#and latin was a really common language for medieval writing

[fma03envy]

Me: Ok I have an important lit test tomorrow I need to be studying

My brain: I wonder if Envy can speak latin

[irish-dress-history]

Did the ancient Celts really paint themselves blue?

Part 1: Brittonic Body Paint

Clockwise from top left: participants in the Picts Vs Romans 5k, a 16th c. painting of painted and tattooed ancient Britons, Boudica: Queen of War (2023), Brave (2012).

The idea that the ancient and medieval Insular Celts painted themselves blue or tattooed themselves with woad is common in modern culture. But where did this idea come from, and is there any evidence for it? In this post, I will examine the evidence for the use of body paint among the ancient peoples of the British Isles, including both written sources and archaeology.

For this post, I am looking at sources pertaining to any ethnic group that lived in the British Isles from the late Iron Age through the early Roman Era. (Later Roman and Medieval sources will be discussed in part 2.) The relevant text sources for Brittonic body paint date from approximately 50 BCE to 100 CE. I am including all British Isles cultures, because a) determining exactly which Insular culture various writers mean by terms like ‘Briton’ is sometimes impossible and b) I don’t want to risk excluding any relevant evidence.

Written Sources:

The earliest source for our notion of blue Celts is Julius Cesar's Gallic War book 5, written circa 50 BCE. In it he says, "Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem, atque hoc horridiores sunt in pugna aspectu," which translates as something like, "All the Britons stain themselves with woad, which produces a bluish colouring, and makes their appearance in battle more terrible" (translation from MacQuarrie 1997). Hollywood sometimes interprets this passage as meaning that the Celts used war paint, but Cesar says that all Britons colored themselves, not just the warriors. The blue coloring just had the effect (on the Romans at least) of making the Briton warriors look scary. The verb inficiunt (infinitive inficio) is sometimes translated as 'paint', but it actually means dye or stain. The Latin verb for paint is pingo (MacQuarrie 1997).

The interpretation of vitro as woad is supported by Vitruvius' statements in De Architectura (7.14.2) that vitrum is called isatis by the Greeks and can be used as a substitute for indigo. Isatis is the Greek word for woad; this is where we get its modern scientific name Isatis tinctoria. Woad and indigo both contain the same blue dye pigment, hence woad can be used as a substitute for indigo (Carr 2005, Hoecherl 2016). The word vitro can also mean 'glass' in Latin, but as staining yourself with glass doesn't make much sense, it's more commonly interpreted here as woad (Carr 2005, Hoecherl 2016, MacQuarrie 1997). I will revisit this interpretation during my discussion of the archaeological evidence.

Almost a century later in De situ orbis, Pomponius Mela says that the Britons "whether for beauty or for some other reason — they have their bodies dyed blue," (translation by Frank E. Romer) using virtually identical language to Cesar, "vitro corpora infecti" (Lib. III Cap. VI p. 63). Pomponius Mela may have copied his information from Cesar (Hoecherl 2016).

Then in 79 CE, Pliny the Elder writes in Natural History book 22 ch 2, "There is a plant in Gaul, similar to the plantago in appearance, and known there by the name of "glastum:" with it both matrons and girls among the people of Britain are in the habit of staining the body all over, when taking part in the performance of certain sacred rites; rivalling hereby the swarthy hue of the Æthiopians, they go in a state of nature." In spite of the fact that glastum means woad in the Gaulish and Celtic languages, Pliny seems to think glastum is not woad. In Natural History book 20 ch 25, he describes different plant which is almost certainly woad, a “wild lettuce” called "isatis" which is "used by dyers of wool." (Woad is a well-known source of fabric dye (Speranza et al 2020)).

Of course, "rivaling the swarthy hue of the Æthiopians" doesn't necessarily mean blue. Pliny seems to think Ethiopians literally have coal-black skin (Latin ater). Additionally, Pliny is taking about a ritual done by women, where Cesar was talking about a practice done by everyone. Are they talking about 2 different cultural practices, or is one of them reporting misinformation? Or are both wrong? Unfortunately, there is no way to know.

The Roman poets Ovid, Propertius, and Marcus Valerius Martialis all make references to blue-colored Britons (Carr 2005), but these are literary allusions, not ethnographic reports. As such, they don't really provide additional evidence that the Britons were actually dyeing or painting themselves blue (Hoecherl 2016). These poetic references merely demonstrate that the Romans believed that the Britons were.

In the sources that come after Pliny the Elder, starting in the 3rd century, there is a shift in the terms used. Instead of inficio which means to dye or stain (Hoecherl 2016), probably a temporary application of color to the surface of the skin, later sources use words like cicatrices (scars) and stigma/stigmata (brand, scar, or tattoo) (Hoecherl 2016, MacQuarrie 1997, Carr 2005) which suggest a permanent placement of pigment under the skin, i.e. a tattoo. This evidence for tattooing will be discussed in a second post.

Discussion:

Although the Romans clearly believed that the Britons were coloring themselves with blue pigment, that doesn't necessarily mean that Julius Cesar, Pomponius Mela, or Pliny the Elder are reliable sources.

In the sentence before he claims that all Britons color themselves blue, Julius Cesar says that most inland Britons "do not sow corn [aka grain], but live on milk and flesh and clothe themselves in skins." (translation from MacQuarrie 1997). This is demonstrably false. Grains like wheat and barley and storage pits for grain have been found at multiple late Iron Age sites in inland Britain (van der Veen and Jones 2006, Lightfood and Stevens 2012, Lodwick et al 2021). This false characterization of Insular Celts as uncivilized savages would continue to show up more than a millennium later in English descriptions of the Irish.

Pomponius Mela, in addition to believing in blue-dyed Britons, also believed that there was an island off the coast of Scythia inhabited by a race called the Panotii "who for clothing have big ears broad enough to go around their whole body (they are otherwise naked)" (Chorographia Bk II 3.56 translation from Romer 1998). Pliny the Elder also believed in Panotii.

15th-century depiction of a Panotii from the Nuremberg Chronicle. Was Celtic body paint as real as these guys?

The Roman historians Tacitus and Cassius Dio make no mention of body paint in their coverage of Iron Age British history (Hoecherl 2016). Their silence on the subject suggests that, in spite of Cesar's claim that all Britons colored themselves blue, the custom of body staining or painting was not actually widespread.

Considering all of these issues, is any of this information trustworthy? Based on my experience studying 16th c. Irish dress, even bigoted sources based on second-hand information often have a grain of truth somewhere in them. Unfortunately, exactly which bit is true is hard to identify without other sources of evidence, and this far in the past we don't have much.

Archaeological Evidence:

There are no known artistic depictions of face paint or body art from Great Britain during this time period. There are some Iron Age continental European coins that show what may be face painting or tattoos, but no such images have been found on British coins (Carr 2005, Hoecherl 2016).

In order for the Britons to have dyed themselves blue, they needed to have had blue pigment. Woad is not native to Great Britain (Speranza et al 2020), but Woad seeds have been found in a pit at the late Iron Age site of Dragonby in England, so the Britons had access to woad as a potential pigment source in Julius Cesar's time (Van der Veen et al 1993). Egyptian blue is another possible source of blue pigment. A bead made of Egyptian blue was found at a late Bronze Age site in Runnymede, England. Pieces of Egyptian blue could have been powdered to produce a pigment for body paint. (Hoecherl 2016). Egyptian blue was also used by the Romans to make blue-colored glass (Fleming 1999). Perhaps this is what Cesar meant by 'vitro'.

Potential sources of blue: Isatis tinctoria (woad) leaves and a lump of Egyptian blue from New Kingdom Egypt

Modern experiments have found that reasonably effective body paint can be made by mixing indigo powder either with water, forming a runny paint which dries on the skin, or with beef drippings, forming a grease paint which needs soap to be removed (Carr 2005, reenactor description). The second recipe is very similar to one used by modern east African argo-pastoralists which consists of ground red ocher mixed with cow fat (unpublished interview*).

Finding blue pigment on the skin of a bog body might confirm Julius Cesar's claim, but unfortunately, the results here are far from conclusive. To my knowledge, Lindow II is the only British bog body that has been tested for indigotin, the dye pigment in woad and indigo. No indigotin was found (Taylor 1986).

The late Iron Age-early Roman era bog bodies Lindown II and Lindown III show some evidence of mineral-based body paint (Joy 2009, Giles 2020). Both of them have elevated levels of calcium, aluminum, silicon, iron, and copper in their skin. Lindow III also has elevated levels of titanium. The calcium levels may simply be the result the of the bog leeching calcium from their bones. Some researchers have suggested that the other elements may be from mineral-based paints applied to the skin. The aluminum and silicon may be from clay minerals. The iron and titanium could be from red ocher. The copper could be from malachite, azurite, or Egyptian blue (CuCaSiO4), pigments that would give a green or blue color (Pyatt et al 1995, Pyatt et al 1991). These elements may have other sources however, and are not present in large enough amounts to provide definitive proof of body paint (Cowell and Craddock 1995, Giles 2020). Testing done on the early Roman Era (80-220 CE) Worsley Man has found no evidence of mineral-based paint (Giles 2020).

One final type of artifact that provides some support for Julius Cesar's claim is a group of small cosmetic grinders from late Iron Age-Roman Era Britain. These mortar and pestle sets are found almost exclusively in Great Britain and are of a style which appears to be an indigenous British development. They are distinctly different from the stone palettes used by the Romans for grinding cosmetics which suggests that these British grinders were used for a different purpose than making Roman-style makeup (Carr 2005). Archaeologist Gillian Carr has suggested that these British grinders might have been used by the Britons for grinding, mixing, and applying a woad-based body paint (Carr 2005).

Left and center: Cosmetic grinder set from Kent. Right: Cosmetic mortar from Staffordshire. images from Portable Antiquities Scheme under CC attribution license

The mortars have a variety of styles of decoration, but the pestles (top left and top center) typically feature a pointed end which could be used for applying paint to the skin (Carr 2005). The grinders are quite small, (most are less than 11 cm (4.5 in) long), making them better suited to preparing paint for drawing small designs rather than for dyeing large areas of skin (Carr 2005, Hoecherl 2016).

Conclusions:

Admittedly, this post is a bit off-topic, since the Irish are not mentioned, but dress history is also about what people did not wear. Hollywood has a tendency to overgeneralize and expropriate, so I want to be clear: There is no known evidence that the ancient Irish used body paint.

So, who did? For the reasons I have already discussed, I don't consider any of the Roman writers particularly trustworthy, but I think the following conclusions are plausible:

A least a few people in Great Britain dyed/stained or painted their bodies between circa 50 BCE and perhaps 100 CE, after which mentions of it end. Written sources from c. 200 CE on talk about tattoos rather than painting or staining. The custom of body dyeing/painting may have started as something practiced by everyone and later changed to something practiced by just women.

None of the writers mention any designs being painted, but Julius Cesar's description could encompass designs or solid area of color. Pliny, on the other hand, states that women were coloring their entire bodies a solid color. The dye was probably blue, although Pliny implies it was black. (I know of no plants in northern Europe that resemble plantago and produce a black dye. I think Pliny was reporting misinformation.)

Archaeological evidence and experimental recreations support the possibility that woad was the source of the pigment, but they cannot confirm it. Data from bog bodies indicate that a mineral pigment like azurite or Egyptian blue is more likely, but these samples are too small to be conclusive.

The small cosmetic grinders are suitable for making designs which might match Cesar and Mela's descriptions, but not Pliny's description of all-over body dyeing.

*Interview with a Daasanach woman I participated in while doing field school in Kenya in 2015.

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Bibliography:

Carr, Gillian. (2005). Woad, Tattooing and Identity in Later Iron Age and Early Roman Britain. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 24(3), 273–292. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0092.2005.00236.x

Cowell, M., and Craddock, P. (1995). Addendum: Copper in the Skin of Lindow Man. In R. C. Turner and R. G. Scaife (eds) Bog Bodies: New Discoveries and New Perspectives (p. 74-75). British Museum Press.

Fleming, S. J. (1999). Roman Glass; reflections on cultural change. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Roman_Glass/ONUFZfcEkBgC?hl=en&gbpv=0

Giles, Melanie. (2020). Bog Bodies Face to face with the past. Manchester University Press, Manchester. https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/46717/9781526150196_fullhl.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Hoecherl, M. (2016). Controlling Colours: Function and Meaning of Colour in the British Iron Age. Archaeopress Publishing LTD, Oxford. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Controlling_Colours/WRteEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Joy, J. (2009). Lindow Man. British Museum Press, London. https://archive.org/details/lindowman0000joyj/mode/2up

Lightfoot, E., and Stevens, R. E. (2012). Stable Isotope Investigations of Charred Barley (Hordeum vulgare) and Wheat (Triticum spelta) Grains from Danebury Hillfort: Implications for Palaeodietary Reconstructions. Journal of Archaeological Science, 39(3), 656–662. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2011.10.026

Lodwick, L., Campbell, G., Crosby, V., Müldner, G. (2021). Isotopic Evidence for Changes in Cereal Production Strategies in Iron Age and Roman Britain. Environmental Archaeology, 26(1), 13-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2020.1718852

MacQuarrie, Charles. (1997). Insular Celtic tattooing: History, myth and metaphor. Etudes Celtiques, 33, 159-189. https://doi.org/10.3406/ecelt.1997.2117

Pomponius Mela. (1998). De situ orbis libri III (F. Romer, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published ca. 43 CE) https://topostext.org/work/145

Pyatt, F.B., Beaumont, E.H., Buckland, P.C., Lacy, D., Magilton, J.R., and Storey, D.M. (1995). Mobilization of Elements from the Bog Bodies Lindow II and III and Some Observations on Body Painting. In R. C. Turner and R. G. Scaife (eds) Bog Bodies: New Discoveries and New Perspectives (p. 62-73). British Museum Press.

Pyatt, F.B., Beaumont, E.H., Lacy, D., Magilton, J.R., and Buckland, P.C. (1991) Non isatis sed vitrum or, the colour of Lindow Man. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 10(1), 61–73. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227808912_Non_Isatis_sed_Vitrum_or_the_colour_of_Lindow_Man

Speranza, J., Miceli, N., Taviano, M.F., Ragusa, S., Kwiecień, I., Szopa, A., Ekiert, H. (2020). Isatis Tinctoria L. (Woad): A Review of Its Botany, Ethnobotanical Uses, Phytochemistry, Biological Activities, and Biotechnical Studies. Plants, 9(3): 298. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants9030298

Taylor, G. W. (1986). Tests for Dyes. In I. Stead, J. B. Bourke and D. Brothwell (eds) Lindow Man: the Body in the Bog (p. 41). British Museum Publications Ltd.

