#morkan

[trixierosewrites]

one more sts one more hi i'd love to hear more about your conlangs :]

have a good day!

writblr: @vsnotresponding

Happy STS, and HIIII!! I love talking about my conlangs so Morkan here we come >:3

The kingdom of Morkus rests on top of the mountain that Akraus resides at the base of, and was once the sister kingdom to Pinia before they, uh, rolled boulders onto it and destroyed it. For some definitely completely unrelated reason, Akraus and Morkus have been at war for... a while. They fight over a lot, including what they call the colonies, or the unhabitable spaces taken over by latent magic.

Morkus speaks Morkan (huge surprise there) and some of their texts are in what is inventively named Old Morkan. This is also where they get the names of their months, and so forth.

The language of Morkan itself went in the opposite direction to Akrausian's simplicity and practicality. It's the most complicated conlang I have and there are no simplifications. In its earliest form, it had 3500 conjugations. It now has more. There is a reason this conlang is forever a WIP, because I do not have! the time!

Morkus has possibly the most obnoxious system of pronouns in the world, and it's that pronouns serve to show:

gender

age

relationship to the person in question

relationship to Morkus

sometimes there are other additions like (affectionate) or (derogatory) or religious stuff

So. There's a pronoun for so many things. But the problem is the variation is very small because they like things to be neat, so you better learn minute spoken differences like di, dit, dee, diz, ditz, and dil, or you might accidentally say "let's fuck" when you meant us (coworkers). Imagine trying to teach this to someone, like, what.

"Okay, so, the word you're looking for here is di - no, not dit, that means "us", yeah, but that's for unhappily married couples in their fifties without a child, di means unmarried couple thinking about marriage in the future in their twenties without a child and one half of the couple is foreign, no, you just said dee, we're not thinking about kids and you're not from Akraus--"

(For the record, dil is the same as di but extra affectionate; it's like saying "me and my beloved" instead of just us. For "you (my beloved)" it would be lil.)

Imagine trying to introduce your "friend" to the family and you accidentally say "unmarried couple thinking about getting engaged because one of us is pregnant" when you use the wrong you. Awful. Terrible language.

I'm going to share my favourite set of pronouns, which are, in their you and us forms, liz, diz, litz, and ditz. Liz and diz mean, essentially, "Hey, there, older man, wanna fuck?" (Technically it's "you (older man (thirties)), I'm interested in you)", and the same for the us format, but this is a way funnier way of saying it.) Litz and ditz are the same but less polite, so more like saying "you look like a slut and I'm interested". For someone younger than you in their thirties, it'd be lizi, dizi, litzi, and ditzi! For twenties it'd be lize, dize, litze, and ditze; for twenties and younger than the person, it'd be lizie, dizie, litzie, and ditzie. These are all masculine singular, also, because I have not finished this conlang. For the same reason I don't have them for above the thirties yet. It is a task for many years.

One letter variations, my beloved <3

Location based is usually "Morkan, foreigner, Akrausian" because in their eyes it's Morkan (beloved), foreigner (neutral), and Akrausian (DIE BY MY BLADE), which I think is very funny. But then there's also variations based on "Morkan from birth, still Morkan" or "moved to Morkus before they were ten" or so forth. Sometimes I try and add more to the conlang and I go "okay, this will never be finished" and I just have to live with that.

There's also separate pronouns (and thus conjugations, yes, I am in conjugation hell) for people who're dead, and then there's, like, variation on how long they've been dead (recently dead, semi-recently dead (last few years), died a while ago, old dead (100+ years), ancient dead (1000+ years)), and then what the relationship the speaker is to the dead, and then what relationship the person the speaker is speaking to had with the dead, and so forth.

Additionally, because Morkan is the language of poets (self-described, I may add, the Morkan people said that about their own language), they have a secondary set of tenses for writing than they do for speaking. They have even more pronouns, because they have pronouns for "this is how you, the reader, should feel about this person" and so forth, and then vaguer ones for when they don't want to convey that, and there's all sorts of poetic nuance I have mostly separated out. Mostly.

