#or what distinguishes a language from a dialect | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

outofangband · 2 months ago

Text

Silmarillion and Sleep and Dream Thoughts Part One (revised and updated edition)

So I have my post on complex trauma and sleep in general but I wanted to share more thoughts with example ideas as well as cultural concepts of nightmares

I also have a follow up here which I’m in the process of rewriting

This could not encompass every culture obviously and I want to make another one with more specific character headcanons so please feel free to request!

-References to specific nightmares are relatively few in the Silm and related texts. There is Idril’s nightmare of Eärendil’s death, Túrin’s fever dreams, Morwen’s imaginings of hearing Arroch while half asleep, Húrin’s uneasy nightmare filled sleep in The Wanderings, and a few other instances of uneasy sleep or nightmarish visions, including some prophetic ones

Some general thoughts

-I talked about elven states of consciousness here! And that goes a bit into different dream states. In short, I believe that while Irmo is the master of visions, not all nighttime dreams are attributed to him or his Maiar (though it might be believed that it is due originally to their Song that these exist), one reason why elves distinguish between a variety of dream states and states of consciousness.

-Lucid dreaming is more common in the elves and practices involving it are done by many cultural groups including the Vanyar, Doriath Sindar, some Avari groups, and some of the Nandor.

-Nightmares of trauma plague the first elves, both who went to Aman and those who stayed. Some believed them to be an aspect of Morgoth’s dark powers rather than an effect of the lasting fear of them

-Elves seem to be able to go into a sort of half sleep where they can continue to move and function while part of their mind are shut down. I will be distinguishing between this and traditional sleepwalking which is not a conscious choice

-On that note traditional sleepwalking is fairly uncommon among the elves and is viewed differently by different cultural groups, some viewing it as a sign or warning, others as something inherently disordered.

-Interpretation of dreams and even what sort of dream is significant also varies among cultures

Language thoughts:

-There are no known words created by Tolkien himself in any of his languages for nightmares (though there are words for dreaming, day dreaming, and visions) so these are my headcanons

-Each elven language has a word for frightening or upsetting dreams. Most have more than one and many distinguish between frightening dreams that could potentially warn of a future incident and ones that are unpleasant reminders of the past though obviously these are not mutually exclusive

-The Noldor have words for anxiety dreams around crafts and projects as well as for restlessness that comes from having to sleep when work is unfinished

-Some of the Avari have specific words for dreams without any speech or elven figures in them

-Bëorian and Hadorian Taliska have words for dreams that invoke fear specifically that are usually meant to mean dreams of being chased, pursued or attacked. The language of the Halidan has more words for a variety of dreams including words for nightmares that cause sleepwalking and dreams not remembered. Many have a negative connotation similar to words for illness. All have a word for dreams one remembers only vaguely or from emotions. Several of these words come from Silvan dialects and the language they spoke in the East

Angband Related Things:

-I’ve talked about the Maiar of Námo and Irmo who were recruited or taken by Melkor before and it is due in part to their influence and spell work that sleep is so disrupted for prisoners within the fortress. True dreams for example are extremely rare and often heavily controlled.

-Former prisoners of Angband obviously suffer nightmares. Their sleep tends to be disordered and sleepwalking and talking are much more common. Many come to fear their sleeping hours and take precautions during them to avoid encounters with others (I’ve spoken for example about Maedhros despising sleeping near others especially ones he does not know because of what he might say in his sleep or act in the twilight between sleep and wake) Others have the opposite and hate sleeping alone, becoming acutely aware of the shadows and darkness around them, suffering paranoia and insomnia.

-Many, especially those who had been slaves in the mines, experience panic upon waking over the fear that they should not have slept or have slept in the wrong place, the punishment for either within Angband being an awful one

-Sleep is an area where there is a lot of stigma and mistrust regarding captives. Those who return under the will of Morgoth often are described as being sleepwalkers (a translation for a term I made up that is neither the half sleep of elves or traditional sleepwalking but something in between)

Other:

The exact nature of elven foresight is somewhat unclear from the books. According to Laws and Customs of the Eldar, elven mothers often give their children names from their own foresight of their fate and there are numerous instances of visions, premonitions and dreams that predict or hint at the future as well as more explicit examples such as with Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings.

For humans, it’s even more complicated.

Does Huor have prophetic dreams or visions? His final words to Turgon, “from you and me, a new star shall arise” obviously foreshadows the fact that from his line and Turgon’s, Eärendil will be born and eventually become a star point in the sky. No explanation is given in the text for this and whether it is dramatic irony or textual foreshadowing or if Huor is truly capable of seeing or knowing into the future.

#the silmarillion #musing and meta #the children of húrin #in the iron hell #post angband #beleriand #mentioned #Morwen #Túrin #Húrin #the wanderings of húrin #maedhros

37 notes · View notes

thosearentcrimes · 4 months ago

Text

Read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin. It rules, what else is there to say? Wonderful book on so many levels.