Van der Veen, M., and Jones, G. (2006). A Re-analysis of Agricultural Production and Consumption: Implications for Understanding the British Iron Age. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 15 (3), 217–228. doi:10.1007/s00334-006-0040-3 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27247136

Van der Veen, M., Hall, A., and May, J. (1993). Woad and the Britons painted blue. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 12(3), 367-371. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249394983

[hassedah]

Do you think anyone is left handed? XD ooh, how does their handwriting look like? I have a hc that Aaron has dysleyia and thus never learned how to read fluently. But he still likes to read sometimes x) What are yours?

How do boys write?

Hi! How are you? I hope you are well! ^^

Here is the headcanon you requested, I hope you enjoy it! ^^

I like the idea of Aaron being dyslexic. What's more, I doubt he learned to read and write as a child. It wasn't common at the time and Aaron was born at a rather complicated time in medieval history (between war, famine and a plague that had been over for a few decades but still had consequences). So I doubt that his little mother would have found the time, money and opportunity to teach him to read and write (although she would have had to know how to read and write herself, and given the literacy rate among women at the time, that's highly unlikely). Aaron must surely have learned to read and write later, perhaps by joining his wolf pack.

Dyslexia would probably not have been detected, not only because the word didn't exist, but also because someone who had difficulty reading and writing wouldn't have seemed surprising.

However, Dyslexia could be detected at the manor. If Ethan has any knowledge on the subject it would be possible. If not, with a dyslexic MC themselves. I think that would be the most coherent because I can't think of any reason why Ethan should have been interested in the Dys disorder.

Take care of yourself and have a nice day! ^^

Vladimir :

Vladimir is right-handed, but he can write with his left hand if necessary. His handwriting is not disastrous with his left hand, but it is even slower than when he writes with his right hand.

His handwriting is beautiful and neat, but he writes very slowly, even when he's in a hurry. This is because he needs to concentrate a lot to have a neat handwriting. If he tries to write faster his handwriting tends to become illegible (something his teachers used to reproach him for when he was a child (while asking him to write faster)).

He writes quite small. As a result, he generally doesn't take up much space on a sheet of paper. His letters are very tight and his handwriting tends to lean to the left of the page. He can write in Braille. He learnt it so that he could talk to Raphaël when they were still exchanging letters.

He always signs with his surname, which is rather unusual for a vampire given that the majority of them only sign with their first name, but Vladimir is incapable of not using his, it's far too important to him to give it up.

He is the one in the manor who masters the most different languages, especially when it comes to the written word (this is due to his education). He can easily read and write texts in French, English and Italian, as well as German, Hungarian and Latin. He makes very few spelling mistakes in these languages and is usually the one to go to if someone has a grammatical or spelling question. He can also read Old English. He also reads Russian and Ancient Greek easily (although with a little more difficulty for the latter).

As he is very clumsy, writing requires a lot of concentration (he probably suffers from dyspraxia but has never been diagnosed for this). But that doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy writing. In fact, he loves writing. The other members of the manor have already offered to buy him a typewriter so that he can continue to write his stories with less fatigue, but Vladimir thinks that the quality of his writing is not worth the expense.

Béliath :

Béliath is right-handed. He can write with his left hand if he really needs to, but in that case he writes very badly, much to his dismay. So if he gets injured and can no longer use his right hand, he will usually ask others to write for him (and the best choice is Ivan or Vladimir).

Béliath writes mainly in cursive and his handwriting is quite ancient. He's not particularly aware of it, because that's how his sister taught him to write, several centuries ago, and he's never thought of changing the way he writes, even less since the people at Moondance have been complimenting him on the beauty of his handwriting. It's true that his handwriting is very pretty and rather neat, and the letters are spaced far enough apart not to be unpleasant to read. He sometimes boasts about it to the others at the manor, and it has to be said that he easily has one of the most beautiful handwritings.

He writes rather quickly (no doubt because of the invitations to his parties, which he has to write by hand since Vladimir refuses to buy a computer and a printer), while keeping his handwriting legible for everyone. His handwriting tends to lean to the right of the page.

Its writing is neither too small nor too large. The letters are easy to read and different enough not to be confused with each other when reading.

Like most vampires and supernatural creatures, he signs with his first name. He doesn't really have a surname anyway, unless you consider Son of Asmodeus to be a family name. His signature is rather complex, with a lot of interlacing around his first name, which makes for a rather complicated signature to reproduce.

He can write in several different languages with varying degrees of spelling ability. He has a perfect command of the demonic language his sister taught him, he can write in Latin and his French and English are not bad (if you ignore the fact that he never uses accents in French). As for the rest, he generally speaks them much better than he writes them.

Ivan :

Ivan is right-handed and can't write with his left hand. It's illegible every time. He tries to practise, though, because he thinks it's cool to be able to write well with both hands, but he can't really do it. If he gets injured and can't write with his right hand, he'll try to write with his left before giving up and asking Vladimir or Beliath for help.

His handwriting is simple, not pretty, but perfectly legible for everyone. It's a quality he really appreciates, because Aaron has already told him that he prefers his handwriting to Beliath's. Ivan has rarely been so proud of himself, after all, everyone in the manor recognises that Beliath's handwriting is pretty.

He can write quickly when he needs to, but this affects the legibility of his handwriting, so he avoids doing so most of the time. He also has a tendency to write quite large, which means that he generally needs a lot more paper to write a text than the other members of the manor.

He has asked Vladimir and Raphaël to teach him to write and read in Braille. He still wants to be able to communicate with Raphaël, even if he leaves the manor, and he would like to be able to read the little stories that Raphaël writes himself and not always have to ask Raphaël to read them for him. He still has a bit of trouble reading quickly, but he's getting better at it, although writing in Braille is still very difficult for him.

He has kept the signature he had before his death, so he continues to sign with his surname, signing with his first name seems strange and… unpleasant. It's not that he doesn't like his first name, but he thought he'd be using his family name signature for decades to come, and having to give it up so soon is still too painful for him.

He can only write in French, although Vladimir persists in trying to teach him at least English (at first Vladimir wanted to teach him Latin). Ivan makes relatively few spelling mistakes (which he's proud of, given that Ethan makes more spelling mistakes than he does in French).

Aaron :

Aaron is normally left-handed, but at the time he was born it was very much frowned upon. So he was forced to learn to use his right hand to work, write and fence, which didn't help his handwriting, which was already difficult to read, and he was much more awkward using his right hand to fight with a sword. Today, he has stopped using his right hand for writing and fencing and has become much more skilful.

He had to concentrate to achieve a beautiful handwriting. The shapes of his letters are simpler than Beliath's because he favours ease of reading over beauty. He also writes quite slowly and never tries to write faster. He knows that writing faster only makes his text more illegible.

Like most supernatural creatures, Aaron signs with his first name. His signature is quite simple, and he sees no point in trying to embellish it with interlacing or lines. For him, it's a waste of time and doesn't fit in with his idea of a signature that should remain legible. After all, with all the interlacing that Beliath puts around his first name, he sometimes finds it hard to read his signature.

Aaron speaks far more languages than he writes, particularly Elvish, and is the only member of the manor to do so. He has a tendency to make a lot of spelling mistakes, but in his defence, between language changes and spelling reforms, he never knows where to turn. He barely has time to understand a spelling rule before humans are happy to change it straight away. He only spells Spanish. For the rest, he always asks Vladimir.

Despite the difficulties, Aaron loves to write and read poetry. Along with Raphaël, he probably owns the largest number of poetry collections. However, he is quite precise about the books he looks for: the text must not be too small and the lines must be spaced far enough apart to be pleasant to read. That's one of the reasons why he doesn't really like Vladimir's old books: the writing is too small and he has a hard time distinguishing between the lines.

Raphaël :

Raphaël is totally ambidextrous, but as a child he was left-handed. His parents insisted that he write with his right hand, but he didn't really want to, so as soon as they weren't watching him he would write with his left hand again. He eventually learned to use his right hand for writing and fencing, but this was only to surprise people who thought he was only left-handed.

When Raphaël was writing in cursive, he loved writing poetry, especially for Margarita and Alessio, who regularly received poetry from Raphaël. He still loves to write, but now he uses a slate and stylus to write in Braille. In fact, he always carries a slate and stylus with him in case he needs to write down an idea somewhere other than his bedroom or the library. The problem is that he always ends up forgetting the paper somewhere.

He found Braille much easier to learn to read than to learn to write. This is because to write braille text, you have to write it the other way round, as the dots are made on the back of the page. It wasn't at all instinctive at first and he got it wrong more than once. Now he's quite happy to be teaching Ivan to write in Braille.

He always signs with his first name and his signature hasn't changed much, but it's still complex to reproduce. There is a lot of interlacing around his first name and the capital R is huge compared to the other letters.

He likes to exchange messages with Vladimir and Ivan, as only the three of them can read them, they usually use them to prepare surprises for the others or to complain that so-and-so has forgotten to clean up again or that Ethan keeps slamming doors.

Raphaël is not bad at spelling and grammar, not as good as Vladimir, but unlike Vladimir, he doesn't read grammar books for pleasure. He can speak more languages than he can read and write. But he reads and writes easily in English, Latin, Italian and French.

He reads a lot, and is one of the biggest readers in the manor. When he first arrived, he only had Braille books, which limited his reading possibilities because they were big books and didn't always cover the subjects that interested him. The arrival of Ivan, introduced him to audio books. He listens to a lot of them now, especially romance novels, and loves the fact that he can listen to books while lying comfortably in bed or cooking.

Ethan :

Ethan is left-handed and he really can't write with his right hand. It has to be said that it never occurred to him to try, and his parents never tried to force him to write with his right hand either. If he gets injured and can no longer write with his left hand, he always asks Beliath to write for him.

Ethan's handwriting is not legible. His "a's" look like "e's" or "o's", his "u's", "i's" and "n's" also look very similar, he never dots his "i's", so they can also be mistaken for "l's", and when he writes in French, he doesn't use the slightest accent, whereas he does in Finnish. It's an ordeal for everyone in the manor to reread what he's written, and Aaron doesn't even try anymore. The only one who manages to read it is Beliath.

He writes very small, which doesn't make it easy to read his handwriting, and he also writes quite quickly. He doesn't like writing anyway, his texts are full of abbreviations and drawings to speed things up, and he's the only one who can decipher the notes he takes. If he can do maths for the sake of doing maths, sitting down to write is an ordeal for him. He doesn't have the patience for it.

Like most vampires, he signs with his first name, a habit he picked up fairly recently after arriving at the manor. His signature is rather simple, with few lines and no interlacing, he framed it with just two lines. The main thing for him was that it was quick to make.

He is quite good at spelling, although his handwriting is not very legible. He writes and reads texts easily in Finnish, English, German and French. He can also read a simple text in Latin… if he has no choice, really, no choice.

He has no idea why everyone finds his handwriting difficult to read. He finds that what he writes is always perfectly legible.

Neil :

Neil is right-handed. He can write with his left hand, he even writes quite well, but he doesn't feel comfortable with it at all. So he will always write right-handed unless he really has no choice.

He's always had a nice handwriting, and that's even truer now that writing has become easy and enjoyable. Before, writing wasn't really something that could be described as enjoyable, given the difficulty of the task. He generally prefers to use a beautiful fountain pen for writing, and doesn't hesitate to buy the most expensive ones. He always has one with him in a small box and several in his desk drawers, and tends to change fountain pens according to his mood.

He always writes in a cursive script that looks rather ancient. There is a lot of curl, especially in the capital letters. His letters are easy to distinguish from one another and the words are spaced far enough apart not to give the impression that the text is cramped. His handwriting always leans very slightly to the right.

His signature is elegant and simpler than his usual handwriting. He always signed with his first name.

He has the impression that the rules of spelling and grammar are constantly changing, as are the meanings of words. He tries to follow them, though, because he doesn't like making mistakes, but he gets tired of constantly having to unlearn what he's learned.

The language he knows best is still Irish, and although he has completely lost the habit of speaking Old Irish, he can still read it easily, as well as Middle Irish and Modern Irish.

He also reads and writes in many other languages without difficulty. The languages he knows best apart from Irish are: English, Greek and Ancient Greek, Latin, French, as well as German, Italian, Spanish and Scottish Gaelic. He can also read and follow a simple discussion in Arabic, Mandarin and Russian. To his dismay, knowing so many languages is more of a problem than anything else, and he tends to switch languages when he can't find the right word in the one he spoke before, which means he loses most of the people he's talking to.

Léandra :

Léandra is left-handed. However, she can write with her right hand if she needs to. Before teaching Beliath to write, she had never written with her right hand. She forced herself to write with her right hand, seeing that it was the one her little brother used all the time; she wanted it to be easier for him to copy her movements that way.

She doesn't really take care of her handwriting. However, if she forces herself, she can have very pretty handwriting, but it's not something that interests her. For her, writing has to be practical before it's pretty; she writes to get a message across or to give information, so she doesn't really see the point of trying to turn it into a work of art.

Léandra is used to writing fast and big. She doesn't think writing should take up too much of her time. In fact, she's never understood how her little brother could enjoy spending so much time writing beautiful letters.

She always signs with her first name and her signature is quite complex. There's a lot of interlacing that surrounds her, like a shield around her signature.

She is quite good at spelling, having taught Beliath to read and write in several different languages, including the demonic one.

She is fluent in several different languages, written and especially spoken. She can write and read demonic, English, Italian and Latin texts with ease. For the rest, she much prefers an oral discussion. This is not to say that she would be unable to write in other languages, just that she sees no point in learning their spelling if she can manage in an oral discussion.

Farah :

Farah is right-handed, but she can write with her left hand if she has problems. However, this affects the quality of her writing, which is harder to read.

Her handwriting is simple but neat. Her brother taught her to write, shortly after they left home. She's happy to be able to read and write, of course, but writing has never been an activity she's been keen on: sitting down for several minutes to write a letter always seems horribly boring to her. Whereas reading, may not be her favourite thing to do, but she'll never turn down a new book, especially a fantasy one.