Word order is used for inflection, so you can say "the green frog" and you're stressing frog, or "the frog green" and you're stressing that the frog is green. However, you can also then say "it" and put all the nuance on that (living being, unusual, dangerous) and you mean THE BASTARD ATTACKED ME BUT THERE'S SOMETHING COOL ABOUT IT???

There's a poetic tendency to us "it" throughout a poem in its variations and only reveal what the thing in question is at the end, or switch to a pronoun like he or she and reveal you were talking about a person the whole time, or reveal you're talking about a person and not change the pronoun (big win for it/its users), or just never real the thing you're talking about because between the poem and the specifics of the pronouns have you not deduced it by now?

Pretentious ass language. Thanks for letting me talk about it!

[morkanslily]

header for @mhiieee 🥳 ‘s fic

[iceunhie]

dawg let yo wrio fics out (not foring ily)😓😓😓 please the kids miss him bro

they're sraying in the trenches hun, but I could give crumbs!!

could.

but I won't.

😈

[neon-chemicals]

Ibby bibby Morkan :>

Twiiiiiins

[toappreciatelife]

Encounters with difference: "The Dead" by James Joyce — Part 1

The power of some literary characters is that they are utterly singular but at the same time resonate with a more general human experience. Such is the case of Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of The Dead, whose character expresses a movement of becoming and decentering, a transformation many of us have gone through or still wrestle with: from control to surrender and acceptance; from absorption in one’s own self to connection and opening. It’s the process and movement of love, condensed in a short story of fifty pages and situated in a very specific context: the Dublin of the early 20th century on a snowy winter night.  

And what better setting is there to begin the study of a character than a party, where all the anxieties about who we are in the face of others come to the fore? Social gatherings are also a kind of microcosm that displays on a micro level transformations that a society is experiencing as a whole. So the first part of the story takes place in the house full of guests of the Misses Morkan (Gabriel’s two aunts and their niece), during the dance they organize every year, which gives us the opportunity to observe how Gabriel behaves in the proximity of other people, as we follow closely his feelings and thoughts. From there, in the last quarter of the story, we travel by carriage and walking to the hotel where Gabriel and his wife Gretta are staying for the night, and where Gabriel’s famous epiphany will occur—in the intimacy of a dark room illuminated by the light coming from a window, almost like in a mystical Caravaggio painting. And this twofold structure has its purpose. If the story had jumped straight to the last scenes in the hotel room, we wouldn’t be as touched by Gabriel’s efforts to open up to his wife and reach out to someone other than himself. But we have been following him during the previous hours and by now we know how he tends to react when confronted with the unexpected. His memory of the immediate past has become our memory as readers. We too, like him, can recall his previous “riot of emotions” and the entire series of his encounters during the party, which seem to form a curious pattern of disconnection and reactivity.

A curious pattern of reactivity

At a historical time in Ireland when traditional gender roles and gender expectations are beginning to shift, Gabriel faces the challenge to respond creatively and adapt to more egalitarian relations, especially when it comes to women who won’t accept a position of subordination anymore, or who don’t conform to his expectations of how a woman should behave or look like.  But Gabriel’s first responses are not proper responses—humble and creative—but reactions and defenses. When we first encounter him at the party, our first impression is that he is a character entangled in the demands of his own wounded ego, oscillating between pride and shame, searching for ways to reassure the frail dominance of his position as a white man of higher education. Women who slightly deviate from traditional gender norms become for him a disruptive other, filling him with self-doubts and a discomfort he tries to dispel by finding refuge in the armor of his own self.

When it comes to his aunts, members of a previous generation, it’s easy for Gabriel to preserve an image of self-importance, because he is their favorite nephew and they assign him all the tasks and symbolic places he needs to secure his position as the man in charge: they let him carve the goose, give the main speech, and sit at the head of the table; they laugh at his jokes, serve him a special dessert, and rely on him to manage the drunk at the party.  Whenever he is treated by his aunts as if he were more special and indispensable, his ego feels at ease and Gabriel is especially animated.

