#Technical Chinese transcription

[transcriptioncity]

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[tsukiyo-7]

This is me trying to bypass Tumblr censorship, attempt 1

Just in case, the full fanart is on ao3

Details under the cut! (It's a bit long, I'm warning you)

Here's the frankly too long explaination.

I basically crammed in this drawing all my favourite motifs and all of my studies.

The tattoo on Sam's back is something I designed myself and represents Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows or Madonna Addolorata) with a stanza from the prayer "Stabat Mater" that goes as folows - "Through her soul, of joy bereaved, bowed with anguish, deeply grieved, now at length the sword hath passed."

Then we have Saint Michael slaughtering the Devil on Dean's arm. This is a mesh up of different stock images; usually Saint Michael stands over a serpent not a dragon and has a sword, not a halberd, those come from Saint George (Patron Saint of soldiers, so not a random choice)

Then there's the scripts. (Open the first pic)

The roman numbers on Dean's collarbone: II.V.XCIII = 2.5.83, Sam's date of birth.

The matching latin tattoos on their bicepts: The whole quote actually is "Nec tecum, nec sine te vivere possum" by Ovidius, which means "I can't live with you nor without you" and I thought of splitting it like that because I think it sums up their relationship pretty well. They can't be together, especially Sam imo (forever the runaway), because it's basically self-destructive, but being apart maybe is even worse (suicidal Dean anyone?).

A mandala with a mantra on Sam's tigh: गते गते पारगते पारसंगते बोधि स्वाहा . The Devanāgarī, for those unfamiliar, is a South Asian writing system. Here we have the mantra that closes the Heart Sutra "Gone, gone, gone to the other shore, Awakening, Svaha." (Svaha is the Hindu goddess of sacrifices; in a Buddhist context the term is used as denoument for mantras, espicially duing rites and offerings).

The characters on Dean's bicept, next to Saint Michael: 天罰. Those are technically Hanja aka Traditional Chinese characters used to write Korean (mostly because I first encountered this word in my korean phylology studies and that's how I know it), but they mean the same thing in Korean, Chinese and Japanese, "Divine Punishment", sooo - the only difference is the ponunciation. Korean: 천벌 (cheonbeol) Japanese: てんばつ (tenbatsu) Chinese: 天罚 (tiān fá).

Lastly, on Dean ribs, say hi to my bestie Hammurabi and his famous Code: here we have the Law 196 which actually even rocks know about; An eye for an eye. The full text says: "If a man has blinded the eye of another man, his eye will be blinded." Can't really offer you a transcript but if you're curious here's the transliteration:

" šum-ma a-wi-lum i-in DUMU a-wi-lim úḫ-tap-pí-id i-in-šu ú-ḫa-ap-pa-du " There's this really neat website here that is a digital version of the whole code and it's also my source.

[henry-fox-biggest-stan]

Some more obscure and / or underrated lesbian literature : An incomplete list made by a lesbian in hopes of making other sapphics happy

(I haven’t read all of them)

Sorted by years (this rapidly became a history lesson of lesbian literature sorry I’m a nerd)

Ancient times

(A good article about lesbians in ancient greece / rome)

Queen Zhuang Jiang 庄姜 (???- BC 690) / We know about Sappho and Enheduanna, but what about her? She wrote poems some of which were, uh, pretty gay. I learnt about her here. It is said than her poems are in The Book of Songs (which is a collection of ancient Chinese poetry). I couldn’t find a lot about her but I found enough to believe than (hopefully) she was a real person and the internet isn't lying to me.

Dialogues of the courtesans - Lucian of Samosata (somewhere in the second century BC) / Basically Dialogues of the courtesans is a collection of dialogues between well, courtesans (prostitutes). Either between themselves or between clients. One of the dialogues is called “The Lesbians”. Link to read (somehow finding a pdf of Dialogues of the courtesans is pretty hard but reading it chapter by chapter online it’s not??)

The Babyloniaka - Iamblichus (somewhere in the second century AC) / Lost novel, so all you need to know is here

Of course we can’t forget this Pompeii poem

1200s

Bieiris de Romans (somewhere in the first half of the 1200s) / Bieiris was a French poet, and we only have one of her poems with us because the others have been lost. We don’t know much (anything) about her, except that she was a woman, French, and who wrote about a woman called Maria. Some say that this mysterious Maria referred to the Virgin Mary, others than Maria was her gf, and others than she was writing in the perspective of a man (because obviously a woman writing about other women in a not so platonic way is unthinkable). Anyway, feel free to get your own conclusions, here’s the poem (translated)

1500s

The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena - Konrad Eisenbichler / So while this is a modern book, it is the only one I’ve been able to find than includes Laudomia Forteguerri’s poems (1515-1555). Some historians considered her to be the earliest Italian lesbian writer. “Although only six of her sonnets have survived, all are testaments to the love she bore for other women, and five are specifically dedicated to Margaret of Austria.”

The Maitland Quarto / Manuscript (1586) / So, this is a collection of 95 scot poems, and poem 49 is pretty sapphic. It’s technically anonymous, but it has been attributed to Marie Maitland (who transcripted the manuscript and is thought to have added her own poems there). The last lines mean “'There is more constancy in our sex / Than ever among men has been”, I haven’t been able to translate the rest of it. The poem.

1600s

The Flower's Shadow Behind the Curtain - Ko Lien Hua Ying (somewhere in the 1600s) / It is said this book was written towards the end of the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644). It’s a erotic book, and chapter 22 includes an erotic story between two 16 year old girls. I found it in Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture by Fang Fu Ruan (believe it or not, I don’t just randomly know all this books, I did research)

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) / English writer, one of the first female writers to live through her writing. She was also a spy. She wrote a lot about women. “Homoeroticism is standard in Behn's verse, either in descriptions such as these of male to male relationships or in depictions of her own attractions to women. Behn was married and widowed early, and as a mature woman her primary publicly acknowledged relationship was with a gay male, John Hoyle, himself the subject of much scandal.” (here). She wrote a lesbian love poem (in the link before, it also makes an analysis of it). The poem: To The Fair Clarinda

Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings - Juana Inés De la Cruz (1648-1695) / So the thing about Juana is than every single spanish-speaking lesbian knows her (and loves her), but hardly anyone who doesn’t speak spanish has ever heard of her, which is a shame, because she’s an absolute icon. She was a Mexican nun who was also incredibly gay. You know how Sappho is called the tenth muse? Juana is also called the (mexican) tenth muse. She’s also called the phoenix of America, which is incredibly badass. She learnt how to read at 3 years old, at 8, she asked her mother to send her to college dressed as a man (her mother refused). She learnt and studied by her own, because she wanted to learn. She studied by cutting her hair (if she got something wrong or forgot something, she cut a strand of her hair as a punishment) because she said that “a head adorned with hair is worthless if it’s a head naked of ideas”. When she was sixteen (important to note than she already spoke Latin fluently at 12, having mastered it in just a few lessons) the archbishop Payo Enríquez de Rivera heard of her, and decided to ask her to be the company lady of his wife (his wife and her eventually would have a relationship) and decided to test her intelligence. He got 40 (!!!) university profesor of all subjects, and they all asked her questions related to maths, literature, philosophy, etc. She answered all of them right. At around 21, she decided to become a nun (not out of faith, but because it was either becoming a nun and being able to continue her education, or marrying a man and stop studying. To her, the choice was clear). Also it is said she owned around 4000 books in her personal library. So yeah, an educated, extremely intelligent gal, who wrote lesbian love poems to her gf, and who was definitely not afraid to stand up for herself.

1700s

The Game of Flats - Nicholas Rowe? (1715) / Poem, “game of flats” was an 18th century slang for lesbian sex. Link to read <- that website includes lots of 18th century queer history and poems like this one

The Sappho-an - Anonymous (1735 or 1749) / When I first heard of this I couldn’t believe it. It sounds like an AO3 fanfic, or some modern erotic book (one of those than have a real person in the cover), or maybe a forgotten 1970s lesbian book. It’s none of that. It’s an anonymous poem written in the 1700s. The plot? The goddesses of Olympus are sexually unsatisfied because the gods keep on going after mortals (except Ares, he’s just too busy with war) instead of paying attention to them. The gods keep going after woman and male mortals, so Hera just says yknow what if they can sleep with men then we can sleep with each other. Sappho also appears. Link to read.

Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure - John Cleland (1742) / Ok fine, this one is not sapphic but the main character (female) does have sex with a woman at one point. This is basically an erotic novel. Very dirty (specially for the time period) and very banned in lots of places. The main character is Fanny, a prostitute. It includes lots of straight sex, some gay (mlm) sex, and two pages where Fanny describes in detail having sex with Phoebe, bisexual prostitute. Not sapphic, but thought it was worth mentioning.

1810s

Christabel - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816) / So, have you heard of Carmilla (1872)? If you’re reading this post, you probably have, if you haven’t, it’s a classic (vampire) book than is said to have inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. It’s also incredibly gay. Well, some say it was Christabel than was the inspiration for Carmilla. Of course we don’t know this for sure, but the similarities definitely are there. Review from a reader: “what if we were the protagonist and villain of a never-completed sensual gothic poem (and we were both girls) / alternately: when you meet a wickedhot girl only she's SPOOKY but that's SEXY and turns out your dad and her dad were also gay back in the day before having a sexy gay falling-out and she's like 'babe let's get naked and hold each other close' and you're like '—wait fuck I mean uhhhh I PRETEND I DO NOT SEE IT!'” I haven’t read this one, however for what it seems Christabel is not explicitly a vampire. Since the poem is unfinished we don’t know the end, and we just think she’s a vampire because so many things used in here were also reused for vampires characterization (like not being able to enter a house unless invited)

1830s

Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier (1835) / “A woman uses her incredible beauty to captivate both d'Albert, a young poet, and disguised as a man, his mistress, Rosette. In this shocking tale of sexual deception, Gautier draws readers into the bedrooms and boudoirs of a French château in a compelling exploration of desire and sexual intrigue, and gives voice to a longing which is larger in scope, namely, the wish for completeness in oneself.”

1870s

Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife - Adolphe Belot (1870) / “The sensational Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife tells of the suffering of a naive young man whose new bride will not agree to consummate the marriage. Eventually he learns from an acquaintance, to his amazement, that their wives are lovers.” In reviews it says than this is a homophobic novel (who’s surprised) but “Christopher Rivers argues in his introduction that the protagonist's homophobic attitude toward lesbianism is ironically linked to his intimate homosocial bonds with men”

1880s

Jill - Amy Dillwyn (1884) / “Jill is the story of an unconventional heroine—a gentlewoman who disguises herself as a maid and runs away to London in search of adventure after her mother dies and her father is pursued by a Victorian gold-digger. Once in London she uses her position as lady's maid to become close to her mistress. Her life above and below stairs is portrayed with irreverent wit in this fast-paced story, but at the centre of the novel is Jill's unfolding love for the woman she works for. On the surface a feminist manifesto, Jill is a poignant story of same-sex desire and unrequited love. A new introduction tells the autobiographical story on which the novel is based —the author's own passionate attachment to a woman she called her wife, but who she couldn't have.”

Mephistophela - Catulle Mendès (1889) / “Telling the story of Baronne Sophor d'Hermelinge, a woman as thoroughly martyrized by her creator as any other heroine in the history of fiction, in spite of the enormous competition for that title established by countless writers, male and female, it is one of the archetypal novels of the Decadent Movement, and one of the most striking, precisely because is it such a discomfiting piece of writing, the deliberately controversial nature of which has been further enhanced as its surrounding social context has changed over time. Highly influential, especially on the works of such writers as Jean Lorrain and Renée Vivien, Mephistophela, in placing lesbian amour in the foreground of the story, deals forthrightly and intensively with a literary theme that had previously only been treated with delicacy and indecision, mostly in poetry. It is essentially a horror story about demonic possession, about contrived and cruel damnation, devoid even of a Faustian pact, which merely employs obsessive lesbian desire as an instrument of damnation.” Goodreads review: “As a story it is quite straightforward. Girl has same-sex desires and the novel follows her various affairs up to about the age of thirty. […] More controversially, Stableford (and the books blurb) suggests that it is a novel of demonic possession. Now Brian has probably forgotten more than I will ever learn about the period but a few of the episodes show distinct Charcotian traits (an early childhood 'illness', two doctors in conversation etc) and a (really great) fantasy/visionary episode in the book seems to show, to me, the influence of Michelets book on witchcraft. If anything, the book seems even more subversive that Stableford suggests, as Sophie seems largely 'out and proud' and the author often says that she is 'is as she is' suggesting to me that it is 'natural' rather than demonic. I wonder whether the publisher asked Mendes to add some suggestion of the demonic to 'tone down' the idea that people were actually like 'that'.”

1890s

Avant la nuit / Before the dark - Marcel Proust (1893) / Short story (seriously, less than 10 pages). I read it the other day before bed and it’s pretty good. Talks about Françoise, a woman, revealing her homosexuality to her friend Leslie.

A Sunless Heart - Edith Johnstone (1894) / “Its first third focuses on Gasparine O'Neill, who shares an intense connection with her sickly twin brother, Gaspar. Living in poverty, the two struggle to live decently until Gaspar dies. Here gritty naturalism gives way to fantasy, as Gasparine is rescued from despair by the brilliant Lotus Grace, a much-admired teacher at the local Ladies' College. Sexually exploited from the age of twelve by her sister's fiancé, Lotus cannot love anyone, not even her illegitimate child. Gasparine devotes herself to Lotus, but Lotus finds her final brief happiness with a woman student, Mona Lefcadio, a passionate Trinidadian heiress. Exploring issues of race, sexuality, and class in compelling prose, A Sunless Heart is a startling re-discovery from the late- Victorian era. The appendices to this Broadview edition provide contemporary documents that illuminate the tension between romantic friendship and lesbian consciousness in the novel and address other debates in which the novel the nature of Creole identity, the education of women, and the dangers of childhood sexual exploitation.”

The Songs of Bilitis - Pierre Louÿs (1894) / Poetry. However, believe it or not, these were not written by a woman but by a man. Why add it then, well, the story is quite original. The author (Pierre Louÿs) published this verses as written in Ancient Greece by a “disciple of sappho” named Bilitis. He created this whole character, she was a woman, she was a poet, she was a sappho disciple, her work has been lost until now, and she was a huge lesbian. Of course, this is not true, but still, it’s an interesting read. “Between their open celebration of lesbian love and the eventual revelation of their true authorship—the verses actually were written by French novelist and poet Pierre Louÿs—they became a succès de scandale. Although debunked as a work of antiquity, The Songs of Bilitis remains a classic of erotic literature.”

1900s

A Woman's Affair - Liane de Pougy (1901) / "Despite her beauty and her riches, Annhine de Lys, one of the most notorious courtesans of 1890s Paris, is bored and restless. Into her life bursts Flossie, a young American woman, and everything changes. The love she offers Annhine is dangerous, perverse and hard to resist. Ignoring the warnings of her best friend, Annhine encourages the affair."

I Await the Devil's Coming - Mary MacLane (1902) / “Mary MacLane's I Await the Devil's Coming is a shocking, brave and intelectually challenging diary of a 19-year-old girl living in Butte, Montana in 1902. Written in potent, raw prose that propelled the author to celebrity upon publication, the book has become almost completely forgotten. In the early 20th century, MacLane's name was synonymous with sexuality; she is widely hailed as being one of the earliest American feminist authors, and critics at the time praised her work for its daringly open and confesional style. In its first month of publication, the book sold 100,000 copies--a remarkable number for a debut author, and one that illustrates MacLane's broad appeal.” She’s pretty sapphic and claims her (female) lit teacher is her true love. Also an excerpt from a Goodreads review: “She awaits the Devil to come and marry her and bring happiness if only for three days, meanwhile rehearsing suicide. She prays to the Devil to deliver her from “unripe bananas; from bathless people; from a waist-line that slopes up in the front" but offers sensuous instructions on how to eat an olive, and enjoys porterhouse steaks and fudge she makes with brown sugar. It's quite a ride. Many recent reviewers pigeonhole her as an ahead-of-her-time Goth or emo, simply transcribing an eternal and universal teen angst.”

Q.E.D. - Gertrude Stein (1903) - Autobiographical short story about a love triangle between three women; Adele (Stein), Mabel, manipulative and wealthy, and Helen, who seduces Adele.