Her letters are mainly in block letters, as she finds cursive writing too time-consuming. She generally writes fairly large and fairly quickly.

Her signature is very simple: she signs only with her first name, without adding the slightest line or interlacing around it. She clearly doesn't see the point and doesn't want to spend any more time signing than she has to.

As she has travelled a lot with her pack, she speaks and reads a lot of different languages, but this is less the case when it comes to writing. In any case, she doesn't always have the necessary writing materials with her and she always loses her notepads or pens when she does have them. She can write Latin and Spanish fairly easily, but the rest is much more complicated. She rarely masters the written word in other languages, even though she can read them. For example, she can read texts in English, Italian and French without being able to write in those languages. And although she can hold a discussion in Arabic, Swedish and German, she is unable to read or write a text in these languages.

[alpaca-clouds]

Castlevania Language Headcanons

I spoke about language in Castlevania before. Like most media the series mostly just shrugs off the entire language barrier. People are just magically able to communicate. No matter from how far apart they actually are.

But personally I find it interesting to think about what languages the characters realistically would have spoken or been able to speak.

Trevor would probably mostly just know Romanescu (old Common Romanian). A language I might note that is a bit different than modern day Romanian, as it had a lot more slavic bits in there, than the modern language does. He might also have known bits and pieces of old Hungarian and Common Turkish, given the political situation at the time. Though I kinda doubt he would've been fluent. I do assume that his family once upon a time would have taught him Latin and Ancient Greek, but I doubt he would remember a lot of that.

Alucard meanwhile would probably know at least the ancient languages. I see Dracula as very intrested in teach him. So, I got to assume that Alucard will know Romanescu, Latin, Ancient Greek, but probably French, Hungarian, Turkish and maybe some Arabic as well.

Sypha seems to canonically just know all the languages. Given the effort was made to cast her with an Hispanic actress and having her speak with a Spanish accent, I assume Spanish is her mother tongue, but she clearly also speaks Romanescu and seems to at least be able to read a write a plethora of ancient languages. Given the fact she has travelled a lot, I will also just assume that she knows a lot of current languages at the time. Probably enough to understand most languages spoken in Europe.

It do assume the trio will use Romanescu to communicate with each other.

Assuming that Dracula is in this timeline still Mathias from France, he will speak Old French, though the question remains whether he understands the Middle French spoken at the ime the series takes place. I do assume though. Given his entire think with knowledge and his almost obsessive collection of it, I just am going to assume he has learned a lot of languages throughout his life, probably being able to at least understand most languages spoken throughout Europe and Asia.

Lisa probably only knows Romanescu, when she arrives at the castle. Maybe some Latin, if she had tried to learn some medicine before. I am going to assume, though, that Vlad is gonna do some work polishing her Latin and Greek at least.

Still assuming, though, that they are going to hold most conversations in Romanescu.

Hector and Isaac are a bit more complicated, of course. Because we know little about them.

It stands to reason, that Hector's mother tongue is Greek (given he grew up on Rhodes) and Isaac's is Arabic. Given he has probably consumed quite a lot of ancient texts and texts about alchemy, I think Hector will at least be able to read and write in old Greek and Latin. I also am going to assume that under Dracula he learned some Romanescu? He might also know some Turkish, given that during his childhood Rhodes was under Turkish control.

Isaac is a bit more complicated, because canonically we do not really know where he got enslaved and what not. In my headcanon I went with him being dragged all the way up to Italy, so he speaks Italian. Given he was a slave in a monastery and tried to help, I assume he knows Latin as well (and quite frankly, learning Latin, when you know medieval Italian is not that hard). I have him end up in Greece, due to the ongoing conflict with the Ottoman Empire, after he escapes. Hence, he speaks Greek as well.

Meaning that in all my Isaactor stuff, the two communicate a lot in Greek.

Given they end up in Austria, though, they do learn German soon enough. Speaking of which...

The sisters are interesting in regards to their lannguages.

Now, Carmilla very probably is from Austria and always has been from there, so she would speak Old High German as her mother tongue. Given she was a vampire for a while, she probably learned a few languages, though. I gotta assume she knows Latin at least, especially given that at the time Latin was kinda the official language of politics in many regards. I am gonna assume she knows at least some Italian, Old French and Hungarian, too.

As I explained before: I assume that Lenore originates in Scotland. But given she was taken from her family as a child, she knows very little in terms of Scottish Gaelic and for the most part her mother tongue is old English. Given she was nobility, she has learned Latin, too. She also is the diplomat of the group, so I gotta assume she knows quite a few other languages as well, just to keep up her position. Very certainly Romanescu, too, given it is Vlad's main spoken language and he seems to be the big boss of vampires.

Morana, of course... Honestly, I am just gonna assume she knows all the languages. The woman is more than a millennium old. Depending on whom you ask even older than two millennia. She had the time to travel. She knows all the ancient languages for certain and if she knows Akkadian, Persian and Phoenician the other languages springing from that will be easy. I have her travelling Asia, too, so she kows at least Hindi, Chinese and Japanese as well.

Striga is a bit more interesting. She speaks with a Slavic Accent and her voice actress is from Croatia. Which made me put Striga there, too. She has to have travelled a bit. And of course she will probably speak Old High German with the sisters. I kinda want her to have learned old Akkadian to speak that language with Morana. Because that would be sweet.

I am going to assume that in everyday life the sisters speak Old High German with each other.

I am also going to assume that Lenore, to woe Hector, is gonna speak Greek with him.

[wuxiaphoenix]

Worldbuilding: Brush Talk

Here’s an interesting bit that doesn’t seem to occur to a lot of writers: just because two characters don’t share the same spoken language, doesn’t mean they can’t talk. Historically, a lot of communication can be done by people writing at each other. In large areas of Medieval and Early Modern Europe, this was done in Latin and Greek. In Northeast Asia, if you knew Chinese characters, you could make yourself understood to educated people in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and much of Manchuria. Paper, ink, and pen or writing brush, and you could talk to each other.

For example, the word we use in English today, “Japan”, comes from the characters 日本, pronounced Nippon or Nihon in Japanese, Riben in Mandarin, and Ilbon (일본) in Korean.

(I’m still not sure how Marco Polo got Cipangu out of that, but then our best evidence is that he was speaking Mongolian, getting information on Kublai Khan’s invasions of Japan second or third-hand, and then translating that into Venetian decades later, and who knows how that much verbal distance mangled it.)

I just find it neat that, instead of Daring Linguists who speak a dozen languages (though those existed), a lot of communication happened by people... effectively emailing each other across the table. Or across continents, sometimes, by letters. And that might allow people to converse for years before they ever met each other, and still meet, even without speaking a common tongue. It’s like arranging a geeky get-together with your friends from around the country, or possibly even around the world; “Hey, everyone want to meet up at that awesome noodle place on Phoenix Street on New Year’s? Sending this out now so people can RSVP!”

You could easily use this in fantastic fiction to have a group pulled together who don’t really know each other. Some of them could be the scholars and doctors exchanging letters, some relatives and bodyguards, some clients or patrons coming along out of curiosity or determined not to let someone out of their sight. Because they’re geeks, and if you let them wander they can get into so much trouble....

[skylar-jay]

Language and Cat Quest 2

More world building stuff, yippee!

So, something I think about a lot when writing +and thinking about) my fic is language. We're working with two different countries here, there has to be at least some difference in how they use language. And there's one side quest that makes me believe they have completely separate languages.

Side Quest: Felinguard's Statue - Rivals of a Kind

(Cat) Peasant: Heya! You ain't afurraid of water, are you? Wanna help me win an epic deathmatch?

(Cat) Peasant: Lookit that dog over there!!

(Cat) Peasant: We've been tryna chase the other off! If only I could swim over there! And he keeps barkin' at me like I understand him- Wait. Are you... a dog?!

(Cat) Peasant: Uhhhh.... OH! You can translate this note I scratched out!! Read it out to him! It'll make him pounce away in tears!

The dialogue here at the start of the quest implies a language barrier (it also implies the two peninsulas where the kingdoms are closest really are as close as they appear on the map), and that common folk are unable to understand each other.

So this gives us at least two languages within the game: Felinguard's native language, and the Lupus Empire's. But then, how are our protagonists able to communicate with each other? Now they don't actually have any dialogue to fill the role of 'silent' protagonist, but we do know they can speak. Both due to Lioner and Wolfen speaking and the fact that they do communicate with people. We just can't see what they're saying. So... How do they talk to each other?

Now, it's possible they know the other's native language, but with the tension between the kingdoms it seems unlikely that they know very much. So, I propose a third language: Latin (or this world's adjacent).

This story takes place in a medieval adjacent world (they have hot dogs for crying out loud, it can't be completely medieval), and based on my limited knowledge of the middle ages (mainly from books set in that time) I'm pretty sure Latin was still in use, though limited to those of high status. It doesn't seem too unlikely to me that our protagonists (and Lioner and Wolfen), who are kings, would know a sort of universal language. I imagine that's how they communicate with each other throughout the game, and translate for each other their native language (and I like to imagine that they begin learning the other's language at some point, seeing how often they move back and forth between the kingdoms. It would be helpful for both kings to understand what's being said so interactions go smoothly).

But, it can't just be them that know it, right? I imagine other nobles can use Latin, too, and folks that have (or had) important roles within the castle.

Here's a list of characters that I suspect are able to communicate with Latin to some extent (plus why I think so)

Kirry (he's supposedly both kings' royal advisor, and at least their guardian spirit. It would be kinda bad if he could only talk to one of them.)

Kit (she's been alive for a very long time, I wouldn't be surprised if she learned at some point. Not to mention she directly addresses Canis and he understands easily. Though it's also possible she just knows the Lupus Empire's native language, considering she was friends with Hotto, and how in the first game it mentions she takes commissions from there.)

Hotto (similarly, he's been around a while, and had to be able to communicate with Kit and Felinguard somehow.)

The imposter head towncat of South Pawt (he and the other dog soldiers invaded, even of they don't know Latin, had to have learned Felinguard's language to stay undercover. Though he also addresses Canis directly, and knowing the Lupus Empire's language as a 'cat' would be suspicious.)

Dr. Jekkit (okay this one is just self indulgent because I love her lol, but it does seem like she directly addresses Canis.)

The Doge Knight (he's a noble, even if be doesn't act like it lol. I imagine he has at least a limited understanding of Latin)

Purrivate Mewman (he's a spy lol. Even if he doesn't knock Latin, he definitely knows the Lupus Empire's language. Otherwise he wouldn't be a very good spy)

There's probably more that I'm missing, but I'm running out of time to write this and if I keep reading the dialogue I'll get distracted lol

Still, even if it's not touched upon very often in the game, I think the concept of a language barrier between the two kingdoms is interesting :) (it's certainly something I plan on touching on in my fic lol. Especially with some of the ocs I have.)

[townofcrosshollow]

I despise of the long-standing misconception that people in the past, particularly the Medieval period, couldn't read or write. It's horseshit.

Literacy estimations from the past are extremely flawed, because they were based on how common books are in archaeological finds from the area. Not only does this idea kind of crumble when you ask "Hey, why would everybody who can read need to own books?" it's also patently ridiculous because books at the time were primarily printed in Latin (and other languages used by the Church)

Basically it's like surveying 50 modern Americans on whether they own any Russian books and concluding "Only 2% of the US population is literate!" Of course commoners in Medieval England didn't own any Latin books, they couldn't read Latin, they could read English.

We actually have evidence of how widespread literacy was among the common population around this time in Europe. The most interesting of this is the birch bark letters found in Novgorod, which preserve hundreds of notes written in a vernacular dialect between average, everyday folks. The existence of these letters seems to imply that literacy levels were very high in Novgorod during this time. Most famous among these are the homework done by a child named Onfim, who had a habit of doodling on his pages. Personally, I'm partial to this one:

From Boris to Nastas’ja – As soon as this letter arrives, send me a man on a stallion, because I have a lot of work here. And send a shirt; I forgot a shirt.

There is nothing more human in this world than writing a letter to your wife asking her to send you some shit you forgot at home because you're a dumbass but you really need it, please can you send that guy with the stallion?

[misseffie]

Is Gendry illiterate?

Short answer: Probably not. 

Long answer: 

I’ve noticed a lot of fanfiction trying to address Gendry’s illiteracy once he becomes a noble. Most fics depict him as being completely illiterate. Some depict him as having some level of literacy, but not enough for his new position. So let’s try to figure it out, shall we?

Part 1: Literacy

We have this assumption that in medieval times no one could read or write unless they were part of the nobility. That is not quite true. Firstly, we have to understand what it meant to be literate by medieval standards: 

“In Medieval times, “Literate” actually meant able to read and write in Latin, which was considered to be the language of learning. Being able to read and write in the vernacular wasn’t considered real learning at all. Most peasants prior to the Black Death (which really shook up society) had little chance to learn - hard labouring work all of the hours of daylight does’t leave a lot of energy for reading or writing.

It’s worth noting, however the panic amongst the ruling classes when translations of The Bible started to appear written in English. This really started in the late 14th Century (about 30 years after the Black Death). The level of panic suggests that the Ruling Classes knew that the numbers of people who could read and write English was far greater than the numbers who could read Latin.”

However, there is no language quite like Latin in Westeros. The closest we come to something similar is High Valyrian. Which noble children seem to have a basic understanding of. We can safely assume that Gendry doesn’t have extensive knowledge of High Valyrian - so he is illiterate in that regard. But I don’t think High Valyrian is as widely used as Latin was in the Middle Ages. It’s also not a language with religious significance. As the Faith of the Seven doesn’t use High Valyrian the way that the Catholic Church used Latin.

So… taking that into account. What I assume that is meant by “literate” in Westeros is being able to read and write in the Common Tongue. 

I will say that even by those parameters I don’t think most of the commoners would have been literate. However, Gendry was not in the same situation as most of the commoners.

Which leads me to... 

Part 2: Socio-economic class in Medieval Times

The level of literacy among the commonfolk has to be examined on a case by case basis.

Literacy among “peasants” varied a lot depending on circumstance. So, for example, it’s not strange that Davos, who was a smuggler prior to meeting Stannis, was illiterate. Or Gilly, who was completely isolated from the world and in terrible conditions.