Although in his speech he talks eloquently about his aunts’ “hospitality, humor and humanity”, he doesn’t seem to truly care about any of these noble traits, viewing them instead as “only two ignorant old women”, and valuing bookish knowledge above all else. The story shows there is a gap between what Gabriel says publicly to make an impression and the way he tries to feel superior to his aunts and the rest of the “vulgarians” in the party due to his university education and cosmopolitan tastes.

But his aunts are not so unidimensional as it may seem if we had no access to any other perspective but that of Gabriel’s. Fortunately for us, Joyce introduces his short story through a different perspective: the point of view of Lily, the caretaker’s daughter. We inhabit inside her subjectivity for only two pages, but it’s enough to make us aware that there are different ways of looking at the same characters. If it wasn’t for that first entrance through Lily, we as readers would have been trapped with Gabriel in his self-absorbed way of looking at things. But this is modernism and now there are different perspectives which filter the world. And what each character chooses to pay attention to is very different according to who they happen to be and what their position is in the social structure.

As a young woman of a humble background, Lily is able to see things very differently. She is able to appreciate the Misses Morkan as three independent woman who work and earn enough money to rent a decent apartment and eat well, despite two of them being already quite old. She seems to see them with a kind of respect; perhaps they are a model to her, in that they show her that it is possible to be a woman and have a good passing without relying on a man—all three of them are single. Although during the party the aunts overact their dependence on Gabriel to flatter him, in fact they don’t need him for daily subsistence. They only need Gabriel’s help for minor tasks on that special occasion and with the house full of guests, something he will come to understand at the end of the story, when power relations are inverted in his perspective and he begins to see himself merely as the “pennyboy” of his aunts—falling from pride to shame, as if he couldn’t accept an equality of relations and had to feel either more important or degraded.

As far as we can get a glimpse of their dynamic, the relationship with his wife has also contributed to sustain Gabriel’s image of self-importance, not posing any real threat until the last discoveries in the hotel room tear the thin fabric of the “reality” he built for himself. Though affectionate, their marriage seems to have been based on a superficial relation, a “dull existence together” with clear-cut gender roles: she is the housewife and he is the breadwinner, this last fact apparently allowing him to decide where to go or not to go on vacation, which his wife accepts as if she were his child. In many passages, Gabriel likes to see Gretta as frail, naive and in need of protection—“country cute”, like he didn’t want his mother to call her—, which in turn makes him feel “valorous” and in control.  Sex can be for him an opportunity to “crush” and “overmaster” her, this beautiful possession he feels proud of. In that famous scene in the staircase, when Gabriel gazes up at her, his wife stands for him as an object of aesthetic contemplation of the most generic type, her face hidden in the darkness. Through his view, Gretta lacks any density of her own and can easily be converted into a symbol. But what about Gretta as Gretta? Has he ever seen her in her singularity, in her uniqueness? Has he ever listened to her musicality?

When Gabriel reviews in his memory their life together, all he comes up with are moments of distance. Some barrier always interposes between them, preventing them from touch and close connection: the envelope of a letter, a gloved hand, looking through a grated window, words in a letter he sent to her. But where is Gretta? She is lost behind the layers of projections he surrounds her with, her figure receding behind the misreadings he makes of her body signs so that they match his own desires and needs.

But with other women in the party things don’t go as smoothly as with his wife and aunts—or as with Mrs Malins, to whom Gabriel doesn’t even bother to listen. Lily and Molly Ivors, both of them single women of a new generation, behave and talk in a way that takes Gabriel by surprise, disorienting him and making him speechless, unable to know in which way to respond. His encounters with them form those micro-moments in social life where things move slightly away from the habitual scripts, where the seed of larger transformations and new ways of being could be planted if the actors involved were able to go patiently through that first moment of confusion and respond in a creative way. But the moment is not ripe for Gabriel yet. Not at this point in the story, not without the help of love. So he feels ashamed, attacked in his self-image, and reacts in a defensive way, trying to restore the statu quo and his familiar position of privilege. His physical gestures are eloquent in this sense: first he blushes, then he tries to discharge his discomfort through energetic actions, finally he rearranges his clothes as best as possible, as someone looking at himself in a mirror and trying to restore his lost composure after suffering a few blows. (And it cannot be omitted here that whenever he needs to find strength, he travels outdoors with his imagination to where the Wellington Monument is standing, that obelisk, the phallic symbol par excellence).