So, the first thing I'll say is that the concept of kemmer ran so omegaverse could crawl. Now, I do not put these into relation purely because they involve the application of concepts of heat/rut to human beings, which would not be a sufficient basis for comparison. Instead, it's that they are both obviously fujoshi-coded. Now, you might wonder, how can kemmer be a fujoshi-coded plot point if it doesn't involve men and is obligately heterosexual? Well, for the former objection, yes it does. They literally all use he/him pronouns lol. There's a whole bit in the book about it (that's obviously a bit outdated with advances in transgenderism, but still holds up). And for the latter objection, it is important to remember that yaoi, especially but not exclusively in the fujoshi subculture, spans a sort of spectrum from "just two guys having sex with each other", through "seme/uke" to "procreative penis in vagina sex in the missionary position" (currently mostly omegaverse, but obviously kemmer falls into it). But of course kemmer is far more interesting conceptually than even the most creative treatment of the omegaverse concept could be.

The worldbuilding is really fun. The way LeGuin allows the reader to sink into an understanding of an authentically alien-feeling world while maintaining enough predictability and familiarity to keep the reader following along is very impressive. I'm not entirely sure what shifgrethor is supposed to be if it's not another word for honor, but the book and its setting is so charming that I treat that as an amusing mystery rather than idle mystification, as I very well might if I were less positively inclined. And similarly for some other elements of the worldbuilding.

I suspect there is a fair deal in the novel to displease conlangers however. There are terms nominally brought in from the Gethenian languages, but it's fairly obvious each term is generated arbitrarily as needed, for spice, even when there is already an equivalent term. Additionally, one feature that is liable to irritate the sort of linguist so impressed with themselves for rejecting both prescriptivism and Chomskyism that they fail to notice they have become as pedantic and rigid as either of those factions tends to get. That is, at one point the novel makes note of the great number of distinct words for snow. Personally I think there's nothing all that wrong with it. To linguists it is a very important matter whether the phenomena invoked are in fact distinct words or not. For everyone else, the point of the factoid, even when it related to specific human groups, was to establish that there were a people who distinguished a very large variety of kinds of snow, which they had established designations for, and that this taxonomy of snow and ice demonstrates an intimate understanding of snow, ice, and related phenomena. These three claims are all true, the precision of the specific statement notwithstanding. And on Gethen, the precision of the specific statement can be assumed, because it says so in the book. That is not to say that a deeper engagement with the referenced factoid wouldn't have helped the book. Notably, I think it is a bit silly that Karhide apparently only has the one language. Given how politically and physically isolated it is, there should be a pile of dialects and arguable distinct languages floating around. But that's a minor quibble.

An interesting, but not particularly bad thing about the book is how heavily the shadow of the Cold War falls on it. Large parts of the book are quite unimaginable outside its context. That the book was published in '69 is hardly surprising. With the benefit of decades of separation from even the Cold War itself, this becomes far more a contextual curiosity than anything else, however. I am excited to see how deranged the present era will seem in the future, if I live that long. It seems plenty deranged already, to be quite honest. Probably did back then too.

I can warmly recommend reading The Left Hand of Darkness. I suppose there are some people who wouldn't like it. It's done in a fairly particular style, and some people might object to the treatment of sex (and gender and sexuality) sufficiently to reject the book entirely. They can if they want to, but I think they're missing out. Very fun book.

#book report #ursula k le guin #the left hand of darkness #tlhod

37 notes · View notes

olderthannetfic · 9 months ago

Note

I was that AAVE anon and thank you for responding. I was just really confused about these being for ONLY black people because I don't use these AAVEs personally at all, especially in real life because my native language is not English.

And I was also pretty sceptic about that these words are exclusive for black people, because I once stumbled upon a post here that showed a tiktok explaining that you can't use the word stud because that's only for black butch lesbians. Also that one post's tone too was pretty insufferable. Basically it was like "See? This word is for black butch lesbians only!!! Don't use it or you're a racist pig!" While others pointed out that it was also used for horses for a longer time. The original post didn't help me learn anything, it just showed me that the poster is insufferable and that I need to be more sceptical about everithing posted anywhere no matter who posts it.

Next time I'll search better if I stumble upon some words from English slang or something. Sorry for wasting your time! 🙈

*giggling*

Yes, anon, I figured you weren't a native speaker. For the record, 'AAVEs' isn't how we use that. AAVE is the name of the dialect: African American Vernacular English. As a term, it works how any name of a language or dialect does. You can say things like "I don't speak AAVE" or "This is grammatical in AAVE". If you want to describe vocabulary, I'd say something like "This word comes from AAVE".

I know what you mean. There's a plague of social media posts about how some word or other is only for black people. (Not surprising given the even bigger plague of appropriation from AAVE.) Half of them are completely accurate and half of them are absolute nonsense, and there's no way to tell which is which from the posts themselves. The only way to distinguish is by already knowing enough that you don't need the damn post in the first place.

60 notes · View notes

haggishlyhagging · 4 months ago

Text

Japanese illustrates the complex interaction between male social/political dominance and control of language use. It manifests not only the three ways patriarchal language infiltrates our minds and the ways we talk (or are permitted to talk) or are talked about by men, but also provides instances of women's defiance of PUD [Patriarchal Universe of Discourse] rules. When men name the world of their perceptions, they also name the place of women in that world; these names lexicalize men's concepts and form semantic sets within a culture's vocabulary. When men control the social and grammatical rules of a language and have mandated their dialect as the standard, they define what women are allowed to say and the way in which they must say it. The "place" of a woman in a man's world isn't only reflected in certain sets of words in the language's vocabulary but is also marked in her speech by specific suffixes. Japanese women aren't utterly silent, however, and have words for describing their own experiences, including derogatory terms for men.