But Gendry is in a different situation.

As @arsenicandfinelace pointed out in this cool meta:

Gendry was definitely born low-class, as an unrecognised bastard whose mother was a tavern girl (read: one step away from prostitute). But the whole point of apprenticing with Tobho Mott is that that was a major leap forward for him, socially.

As Davos put it in 3x10, “The Street of Steel? You lived in the fancy part of town.” Yes, a tradesman of any kind is leagues below the nobility, and could never ever be worthy of marrying a highborn girl like Arya. But Tobho Mott is a master craftsman, the best armourer in the capital city of a heavily martial country. As far as tradesman go, he’s the best of the best, and charges accordingly.

There’s a reason Varys had to pay out the ass to get Gendry apprenticed there. If he had stayed, completed his apprenticeship, and eventually taken over the workshop, he would have been very wealthy (by commoner standards) and respectable (again, by commomner standards), despite his low birth.

Tobho Mott is a tradesman and a craftsman. He is part of the merchant class. * Merchants are often referred to as a different class from the rest of the population. The merchant class in Medieval Times was closer to the middle class of contemporary times.

“By the 15th century, merchants were the elite class of many towns and their guilds controlled the town government. Guilds were all-powerful and if a merchant was kicked out of one, he would likely not be able to earn a living again.”

Mott would be considered to be part of the merchant class - and not even a common kind of merchant either. He was the best Blacksmith in all of King's Landing, the capital of the Seven Kingdoms. So we can assume that Tobho Mott was a very wealthy and powerful craftsman and merchant.  

“That many 'middle class' people (tradesmen, merchants and the like) could read and write in the late middle ages cannot be disputed.”

I’m not saying that all tradesmen/merchants/craftsmen were literate back then. It was still a smaller percentage than the nobility. Only the richer and more influential of tradesmen would learn Latin. But I think most of them would be literate enough in the vernacular to run a business. Considering Mott’s reputation and his clientele I’m certain that Mott is part of that literate percentage.

In season 2, Arya accidentally reveals to Tywin that she can read. Realizing her mistake she covers up by saying that her father, a ’stonemason', taught her. Of course, I don’t think that completely fooled Tywin but why did Arya say her father was Stonemason. Why did his profession matter at all? Surely it wouldn’t have mattered if he was a fisherman or a farmer... a peasant is a peasant, right?

Wrong.

“The Medieval Stonemason asserts that they were not monks but highly skilled craftsmen who combined the roles of architect, builder, craftsman, designer, and engineer. Many, if not all masons of the Middle Ages learnt their craft through an informal apprentice system”

“Children from merchants and craftsmen were able to study longer and continuous, so they were able to learn Latin at a later age. This way, everyone learned to read and write (some better than others) sufficiently for their trade.”

Stonemasons were the architects of the time and no doubt the top tier was literate.

Many trades (by the 15th C) required reading and writing, so it was taught to apprentices by the masters. We know from apprenticeship agreements that many masters were expected to continue the apprentice's literacy or start it, which makes sense for the wider viability of the trade.

The War of the Roses took place in the late 15th Century. So I’m guessing that that’s the time period that ASOIAF is mostly based on.

Part 3: Level of literacy

I think it’s safe to say that Gendry has some level of literacy. However, his “level” is pretty much up for debate. If he’d finished his apprenticeship it’s likely he’d have a decent level of reading/writing comprehension. However, near the end of his apprenticeship he was kicked out.

I’m not sure how much Gendry could read/write by the time that he was kicked out by Tobho Mott. But he’d already been his apprentice for 10 years (in show canon). More than enough time to get some basic reading/writing/basic math lessons. 

It seems that show!Gendry is more likely to have a higher level of literacy than book!Gendry. In the show, he leaves Tobho Mott at 16, while in the book he is 14. This is just my own impression, but I think his education would be more complete by age 16 than age 14.

Not to mention that book!Gendry is still in the Riverlands and working for outlaws. But in the show we can assume that Gendry has been smithing in King’s Landing for years and it is insinuated that he owns a shop. Meaning he might have reached “Master” status and can take on apprentices of his own. It might seem like Gendry is too young for that. But it’s actually not that strange. 

“Apprentices stayed with their masters for seven to nine years before they were able to claim journeyman status. Journeyman blacksmiths possessed the basic skills necessary to work alongside their master, seek work with other shops, or even open their own businesses.”

Considering that Gendry has been with Mott for 10 years in show!canon, it’s possible that Gendry was a “journeyman” and not an “apprentice” by the time that Ned meets him in season 1. But he might be nearing the end of his apprenticeship in the books.

Guilds also required journeymen to submit work for examination each year in each area of expertise. So, a journeyman who perhaps crafted swords, locks, and keys would need to submit each item to his guild annually for inspection. If the guild approved the craftsmanship of the products, the journeyman could eventually move up to master status.

The process of becoming a master could take from 2 to 5 years. Considering that Gendry is regarded as talented, it’s likely that he achieved this in a shorter period of time. As a journeyman he also needed to work alongside a master for 3 to 4 years before he could obtain master status. Which would still explain why he was so upset at being kicked out by Mott - it’s like someone getting kicked out while they’re trying to obtain a PHD. 

By the time we meet him in season 7 it’s very possible that Gendry is now considered a master of his trade.

He also seems to be making armour and weapons for “Lannisters” which means he has a mostly noble clientele. He probably has plenty of fancy clients asking for custom-made products. With sketches and measurements and all that shit. Which is not surprising since he probably has a de facto reputation simply by merit of being Tobho Mott’s apprentice (lets ignore how dumb it is that no one discovered that Gendry was in King’s Landing since he made no effort to hide who he was or try to hide from the nobility lol).

Conclusion: 

It’s safe to say that Gendry had some access to higher education. He can probably read and write enough for his line of work. It’s likely that his level would still leave much to be desired once he became a noble though. For comparison, imagine if someone left school at age 11 and was then required to write a college-level thesis. So he’d definitely need some “lordly” writing lessons and further education.

Gendry is still wildly uneducated for what he needs to do. So...

This meme is still gold 10/10

* Correction: Though Mott would be considered part of the same socio-economic class as merchants he is primarily a tradesman/craftsman, and would be referred to as such. Since merchants didn’t produce the goods they sold. However they could belong to the same guild, along with artisans and craftsmen. 

[fairhairedkings]

Translation

I mentioned in this earlier post that I have a lot of thoughts/feelings about the art of translation and now you get to hear them because I need something to do. I’m coming at this as someone whose translation experience was/is Latin to English. I also spent too much time researching and writing about the translation of ideas from text into the visual — specifically biblical commentary being adapted for art. So that is where I’m coming from with all this and why my personal anecdotes are all Latin related.

There’s a scene in the movie Arrival when Amy Adams’ character is talking to Forest Whitaker’s character about the difficulties of translation and she explains that it isn’t just a matter of swapping out words and that’s it. You have to make sure that the meaning of the word is carried from one language to the next. (One day I will (maybe) write something about adaptation as translation and how things that are seen as “faithful” translations focus on the letter rather than the meaning, but generally this doesn’t result in a good final piece of art.) It’s part of why machine generated translations aren’t great. They’re translating the word, not what it means.

In languages with multiple cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, and so on), it’s even harder. I was in a class that got derailed for an entire day to argue over what kind of dative was being used in a passage from the Aeneid and either way, the English translation looked the exact same. But the nuance was important and one of the options made everything a whole lot more tragic.

That doesn’t even get into whether or not people are using the word to mean the same thing. A good chunk of the arguments that I see on this website are because people are using terms to talk about two slightly different things and no one has taken the time to define the term and how they are using it. I know it sounds really dumb and like you’re talking down to someone, but it is so useful. I just wrote a paper that talked about medieval studies and I realized that the (non-medievalist) audience that I was writing for didn’t actually know what medieval is. They had a rough idea, but their understanding of it wasn’t mine. So I explicitly stated that I was using medieval to refer to the period between 500 and 1500 of the Common Era (and don’t even get me started on how messy dating and periodization are) in Western Europe.

We don’t notice how much context we’re relying on with our words a lot of the time and, relating this back to fandom, it’s really obvious sometimes. It might be “Britishisms” in a fic set in the US, but it can extend to things like cultural norms and taboos. From time to time, I’ll read something and I just know that the person writing isn’t North American. (I’m Canadian, so I’m sure people twitch over my stuff too sometimes.) This isn’t automatically bad - reading boot instead of trunk isn’t going to kill me, but that different context is still there and we should be aware of it, especially when it comes to important topics.

The post that set this off was me pulling up the following translations for the same thing: “You aren’t allowed to be weak” vs. “I won’t allow you to be weak”. They mean pretty much the same thing. The character can’t be weak. But “I won’t allow you to be weak” implies that Xiao Qi (the speaker) will be helping A’wu so that she won’t be weak, in contrast to “You aren’t allowed to be weak”, which puts the need to be strong on her and her alone. @orsuliya was very helpful and said that in the Russian subs the “word they chose to use for allow implies he's going to be rather more active than simply enforcing a rule.” It’s an expression of support, not him making a demand of her.

A truly “useful” (in an academic sense at least) translation is not only going to have a million footnotes to explain choices that the translator has made, but will indicate places where the original text is unclear or where one version of a text has one verb while another version has a different one. The difference of a letter can mean a lot and word choices do matter. I did a translation of a letter a few years back and I needed to make a footnote about the use of the word cauda (meaning tail, but also slang for penis). It was a pointed word choice because the person writing the letter was drawing parallels between the recipient and bees and snakes, all while referencing Psalm 140: 3, which is “They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders’ poison is under their lips,” using parallel constructions and all kinds of other stuff to drive the point home. The whole thing was a (not very) veiled reference to the fact that the person the letter was written to (Peter Abelard) had been castrated after getting involved with someone that he very much should not have and therefore could no longer sting with his “tail” like a bee did, but had to sting with the “tongue” like a snake did (and that wasn’t going to last for long either, according to the author). That was to explain the use of a single word.

As a result, I admit that I have a bit of a distrust for any type of literary analysis carried out on a translation that relies on the language used. For example, let’s say that Language A has seven words for cloud, each of which is quite different from the others in in its meaning. Language B has one word for cloud. When you translate a text from Language A into Language B, those differences disappear. If you then analyze the use of clouds in the text, but you only look at the text in Language B, which only has one word for cloud, your analysis is going to be missing something. If it’s going the other way and you’re reading a text that’s been translated from Language B into Language A, do you know how the translator has chosen which of the seven words for cloud to use in each case? Translation is more of an art than a science, especially when it comes to anything narrative. We might not put as much effort into translating a memo as we would a poem because their purposes are different.

There’s plenty of stuff that’s been written about translation, the impact that a translator can have on a text (look at anything about Emily Wilson and her translation of The Odyssey) and I’ve attached a few sources below if you’re interested. This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how complex language and translation are, but it’s something that I’m interested in and would love to talk about - like how most of what I’ve been talking about is literary translations, but this started because of differing fan created subtitles on a TV show. I admit that I didn’t spend a ton of time looking into it, but there’s at least a couple of academic articles on fansubbing, though it appears that they’re primarily interested in the labour aspects of it. Hilariously, there is an article with a great sounding abstract that I cannot read because the article itself is in Korean. I’m sure that Alanis Morissette would tell me that this is ironic or something.

This is all to say, please talk to me about translation (and also other stuff).

Anna North. “Historically, men translated the Odyssey. Here’s what happened when a woman took the job.” Vox. (November 20, 2017.) https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/11/20/16651634/odyssey-emily-wilson-translation-first-woman-english

J.R.R. Tolkien on Translation. (1963.) https://www.tolkienestate.com/en/writing/translations-essays/jrrt-on-translation.html

Lauren Rebecca Thacker. “Lost and Found: Translation is an art that allows us to communicate across cultural difference.” Omnia. (November 24, 2020.) https://omnia.sas.upenn.edu/story/lost-and-found

The ones below on Viki are academic and there are uhhhh places that you can get those.

Soon Mi Kim. “Crowdsourced Translation in the Digital Era: Focusing on Viki Fansubbing Community.” The Journal of Translation Studies 18, no. 2 (2017): 67–96. https://doi.org/10.15749/jts.2017.18.2.003

Tessa Dwyer. “Fansub Dreaming on ViKi: ‘Don’t Just Watch But Help When You Are Free.’” Translator (Manchester, England) 18, no. 2 (2012): 217–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2012.10799509

Jamie Henthorn. “International Fan Professionalization on Viki.” Television & New Media 20, no. 5 (2019): 525–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418770742

[cyclesprefectpress]

[image description: a proof of a font of handset type for letterpress printing, displaying every letter, symbol, and special character in the font. it's called "Sixteenth Century Roman," 24 pt., and is a rough-edged serif font with a deliberately worn look. end description.]

hello hello i am return from a deep dive into several reference materials that assumed a little bit more knowledge about how Medieval Latin works than i actually have, but, it was all exTREMEly inch resting to me. i am absolutely not a historian but here we are, a speedrun of my pinballing around trying to ensure that I know what the fuck im storing in my type corridor:

so 16th Cent. Roman, i already knew, was a font Paul Duensing designed based on this incomplete set of old Italian punches he acquired (punches, the first step of old school typecasting, where you carve the relief letter shape into the end of a stick of steel, and you uuuh punch that into the copper matrix, which is then the negative mould-shape you use to cast multiple copies of the lead sorts with hot metal; surviving punches are precious artifacts not the least because they are. they’re hand-carved!! often by the type designer themselves. historical and also wildly cool craftsmanship). these punches were all beat up and probably water damaged, fucky and rough-edged, so he re-did and filled in the gaps in the alphabet with similarly styled letters of his own. very cool. an extremely nerdy lil passion project of a typecaster in the 1960s, very typical of type people. we all find a Thing to obsess over, and sometimes it's reviving an incomplete set of punches from the 1500s that you found in, idk, it's usually a bucket in somebody's basement.

anyway it's got a bunch of ligatures and the long s, sure sure sure, but WHAT are all these gibberish characters with tildas and lines thru the stems of ps and qs and such—

Duensing's full font is in Mac McGrew's specimen book, great, i have that, except McGrew's book has complete proofs and a little bit of history for each font but doesn't always cover what each symbol in a unique alphabet is for, and i knew just enough about Latin to guess that they were abbreviations but not what each of them stood for. a little bit of searching got me this far, which is to say, "Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography," a translation of an Italian essay on the subject from 1929. It is prefaced by the translators with gems like: "Take a foreign language, write it in an unfamiliar script, abbreviating every third word, and you have the compound puzzle that is the medieval Latin manuscript." Scribes writing in medieval Latin just tossed out letters they didn't care to deal with, constantly, and had stand-in special characters and abbreviations for syllables/words/particles and there were intuitive rules but way too many variations in time and place and person to make a reasonably-sized, static lexicon. amazing. hope all u paleographers are having fun over there.

the essay has a great big glossary of truncations and abbreviations and so on which clearly cover most of the figures in Duensing's font:

[image description: screenshots of the essay, with various symbols and the Latin syllables they abbreviated. an m with a bar over it, ex., stood in for men or mun. end description.]

ok! BUT this q with a little swoop off the end kept bugging me!! for all these dead-use symbols this essay is using handwritten samples, obviously, and there's clearly variation in execution and also typographers take liberties, and i just thought, sure my piece of type looks a lot like the quod here but it does link the staff to the swoop where the handwritten sample doesn't, and it could just as well be a fanciful ligature for qn which apparently can stand in for quando, and i have no idea which is a more common-use syllable likely to be cast in the font if you're only going to pick your top 14, and i just like to be sure about things.

