#like i know they had linguists make proper conlangs but it was still a language they didn’t know or speak

[aj-lenoire]

for all game of thrones’ ending sucked ass i’m still massively impressed by the actors—namely jason momoa and emilia clark—being able to remember entire speeches in gibberish

[meichenxi]

5 & 12 for the ask game! <3

Hiii! :D

5) How old were you when you first started learning a foreign language?

I went to The Netherlands - my first foreign country!! how exciting!! - aged 6 and boldly declared after one week that when I was older, I was only going to speak Dutch. It absolutely blew my child’s brain that these kids were speaking...words...and I couldn’t understand them. I dragged my dad to the local cafe and we poured over books together when we got back to the UK, but he predictably soon stopped and I was too young to really continue on my own. I did however ‘speak’ Dutch (read: terribly) in school for the next six months to literally all of my friends until my mother genuinely had to sit me down and tell me the reason no one would talk to me was because I was NOT COMMUNICATING in a language that anyone else knew. I also used to conlang as a kid, and way before I spoke another language properly had a ‘conlang’ called Kalichiyaan that was fairly developed (though still essentially a cipher of English, as I had never learnt a foreign language properly) - I used to write my diary in it. Otherwise, the first ‘proper’ language I learnt was German when I was 12 at school. 

12) Have you always enjoyed language learning? What made you enjoy it?

Genuinely yes!! Since as far as I can remember it’s been my refuge and my joy. I loved seeing how things clicked together - communication was sort of secondary, and while it was nice to speak to people who spoke the language, I just liked learning grammar and having things make sense. I liked having a ‘private’ language. And for years German was my emotional refuge - that sounds ridiculous but everything that happened in those years, I turned to German, novels and books and writing, and there was a lot of comfort there. My diary was in German for years. It was sort of a terrible day when I realised that hundreds of millions of people actually spoke it!!

I have also been conlanging since I was young, which is just the most fun hobby a linguist can possibly have. A lot of the things I know now come from research from conlanging so it’s given me a lot

I went through a period of a couple of years up until about last year where I wasn’t learning languages as much because of mental health stuff, but I always wanted to, and the fact that I had lost the passion for that was massively frustrating and stressful. As shit as the pandemic has been, I’m so glad I got to start learning Chinese again and became part of the wonderful studyblr community :D It’s been great to be back and I’m so excited for what the future might bring!

[lord-arlen]

Thoughts inspired by looking at the archives of this blog, which basically turned into a lengthy account of the last 3 years of my life.

Why did I originally stop using this blog? I originally stopped using this blog not long after starting my studies in Edinburgh when I was in a really bad condition mentally. I had intended Edinburgh to be a new start where I would try to be a different person and it just completely failed; I didn’t have the willpower. So the first few months I was beating myself up over having failed to do any activities or talk to anybody. I got really depressed and I felt like I had to stop posting here, because I was worried that contemplating the situation too much was exacerbating it, and I was worried that I would spread too much of a negative mood to my readers.

But not long after I made this blog private a magical thing happened. I was on a pretty small Master’s course, and everybody on it was talking to each other via a group chat and going out together and stuff like that---except me, because I hadn’t spoken to anybody and didn’t know any of this was going on. But since the course was that small, it was impossible for them not to notice this. So they took pity on me, I guess---I think it was actually mostly the initiative of one person, a Greek called Olga. She started kind of aggressively socializing with me in class, asking me questions and so on, and soon enough I was in their group chat and being invited to outings to pubs and films and so on. There also ended up being a fair amount of group project work on the course, so I got to know a lot of them that way. Although I was a very quiet member of the group normally, I could actually make significant contributions to discussions when I was working together with them on a group project. All sorts of things happened! We all watched Arrival together! I went to somebody’s house to talk to them about research! I celebrated Chinese New Year with people! I went to a sushi party! At one point I was even going semi-regularly to the common room to have lunch with these people and just chat with them relaxedly---this is the kind of Holy Grail of social life that I’ve never previously or since attained. One of my regrets is that I never went with them with them to an academic conference in (IIRC) the Netherlands---I’m not very confident about travelling because I’ve basically never travelled anywhere far from home before, but that would have been an ideal opportunity to get that experience.

