgoth blogs are posting are from catalogs, fashion shows, costume events, yearly balls and fetes like Wave Gothik Treffen, and other places where people save up literally all year, or many years in a row, to put together ONE outfit. and there's nothing wrong with that, personally I'm proud and pleased that our hard work is being recognized and preserved. but just like formal studio photographs from the Victorian era, it is not representative of the daily or even weekly (for clubs) reality of people in the scene, some of whom were completely out of goth clothing during the day or week just to fit in at work or sometimes just to get along without being bothered at home by family members who thought the Cure was Satanic.

the people who RUN the scenes, the promoters and DJs and gogo dancers and independent designers and people who run the mailing lists and websites, the people who organize the room parties at conventions, and yes even most of the original Burning Man camps like Thunderdome, they mostly live in poverty. especially if they're young. when people organize club nights and shows, they're lucky if they break even. I wasn't aware of any of this until I started working at DNA Lounge in San Francisco, which hosts one of the oldest goth nights in the country, Death Guild. I got to know the owner of DNA well enough to find out about the financial reality of the entire scene, even the people who own the means of production and the actual property in this case, and it's not lucrative. I mean, it sometimes is, if you're running a bar for normal people and have investment captain etc, but the majority of legit subculture economics is just barely breaking even. every single event is 90% volunteer labor.

the issue of labor is maybe the confusing thing for the zoomers who are confused. goth outfits take actual physical work. maybe the Aspirational Spectacle of Labor that makes up most of TikTok has made it appear unreal to the audience rather than something you can just sit down and do?

it takes forty seconds to make the fishnet tights into a shirt. you don't need instructions, you really can just look at it and figure it out. then you think, hm, if I can make fishnets into a shirt I wonder what other things I can turn into something else. your brain will amaze you. my mom would save her tights from her formal work outfits for me when they got holes or whatever and I would just go crazy with scissors and safety pins. lots of young designers are getting attention for this layered, tights-n-pins look at the moment and it really is a fantastic aesthetic but I wonder if people think there's something special about the people who make these clothes? there isn't. you can just do it at home while you watch trashy youtubes.

one time, around 2008 or so, @gothiccharmschool and I were at the photoshoot for tabletop RPG Unhallowed Metropolis. we were there with a bunch of local goths to all make the pictures for this book together. we had all brought tons of our costumes from home to cobble together outfits for the book illustrations, and there was a moment when I just handed Jilli a pile of black skirts and some pins and said hey Jilli, could you please make me up a bustle skirt for this model real quick while I shoot these other models? and of course she did, and they were beautiful, because she knows exactly what she's doing, and because that's all a bustle is: it's a way of bunching up a skirt with another skirt. you can do it at home. you don't need instructions or to hire a seamstress or watch a video. you can just look at something and say hm does it look like a bustle? let's drape it and play with it and pin whatever works. and then you wear it for the photoshoot, or to the club!!! and then next week you pin it a different way and it's a cape instead and you wear it again!!!!!!!

#blog #goth history #goth #looking like absolute shit at the club #as is my sacred right

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firawren · 2 months ago

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Austen adjectives cheat-sheet

I made a venting post about the struggle to not use superlatives in Jane Austen fanfic, but now I want to more seriously share my cheat-sheet of Austen adjectives with you, for use when trying to write in Austen’s style.

Some of these words have changed from how we typically use them nowadays, at least in US English (my native language); I’ve marked these with an asterisk * so you can pay special attention and be careful how you use them.

Please note that I’m no linguist or literary scholar; this is just a casual collection I pulled together for personal use writing fanfic, and is based on my own interpretations of Austen’s wording. I make no claims for this being academically robust, flawless, comprehensive, or nuanced. Again, it’s just a cheat-sheet.

Adjectives:

Mid: tolerable (do not use fine!)

Good: good, nice, well, pleasant, agreeable, fine*, amiable, pleasing, lovely, estimable

Really good: very good, exceeding(ly) good, very agreeable, delightful, excellent, splendid, first-rate, exemplary, exquisite, capital (do not use great!)

Satisfying: satisfactory*, acceptable*, gratifying

Sufficient: satisfactory, acceptable

A lot/very: great*, exquisite*, amazing(ly)

Strong/intense: great*, impressive*

Impressive: great*, glorious, magnificent, remarkable, extraordinary, awful* (do not use impressive!)

Important/weighty: important, great*, remarkable*, awful*

Interesting: interesting, remarkable

Surprising: surprising, amazing*, wonderful*, incredible*, exceptional*, remarkable, extraordinary

Scary: terrific*, tremendous*, horrid, terrible*, awful*

Bad: bad, poor, disagreeable, unpleasant, unbecoming, grievous, direful, ill*

Really bad: very bad, wretched, dreadful, horrible, horrid, odious, despicable, terrible (do not use awful!)

(Apologies to Mr. Tilney: though “good” was not the primary meaning of “nice” in Austen’s work, it was one of the meanings of it in her work!)

Superlatives not used in any Austen novels: superb, breathtaking, fabulous, fantastic, marvelous, phenomenal, stunning, spectacular, outstanding, supreme, sensational, stellar, top-notch, awesome, divine (divine is used but only with its literal meaning, never as a generic superlative)

Also of note: quite vs rather in Austen’s time aligns pretty well with the modern-day US English usage and not with the modern-day UK usage, generally speaking.

Quite = very

Rather = somewhat, kind of

Further reference:

The Jane Austen Word List: every single word used in Austen's works

Austen Word Frequencies: per novel, character, etc.

Etymonline: dictionary with historical meanings

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: digitized version of an actual 18th century dictionary

#linguistics #writing #regency #jane austen #fanfic #jaff #reference

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unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240 · 1 year ago

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To follow up on my Hosanna poll, I think before things go any further, it'd be good to actually explain and define it. I was initially going to wait until the end of the poll, but it seems that google is giving people a lot of bad and/or conflicting answers and I'd rather people walk away with the correct information.

So! Hosanna is an anglicized version of the Hebrew words "hosha na" [הושע נא or as a contraction הושענא]. Hosha na is a little enigmatic and hard to translate, but the simplest translation is probably "save us, please." It's traditionally used as an exclamation to G-d to rescue us, but it also has shades of being a triumphant shout (the implication being confidence that G-d will save us.)

Jews say "hoshanot" (the plural of hosha na) as part of our traditional Sukkot liturgy, and is something we do still today.

For us, the multi-faceted meaning of the root word allows us to have multiple layers of meaning. During Sukkot, we start praying for rain in its proper season and amounts, and we shake the lulav and etrog as part of these processions and liturgy. On Hoshana Rabba [the "great hoshana"], the last day of Sukkot, we process around the bimah (front lectern) seven times as a completion of our season of repentance and our starting of the new year with abundant blessings.