In a 1988 Weekend Edition, National Public Radio (NPR) did a segment called "Japanese Women's Language." A man's voice introduced the segment as "a story about sexism, although most people in the country we're about to visit wouldn't call it that." Patronizingly acknowledging that, "of course, the United States has its share of sexism," he went on with his ethnocentric description of "sexism" in Japan:

now imagine a culture that forbids women most of the time to speak the same language as men, a society where women actually have to use different words than men do to say the same thing, or else they'll be shunned.

Men's subjugation of women in Japan goes back at least 1,000 years, to a time when women were forbidden to speak to men. In the 1930s, the Japanese government issued edicts warning women not to use words reserved to men, and the resulting differentiations remain in force, if not the edicts themselves (NPR). The significant adjectives that distinguish onna kotaba, 'women's words', from the male dialect are 'soft' and 'harsh', the equivalents of English 'weak' and 'forceful'. One example of the pressure on women to speak softly and submissively, if they speak at all, is the custom of hiring elevator "girls" in Japanese department stores.

According to the NPR report, women hired as elevator "girls" must be "pretty, young, and very, very feminine." One of the behaviors that conveys onna-rashisa (the stereotype of femininity) is the ability to speak women's "language" correctly, and this aspect of the elevator operator's job performance is closely monitored. They are expected to talk in "perfect women's language," and "never slip and use a masculine word." Their fluency in the linguistic display of submissiveness is insured by one-half hour of mandatory daily practice, during which any "unfeminine" pronunciations are corrected. In order for a woman, any woman, to be perceived as "nice," she must speak "correct women's language" (NPR). Women who don't speak the submissive dialect men assign to them don't get jobs.

R. Lakoff (1975) and Mary Ritchie Key (1975) both noted that the sentences of English-speaking women are likely to be longer and wordier than those of men, and the same apparently holds true for Japanese. A man might be able to say, "Open the window!" but a Japanese woman, in order to get the same thing done, would have to say, "Please open the window a little bit, if you don't mind!" The result is that a woman's sentence has only one or two words in common with a comparable male utterance (NPR) and is much longer. Not surprisingly, Japanese women's dialect is perceived as more subservient and tentative than men's, because the women must use submissive, self-effacing phrases equivalent to the tag-questions that Robin Lakoff (1975) associated with women's speech in English. These phrases translate into English as "do you think," "I can't be sure," and "will it be," and their use in commonplace statements means that Japanese women say an average of 20% more words than men to describe the same thing. In Japanese, it is impossible for a woman to speak informally and assertively at the same time (NPR).

-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues

#julia penelope #japanese language #female oppression #patriarchy #women’s language #perhaps women are stereotyped as being more talkative because men force them to do so #linguistics

34 notes · View notes

botanybulbasaur · 1 year ago

Text

Schneider is SICILIAN, not Italian. YOU ARE WRITING HER WRONG.

Yes, this post is directed towards YOU, fan fiction authors!! And— yes, I will admit, it sounds a little confusing, but I’ll elaborate.

Schneider is an immigrant from Sicily, which, in all due respects to everybody who writes her speaking standard Italian, HAS ITS OWN LANGUAGE!! (Or dialect..? Aye aye aye, I am not awake enough to perpetuate one side or another of a centuries-old argument.)

For more information, you can go to a website somewhere on the interwebs (like this one!: https://mangolanguages.com/resources-articles/sicilian-and-italian-whats-the-difference/) or simply take a look at Schneider’s wiki page!

So, sí, Reverse 1999 officially makes the distinguishment here: her mother tongue is Sicilian!

The next time you pick up your keyboard (or.. phone, if that’s your thing?) to write a fic, stay away from the Italian google translate screen— as tempting as it may be!— and go to a website like Glosbe instead to use the Sicilian translator there; given you’re trying to write a vulnerable moment where she expresses herself in the first language she’s ever learned to.

I apologize if anything in this post is overly fired-up or aggressive. My family (particularly my grandfather) have been looked at like they were insane when they spoke Neapolitan in the middle of Rome, so the distinguishment between Italian and its sister languages is very important to me— as well as other Italian fans of the game, I’m sure.

That’s all for this post! Happy writing :3

#reverse 1999 #r1999 #re1999 #schneider #yelena greco #schneider greco #kisses her gently. go cuss a fucker out in sicilian my dear #yes her ult line is in Italian. yes she uses swear words from Italian. no you should not only have her speak Italian in your fic #just because reverse 1999 devs only had her speak in Italian (..for some reason :c) it doesn’t mean YOU should!!#sicily #auauaughh #I’d like to think they intended to have her speak Sicilian but fucked up #Or maybe she just uses it to communicate w mafia members?#Most Sicilian people do use Italian at their jobs lmao #Crime is #Technically a job #Remember the phrase ‘Sicilian first (comma here) Italian second’#Hhhhhh

117 notes · View notes

max1461 · 1 year ago

Text

I have a lot of thoughts about epistemology and the nature of procedural knowledge. Studying linguistics really impresses upon you just the sheer amount of human knowledge that is procedural and implicit. Languages are these huge, ridiculously complex systems, and even when it comes to the most thoroughly documented language in human history (English), you can still make an entire career documenting as-yet-unknown minutiae of some corner of a corner of the system. It's very difficult to impress upon non-linguists just how big and ill-understood languages are.