SO. i went to double-check with Johnson’s Typographia. Johnson made like a thousand pages of printing manuals set in tiny tiny type in the 1820s which are rad as hell and tell you all sorts of things about how to run a shop and build your own press and cast type and going rates for work and employment and also, the alphabets/type case layout for whatever language or symbol set you might have to set type in, when handsetting type was mostly the only way to get stuff printed—English, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, musical notation, astronomical signs, aaaand it’s got a section for "Marks & characters used in the Domesday Book & other ancient records.”

[image description: a photo of a page of the manual, with similar but not always identical symbols for abbreviated use. many of these abbreviations are described as "a Domesday contraction." end description.]

and WHAT is a Domesday contraction, WELL, it's a contraction specifically from/prevalent in the Domesday book, a deeply boring and historically important tome about property distribution in England. It’s literally a survey. who owned what, in 1086. presumably mind-numbing. enormous, handwritten in Medieval Latin, EXTREMELY cool, go look at some images of it at least, very important to historians, economists, linguists, and a complete pain in the ass to set in type when that technology became available, having to cast any significant proportion of these variant characters in an alphabet. Johnson says, (in 1824) “It is an improvement of latter years only*, to have type cast to resemble the abbreviations used in the more ancient manuscripts; they being formerly rudely imitated, either from a common fount, or else were cut in wood for the purposes of any particular work.” wow that sucks. but in 1773 the government really wanted to be able to reproduce the Domesday Book in type, so a couple people tried to cut a set of punches for Domesday abbreviations and Joseph Jackson got it done and it only took 10 years to print an edited version of the manuscript. and then apparently all the type was destroyed in a fire in 1808. WOW that sucks.

but the point is, Johnson has a great big glossary of characters as they were translated into type in the making of the printed Domesday Book, and the Domesday punches were used or refrenced in the printing of other medieval latin works, which consequences a degree of standardization in the abbreviations used in those versions of the text that handwritten manuscripts never had or needed.

notably the Domesday quod looks even more different from my piece of type here which was pretty annoying, so what are the chances this thing is a quando, and anyway that's when my sister texted me back with better computer skills and a different search engine and found me a perfect match on the first try. it’s a quod. this National Diet Library digital exhibition has several different sample fonts, both black letter and roman, with quite consistent letter forms, if not choices about which abbreviations to bother casting.

*I don’t……exactly know what he means by this, since Gutenberg and contemporaries absolutely did cast many Medieval Latin abbreviations for their fonts nearly 400 years before this. His dismissal of “from a common fount” might be fair, since i think what he means by it is that you’d have a generic set of abbreviation characters which you would have to use in conjunction with whatever font was the main body of your text, and it’s messy to mix things that weren’t designed specifically to match. he may just mean that it’s new for his contemporary foundries to be casting all these expanded alphabets of abbreviations; Gutenberg didn’t have foundries to buy from and made his own type. he could include as many characters as he had the patience for. maybe Johnson is just a guy from the 1800s that didn’t have the internet and i shouldn’t jump down his throat for not knowing something. idk!! i have homework.

anyway that was my Friday!! feel free to correct me and/or suggest further reading if early typecasting is your Thing or. again. you just have better googling than me.

[dwellordream]

“…In modern English, we often use oath and vow interchangeably, but they are not (usually) the same thing. Divine beings figure in both kinds of promises, but in different ways. In a vow, the god or gods in question are the recipients of the promise: you vow something to God (or a god). By contrast, an oath is made typically to a person and the role of the divine being in the whole affair is a bit more complex.

…In a vow, the participant promises something – either in the present or the future – to a god, typically in exchange for something. This is why we talk of an oath of fealty or homage (promises made to a human), but a monk’s vows. When a monk promises obedience, chastity and poverty, he is offering these things to God in exchange for grace, rather than to any mortal person. Those vows are not to the community (though it may be present), but to God (e.g. Benedict in his Rule notes that the vow “is done in the presence of God and his saints to impress on the novice that if he ever acts otherwise, he will surely be condemned by the one he mocks.” (RB 58.18)). Note that a physical thing given in a vow is called a votive (from that Latin root).

(More digressions: Why do we say ‘marriage vows‘ in English? Isn’t this a promise to another human being? I suspect this usage – functionally a ‘frozen’ phrase – derives from the assumption that the vows are, in fact, not a promise to your better half, but to God to maintain. After all, the Latin Church held – and the Catholic Church still holds – that a marriage cannot be dissolved by the consent of both parties (unlike oaths, from which a person may be released with the consent of the recipient). The act of divine ratification makes God a party to the marriage, and thus the promise is to him. Thus a vow, and not an oath.)

…Which brings us to the question how does an oath work? In most of modern life, we have drained much of the meaning out of the few oaths that we still take, in part because we tend to be very secular and so don’t regularly consider the religious aspects of the oaths – even for people who are themselves religious. Consider it this way: when someone lies in court on a TV show, we think, “ooh, he’s going to get in trouble with the law for perjury.” We do not generally think, “Ah yes, this man’s soul will burn in hell for all eternity, for he has (literally!) damned himself.” But that is the theological implication of a broken oath!

So when thinking about oaths, we want to think about them the way people in the past did: as things that work – that is they do something. In particular, we should understand these oaths as effective – by which I mean that the oath itself actually does something more than just the words alone. They trigger some actual, functional supernatural mechanisms. In essence, we want to treat these oaths as real in order to understand them.

So what is an oath? To borrow Richard Janko’s (The Iliad: A Commentary (1992), in turn quoted by Sommerstein) formulation, “to take an oath is in effect to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting a curse upon oneself if it is false.” Following Sommerstein, an oath has three key components:

First: A declaration, which may be either something about the present or past or a promise for the future.

Second: The specific powers greater than oneself who are invoked as witnesses and who will enforce the penalty if the oath is false. In Christian oaths, this is typically God, although it can also include saints. For the Greeks, Zeus Horkios (Zeus the Oath-Keeper) is the most common witness for oaths. This is almost never omitted, even when it is obvious.

Third: A curse, by the swearers, called down on themselves, should they be false. This third part is often omitted or left implied, where the cultural context makes it clear what the curse ought to be. Particularly, in Christian contexts, the curse is theologically obvious (damnation, delivered at judgment) and so is often omitted.

While some of these components (especially the last) may be implied in the form of an oath, all three are necessary for the oath to be effective – that is, for the oath to work.

A fantastic example of the basic formula comes from Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (656 – that’s a section, not a date), where the promise in question is the construction of a new monastery, which runs thusly (Anne Savage’s translation):

These are the witnesses that were there, who signed on Christ’s cross with their fingers and agreed with their tongues…”I, king Wulfhere, with these king’s eorls, war-leaders and thanes, witness of my gift, before archbishop Deusdedit, confirm with Christ’s cross”…they laid God’s curse, and the curse of all the saints and all God’s people on anyone who undid anything of what was done, so be it, say we all. Amen.”

So we have the promise (building a monastery and respecting the donation of land to it), the specific power invoked as witness, both by name and through the connection to a specific object (the cross – I’ve omitted the oaths of all of Wulfhere’s subordinates, but each and every one of them assented ‘with Christ’s cross,’ which they are touching) and then the curse to be laid on anyone who should break the oath.

…With those components laid out, it may be fairly easy to see how the oath works, but let’s spell it out nonetheless. You swear an oath because your own word isn’t good enough, either because no one trusts you, or because the matter is so serious that the extra assurance is required.

That assurance comes from the presumption that the oath will be enforced by the divine third party. The god is called – literally – to witness the oath and to lay down the appropriate curses if the oath is violated. Knowing that horrible divine punishment awaits forswearing, the oath-taker, it is assumed, is less likely to make the oath. Interestingly, in the literature of classical antiquity, it was also fairly common for the gods to prevent the swearing of false oaths – characters would find themselves incapable of pronouncing the words or swearing the oath properly.

And that brings us to a second, crucial point – these are legalistic proceedings, in the sense that getting the details right matters a great detail. The god is going to enforce the oath based on its exact wording (what you said, not what you meant to say!), so the exact wording must be correct. It was very, very common to add that oaths were sworn ‘without guile or deceit’ or some such formulation, precisely to head off this potential trick (this is also, interestingly, true of ancient votives – a Roman or a Greek really could try to bargain with a god, “I’ll give X if you give Y, but only if I get by Z date, in ABC form.” – but that’s vows, and we’re talking oaths).

…Not all oaths are made in full, with the entire formal structure, of course. Short forms are made. In Greek, it was common to transform a statement into an oath by adding something like τὸν Δία (by Zeus!). Those sorts of phrases could serve to make a compact oath – e.g. μὰ τὸν Δία! (yes, [I swear] by Zeus!) as an answer to the question is essentially swearing to the answer – grammatically speaking, the verb of swearing is necessary, but left implied. We do the same thing, (“I’ll get up this hill, by God!”). And, I should note, exactly like in English, these forms became standard exclamations, as in Latin comedy, this is often hercule! (by Hercules!), edepol! (by Pollux!) or ecastor! (By Castor! – oddly only used by women). One wonders in these cases if Plautus chooses semi-divine heroes rather than full on gods to lessen the intensity of the exclamation (‘shoot!’ rather than ‘shit!’ as it were). Aristophanes, writing in Greek, has no such compunction, and uses ‘by Zeus!’ quite a bit, often quite frivolously.

Nevertheless, serious oaths are generally made in full, often in quite specific and formal language. Remember that an oath is essentially a contract, cosigned by a god – when you are dealing with that kind of power, you absolutely want to be sure you have dotted all of the ‘i’s and crossed all of the ‘t’s. Most pre-modern religions are very concerned with what we sometimes call ‘orthopraxy’ (‘right practice’ – compare orthodoxy, ‘right doctrine’). Intent doesn’t matter nearly as much as getting the exact form or the ritual precisely correct (for comparison, ancient paganisms tend to care almost exclusively about orthopraxy, whereas medieval Christianity balances concern between orthodoxy and orthopraxy (but with orthodoxy being the more important)).”

- Bret Devereaux, “Oaths! How do they Work?”

[fineillsignup]

tips for choosing a Chinese name for your OC when you don’t know Chinese

This is a meta for gifset trade with @purple-fury! Maybe you would like to trade something with me? You can PM me if so!

Choosing a Chinese name, if you don’t know a Chinese language, is difficult, but here’s a secret for you: choosing a Chinese name, when you do know a Chinese language, is also difficult. So, my tip #1 is: Relax. Did you know that Actual Chinese People choose shitty names all the dang time? It’s true!!! Just as you, doubtless, have come across people in your daily life in your native language that you think “God, your parents must have been on SOME SHIT when they named you”, the same is true about Chinese people, now and throughout history. If you choose a shitty name, it’s not the end of the world! Your character’s parents now canonically suck at choosing a name. There, we fixed it!

However. Just because you should not drive yourself to the brink of the grave fretting over choosing a Chinese name for a character, neither does that mean you shouldn’t care at all. Especially, tip #2, Never just pick some syllables that vaguely sound Chinese and call it a day. That shit is awful and tbh it’s as inaccurate and racist as saying “ching chong” to mimic the Chinese language. Examples: Cho Chang from Harry Potter, Tenten from Naruto, and most notorious of all, Fu Manchu and his daughter Fah lo Suee (how the F/UCK did he come up with that one).

So where do you begin then? Well, first you need to pick your character’s surname. This is actually not too difficult, because Chinese actually doesn’t have that many surnames in common use. One hundred surnames cover over eighty percent of China’s population, and in local areas especially, certain surnames within that one hundred are absurdly common, like one out of every ten people you meet is surnamed Wang, for example. Also, if you’re making an OC for an established media franchise, you may already have the surname based on who you want your character related to. Finally, if you’re writing an ethnically Chinese character who was born and raised outside of China, you might only want their surname to be Chinese, and give them a given name from the language/culture of their native country; that’s very very common.

If you don’t have a surname in mind, check out the Wikipedia page for the list of common Chinese surnames, roughly the top one hundred. If you’re not going to pick one of the top one hundred surnames, you should have a good reason why. Now you need to choose a romanization system. You’ll note that the Wikipedia list contains variant spellings. If your character is a Chinese-American (or other non-Chinese country) whose ancestors emigrated before the 1950s (or whose ancestors did not come from mainland China), their name will not be spelled according to pinyin. It might be spelled according to Wade-Giles romanization, or according to the name’s pronunciation in other Chinese languages, or according to what the name sounds like in the language of the country they immigrated to. (The latter is where you get spellings like Lee, Young, Woo, and Law.)  A huge proportion of emigration especially came from southern China, where people spoke Cantonese, Min, Hakka, and other non-Mandarin languages.

So, for example, if you want to make a Chinese-Canadian character whose paternal source of their surname immigrated to Canada in the 20s, don’t give them the surname Xie, spelled that way, because #1 that spelling didn’t exist when their first generation ancestor left China and #2 their first generation ancestor was unlikely to have come from a part of China where Mandarin was spoken anyway (although still could have! that’s up to you). Instead, name them Tse, Tze, Sia, Chia, or Hsieh.