My siddur (prayer book) Lev Shalem has this as an explanation and translation:

[Image ID is of the Lev Shalem siddur, pages 382 & 383 - I tried hard to find a pdf of this that would be readable using a screen reader, but the versions I'm finding cut off at pg. 376 at the latest. If anyone has bandwidth to type this up, I would greatly appreciate it]

For the curious, here is a recording of the Hoshanot liturgy and procession:

youtube

Christians mostly know the word from the gospels and hymns.

Here is what Wikipedia says about its use in Christianity:

Historical meaning

Since those welcoming Jesus were Jewish, as of course Jesus himself was, some would interpret the cry of "Hosanna" on the entry of Jesus in its proper meaning, as a cry by the people for salvation and rescue.

Christian reinterpretation

"Hosanna" many interpret as a shout of praise or adoration made in recognition of the messiahship of Jesus on his entry into Jerusalem

It is applied in numerous verses of the New Testament, including "Hosanna! blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lᴏʀᴅ!" (Matthew 21:9,15; Mark 11:9–10; John 12:13), which forms part of the Sanctus prayer; "hosanna in the highest" (Mark 11.10); and "hosanna to the Son of David" (Matt 21:9). These quotations, however, are of words in the Jewish Psalm 118. Although not used in the book of Luke, the testimony of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is recorded in Luke 19.

In church music

The "Hosanna Anthem", based on the phrase Hosanna, is a traditional Moravian Church anthem written by Bishop Christian Gregor of Herrnhut sung on Palm Sunday and the first Sunday of Advent. It is antiphonal, i.e. a call-and-response song; traditionally, it is sung between the children and adult congregation, though it is not unheard of for it to be done in other ways, such as between choir and congregation, or played between trombone choirs.

The bottom line:

Jews and Christians have different connections, associations, and meanings attached to this word as expressions of our different theologies and texts. The word is derived from a Hebrew word and was created by Jews and is still used by us today. (Like literally today - we are currently in the middle of the Sukkot festival.) Christians changed the meaning to fit within their own context, and pronunciation of the word evolved with linguistic drift over time. In the same way that there's not a reason to pitch a fit over saying Jesus rather than Yeshua, there's no compelling reason to change hosanna back to hosha na; if anything, the distinction helps make it clear that it's effectively a different word and concept from ours.

On the other hand, I do think Christians ought to know the original meaning of the word if they're going to use it. To only ever know their version when it was derived from ours is yet another small way of playing into supercessionism by erasing and replacing the Jewish context of things that were originated in Judaism that Christians have embedded in Christianity. While the Christians of today cannot unwind the supercessionism of Christian history, they *can* choose to understand their present Christianity in ways that do not play into supercessionism and that respect the Jewish community of today.

I hope this was helpful and gives folks a new perspective on an obscure Hebrew word!

#jumblr #christian #every hour is theology hour around here apparently

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xclowniex · 1 month ago

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I made the mistake of being on tik tok, which means I've come across more antisemitism.

This is old so definitely not new but since it's being brought up again like it is around any jewish holiday, I want to speak about palestinian jews.

Palestinian jews do exist, but not in the way that a lot of antizionists claim.

Most antizionists claim that Palestinian jews have lived in Palestinian for centuries before modern day Israel. Which is true in a historical context, but not in the modern lense antizionists put on it.

Palestinian jews historically were not jews who were of arab/Palestinian descent, they were jews who lived in Palestinian. It is a common phrasing to call a jew (insert nationality) jew. Eg, Israeli jew, amercian jew, Australian jew, etc.

Palestinian jews of the past, were 99% non arab jews (well talk about the 1% later). Palestinian was used to refer to nationality, which linguistically it still does as Palestinian is not an ethnicity, it is the name of a country so therefore nationality. Arab is an ethnicity, which Palestinian are. Palestinian jews of the past were jews who lived in Palestine. This doesn't happen anymore, as for years, jews have not been allowed to live in Palestine. Yep, this also does include antizionist jews. The Palestinian jews of the past, moved to Israel when it was formed and became Israeli jews, with some moving elsewhere becoming various nationality jews. Different people have different views on calling yourself a nationality once you move away, and every view is an individual choice. I dated someone who immigrated to NZ from Sri Lanka and whilst they considered sinhala to be their ethnicity, nationality wise they considered themselves to be a kiwi. I also know people whose parents moved to NZ from elsewhere and they also consider themselves to have dual nationality. Both ways are valid.

Well, what about that 1% I mentioned?

There is a way for Palestinian jews to exist in a modern context, well actually two ways.

The first is the obvious, through conversion. Someone who is Palestinian can convert to Judaism and therefore be a Palestinian jew. Now this can't happen in Palestine as no jews live in Palestine so therefore no rabbi which is required for someone to convert. However diaspora Palestinians can convert and I do know a Palestinian convert.

The second way is for a Palestinian and a jew to have a child. Some people who fall into this category may considered themselves to just be Jewish, some may consider themselves to be both jewish and Palestinian. The choice is up to the individual and both are correct and fine.

Now I do want to say that my 1% figure is not at all based in data and is simply for thr narrative as I do not have any actual data, but please do note that it was not common. If anyone does have any data sets for that time period, please send them I love looking at data.

But case in point, there never were nor currently are, tons and tons of Palestinian jews in the way antizionists view them.

The idea that there was, honestly is just antisemitic. The reason why is because these people don't actually care about actual Palestinian jews who exist today, they just use them as an argument to erase jewish indigenousness, as they often believe that the only indigenous jews are Palestinian jews who non Palestinian jews "massacred" (which is a total lie).

And I do think that we do need to unite as jews about how we view Palestinian jews. In people's quest to fight that antisemitism rhetoric, they often erase Palestinian jews as a whole. Which is super messed up because as we already established, some do exist and they deserve to be recognized, not shoved under the rug for arguments sake.

#antisemitism #jumblr #israel #i/p #jewblr #palestine #i/p war #gaza

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openphrase123 · 6 months ago

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hey hi hi i've read everything of curtain call (except, obviously, what hasn't been posted yet) and i HAVE to ask you to share your lost country/skywatcher language thoughts so i can devour them immediately please.

hiiiiiiii so like 90% of the language worldbuilding i did for curtain call was like. very simple sentences and words since i didn't want to make an entire conlang for this fanfiction. what i have written in-fic would fall apart in two seconds if i tried to expand it to any of the lines outside of what i wrote. HOWEVER i have a lot of thoughts about how it WOULD work if it had the capacity to expand outward

putting under a readmore both for curtain call spoilers and because this is going to get long and insufferable for anyone except ME

also if you're not reading curtain call. this is still a fun little analysis about how siffrin's native language influences their behavior. you might have fun with it wheeeee just know that the actual language i'm talking about is not canon. i made it up.

disclaimer: i speak a couple of languages but my knowledge of languages is VERY limited to what i know. so you're going to see a lot of instances of me calling back to japanese or other english dialects. other languages exist and also have these features but i'm just not gonna say anything if i'm not sure of what i'm saying. if you are interested in these concepts in a more academic setting i am NOT the place to find that

second disclaimer: in curtain call, the name for qilaksut comes from greenlandic/kalaalisut which is an endangered indigenous language. this is an open invitation to go learn who, historically, lived in and supported the land you're living on. consider supporting them whatever way you can.