So I was pretty happy from like November 2016 to May 2017. And I think some of the highest-quality output on my WordPress blog and main Tumblr account comes from that time.

It wasn’t to last, however. In the end, I still didn’t manage to make any proper connections with people. I never initiated conversations with anybody, because I didn’t know what to talk to them about. I never really got any idea of what they were like as a person, what they would like or wouldn’t like to talk about, because I’m bad at paying attention to such things. My presence in that social group was only really maintained by the common social context of the Master’s course bringing us together. So by the time teaching ended and I started working on my dissertation, all the social events dried up as everybody had to get to work. I was still in their group chat, and some people asked me for help proofreading their essays or with writing code for their projects, so I did have some contact still, but it was all slowing down and I realized it wasn’t going to last.

The dissertation was an interesting experience. It was probably the most significant thing I’ve ever achieved. I had been worried about whether I would be able to come up with something to do it on, given that I’m not particularly creative and more comfortable with learning what’s already known than doing original research. But one of my lecturers had been talking about an approach to doing linguistics research that I had never come across before: having people learn artificial “mini-languages” in an experimental setting and seeing what sort of errors they made, in the hope that this would tell us about the language transmission process in general. It was pretty easy to generate a novel experiment in this vein formulaically: just pick a Greenbergian universal of the form “A implies B”, design the artificial language training data to exhibit A but be ambiguous about whether it has B, see if the experiment subjects generalize to B or ¬B when their knowledge of the mini-language is tested subsequent to training. So I picked Universal 38 and my dissertation was the resulting experiment.

Designing and carrying out the experiment was quite fun. There was a bit of an issue where I took a while designing the experiment and my supervisor got worried. But eventually I was done, and when I was done it had been designed carefully. I put out an ad offering to pay £5 to all of my subjects (all funded by a grant from the department) and I got my desired 40 subjects quite quickly. Setting up the experiment, contacting all 40 of these people, scheduling a place to meet them, instructing them on what to do, all of these were things I never thought I’d have the executive function to pull off, and yet I did them all with actual ease. The effort of doing all this basically distracted me from the emerging collapse of my social life.

Then I got to the stage of actually writing the dissertation. And that was pretty tough. One issue was that my parents wanted me to go on holiday with them to Greece, because by this time it was July. I had a kind of emotional conversation with them where I had to refuse, because I knew I was pressed for time and taking a week off from writing would probably result in failure. They didn’t really accept this and kept saying things like, “but if you work hard enough, you can finish the dissertation in time and still go on holiday with us”, and I had to convince them I wasn’t capable of working that hard. After repeatedly keeping my stance firm they finally relented. (This is a fairly significant milestone in my mind because my parents still kind of have the mindset where I’m their child and they determine what activities I’m doing, and I’m generally bad at saying “no” to them.)

But writing the dissertation was a fairly lonely and stressful endeavour, and by the time I finished, I had kind of lost all faith in my experiment. I doubted whether an artificial “mini-language” could really tell us anything about a real natural language. I also realized I had no real understanding of statistical inference, and so I couldn’t really talk about what my results meant. I did a very basic statistical analysis on the data, which may not have been the appropriate one for the data, and got a nearly-but-not-quite significant p-value. My results and conclusion sections ended up being very short.

It was this disillusionment that led to me deciding to not bother to apply for a PhD and just try to get a job. I knew it would be difficult, because I had no idea what sort of job to do, or how to effectively decide what sort of job to do. But I figured it was what I had to do. And in the end I’d probably get it done, I thought. Even though I was disillusioned with what I had done, 2017 gave me a lot more confidence in my ability to do things.

In September my accommodation contract ended and I was living with my parents again. I had one idea for what job to do that had come to me at that point (via a suggestion from my mother, not from my own searching): to get a job as a copy editor at a fairly well-known UK secondary educational textbook company. That seemed like a reasonably interesting thing to do and the company seemed like a nice place to work it. They had a pretty gruelling application process. I did get invited to an on-site interview + round of tests at an “Assessment Centre” in December. Although this happened in September, I basically avoided job searching until this interview happened months later, because I was kind of riding all my hopes on this one job and because searching for jobs was hard.