A Woman Appeared To Me - Renée Vivien (1904) / I have no idea how to explain this book other than it's all I ever wanted and it has an absolutely breathtaking prose. Think of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s writing style and descriptions, the character's philosophy, and the queer toxic relationships in the book. Now make it lesbian and even more explicitly queer. Also I'm pretty sure the main characters want to fuck Sappho. On the second chapter the main characters + some side characters (all women + one guy) are having a discussion (a symposium of sorts) about how much they love sappho and how believing she married a man is stupid and how they don’t hate men, just really dislike them, and the guy says: "Mademoiselle, you are trying to hide from the irresistible seduction of the male. You will certainly finish your love-life in the arms of a man." And our main character being an icon finished the chapter answering him this: "That would be a crime against nature, sir. I have too much respect for our friend to believe her capable of an abnormal passion!". It’s so good. I have seen mixed opinions on this one, but I’m just gonna say: the girls than get it, get it. Everything by Renée Vivien is so good, but this is her only full novel I think (she also wrote poems and short stories). If you have to read only one book out of all the books in this post, let it be this one.

Zezé - Ángeles Vicente (1909) / Not translated (I think) but it’s the first lesbian novel written in Spanish which is pretty cool (even cooler than it was written by a woman who, in 1909 (or around it) divorced her husband and lived through her writing). The plot is basically, the narrator (the author) is on a ship and shares the cabin where she’s staying with another woman, Zezé, a cuplé singer, who tells her about her life (her childhood in a religious school, where she discovered her sexuality with had a relationship with another (female) student, her life in Madrid as an adult and living life as a woman, etc)

1910s

Despised & Rejected - Rose Allatini (1918) / A gay man and a lesbian are friends during WWI, which they are against (an anti-war novel). I think the book is in the perspective of the gay man, but his friend is also a main character.

The Scorpion - Anna Elisabet Weirauch (1919) / A review by a reader: “This book felt more like historical fiction than a novel actually written in 1919-1932, considering the explicitly lesbian relationships and coming of age and coming out style narrative. The story follows the life of Metta, a lesbian who grew up with a controlling family in Berlin. The narrative follows her from her first crush on her manipulative governess, to her first love the older and intelectual Olga, and her foray into the gay scene in Munich and beyond. The story isn't without suffering and it isn't just a love story despite how much you might want it to be. Definite trigger warnings for suicide (not Metta), poor mental health, homophobia and general cringe comments due to the time of writing. But the point of the book is for Metta to find a way to be, a way to live her life comfortably and happily, essentially to find herself.”

1920s

The Bacheloress - Victor Marqueritte (1922) / “Monique is an emancipated French woman who leaves home to escape a marriage of convenience to a man whom her parents have forced on her. She then succumbs to all sorts of carnal temptations including a lesbian love affair with a singer. The scandal provoked by Victor Margueritte's La Garçonne, here translated as The Bacheloress, led to its author having his legion d'honneur revoked, which only propelled this novel about a brazenly independent "new woman" to best-seller status. What was shocking then was not so much the reckless behavior of its heroine, who is depicted as the victim of psychological torment, but the portrait of the corrupt post-WWI society in which she lives. Authentic as Monique is, the types of love she encounters, set against the hostile and contemptuous portrayal of her peers, only amplifies her struggle.”

Yellow Rose - Nobuko Yoshiva (1923) / This is the only book than has been translated by this author, she was a lesbian who wrote Class-S romance (a Japanese book genre of the time, which focused on lesbian / homoerotic relationships between women [so-called romantic friendships], than usually take place in an all-girls boarding school). This specific story talks about a teacher-student relationship. She has other books, one called Yaneura no nishojo (two virgins in the attic) (1919) which isn’t translated, but sounds good, the story “is thought to be semi-autobiographical, and describes a female-female love experience with her dormmate. In the last scene, the two girls decide to live together as a couple. This work, in attacking male-oriented society, and showing two women as a couple after they have finished secondary education presents a strong feminist attitude, and also reveals Yoshiya's own lesbian sexual orientation”.

Freundinnen: ein Roman unter Frauen / Girlfriends: a Novel among Women - Maximiliane Ackers (1923) / Only in German, not translated. Review from an English reader: “This novel—which went through several editions in the 20s before being banned by the Nazis—is uncompromisingly, heartbreakingly queer. The novel tells the story of the love between two actresses in Wiemar Germany, Ruth and Erika. Both women struggle to support themselves on the stage, to live independently, and to come to terms with their love for each other and how they might live and express themselves and their desire.”

Surplus - Sylvia Stevenson (1924) / Review from a reader: “This book should be included in lists of seminal lesbian fiction. Published in 1924, Surplus is the story of Sally Wraith's young adult adventures after the end of WWI, during which period she served as an ambulance driver. The novel is not explicit and dos not detail a physical relationship between Sally and her romantic friend Averil but Sally refers to Averil as her "dream girl" with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life. This novel was published before Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness , which is often hailed for its early negative portrayal of homophobia. But I find it compelling that Sally's love for Averil is not treated as deviant. It's just tragic for any babydyke to fall in love with a straight girl!”

The Captive - Eduard Bourdet (1926) / Theatre, “Irène is a lesbian tortured by her love for Madame d'Aiguines, but pretending engagement to Jacques (man). Though Irène attempts to leave Madame d'Aiguines and marry Jacques, she returns to the relationship, saying that it is "a prison to which I must return captive, despite myself". Madame d'Aiguines is not seen in the play, but leaves behind nosegays of violets for Irène, as a symbol of her love.” Read here

Women Lovers, or The Third Woman - Natalie Clifford Barney (1926) / “This long-lost novel recounts a passionate triangle of love and loss among three of the most daring women of belle époque Paris. In this barely disguised roman à clef, the legendary American heiress, writer, and arts patron Natalie Clifford Barney, the dashing Italian baroness Mimi Franchetti, and the beautiful French courtesan Liane de Pougy share erotic liaisons that break all taboos and end in devastation as one unexpectedly becomes the "third woman."

HERmione - H.D (1927) / “This autobiographical novel, an interior self-portrait of the poet H. D. (1886-1961) is what can best be described as a find, “a posthumous treasure”. In writing HERmione, H.D. returned to a year in her life that was peculiarly blighted. She was in her early twenties—a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place... Waves to fight against, to fight against alone... “I am Hermione Gart, a failure” —she cried in her dementia, “I am Her, Her, Her.” She had failed at Bryn Mawr, she felt hemmed in by her family, she did not yet know what she was going to do with her life. The return from Europe of the wild-haired George Lowndes (Ezra Pound) expanded her horizons but threatened her sense of self. An intense new friendship with Fayne Rabb (Frances Josepha Gregg), an odd girl who was, if not lesbian, then certainly of bisexual bent, brought an atmosphere that made her hold on everyday reality more tenuous. This stormy course led to mental breakdown, then to a turning point and a new beginning as her own true self, as Her"

Lucia Sánchez Saornil (1895 - 1970) / Spanish poet, putting her here because she’s part of generation ‘27. Read her Wikipedia page because she’s literally iconic (I can’t put the link here for some reason). I love her so much. She was an anarchist and very revolutionary. She wrote under a pen name to be able to explicitly write about women and lived with her partner (América Barroso) until she died. I haven’t been able to find an English translation of her writing, but I do have found a French one, so better than nothing

Dusty Answer - Rosamond Lehmann (1927) / Coming of age story of Judith Earle, sensitive, lonely, who grew up as an only child, but with 4 neighbors (all cousins) to make her company (and eventually harbor romantic feelings for). Then she moves to college, where she meets Jennifer and enters a relationship with her. Although the relationship is not explicitly romantic.

Ladies Almanack - Djuna Barnes (1928) / “Written as a medieval calendar, Ladies Almanack is a clever parody of the crazy sapphic circle of Natalie Barney and her Académie des Femmes. Sharp, biting, witty and transgressive, it is also a modern and pioneer in his vision of lesbianism and the issues surrounding relationships between women. The emotional endogamy, transvestism, motherhood, marriage or differences between sex and gender are already presented in the book with a charge of irony and acidity that is rare in the treatment of the topic. And it is also a breath of fresh air, an essential reference to know the world of lesbian women in all its breadth and diversity.”

1930s

The Angel and the Perverts - Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (around 1930) / "Set in the lesbian and gay circles of Paris in the 1920s, The Angel and the Perverts tells the story of a hermaphrodite born to upper class parents in Normandy and ignorant of his/her physical difference. As an adult, s/he lives a double life as Marion/Mario, passing undetected as a lesbian in the literary salons of the times, and as a gay man in the cocaine dens made famous by Colette." Technically not lesbian, but it’s “set in the lesbian cercles of Paris”

Broderie Anglaise - Violet Trefusis (1935) / Technically not a lesbian novel, but by a sapphic author. Do you know about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West? Of course you do, everyone does. However, do you know than Violet Trefusis used to be Vita’s lover? They dated as teens and again as adults. There’s this whole gay toxic romantic circle between Violet, Vita, and Virginia. Violet wrote this book where she’s basically adding Vita, Virginia, and herself into the characters and dissing them. The plot centers on an encounter between Alexa, a celebrated English writer (Virginia), and her rival, Anne (Violet), and their discussion about their mutual lover, Lord Shorne (Vita).

Summer Will Show - Sylvia Townsend Warner (1936) / Sophia Willoughby's husband has a mistress who he cheats on her with. So she grabs him and packs him up to Paris with his mistress. She'll raise their children and he can have his mistress all day long if he wants, what she wants is to not see him. Sadly, her children die, and she goes to Paris, where she'll find her husband's mistress, and the two of them start an affair with eachother.

Diana: A Strange Autobiography - Diana Frederics (1939) / “«This is the unusual and compelling story of Diana, a tantalizingly beautiful woman who sought love in the strange by-paths of Lesbos. Fearless and outspoken, it dares to reveal that hidden world where perfumed caresses and half-whispered endearments constitute the forbidden fruits in a Garden of Eden where men are never accepted». This is how A Strange Autobiography was described when it was published in paperback in 1952. The original 1939 hardcover edition carried with it a Publisher's This is the autobiography of a woman who tried to be normal. In the book, Diana is presented as the unexceptional daughter of an unexceptional plutocratic family. During adolescence, she finds herself drawn with mysterious intensity to a girl friend. The narrative follows Diana's progress through college; a trial marriage that proves she is incapable of heterosexuality; intelectual and sexual education in Europe; and a series of lesbian relationships culminating in a final tormented triangular struggle with two other women for the individual salvation to be found in a happy couple.”

1940s

Hidden Path - Elena Fortún (somewhere around the 1940s) / Maria Luisa grows up on 1910s/1920s Spain. She is a peculiar girl, one who despises wearing dresses and wants to dress as a sailor, who could spend all day reading, who loves painting, and who swears she will never marry. Oh, and she's also a lesbian. Based on the author's life Maria Luisa is kind of the author's alter ego, and it follows her from childhood to adulthood while dealing with a world not created with people like her in mind. (Not published until 2016)

El Pensionado de Santa Casilda / The Boarding School of Saint Casilda - Elena Fortún (somewhere around the 1940s) / This book is not translated, but if you know spanish I recommend to pick it up. A group of 14/15 year old girls who go to the same spanish all-girls boarding school, and they are all in love with each other. It follows them into adulthood and how they navigate their lives being women and lesbians in the past (Not published until 2022). Messy lesbians at its finest. Like, seriously. Lesbians still in love with their ex and not over their first love, dating their friends and their ex friend, and the ex of their friend, and having sugar mommies, etc etc

1960s

Winter Love - Han Suyin (1962) / “As a college student in London during the bitterly cold winter of 1944, Red falls in love with her married classmate Mara. Their affair unleashes a physical passion, a jealousy, and a sense of self-doubt that sweep all her previous experiences aside and will leave her changed forever. Set against the rubble of the bombed city, in a time of gray austerity and deprivation, Winter Love recalls a life at its most vivid.”

The Chinese Garden - Rosemary Manning (1962) / “A "very intelligent, sensitive, and compelling" novel of adolescent rebellion and sexual awakening at a girls' boarding school (Anthony Burgess). Set in a repressive British girls' boarding school in the late 1920s—where not only sexuality but femininity is squashed—the novel is the coming-of-age story of sixteen-year-old Rachel, a sensitive, bright, and innocent student. Rachel finds refuge from the Spartan conditions, strict regime, fierce discipline, and formidable headmistress at Bampfield in a secret garden. She also finds friendship there, with a rebellious girl named Margaret. As Margaret has her mind expanded by a scandalous tome entitled The Well of Loneliness, she engages in a bold, forbidden act—the ultimate transgression at Bampfield—and Rachel is drawn into the turmoil. Confronted with the persecution of her friend and troubled by a growing awareness of her own sensuality, Rachel faces an imposible choice that drives her to desperate measures.”

The Microcosm - Maureen Duffy (1966) / “At the House of Shades, Matt, a bar-room philosopher, tries to make sense of the disparate lives which cross here -- of Judy who saves herself and her finery for a Saturday night lover, of Steve the gym teacher who dreads a chance encounter with a pupil in this twilight environment, and of Matt herself, who needs these vicarious exchanges despite the security of her relationship with Rae and her sense that this lesbian sanctuary is a prison too, enforcing the guilt and estrangement of the city streets beyond. Elsewhere there are women such as Marie, trapped within an unwanted marriage and unable to admit her sexuality, and Cathy, for whom the discovery that she is not 'the only one in the world' is an affirmation of her existence. With its innovative structure and style, perfectly mirroring the voices and experiences of women forced by society to live on the margins, The Microcosm remains as powerful today as when originally published in 1966.”

1970s

Beginning with O - Olga Broumas (1977) / A poetry collection by a lesbian, greek writer.

The Same Sea as Every Summer - Esther Tusquets (1978) / A stream-of-consciousness type book, by an author who has been compared to Virginia Woolf. “Poetic and erotic, El mismo mar de todos los veranos ( The Same Sea As Every Summer ) was originally published in Spain in 1978, three years after the death of Franco and in the same year that government censorship was abolished. But even in a new era that fostered more liberal attitudes toward divorce, homosexuality, and women's rights, this novel by Esther Tusquets was controversial. Its feminine view of sexuality (in particular, its depiction of a lesbian relationship) was unprecedented in Spanish fiction. The disillusioned narrator of The Same Sea As Every Summer is a middle-aged woman whose unhappy life prompts a journey into she past to rediscover a more authentic self. However, events force her to realize that love or trust will inevitably be repaid by betrayal. This pattern assumes various forms in a story that moves forward as well as backward, playing out in Barcelona among the haute bourgeoisie. Richly textured with allusion, The Same Sea As Every Summer is also a commentary on post-Civil War Spanish society by an author who grew up during the repressive Franco regime.”

Así es: Mi vida 3 - Victorina Durán (somewhere in the late 1970s) / So, not translated but has great historical value. Basically, this is the third book out of Victorina’s memories that she wrote in the 70s. Victorina (1899 - 1993) was so cool. She was an icon. She was a sceneographer, a painter, a costume designer, writer (aside from her memories, she has some theatre plays), etc. She actually wanted to be an actress. She was part of the Círculo Sáfico de Madrid (the sapphic club of Madrid, a club made out of her and her friends, who were sapphic) among others. She never hid her sexuality. She was friends with almost all the importante well known people in 1920s / 1930s Spain. This book is the third one out of her memories, and it’s focused explicitly on her relationships (all with women). She said she wanted to focus on them and give them a book of their own, so this is of great historical value, giving insights into the queer spaces, lesbian scene, wlw relationships and being gay at that time. I need to read it so bad if someone has a pdf please tell me I’ll send them my fanfic wips

1980s

On Strike against God - Joanna Russ (1980) / “A lost feminist masterwork by feminist and speculative fiction icon, Joanna Russ, about a young lesbian's coming-to-consciousness during the social upheaval of the 1970s. When Esther, a recently divorced professor, has her first lesbian love affair, the fallout brings her everyday miseries into focus and precipitates a personal crisis. She flees her small, upstate New York college town, grapples with gender confusion and the ghosts of therapists past, and fumbles her way through comedic sexual self-discovery, oscillating all the while between visionary confidence and debilitating self-doubt. Confronted with the homophobia of straight feminists and the misogyny of gay men, Esther is left to forge a language for her feminism and her burgeoning lesbian desire. On Strike Against God is quintessentially experimental but accesible, alternately wry and earnest, poignantly didactic, playful, and emotionally charged.” From a review: “For anyone like me who's unfamiliar with the quote which inspired the title: A judge was sentencing a picketer from the early twentieth century shirtwaist-makers strike (the first large scale strike by women), and he told her, "You are striking against God and Nature, whose law is that man shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God!"

Faultline - Sheila Ortiz Taylor (1982) / “An outrageous, zesty, funny Lesbian novel; the adventures of a Lesbian mother with six children, three hundred rabbits, and very relaxed attitude."