number ONE. dude is it that serious??

nah.

again, i built this for like ten sentences out of a 100k+ fic. so like. there's some inconsistencies, there's some weird stuff. and i know i could have just written all of the curtain call qilaksut in english but italicized, there would have been nothing wrong with that. but i did not because i thought it would be a good exercise in character exploration

because the language you speak has some measure of how you act and carry yourself in the world. (sorry elizabeth if you're reading this. i'm not going full noam chomsky i swear i don't believe in linguistic determinism i'm using this as a literary device) and since siffrin is the only speaker of the forgotten language we see (loop never engages with that in-game as much) and i was a little bit like. okay. why is he like that. how much of that is siffrin and how much of that is the home they don't know

in odile's friendquest she remarks that she only finds similarity in herself within vaugarde because vaugarde is so welcoming to travelers. however odile never went to vaugarde until she was an adult - siffrin presumably lived on the island until he was a teenager, and your personality is fairly Formed by then (at least enough for people to put iterations on it in adulthood) so as much as i could have gone the route of "siffrin it's okay that you don't see yourself in your past" i thought for the themes of this fic it made more sense to go "oh THAT'S why siffrin is Like That"

so as you're reading through this: yes i'm worldbuilding language. but MOSTLY as a siffrin character study. okay! okay.

number TWO. situational meanings.

so ✦‧₊ is "you" and ✧‧₊ is "me/i". but "hello" is ❇✧ which - hang on, isn't that the word for universe and me? no, actually, there's no pronoun suffix (‧₊ denotes when a person is being talked about) so in this context ✧ means "inside". which means ✦ means "outside" in some contexts.

(but harrie, why does "hello" mean "inside universe"?? well i imagine it's the difference between older medieval greetings and the modern "hi". languages morph and drift. this kind of just suggests that without me having to write an Entire Language Family Background. probably a shortening of some corny shit like "within the universe i find you" or whatever. semantic drift.)

and part of the reason i did that was for unicode constraints - there are only unicode characters that look like stars. but the other half is because in japanese and i THINK also in chinese each character has a few different meanings. take 本, in japanese. it has a lot of meanings on its own but let's look at it in situational context. 本棚 is bookshelf. 本物 means real. 本土 is mainland.

so in qilaksut i think these kinds of multi-use words are common. ERGO. why siffrin has trouble thinking of very situational words in vaugardian. if your native language is built up of tangential mnemonic connections, of course you're going to have trouble remembering the word kiln!!

number THREE. reduplication and repetition

take the phrase "✦‧₊ »»⟢" from ch10. in my head, » means "fast" and doubling it gives you "really fast". this happens in AAVE (e.g. "he's RICH rich") and japanese (there is an entire kanji expressly used as a repetition mark so that you don't have to draw complicated kanji twice, it's 々(noma) and as an example, person is 人 but people is 人々)

reduplication is slightly different from this but i think it shows up for words like »», where you're not literally saying the word twice but the vowels double themselves. kind of in a trilling way. i actually say this in inutile and not curtain call but i think the Siffrin Accent wavers a lot and feels like a twinkling star. because i think it's cute

alsooo repetition. wish craft. do u see the vision

number FOUR. pronouns and clusivity

i don't get into the he/she/they or any other third person pronouns in the fic because. well i think the lost country would go so hard on pronouns. there are child pronouns. adult pronouns. pronouns denoting somebody's job or status. hell loop is SO casual about offering to use the "royal we" i genuinely think pronoun usage in the lost country is more tied to interpersonal relationships than gender. but of course that plays a role too

because i think there's a huge amount of gender concoction you could brew in there. i think it would be really fun if siffrin uses he/they because in qilaksut siffrin is mainly referred to as the neutral pronoun mashed together with the masculine one. i think that would be fun.

and then for funsies. clusivity. i definitely think there is a difference between "we" (me+one other person, excluding you) and "we" (me+others+you) in qilaksut. would be fun if this is why siffrin automatically assumes they're getting excluded from things. "where is the vaugardian inclusive we and why has nobody said it to me???"

number FIVE. structure

i don't have a lot of Full Sentences in qilaksut in the fic but in general it follows the pattern place - > noun - > adjective - > verb. and you might be going "harrie, you weeb, that's japanese again" well. i didn't want it to be like french or english. and that's the one i know. so. shut up!!!!

"well why can't it be the same syntax as vaugardian then?" i'm glad you asked. i wanted it to feed again more into the idea that siffrin is more susceptible to getting "lost" in a conversation. hard to focus when your normal syntax anchors are not there!!

but at the same time. i write siffrin as a polyglot in curtain call. they're pretty equipped to learn and absorb new languages. once you learn a second language, in general, your third/fourth/fifth gets easier

number SIX. things i can't do in the fic except for once or twice because of unicode restrictions

well i could do it ONCE. with two sentences that are coming up in tomorrow's chapter: but i think in qilaksut writing, changing the rotation/orientation of the word also changes the meaning. slight spoilers for tomorrow's chapter but siffrin has two ways of saying "love you" for two different people - for odile, it's ❥✦‧₊ and for isabeau it's ❤✦‧₊

this isn't for any particular reason, i just think it's neat in the context of how i do names and titles for the rest of the fic. getting called different names based on your relationship to somebody, using altered terms of endearment for someone. two extra rotations of the heart could exist in theory so one of them is probably "loving your kid" and the other issss i dunno. maybe a closer platonic love nearer to a qpr or something. or what you use for your parents/guardians or your betters. i didn't think that far!!

also word opposites. ✷ doesn't have another version with just the lines, but that means "yes" and i think a hollowed out version of that would mean "no." obviously the ✦/✧ shift goes here too. and i think the inverse of ✪ (little) would mean big. but i couldn't find those in unicode so they do not exist in this fic oops

if you made it this far into the post. hi. thank you for reading :) that was probably a lot more than you were asking for. i won't apologize. anyway this post doesn't even TOUCH how i do name stuff in the fic but that also feeds into this. (and the name stuff was something i took out of an old dnd campaign anyway) (of which i have a DIFFERENT altered version for my original fiction but shhhh)

#isat #thank you for asking :)#i'll always extrapolate on some bullshit i made up for a fic AKDJFLSADKJF #i think about this stuff Too Much

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la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre · 1 year ago

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Jewish-Celtic Similarities

So I know I'm late to this, but a while back @nattitavi asked me to please tell more about Jewish-Celtic similarities. This is something that I, too, have some interest in. For context, I'm an American Jew with some Celtic ancestry (my dad's family is """Irish""") and am now living in a Celtic country (not Ireland-don't want to say where exactly I live on the internet). Unfortunately, I don't know of any "scholarly" resources on this topic, but there are some similarities I can think of off the top of my head and have heard brought up in discussions:

Both are communal cultures in which the people help each other out.