Their Assessment Centre experience was actually quite fun. Apart from the job interview, my first ever, where I was extremely awkward, as one would expect from my personality. But the tests were fun, and they seemed easy enough. There were also several people doing the tests with me who I talked to a bit throughout the day. There was an extremely posh guy called Rupert who was writing a sci-fi novel and making a conlang for it---he’s the only other person I’ve ever met IRL who does conlanging. There was a girl who I talked to about birds (I had gotten into birdwatching [solitarily] in mid-2017 at Edinburgh once social events with my course mates became less frequent.) But I didn’t get any of these people’s emails or phone numbers or Facebook accounts or anything, so nothing lasting came of that.

In the end, that job went to one of the other people. So then I had to continue my job search. My graduation from Edinburgh happened around this time, at the end of December. I ended up feeling pretty sad throughout the ceremony because I felt like the good part of my life was ending. My parents tried to get pictures of me smiling, which was really annoying at the time. In the end they didn’t get any. Obviously I think it’s a pity now that there are no photos of me smiling at my graduation from Edinburgh, but it was necessary with my feelings at the time.

Although I’ve just realized that there is a photo of me smiling at my graduation... just not one my parents took. Obviously I saw my coursemates again at graduation. But I really didn’t know how to deal with this, given that it would probably be the last time I ever saw them again. I don’t know how to handle saying goodbye to people. So naturally I handled it in the worst possible way by trying to avoid them. I chatted a bit to the people I was sitting next to during the ceremony, but then afterwards when we all went outside, and everybody gathered together to do some more chatting, I just slunk off back to my parents. But before I could get to them, I heard somebody calling my name, and it turned out that one of them---a Bulgarian girl called Zlati---wanted to take a picture of me, to remember me by. I was quite touched by this and so at that point, I did smile. OK, it wasn’t really a genuine smile, I was too depressed for that, but I did make my best effort to smile. Here is the picture (she sent it to me on Facebook afterwards):

She works in Oxford now, or at least that’s where she went immediately after Edinburgh. She told me that if I’m ever in Oxford I should let her know. I haven’t spoken to her ever since. I would like to, but I don’t know how to. (The same goes for all of my Edinburgh coursemates, of course.) If I did go to Oxford I probably would be able to contact her because she explicitly permitted that, but until that happens I probably won’t do it. Maybe I could go to Oxford once I have my own place and am more confident about travelling. Hopefully she would still be happy to meet me now that over a year has passed.

In any case---although I would definitely like to meet my Edinburgh friends again, ultimately I am not going to have my social needs met until I have friends where I live, who I can meet on a regular basis.

Anyway, that was 2017. And then in 2018, I just... kind of faffed around for the first half of the year. I couldn’t make any decisions. It was just very exhausting to think about what I should do. I could do programing, but it wasn’t something that really appealed to me very much. I did contemplate becoming a teacher, because trying to convey information to people is something I do enjoy very much... but teaching involves a lot more than that, and it is probably something that would be pretty tough on somebody with as poor social skills as me. So while I did contact some recruiters about teaching jobs I ended up chickening out on following up on any of the opportunities they brought up. By February I was thinking I should definitely consider doing a PhD as well. But the application process for a PhD is a lot more demanding, and it’s more difficult to find information on how it should be done. If I had still been in Edinburgh I could have asked my coursemates for help, maybe, but at home it seemed impossible. The biggest obstacles are the need to pick a supervisor, and the need to have a research proposal (if I’m looking to do a PhD in linguistics in the UK, at least). I still would like to do a PhD more than anything else but I can’t make any progress towards it until I have some idea what I would do my PhD about.

In March my parents made me sign up for a free course offered by the local council for jobseekers. That actually had the effect of me not doing any jobseeking while the course was running, because as long as I was attending the course I felt like I was Doing Something. The classes for the course were not particularly bothersome because they were only from 10am to 3pm, and they didn’t require much work---all we were doing was getting told basic information about how to write CVs, how to use Microsoft Excel, etc. I did talk to the other course attendees, one of whom happened to actually be someone I knew from high school. So that was a reasonably fun experience. But it was just procrastination really.