The Swashbuckler - Lee Lynch (1985) / "Frenchy Tonneau leaves her closeted home in the Bronx for the bars of New York City, the freedom of Provincetown, and the liberation of Greenwich Village in the 1960s and 1970s. Her hangouts, her women, her small yet universal world tell the stories of the times - and the stories of lesbians today. A timeless journey and a riveting read, The Swashbuckler is heart-wrenching, heartwarming, and unforgettable." Butch main character, lesbian life in the 60s/70s, lesbian-feminism, butchfemme, etc.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café - Fannie Flagg (1987) / listen, LISTEN, I know this book is not obscure, absolutely not given it even has a movie adaptation, but people do not give this book the love it deserves. I'm constantly thinking about Idgie and Ruth, they are one of my favorite fictional couples ever, and also my favorite lesbian fictional couple. They are such interesting characters with such an interesting dynamic and I just love them so so much. A femmebutch couple in 1920s Alabama, who go through many hardships but still find eachother, still end together, and even have a restaurant, live together, and raise a kid. And not only them, but the book is made out of 4 main characters (or 3 depends on if you see Ninny as a main character or not), Idgie, Ruth, and Ninny and Evelyn. Evelyn, an 80s depressed housewife in her 40s finds solace and a true friend in Ninny, a 90 year old woman staying at a nursing home (not ‘cause she needs it, but to keep a friend company). Ninny tells her the story of Idgie (her, kind of, sister) and Ruth, her best friend and lover. Evelyn finds feminism and hope through the memories, getting inspired by Idgie and Ruth's story and becoming happier in her life. It has several points of views and it jumps between years (first 1980s, then 1920s, then 1940s, then 1980s again, etc) and it also talks a lot about racism in 1920s Alabama, and i'll just stop because I love this book so much and i could go on forever. Oh, and also they murder a man and feed him to a police officer.

Lovers' choice - Becky Birtha (1987) / A collection of eleven short stories about lesbian women.

1990s

Out Of Time - Paula Martinac (1990) / Susan finds an old photograph album with pictures from the 1920s, all pictures being of a group of women (four in total). She's told it's not for sale, but she steals it anyway. After some digging, she finds out than two of the girls from the photos were lovers! And not only is Susan trying to navigate the details of her life and of her relationship with her own girlfriend, but she obsesses over the women in the picture, and eventually, the spirits of the girls start to haunt her.

The Gilda Stories - Jewele Gomez (1991) / Gilda escaped from slavery in the 1850s, until she's taken by a vampire who (consensually) turns her into a vampire too. Gilda moves through the decades finding community and connections and helping people, and slowly builds a place for herself in time. (Fine, not actually obscure since I’ve seen it all around the internet, but it just sounds so good)

Annabel and I - Chris Anne Wolfe (1996) / Plot summed up by a reader: “Half-orphaned Jenny-Wren spends her summers at her uncle Jake's fishing lodge on Lake Chautauqua. One summer day when she's twelve years old while boating with her uncle, she finds a girl on the end of a dock reaching futilely for her escaped model boat. Jenny swims over and rescues the boat, meeting the orphaned Annabel, spending her summers at her grandmother's summer estate. This begins a friendship that endures and grows for years as the two girls spent each summer together, only to be separated at the end of summer. As the two grow older, they realize a magic is at work that keeps bringing them together, despite the near century between them. As the summers come and go, the two young women discover their love for each other, and the realization that their love is imposible. Can their love persist beyond those fleeting summers and flourish, in the face of time?”. Review from a reader: “The foreword says this book is for all wlw, and that, "Because there are as many different ways to love a woman as there are women who love women; it's the loving, not the label, that really matters." That really captured the core of what this book does, it treasures the love we create with our bare hands for and with another woman.” A time travel romance (Jenny is from the 1980s, Annabel from 1890s)

Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice - April Sinclair (1996) / Bisexual mc. “Jean "Stevie" Stevenson, the indomitable heroine of "Coffee Will Make You Black," is back—somewhat older and wiser, with some experience and a college degree -- diving headfirst into the hot tub, free love, yoga, and vegetarian lifestyle of 1970s San Francisco. In this liberating new world of raised consciousness, mind-expanding, and disco-dancing, a soul sister with passion and daring has room to experiment with life and love to find out who she "really" is.”

Beyond the Pale - Elana Dykewomon (1997) / “The story of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York. Interwoven with her tale is that Chava Meyer, who was attended by Gurvich at her birth and grew up to survive the pogrom that took the lives of her parents. Throughout the book, historical background plays a large part: Jewish faith and traditions, the practice of midwifery, the horrific conditions in prerevolutionary Russia and New York sweatshops, and the determined work of labor unionists and suffragists." While it is a romance, it's also more than that, it's about the life of Jewish women in the 20th century.

Crystal Diary - Frankie Hucklenbroich (1997) / “Frankie Hucklenbroich's razor-edged, compelling, often wryly humorous story hustles us from the blood-and-beer-drenched corners of her St. Louis meat-packing district '50s youth, through the sex-soaked Hollywood alleys of her '60s baby butch years, into the druggy metropolis of '70s San Francisco. Moving relentlessly from one woman to another until faces and bodies blur, scamming her existence, learning what the street has to how to make a buck, how to make it with a woman, how to court the dangers of crystal meth, how to survive.”

Hers 3 - Terry Wolverton (1999) / Short stories

2000s

Valencia - Michelle Tea (2000) / "Valencia is the fast-paced account of one girl's search for love and high times in the drama-filled dyke world of San Francisco's Mission District. Through a string of narrative moments, Tea records a year lived in a world of girls: there's knife-wielding Marta, who introduces Michelle to a new world of radical sex; Willa, Michelle's tormented poet-girlfriend; Iris, the beautiful boy-dyke who ran away from the South in a dust cloud of drama; and Iris's ex, Magdalena Squalor, to whom Michelle turns when Iris breaks her heart."

Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir - Lillian Faderman (2003) / “Born in 1940, Lillian Faderman is the only child of an uneducated and unmarried Jewish woman who left Latvia to seek a better life in America. Lillian grew up in poverty, but fantasised about becoming an actress. When her dreams led to the dangerous, seductive world of the sex trade and sham-marriages in Hollywood of the fifties, she realised she was attracted to women, and that show-biz is as cruel as they say. Desperately seeking to make her life meaningful, she studied at Berkeley; paying her way by working as a pin-up model and burlesque dancer, hiding her lesbian affairs from the outside world. At last she became a brilliant student and the woman who becomes a loving partner, a devoted mother, an acclaimed writer and ground-breaking pioneer of gay and lesbian scholarship. Told with wrenching immediacy and great power, Naked in the Promised Land is the story of an exceptional woman and her remarkable, unorthodox life.”

Her Naked Skin - Rebecca Lenkiewicz (2008) / Theatre. “Militancy in the Suffragette Movement is at its height. Thousands of women of all classes serve time in Holloway Prison in their fight to gain the vote. Amongst them is Lady Celia Cain who feels trapped by both the policies of the day and the shackles of a frustrating marriage. Inside, she meets a young seamstress, Eve Douglas, and her life spirals into an erotic but dangerous chaos. London 1913. A crucial moment when, with emancipation almost in sight, women refuse to let the establishment stand in their way.”

The Rain Before it Falls - Jonathan Coe (2008) / “A story of three generations of women whose destinies reach from the English countryside in World War Il to London, Toronto, and southern France at the turn of the new century. Evacuated to Shropshire during the Blitz, eight-year-old Rosamond forged a bond with her cousin Beatrix that augured the most treasured and devastating moments of her life. She recorded these memories sixty years later, just before her death, on cassettes she bequeathed to a woman she hadn't seen in decades. When her beloved niece, Gill, plays the tapes in hopes of locating this unwitting heir, she instead hears a family saga swathed in promise and the story of how Beatrix, starved of her mother's affection, conceived a fraught bloodline that culminated in heart-stopping tragedy—its chief victim being her own granddaughter. And as Rosamond explores the ties that bound these generations together and shaped her experience all along, Gill grows increasingly haunted by how profoundly her own recollections--not to mention the love she feels for her grown daughters, listening alongside her-- are linked to generations of women she never knew. A stirring, masterful portrait of motherhood and family secrets, "The Rain Before It Falls" is also a meditation on the tapestries we weave out of the past, whether transcendent or horrific.”

2010s

When We Were Outlaws - Jeanne Cordova (2011) / "A sweeping memoir, a raw and intimate chronicle of a young activist torn between conflicting personal longings and political goals. When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women's Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s. Brash and ambitious, activist Jeanne Cordova is living with one woman and falling in love with another, but her passionate beliefs tell her that her first duty is "to the revolution".—to change the world and end discrimination against gays and lesbians."

Call Me Esteban - Leila Kalamuié (2015) / “With unapologetic vividness, Lejla Kalamujic depicts pre- and post-war Sarajevo by charting a daughter coping with losing her mother, but discovering herself. From imagined conversations with Franz Kafka to cozy apartments, psychiatric wards, and cemeteries, Call Me Esteban is a piercing meditation on a woman grasping at memories in the name of claiming her identity.”

Lancelot: Her Story - Carol Anne Douglas (2015) / Arthurian legend retelling! "A young girl sees a man rape and murder her mother. She grabs a stick and puts out his eye. Her father raises her as a boy so she will be safe from men's attacks. She practices and practices until she becomes a great fighter - Lancelot. She wants to protect women—and she does. Lancelot hears about King Arthur, a just king across the sea, and journeys to earn a place at Camelot. She vows to serve him. but fears that Arthur and his men will discover that she is a woman and send her away. Lancelot is shocked to realize that she is falling in love with the king's wife, Guinevere. Guinevere is a strong woman who would have preferred to be queen in her own right, not through marriage. Saxons attack Arthur's kingdom, and Lancelot finds out that fighting a war is far different from saving women in single combat. The savagery of war devastates her, she is living a lie, but she is also deeply in love…”

Jigsaw Youth - Tiffany Scandal (2015) / “Lose your best friend because you finally Came Out. Spend days driving aimlessly because there's nothing to do. Serve your rapist breakfast because you need your job. Fall asleep to gunshots and sirens because that's the only sense of home you've ever known. Hold hands with ghosts. Your life is in pieces, but you can't be broken. Wipe off the blood. Tired of being told who to be, what to wear, how to act and who to fuck. Break the rules and learn fast how to never get caught. All you need is nothing, but you're happy with your car, guitar and camera. Throwing around polaroids of tits like they're money, you swap stories about adventures and realize that we're all running away from something.”

Creatures of Will & Temper - Molly Tanzer (2017) / Recommended as a sapphic picture of dorian gray retelling, it tells the story of Dorina (hedonistic, art lover, and woman-kisser), her older sister Evadne (fencer and responsable), Lady Henrietta (suit-wearing, cigar-smoking lesbian who is a horrible influence), and Basil, Dorina and Evadne's uncle, and who's character has not changed much. They also summon demons.

The Adventures of China Iron - Gabriela Cabez��n Cámara (2017) / “1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina's richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to the ruthless violence involved in nation-building. This subversive retelling of Argentina's foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro is a celebration of the colour and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom. With humour and sophistication, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara has created a joyful, hallucinatory novel that is also an incisive critique of national myths.”

2020s

Thirst - Marina Yuszczuk (2020) / “Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. It is the twilight of Europe's bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet. In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother's terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women-and they cross a threshold from which there's no turning back. With echoes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.” Lesbian vampires!

The Lives We Left Behind - Olivia Bratherton-Wilson (2021) / I read this one so long ago and I don’t remember everything with detail, just than I really liked it. “1943. Seventeen-year-old Dorotea Miller is given the responsibility of managing the family farm when her father and brother are conscripted, leaving her with only her distant mother and the unfamiliar Land Girls for company. Angeline Carter and her four younger brothers are evacuated to the Welsh countryside to escape the bombings; the Miller farm is nothing like they've seen before and certainly more than Angeline bargained for when she meets the surly, unwelcoming farmer's daughter. Despite their rocky start, misunderstandings and tragedies, Dorothea and Angeline realise that their friendship may run deeper than either of them had prepared for.” There is also a sequel! That one I haven’t read tho.

Agatha of Little Neon - Claire Luchette (2021) / "Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters (the other nuns) : they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a formermill town now dotted with wind turbines. […] Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone, to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she will have to reckon with what she sees and feels all on her own. Who will she be if she isn't with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home--or has she just been hiding? […] It is a novel about female friendship and devotion, the roles made available to us, and how we become ourselves." Lesbian nuns

Burning Butch - R/B Mertz (2022) / A butch lesbian memoir of their life growing up catholic and surviving in the world, while dealing with faith and what it shape it takes to them.

London on My Mind - Clara Alves (2022) / So, the English translation just came out! Funny thing is, I started this in 2022 even tho I don’t know Portuguese (translating paragraph by paragraph with google translate) and it was pretty good. I haven’t finished it (translating a whole book with google translate is definitely work) but I’m so ready to read it now that it’s translated. Dayana (seventeen, black, plus size, and Brazilian) is forced to move to London with her father (who abandoned her mother and her) and his new family after her mother died. She’s having a pretty horrible time, until, on a walk, finds a redhead girl… escaping Buckingham Palace?? So of course, she helps her escape. Who exactly is this girl? Why was she escaping?? The answer, her name is Diana and she’s sort of (super) the princess of Wales. Huh.

Helen House - Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (2022) / “Right before meeting her girlfriend Amber's parents for the first time, the unnamed narrator of Helen House learns that she and her partner share a similar both of their sisters are dead. As the narrator wonders what else Amber has been hiding, she struggles with her own secret--using sex as a coping mechanism--as well as confusion and guilt over whether she really cares about Amber, or if she's only using her for sex. When they arrive at the parents' rural upstate home, a quaint but awkward first meeting unravels into a nightmare in which the narrator finds herself stranded in a family's decades-long mourning ritual. At turns terrifying and erotic, Helen House is a queer ghost story about trauma and grief.”

Promises in Pompeii - Violet Morley (2022) / Set in Ancient Rome, it tells the story of two girls, Octavia and Helvia, childhood friends, and their journey through life as women and through their feelings. In the author ig, she said it includes: adventure/survival, against the odds, brothels, butch/femme, coming of age, disguised as a man, first love, friends to lovers, opposites attract, etc. I’m currently reading it, and I really like it so far.

Nettleblack - Nat Reeve (2022) / “Subversive and playful, Nettleblack is a neo-Victorian queer farce that follows a runaway heir/ess and an organisation of crime-fighting misfits as they struggle with the misdeeds besieging a rural English town. The year is 1893. Having run away from her family home to escape an arranged marriage, Welsh heiress Henrietta “Henry” Nettleblack finds herself ambushed, robbed, and then saved by the mysterious Dallyangle Division - part detective agency, part neighbourhood watch. Desperate to hide from her older sisters, Henry disguises herself and enlists. But the Division soon finds itself under siege from a spate of crimes and must fight for its very survival. Assailed by strange feelings for her new colleague - the tomboyish, moody Septimus - Henry quickly sees that she's lost in a small rural town with surprisingly big problems. And to make things worse, sinister forces threaten to expose her as the missing Nettleblack sister. As the net starts to close around Henry, the new people in her life seem to offer her a way out, and a way forward. Is the world she's lost in also a place she can find herself? Told through journal entries and letters, Nettleblack is a picaresque ride through the perils and joys of finding your place in the world, challenging myths about queerness - particularly transness - as a modern phenomenon, while exploring the practicalities of articulating queer perspectives when you're struggling for words.”

Sunburn - Chloe Michelle (2023) / In Ireland, the early 1990s, Lucy feels out of place in her small town. She falls in love with her best friend and she has to find a way to find herself, make a meaning out of her feelings, and hide the truth from her conservative small town and religious peers.

Lucky Red - Claudia Cravens (2023) / "A vibrant and cinematic debut set in the American West about a scrappy orphan who finds friendship, romance, and her true calling as a revenge-seeking gunslinger." Lesbian cowboys

Neon Roses - Rachel Dawson (2023) / “Eluned Hughes is stuck. It's 1984 in a valley in south Wales: the miners' strike is ravaging her community; her sister's swanned off with a Thatcherite policeman; and her boyfriend Lloyd keeps bringing up marriage. And if they play '99 Red Balloons' on the radio one more time, she might just lose her mind. Then the fundraising group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners comes down from London, and she meets June, a snaggle-toothed blonde in a too-big leather jacket. Suddenly, Eluned isn't stuck any more - she's in freefall. June's an artist and an activist, living in a squat in Camden. With June, Eluned can imagine a completely different - and exciting - life for herself. But as her family struggles with the strike, and her relationship with her sister deteriorates, should she really leave it all behind? From the Valleys to the nightclubs of Cardiff, London and Manchester, NEON ROSES is a heartwarming, funny and a little bit filthy queer coming-of-age story with a cracking '80s soundtrack.”