Historical dependence on sheep

Indigenous peoples who take responsibility for nature

Long history of persecution and being colonized

Many Celtic rock groups have a lot of Jewish fans and sometimes Celtic rock songs happen to have Jewish themes. For example, to me at least, the song "In a Big Country" by Big Country is clearly about Shoah survivors making new lives for themselves in Israel (but then shouldn't it be called in a small country?), "The Storm", also by Big Country, despite explicitly being about the battle of Culloden just makes me think of 7/10 whenever I listen to it since then, and "Blood" by Dropkick Murphys seems like a good song for Purim (or really any holiday that's "they tried to kill us, we survived").

Using the tree of life as a symbol (although that exists in other cultures, too).

There are some linguistic similarities between Celtic and Semitic languages! I actually do have a source for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAAmwtdP1bE

Could the Celts be one or more of the lost tribes? There's some speculation about this that's in the realm of conspiracy theories, but I think it's possible.

#jumblr #celtic #Ireland #Israel #uk #scotland #wales #the betrayal #questions answered #ישראבלר #history

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jellolegos · 5 months ago

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you mentioned that palaeography in hotd can be considered your special interest, yet the only thing i know about it is that it studies writing in historical context

SO please tell me more?? was it high valyrian that sparked the interest? if it was, what moment did? and has grammar changed over the years? does it have an interrelation with cultural events? i will read literally anything you would like to ramble about

genuine curiosity of a linguistics major

and, cannot miss a chance to say, your art is absolutely utterly stunning :)

thank you in advance!

Oh of course! My apologies, I think I may have been misleading, I've mostly been interested in the type of script they are using in the show. Unfortunately I've always been a bit more numerate rather than literate (as I am certain you'll pick up on as you read my writing, it has never been my strong suit) so honestly I haven't a clue about linguistic aspects! But, I believe the creator of the languages in the HotD/GoT universe is actually on here, his blog is: @dedalvs :)

Mostly what I meant by 'Palaeography' is since we have such a lovely opportunity to see book pages in HOTD I've been very much interested in what script model the artist was attempting to imitate.

I, I think like a lot of other hobbyists of niche interests, am always interested to see what gets translated from real life to screen. Just as I'd imagine you're interested in the conlang aspects of HotD! So I've been really interested to see what they're trying to do with the books in HotD. Without futher ado...

Hotd, Palaeography, and a Needlessly Thorough Examination of a Manuscript Page

All manuscripts I talk about here have clickable digitised links, so if you want to take a peep beyond what I talk about, feel free. They are really lovely manuscripts!

Disclaimer before the yapping commences that I am a Pre-Conquest gal and most of what I'll be talking about is Post-Conquest, and also that my research at a graduate/post-graduate level has been more involved with manuscript materiality (which I am again, happy to talk about, just not on this already-overly-wordy ask), rather purely palaeographic pursuits.

I should also say that none of this analysis is significant for any reason relating to the plot; this is just an examination of the prop art!

Also I am definitely NOT an expert in any way, shape, or form, so there are absolutely things I am missing here, there, everywhere... you have been warned.

Onto the yap...

Explaining the Frame

Before I fully get into it I think it is a little bit important to establish why historians study scripts at all. In a modern world, where writing is ubiquitous and literacy rates are high, it can be sometimes hard to understand why scripts are historically consequential (and why Pre-Reaganite/Thatcherite austerity, there were such things as tenured Professors of Palaeography!).

I think the best way to frame this is to use an example:

Above are two paintings. They are depicting the military action and are created with the same tools and by artists living in the same century and a half and in broadly the same geographical location. Now, if I were to say something like 'These are both paintings of military actiom, therefore they are the same', technically I wouldn't be incorrect. But I would be missing a huge component of these pieces!

In other words, just like painting, the form is just as important as the content itself; a scribe does not simply choose to write differently one day to the next but rather scripts, like any other art form, are nuanced and just as worthy of study as the actual text itself. As vehicles of text, how that text is manipulated, displayed and otherwise portrayed, can often tell us (as historians - amateur or not) a great deal about the surrounding historical period.

So something that is important to remember as I describe what is essentially, font analysis, is that the value placed on said font in an academic context is the result of historical weight placed on script that is almost entirely alien to a world where I can easily swap between Arial and Papyrus.

So, what script do they use in the HotD manuscript??

I can tell you its most certainly attempting to imitate a form of textualis. As one of the most profuse (spatially and temporally) script models, I would say it's a great choice. I think it the popular conception of manuscripts (what a manuscript should look like), this is what people would probably choose precisely for that reason! Textualis is/was popular from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries across Europe.

MS545 -14thc.

It was developed as a documentary script (aka used for documents, such as charters) but came to be used more often in prestige non-documentary manuscripts (like liturgical volumes, or conceivably, like Nymeria's history).

A charter with the seal intact from Magdalen College, Ox

It comes in different forms called 'grades', what those 'grades' are really depends on which scholar you want to follow. From my teaching, they are precissa, quadrata, semi-quadrata, and rotunda (from highest grade to lowest grade). Without getting into too much detail, different grades of textualis are often determined by the shape of the minims (aka bottom of the letter).

(Clockwise from upper left: Precissa [all letters are terminated neatly at the baseline - MS233 -14thc], Quadrata [all letters have little diamonds at the bottom - MS545 -14thc.] Semi-Quadrata [minims with intermittent attempts at feet - MSStowe17 - 14thc] Rotunda [rounded out minims - MS Add. 2. 263]).

Part of the reason this distinction is made, both between different grades of textualis and also between scripts used for documentary text and those used for non-documentary text is because manuscripts were/are valuable objects. It will obviously take longer for a scribe to diamond off every. single. minim. than it would for them to have letters flow into each other.

Something that is often forgotten in our modern period of relative book ubiquity is that manuscripts were objects subject to market forces as much as they were art pieces or vehicles of text. All things 'manuscript', from the scribes writing it to the pigment and vellum, were subject to various degrees of scarcity and luxury (which is actually what my research is about!). Below is an example of a scribe advertising their different grades of script.

MS e.Mus 198* - 14thc.

A closer look...?

Beyond just going 'yea they kinda look similar!' (deceptively, a lot of what manuscript scholarship is, lol), I can pull out a few things point me in the textualis direction. Let's take a look at the shapes of 'O' 'N' and 'G'. Our 'o' here is distinctively six-sided, which is also present on the main body of the 'g'. The 'n' similarly has a pronounced parallel line shape, with tapering on the curves.

Generally textualis has a very compact look with attention to downstrokes and neat parallel lines creating almost a 'box' effect with the x-height (aka how tall the x's are). I'm not sure how best to explain this but there is a keen dynamism in different parts of the stroke, with drastic differences in width between various parts of the ascenders/descenders in a letterform. The thick and thin elements of a letterform (such as the short corners on the 'o' or the often hairline strokes that connect the upper loop on an 'a' to the bottom loop), are really exaggerated in these scripts in a way you don't see with other earlier or later scripts.