After that course I had to just suck it up and get a programming job. I couldn’t think of anything else; although I wasn’t really into programming, I had been in the past and had acquired basic fluency with coding that way. Since programmers are in high demand, and employers are also used to them being socially awkward types who don’t do well in behavioural interviews, I figured I’d be able to get a job without too much trouble.

And that’s what happened. I applied for a few jobs, got a few interviews, and said yes to the first company that gave me an offer. And that’s how we got to the current situation. What I didn’t really realize at the time was how unpleasant the experience of having a job I’m not enthusiastic about would be. I obviously wasn’t looking forward too it, but I figured it would just be a bit dull and I’d be able to deal with it and maybe think in a relaxed way about how to achieve greater ambitions over several years. Instead it turns out that it’s actively, significantly unpleasant and leaves me in a state of sort of perpetual panic.

So I am pretty depressed again, just like I was when I stopped this blog. But not depressed in a hopeless way. I mean, things could get better, and I am trying to make them better. Right now, the most important change I think I can make is moving out of my parent’s house. One thing that’s apparent from this review of the last 3 years is that although I managed to Do Things at Edinburgh to some extent, I pretty much lost that ability once I moved back in with my parents. I guess this is the place where I spent two decades growing up as a more or less completely passive person, so naturally it’s hard to maintain agency here. Maybe moving will help, maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t help, I have more options, like trying to get a new job or doing serious dedicated work towards coming up with a PhD research proposal or trying to find fulfilment from hobbies or something. I will never be out of options; there are always new things to try; there is always hope. The good part of my life may be over but we won’t know for certain until the day that I die, which is hopefully a long way away.

[moonbittern]

im exhausted and have been dealing with sensory overload all day so it seems like a great time to make an unnecessarily long-winded post about gallifreyans + language

(before we start i want to clarify that i largely operate on my own sense of canon so this is going to be part actual canon, part ignoring canon, and part making shit up) (but largely the latter)

doctor who likes to do the “one language per species/planet” thing, which is a very common scifi pitfall but it’s wrong and im against it. if you’re going to pull out any sort of “one culture/language/etc per species/planet” thing and there’s more than 10 people in your species/on your planet - well, first of all, you’re wrong, but second of all there is going to be a story behind why things are so lacking in diversity, and it’s not going to be a good one.

now, honestly, gallifrey is a better fit for the above than most scifi planets, if only because rassilon is The Worst and gallifreyan society is pretty strictly controlled. it’s easy to imagine that there is, at the very least, one Proper Gallifreyan Language with some other Less Acceptable Gallifreyan Languages that the prescriptivists all turn their noses up at, and that the end result is very little in the way of linguistic diversity.

HOWEVER.

i would like to suggest the exact opposite - that gallifrey is extremely linguistically diverse. like, ridiculously. like, how in the world can you even sustain that language:people ratio.

(honestly, i only really thought of this bc it gives me the opportunity to come up with a lot of fun language headcanons and to make a lot of conlangs, but i think my explanation makes sense, and everything’s more enjoyable for me this way and do i need an excuse?)

i’ve seen people interpret the 1-2 comments the doctor makes about language as them not being fluent in very many and largely relying on the tardis translation circuits to get around, but given that we’ve heard them speaking languages that are just as alien to them as they are to us, i prefer to think that the doctor is legitimately fluent in a ton of languages and that they have some amount of control over what languages onlookers hear them speak via the translation circuits. nine made a comment about knowing billions of languages, which is almost certainly an exaggeration but still evens out to “a fuckton”, and im willing to take them at their word.

my point being is that even if you gave a human being centuries with which to do nothing but study languages, they wouldn’t be able to achieve fluency in that many (even if we’re assuming said human being was cognitively wired in a way that was compatible with those languages, which isn’t a guarantee but, you know, scifi) and obviously the doctor does a lot more with their time than learn languages. i tend to think the doctor is naturally good at languages, but being good with languages doesn’t bridge that sort of gap, and imo the logical conclusion is that gallifreyans are extremely quick to take up new languages and on top of that likely never lose their language-learning sweet spot (humans lose this...well, it’s complicated, but it’s around the age of 7, which is why it can be so hard to learn new languages as an adult).