Tale of Three Ships - Darcia G. Laucerica (2023) / “In a world under the thumb of an empire, pirates sail away searching for a breath of freedom. But even the ocean is tainted by the powerful nation that has spread lies about women being bad luck at sea. Glenlivet has never cared about the fear-mongering. Her ship welcomes those who are rejected and need a home. For all the sailor' s superstitions and "codes" of piracy the captain mocks every day, not leaving the docks when it's dark is a personal boundary she swears by ever since acquiring The Outsider about eight years ago. She just might have to break her own rules to protect her crew, escape the claws of a king who wants her dead, and murder the man who raised her.” I’ve heard so many good things about this. Lesbian main character, with mlm and trans side characters. Author in social media said it includes: Chosen pirate family, sirens, indigenous and latine inspired characters, anti-colonialism, and people fighting injustice and abuse.

How to Breathe Ash - Alex Nonymous (2023) / “Eleanor Perrault doesn't know if there's a right way to handle being suddenly orphaned at sixteen, but it's definitely not the way that she's been coping with it. It's been two months since her parents died and despite her autism normally causing her to be even more emotionally volatile than most of her peers, she still hasn't even managed to cry over them yet. On top of trying to learn how to grieve properly, Eleanor's juggling starting a new semester in a new town with an aunt who seems eternally disappointed in her and a cousin who's randomly decided to start hating her. And a crush on the incredibly pretty president of her new school's QSA. How to Breathe Ash is a contemporary YA Cinderella retelling following Eleanor through elaborate dances, anonymous chat rooms, and learning the right way to not be alright.” Autistic mc! While I haven’t read anything from this author (yet) they have lots of wlw/nblw/nblnb books with autistic main characters.

War and Solace: A Tale from Norvegr - Edale Lane (2023) / “A battle-hardened shieldmaiden. A pacifist healer. Can the two find love amid the chaos of war? From Edale Lane, the award-winning, best-selling author of Sigrid & Elyn, comes a new Tale from Norgevr! Tyrdis is a stalwart warrior raised to value honor, courage, and military prowess. When a traumatic injury renders the powerful protector helpless, she depends on the lovely, tender-hearted Adelle to restore her from the brink of death. Is it merely gratitude or true love that draws Tyrdis to the healer? Defying cultural norms, Adelle despises violence and those who propagate it, but when her shieldmaiden patient saves the life of her beloved little girl, she must reexamine her values. Could Tyrdis be more than a stiff, efficient killer with an amazing body? In a kingdom steeped in conflict with their neighbors and internal strife, shocking secrets are revealed, and both women strive to ensure justice prevails. Can they overcome their differences to safeguard their friends, end the war, and fall in love, or will fate prove to be a cruel sovereign?” Historical fiction set during 643. The author also has another two sapphic books set in the same time period.

Maddalena and the Dark - Julia Fine (2023) / “A novel set in 18th-century Venice at a prestigious music school, about two girls drawn together by a dangerous wager Venice, 1717. Fifteen-year-old Luisa has only wanted one thing: to be the best at violin. As a student at the Ospedale della Pietà, she hopes to join the highest ranks of its illustrious girls' orchestra and become a protégé of the great Antonio Vivaldi. Luisa is good at violin, but she is not the best. She has peers, but she does not have friends. Until Maddalena. After a scandal threatens her noble family's reputation, Maddalena is sent to the Pietà to preserve her marriage prospects. When she meets Luisa, Maddalena feels the stirrings of a friendship unlike anything she has known. But Maddalena has a secret: she has hatched a dangerous plot to rescue her future her own way. When she invites Luisa into her plans, promising to make her dreams come true, Luisa doesn't hesitate. But every wager has its price, and as the girls are drawn into the decadent world outside the Pietà's walls, they must decide what it is they truly want—and what they will do to pay for it. Lush and heady, swirling with music and magic, Maddalena and the Dark is a Venetian fairytale about the friendship between two girls and the boundless desire that will set them free, if it doesn't consume them first.”

Greasepaint - Hannah Levene (2024) / “Set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, this experimental novel follows an ensemble cast of all-singing, all-dancing butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists through eternal Friday nights, around the table, and at the bar. In one of many bars, Frankie Gold sings while Sammy Silver plays piano after a day job at the anarchist newspaper. The Butch Piano Players Union meets in the corner next to the jukebox. Laur smokes on the back steps, sweaty thigh to thigh with Vic. Frankie's childhood sweetheart, Lily, turns up at yet another bar to see a second Sammy play every Friday night. And before all that, there's always dinner at Marg's. Fabulated out of oral histories, anthologies, as well as the fiction of the butch-femme bar scene and Yiddish anarchist tradition, Greasepaint is a rollicking whirlwind of music and politics- the currents of community embodied and held inside the bar.”

Perfume & Pain - Anna Dorn (2024) / “A controversial Los Angeles author attempts to revive her career and finally find true love in this hilarious nod to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction. Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer's group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student who smells like metallic orchids and is researching 1950s lesbian pulp, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli. When Astrid receives an unexpected call from her agent with the news that actress and influencer Kat Gold wants to adapt her previous novel for TV, Astrid finally has a chance to resurrect her waning career. But the pressure causes Astrid's worst vice to rear its head—the Patricia Highsmith, a blend of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes-and results in blackouts and a disturbing series of events. Unapologetically feminine yet ribald, steamy yet hilarious, Anna Dorn has crafted an exquisite homage to the lesbian pulp of yore, reclaiming it for our internet—and celebrity-obsessed world”

How It Works Out - Myriam Lacroix (2024) / “Surreal, darkly comic and achingly tender, Myriam Lacroix's debut sees a queer love story play out in many alternate realities. What if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out? After Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in run-down punk house, their relationship starts to unfold through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam's depression was Allison's flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker-or sexier-would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love's many promises and perils. Equal parts sexy and profane, unsentimental, and gut-wrenching, How It Works Out is a formally inventive, arresting, uncanny exploration of queerness, love, and our drive for connection, in any and all possible worlds.”

All the Painted Stars - Emma Denny (@a-kind-of-merry-war) (2024) / “Oxfordshire 1362. When Lily Barden discovers her best friend Johanna's hand in marriage is being awarded as the main prize at a tournament, she is determined to stop it. Disguised as a knight, she infiltrates the contest, preparing to fight for Jo's hand. But her conduct ruffles feathers, and when a dangerous incident escalates out of Lily's control, Jo must help her escape. Finding safety with a local brewster, Lily and Jo soon settle into their new freedom, and amongst blackberry bushes and lakeside walks an unexpected relationship blossoms. But when Jo's past caches up with her and Lily's reckless behaviour threatens their newfound happiness, both women realise that choices must always come at a cost. The question they need to ask is if the cost is worth the price of love…” The cover of the edition coming out in November is SO pretty and lately I’ve been looking for medieval sapphic books like crazy.

Gentlest of Wild Things - Sarah Underwood (2024 - out august 15th) / So this book is by the same author as Lies We Sing to the Sea, and I’m in no rush to read that book (a so-called odyssey retelling even tho the author has admitted to never actually reading the odyssey??) but this one looks compelling. “On the island of Zakynthos, nothing is more powerful than Desire-love itself, bottled and sold to the highest bidder by Leandros, a power-hungry descendent of the god Eros. Eirene and her beloved twin sister, Phoebe, have always managed to escape Desire's thrall. Until Leandros' wife dies mysteriously and he sets his sights on Phoebe. Determined to keep her sister safe, Eirene strikes a bargain with Leandros: if she can complete the four elaborate tasks he sets her, he will find another bride. But it soon becomes clear that the tasks are part of something bigger; something related to Desire and Lamia, the strange, neglected daughter Leandros keeps locked away. Lamia knows her father hides her for her own protection, though as she and Eirene grow closer, she finds herself longing for the outside world. But the price of freedom is high, and with something deadly-something hungry- stalking the night, that price must be paid in blood…” The author said that “Gentlest of Wild Things is a sapphic vampiric twist on the story of Eros and Psyche”

The End Crowns All - Bea Fitzgerald (2024 - out on July 18th) / “Princess. Priestess. The most beautiful girl in Troy. Casandra is used to being adored - and when her patron god, Apollo, offers her the power of prophecy, she sees an opportunity to rise even higher. But when she fails to uphold her end of the agreement, she discovers just how very far she has to fall. No one believes her visions. And they all seem to be of one girl - and the war she's going to bring to Troy's shores. Helen fled Sparta in pursuit of love, but it's soon clear Troy is a court like any other, with all its politics and backstabbing. And one princess seems particularly intent on driving her from the city before disaster can strike... But when war finally comes, it's more than the army at their walls they must contend with. Casandra and Helen might hold the key to reweaving fate itself - especially with the prophetic strands drawing them ever closer together. But how do you change your future when the gods themselves are dictating your demise?” Sapphic retelling of the iliad where Helen and Kassandra end up together

If asked, I’ll also do one with gay books

(No 1950s lesbians because I don’t like pulp fiction :( )

[buried-in-stardust]

Made a playlist of some current listens! (Only including Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Hokkien songs)

Some special mentions:

萬千花蕊慈母悲哀: This is my currently my favourite song! Since it's in Taiwanese Hokkien, though, I can't actually understand the lyrics beside a few phrases, but the vibes>>>> The fact that the written lyrics are a transcription into hanzi also means I can't really read them either lmao

別人的: The only Taiwanese Hokkien song that I can sing with any kind of accuracy (read: at all). Don't ask me to pronounce any of it with the proper tones though lol

撒野: Theme song for Saye (Run Wild)! 💙💙To be honest, I like this version more than the audio drama's rendition

招娣: Lit. Bring a little brother (Technically the second character isn't the correct one for little brother, but in practice, that is what's meant). A commentary on how parents prefer sons over daughters. The title is a common name given to daughters by parents hoping for a son.

The 1st, 6th, 10th, 15th, and 20th songs are in Taiwanese Hokkien. The rest are in Mandarin Chinese

[dkniade]

(Conversations with a fan about the possible origins of fandom nicknames for Furina and (mostly) Neuvillette in English and Chinese.)

Fans calling Neuvillette nicknames like Neuvi or Neuv is even funnier when you remember Neuvillette is his last name (as he says in his “Hello” voice-over.) We’re not actually sure what his first name is, right …? (At least according to his Character Story.) Imagine people making a cute nickname from your last name; that must be an interesting feeling

In-universe he’s referred as Monsieur Neuvillette by most Melusines I think? It’s kind of equivalent to Yun Jin’s (CN) title of Yun-xiansheng by the Liyue opera fans. So the fandom calling Neuvillette “Neuvi” is like calling Yun Jin “Yunyun”, haha

(The fan mention in the Chinese fandom, nicknames for Neuvillette and Furina are Vivi and Fufu)

Ah! I’ve seen CN fandom call Furina (芙宁娜 Fúníngnà) —> Fufu (芙芙 Fúfú). It’s the first hanzi character repeated. Reduplication is a common way to make nicknames in Mandarin!

Mm— Neuvillette’s name in Chinese is 那维莱特 (Nàwéiláitè). I guess you could have a nickname be 维维 (Wéiwéi), but technically speaking the /v/ sound doesn’t exist in Mandarin (I think).

Oh but Neuvillette is also the name of multiple real-life communes in France. Those communes are known as 讷维莱特 (Nèwéiláitè) in Chinese. The first syllable Nè is actually closer to how the name is pronounced in French. Not sure why Genshin didn’t use that transcription instead,,

(Thinking about it now—let’s use pinyin—I guess the first vowel in the French commune’s Chinese name “Nèwéiláitè” is /ɤ/ and the first vowel in a French reading of “Neuvillette” is /ø/ and they’re both close-mid vowels which means they have the same height, which makes them sound more similar… compared to the first vowel /a/ used in the in-game Chinese transcription “Nàwéiláitè”…)

Though, since it’s a Chinese transcription of a French name, I wonder if… the reference (?) pronunciation is of a different French dialect or something?

(The fan tells me that a French-speaker told them, since Neuvillette is a very French surname, possible nicknames could be Vivi or Neuvi. But Neuneu means “dumb dumb” in French so that wouldn’t be a good nickname haha)

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Do you have any reliable sources on giant salamander vocalization? I've got myself convinced that them sounding like babies (or vocalizing at all) is a myth since the only evidence I've seen of it were videos of them with crying baby sounds clearly edited in over top. But I also haven't gone far out of my way looking for info on it

Boy did this question send me down a rabbit hole!

Giant salamanders (including other species like the Japanese giant salamander) all make lots of sounds. The most commonly recorded one is their hiss, which sounds pretty much exactly how you'd expect.

Unfortunately, the only video I could find that depicts the giant salamander's 'cry' is this one:

(Skip to 1:18 for the clearest sound)

Furthermore, I don't speak Chinese and was unable to find a transcript, so what the researchers were doing with this particular sound I couldn't tell you.

I was, however, able to find this paper on giant salamander calls- it's a fairly interesting read, if a little technical.

[eternal-bauhinian]

"Cat" in Chinese is complicated: a short essay

I saw that the Chinese submissions for "cat" (貓/猫 and 小貓/小猫) for the @words-for-cat-bracket​ didn't have IPA transcripts according to the Google Sheets file, so I'm here to write about the IPA! This was originally going to be an ask but it got kind of long, so I thought it deserves its own post.

Annotation #1: I only speak Cantonese (Hong Kong dialect) and Mandarin (was taught Standard/Northern dialects for 9+ years, personally speak with a Southern/Cantonese accent), so I sadly cannot provide pronunciations for other Chinese varieties or their words for "cat".

Annotation #2: I am adding the specific vowel names because of Tumblr desktop ask/post font limitations when I initially wrote the post.

貓/猫 ("cat")

Standard Mandarin: māo (pinyin) → [mɑu̯˥]; the first half of the diphthong is the open back unrounded vowel, at least that is how I pronounce it

Cantonese: maau1 (Jyutping) / māau (Yale) → [maːu˥]; the first half of the diphthong is an open central unrounded vowel

小貓/小猫 ("little cat; kitten")

Standard Mandarin: xiǎomāo (pinyin) → [ɕjau̯˩ mɑu̯˥]; same vowel diphthong notes as above

Cantonese: siu2 maau1 (Jyutping) / síu māau (Yale) → [siːu˧˥ maːu˥]; not colloquial Cantonese, refer to additional linguistics notes for details

Additional linguistics notes

The diminutive prefix 小 is actually not commonly used in Cantonese; we have a bit of diglossia going on in Cantonese-speaking regions, where colloquial Cantonese is Low and Mandarin/Std. Chinese is High. (Technically, both Mandarin/Std. Chinese and English are High, at least in Hong Kong, but in the context of the conversation, Mandarin/Std. Chinese is High.)

Us Cantonese speakers only really say 小貓/小猫 if we are reading a text written in Written Standard Chinese, which is based on Mandarin. In colloquial Cantonese, we say 貓仔/猫仔 [maːu˥ tsɐi˧˥]; maau1 zai1 (Jyutping) or māau jái (Yale), with a different diminutive suffix instead of a prefix.

Mandarin also has a diminutive suffix, 兒/儿 (IPA can change depending on the syllable it's used on); it is usually ér in pinyin but in the context of the diminutive, it is shortened to an -r suffix and there is a whole set of rules surrounding it regarding pronunciation. This érhuà system is only really used in North China, rarely in the South (including Taiwan).

Both 貓兒/猫儿 [mau̯˞˥] (pinyin: māor) and 小貓兒/小猫儿 [ɕjau̯˩ mau̯˞˥] (pinyin: xiǎomāor) are valid forms of the word-phrases in Northern dialects of Mandarin. Heck, if you look at the dialectal synonyms chart on the Wiktionary page, you will even see that the latter version (小貓兒/小猫儿) is the preferred variant for "kitten" used in Beijing.

Conclusion

This got really unexpectedly long, which is why I split this into its own post. I know that @/words-for-cat-bracket no longer accepts submissions into the bracket for the Chinese words for "cat" I wrote about in the "Additional linguistics notes" section of this post, and I am fine with it.

I will, however, request that 小貓/小猫 be described in the bracket to be the word-phrase for kitten in Mandarin specifically, not in Cantonese or Chinese in general.

TL;DR: Submitted pronunciation IPA for the Mandarin and Cantonese word-phrases for "cat". The Sinitic languages mostly share a writing system but are linguistically Complicated.