For reference (an oversimplification to be sure, but a helpful one! Note that some of these scripts are geographically restricted, used only in Insular or Continental scribal environs)

^ Here are some real life examples of those same letter forms (L to R - LPL MS209 13thc, LPL MS75 13th c , LPL MS545 14th/15thc,)

While textualis was one of the more popular script models, other scripts were also popular in England at this time (roughly, lol). Anglicana and then Secretary hands rose to prominence, as you can see they look quite a bit different from textualis.

(MS Ashmole 35-15thc.)

These were considered lower grade scripts, used more often for documents as they can be written more quickly (important when you have many things to write!). So if we were able to take a peek at some of those scrolls that are in the Dragonstone Library, maybe we'd be able to find HotD's equivalent.

There is some crossover between these scripts and some sticky stuff about regionality, I know very little beyond surface-level, so I'm just going to point you to the resources I linked at the end.

Am Dipl. Dan LX- 15thc. with some other ones

The broad point is that textualis is most certainly a major mediaeval script, one I believe served as reference for the HotD manuscript, but it was not the only one present during the high middle ages. Now... would this script have been used at all during the succession wars that served as HotD's inspiration...?

Inspiration and Historicity:

If we're going on what scripts would have looked like in the period of the Dance's inspiration (Empress Mathilda), I would say this particular script is a bit late. Textualis reaches its more formalised state beginning at the end of the twelfth century (really, the thirteenth but..), so a little early for Rhaenyra's/Mathilda's 1115. Instead, assuming that this is entirely like our own mediaeval period, we'd be looking at the script that precedes it, called protogothic. Here are some examples:

(MS Digby 83 - 12th c England)

(CC MS 95 -12th c England)

A vernacular hand (aka. non-Latin, here old English), may look a little different. Here's one example, in what I would call Anglo-caroline script. Again, just like our documentary/non-documentary, purpose, and cost factors weigh into the script model chosen for a piece of text, so does the language (although Anglo-caroline was not restricted to vernacular!):

(MS 180, 12th c England)

You can probably see how the more formal textualis is an evolution of protogothic, rendered more professionally as the high middle ages came to pass. There is definitely a lot of interesting discussion about how script models take hold as lay literacy rates increase, as scribal practice begins to move from monasteries and limited courtly settings to 'professional scribes', but I won't get into it here.

The Critique (that no one asked for):

If I had to give an artist who did the HOTD prop a few pointers (my opinion that they definitely didn't ask for + I think they did great overall + mandatory 'script is highly variable, some of these pointers may not apply'), I would say the following:

1. Textualis in the real world, generally but not always, tends to have a two compartment 'a', it retains this from protogothic which in turn stole it from Anglo-caroline. Scripts in England prior to Anglo-caroline (which was a combination Anglo [English/Insular] and caroline [Continental/Carolingian] - see timeline above) more often used single compartment 'a's, so the dual compartment is a bit of a bigger deal.

MS Douce 366- 13thc

2. 'S' letterforms in textualis tend to be very compact. They often come in two shapes, the 'long s' and our more familiar 's' shape. In both forms there is attention to maintaining a compact figure, so when you have an entire page the x-height is strictly adhered to. By having some extra little whirly lines, the page image in the HotD manuscript is less neat overall. One exception tends to be sentence-initial 'S' letterforms, which are exaggerated because they start the sentence.

MS Bodl476- 13thc

Above are three 's' letterforms, spelling 'zacharias. Susci-(tavit-cutoff). We finish 'zacharias' with a familiar s. The next sentence starts with an exaggerated word-initial 's' which is purposefully larger and with significant spurs to signal the start of the sentence. Finally, we also have a 'long' s which looks like an l with an overhang, or an 'f' without the cross. You'll notice that the first 's' does not exceed the height of anything else in the word. Similarly, the 'long' s generally fits with the aspect of the script model, made with a thick downstroke. Only the second 'S', which is the largest, is purposefully flared to start the sentence.

On rewatching, we do get something similar-ish to majuscule letters to start sentences on other pages

It may seem a little silly, but I think the HotD script lacks this same internal logic and the flairs, which aren't technically incorrect, work against the overall appearance of the page, rendering it messier.

3. Some addtl. silly ones: 'i's in textura are not frequently dotted, those marks above letters are abbreviation marks e.g. p(er), domin(us). 'T's are usually crossed at the top rather than the middle until the late mediaeval period (again, carry over from previous scripts). Plausibly, it could look like this one from the lower Rhineland, which is less attached to that compact look overall:

MSDouce 185- 14thc.

But you'll notice a few things. The 'i's are marked with hairline marks (Michelle Brown calls these 'a light serif'), not the big dots we get with the HotD manuscript, and those 't' bars are really pretty high with exception where one letter flows into the next ('noctis' and 'peste' in line 1, 'est' with a long 's' is one I also often see with a high t bar).

A lot of this criticism on the letterforms, which is most certainly very annoying (who really gives a fuck), again just comes down to the fact that all historical scripts had an internal logic to them, and so these tiny tweaks could make the page as a whole look a little better.

4. There appears to be a great deal of space (imo too much) between the lines of text. Vellum is expensive! Even when there is deliberate space left empty in manuscripts, its not generally between the lines of text; the goal is to be relatively economical with your space, keeping significant breaks in text for mostly 1) thematic changes (ends of chapters, verses, etc.) 2) poetry lineation 3) dramatic visual effect.

(MS 52 - 9thc, - notice how space is filled with punctuation and drawn out terminal strokes to keep the diamond shape [dramatic visual effect], MS218 - 10thc. [poetry lineation])

5. Very very annoying but: in my opinion would be very difficult to rip a manuscript the way that Rhaenyra is able to. There is a very good reason why we have so many manuscripts from 1400 years ago, and that is because those things are BEASTS. There's definitely a phenomenon of survivorship bias, but any royal manuscript would be made with a well prepared skin and would be very difficult to tear.

I am aware that the very clear message of the scene is Rhaenyra's disregard for history and norms (literally ripping apart the annals of history with her bare hands), I wonder if we could have the same effect but with Rhaenyra pulling out a pen-knife or the like. She would still be destroying the manuscript, just with the weapons of war rather than with her hands.

Example of embroidery to repair a manuscript (Morgan Library)- Again, absolute beasts compared to modern books.

On manuscript physics...We also see one of the manuscripts have this wild separation between the text block and the spine:

Unlike modern book manufacturing, manuscripts usually have a very solid connection between the text block and the spine. This might be harder to verbalise than it is to show, so...The House of Stopan has lovely videos of the process, which I will be stealing for example here. Pages are sewn together on "cords":

Those cords are then cut short and frayed, then pulled through the book boards (which were usually actual pieces of thin wood, here however he's using a thicker cardboard). They're then glued to the boards.