so, then, how might that affect linguistic diversity? imo it’s likely to sort of trickle down into rapid linguistic evolution (well, maybe just relatively rapid, but still), and while there are theoretically ways they could force standardization, i ask: would they want to?

the destruction of minority/marginalized languages - intentionally or otherwise - is a distressingly common occurrence here on earth. but we’re a species that loses its ability to acquire native fluency in new languages after our first decade of being alive and struggle to acquire any sort of fluency in the less than a century we have to live after that. if we take everything i’ve said until now to be true, gallifreyans - with an average lifespan up to at least several centuries if not several thousands of years, depending on your feelings about who can regenerate etc - can easily acquire fluency (possibly even native fluency, if their brains don’t distinguish between the first language they learn and the ones that follow) throughout their entire lifespan. which, again, may make their languages evolve and differentiate quickly, as presumably it makes basic things like picking up new words and phrases easier as well. it also means that high linguistic diversity doesn’t create many communication barriers, bc you probably speak every language you need anyway, no matter how many that is.

(not as many as the doctor, bc the doctor’s a deviant who willingly associates with aliens; but still)

so we’ve got a situation where the chapters are almost certainly divided by language. socioeconomic classes are likely divided by language, at least to a point. individual houses may cluster into language groups, and likely have their own dialects. you probably have a distinct idiolect that you only use around close friends/housemates/family - bc said idiolect would have developed around them, so they’ve had the chance to learn it. there’s a lingua franca (or two, or three, or ten) used for inter-chapter and inter-class (and possibly inter-house) communication. you speak A Lot of languages and all of them are gallifreyan and they exert a lot of influence on each other, but you’re also very aware of what languages are appropriate to use with what people.

which brings me to my next point: gallifrey is kind of awful and very much a dystopia, and not trying to actively stamp out certain languages doesn’t mean certain languages aren’t looked down upon or that language isn’t used as a tool of oppression.

the first point is familiar to us and probably speaks for itself. aristocratic prydonians probably think the languages that are associated with cerulean shobogans are awful and ugly and inferior, and so on.

the second point i think deserves a bit more discussion. gallifreyans are big on education, but there are limits to who gets what sort of education, and even if you acquire languages easily, you can still be denied access to learning those languages.

i imagine the higher up you are on the socioeconomic ladder, the more languages you have the opportunity to learn. depending on who you are and what sort of job you’re planning on getting there may be some languages lower down on the ladder that you need to learn, but honestly a lot of people probably don’t bother; classism runs deep, and you always have the cross-class lingua francas. you do probably learn languages at your level that are spoken in other chapters, just in case, but obviously your chapter’s languages are the best (plus those handy lingua francas!) so again, why bother speaking the others much?

what you are not allowed to do is learn languages that fall above you on the social ladder. im sure some people get past that restriction, but for the most part it doesn’t happen, and there is oh so much that can be done with that. people can have snide conversations in your presence that you can’t prove have anything to do with you; certain educational materials/scientific journals/etc are written in languages you’re unfamiliar with, therefore effectively blocking you from learning about subjects considered above your station; you may not be able to read signage in certain areas; the possibilities are endless and if you’re thinking that any of that sounds suspiciously similar to real-life things that happen on earth, well, you’re not wrong.

(a lot of the above probably also applies to writing systems and there’s also probably unique things to say about that but honestly im not super knowledgeable about scripts and im tired so i will leave it at that)

(could also probably make a whole ‘nother post about how gallifreyan society handles aphasia (i.e. not well) but again, tired and not my area of expertise)

language, guys. language.

[amygdalalangblr]

11 Questions Tag

Tagged by @languagesandshootingstars

Rules: post the rules, answer the 11 questions, make up 11 new questions, and tag 11 people.

Under a cut because it got long.

1. How do you motivate yourself to study your target language when you don’t feel like it?

Haha- I don’t. Not really. Self-discipline and necessity trumps motivation nearly every time, and my target languages are just another whetstone upon which to sharpen myself to be a better version of myself. That I genuinely enjoy the languages I learn is a pleasant bonus.