[a-captions-blog]

[Image descriptions: The first image shows the cookbook cover. The book is titled ‘The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don’t Die’ and is by Zilla Novikov and Rachel A. Rosen, illustrated by Marten Norr. The cover shows a vase of red flowers, a floral tissue box, and a small plate with a rectangle of dry ramen noodles next to a plastic fork. The quote at the top says, “Technically most of the food in this book is edible, and some of it even contains nutrients.” – Rohan O’Duill, author and professional chef. The rest of the images are screenshots of the table of contents. Long transcriptions follow (page numbers omitted).

Table of Contents Content notes: Mental and physical illness, disordered eating, and dark humour throughout, as well as occasional mentions of alcohol, swearing, and political references. If you have specific food triggers, some recipes may be unpalatable to you. Recipes which have vegan core ingredients are marked with a [circle with a V in the centre.] Table of Contents [a handwriting-style note points to this entry and says, ‘We’re so meta that we include the Table of Contents in the Table of Contents. Lev would approve.’ Introduction Ramen Variations Part 1: Classic Ramen (vegan) Ramen Variations Part II: Instant Noodles on Plate (vegan) Ramen Variations Part III: Apocalypse Ramen (vegan) Kinda Like Pad Thai (vegan) Pasta Variations (vegan) Literal Depression Cooking Pasta in a Rice Cooker (vegan) Eggy Pasta Paste with Homemade Tomato Sauce (vegan) Pasta with One (1) Actual Vegetable (vegan) Spaghetti Aglio e Olio (vegan) Mac & Cheese Rice Variations Part I: Cook the Rice (vegan) Rice Variations Part II: Add Stuff to the Cooking Water (vegan) Rice Variations Part III: Add Stuff to the Cooked Rice (vegan) Another Rice Variation: Black Beans & Rice (vegan) Rice Variations Part IV: Fried Rice (vegan) Fried Noodles (vegan) Couscous Variations (vegan) Potato Variations Part I: Baked (vegan) Potato Variations Part II: Boiled (vegan) Potato Variations Part III: Mashed (vegan) Potato Variations Part IV: French Fries (vegan) French Fry Variations: Now What? (vegan) Spring Rolls (vegan) Hangover Bubble and Squeak (vegan) Roasted Vegetables (vegan) Pancakes (vegan) Korean-Inspired Pancakes (vegan) Oatmeal Variations (vegan) The Humble Egg Chinese-Style Eggs & Tomato Eggs & Bread Variations Bean Salad (vegan) Lentils in a Pot (vegan) Cheater Chana Masala (vegan) Can of Soup (vegan) Dumplings (vegan) Pierogi (vegan) Peanut Butter on a Spoon (vegan) Peanut Butter Balls (vegan) Apple Slices Yes (vegan) Grapefruit No (vegan) Eat a Dill Pickle Out of the Jar While Standing in Front of the Fridge (vegan) Popcorn (vegan) Eddy No (vegan) Chips (vegan) College Guacamole (vegan) The Fastest Nachos (vegan) Quesadillas & Pumpki-dillas Part I: The Basics (vegan) Quesadillas & Pumpki-dillas Part II: Variations (vegan) Wraps (vegan) Toast Variations (vegan) Crackers and Stuff (vegan) Fancy Cheese and Crackers Hummus (vegan) Garlic Bread (vegan) Tostadas Con Tomate (vegan) Grilled Cheese Sandwiches “Pizza” (vegan) Tanzanian Braised Coconut Cabbage (vegan) Bag Salad (vegan) Cabbage Salads (vegan) Ants on a Log (vegan) Fried Plantains (vegan) Smoothie Variations (vegan) Ice Cream (vegan) Moroccan Oranges (vegan) “Baked” Apples (vegan) Banana Frozen Yogurt “Parfait” Chocolate Pudding (vegan) Core Ingredients to Keep in Your Kitchen Zilla’s Shopping List & Weekly Menu Rachel’s “Three Meals a Day Are Cognitive Overload" Shopping List & Weekly Menu Thank You to Our Contributor: Message from the Authors Not an Index \End description]

[Reblog plain text: Spread the word this is fucking god tier oh my god, sometimes I have spoons sometimes I don't but no cookbook offers levels in their recipes this one does! \End PT

People with low spoons, someone just recommended this cookbook to me, so I thought I’d pass it on.

I always look at cookbooks for people who have no energy/time to do elaborate meal preparations, and roll my eyes. Like, you want me to stay on my feet for long enough to prepare 15 different ingredients from scratch, and use 5 different pots and pans, when I have chronic fatigue and no dishwasher?

These people seem to get it, though. It’s very simple in places. It’s basically the cookbook for people who think, ‘I’m really bored of those same five low-spoons meals I eat, but I can’t think of anything else to cook that won’t exhaust me’. And it’s free!

[translation4everyone]

Interpretation and A.I.

As said before in a previous post, the way A.I. interpretation works is by speech-to-text, the device registers the input voice and at the same time produces a translated text into the desired language. Some useful apps for this are Kudo (paid) and ChatGPT (free). Interpretation has become more accesible thanks to the use of these apps.

Certainly an A.I. interpreter has more advantages than a human one, it can store in its memory large amounts of technical and complicated words, manage multilingual translations simultaneously, and at the same time it is fast and has high performance. However, this technology has its limits, it is unable to identify a high and specialized register with its semantic meaning, it faces the common mistakes of voice recognition, and it is incapable to convey cultural nuances and emotions.

In 2019, the chinese platform Baidu released the DuTongChuan, a translation model receptive to context to make simultaneous interpretation more accesible. The company reported that the accuracy of the translator was of 85.7% from English to Chinese and 86.4% from Chinese to English, almost the same as a human interpreter. Moreover, the output's lag is of three seconds, comparable to a human translator.

Nevertheless, not everything is a walk in the park with technology. In 2018 in China, the Boao Forum was held, and the Zhiling from the company Tencent debuted, a voice recognition engine that demonstrated the company's capacity to do live transcriptions and interpretations. Interpreters were available during the forum, and for the transmission of some conferences the forum used A.I. by putting screens next to stage or via the platform WeChat for those who followed the event online. The result? Unexpected. The transcription generated by the A.I. did not reflect what the speaker said since the recognition engine failed at the moment when the speaker started to speak in a non-structured way.

What can we learn from this? Interpretation is becoming more accesible, but we need to know when to use A.I. and when to hire a human interpreter.

[addierose444]

Latin Honors

As you may know from my commencement post and other recent blog posts, I recently graduated from Smith College summa cum laude. I’ve briefly explained this as being the highest tier of Latin Honors but will delve a bit deeper into what Latin Honors are in this post. Latin Honors serve to recognize the top graduating seniors who to at least some extent embraced Smith being a liberal arts school. To qualify one must complete the Latin Honors distributional requirements, complete a minimum of 48 graded credits during sophomore, junior, and senior years, and meet the minimum Latin Honors GPA for the graduating class. 

As an engineering major, I was required to either minor in a non-STEM field or complete the Latin Honors distributional requirements. Completing the Latin Honors distributional requirements was the obvious choice for me as it was easier, better aligned with my academic goals, and made it possible for me to actually earn Latin Honors. 

Fulfilling the Latin Honors distributional requirements involves earning at least four credits course in each of the following seven major fields of knowledge:

Arts

Foreign Language

Literature

Historical Studies

Mathematics and Analytic Philosophy

Natural Science

Social Science

As an engineering and computer science double major pretty much all of my major courses counted as math and/or natural science. Additionally, my electives from the philosophy department each counted towards one of these requirements. The foreign language requirement can be a little trickier because it requires one to either take an intermediate or advanced language course or to take a full-year beginner course. In my case, I fulfilled the requirement during my first semester of college with FRN 120 (Intermediate French). I also subsequently took an additional two French courses one of which, FRN 230 (Colloquium in French Studies French Calligraphies: Contemporary Chinese Women's Writing) counted as a literature course. I was very fortunate to take a first-year seminar (FYS 193 - Representations of Cancer) that counted as either historical studies or social science. Spring semester of my first year I took a game theory course (ECO 125) which counted as my social science course. As for the arts requirement with individual guitar lessons for credit MUS 914Y (First Year Performance). In my senior year I also joined the Chinese Music Ensemble (MUS 960), but this alone would have only been two credits and four are required. I only just discovered this but turns out that the Korean Cinema course (EAL 253) I took this past spring technically counted as literature or historical studies. 

The GPA cutoffs are set each year for graduating class but aren’t published or disclosed. So pretty much all that’s guaranteed is a 4.0 GPA maps to summa cum laude. Following summa cum laude, the next tier is magna cum laude, and finally cum laude. In the case where the distributional requirements are met but the GPA requirement is not the notation of “Liberal Arts Commendation" is added to one’s transcript. It was my understanding that Latin Honors were denoted on transcripts as well, but so far this doesn’t seem to be the case (at least for the unofficial version). What I do know for sure is that Latin Honors are denoted on diplomas and printed in both the Ivy Day and commencement programs. In the case of the select few graduating summa cum laude they are called up by name during the Ivy Day ceremony to be recognized and pick up a gold tassel and cord to wear during commencement. 

[stapcs]

they hadn't fought like this since christine was a teen & back then it was probably over something stupid like her begging for a later curfew when the only reason she had one was because her parents knew what kind of danger lived out in the world. looking back ... once she hit fifteen or so, chris & her parents yelled at each other a lot ( she almost always instigated it ) simply because she accused them of being too overprotective even knowing the horrors they came face to face with constantly. this was different though. this wasn't a teen rebelling as a rite of passage or getting defensive because she'd been caught sneaking in or out, no, there was a sort of sadness in her father's eyes & an anger in hers.  ❛ then you and i both know that's exactly what this is about. ❜ out of all the possible outcomes she'd gone over leading up to this family dinner, this one never crossed her mind. she'd never expected a blowup, not with booth, perhaps her mom, maybe her brothers, but not him. SHE IS BECAUSE HE WAS. his carbon copy, down to the mirroring stances no wonder this had gotten out of hand, their emotions matched. daddy, are you still proud of me ? she'll admit that bringing up she was going to put in for a transfer might've gone over better than just springing she'd already done it on them but the moment an opportunity to even consider transferring to the bau was on the table, christine knew where she was going.

 ❛ you can't hold my hand forever, dad. ❜ she whispers & technically, he wasn't still holding on, christine ran point alone all the time, but she was under his eye twenty-four-seven ... HOW WAS SHE SUPPOSED TO GROW IF HER PARENTS WERE ALWAYS THREE STEPS BEHIND HER ? people talked. she'd been in & out of the hoover building her ENTIRE life & whether you saw that booth was never on any of chris' academy transcripts or not, people whispered her parents got her where she was today. hell, since they would never see the scene that just transpired over chinese takeout they'll say her parents pulled the strings for this new assignment, but at least she wouldn't have to face them every day anymore.  ❛ you have to trust that ━ that you raised me well enough to know what's best for me. ❜ the flames began to die down, cheeks red & hot starting to tingle as she calmed.  ❛ she sees something in me, daddy, something you used to see in me. she picked me. not because i'm agent booth's daughter or dr. temperance brennan's daughter, but because I AM AGENT BOOTH and she believes in me. ❜ she crossed the room & took her father's hands in her own.  ❛ i will miss seeing you at work every day or watching you scold uncle aubrey for getting crumbs in between the seats, but i'll be here every sunday just like always. i have to do this. you know i do. ❜

@coaxedparadise , seeley booth : this isn't about that. this is about us.

[worldwideinterpreters1]

Importance of Choosing A NAATI Accredited Translator

 NAATI or National Accreditation Authority of Translators and Interpreters is the only recognized authority for interpretations and translation in Australia. The organization sets high professional competence standards for those inspiring to make a profession out of translations. The organization is owned together by Commonwealth, State and Territory governments. The translators have to go through a rigorous translation and ethics exam. There is a very small percentage of Australian translators that actually pass these tests set by NAATI.

If you come across a Chinese NAATI translator, you can be rest assured of his level of translating skills for making accurate translations. The document will be translated to perfection, maintaining high standard of quality. Generally, we find customers asking for all kinds of translations. Let us see what kind of services are generally offered by these translation services, so as to meet your personal, business and communication needs.

Specialized services for certified translations

License, certificates and Cards- Driving licenses, Graduation certificates, Marriage certificates, Visa documents, Birth certificates, Academic degrees and transcripts, Notarial certificates, Police checks, ID cards, Divorce certificates, etc.

Technical And Scientific - Electronic product manuals, Experiment reports, safety manuals, Instruction booklets, documentation of Technical equipment, Scientific studies, Experiment reports, Data sheets, Engineering specifications, Mining documents, Scientific teaching materials, etc.

Tourism - Migration information, Brochures and flyers, Websites. Menus, Hotel information, Tourist maps, Guidebooks, Casino gaming, Product descriptions, and other Tourism promotional material.

Advertising - Online news, Print media, Newspaper articles, Interviews, Magazine articles, Online forums, Press releases, Social networking site content, etc.

government translation - Laws, Policies and procedures, Educational material, Government websites and reports,

Manufacturing - Product manuals, Instruction booklets, User guides, Advertising, Packaging, Safety information, Warranties, Product information, Quality control tests and Management System certificates, etc.

Hiring a freelance translator?

One often finds large number of freelance translators and wonders if they can be assigned the project. However, before employing one, just make sure if he holds NAATI accreditations and carries a good reputation. After all, one needs to tackle with the issue of quality control and it is a serious one where translations are concerned. So, the first good step is to check his NAATI accreditations, as this will point to his competency and professionalism. Professional agencies to hire freelance translators who meet their level of criteria.

Expert Translations for documents

If need of getting your important document translated, one has to be very careful about the translation services they hire. Look for a reputed NAATI accredited translator to start with. You may need translations of personal document, birth certificate, marriage certificate, driver's license, diploma, degree, medical documents or any other document theta is important and needs to be used in different Government departments. Getting a document translated from one language to another is a professional task and the translation has to be complete and accurate. An immigrant to a new country often has to deal with complicated documents relating to State Licensing Departments, Customs and Immigration Officials, Lawyers, etc. At this point, one cannot afford a mishap or any errors with their translations.A certified translation ensures that there are no disruptions in the significant process.

NAATI Accredited Chinese translator

The Chinese language is a family of different spoken languages and the most common dialects are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese and Min. All businesses in China are unusually conducted in Mandarin and the written language carries two major variations, simplified and traditional. The Chinese NAATI translator is an interpreter between English and Mandarin and a translator between English and Chinese. He knows how to interpret the spoken language and translate the written language. When looking for such a NAATI Translator, just check out his experience and reputation in the market before employing. He should be an expert with certified translation and be confident of handling any kinds of documents.

[dkniade]

Would you exclaim (euphemistically or non-euphemistically) using the name of the Archons…?

Actually, how would euphemisms of the Archons work (think gosh or golly for God)…?

Canonical Chinese terms for Morax in Liyue include: 岩王帝君 (Yán Wáng Dìjūn)，帝君 (Dìjūn)，岩王爷 (Yán wángyé), 他老人家 (tā lǎorénjiā, Chinese honourific meaning that old man).

By the way, 岩王爷 and 他老人家 are used by Yun Jin in her “About the Vision” voiceline in relation to her Geo Vision. (In the English localization she calls him Lord of Geo and the old man, respectively.)

Let it be known that in Mandarin, 岩王爷 (despite using 岩 which is stone, localized as Geo for the element) is a homonym of 阎王爷 (Yán wángyé), who’s the King of Hell in ancient Chinese religions. Other terms for this deity in real life include 阎罗王 (Yánluó wáng), 阎罗 (Yánluó), and 阎罗大王 (Yáluó Dàwáng) in Mandarin, and यम (Yama-raja) in Sanskrit (in Hinduism).

(From Baidu Baike page “阎罗王 (中国古代神话中的十殿阎王之一 )” and the Wikipedia page on “Yama (Hinduism)”)

Rex Lapis’ page on the Genshin Impact wiki also states

“His Chinese title, 岩王帝君 Yánwáng Dìjūn, "Imperial Sovereign Yánwáng; Stonelord Sovereign; Rex Lapis" includes the honorific title 帝君 dìjūn, "sovereign," typically added to the names of Daoist deities.”

(The page also has some great discussions on the etymologies of Morax’s titles in the comments.)

Technically speaking, 岩王帝君 in pinyin would be written as Yán Wáng Dìjūn because 岩 means rock or stone, and 王 means lord or king, and thus 岩王 (meaning rock king, stone lord, Lord of Geo if you will) is not one word and would not be transcribed as Yánwáng. (So if anyone could edit pinyin transcriptions of the tile on the wiki that’d be great.)