A piece of leather (or other material), is then draped over and glued to the spine + on the outside of the boards. Those points of elevation on the spine, which I've seen added for purely aesthetic reasons in modern books (such as collector's editions), in manuscripts are actually the leather being smoothed over and shaped to the cords underneath.

The leather/material is prepared specifically so it conforms to the text block beneath. Pieces of thin cardboard or supporting material may be added between the cords on the spine.

If we take a look at this intact 11th c. Greek binding (sorry, only one I could find available!) you can actually still see the cords. In other words, I believe that an entire separation of the text block from the spine wouldn't really be plausible with a high grade manuscript (such as a courtly copy). I am no expert on manuscript manufacture, but within my knowledge of bookmaking, it stood out to me a bit! Happy to be corrected on this one especially :]

MS1175- 11thc

6. If I had to make one final note, so much of the series emphasises the fact that this is 200 years before GoT. There are attempts to archaeise various aspects of the keep and the armour. I would personally choose a script model that is a little older. I think there was probably a choice made about how accessible they wanted the manuscript text to be (so that dweebs like myself could actually read what's on the page), and I think using a slightly older script model like uncial/half-uncial would still reach that benchmark while appearing 'older'.

The Rushworth Gospels- 9thc.

Quite strangely enough Merlin, for all its historical inaccuracy actually does a really good job of hitting most of those notes I mentioned above (two compartment a's, neatly written 's's, etc.). Whether this would've been the actual script model used in Merlin's actual period is a whole different thing... and actually closer to my research interests!

As I mentioned at the beginning, I am not an expert in any sense of the word. For further reading you can check out Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500, Cambridge History of the Book in Britain Series, A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 (although the plates kinda suck ass so beware.. the tragedies of photocopy technology), as really lovely books/series if you are interested! I find them to be very approachable reading for specialists/non-specialists alike and they are written by really the people who actually know about these things.

Scene.

#misc #asks

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flameswallower · 3 months ago

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By request, I'm reposting my Goodreads review of Maej, by Dale Stromberg, here on tumblr! You can find the novel here.

It is rare that I encounter a novel like Maej: a doorstopper I found difficult to put down and finished inside a week; a work of very unapologetic genre fiction that’s equally unapologetic in its intelligence and dedication to doing strange, creative things with language; a high fantasy story I actually liked.

The setting is the city of Sforre-Yomn, in the country of Hwoama, whose culture combines elements from across the continents of Asia and Europe. But Hwoama is matriarchal: men are subordinate to women, who dominate politics, business, the military, and nearly all other professions. As a result of this fact, almost all the major characters in the novel are female. By turns this presents a fun, simple, mischievous inversion of maleness as the unmarked default state for fictional characters, and meaty commentary on the social construction of sex, sexuality, and gender. Stromberg has cited Le Guin as an influence on Maej and, in the most complimentary way possible, this influence is evident.

The plot of Maej is a delightful Rube Goldberg machine too elaborate and surprising to go into here, filled with political intrigue, action, twists, tragedy, and even a touch of romance. It involves the plight of the Ilas, a ghettoized minority ethnolinguistic group whose oppression at the hands of the dominant Sforrings and Yomnings brings to mind several contemporary and historical analogues. Once again, there’s pointed and poignant social commentary akin to Le Guin, or Butler, or Delany.

There’s also what I consider a wonderful linguistic gimmick: the Hwoamish language is represented by a rollicking pastiche of Early Modern English in roughly Shakespearean style. (Other languages are represented by standard, albeit formal, contemporary English.) This would be insufferable if it were done badly, but Stromberg absolutely knows his stuff and carries it off with aplomb.

Other things you may find in this unique, complex fantasy: gryphons, berserker rages, fate-worship, anthropologists, hallucinogenic flower wine, poetry battles, flying contraptions, an underground city, a gaolbreak, and an awful politician getting assassinated while using the toilet. * * * I received an ARC of the novel in exchange for an honest review. Please, read this book! I would love to see it become even a twelfth as popular as a lot of way worse fantasy novels I won't deign to actually name.

#reviews/recs #maej

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soli-nepenthe · 2 months ago

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On Sylus's 'true' name/some thoughts: *spoilers below*

N.B.: These are just purely speculations of mine fueled by my minor knowledge of linguistics/historical linguistics that I took in university and unfortunately, I am not fluent in Greek either, still at a beginner level. I am just an amateur. If I was a philologist, especially one that specializes in Classic languages, that would be cool, but, alas, I am not.

In terms of the localized English version (I cannot speak for the original source text in Chinese, but I bet there is more nuance as a tonal language; there's more room to play around with meaning) but the way the dialogue was presented made it seem uncertain.

As we can see, her response to hearing his "faint" words is unclear, and it appears that Ancient Philosian is presumably a 'dead' language that is no longer studied/used in the everyday life of the people.

(I wonder what the reasons were that caused that to happen, considering the inscription of the dragon's defeat in the Sanctuary is in Ancient Philosian, thus the language must have been used by the educated elite for a time, but I digress...)

It would be fair to assume that there is a Greek influence in this blend of Eastern/Western or xuanhuan storytelling, with the name of the world phílos deriving from the Greek with the meanings of "beloved, dear", coming from the Greek verb philéō "to love".

Even the name that she gives him, Sylus, has Greek and Roman connections being a diminutive of Silvanus, derived from the Roman god of forests meaning "of the woods", in addition to it's possible connection to the Hebrew name Saul, meaning "prayed for".

As for his true name, I was wondering if it would be fair to say that it would also have a Greek influence, with consonant clusters being common in Greek, especially with the beginning of 'st' in his name.

The ending of his name might also offer some clues, if the '-us' suffix is an alternative form of "-eus" which is derived from the Greek suffix "-εῖος" with the meaning related to location in the sense "of" or "from". But this is used to form adjectives, so someone from the place Elis could also be called "Ἠλεῖος" to show where they hail from.

It could be that his name indicates where he is from/or possible origins, or it might not. The first syllable of his name could hold the key meaning of his name.

If his name had a patronymic suffix, like "-ídēs," in Atreides, sons of Atreus, referring to either Agamemnon or Menelaus, then it could also point to a clue of his origins or identity.

Once again, just to clarify I am not a Classics major, but I really am curious to what the actual Philosian word is for his name, and if the localization team will reveal that in a spelling that more or less resembles the phonology of the language they are using as inspiration, in this case, Greek. It also might be Latin.

I apologize if any of my guesses are completely wrong.

If anyone has stumbled on any clues of their own, please share!

( Note: I know that Greek isn't the only language with consonant clusters, there are others like Czech, Slovene, Polish, Georgian, it even occurs in English...but for the specific cultural influence of Greek for Philos, I supposed Greek would be the logical choice.)

#random thoughts #lads spoilers #lads sylus #love and deepspace sylus #a mild attempt at a linguistic analysis #but there really isn't much to go on #just pure speculation

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ranahan · 10 months ago

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What do you think is the correct word for "greater Mandalorian space"? I've seen 'Mandalase', don't remember where though, and have been using Tra'Manda in my own fics. Is there anything established in canon/fanon?