In the case of Lily, who amuses him by mispronouncing his name with her lower-class accent, Gabriel would like to think of her as more innocent than she actually is, perhaps as harmless and sweet as the rag dolls she used to play with not long ago.  What other future could a maid have than get married after school and depend on a good man? This is the social order implicit in the question he asks to her, the world Gabriel expects and was taught to find comforting, but the girl has already had other experiences in life and has formed other opinions about men. If we interpret her answer correctly, she finds that men “nowadays” don’t really care about women, but just want to satisfy their own sexual desires through them, and they are willing to use lies and pretexts (“all palaver”) when necessary. Certainly, her answer isn’t what Gabriel was expecting. It is too honest, too dismissive of conventions and social barriers. He blushes, his shame coming not only from having made the wrong assumptions about the complexity of the girl, but also because she has exposed something hidden about who he might be but doesn’t want to think he is. To restore the momentarily threatened hierarchy of class and gender, he gives her a coin and escapes up the stairs.

But Molly Ivors cannot be shut up with a coin, nor with a grandiose remark, because Gabriel considers her equal in terms of their education, both of them university teachers and friends. With humor and warmth, Molly questions Gabriel in his cosmopolitan preferences and his disdain for his own country. And it is true that he seems to consider what comes from the rest of Europe as worthier than Irish customs and land (regardless of whether he is or not a “West Briton”, as she calls him): he wears galoshes because they wear them on the continent, he’d rather go on holidays to France and Belgium than visit Ireland with friends, and he does write reviews in a British newspaper. But instead of acknowledging these contradictory aspects of himself, taking Molly’s observations with a sense of humor, he feels wounded in his ego, resenting her precisely in those traits that make of Molly a woman that can treat him as his equal and joke with him: her education, her frank manners and direct gaze, her political commitments, her disinterest in showing at the party like an object for the male gaze (“she did not wear a low-cut bodice”), all of which make hard for Gabriel to place her in a known and definite feminine category (“…the girl or woman, or whatever she was…”). Full of resentment, he will try to get back at her by introducing in his speech some critical remarks implicitly addressed to her, which actually describe him more adequately than her, with his seriousness and lack of humor. Too bad Molly didn’t stay for supper to hear it!

Due to these encounters, Gabriel ends up so busy and tangled with his destabilized ego, that the others in their radical difference fade beyond his reach, or reach him from far away, like muffled sounds, like “distant music”. In fact, listening and not listening is one of the ways this short story chooses to show us how trapped Gabriel is within himself.  We often find him standing behind barriers: the lens of his glasses, the pane of the window where he goes to find refuge; and listening to distant sounds or music through the filter of some obstacle—a door, a ceiling, etc.—though of course the real barriers are not material. It is his self-centeredness functioning as a kind of invisible barrier that protects him from a closer connection with other people, like the galoshes he likes to wear and makes Gretta wear too, that extra layer of protection he puts over his boots so as not to feel on his skin the wetness of the ground, the cold snow below. And she makes the joke that Gabriel would buy her a “diving suit” if he could, the ultimate protection! Self-absorption can certainly be a safe place, but it also comes with a flipside: isolation and separation from life. How could one possibly listen to the voices of others through the noise of one’s own thoughts and self-doubts? Until this point in the story, Gabriel is just a man sunken in his own kind of ��thought-tormented music”, full of resentment and hardly capable of really listening to anyone else.

He looked at the pantry ceiling, which was shaking with the stamping and shuffling of feet on the floor above, listened for a moment to the piano…

He waited outside the drawing-room door, until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it…

Gabriel went to the stairs and listened over the banisters. He could hear two persons talking in the pantry.

Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing…

Gabriel hardly heard what she said.

Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little…

Follow the second part of this essay in the next post, where we explore how Gabriel stops reacting and experiences a beautiful transformation, finally able to listen and open up.

The pictures in this post are stills from the film The Dead by John Huston.

[boldlymagnificentperson]

13esima: J. Joyce, Gente di Dublino, Il Saggiatore

Da Giorgio Secchi riceviamo il finale di Gente di Dublino di James Joyce. A Dublino, nel 1904, in una serata del  periodo natalizio,  si svolge la tradizionale festa che tre  signorine della buona borghesia, due anziane sorelle, Kate e Julia Morkan, e la loro nipote Mary Jane, offrono ogni anno per amici e  parenti. Si fa musica, si balla e si partecipa ad un ottimo pranzo, preparato…

[doughmonkey]

One of the highlights of my life here, In Ireland was to see the film "The Dead", directed by John Huston, years and years ago in the Joyce Center, in Dublin, just before Christmas. There was candlelight and mince pies, mulled wine, a large dark room and the movie. My favourite short story ever. Not something I can watch or read in public, as the last paragraphs always make me sob, as it is so beautiful and so heartbreaking. Such a story, such writing, such wise sentences. And read by my favourite Irish actor... what more one could ask for a late Christmas present?

[marcellomercado]

The dead by James Joyce (fragment)

How poor a part I've played in your life, it's almost as though I'm not your husband, and we've never lived together as man and wife.

What were you like, then? To me, your face is still beautiful, but it's no longer the one for which Michael Furey braved death. Why am I feeling this riot of emotion? What started it up? A ride in the cab? When not responding when I kissed her hand? My aunt's party? My own foolish speech? Wine, dancing, music? Poor Aunt Julia… That haggard look on her face when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, she'll be a shade too, with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. Soon, perhaps, I'll be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, The blinds would be drawn down, and I'd be casting about in my mind for words of consolation. And would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes. That will happen very soon.

Yes, the newspapers are right: Snow is general all over Ireland. Falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, softly upon the Bog of Allen, and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

One by one we are all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

How long you locked away in your heart, the image of your lover's eyes when he told you that he did not wish to live? I've never felt like that myself towards any woman, but I know that such a feeling must be love.

Think of all those who ever were, back to the start of time. And me, transient as they, flickering out as well into their grey world.

Like everything around me, this solid world itself, which they reared and lived in, is dwindling and dissolving.

Snow is falling. Falling in that lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lays buried. Falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

(adapted fragment of the short story "The dead" by James Joyce)

[starwarsrecrimination]

Excerpt from Morkan's Understudy

[wordwabbit]

The Dead

Just before Sunday service (Photo credit: Wikipedia) By James Joyce, 35 pages This story took a good 20 pages to gain my interest, but the end was worth it. The story takes place on the night of the Misses Morkan’s annual dance, which is in the wintertime, I think between Christmas and New Year. The Misses Morkans are three elderly ladies who live in Dublin and have lots of friends and…

[leanstooneside]

Beauty is but skin deep

◊ For the children

◊ I'm the man

◊ nephew the son

◊ her the brains

◊ books the books

◊ hearers the text

◊ affair the Misses

◊ Grimes the owner

◊ renounce the devil

◊ They're the boyos

◊ bade the Misses

◊ undertone the story

◊ Morkan the reason

◊ moment the Pope

◊ her the appearance

◊ D'Arcy the tenor

◊ Fanning the registration

◊ LILY the caretaker's

◊ family the members

[trixierosewrites]

happy sts!

i see in your intro post that you have created seven conlangs, would you like to yap about them?

writblr: @vsnotresponding

YES YES YES YES YES YES. YOU WILL REGRET THIS.

The first I'll talk about is Akrausian, and I'll probably only mention two in this post so I can go into great detail >:3 Akrausian is the language of a very military society, Akraus, which is at the base of the mountain that Morkus is on top of, and the two are essentially opposites.