For 阎王爷, 阎 is also part of the name and 王爷 is the honorific..

…Hm.

(Spoilers for Neuvillette’s profile line after completing Masquerade of the Guilty.)

.

Neuvillette in the English localization of his “About the Geo Archon” profile line calls the Geo Archon Deus Auri (Latin: God of Gold) who has the Authority of Geo. In the original Chinese text, the first is 贵金之神 (Guìjīn zhī Shén, God of Gold), and the second is 岩之大权 (Yán zhī Dàquán). Hmm… 贵金 possibly comes from 贵金属 (Guìjīnshǔ) which is precious metal, referring to such as gold, silver, and platinum… Well, it’s likely a cultural difference between Liyue and Fontaine that resulted in such titles.

Looking at the (English localization of the) diegesis, with the Iudex of Fontaine calling the Geo Archon Deus Auri, it makes less sense that in the English localization, Liyue people would use the Latin term Rex Lapis for him when in contrast the Inazuma people refer to Ei and the Shogun puppet as Raiden Shogun.

I think… It’d make sense for Fontainians or Mondstadters to call him Rex Lapis.

[namrita]

Best Colleges For Lateral Entry In B. Tech.

College is a time for people to explore their interests and figure out what they want to do with their lives. For some, this process happens during their undergraduate years while others may take longer to figure things out. If you are considering a career change or are just looking for an edge in the job market, then a B. Tech degree may be the perfect choice for you.

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Title: 5 Tips For Effective Email Marketing Campaigns

Description: Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with your customers and drive conversions. In this article, we will give you five tips that will help you create successful email campaigns.

The Education System

The education system in India is one of the oldest in the world and has been a source of inspiration for many countries. The country has a well-developed system of public and private schools, colleges and universities. Public schools are run by the government while private schools are either affiliated to a national or state university. Colleges and universities in India offer various courses of study leading to undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels.

There are seven systems of education in India:

1) The British Indian School System

2) The Hindu School System

3) The Muslim Schools System

4) The Sikh Schools System

5) The American School System

6) The Chinese School System 

7) The Russian School System

Admission Process

The admission process at the best colleges for lateral entry in B. Tech varies depending on the school, but most follow a common pattern. You will likely need transcripts from all of your previous schools, and usually an SAT or ACT score. Some schools also require letters of recommendation.

What Should I Expect in a B. Tech Program?

B.Tech programs at the most prestigious colleges and universities in North America offer a rich blend of theoretical and practical knowledge, making them well-suited for those who wish to enter the workforce immediately after graduation. The length of these programs typically ranges from four to five years, with each year consisting of around 30-35 courses.

In terms of course content, B.Tech students are usually required to take courses in engineering, mathematics, computer science, and natural sciences. In addition, many schools require students to take courses in business administration and critical thinking.

Upon completion of a B. Tech program, students will be able to:

-Demonstrate an understanding of fundamental concepts in engineering, mathematics, computer science, and natural sciences;

-Apply mathematical concepts and principles to solve problems;

-Understand the basics of software development process;

-Have a general understanding of business administration principles;

-Be proficient in using technical tools and equipment relevant to their field of study;

- Have developed critical thinking skills necessary for problem solving in professional contexts.

Finding Programs at the Right Level for You

Lateral entry programs in B. Tech are an excellent way to find a program that is the perfect fit for your unique skills and interests.

There are numerous programs available, so it can be difficult to decide where to start.

Below is a list of some of the best colleges for lateral entry in B. Tech:

Foothill College has a variety of B.Tech programs that are perfect for those who want to specialize in a certain area.

They have programs in engineering, business, information technology, and health care administration, among others.

If you’re interested in working in a certain field after completing your degree, Foothill College is the place for you!

San Jose State University offers several B.Tech programs that focus on specific areas of technology such as computer engineering or software development.

What makes San Jose State unique is that their program can be completed as an evening or weekend course, which gives you more flexibility when it comes to your career goals and schedule.

If you want to work in technology-related fields after completing your degree, San Jose State is a great option!

Other Factors to Consider When Choosing a College

When choosing a college to pursue a B. Tech degree, there are many factors to consider. Some of these include the school's location, academic offerings, and cost. However, some students also want to consider whether the school is suited for their career interests.

Some students may want to attend a large university that has a wide variety of programs available. Other students may prefer a smaller, more specialized school that offers more hands-on learning experiences in their field of interest.

Another important factor to consider is the college's admissions policy. Some colleges accept a lower percentage of applicants than others, which can affect how much financial aid an applicant is eligible for and how quickly they will be accepted into the program.

Finally, several other factors can influence how happy and successful a student will be while attending college. These include social interaction, proximity to family and friends, quality of life amenities, and extracurricular activities.

Conclusion

The B. Tech program at a particular college or university is only one factor that you should consider when deciding where to attend college for your undergraduate degree. Other factors include the cost of tuition, room and board, financial aid options available, and the career opportunities available in the area after you graduate. So before making any decisions about which colleges to apply to, be sure to research all of the schools that interest you and assess each one based on what is important to you as an individual student.

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[edubrainfashoin]

How to apply for B.Des in Fashion Design in 2023?

Step 1: Fill out the application form.

Step 2: Submit your application to the school of your choice.

Step 3: Wait for the admission notification.

Step 4: Attend the entrance examination and get selected for B des in fashion design in 2023.

B DES in fashion design is a program that focuses on the study of clothing design and other related subjects. It is offered by the EduBrain Academy . The program offers students an opportunity to learn about fashion and its history, as well as how it has evolved over time. Students will also learn about the different types of clothing and how they are created.

The B DES in fashion design program is offered at EduBrain Academy campus in Delhi city as well as online through a distance learning program. Students have the option to take courses at their own pace, or they can enroll in one or more courses at night while working full time during the day.

Students who wish to apply for this program must first complete a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution before applying for admission into this program. They must also have completed coursework in math, English, science and social studies related to fashion design. If you are interested in applying for admission into this program, it is important that you take note of the application process and deadlines that apply before submitting your application

1. Complete the online application form and attach your relevant documents.

2. Choose a payment method that is convenient to you and submit the application fee  (non-refundable).

3. Upload any additional documents and supporting materials that are relevant to your application, such as:

4. An academic transcript for all previous studies with grades, in English or Chinese, from all institutions attended (if applicable)

5. A portfolio of work samples that demonstrates understanding of the course content, design skills and artistic vision for fashion design. The portfolio should include examples of completed work samples as well as sketches and notes on how they were developed.

B DES IN FASHION DESIGN, 2023

The Bachelor of Design (B.Des) in fashion design is a professional undergraduate degree offered by the EduBrain Academy . 

The programme is designed to provide a broad knowledge base across design disciplines to equip students for careers in design or related fields such as product and graphic design, visual communications, architecture and interior design, industrial design and manufacturing as well as creative industries.

Students are also encouraged to explore other fields such as business management and entrepreneurship through an integrated curriculum that integrates theory with practice while they hone their skills in areas such as art history and philosophy.

The B.Des degree in Fashion Design is designed to give students the skills and knowledge necessary to design, create and market a variety of products. Students will learn how to effectively use computer applications, design software, and use advanced technical skills in order to produce a wide range of products that meet the needs of consumers.

The curriculum is divided into two parts:

Part I (Fashion Design) is for students who want to pursue a career as an artist or designer. It includes courses such as 2D Design (printmaking), 3D Design (photography), Drawing & Painting, Figure Drawing, Introduction to Intermedia, Introduction to Digital Technologies, Introduction to Product Development and Introduction to Textiles.

Part II (Apparel Design) is for students who want to pursue a career in fashion or textiles design or marketing. It includes courses such as Advanced Fashion Modeling; Advanced Sewing; Apparel Construction; Advanced Styling; Pattern Making & Cutting; Application of Specialty Fabrics; Merchandising & Marketing

Mail us at - Edubrainfoundation@gmail.com

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd’. 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 show notes page.

[Music]

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

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about absurd, hypothetical linguistics questions. But first, our most recent bonus episode was a chat about the design of IPA charts and how the International Phonetic Alphabet is arranged.

Gretchen: We talked to Lingthusiasm’s resident artist, Lucy Maddox, about designing a different take on the IPA chart that is gonna be available for you on posters and lens cleaning cloths and various other items.

Lauren: Those lens cleaning cloths are a special offer for our patrons, so head to patreon.com/lingthusiasm by October 5th to participate in that special offer.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, I’ve been reading What If? 2 by Randall Munroe, who does xkcd, and I’m delighted there are a couple of linguistics-related chapters in that book.

Gretchen: There’s this fun one about how long it would take to read all of the laws, which it seems like a massive task.

Lauren: Including a fun digression as to whether a Poké Ball is an egg.

Gretchen: This very much reminds me of the is-a-hotdog-a-sandwich type question.

Lauren: Hmm, legal minds will debate, I’m sure. If only there was more linguistics content in that book, though.

Gretchen: Well, you know, Lauren, as it happens, I have Randall Munroe right here. He has some linguistics questions to ask us as if we were starring characters in What If? 2.

Lauren: Amazing. Welcome, Randall!

Randall: Hi! Thanks so much for having me on. I know I’ve met you, Gretchen, in the outside world, but it’s really exciting to meet you here for real inside this podcast.

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm headquarters, as it were.

Lauren: We are delighted to answer your hypothetical linguistics questions.

Randall: There’re a lot of things that’ve confused me about language. English has some weird features. I was wondering, if I’m in a government hearing after this where they’re questioning me, and if they ask me, "Are you now or have you ever been a guest on Lingthusiasm?”–

Gretchen: To which you would have to answer, “Yes,” at this point.

Randall: Right. But my question is why the awkward repetition? Like, why does English make us specify whether the thing happened now or in the past? Why can’t they just say, “Are you/were you a guest on Lingthusiasm”?

Gretchen: I mean, there’re definitely some languages that do things like this. In Chinese, for example, you don’t have to specify the time in a statement. You can say the time, but you don’t have to say it, which is one of the parameters on which language varies, but the specific legal question also has stuff going on in it.

Lauren: It’s partly because legalese is a technical variety of English, but it doesn’t always just use technical vocabulary that makes it seem opaque. It also uses everyday words in a way that have really technical and specific meanings. Some of that is because legalese is about this process of building laws on top of each other and historically layering them. So, a word that has a really common meaning in general develops this really specific meaning in the legal context.

Gretchen: I also think it’s because lawyers have this very pedantic approach to language and looking at every single comma and potential for ambiguity. Because in realistic language we tolerate a lot of ambiguity, and we figure it out from context. But the whole thing with laws and trying to get it exactly on your side is not really allowing space for context and trying to pin everything down really precisely.

Randall: Well, I was thinking about it. If I wanted to create that ambiguity – like, if I wanted to ask, “Are you in Nova Scotia now, or have you been there in the past?” – how would I do that? I couldn’t figure it out.

Gretchen: I think in ordinary English you might just ask one version of the question – “Have you ever been to Nova Scotia?” “Have you ever been on Lingthusiasm?” And then someone would just answer that with a “Yes, in fact, I am there right now.”

Lauren: We’re trying to be helpful to each other in conversation in a way that law doesn’t necessarily start from the same premise of being helpful. It’s starting from the premise of being complete.

Gretchen: And starting from the premise of being, actually, kind of antagonistic.

Lauren: Deliberately unhelpful.

Gretchen: It’s like an adversarial approach to language rather than the cooperative approach we normally have.

Randall: That makes sense – making it clear from context that you are asking about both the past and present even if you’re only specifically referring to one of them.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because if I say like, “Have you ever been interested in linguistics?” “Yes, I still am.” Like, it’s still sort of true, but in this legal sense you might be like, “No, it’s not that I was before, it’s that I am now.” It’s just sort of trying to catch people out in being incredibly pedantic.

Randall: If you wanted to add a way in English to make that explicitly ambiguous – like if I wanted a way to say, “You something something Lingthusiasm guest” – is there a natural structure that you would add if you were in charge of revising English?

Gretchen: Well, I mean, one option you could do – so English technically has only two tenses, past and non-past. Because you can say something like, “Tomorrow I go to the airport, and I fly to this place.” So, you can use what’s often called the “present” to refer to future events. If non-past is the more versatile English tense, you could just make a special rule that’s like, you don’t change it. I think probably the most realistic English way would be to try to add an auxiliary. So, the future in English is often formed with “will” or “gonna.” You could have a new one of those. Like, “Are you sort of Lingthusiasm guest?”

Randall: Or like, “You ever a Lingthusiasm guest?” Yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah. You could maybe use “ever” into – like dropping the verb would help. Entirely. Or making some new version of “would” or “sort of” or something.

Lauren: Just a new, tense-less version of English.

Gretchen: Just delete all the tenses in general.

Lauren: I feel like that would keep the lawyers even busier.

Randall: I’m curious about the sounds of English. I know there’re some sounds that are merging together, like the distinction between “caught” and “cot” in some dialects. Are there any sounds or phonemes that are currently in the process of coming into English or disappearing from it entirely?

Lauren: There’s one that is disappearing and becoming a ghost before our very ears, which has millennia of history, which is what is known as the “wine/whine” merger.

Gretchen: The /waɪn-hwaɪn/ merger.

Lauren: That W-H /w/ that is pronounced by some older speakers or speakers of very fancy registers like RP as /hw/ – so /hwɪt͡ʃ/, “Having a bit of /hwaɪn/ over my /waɪn/.”

Gretchen: As you can hear from both me and Lauren, we both have the merger.

Lauren: We have absolutely merged these. They are indistinct for us. /wɪt͡ʃ/ and /hwɪt͡ʃ/ is a very forced distinction I have to make. But for maybe, like, grandparent to great-grandparent generations at the moment, you do find it for some speakers which is a form of a sound that goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European.

Randall: Wow. It made it all this time, and now, we’re the ones killing it off.

Lauren: We’re killing it off right now.

Randall: Wow!

Gretchen: It’s kind of neat because in Proto-Indo-European, there was a /kw/ sound – a sort of K-W – which in modern Romance languages has become Q-U but still pronounced /kw/ or /k/. This is like in “quando” or “quoi” or some of these words you might know from French or Spanish or Italian. All these words that have K in it became H in the Germanic set of words. You get things like “cornu-,” as in “cornucopia,” became “horn,” as in “horn of plenty.” There’s all these words that have a K sound – which is sometimes written with a C, sometimes with a Q – and those all became H. This is why we have all these words that begin with W-H – “Who, what, where, when, why” and the exceptional “how.” Those are the same as the /kw/ words in those other languages because that K became an H. Then the H and the W swapped positions at some point because people decided they liked it better. Then, not quite the H stopped getting pronounced, but the H influenced the pronunciation of the W becoming /hw/ rather than – I don’t even know how you’d do it. Now, it’s just sort of merged back with that W that we have – /w/.

Lauren: It’s so widespread that the W-H set of question words in English are all /k/ words even in languages like Hindi and Nepali, which are over in the Indo-Aryan side of that language family. You get “kina”, “ko,” “kahile.”

Randall: Oh, so it’s really old.

Gretchen: That’s why that H is there even though most people don’t pronounce it. I think you’re more likely to get sounds enter one variety of English, or disappear from one variety of English, and then that change spreads for a long time, and it takes a while to get to all of them.

Lauren: You still occasionally find “wine” and “whine” as distinct, or more often, you find it distinct in Scotland, a lot of Ireland, and apparently older speakers in New Zealand have been slower than Australians and Canadians and Brits in dropping this.

Randall: That makes sense. I know a few people who have that distinction, too, but like you said, it does tend to be older people. Although, I always find it funny. I always answered those dialect quizzes saying that I pronounced C-O-T and C-A-U-G-H-T the same. Then I was describing this merger to someone, and they said, “No, you don’t. Say it in a sentence.” I said it out loud, and I realised I am inside me. I didn’t hear how it sounded from the outside.

Gretchen: Okay. Say the words.

Randall: Like, “I /kɑt/ him sleeping on the /kat/.” “I /kɑt/ him sleeping on the /kat/.”

Gretchen: Oh, you absolutely say those differently.

Lauren: They are very different.

Gretchen: I would say, “I /kat/ him sleeping on the /kat/.”

Randall: I was born in that pocket of Pennsylvania where, when I looked on those dialect maps, that area is one of the unmerged areas.

Gretchen: And all of these sorts of splits – like dropped “for whom” or added “for whom.” Indian English has a bunch of retroflex sounds. All their Ts and Ds are produced with the tongue curled back onto the tip of the mouth. That’s entered one variety of English, but it seems probably unlikely it will spread to all of the other varieties, but who knows.