If you’re working with a character who lives in, or who left or is descended from people who left mainland China in the 1960s or later; or if you’re working with a historical or mythological setting, then you are going to want to use the pinyin romanization. The reason I say that you should use pinyin for historical or mythological settings is because pinyin is now the official or de facto romanization system for international standards in academia, the United Nations, etc. So if you’re writing a story with characters from ancient China, or medieval China, use pinyin, even though not only pinyin, but the Mandarin pronunciations themselves didn’t exist back then. Just... just accept this. This is one of those quirks of having a non-alphabetic language.

(Here’s an “exceptions” paragraph: there are various well known Chinese names that are typically, even now, transliterated in a non-standard way: Confucius, Mencius, the Yangtze River, Sun Yat-sen, etc. Go ahead and use these if you want. And if you really consciously want to make a Cantonese or Hakka or whatever setting, more power to you, but in that case you better be far beyond needing this tutorial and I don’t know why you’re here. Get. Scoot!)

One last point about names that use the ü with the umlaut over it. The umlaut ü is actually pretty critical for the meaning because wherever the ü appears, the consonant preceding it also can be used with u: lu/lü, nu/nü, etc. However, de facto, lots of individual people, media franchises, etc, simply drop the umlaut and write u instead when writing a name in English, such as “Lu Bu” in the Dynasty Warriors franchise in English (it should be written Lü Bu). And to be fair, since tones are also typically dropped in Latin script and are just as critical to the meaning and pronunciation of the original, dropping the umlaut probably doesn’t make much difference. This is kind of a choice you have to make for yourself. Maybe you even want to play with it! Maybe everybody thinks your character’s surname is pronounced “loo as in loo roll” but SURPRISE MOFO it’s actually lü! You could Do Something with that. Also, in contexts where people want to distinguish between u and ü when typing but don’t have easy access to a keyboard method of making the ü, the typical shorthand is the letter v. 

Alright! So you have your surname and you know how you want it spelled using the Latin alphabet. Great! What next?

Alright, so, now we get to the hard part: choosing the given name. No, don’t cry, I know baby I know. We can do this. I believe in you.

Here are some premises we’re going to be operating on, and I’m not entirely sure why I made this a numbered list:

Chinese people, generally, love their kids. (Obviously, like in every culture, there are some awful exceptions, and I’ll give one specific example of this later on.)

As part of loving their kids, they want to give them a Good name.

So what makes a name a Good name??? Well, in Chinese culture, the cultural values (which have changed over time) have tended to prioritize things like: education; clan and family; health and beauty; religious devotions of various religions (Buddhism, Taoism, folk religions, Christianity, other); philosophical beliefs (Buddhism, Confucianism, etc) (see also education); refinement and culture (see also education); moral rectitude; and of course many other things as the individual personally finds important. You’ll notice that education is a big one. If you can’t decide on where to start, something related to education, intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, etc, is a bet that can’t go wrong.

Unlike in English speaking cultures (and I’m going to limit myself to English because we’re writing English and good God look at how long this post is already), there is no canon of “names” in Chinese like there has traditionally been in English. No John, Mary, Susan, Jacob, Maxine, William, and other words that are names and only names and which, historically at least, almost everyone was named. Instead, in Chinese culture, you can basically choose any character you want. You can choose one character, or two characters. (More than two characters? No one can live at that speed. Seriously, do not give your character a given name with more than two characters. If you need this tutorial, you don’t know enough to try it.) Congratulations, it is now a name!!

But what this means is that Chinese names aggressively Mean Something in a way that most English names don’t. You know nature names like Rose and Pearl, and Puritan names like Wrestling, Makepeace, Prudence, Silence, Zeal, and Unity? I mean, yeah, you can technically look up that the name Mary comes from a etymological root meaning bitter, but Mary doesn’t mean bitter in the way that Silence means, well, silence. Chinese names are much much more like the latter, because even though there are some characters that are more common as names than as words, the meaning of the name is still far more upfront than English names.

So the meaning of the name is generally a much more direct expression of those Good Values mentioned before. But it gets more complicated!

Being too direct has, across many eras of Chinese history, been considered crude; the very opposite of the education you’re valuing in the first place. Therefore, rather than the Puritan slap you in the face approach where you just name your kid VIRTUE!, Chinese have typically favoured instead more indirect, related words about these virtues and values, or poetic allusions to same. What might seem like a very blunt, concrete name, such as Guan Yu’s “yu” (which means feather), is actually a poetic, referential name to all the things that feathers evoke: flight, freedom, intellectual broadmindness, protection...

So when you’re choosing a name, you start from the value you want to express, then see where looking up related words in a dictionary gets you until you find something that sounds “like a name”; you can also try researching Chinese art symbolism to get more concrete names. Then, here’s my favourite trick, try combining your fake name with several of the most common surnames: 王，李，陈. And Google that shit. If you find Actual Human Beings with that name: congratulations, at least if you did f/uck up, somebody else out there f/ucked up first and stuck a Human Being with it, so you’re still doing better than they are. High five!

You’re going to stick with the same romanization system (or lack thereof) as you’ve used for the surname. In the interests of time, I’m going to focus on pinyin only.

First let’s take a look at some real and actual Chinese names and talk about what they mean, why they might have been chosen, and also some fictional OC names that I’ve come up with that riff off of these actual Chinese names. And then we’ll go over some resources and also some pitfalls. Hopefully you can learn by example! Fun!!!

Let’s start with two great historical strategists: Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu, and the names I picked for some (fictional) sons of theirs. Then I will be talking about Sun Shangxiang and Guan Yinping, two historical-legendary women of the same era, and what I named their fictional daughters. And finally I’ll be talking about historical Chinese pirate Gan Ning and what I named his fictional wife and fictional daughter. Uh, this could be considered spoilers for my novel Clouds and Rain and associated one-shots in that universe, so you probably want to go and read that work... and its prequels... and leave lots of comments and kudos first and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

(I’m just kidding you don’t need to know a thing about my work to find this useful.)

ZHUGE Liang is written 諸葛亮 in traditional Chinese characters and 诸葛亮 in simplified Chinese characters. It is a two-character surname. Two character surnames used to be more common than they are now. When I read Chinese history, I notice that two character surname clans seem to have a bad habit of flying real high and then getting the Icarus treatment if Icarus when his wings melted also got beheaded and had the Nine Familial Exterminations performed on his clan. Yikes. Sooner or later that'll cost ya.

But anyway. Zhuge means “lots of kudzu”, which if you have been to the American south you know is that only way that kudzu comes. Liang means “light, shining” in the sense of daylight, moonlight, etc; and from this literal meaning also such figurative meanings as reveal or clear. (I’m going to talk about words have a primary and secondary meaning in this way because I think it’s important for understanding. It’s just like how in English, ‘run’ has many meanings, but almost of all them are derived from a primary meaning of ‘to move fast via one’s human legs’, if I can be weird for a moment. “Run” as in “home run” comes from that, “run” as in “run in your stocking” comes from that, “run” as in “that’ll run you at least $200″ comes from that. You have to get it straight which is the primary meaning, which is the one that people think of first and they way they get to the secondary meaning.)

“Light” has a similar “enlightenment” concept in Chinese as in English, so the person who chose Zhuge Liang’s name—most likely his father or grandfather—clearly valued learning.

I named my fictional son for Zhuge Liang Zhuge Jing 京. The value or direction I was coming from is that Zhuge Liang has come to the decision that he has to nurture the next generation for the benefit of the land, that he has to remain in the world in a way that he very much did not want to do when he himself was a young man. In this alternate universe, Liu Bei has formed a new Han dynasty and recaptured Luoyang, so when Zhuge Liang’s son is then born he chooses this name Jing which means literally “capital”. This concrete name is meant as an allusion to a devotion to public service and to remaining “central”. After I chose this name, I discovered that Zhuge Liang actually has a recorded grandson named Zhuge Jing with this same character.

above, me, realizing I picked a good name

ZHOU Yu is written 周瑜 in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.

The surname Zhou was and remains a very common Chinese surname whose original meaning was like... a really nice field. Like just the greatest f/ucking field you’ve ever seen. “Dang, that is a sweet field” said an ancient Chinese farmer, “I’m gonna make a new Chinese character to record just how great it is.” And then it came to mean things along the line of complete and thorough.

Yu means the excellence of a gemstone--its brilliance, lustre, etc, as opposed to its flaws. It is not a common word but does appear in some expressions such as 瑕不掩瑜 "a flaw does not conceal the rest of the gemstone's beauty; a defect does not mean the whole thing is bad".

Zhou Yu has gone down in history for being not only smart but also artistic and handsome. A real triple threat. And this name speaks to a family that valued art and beauty. It really does suit him.

Zhou Yu had two recorded sons but in my alternate history I gave him four. I borrowed the first one’s name from history: Xun 循, follow. Based on this name, I chose other names that I thought gave a similar sense of his values: Shou 守, guard; Wen 聞, listen. The youngest one I had born when he already knew he was dying, and things had not been going well generally; therefore I had him give him the name Shen 慎, which means “careful, cautious”.

SUN Shangxiang 孫尚香 is one of several names that history and legend give for a sister of w//arlord-king Sun Quan who was married to a rival w//arlord named Liu Bei in a marriage which, historically, uh, didn’t... didn’t go all that well. In my alternate history it goes well! You can’t stop me, I’ve already done it!

The surname Sun means “grandson” and the given name components are Shang mean “values, esteems” and Xiang “scent” which we can combine into meaning something like “precious perfume”. A lot of the recorded names for women in this era (a huge number didn’t have any names recorded, a problem in itself) seem to me to be more concrete, to contain more objects, to be more focused on affection, less focused on hopes and dreams. This makes sense for the era: you love your daughters (I HOPE) but then they get married and leave you. You don’t have long term plans for them because their long term belongs to another clan.

I gave her daughter by Liu Bei the name Liu Yitao 劉義桃. Yi 義 meaning righteousness, rectitude and 桃 meaning... peach. Okay, okay, I know "righteous peach" sounds damn funny in English, but the legendary oath in the peach garden, the "oath of brotherhood" is called in Chinese 結義 "tying righteousness" and the peach garden is, uh, a peach garden. I also give her the cutesy nickname Taotao 桃桃 which you could compare to “Peaches” or “Peachy”. Reduplication of a character in a two-character name is a classic nickname strategy in Chinese.

GUAN Yinping 關銀屏/关银屏 is a “made up” (scare quotes because old legends have their own kind of validity, fight me) name for a historical daughter of Guan Yu. Guan means “to close (a door)”. Yin means “silver” and ping means “a screen, to hide” and according to the legend, her father’s oath brother Zhang Fei named her after a silver treasure. So here again we see a name for a woman that completely lacks the kind of aspirations we see in male names. Who would have an aspiration for a daughter?

My fictional characters, that’s who. I named her daughter Lu Ruofeng 陸若鳳/陆若凤, Ruo (like the) Feng (phoenix), based on a quote from a Confucian text about what one should try to be during both times of chaos and times of good government. I portray her father as a devoted Confucian scholar, so that was another factor for why I looked to Confucian texts for a source of a name.

Modern parents also now have big dreams for their daughters :’) and so modern girls receive names that are far more similar to how boys are named. 

GAN Ning 甘寧/甘宁 is a great example of a person whose name does not suit him. Gan 甘 depicts a tongue and means “sweet”, and Ning 寧 which shows a bowl and table and heart beneath a roof means “peaceful”. Which, it would be hard to come up with a name for this guy, a ruthless pirate turned extremely effective general:

that is less suitable than essentially being named “Sweet Peace”.

And when he was an adult, his style name—a name that Chinese men used to be given when they turned 20 (ie became adults) by East Asian reckoning—indeed reflects that. Choosing your own style name was widely considered to be crass. I absolutely think that Gan Ning chose his own style name; he was that kind of a guy. And the name he chose! Xingba 興霸/兴霸! I’ve never seen another style name like it. It means, basically, “thriving dominator”! Brand new official adult Gan Ning treats his style name like he’s picking his Xbox gamer tag and he picks BadassBoss69_420, that’s what this style name is like to me. Except, you know, he had almost certainly killed many hundreds of people by the time he was nineteen, so, uh, it wouldn’t be a wise idea to make fun of his name to his face.

In my fictional version of his life, he married a woman whose father was the exception to the “parents love their children” rule and who named his daughter Pandi 盼第 “expecting a younger brother”, which is a classic “daughters ain’t shit, I want a son” name. Real and actual Chinese women have been given this shitty name and ones like it.

Because Gan Ning had an ironically placid name, I also gave his daughter the placid single character name Wan 婉, which means “gentle, restrained”, as a foil to her wild personality.

So there are a bunch of examples of some historical characters and some OCs and how I chose their names. “But wait, all that was really cool, but how can I do that? You can read Chinese, I can’t!”

I originally had a bunch of links here to dictionaries and resources but Tumblr :) wouldn’t let the post show up in tag search with all the links :) :) :) so you need to check the reblogs of this post to see my own reblog; that reblog has all the links. I’M SORRY ABOUT THIS. Here are a list of the sites without the links if you want to Google them yourself.

MDBG  - an open source dictionary - start here

Wiktionary -  don’t knock it til you try it

iCIBA (they recently changed their user interface and it’s much less English-speaker friendly now but it’s still a great dictionary)

Pleco (an iOS app, maybe also Android???) contains same open source dictionary as MDBG and also its own proprietary dictionary

Chinese Etymology at hanziyuan dot net

You search some English keywords from the value you want, and then you see what kind of characters you get. You should take the character and then reverse search, making sure that it doesn’t have negative words/meanings, and similar. Look into the etymology and see if it has any thematic elements that appeal to what you’re doing with the character--eg a fire radical for a character with fire powers.

And then, like I mention before, when you have got a couple characters and you think “I think this could be a good name”, you go to Google, you take a very common surname, you append your chosen name—don’t forget to use quotation marks—and you see what happens. Did you get some results? Even better, did you get lots of results? Then you’re probably safe! No results does not necessarily mean your name won’t work, but you should probably run it by an Actual Chinese Native Speaker at that point to check. Also, remember, as I said at the beginning, sometimes people have weird names. If you consciously decide “you know what, I think this character’s parents would choose a weird name”, then own that.