There is no book which explains the whole of English grammar. No one on earth knows the complete rule-set of English grammar. Not even for one dialect, not even for one single speaker. No one on earth could write a comprehensive treatise on English pronunciation. We do not know how English works. We do not know how any language works.

And yet, these systems are, in their entirety, already stored in the mind of every native speaker.

When it comes to synchronic information, I literally already know everything there is to know about my dialect of English. I know the timing of every articulation, the exact rules for verb and auxiliary and quantifier placement, the phonology, semantics, syntax, the lexical variation, the registers, all of it. I can deploy it effortlessly while I am thinking about something else. I can form reams of perfectly grammatical English sentences without a second thought. I can deploy the most arcane rules of wh-movement and quantifier raising and whatever else. With no effort at all.

Tens of thousands of people having been making careers trying to document these things, not for my exact dialect but for varieties essentially the same as mine, for 60 years in earnest. And they aren't close to done. And I already know it all. And so do they! They already know it too! The hard part is accessing it, putting it down on paper. That requires experimentation, systematic empirical investigation—science.

So what this has really impressed on me is how much of human knowledge is procedural. How much of it is known only in the doing. I'd wager that's the significant majority of what we know.

This is related to two thoughts that I have.

The first is about the value of unbroken lines of cultural inheritance. With language, the difference between native speakers and second language learners is stark. I think it's safe to say, per current research, that someone who learns a language in adulthood will simply never have the same command of it as someone who learned it in childhood. There are a variety of tests which consistently distinguish native from non-native speakers. You can get very good at a language as an adult learner, good enough for basically all practical needs (except being a spy), but there's a bar your brain just cannot meet.

The unfortunate fact about language is this: if the line of native-speaker-to-child transmission is ever broken, that language is lost. You can try to revive... something, if you want. Like was done with Hebrew in Israel. But it will not be the same language. And not just in the sense that, by the passing of time, all languages inherently change. In a much stronger sense than that. No matter how big a text corpus you have, no matter how well documented the language is, there is an immense body of implicit, undocumented, procedural knowledge that dies when the last native speaker does. And you cannot ever get it back.

I think, often, about the fact that so much human knowledge is procedural, is used and understood and passed on in illegible, difficult to codify ways. I think about the effect that a rapidly changing world has on this body of knowledge. Is it going to be essential for human prosperity? Probably not. But that doesn't mean that losing it will harmless. Certainly I expect much of it to be missed.

The second thought is about an epistemic distinction that I've had in my head for a long time, a distinction I'd like to refer to as that between a science and an art.

An art is any endeavor for which there is an established methodology, an established set of procedures and rules. These rules can be explicit and codified, like the rules of a game, or implicit, like the grammar of a language. They can be absolute or they can be mere guidelines. But in essence, an art is anything you can get good at. Math is quintessentially an art. Football is an art. Ballet is an art. Painting is an art. An art is any endeavor in which procedural knowledge is acquired and channeled and refined and passed on.

Art contrasts with science. A science is any endeavor in which one is shooting blind. Science is the domain of guesswork and trial-and-error. Sciences are those domains that do not lend themself to practice, because... what would you practice at? You cannot get better at science, because science is not about skill. Science is about exploration. It necessarily involves forging your own path, working with odd and faulty tools and odd and faulty ideas, trying to get them to work. Science only exists at the frontiers; when a path is well-tread enough that a body of procedure becomes known and practiced, that path is now art and no longer science.

This distinction is not a taxonomy. Everything we do involves a little bit of art and a little bit of science. Everything involves both a refinement of known skills and an exploration of new avenues. Of course there's a little bit of science in painting, there's quite a lot of science in painting. Every modern and contemporary art museum is full of it! And there's science in math, every once in a while. And there's art in biology and chemistry. Art and science are two modes of engagement, and different endeavors demand them of you in different ways.

Perhaps science is like a glider (you know, from Conway's game of life?), traveling ever outward, and with enough passes over the same area leaving art in its wake. And I think in some sense that all real human knowledge exists as art, that all endeavors capable of producing true insight are either arts or sciences buttressed by a great many supporting arts. Although maybe I'm wrong about this.

I think history is mostly science, and in large part history as a field seems to be on quite solid epistemic footing. So I don't want to convey the idea that science is inherently dubious; clearly from the above description that can't be my position. Nor is art inherently trustworthy—for instance I think jurisprudence is primarily an art, including religious jurisprudence, which of course I don't place any stock in. But I do think I'm getting at something with the idea that there are a range of epistemic benefits to working within an art that one lacks access to in a totally unconstrained science. This is also closely related to my ideas about abstraction and concretization schemes.

Language is an art, one of the oldest arts, but modern linguistics is more or less a science. Like any good science, linguistics has certain arts unique to itself—fieldwork and the comparative method come to mind—but the most vibrant parts of the field at present are science through-and-through. It's a science whose objects of study are arts, and I think maybe that's part of why I've become so aware of this distinction. Or, language is the ur-example of an art, the art from which (if I were to conjecture wildly) I think the cognitive machinery for very many other arts has been borrowed. But I don't really know.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

#navel gazing #linguistics #math

219 notes · View notes

starsofarda · 1 month ago

Text

Ok, I am following after this brainrot.