Good question! I’ve pondered it myself and the answer I’ve arrived at is that there should probably be several words.

See, what is meant by “the greater Mandalorian space” probably varies depending on the time and the speaker and the context, because the Mandalorian civilisation is a bit like the Roman civilisation: do you mean Rome the city, Rome the administrative region, the Roman Empire, or the Roman world as a cultural area?

For Mandalore we have at least these different senses:

Mandalore the planet (“Mandalore actual” or Manda’yaim)

Mandalore system (which includes at least three other inhabited planets and moons)

Mandalore sector

The entire area of space administered by the Mandalorian government (which is never really defined in canon)

Mandalorian Empire (historical)

The wider Mandalorian cultural area/area influenced or historically a part of the Mandalorian Empire

The indented words are from the unedited parts of my dictionary, so they are somewhat tentative and I’m not necessarily married to them. However this is what I currently have.

The first is easy, the planet Mandalore is called Manda’yaim in Mando’a.

Manda’yaim: 1 the planet Mandalore, the fifth planet in the Mandalore system, capital world of the Mandalorians; 2 during periods of diaspora, can also refer to other Mandalorian areas or enclaves

haat’manda’yaim: Manda'yaim proper; planet Mandalore in contrast to its satellite Concordia, other planets in the Mandalore system, other Mandalorian worlds, or Mandalorian enclaves of the Mandalorian diaspora

The Mandalorian system we can probably form directly from the word for a star system, perhaps Mando’tolase, lit. Mandalorian system, assuming tolase is also the word used for star systems and not just for other kinds of systems (not sure which way I lean on it tbh). Or Manda’tolase, if you subscribe to the fandom take that the star Mandalore is named Manda (or a variation thereof).

Or people might colloquially refer to the Mandalorian system also as Manda’lase.

I imagine there’s probably some kind of interplanetary law which defines what area of space is considered to belong to a planetary system and what is “international waters”/deep space.

#3-4

The third is what I suppose you were asking about. I’ve seen Manda’lase all over the place, but I don’t actually know where it came from—if anyone does know, please let me know! Linguistically the derivation goes something like this: manda ‘the shared Mandalorian oversoul’ > manda’la ‘having the Mandalorian soul, i.e. Mandalorian’ > Manda’lase ‘all of Mandalorians collectively’. In any case, I rather like it and have been using it myself since it seems about as established as anything in Fando’a.

Edit: Manda’lase appears to have been coined by Batsutousai; thanks for @johamur for pointing it out!

Mando’tra, Mandalorian space could also work. Manda’tra, substituting the word mando ‘mandalorian’ for manda ‘soul’, sounds to me a bit like the emphasis is on the shared culture less than the shared administration. Not that Mandalorians themselves necessarily see a big difference there.

It’s unclear whether Mandalore sector refers to a geographical area or an administrative region. I guess in everyday speech, people might conflate the two and use Manda’lase for both. So you might end up with a definition something like the following:

Manda’lase: 1 Mandalorian space; 2 Mandalorian system; 3 Mandalorian sector (colloquially)

In any case, I haven’t come up with a word for sector I like yet, although it’s on my list of needed words.

#5-6

For the historical Mandalorian Empire, I have:

Mando’alorai (or Mand’alorai): 1 Mandalorian Empire (historical); 2 still sometimes used of the regions that used to be governed by the Empire as a cultural area

alorai (n): 1 empire; 2 realm, domain, holding, governed area

Where alorai is either a portmanteau of alor + veeray, or alor + the same nominal suffix -ai we have in e.g. parjai.

Another option is:

Ori’Manda’lase: Mandalorian Empire (lit. Great Mandalore); Greater Mandalore, the historical region of space once controlled by the Mandalorian Empire

ori’manda’la (a): imperial (of Mandalorian Empire specifically, not other empires); of or belonging to Greater Mandalore, the historical region once controlled by Mandalorian Empire

ori’manda’lase tugoten (n): Mandalorian Empire Revivalism (Revanchism), an ideology on Mandalore that supports the revival of the Mandalorian Empire and a return to Mandalore's conquering days.

ori’manda’lase tugotenii (n): Mandalorian Empire revivalist, a supporter of Mandalorian Empire Revivalism. Tugotenii for short.

I’m using revivalism and revivalist over revanchism and revanchist, because in the Star Wars universe revanchists could be confused with supporters of Revan.

In any case, I think context should determine whether you mean the historical empire as a nation state, or the historical empire as a current area of cultural influence. Most reasonable beings would use Mandalorian Empire in either of these two senses, but then you have the likes of Tor Vizsla, who’d probably use a term with a similar sense to “Greater Russia”, i.e. areas that “should” belong to or be returned to Mandalorian governance.

I have some other scattered words and thoughts about Mandalorian government and citizenship, but this is already pretty long. In any case, that’s what a quick search through my dictionary file brought up, hope you found something to your liking!

#mando’a #mandoa #star wars #meta: mandalorians #mando’a language #mandalorians #mando'a #mando’a extended dictionary #ranah talks mando’a #ranah answers #answered asks #asks #mando’a place names

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kiragecko · 14 days ago

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@lordlyhour asked me for suggestions about how to get into linguistics. I'm too wordy to stuff all my thoughts into a reply, so here's a post!

Figure out what you're curious about and look into it casually. Don't take it too seriously. Linguistics is a huge field, and it can take a while to figure out which parts really resonate, so explore!

You want to understand more about how language changes and develops? I suggest looking up various words on Wiktionary, and clicking on various links in the "Etymology" section. Stop in the middle of thoughts to see if random words could be connected. Read through a page of words on Old-Engli . sh and see which ones you recognize. Look up a list of English prefixes and learn about where they come from and their subtleties of meaning.

Or look up Creoles and Pidgins! They are really cool, and also, because of the way they develop to bridge communication gaps, can work is interesting primers to a lot of concepts.

If you're interested in sounds, I suggest going to a site that shows an interactable IPA alphabet, and just listening to the various sounds and trying to interpret all the gobbledy-gook describing them. I mostly just use Wikipedia these days, but IPAChart is also pretty good, and there are a lot of other sites online with similar things.

Try to transcribe your own words in IPA. (You WILL be wrong, especially if you don't speak General American or a prestige British English dialect. Accept that and have fun doing it anyways!)

Watch some videos by Dr. Geoff Lindsey or Tom Scott's Language Files.

Find a bunch of pictures of your mouth and throat when forming various vowels. Read up on all the structures in your mouth/throat and how they affect sounds.

If you have fun getting thrown in the deep end, Index Diachronica has a lot of good info about historic sound changes, and PHOIBLE has a LOT of info about what sounds languages are actually likely to use, and how complex they can get. Neither is even slightly designed for newcomers, but it can be fun to play with stuff that only sort-of makes sense!