THINGS YOU SHOULD PROBABLY IGNORE!

Starting in relatively recent history (not really a big thing until Song dynasty) and continuing, moreso outside of mainland China, to the modern day, there is something called a generation name component to a name. This means that of a name’s two characters, one of the characters is shared with every other paternal line relative of that person’s generation; historically, usually only boys get a generation name and girls don’t. (Chinese history, banging on pots and pans: DAUGHTERS AIN’T SHIT AND DON’T FORGET IT!) “Generation” here means everyone who is equidistant descendant from some past ancestor, not necessarily that they are exactly the same age. For example, all of ancestor’s X’s sons share the character 一 in their names, his grandsons all have the character 二，great-grandsons 三, great-great-grandsons 四 (I just used numbers because I’m lazy). By the time you get to great-great-grandson, you might have some that are forty years old and some that are babies (because of how old their fathers were when they were conceived), but they are still the same generation.

In some clans, this tradition goes so far as to have something called a name poem, where the generations cycle, character by character, through a poem that was specifically written for this purpose and which is generally about how their clan is super rad.

If you want to riff off of this idea and have siblings or paternal cousins share a character in their names, ok, but it genuinely isn’t necessary. Anyone with a single character name obviously doesn’t have one of these generation names, and by no means does every person with a two character name (especially female) have a generation name. If you’re doing an OC for an ancient Chinese setting (certainly anything before the year about 500), you shouldn’t use these generation names because it wasn’t a thing. Also, in a modern setting, even if such a generation name or name poem exists, it’s not like there is any legal requirement to use it (though there may be family pressure to do so).

As a further complication, some parents do the shared character thing among their children without it actually being a generation name per se because it isn’t shared by any cousins. Or, they have all their children (or all their children of the same gender) share a radical, which is a meaning component in a Chinese character.

If someone does have one of these shared character names, then their nickname will never come from that shared character; either they will be called by the full name or by some name riffing off of the character that is not shared. For example, I knew a pair of sisters called Yuru and Yufei with the same first character; the first sister went by her English name in daily life (even when speaking Chinese) while the second sister was called Feifei.

tl;dr If you don’t already know Chinese, consider generation names an extra complication for masochists only. Definitely not required for modern characters.

Fortune telling is another thing that I think you should either ignore or wildly make up. Do you know what ordinary Chinese people who want to choose a lucky name for their child do? They hire someone to work it out. This is not some DIY shit even if you are deeply immured in the culture. There are considerations of the number of strokes, the radicals, the birth date, the birth hour. You’re the god of your fictional universe, so go ahead and unilaterally declare that your desired names are lucky or unlucky as suits the story if you want to.

MILK NAMES

In modern times, babies get named right away, if for no other reason that the government requires it everywhere in the world for record keeping purposes.

However, in traditional times, Chinese people did not give babies a permanent name right away, instead waiting until a certain period of time had passed (3 months/100 days is a classic).

What do you call the baby in the meantime? A milk name 乳名, which your (close, older than you) family may or may not keep on using for you until such time as you die, just so that you remember that you used to be a funny looking little raisin that peed on people.

This kind of name is almost always very humble, sometimes to the point of being outright insulting. This is because to use any name on your baby that implies you might actually like the little thing is tempting Bad News. Possible exception: sometimes a baby would receive a milk name that dedicated it to some deity. In this case, I guess you’re hoping that deity will be flattered enough to take on the job of shooing away all the other spirits and things that might be otherwise attracted to this Delicious Fresh Baby.

Because milk names were only used by one’s (older) family and very close family friends of one’s parents/grandparents, most people’s milk names are not recorded or known, with some notable exceptions. Liu Shan, the son of Liu Bei, who as a baby was rescued by Zhao Yun during the Shu forces retreat from Changban. Perhaps because his big debut in history/legend was as a baby, he is well-known for his milk name A-Dou 阿斗, which means, essentially, Dipper.

If you’re writing a story, you really only need to worry about a milk name for your character if it’s a historical (or pseudohistorical) setting, and even then only if the character either makes an appearance as a small infant or you consciously decide to have them interact with characters who knew them well as a small child and choose to continue using the milk name. Not all parents, etc who could use the milk name with a youth or an adult actually did so.

Here are some milk names I’ve come up with in my fiction: Little Mouse/Xiaoshu 小鼠 for a girl, Tadpole/Kedou 蝌蚪 for a boy, and Shouty/A-Yao 阿吆 for a boy. In the first two cases the babies were both smol and quiet (as babies go). The last one neither small nor quiet, ahahaha. 蔷蔷 Qiangqiang, which is a pretty enough name meaning “wild rose” (duplication to make it lighter), except the baby is a boy, so this is the typical idea that making a boy feminine makes him worth less, which, yikes, but also, historically accurate. Also Xiaohei 小黑 “Blackie” for a work that I will probably never publish because I don’t ever see myself finishing it. I might recycle it to use on another story.

 Here are some more milk names I came up with off the cuff for a friend that wanted an insulting milk name. They ended up not using any of these, so feel free to use, no credit necessary. Rongzi 冗子 “Unwanted Child”; Xiaochou 小丑 “Little Ugly”; A-Xu 阿虛 “Empty”; Pangzhu 胖豬 “Fat Pig”;  Shasha 傻傻 “Dummy”.

PITFALLS!

Chinese has a lot of homophones. Like, so many, you cannot even believe. That means the potential for puns, double meanings, etc, is off the charts. And this can be bad, real real bad, when it comes to names. It is way too easy to pick a name and think to yourself “wow, this name is great” and then realize later that the name sounds exactly the same as “cat shit” or something even worse.

Some Chinese families live the name choosing life on hard mode because their surname is itself a homonym that can make almost any name sound bad. I’m speaking of course of the poor Wus and Bus of the world. You see Wu may have innocuous and pleasant surnames associated with it, but it also means “without, un-”. (Bu is similar, sounds like “no, not”.) Suddenly, any pleasant name you give your kid, your kid is NOT that thing.

This means picking a name that is pleasant in itself yet also somehow also pleasant when combined with Wu. So you might pick a character with a sound like Ting, Xian, Hui, or Liang - unstopping, unlimited, no regrets, immeasurable. A positive negative name, a kind of paradox. Like I said, this is naming on hard mode.

If you are naming an ancient character, I am going to say in my opinion you should ignore all considerations of sound, because reconstruction of ancient Chinese pronunciations is on some other, other level of pedantic and you just don’t need to do that to yourself.

For modern characters, however, an attractive name, in general, should be a mix of tones and a mix of sounds. As a non-Chinese speaker, basically this means especially if you go for a two character given name, having all three characters start with the same sound, or end with the same sound, can sound kind of tongue twistery and thus silly/stupid. That doesn’t mean that such names never exist, and can in some cases even sound good (or at least memorable), but how likely is it that you’ve found the exception? Not very. (Two out of three having repetition isn’t bad. It’s three out of three you have to be careful of. Something like Wang Fang or Zhou Pengpeng is probably fine; it’s something over the top like Guan Guangguo or Li Lili you want to avoid.)

Just like the West (sigh), in the modern Sinosphere it is widely acceptable for girls to have masculine names but totally unacceptable for boys to have feminine names. If you see the radical 女 which means woman, don’t choose that character for a boy, at least if you’re trying to be realistic. Now Chinese ideas of masculinity doesn’t have the same boundaries as Western ideas, but if you want to play around in those boundaries, you gotta do that research on your own; you’ve left what I can teach you in this already entirely too long tutorial.

Don’t name a character after someone else in story, or after a famous person. In some/many Western cultures, and actually in some Eastern cultures too (Japan is basically fine with this, for example), naming a baby the same name as someone else (a relative, a saint, a famous person, etc), is a respected and popular way to honour that person.

But not in Chinese culture, not now, not a thousand years ago, not two thousand years ago. (Disclaimer: I bet there is some weird rare exception that, eventually, somebody will “gotcha” me with. I am prepared to be amazed and delighted when this occurs.)

Part of this is because of a fundamentally different idea in Chinese culture vs many other cultures about what is valuing vs disrespecting with regard to personal names. The highest respect paid in Chinese history to a category of personal names is to the emperor, and what would happen there is that it would be under name taboo, a very serious and onerous custom where you not only have to not say the emperor’s name, but you can’t say anything that sounds the same as the emperor’s name.

Did I mention that this is in the language of CRAZY GO NUTS numbers of homonyms? The day-to-day troubles caused by observing name taboo were so potentially intense that there are even instances where, before ascending to the imperial throne, the emperor-to-be would change his name to something that was easier to observe taboo about!

So you see this is an attitude that says: if you want to honour and show respect to somebody, you don’t speak their name.

As the highest person in the land, only the emperor gets this extreme level of avoidance, but it trickles down all through society. You can’t use the personal names of people superior to you. Naming a baby after someone inherently throws the hierarchy out of whack. Now you have a young baby with the same name as a grown adult, or even a dead person, who is due honour from their rank in life. People who would not be permitted to use the inspiration’s name may now use that name because they are superior to the baby who received the name! This would mean that hierarchy was not being preserved, and oh my heaven, is there anything worse than hierarchy not being preserved? All of Chinese History: Noooooo!

Now. As an author—and I hope to God no one is using my Chinese name guide as a resource to name an actual human baby because I can’t take that kind of pressure—you can use the names of characters to inspire the names of other characters, in the following way.

Remember that I said that the key, the starting point, to naming someone in Chinese is to start from a value. Okay. So what you do, if as the author you want to draw a thematic connection between two fictional characters, is take the Inspiration character’s name, think about what the value is that caused that name to be chosen, and then go from that value to choose the New Character’s name.

If you’ll recall what I said about Gan Ning and his baby Wan, this is exactly the approach I took. Gan Ning had a placid single character name that belied his violent and outrageous personality; I chose a placid single character name for his similarly wild daughter to make them thematically similar. As an author, I named his baby after him. But within the context of the story, she was not named after him. Does the distinction make sense?

Values also run in families for obvious reasons. It’s very common to look at a family tree and see lots of names that follow a kind of theme and give you a sense that, eg, this family is rather low class and uneducated; this family is very erudite but a bit too fussy about it; this family is really big on Confucianism. So yes, as an author, looking to other characters for inspiration is not a bad idea.

Remember, a lot of times, as an author, you can and even should kick realism to the curb sometimes. If you want to make some Ominous Foreshadowing that Character A’s name is something to do with fire but! They name their child something to do with water and therefore they are destined to clash with their own offspring, gasp, you can do that kind of thing because you are the god of your universe. Relish your power.

Do you have any more questions? Feel free to send a PM or an ask. I hope this was helpful! Go forth and name your Chinese OCs with slightly more confidence!

Edit 22 April 2019: I added some more sections (fortune telling, Milk Names, and taboo on naming after people). I also need to overhaul the entirety of the previous to emphasize that even thought I thoughtlessly used “Chinese” as if it was synonymous with “Han”, there are non-Han Chinese and they can have very different naming customs. Mea culpa.

[elisaenglish]

The Conscience of Words

“We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we’d rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, and closed down.

What do we mean, for example, by the word “peace”? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean a forgetting? Do we mean forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancour? It seems to me that what most people mean by “peace” is victory. The victory of their side. That’s what “peace” means to them, while to the other’s peace means defeat. If the idea takes hold that peace, while in principle to be desired, entails an unacceptable renunciation of legitimate claims, then the most plausible course will be the practice of war by less than total means. Calls for peace will be felt to be, if not fraudulent, then certainly premature. Peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit. Peace has to be re-settled. Re-colonised.

And what do we mean by “honour”? Honour as an exacting standard of private conduct seems to belong to some faraway time. But the custom of conferring honours—to flatter ourselves and one another—continues unabated. To confer an honour is to affirm a standard believed to be held in common. To accept an honour is to believe, for a moment, that one has deserved it. (The most one should say, in all decency, is that one is not unworthy of it.) To refuse an honour offered seems boorish, convivial, and pretentious. A prize accumulates honour—and the ability to confer honour—by the choice it has made in previous years of whom to honour.

By this standard, consider the polemically named Jerusalem Prize, which, in its relatively short history, has been awarded to some of the best writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Though by any obvious criteria a literary prize, it is not called The Jerusalem Prize for Literature but The Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. Have all the writers who have won the prize really championed the Freedom of the Individual in Society? Is that what they—now I must say “we”—have in common? I think not.

Not only do they represent a large spectrum of political opinion. Some of them have barely touched the Big Words: freedom, individual, society. But it isn’t what a writer says that matters, it’s what a writer is. Writers—by which I mean members of the community of literature—are emblems of the persistence (and the necessity) of individual vision.

I prefer to use “individual” as an adjective rather than as a noun. The unceasing propaganda in our time for “the individual” seems to me deeply suspect, as “individuality” itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising “individuality” and “freedom”—which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandisement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.

I don’t believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern. As a writer, a maker of literature, I am both a narrator and a ruminator. Ideas move me. But novels are made not of ideas but of forms. Forms of language. Forms of expressiveness. I don’t have a story in my head until I have the form. (As Vladimir Nabokov said: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.”) And—implicitly or tacitly—novels are made out of the writer’s sense of what literature is or can be. Every writer’s work, every literary performance is, or amounts to, an account of literature itself. The defense of literature has become one of the writer’s main subjects. But as Oscar Wilde observed, “A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.” Paraphrasing Wilde, I would say: A truth about literature is that whose opposite is also true. Thus, literature—and I speak prescriptively, not just descriptively—is self-consciousness, doubt, scruple, fastidiousness. It is also—again, prescriptively as well as descriptively—song, spontaneity, celebration, bliss. Ideas about literature—unlike ideas about, say, love—almost never arise except in response to other people’s ideas. They are reactive ideas.

I say this because it’s my impression that you—or most people—are saying that. Thereby I want to make room for a larger passion or different practice. Ideas give permission—and I want to give permission to a different feeling or practice. I say this when you’re saying that, not just because writers are, sometimes, professional adversaries. Not just to redress the inevitable imbalance or one-sidedness of any practice which has the character of an institution—and literature is an institution—but because literature is a practice which is rooted in inherently contradictory aspirations.