Have a ficlet - it's probably what I am gonna do about this whole thing, unfortunately it's the time where I don't have many energies.

And yes, I know that I have other things, but again, low energy. ADHD is being a bitch to me.

I hope you will enjoy my offer <3

PS: I know, language barriers, pls do not ask me to write in actual Elvish. Here's a small legendarium for different languages:

Normal font: Westron

Typed: Legolas specifically with his horrendous Sylvan dialect

Italic: Sindarin

Bold: Khuzdul (underlined if ANCIENT Khuzdul)

Cursive: Quenya

At first it felt like a light trickling of dust and pebbles over him - he didn't bother opening his eyes yet.

He was still grappling with the fact that he was breathing again and that he was not in the peaceful Halls of Mandos anymore.

And then he heard drums.

Drums and hurried footsteps and the skittering of orcs - no, not orcs, goblins.

That was when he decided to open his eyes and free himself from the wall he had been apparently staying.

It took him a short while to get back some of his movement, enough to start walking towards the source of that noise, hoping that once he got there he would have enough strength to just give a hand to whoever was in there - no pun intended, he thought, as he slowly directed himself whilst leaning against the stony walls.

It seemed that he was in a mine - a Dwarven mine, to be exact.

That was when he heard it - the horrible noise of a Balrog - and he knew those fiendish creatures quite well.

He needed to hurry, whoever was in there did not deserve to face any Balrogs of Morgoth.

It took a while for him to catch up.

When he finally did arrive, he was just in time to see as what looked like a Wizard was facing off with the Balrog.

The Wizard was speaking a language unknown to him.

"You cannot pass! I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass!"

Alas he was way too far yet, as he hurried as best he could towards the group - he could see a Dwarf, an Elf, two men and four halflings - or children, he really could not distinguish them in such darkness.

As the Wizard was caught by the whip of the Balrog and shouted "Fly, you fools!", he jumped straight next to one of the men, helping him hold the little ones.

Aragorn suddenly saw the presence of probably the tallest Elf he had ever met and with fiery red hair - something he himself had never seen. "What?!" He exclaimed confused.

The red haired Elf just shook his head.

"Let's talk later, once we are out of here."

Aragorn nodded and lead the Fellowship out of Moria, as per plans. There would be time to grieve later on.

Once outside the situation looked grim. The Hobbits were stricken by grief, the Fellowship was lost, and on top of that not onl was Gandalf dead at the hands of a Balrog, but they acquired one more Elf - and what kind of Elf.

Tall, fiery red hair, missing right hand and scarred left hand. Aragorn talked to him.

"We will talk once we are out of orcs' sight."

"Fine by me, Elros."

"... My name is Aragorn. I think you have me confused."

"Oh, sorry. My name is Nelyo."

Aragorn definitely had heard that name before, although he could not pinpoint exactly when, or where. Somehow he was thinking of Elrond, but he would know for certain if Elrond had mentioned that name. In any case, that definitely wasn't the time to linger on issues and thoughts - he would have time to do so once the Fellowship reached Lothlorien.

"Boromir, get the Hobbits up, we need to go!"

"Give them a moment, for pity's sake!"

"By nighttime this place will be crawling with orcs."

Legolas was looking uneasy, something Aragorn picked up immediately. "Yes, we are taking the Elf with us."

"I don't think that's a good idea, Aragorn."

The man stopped. "And why not? He helped us."

"He is a kinslayer."

"As far as I am concerned, this one just came out of the rocks of Moria, if anything I will let the lady of the Galadhrim decide."

Nelyo understood only about half of the conversation - damn, the language did evolve a lot during the time he was in Mandos. He would have to ask someone what had happened in the meantime, but for the moment he stood upand wobbled a little towards two of the halflings, gently patting them and signaling themm it was time to go.

The two latched onto him, as the rest followed the man who introduced himself

By the time they stopped by the river Nimrodel, they finally shifted the attention to "Nelyo", as Aragorn had relayed his name to the rest of the Fellowship.

In the meantime Nelyo had understood that probably speaking Sindarin instead of Quenya would be a better shot. It was Aragorn, once again, that talked to him.

"We are about to enter Lady Galadriel's realm. We are on a secret errand. What can you tell us?"

Nelyo considered his options. Also, the fact that Galadriel had been mentioned meant a 99% of certain death - that would suck, but at least he'd say sorry.

"I think it's probably easier if I speak Sindarin."

"Indeed."

Nelyo braced himself. "My Sinda name is Maedhros. I died... Well, I am not sure, but I died. Somehow I was re-embodied here."

Now, Aragorn definitely had heard the name "Maedhros".

"That's why Legolas here said that you were a kinslayer." He pointed at the blond Elf next to him.

"Indeed. It is probably not a good idea making me go anywhere near Galadriel."

"Agreed." Legolas interjected. "My father and grandfather have told me about ancient Doriath."

Now things started to click for Aragorn. Boromir was looking at everyone with eyes wide open - as much as he understood Sindarin, he was nowhere near fluent, so he would need to ask about the ordeal later on, swallowing at least a bit of his pride.