Lauren: One can hope. Because I would love to be able to distinguish between a retroflex and a non-retroflex. Too late for the plasticity of my phonemic inventory, but for future Englishes, it could be exciting.

Gretchen: They’re cool sounds.

Randall: Can you practice the sound enough that you can convincingly convey it to other people who then learn it from you? And then it becomes natural for them?

Lauren: Deliberately raise a family of people who have these distinctions.

Gretchen: I mean, I’ve always thought it would be cool to come up with some sort of, I dunno, conlang or something you could teach a kid or some sort of array of here’s, like, three languages you could teach a kid that would give them the maximal number of phonemic distinctions based on those languages. Because Germanic languages actually have tons of vowels cross-linguistically. A lot of languages have five vowels or three vowels or maybe seven, and English has fourteen-ish, depending on the dialect. German, I think Norwegian, Dutch, also, all the Germanic languages have tons of vowels. It would be like, okay, you wanna include one Germanic language for the vowels, and then you want a language that has tons of consonants like maybe Ubykh.

Lauren: Something around the Caucasus, for sure.

Gretchen: Something around the Caucasus for consonants. And then maybe a language with lots of tones – like Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin, so maybe give them Cantonese so they get tone. Then you have this nice array of this will make it easier for you to learn any other language because you’ve got most of the major sound distinctions.

Lauren: It’s also really good because you also have a really good spread of a language that’s isolating and doesn’t have a lot of morphology through to one with middling – English is very underwhelmingly average – and then those Caucasian languages do tend to have really good morphology, so it would be typologically satisfying on multiple fronts.

Gretchen: Yeah. So, raise your kid to be Cantonese-Ubykh-English trilingual, and they’ll be all set for their future language learning.

Lauren: [Laughs] I think we’ve said everything un-useful to say about that question.

Gretchen: [Laughs]

Randall: Say we’re playing a game. I’m gonna pick a random North American English speaker and ask them a spoken or written usage question. Like, “How would you say this?” “How do you pronounce this?” “How do you write this?” Now, you get to pick someone else to ask them same question to without knowing what it’s gonna be. If your person gives the same answer as my person, then you win. Now, who would you pick if you wanted the best chance of matching a random person? Would you pick, like, a news anchor, a kid, or a nondescript middle-aged person, or like a writer or something?

Lauren: I think I have an answer. Gretchen, who would you pick?

Gretchen: I think this is really complicated because I wanna know what’s the spoken or written usage question that you’re asking them because I think it would depend what are the parameters this varies on. Because if it’s an age-based usage question that I’m asking, then I wanna pick based on age, but if maybe it’s geography that’s more relevant or urban status – I think you’d probably want somebody in a mid-sized city because language change tends to happen faster in urban centres and slower in rural areas. You wanna split the difference. But not one of the mid-sized cities that has distinctive stuff going on. Like, Pittsburgh has got a whole bunch of stuff that’s been documented for it. So, yeah, I’m like, what are you gonna do for gender? I guess you sort of want somebody who’s around the middle for a lot of statistics, sort of middling in age – not too old, not too young – middling in terms of city. I dunno. Lauren, do you have a more specific answer?

Lauren: Oh, yeah, I’d pick a lexicographer. [Laughter]

Randall: And you’d tell them what the game is?

Lauren: Well, I think because of all of the people who have to think about and understand language usage, I always find lexicographers have a really solid appreciation for what is in the mind of the average language user. They’d be the first group of people that come to mind for me. I guess we want someone who’s at the intersection of being a lexicographer and all of those demographic details that Gretchen was suggesting.

Gretchen: I mean, I think that’s probably Kory Stamper, right, because she’s one of the youngest lexicographers. But “young” for lexicographer is like, I dunno, probably 40s. I think she lives in a mid-size American city.

Lauren: Okay, our answer is Kory Stamper. Done.

Gretchen: There we go.

Randall: Nice. You know, Gretchen, I realised as you were answering that, there was a project in a Midwestern newspaper ran a contest to try to find the most average person in the country. They did exactly the procedure you’re describing where they picked a city that was the most mid-size that was in the middle on a whole bunch of variables, and then they had the town vote on who the most representative average person in the town was. They picked this one guy. He owned a hat store, I think. Then they were like, “We found America’s average man.” Then they took him around to show him a bunch of stuff and get the average man’s opinion on this and that.

Gretchen: Sort of proto-Joe-the-plumber experience.

Lauren: It must be really good to track down the most average person because they must be a wealth of marketing insights.

Gretchen: Well, I was also trying to answer the question for gender because you can sort of pick an average age, you can pick an average location, but for gender, I do actually think that there might be benefits in choosing a non-binary person, not necessarily because non-binary is the average of men and women, but there was a really interesting study by Chantal Gratton on how non-binary people talk in different types of circumstances and how they can adopt features that are associated with multiple genders from that axis. I think, again, if we’re looking for versatility, which is a reason for picking a lexicographer.

Lauren: If you’re a non-binary person working in lexicography –

Gretchen: We wanna hear from you.

Lauren: We’ve got a great game to play.

Gretchen: [Laughs]

Randall: So, if I say, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and hot out,” what is “it” in that sentence? Because the more I think about it, the more it hurts my head.

Gretchen: That’s a fun question because this “it” is doing something that’s, as you may have noticed, semantically meaningless. That’s not the same thing as “I ate it,” where “it” refers to maybe some cake, maybe an apple, a physical object that you can point to. The “it” in “It’s 3:00 p.m.,” “It’s hot,” “It’s raining” is just there because English really hates it when sentences don’t have a subject – like a real, physical subject that’s there that you’ve said even if it doesn’t mean anything. English is not okay with that.

Lauren: There’s lots of languages that will happily say something that would translate into English literally as “Is 3:00 p.m. Is hot.” Or “Is 3:00 p.m. and hot.” And therefore, there’s no “it” there. Because it’s not there for its meaning, it’s just there to fill this spot in a sentence, it doesn’t matter that it is filling the role for being 3:00 p.m. and hot. “It” is just there to tick a box. In fact, this is so odd in English and such a quirk of English that it has a name which is “dummy it.”

Randall: So, wait. You could attach that “it” both to the “3:00 p.m.” and to another verb. I could say, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and was eaten.”

Gretchen: I don’t think you can. [Laughter] Do you think that’s grammatical?

Randall: What just got eaten?

Gretchen: “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten” is like a Lewis Carroll story or something.

Lauren: The “it” being eaten is suddenly meaningful, and so it can’t coordinate as an empty dummy it and a meaningful-subject it.

Gretchen: I think that’s actually a nice test because you can say, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and hot and raining,” and all of those are doing the same “it.” But when you start combining them – I mean, I guess if you say, “It’s hot and eaten,” now you’re just referring to a specific item and not the general state of affairs. Some people think the “it” in “It’s hot” or “It’s raining” refers to the weather or the sky. But we don’t generally go around saying, “The sky is raining.”

Randall: Well, now I’m gonna start.

Gretchen: I mean, you can change things.

Lauren: “It’s raining” is an interesting construction across languages because a lot of languages require you to say something like, “Rain is raining” or “Water is raining.” They don’t have that dummy construction. They’ve solved it in a different way.

Gretchen: I should say this is the dummy as in a dressmaker’s dummy or like a mannequin in a store window. It’s just propping up the clothes. You can think of this “it” as propping up the rest of the sentence.

Lauren: I also like to think of it as because English is so stressed about not having a subject, like a distressed baby, it needs a pacifier, and that’s why you give it a dummy.

Randall: Then I think “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten” is gonna stress out English just a little too much.

Gretchen: Yeah. If you want another piece of technical vocabulary, this construction like, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten,” is known as zeugma. This is something like, “She put out the light and the cat.”

Randall: Oh, I like that.

Lauren: You like it, but the lawyers would be having a meltdown.

Gretchen: Let’s see if there are any other fun examples. “You held your breath and the door for me.” “I took the podium and my second trophy of the evening.” “The boy swallowed milk and kisses.” You can use it for multiple functions. But I think normally when zeugma works, it’s – I mean, you can do it in the abstract like “Put out the light and the cat” because one’s a figurative use and one’s a physical use. But I think, yeah, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten” I have trouble with. It’s definitely deliberately playful. I don’t even know if it’s even ungrammatical. It’s deliberately playful.

Lauren: “What’s afternoon tea?” “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten.”

Randall: Yeah, it seems like there’s an omitted “at,” like, “It’s at 3:00 p.m. and ready.”

Lauren: It’s because “ready” is definitely more of an adjective, whereas “eaten” is a more nominalised-but-still-verb.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think “It’s at 3:00 p.m.” – that can refer to, like, the event is at 3:00 p.m. That’s changing it into a literal “it” again.

Randall: Well, and the reason I couldn’t say, “It’s 3:00 p.m., and I’m eating it,” is then you’re like, “It’s a different ‘it’.”

Gretchen: Yeah, each of them has its own subject, so that’s fine.

Randall: Yeah, and it’s like, “Oh, you didn’t say what he’s eating, but he’s eating it,” you know.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Randall: So, as I understand it, you can use the International Phonetic Alphabet to transcribe all the sounds that people use in language.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Randall: How you do you write a cough in IPA? I was looking through the chart, and I couldn’t figure out, is there a symbol that would go with that sound?

Lauren: A general, full-throated cough is not something that is specifically a speech sound in any human language, so there’s not a –

Gretchen: That we know of yet.

Lauren: That we know of yet or that someone has not created to raise their child to attempt to turn it into normal phonology. So, we don’t have a specific symbol for a cough in the standard International Phonetic Alphabet as set forward by the International Phonetic Association.

Gretchen: However, you have now unlocked – congratulations – the extended IPA.

Randall: I’ve never heard of the extended IPA.

Gretchen: I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it on an episode.

Lauren: Oh, how excellent!

Gretchen: This is yet more IPA for your fun and enjoyment.

Lauren: Also, for useful technical reasons.

Gretchen: Also, useful technical reasons.

Randall: Are you allowed to tell everyone about this? Or is this a secret held among linguists?

Gretchen: The classic IPA is devised for linguists to talk about sounds that are in the regular speech repertoire of spoken languages. The extended IPA is generally used by speech pathologists to transcribe other sounds that people sometimes make when they’re learning to or producing speech differently from how the typical user of their language does it.

Lauren: Speech pathology covers a really wide range. It could be anything from working with children who have lisps and stutters through to helping people post-stroke or with aphasia regain the ability to speak.

Gretchen: Some sounds – the one that’s really memorable for me is that they have gnashing of teeth in extIPA and also smacking lips and other types of whistled version of S, which I’m not gonna demonstrate because a.) I don’t think I can, and b.) it might be kind of painful if you’re on headphones. There’s also some sounds in extIPA that are, I think, very difficult to pronounce unless you have a cleft palate because they’re bringing the air through the palate in your mouth where most people don’t have a hole there or through your nose and mouth at the same time, if you have a cleft palate. That’s where I would look if I was looking for coughing because it seems like the kind of thing they might have done.

Randall: Okay. Do they have a whole new set of symbols, or is it mostly the Latin letters turned upside-down and stuff?

Lauren: There’s a lot of Latin letters turned upside-down or back-to-front. Or sometimes they’ll use something from the IPA with some additional diacritics and decoration.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s a lot of diacritics. Like, things above and below the original letters. Unfortunately, it’s very unglamourous having hyped up the extIPA. There’s a whole section for unidentified or indeterminate sounds, which are a bunch of symbols in a circle. So, if you’re not sure what consonant is said, you can write C in a circle, which is kind of neat. But cough is written as – do you wanna get a pencil and write this down?

Randall: Okay.

Gretchen: Open bracket, open bracket, “cough,” close bracket, close bracket. [Laughter]

Randall: All right. I guess we’ve already got a way to write that.

Gretchen: I wish there was some sort of more interesting symbol. But there is this whole thing. They use music notation for loud speech and soft speech. They have “forte” and “pianissimo” and these sorts of things.

Lauren: This is outside of the extIPA, but if you want a linguist-approved convention for writing laughter in a conversation analysis, they use the @ sign.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s true.

Lauren: I do have a handful of friends who will text me with “@@@” instead of “lol.”

Gretchen: Amazing.

Lauren: It’s handy.

Randall: That reminds me of a comics problem which is, as far as I know, there’s no good written onomatopoeia or sound effect for the sound of applause. So, if you wanna show applause offscreen – off-panel in a comic – if there was an explosion, you would write, “boom,” you know.

Gretchen: Or “bang” or something.

Randall: There’re sounds for splashing – like “psh.” But there’s nothing for the sound of applauding. I don’t even know how to suggest it. Usually what cartoonists do is cheat, and they’ll write, “woo,” to imply people cheering.

Lauren: As someone who studies language and gesture, I don’t think that’s cheating. I think that’s cooping the multimodality of human expression to advantage in a graphic novel format.

Randall: The other thing you’ll sometimes see is people will just write, “clap clap clap clap.” So, it’s not cheating. It’s, you know, one of the many ways you can use language. But I feel like it would be so helpful if there were some way to write that sound. Since you’re both linguists, can you make one? [Gretchen laughs] How would you represent that? Like, okay, if “@@@” is laughing?

Lauren: Representing a sound as a conventionalised spoken form is onomatopoeia. Some languages do this kind of thing far more frequently and more conventionally than English does. We might want to take a look at a language that does that. I think Japanese is one of those languages that has a lot of ideophones and onomatopoeia.

Gretchen: Japanese does this a ton. The Japanese ideophone, onomatopoeia, for clapping is “pachi pachi.”

Randall: “Pachi pachi.” That seems about right.

Gretchen: Yeah, it seems about right. But the fun thing is also that “pachi” can also refer to the number eight in Japanese, which is more commonly “hachi,” but it can also be “pachi.” If you’re texting or you’re on social media, and you wanna indicate applause or clapping, you can also write a bunch of eights. At least Japanese speakers will know what you mean by that. I mean, I guess there’s also the emoji these days. People do that as well.

Lauren: The emoji does have those little action lines. But to get those action lines into English, we just made a big deal about Japanese having this onomatopoeic form, but I think “clap” is also a form of onomatopoeia. We just don’t look at it that way.

Randall: Huh, “clap.”

Gretchen: Oh, no, wait. So, the etymology of “clap.”

Randall: I’ve never been on tenterhooks waiting for an Etymonline definition.

Gretchen: Yeah. So, the Etymonline entry for “clap” has “a common Germanic echoic verb,” which is also found in Old Frisian, Old High German, Old Saxon “klapunga,” and it – yeah, “unknown origin, probably onomatopoeic.”

Lauren: I think the obvious thing to do is to put “clap clap clap,” footnote, down the bottom of the comic, because good comics should have footnotes, you just link to the Etymonline entry. Everyone’s happy. [Laughter]

Randall: Yes, oh man.

Gretchen: The answer was inside you all along.

Randall: It’s like you start saying “clap” so fast that you stumble over the sounds, and there you’ve got it.

Gretchen: From a physical, articulatory perspective, you’re sort of doing a teeny-tiny clap with your tongue, inside your mouth, against the rest of your mouth.

Randall: Yeah. I mean, because, well, the /k/ is the clapping at the back, and then the /p/ is the front, and the /l/ is the labiodental –

Gretchen: It’s a lateral.

Lauren: Your whole mouth is clapping.

Randall: Yeah.

Gretchen: Three or four different parts of your tongue are all doing little taps against the roof of your mouth.

Randall: Your whole mouth is applauding. That is so cool. Okay. Thank you for that.

Gretchen: You’re very welcome.

Randall: This might be almost a question for a singer, but you mentioned these sounds that are outside the speech register. What’s up with the piercing sound of a horror movie scream? Is that falsetto? Is that a normal speech sound but louder? Or is that your throat doing something weird?

Gretchen: There’s a great paper about screaming, which is brilliantly titled, “Human Screams Occupy a Privileged Niche in the Communication Soundscape,” which I think begins to answer your question. It suggests that screams are universal and acoustically unique so that they’ll alert us to danger and ensure, and I quote, “biological and ultimately social efficiency.” I guess the hope being that, like, if someone’s screaming, even if you don’t speak their language, you can still tell this is a human distress signal. We normally write a scream from an onomatopoeia perspective as “Aaahhhhhh!” with a lot of As and maybe Hs because /a/ is the most open of the vowels. The Jaw is just fully dropped. It’s the least restricted. If you tried to scream something like, “Eeeeeee!”, you’d have to have your mouth be a lot more closed.

Randall: Yeah, you never write I-I-I-I-I.