My view is that any one account of literature is untrue that is, reductive; merely polemical. While to speak truthfully about literature is necessarily to speak in paradoxes. Thus, each work of literature that matters, that deserves the name of literature, incarnates an ideal of singularity, of the singular voice. But literature, which is an accumulation, incarnates an ideal of plurality, of multiplicity, of promiscuity. Every notion of literature we can think of—literature as social engagement, literature as the pursuit of private spiritual intensities, national literature, world literature—is, or can become, a form of spiritual complacency, or vanity, or self-congratulation.

Literature is a system—a plural system—of standards, ambitions, and loyalties. Part of the ethical function of literature is the lesson of the value of diversity. Of course, literature must operate within boundaries. (Like all human activities. The only boundless activity is being dead.) The problem is that the boundaries most people want to draw would choke off the freedom of literature to be what it can be, in all its inventiveness and capacity to be agitated. We live in a culture committed to unifying greed, and one of the world’s vast and glorious multiplicity of languages, the one in which I speak and write, is now the dominant language. English has come to play, on a world scale and for vastly larger populations within the world’s countries, a role similar to that played in medieval Europe by Latin.

But as we live in an increasingly global, transnational culture, we are also mired in increasingly fractionalised claims by real or newly self-constituted tribes. The old humanistic ideas—of the republic of letters, of world literature—are under attack everywhere. They seem, to some, naive, as well as tainted by their origin in the great European ideal—some would say Eurocentric ideal—of universal values. The notions of “liberty” and of “rights” have undergone a striking degradation in recent years. In many communities, group rights are given greater weight than individual rights. In this respect, what makers of literature do can, implicitly, bolster the credibility of free expression, and of individual rights. Even when makers of literature have consecrated their work to the service of the tribes or communities to which they belong, their accomplishment as writers depends on transcending this aim.

The qualities that make a given writer valuable or admirable can all be located within the singularity of the writer’s voice. But this singularity, which is cultivated in private and is the result of a long apprenticeship in reflection and in solitude, is constantly being tested by the social role writers feel called on to play.

I do not question the right of the writer to engage in debate on public matters, to make common cause and practice solidarity with like-minded others. Nor is my point that such activity takes the writer far from the reclusive, eccentric inner place where literature is made. So do almost all the other activities that make up having a life. But it’s one thing to volunteer, stirred by the imperatives of conscience or of interest, to engage in public debate and public action. It’s another to produce opinions—moralistic sound-bites on demand.

Not: Been there, done that. But: For this, against that. But a writer ought not to be an opinion-machine. As a black poet in my country put it, when reproached by some fellow African-Americans for not writing poems about the indignities of racism, “A writer is not a jukebox.” The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences. It is the job of the writer to depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.

I am haunted by that “something else.” I am haunted by the conflict of rights and of values I cherish. For instance that—sometimes—telling the truth does not further justice. That—sometimes—the furthering of justice may entail suppressing a good part of the truth. Many of the twentieth century’s most notable writers, in their activity as public voices, were accomplices in the suppression of truth to further what they understood to be (what were, in many cases) just causes.

My own view is, if I have to choose between truth and justice—of course, I don’t want to choose—I choose truth.”

-Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches-

[buiocelestiale]

Japanese Literature

Henlo there demons, it’s ya boi, Nyah Lajom. 

East Asia is where you'll find China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North and South Korea, and Taiwan. 

In this blog, I will be talking about the prevalent themes of literature in Japan throughout the history.  

Long ago, the Japanese citizens farmed together in harmony and then everything changed when the Portuguese empire attacked. They brought a brand new religion from the far far west, Catholicism, and new innovations like guns and gun powder.

In antiquated writing, just like in the Philippines, information is passed down orally, this implies that over the long haul, some of it is lost or changed. However, at that point, writing was introduced to Japan by the Chinese via Koreans.

ANCIENT LITERATURE (8th Century)

(ᴘʟᴇᴀꜱᴇ ɴᴏᴛᴇ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ʜᴇ ᴛɪᴍᴇʟɪɴᴇ ɪ ᴜꜱᴇᴅ ɪɴ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴘᴇʀɪᴏᴅ ɪꜱ ᴜɴᴏꜰꜰɪᴄɪᴀʟ)

The most established enduring works are the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the two books were passed down through oral literature. 

Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) is a book about the myths and legends of Japan. 

Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan) is the chronological record of history.

Both works were from early 8th Century and are government projects.

CLASSICAL LITERATURE  (794-1185)

During the Heian Period, the nobles and rich were fascinated by the Chinese culture, respectable men utilized the Chinese language similarly that Medieval European aristocrats and ministers utilized Latin. In Heian Japan, women were not permitted to speak Chinese. (Misogyny was rampant at the time) 

Early 11th Century, Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Kenji. The novel enables us to see how aristocrats live because it’s about a man named Kenji and his gag with women and nobles. It is said that The moral of the story is that affection isn't about the craving of having intercourse with some ladies or about the battle to overcome every single pretty woman. Be that as it may, love should be kept with a lady we love for eternity. 

Genji shows how extraordinary the thing that matters was between the sexual orientations by having characters experience passionate feelings for one another dependent on their penmanship.

Mid 10th Century, Tosa Hiromichi wrote Taketori Monogatari. The story details the life of Kaguya-hime, a princess from the Moon who is discovered as a baby inside the stalk of a glowing bamboo plant.

MEDIEVAL LITERATURE  (1185-1600)

The Medieval Literature was basically Japan having civil wars and books were all about it.

An example of this is Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace), composed in the late 14th century, is a Japanese historical epic and covers the period from 1319 to 1367. It deals mainly with Nanboku-chō, the time of conflict between the Kyoto Ashikaga Takauji Northern Court and the Yoshino Southern Court of Emperor Go-Daigo. 

The dominant theme in this era is Zen Buddhism. It’s about life, spirituality, and existence. The writers in this time tackled more on existential crises and death. It’s like the Greek philosophers but make it  ✨ j a p a n e s e ✨ 

Let me give you another example of writers and their work. Yoshida Kenko's Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) and Kamo no Chomei's Hojoki (An Account of My Hut) just like I said earlier, the question of eternal redemption is posed by both works. 

(Tsurezuregusa)

 (Hojoki)

EDO PERIOD (1600-1868)

The Edo period was really the rise of popular culture in Japan. Increased leisure time gave the rising merchant class a chance to explore things like bathhouses, the theater, and reading.  A lot happened in this era so I’m gonna summarize it. 

The position of literature as a means of social intercourse expanded. 

Haiku is perfected and seen as the embodiment of elegant simplicity. 

In the new capital of Edo (modern Tokyo), due in large part to the growth of the working and middle classes, types of common drama emerged that would later evolve into Kabuki.

Literacy rate rose. 

The introduction of Chinese vernacular fiction which has shown the greatest external effect on the production of Japanese fiction in the Early Modern period.

In the development of the Yomihon, which were historical romances almost entirely in prose, Tsuga Teisho, Takebe Ayatari, and Okajima Kanzan were instrumental.

Santo Kyoden wrote Yomihon, often set in gay quarters,  before such works were banned by the Kansei edicts, and he turned to comic Kibyoshi. Genres included horror, stories of crime, stories of morality, satire, and pornography, frequently accompanied by colorful prints of woodcut. 

MEIJI PERIOD (1868-1945) 

The Meiji Period parkoured over themes so I’m just gonna put the timelines and its dominant themes.

1868-1880′s Realism is the dominating literature theme. In a simple style between literary and colloquial, Ichiyo Higuchi, a rare woman writer in this period, wrote short stories about powerless women of this generation.

1889-1905 Romanticism was brought in by Mori Ogai, and hen Toson Shimazaki carried it to its height.

1906-1910 Naturalism, Shimazaki shifted to Naturalism, this describes the authors themselves and depicts their own mental states.

1920-1930 Socio-political created by Takiji Kobayashi, Denji Kuroshima, Yuriko Miyamoto, and Ineko Sata portrays the harsh lives of laborers, peasants, women, and other downtrodden members of society and their struggles for change.

Meiji Period in a nutshell. 

POST-WAR PERIOD (1945-Present)

After the WWII, Japan was defeated and many expressed their disaffection, loss of purpose. The predominant theme in is Socio-political commentary then in the early 1980′s popular fiction became the mainstream theme until now.

Nyah Lajom 

[racefortheironthrone]

What were the admission criteria, for students, to European universities during the Medieval period?

Good question!

The answer is…it really, really varied. On paper, universities had to be open to anyone of any nation who could afford the tuition. 

In reality, though, the university wasn’t really making admissions decisions, because it wasn’t technically providing the education as much as it was regulating who could provide the education and providing infrastructure (mostly food and lodging) for faculty and students. 

Instead, individual masters decided on who they would accept as students, and had a good deal of independence in making this decision. Parents would apply (usually, by letter) on behalf of their children, and if the family was of high birth and/or extremely wealthy, a master might decide to take their son as a student even if they were a complete idiot who’d need a tutor to teach them basic literacy because they wanted that family’s patronage; alternatively, they might decide to take on the son of a poor family if they showed real intellectual promise.

Despite this independence and the variance that resulted, there were some commonalities:

“Before the student could profitably attend university lectures, he must have learned to read, write, and understand such Latin as was used in the schools…There was not such thing as an entrance examination, except in the colleges; and the want of proper grounding in the Latin Language constituted one of the most glaring defects of the medieval system. Still, in the first half of our period, when the universities were cosmopolitan, conversational Latin must have been almost a necessity of life to the university student…A statute of Paris makes the ability of a petitioner to state his case before the rector in his bona fide studentship. The certificate of ‘scholarity’ was to be refused if the applicant’s Latinity proved unequal to the strain.” (Rashdall,  The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages)

However, Rashdall points out that these requirements weren’t enforced at the moment of entry into a university, and there wasn’t any requirement for students to take exams or graduate with a degree in a particular subject, and in fact most students didn’t graduate with a degree (especially if they needed to avoid the complications that clerical status would impose on marriage, for example). 

I guess the best you could say is that the medieval university really allowed students to sink or swim on their own. 

[jesawyer]

I know from Twitter that you play Ars Magica. Do you have any advice for making tabletop RPG campaigns feel inclusive to all races/genders/sexualities when playing in a real(ish)-world historical setting?

I think it depends heavily on what the setting actually is and how the group wants to play with the historical context.

It’s a common assumption that older era = more conservative than now.  That’s not always the case, and it depends heavily on the exact time, place, and cultural circumstances.

The scholar John Boswell, author of Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, makes a convincing case that homosexuality, which arguably wasn’t even considered “a thing” (at least for men) among pre-Christian Romans, was slowly reified and increasingly criminalized throughout Europe over time.  If you want to play a historical setting in a way that is consonant with what we largely understand it to be, the Holy Roman Empire ca. the 17th century is generally not a safe place to be openly homosexual, especially in the midst of violent purges against people for behavior considered “deviant” by those in power.

But your group can decide that’s not an aspect of history you want to explore or play with, like 50% infant mortality or other grim realities of any given time period.  I really think that the important thing is to talk about what people are comfortable with – which is true of any aspect of play in a group.  Maybe the group does want to explore themes of persecution.  But that’s not something that should be assumed or forced on people who are coming to the table for other reasons.

In Ars Magica, it’s honestly not that hard to justify an extremely diverse group of magi, in particular, for the following reasons:

* 1 in 10,000 humans are born with the Gift.  No matter how insanely prejudiced you are, it’s difficult to justify a maga or magus turning down an apprentice because of their gender, skin color, cultural background, or potential sexuality.

* Hermetic magi organize themselves into covenants that typically live apart from “mundane” society.  This is in part because the Gift makes mundanes instinctively distrust/hate you at first glance.  Secondary characteristics like what you look like or whom you like sleeping with rank far below gut responses to the Gift.

* As it was for Medieval monastic communities and universities, Latin is the lingua franca of the Order of Hermes.  No one gives a shit if your mother tongue is Hungarian or Russian or Italian because all of your sodales speak, write, and read Latin.

* Even young magi are incredibly powerful.  Oh wow the miller doesn’t like that a gay, swarthy magus is performing a Mercurian ritual in the tower on the hill?  Fascinating.  Does he want to be turned to ash/a frog/stone?  Magi typically don’t push their luck due to the potential involvement of the church, but as long as they aren’t making huge public scenes (which is mechanically discouraged due to how Auras work), individual peasants/merchants/etc. really can’t do a damned thing to magi.

In my time playing Ars Magica, I played the following characters:

* Leofric, an ex-crusader who openly hated the church and got into quarrels with Hospitallers.  Due to his position as a companion in the covenant, it was difficult for the Hospitallers to really do anything to him.

* Venzi, a Tremere disputant from Lombardia who performed Mercurian rituals on the reg, almost never went to church despite being commanded to by a local bishop, never learned more than basic French despite living in Burgundy for literally 80 years.  Also almost never left the covenant and usually did so under heavy protection of magic.

* Ciragua, a widowed Cathar heretic and trobairitz from Nîmes who spent most of her life in Burgundy following her husband’s death in the Albigensian Crusades.  Never fully converted to Catholicism, traveled on her own and got in trouble for it, but never suffered real consequences due to her position as a teacher in the covenant.

* Bertranz, an old Cathar perfect who escaped the Albigensian Crusades and lived out the rest of his life in Burgundy, where, among other things, he was known to teach people Greek through heretical doctrinal passages.  Also often went around naked because he kept taking off his robe to give to people suffering from the cold or rain.  Avoided detection by hiding in the covenant and generally kept a low profile. Died at age 79 immediately after writing Apologia pro duabus vitis, a defense of Catharism.

* Ariam, an Ethiopian scribe who only knew Ge’ez, Latin, and one other Ethiopian language.  When Italians saw him they went, “Wow! Holy shit!” and otherwise were amazed, not weighed down by the baggage of post-19th century racial theory.

* Orsu Paganacci, a lecherous learned magician from Corsica who was wanted (dead) by many angry husbands across Italy.  His libertine sensibilities and actions got him beaten up and exiled from some communities, but he was able to avoid serious reprisal by hiding out in the covenant.

The covenants also had gay characters, transgender characters, and a variety of other folks who got disapproving comments but otherwise were able to ignore the prevailing social opinions because they lived in a magic wizard house.