Maedhros sighed. "I will take my punishment whatever that will be."

That kind of settled things down.

At that point Sam interjected. "Hey, Mr. Nelyo did help us and has been nothing but mindful! Why are you all being mean?!"

"I am afraid, Master Gamgee, that the issue runs deeper than ever. But it is indeed true, maybe the Lady of the Galadhrim will be merciful, given the more pressing matters."

Maedhros was tired, however. Whatever would be his destiny, at least he'd get to see the stars once more - so he thought as Legolas seemed to tell a story and sing.

He kind of went back memory lane, when Maglor used to sing, now only just a memory.

The halflings suddenly latched onto him once again. "See, Merry? Mr. Nelyo Elf was feeling grief too, that's not hard to see!"

"He doesn't look as scary now, Pippin!"

"I never said he was!"

And Maedhros was not understanding a single word of that language, but he surely understood warmth. These halflings truly were like children to him. He made a half smile.

"See? He smiled! Frodo, Sam, he smiled!"

Boromir intervened. "Yes, and now we are all very tired. And orcs are still about. Leave him be.

That pretty much concluded the night. Every problem that still lingered would be resolved by morning.

#tolkien #the lord of the rings #lotr fanfic #pls be nice #maedhros joins the fellowship #maedhros #mae joins the fellowship

18 notes · View notes

somethingclevermahogony · 2 months ago

Note

Happy spooky WBW! I wanna focus on ghosts today. Ghosts and/or the afterlife are super important in most worlds. What are spirits like in yours? Real or imagined? Good or evil? Sacred or common? 👻

Hello and thank you for the ask! Sorry it took me a few days to get to it!

Ghosts and Spirits in the Lands of the Green Sea

In order to understand the nature of spirits and ghosts throughout the lands of the Green Sea it is important to lay out a few definitions.

Spirit

Spirits are real entities within the world of Kobani and the wider universe.

Fun Fact: The words used to refer to spirits throughout the Green Sea seem to be related, suggesting an origin which stems from a Pre-Calamity language, making said tradition thousands of years old. Kishite: Baba, Shabalic: Baba, Ikopeshi: Bebi, Apunic: Bap, Korithian: Buwa, Arkodian: Buwa, Pyrian: Pa, Various Western Makuric Dialects: Bama/Maba/Ma, Makorian Dialects: Bata/Pada The word for soul, Kishite: He(e)t, shows a similar level of continuity between languages.

Spirits are distinguished from beings like humans and animals by their dynamic nature. Their forms are not static in the sense that the human form is static, rather the size/shape/appearance of spirits may fluctuate typically in reaction to their mood or their environment or by conscious effort.

Spirits are broadly categorized into two categories Naturalistic and Celestial. Naturalistic spirits are born on Kobani itself and function primarily as personifications of certain objects, places, or phenomena, such as a tree, forest, mountain, the winds, fire, etc. Celestial Spirits on the other hand are born in the so-called "Celestial Spheres" or "Spirit Worlds" before finding their way to Kobani by some means. These spirits are not tied to specific locations or phenomena in the same way as Naturalistic spirits, as a result these spirits tend to be far more wide-roaming while also being far more alien, both in their nature and personality.

Great Spirits and Demons also fall under the category of Spirits. Both of these designations are human inventions. A Great Spirit typically refers to a particularly powerful spirit, typically one which is sapient (Spiritbloods are typically the result of a pairing between a so-called Great Spirit and a human.) Great Spirits often act as the personifications/guardians of large natural features such as mountains, rivers, or lakes. In the Kishite culture when a Great Spirit is prayed to or treated as a city guardian they are referred to as a Mountain Lord/God. Demon or Kosubaba, is a term used to refer to a spirit which is actively hostile towards humans in a way which is actively malevolent. Kosubaba are always sentient. This is not the same as territorial spirits or non-sentient species which may act violently or unintentionally cause harm. Demons typically hide in their lairs, still fearful of what few magical weapons remain, and from there they manipulate and play with humans. Demon/Kosubaba is not a true scientific classification, but a title. There are many hostile and territorial spirits but a demon is different, a demon wants mortals to enter their territory, like a spider waiting to catch a fly.

Souls

The Kishite word for the soul is he(e)t. The soul is the animating force within mortal beings, the purest embodiment of primordial creation within the living form. The soul is also the part of the being which carries on during the Cycle of Reincarnation, being reborn in new bodies throughout different worlds until the full development of that particular soul is considered sufficient to continue on to the domain of the divine. The soul is not necessarily tied to the mind or the state consciousness, as such the soul does not "degrad" or "decline" in time with the natural decline of the mind/mental function due to aging or injury. The soul is innately magic. Spirits do not have souls, at least not in the sense that mortal beings do. This is because, unlike with mortal beings, there is no distinct delineation between what is and isn't magic within their build-up, put more simply the form of the spirit is in itself "the soul". This means that if a spirit does reincarnate it is as itself, rather than forming a new entity and thus spirits do not progress through the Cycle of Reincarnation.

In the English language spirit and soul can sometimes be used interchangeably. This is not the case in Kishite, which brings us to the question of...

Ghosts!!!!!

So are ghosts real in Kobani? The short answer is no. The longer answer is sort of.