Lauren: I guess that’s why the /i/ in “shriek” is trying to – because it’s closed, but it also then tends to correlate with perceptually higher-pitched things. That’s trying to give you that perception of it being really high-pitched, which /a/ doesn’t necessarily do.

Lauren: Yes. Because some comics will do A-I-E-E-E-E-E, like “Aieeeee!”

Lauren: Trying to get the best of both.

Gretchen: Yeah. Trying to give the high-pitched-ness of it. The other thing about this paper is that it says that screams are “acoustically well segregated from other communication signals,” as in, they’re higher-pitched than other communication signals, and that this is also partly to avoid false alarms. Because, like, imagine if a third of your words just had the scream bit in them, and then you’d kind of be like the “boy who cries wolf” of like, “Oh, well, if you’re screaming all the time, nothing’s ever urgent.”

Randall: You know what. There are a few animals that make sounds that I think are in that scream register because people get freaked out by them. I think foxes and then elk do a weird noise.

Gretchen: There’s some animals that make sounds like crying babies, which I dunno if that’s also in the same range, but the scream cluster is in 30-150 Hz. So, animals – probably some of them are in that range, and you could measure that. And that there’s also a perceptual attribute called “roughness” that screams tend to have. I really don’t wanna demonstrate a scream and really freak people out listening to the podcast, but if you think about your latest horror movie scream style, it’s got this sort of back-and-forth modulation, that sort of roughness.

Randall: I’m curious – it was interesting to realise that I learned from you about how emojis, a lot of them represent gestures, and how some of them are things we have words for, but some of them aren’t. What are some gestures that people do without realising this is a type of communication or without having a word for it?

Lauren: I’m gonna tell you the answer. But once I do, you will never unsee this. I just have to prepare you for that fact. There is something that everyone who gestures does all the time. It has a specific technical name. That is the repetition in a gesture to indicate duration or emphasis. This kind of repetition is known as a “beat” gesture. You will absolutely see it in the most clearest manifestation if you watch a politician give a speech because they love to use them to give a sense of coherence to what they’re saying. It’s this magic thing. If you’re giving a speech, here’s a pro tip. You can use beat gestures. If you continue to use the same repetition on your stressed syllables – I’m doing it now, but you can’t see it.

Gretchen: Lauren, I feel like you’re really emphasising the beat gestures in a very auditory way.

Lauren: I’m emphasising the beat gestures auditorily. But if you continue to do this gesture repetition, you can actually give the sense that everything you’re saying alongside those gestures is the same topic or it’s coherent even though it may not actually be so.

Randall: Huh. So, this is like when you’re shaking your hand up and down as you talk, and the up and down motion goes with the syllables, and then suddenly, when you do that, I have this urge to vote for you.

Gretchen: Vote for Lauren. She can’t be beat.

Lauren: [Laughs] There’s my slogan. So, you can combine it with a thumbs up if you wanna be like, “That was a really great job,” or a pointing gesture. It combines with other gestures. That’s part of why you see it everywhere. But sometimes, a person’s hands won’t be indicating, like, a pointing gesture, or they won’t be giving any information about the size or the shape of something. They’re just doing this repetition. The analogy in emoji is that we use a lot of repetition in our emoji to do the same kind of emphasis or duration – so a string of clapping hands to show applause in emoji or a string of hearts to say, “I really love that idea.”

Randall: Is it true that if you make someone hold their hands still when they’re talking, they’re less coherent or have a harder time forming sentences? I feel like I heard that somewhere.

Lauren: The general suggestion is yes. I think we’ve talked about it before, and I’ve said that’s the case. I’ve been returning to this literature and will probably revisit it in an episode, but it turns out that there is a lot of variation in what people mean when they say that they’ve stopped people from gesturing. And so, there’s a lot of variation in just how much it really does change how people speak. Possibly, sometimes it’s just because they come up with these really fantastically bizarre experiments.

Gretchen: There’s some where they tie them down so they can’t gesture, right. Maybe being tied down is a bit distracting.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, there are some fascinating study designs.

Randall: I mean, any time you have to have anyone do anything in an MRI, their circumstances are not gonna be natural. Well, what you really need to do is just raise someone in, like, have all the furniture in their house to be shaped like an MRI.

Gretchen: And then they’d be totally comfortable with it.

Randall: So, they go to sleep, and it’s in an MRI. And their couch where they watch TV is an MRI.

Lauren: Adding it to my long list of study design ideas that are terrible. A lot in this area are fascinatingly bad.

Randall: So, a lot of the time, I’ll read fiction or watch a movie where there’s a fictional language. If I come across a sample of a language, and I’m trying to figure out, “Is this a real, natural human language, or is it something that was created by a language enthusiast to seem real,” if you were hired as detectives to try to figure it out, what do you look for? What would be the hallmarks of an invented language?

Gretchen: This sounds like a great linguist job.

Randall: What would be the hallmarks that give away, you know, it’s someone who’s trying to make it seem like a natural language. If you were trying to figure out if you’re looking at a real language or one by someone who’s trying to fool you, what would you look for?

Lauren: I would go straight to trying to find the irregularities. If there are no irregularities, that’s an immediate sign that you have something that is too neat to have been slowly evolved collectively as a communal agreement by a collection of speakers.

Gretchen: Especially if there’re some people who do this and some people that do that. Because one of the things with artificial languages is they’ll tend to make one language. But as we were talking about with “wine” and “whine,” or trying to find the averagest English speaker, everyone’s slightly different with the language. If you don’t have any of that representation of “Different people are doing this slightly differently, and we don’t fully know exactly how all of this stuff works, but here’s a bunch of ways that it could be” –

Lauren: I think I would go, probably, straight to the pronoun system or how they do copulas – so in English “is, are, be, am” are all copula verbs, but they’re all a bit of a hot mess because, over time, we’ve created this really unbalanced paradigm. Or we’ve taken two different verbs and turned them into the past and the present of the current one. Or with pronouns – we just borrowed “they” from one of the Scandinavian languages, and you can’t actually find a robust explanation for where “she” came from in the English paradigm. “I” and “me” are incredibly ill-balanced. If you have a completely neat, like, “I have all these pronouns, and they’re perfectly clear which one is ‘me’ and which one is ‘you’ and which one’s single and which one’s plural,” I’m like, ugh, that is suspiciously regular. And language is very good at being irregular in these high-use areas.

Gretchen: It’s like a house that no one lives in because it’s suspiciously tidy. I think also the high-use areas, like in a house that you live in, tend to have more irregularity going on. I think it’s the difference between a stair rail or something that’s been polished by generations of people walking by it and having their hand on it. Some areas will be smoother than others. It’s hard to get that patina of use without lots of people doing it.

Lauren: I find the best way to do that when I’m constructing languages for fictional worlds is just to bring a degree of absentmindedness to my work. I might just generate the pronoun paradigm twice, and then take the bits I like of both of them, but then randomly forget sometime and use another form so there’s one completely irregular one in there.

Randall: That makes sense. Now and then I see people complain about like, “Oh, this show is unrealistic because the characters pronounce this one character’s name two different ways.” Like in Star Wars, some of them say /han/ Solo and some of them say /hæn/ Solo. “That’s because they haven’t prepared well enough.”

Lauren: It’s just two different parts of the galaxy.

Randall: Yeah.

Gretchen: As somebody named Lauren /gan/ – or as you say it –

Lauren: Lauren /gɑn/.

Gretchen: Yes. People never pronounce real people’s names differently depending on their accent.

Lauren: People would never have a /gɑn/gan/ merger. That would be completely unrealistic for my co-host to use the incorrect vowel in pronouncing my name.

Gretchen: Because I don’t have your /gɑn/ vowel.

Lauren: So, yeah, that kind of irregularity. I do have to say, sometimes there is implausible irregularity. In Game of Thrones, I found it comedically implausible that every single member of Arya Stark’s family would pronounce her first name differently. But I can totally believe there is an entire galaxy where there are two different ways to pronounce /hɑn/ or /hæn/.

Randall: So, it’s like the difference between there being, oh, a couple of different accents – some people say this name this way, some people say /hɑn/, some people say /hæn/ – versus, like, these people have clearly not met Arya because they all say it differently.

Lauren: Her own family members don’t seem to know.

Gretchen: And the reasons are often motivated in some sort of factor. If you have characters – okay, people who are in this group do this; people who are in that group do this – but like, why do these characters who all grew up together in the same environment, why do they talk so differently if they all grew up together? Maybe there’s some sort of other reason, right? But what sort of factors are influencing how people are talking differently or like, “Oh, we just happened to hire a bunch of actors from different places. Whatever.” Sometimes, you get a show that does that sort of accent neutral casting or accent indifferent casting, but if you wanna create within-world story reasons for people – you know, “Oh, we’re gonna give all the good guys British accents.”

Lauren: Yeah, a bit of randomness and whimsy definitely helps bring a language to life.

Randall: That’s a really clever thing to look for. It’s nice to know that you could just be a little bit less fastidious and actually make it seem more real. Let’s just suppose, optimistically, that this podcast recording survives for 50 or 100 years. I always think it’s funny. We’re sitting here recording this at a specific time and place, but it’s gonna be listened to in the future. And we don’t actually know how far in the future. People will listen when it’s posted, but then it’ll sit around. I thought it would be fun, keeping in mind those people 50 or 100 years in the future that if we try to make guesses about features of English that seem unusual to us but will seem like normal usage to the listeners in 2072 or 2122, we could make our guesses about what we think usage is gonna look like. And then, in 100 years, the listeners can grade us on who got closest to correct. It’s like a contest. We wouldn’t get our scores for 100 years.

Gretchen: Please, if you’re listening to this in 100 years, you know, maybe human life expectancy will have gone up, and we’ll still be around.

Randall: Be sure to post this episode on the “intergalactic hollow-sphere.”

Gretchen: Share it with your friends via your brain implant. Okay.

Randall: Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and merge the podcast with your consciousness at the “galactic core.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: I actually have a suggestion that might even work on a shorter timeframe. We might be around in, say, 20 years or 30 years to hear the answers to some of these, which would be kind of exciting. One of the fastest changing areas of language is that there’s a new word for “cool” about every decade or so – sometimes less. I was writing another article where I had to project the future of English, and I thought, you know, if we go back, and we look at a list of words for “cool,” do they have any sort of features in common so we could predict what the new, cool word for “cool” might be? Some words for “cool” that may not be cool anymore, things like, “sick,” “hot,” “lit,” “rad,” “sweet,” “tight,” “nice,” “neat.” There’s also another subset like –

Randall: “Keen.”

Gretchen: “Keen,” “nifty,” “groovy.” Apart from “nifty” and “groovy,” which both have this /i/ sound at the end, all of these other words are very consonant-vowel-consonant from a pronunciation perspective. Sometimes with an extra consonant at the beginning or end. Sometimes, there’s two. Like, “sick,” “lit,” “rad,” “sweet,” “nice,” “neat,” they’ve all got these bookended consonants on either side. If we can come up with some other words that are monosyllables with consonants on either side, maybe one of these words will eventually turn into the word for “cool.” This would be the first time that I’ve ever been cool in my life. We can come up with some of them. I think the current word that “the kids” are using these days is “based,” which is the opposite of “cringe.” It’s like “based in fact,” sometimes used meta-ironically. Attributed to the rapper Lil B. I’m getting this from Urban Dictionary because, again, I don’t think we’re particularly cool here. I came up with some additional candidates. If you wish to contribute any, you also can, of words that have the right phonetic form that could turn into a word for “cool” maybe. But maybe there are more. They don’t have to mean something that sounds good, right. Because “sick” or something doesn’t sound good.

Lauren: Okay, what have you got?

Gretchen: So, “sop” seems like it’s got potential. “Numb.” I dunno, I just feel like “numb” could mean “cool.” “Left.” I dunno, maybe it’s kind of “out from left field” or sort of bizarre. As a left-handed person, I kind of like this one.

Lauren: I was gonna say, I feel like this is your left-handed affirmation coming through here.

Gretchen: Thank you. “Sunk.” I dunno, “sunk” could mean “cool.” These have got some good acoustics to them.

Randall: Oh, getting a new meaning for, like, the sunk cost fallacy becomes the sunk cost positive thing.

Gretchen: Yeah. Like, “Wow! That’s so sunk, man. I can’t believe it.”

Lauren: I have a very long bow to draw here. I don’t think I’m gonna win with this. But I would like to propose “whale,” as in the ocean-going mammal, because there are some people who still pronounce that as /hwɛɪl/, and then I’ll have a really obvious token to check if we fully reduce the wine/whine merger.

Gretchen: “/hwaʊ/ that’s so /hwɛɪl/ of you!”

Lauren: I just wanna make sure we have a lot of tokens for something that has a W-H pronunciation for some people to make sure that we’ve definitely closed that merger. Or it’s been de-merged.

Gretchen: Hmm. I mean, some people are using the Beowulf “hwaet” ironically now.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, maybe we could get that going.

Gretchen: Bring some of this stuff back.

Randall: Or, hey, this can be my opening. If America has finished merging “caught” and “cot,” then we could bring back “caught” to mean “cool.”

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, “That’s so cot of you.”

Randall: No, no, no, you got to unmerge it.

Gretchen: “That’s so /kɑt/ of you.”

Randall: You know, the weird thing is when you’re describing this, you’re using the word “cool” a lot. It strikes me that that word has hung on for a weirdly long time and means the same thing. There’re all these other synonyms that come and go, but that one – like, when I read old newspapers going back at least five or six decades – has basically the same connotation.

Gretchen: It’s interesting that “cool” retains its meaning as the meta-term for this category, whereas if I say something’s “groovy” now, I’m implying it’s dated. I’m not saying it’s still cool. I mean, like, I dunno if there’re gonna be more temperature words. I think that mine has been pretty much exhausted. I mean, unless you’re gonna start saying something’s “warm.” Like, “cool,” “chill,” “hot.”

Randall: “Tepid, man.”

Gretchen: I think that’s the wrong phonetic profile.

Lauren: Actually, “luke” fits. And it’s now only in the context of “lukewarm.”

Gretchen: Yeah, “That’s so luke.”

Lauren: Sorry Lukes out there.

Randall: I mean, if you’re going for the phonetic profile, I think “damp” fits.

Gretchen: “That’s so damp, man.”

Randall: No, wait, no, because, I mean, that’s very similar to “dank.”

Gretchen: That’s very similar to “dank,” yeah. “Dank” is already there.

Lauren: The things people can semantically shift when they set their minds to it are truly astounding.

Gretchen: You really can’t predict what’s gonna be in cool, but they do seem to have some sort of phonetic signature. If any of these words that we’ve mentioned turn into a word for “cool,” I definitely didn’t see “based” coming, so who knows.

Lauren: That would be very “whale.”

Gretchen: We get bragging rights. That would be very “whale.”

Randall: That was real “tepid” of you. Well, to put my stake in the ground, my prediction – when I was a little kid, you could tell if someone learned from reading because they would pronounce certain words ways that – like they’d say /dɛbɹɪs/ instead of /dɛbɹi/ because they hadn’t heard someone say it. They had read it. I feel like we’re conducting so much written communication now, I wonder if more of those will just become alternate, accepted pronunciations. So, like /dɛbɹɪs/, /fəkɛɪd/ instead of “façade.”

Gretchen: If you were me when I was a kid saying /sɛntɹɪfjʊgl̩/ instead of /sɛntɹɪfɪkl̩/.

Randall: Exactly. “Grand /fɪnal/.”

Gretchen: There’s one that’s already there which is “forte.”

Randall: Oh, yeah, I only just learned that I’ve been saying that one wrong.

Lauren: What would be a “non-forte” pronunciation of “forte”?

Gretchen: /foɹt/, I think, right, because it’s originally Italian. In Italian, it’s both spelled “forte” and pronounced “forte,” but a lot of people write it with an accent mark as if it was French, like “café” – or “resumé,” which gets written with the accent mark. You can understand why you’d wanna do this because the E there isn’t silent, but it’s not actually originally a French word.

Randall: Yes.

Gretchen: Yeah, I like that we had this pronunciation argument. This makes me feel much cooler than coming up with for words for “cool.”

Randall: Mispronunciation is my “forté.”

Lauren: I guess if you’re listening to this in 100 years from when it was released, email/contact @lingthusiasm to let us know which of us is closest. [Laughter]

[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, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get tree structure scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar” notebooks, and kiki-bouba mugs, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. You can follow our guest, Randall Munroe, @xkcd on various social media sites. His new book is called What If? 2. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk to about it? Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include a chat about the design of the IPA chat and what it’s like to be in an MRI machine. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Production Manager is Liz McCullough. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Randall: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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