Akrausian is about simplicity and practicality, so it helpfully has no tenses and no genders. On the plus side, this it's way easier to learn, so once you've got afsie/tosie/tohrsie (they/them/theirs), eisie/mouchsie/wirsie (you, me, we), and tiesie (it), you're good to go, pronoun wise! Tense wise, it's all in the present tense, so a sentence for the past would probably be (directly) translated something like "Yesterday, we are having tea" or so forth.

Types of words often have patterns to be easily recognisable; pronouns have the -sie suffix, connectives have the -ai suffix (uai (and), wiai (as), for example); verbs have the -en suffix (machen, tomitten, stamachen | stab, cut, stop) and so forth.

Of course, it's not all easy. Akrausian has three layers; the format in which I've been sharing words so far, or the council format, where words are said in full; the standard/military format, and the Oh Fuck You're In Trouble Now format (I need a real name for this that's not that. I was thinking the command format, but that then implies other formats can't be a command...).

Take stamachen, for example: in council format, the word for stop takes its full form; in standard/military format, it becomes stamach; in [command] format, it becomes sta.

The idea of this is then that the level of urgency is imbued into the word. The time needed to say it is decreased based on the urgency the situation requires; if someone shouted sta!, a lot of people would freeze immediately.

For hautikos, which is a less easily chopped up word: in council format, it has its full form; in standard/military format, it becomes hautkos; in [command] format, it becomes hotkis (the vowels being shortened rather than syllables being removed).

If you wanted to go them!, the word tosie: its full form in council format; in standard/military format, it becomes toos, in [command] format it can be toss or tis depending on accent. (The original word is pronounced with an o sound like saying "oh".)

I actually designed Akrausian for in-story use, which means that the order in which words were created is really fucking funny, because you get words like niuros (whore), haustikos (pet), skoten (kill), akstummen (maim), machen (stab), and tomitten (cut). Incredible set of first words.

...Maybe I don't have room to talk about Morkan. Someone send me an ask talking about Morkan. I yearn to talk about Morkan.

[the-gnomish-bastard]

Going to Morkans Alchemy Shop to pick up some goblin teeth, you any anything while I’m there Mr. @evilwizard?

[radioactivesoda-gw2]

Khallalh’s family tree! : D Feat. some close-ups since tumblr can suck with such large images. x’D All offspring is ordered by left-to-right eldest to youngest :> (i.e. Khavva is eldest, Harvey youngest---Tutt'uk is eldest, Tunn'ko youngest---Teli is older than Torkan--Khallalh is older than Kalla!)

Lanni belongs to @flame-squad​!

💫 Support my work on Patreon! 💫

[neon-chemicals]

Three Court Jesters

[Left to Right]

The Obscured - Morkan Melpom [He/They]

The Diabolis - Belial Hofman [He/Him]

The Euphoric - Morkis Melpom [It/It’s]

-

Three adult trolls who reside off planet who are very important to my ~purpleblood lore~

I will probably post about it eventually when I have time to compile it all

[ikrutt]

Being forced to protect a complete stranger in an inhospitable desert, is severe punishment for a social butterfly like Morkant. Adreas is very difficult to work with on account of his personality. He also manages to almost die on a weekly basis. So, during the first season of field work, they both have enough with getting through each day with their hides intact.

Nobody expects Morkant to then volunteer as a guide for a second season. Not because of Adreas’ company, mind, but because of his growing (and very secret) interest in research. The second season being more organized yields more interesting results, which only encourages Morkant. The work being more predictable also frees up some time for various other activities.

(Moskuans are highly social and have a mating system which includes sexual camaraderie among young males. They are pretty xenophobic, however,  and think interspecies relations in general are difficult. But, eh, any port in a storm.)

Adreas does not know what to think when Morkan first starts making advances, due to Morkant’s strict no-touching-no-riding-no-treating-me-like-a-pack-animal policy during the first year. But he rolls with it. For some reason, this is also when he stops smoking.