2. Have you ever had a dream in other language than your native one?

Yup! It’s kind of trippy but really neat.

3. Do you like pokémon? If yes, which is your favourite pokémon?

I do, and it’s always difficult to pick a favourite as there’s so many that I like. Usually, I end up gravitating back to either Ponyta or Medicham.

4. If you could learn to speak one fictional language, which one would you choose?

Considering I’ve just started delving into the Star Wars fandom, I’m tempted to say Huttese or Mando’a (more Mando’a instead of Huttese, but they’re equally as interesting linguistically), but I’m really rather keen on Hobbitish and Khuzdul. Unfortunately, as with many popular conlangers, Tolkien left us bereft of a full language - hi, Sindarin, you darling child, you - for either, and I also heavily disagree with some conlangers in the fandom. I rather like the challenge of learning a language as I build it, though, but I’d have to learn more about linguistics proper before I really get into it.

5. Are you participating in any langblr challenges?

Those tend to be tied up in calendars - do a different thing every day! for a whole month! - and frankly I find those to be too stressful and frequently a bit presumptive on people’s learning styles, so... no. But I rather like the Fiction Writing Challenge because I write fanfic, anyway, and the prompts are interesting.

6. What language has the prettiest script in your opinion?

Uhhh, I’m torn between Sanskrit and Egyptian. Wildly different scripts, but aesthetically pleasing in their own ways.

7. What kind of stationery do you like the most?

As much as I like stationary, I can’t remember the last time I’ve used it - if ever, so I suppose I don’t have much of a preference. Something heavy enough to withstand a calligraphy pen, small margins to fit the most text, and some colour scheme that fades into the background enough to not be obnoxious and distracting is good enough for me.

8. Where do you buy your language textbooks?

My mom. For real, though, if it’s not a class textbook or online, it’s usually gifted to me. I’ve only just started buying language books, though, so I don’t have very many of them.

9. What is your favourite Disney song in another language than your native one?

I don’t... really listen to Disney songs? I like Once Upon A December from Anastasia in Russian (it’s not Disney but shh), and Jackie Chan singing I’ll Make a Man Out of You in... Mandarin? There’s a Cantonese version, says YouTube, but I can’t tell the difference between the two languages and if I’ve got the right one listed.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Ironically neither of these are my target languages.

10. Do you think it’s okay to tell people you hate some language?

I think people are allowed to say whatever they want so long as it’s contextually appropriate and handled maturely by all parties involved. If someone doesn’t ask for your opinion on something, they likely don’t want to hear it, and it’s prudent to not bring it up unless it productively furthers conversation.

That being said, I think people should remember more that opinions are personal - sometimes intensely so. Be it negative or positive, it reflects someone’s experience with the thing they talk about. Languages in particular are a facet of culture, and someone’s reason for disliking a language can be a reaction borne of their experience with that culture or what their own culture dictates to them.

Don’t shun them. Reach out - be compassionate, and try to have a discussion with them about it. They may react badly, they may just be wanting someone to talk to about such a hot-button topic, but you’ll never know unless you approach the vitriol with an open hand first. Even if it doesn’t end on a positive note, you’ll still have given them something to think about.

And if they’re still a brat about it, block them. It’s the internet, guys. C’mon.

11. Which Hogwarts house do you belong to?

Ravenclaw!

Questions:

What do you think about linguistics?

Do you prefer to handwrite notes or type them?

What’s your least favourite subject?

What do you like most about your native language? Dislike?

What’s a cultural quirk you like from a country in your target language?

How elaborate are your notes?

Why did you decide to learn your (first) target language?

What sort of background music do you like?

What sort of non-langblr hobby do you have?

Would you wear a hat?

Soup or stew?

Tagging: @lemonadeandlanguages, @fluencylevelfrench, @jagheter-eliot, @langwishes, @sadies-langblr, @apolyglotwannabe, @tincansamurai, @johnlaurenswithaflowercrown, @ida-ska-sen, @little-study-bug, and @beauplains.