In the traditional sense a ghost is understood to be the lingering soul or a fraction/shadow of the soul which remains of a being after its death. In this sense ghosts in Kobani are not real.

The Cycle of Reincarnation is a phenomenon directed by and overseen by both the gods and by nature itself, it is not something which can be resisted or circumnavigated by mortals in any sense. When a mortal dies their soul will be reincarnated, either in a new world or once again on Kobani, no matter how much "unfinished business" that soul may have.

This of course has not stopped many myths from forming regarding ways in which the soul may become lost on the way to judgement or else shut off from reincarnation (Curses, heresy, etc.) but these are all fictional. Kishite children are often told scary stories of haunted battlefields and the souls of murdered wives stalking streets and abandoned homes, too filled with hate and sorrow to be reincarnated.

However, there is a phenomenon which may be mistaken for ghosts at first glance, spirits. As was previously mentioned, spirits often change their forms, sometimes in response to their environments. It is not unheard of for spirits which are in regular contact with humans, particularly with sages to adopt characteristics of those humans, sometimes even after those humans have passed on. As such it is not unheard of for the homes of recently deceased sages to be haunted for a short period of time by spirits imitating their voices or even hazy versions of their forms before moving on to better things.

Far more rarely but far more sinisterly, there have been several instances when spirits (often demons) have possessed the bodies of the very recently deceased, using said body as a mode to interact with and often to harm humans. In one particularly dark tale from the city of Chibal, a demon possessed the body of a recently deceased midwife and then used this macabre disguise in order to runaway with the new-born of the family that had hired that midwife, never to be seen again. Stories like this are one reason (among others) why it has become tradition in Kishetal to stand vigil over the deceased until their bodies show the first signs of natural decline/decay, lest a spirit/demon use the body for nefarious purposes.

@patternwelded-quill @flaneurarbiter @skyderman @paeliae-occasionally

@roach-pizza @illarian-rambling @dezerex @theocticscribe, @willtheweaver

@axl-ul, @persnickety-peahen, @surroundedbypearls, @elsie-writes,

@mk-writes-stuff, @kaylinalexanderbooks, @the-golden-comet,

#testamentsofthegreensea #writeblr #fantasy writing #worldbuilding #writing #fantasy #fantasy world #world building #wbw #ghosts #spooky worldbuilding

15 notes · View notes

radioactivepeasant · 9 months ago

Text

Snippets: Free Day Friday

Fragile Things (the one where Damas time traveled)

Spargus: a month and a half after Damas rescued Jak from Haven.

Jak seemed to have been waiting for him -- unless he had been stealing dates from the palms in the throne room again, which was a very real possibility.

Damas ruled this out when he saw the conflicted look on the boy's face.

"You're up here early," he said by way of greeting, "I thought you were going to join the field trip to Tributary to get parts for your talk-box."

Jak shrugged and hopped from one stepping stone to the next. "That's later. Had to ask you something first."

He looked...nervous. Like he didn't really want to ask, but couldn't bear to hold the question in.

"Ask away, little one." Damas tousled Jak's hair as he passed him.

He was never going to get over how small Jak was at thirteen. The Jak he knew before almost always managed to dodge him. This Jak never saw him coming. Stranger, this Jak never minded. The Before Jak soaked up any little scrap of kindness with a painful desperation, and so did the Present Jak. But this one didn't shy away from touch. Sometimes he even ambushed Damas in the market to hug him playfully and then run off to get into more trouble.

The second he'd turned to face Jak, the question was flying out of the boy's hands.

"Are you actually my father or something?"

He cringed.

"Sorry. It's just- Never had anybody help me like you, except Daxter."

He didn't use exactly the same signing dialect that Spargus used. It was faster, and a little hard to distinguish tense indicators sometimes, but not so different that Damas couldn't work out what he meant. Jak vocalized sometimes, when he felt comfortable, but they were sounds more than language. And Damas did remember Jak telling him before that he'd spent much of his childhood nonverbal. But it was more jarring than he'd expected when it came from a smaller, softer face. One that reminded him, over and over, of Mar.

"I-"

"And- and Samos always helped Keira but not me and Dax because we weren't his kids, so I couldn't figure out why you're so nice to me if you're not like, y'know, my-" Jak's face reddened and his signs became small and faster. "My dad or something. Sorry. Sorrysorry just forget it."

Damas blinked and realized he'd stopped breathing for a moment. He took a breath and slowly lowered himself to sit on the dais, waving Jak over to sit beside him.

"No, nonono don't apologize. It's- I've been trying to think of how to tell you this for weeks. It's just...going to sound strange."

"As strange as going through a giant transport ring and time going weird?" Jak asked as he gingerly sat down.

"Oh, absolutely." Damas rubbed his chin and glanced at Jak from the corner of his eye.

"I...do not know how closely we are related, to tell you the truth. But the longer you're here, the more certain I become that we do share blood. I just...don't know how many generations back our common ancestor is."

It was the only explanation he could think of for why Jak resembled Mar so closely. Why he looked at him sometimes and saw both of his sons in one face. Why the boy had the same prism-potential in channeling.

"Oh." Jak sat up a little straighter. "Really? I thought I didn't have any family! I mean, there's Uncle, but he's gone all the time."