Conlangers (people who design artificial languages) also have a lot of good beginner resources! The Language Construction Kit covers all the basics in an interesting and accessible way.

Getting a book about historical linguistics from the public library can also be a great start. It will go over all the various things about language that can change, and give you a pretty good primer to the broader field while doing it. Also, you get to read about sound changes, and how sounds diverge as languages split from each other, and I LOVE that sort of thing! It's really really neat!

Also, look up the inflection systems of at least one language, because English's case system for nouns is pathetic, and our conjugation of verbs still leaves a lot to be desired. This leaves English speakers at a disadvantage when learning linguistics, because that stuff is kinda fundamental and instead we're heavily relying on word order.

I'm not nearly as interested in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but look into them enough to see if anything catches your eye.

If there's something that seems cool, look into it more. Read up on Latin, or Proto-Indo-European, or explore the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary. Look up the Indigenous languages in your area and try to learn how to actually pronounce the street names and other locations that everyone butchers. Listen to the people around you and notice the variations in dialect. Look at ALL the various meanings of 'for' or some other tiny particle, and try to understand the nuances. Whatever it is, dig in. If something is confusing, look into that. If something is distracting, note it for later, or let yourself get sidetracked.

There are fundamentals in linguistics. It helps to learn them at some point. But please have fun first! Then you'll get a better idea of which type of fundamentals you want to invest in. Because if you're interested in word change, you want to focus on very different things then if sounds systems intrigue you, or you want to understand what's happening in your brain.

#linguistics

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etudieryvivere · 2 years ago

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Cantonese Resources

This will be a list in progress, just whatever I find. Feel free (please help) to recommend any resources that you know of.

Websites:

cantonese.sheik.co.uk

This has characters, vocabulary, pronunciation help, essays, a bunch of different stuff, Beginner to Intermediate. CantoDict is apart of this (add /dictionary/ to the url)

cantoneseclass101.com/cantonese-resources/

Some stuff for grammar, reading and writing, pronunciation, etc. The actual course is Beginner to Advanced, but the free stuff is just beginner. They also have a free Word of the Day email newsletter thingy.

cantonese.ca

Vocab lists!

livelingua.com/courses/cantonese

Audio lessons along with a textbook. It seems free (and claims so). It's only a basic course, and comes with a dictionary as well, although it's hard to see the characters well. They also have tons of other languages (including ones like Igbo and Finnish, so check it out).

cantonese-alliance.github.io/courses.html

Okay this one is super cool. In the proficiency levels tab, they have some curriculums for different levels (with tons of resources). There's also 'Cantonese through films' which has a long list of movies organized by decades. Even more materials, historical, linguistic, and the like. Overall, super interesting.

savecantonese.org/education

Textbooks and resources (most of which are mentioned).

These are just the first few things I've found, but there's alot, so I', making a spreadsheet with everything else on it too. Hope this helps!

#langblr #studying #cantonese #chinese langblr #chinese language #yue #cantonese langblr

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communistkenobi · 2 years ago

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i never really paid much attention to star wars before the mandalorian so please forgive me if this is super obvious but: are we supposed to view the droids as being kind of alive? beings with artificial intelligence? i was very uncomfortable with how the ugnaughts (sp?) were portrayed in the last episode but i didn’t think much of the droids because always just saw them a technological tool. i was a little surprised when the bartender droid gave their monologue about the droids wanting to work and catch the bad droids, and thought maybe they want to work to fulfill their programming. but maybe i should have been more considerate. (i am kind of a dumb bitch too tho so maybe this is just something that’s super obvious to most people and not me :s)

Narratively I think droids are supposed to represent an advanced form of automation - astromechs are navigational droids that handle the immense amount of math that’s required to travel through space, droids like C3PO house linguistic and cultural information for diplomatic purposes, etc. I think originally, given that Star Wars was created prior to the internet being a thing, they were used to represent mass sums of human information, but access to that information was restricted to wherever those droids happened to be in spacetime. They’re essentially mobile computers, but not in the way we think of them (eg phones). But because they’re mobile and have to communicate with human beings without any touch screens or interfaces, especially in the case of droids like C3PO, they are by default anthropomorphised. It’s on par with people naming their roombas. These are tasks that are within human capability, but have been offloaded and automated to make everyone’s lives easier (and probably also many financial and political reasons, but that gets into like, the political economy of Star Wars, which if you talk about that you threaten to take Star Wars too seriously).

But, given how expansive Star Wars is, the answer to your question is maybe sometimes. Chopper in Rebels seems to fill the role of the beloved family pet. L3-37 in Solo is explicitly calling for droid liberation and insists that she and all other droids are equal to organics. Mouse droids likewise seem to be viewed as robotic animals. Mando again makes equivalent droid automation and slave labour.

However, this becomes complicated because there are also actual slaves in Star Wars. The clones are the most obvious example, but the twi’lek as a species also are often enslaved. There are also slaver “planets” and “races” who base their economy off of the buying and selling of slaves (that was in the clone wars, I can’t remember what episodes though). Droid liberation is often framed as inherently farcical in the franchise, but “droid liberation” also exists as a form of deracialised political action, and I mean that in the real world sense - droids are not analogous to a given real world conflict or historical process the way that like, twi’lek are (who even have french accents and speak space french! Now Filoni is an idiot and says this is because he’s drawing inspiration from the French Revolution as opposed to the much more appropriate and obvious Haitian Revolution, but whatever). So when drawing parallels between slavery as a thing in Star Wars and slavery as a real world historical process, it becomes frustrating to talk about, because droid lib is both set-up and punchline, but it’s also the most “acceptable” way to explore ending slavery in SW because it means the white writers don’t have to engage with systemic racial oppression in a way that might make them feel uncomfortable. As a comparison, there are multiple episodes in clone wars where clones refuse to follow orders or try to escape and they’re treated as defective or wrong or insane. That shit fucking sucks and it takes on a much more insidious tone than “haha, the droids want weekends off. how cute.”

And then the counter COUNTER problem with that, which is explicitly invoked in The Mandalorian, is that droids are essentialised to their code or “base functions.” These are facts about a droid that are intrinsic to their nature and cannot be altered or removed, and to attempt otherwise means perverting the “true nature” of droids - they are doomed to be what they were created for (I guess forget about IG-11 being rehabilitated lol). So when you call them slaves, and then insist they are forever shackled to their programming, that’s not a neutral storytelling choice, and you are essentially invoking the idea that there are some races or people for whom slavery is more naturally suited. Which is explicitly a white supremacist idea. And given the context of this storyline in The Mandalorian’s broader political problems, it becomes particularly nefarious.

All this to say - droids are maybe slaves. It depends on the story being told and why, it depends on the writer, etc. But when analogising it to real world history it becomes fraught, given that there are actual slaves in SW who are intended as obvious parallels to real world acts of slavery in human history, a thing that is omnipresent in star wars while also being largely ignored or dismissed by the writers

#sw.txt #asks

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