Damas cleared his throat awkwardly. "There's ah, there's something else."

"What is it?" Now far less tense, Jak leaned in eagerly.

"I...do not know how to explain it, truthfully," Damas sighed, "But I...somehow I lived three years into the future, or saw a vision -- I'm beginning to wonder which it was -- and in that future you- you were there. You- I had taken you in as my own son."

Jak tilted his head, then his eyes flew wide. His mouth dropped open a little. "You saw me? And I was your kid on purpose?!"

"On purpose," Damas agreed, smiling a little at the turn of phrase.

"That's why you came to attack that commander? You were actually looking for me?" Jak scooted closer, and an eager expression began to replace his slightly nervous one.

"Yes," Damas answered gravely, "Because I had seen my future son and I could never leave him behind, even if he didn't know me."

even if you're not interested in being family this time. As long as you're safe, I'm happy- just as long as you're safe!

Jak made a thoughtful sound and propped his chin up on his fists. For a worryingly long time he stared off into space, thinking. Then he smiled, bright and innocent.

"Oh, okay."

Damas blinked. "Okay?"

"Yeah. I was just wondering. I'm glad I asked." He hopped to his feet and stretched.

"You're way nicer than Samos is. I'd rather you be my dad than him."

Damas shoved away memories of a certain Arena debacle. "I...certainly hope to live up to your expectations, my boy."

"Also, it would be weird if Samos tried to be my dad because he's been mean. And because then Keira would be my sister and I don't think she'd like that. I wouldn't either."

The child hopped down the stairs and balanced on one foot on the stepping stones. He pretended to wobble before grinning and hopping to the next stone.

"I'm gonna go to the field trip thing now." Jak beamed and waved. "Bye Damas!"

He all but bounced to the elevator, humming happily.

Damas stayed sitting, not entirely sure what had just happened.

"Well," he said aloud, "that could've gone worse."

#fic prompts #writing prompts #free day Friday #jak and daxter #dadmas #king damas #jak and daxter au #fragile things au #time travel damas #tpl Jak #damas is used to withdrawn traumatized jak #he doesn't know what to do with this bubbly gremlin #damas has been worried about how to broach the topic with Jak this whole time #and then the kid is like 'so are you my dad or what' and damas does a spit-take #he's a little menace but he means well

36 notes · View notes

kiragecko · 16 days ago

Text

How Common Are Various Vowels?

I've been making a bunch of charts of how common various vowels sounds are around the world. Decided to share them with you guys. Information about the source, limitations, and what they're actually saying is under the cut. (Google Sheets document here if you want a text version.)

These charts are based on data from PHOIBLE. PHOIBLE is a repository of phonological data, ie. the sounds used in various languages. While there are 5,000-7,000 languages in the world¹ PHOIBLE only has data for 2,186. Which may make it the largest phonological database in the world, but means it still covers less than half of the world's languages!

So, these numbers do NOT indicate how many languages have each sound. They indicate how many of the languages REPRESENTED have that sound!

Also, where linguists have disagreed about the sounds in a language, PHOIBLE includes both descriptions. So there are actually 3,020 inventories - which is almost 1,000 more than the number of distinct languages! Some sounds may be over-represented if they occur in a lot of debated languages.

Some areas of the world are more represented than others. Specialized databases for South America and Africa were copied over, but there wasn't anything similar for North America. I'm pretty sure I'd have been able to make a chart for voiceless vowels if there had been, and am sad to not get the opportunity!

I've made a chart for almost every type of vowel that's used in 6 or more languages. I didn't include over/under-rounded vowels because I find them confusing for some reason.² I also didn't include nasal dipthongs because I didn't want to design an entire additional chart OR have a giant one that's almost empty. Both groups only have one sound with 6 uses, anyways.

The chart is shaped somewhat differently than other vowel charts. I decided to lean a bit more into formant values for its shape.³ I also wanted to include every type of vowel that linguists actually used in PHOIBLE, not just the cardinal ones common to most IPA charts. So it includes lowered, raised, and centralized vowels.⁴

Some numbers are actually combinations of multiple entries I decided were close enough to group together. These are marked with an asterisk ( * ) on the dipthong chart, and are unmarked on the other charts.

For example, the cell for 'ui' shows 72 occurrences. In PHOIBLE this is 55 occurrences for 'ui', 13 for 'ui̯', and 4 for 'u̯i'. (The final two are indicating the sound is 'uy' and 'wi', respectively.)

Another example: On the main vowel chart, 'ɪ̈' is actually a combination of 'ɪ̈' and 'ɨ̞'. The first has 11 occurrences, and the second 8, for a total of 19.

Finally, vowels don't actually have boundaries between them. In many ways, these charts are MORE misleading than ones with fewer options. Its a 3 dimensional spectrum, and sounds can be produced anywhere inside of it. The way people will pronounce the 'same' vowel in different contexts can vary wildly, and easily line up with multiple cells.

At the same time, sometimes precise distinctions are necessary. Our ears are capable of hearing VERY precise distinctions. We learn to ignore many of them while learning to speak, but there are dialects of English that distinguish 'ɜ' and 'ɐ', two muddy sounds that are right next to each other. So there IS value in a chart like this, as long as you can recognize that things are actually really messy most of the time.

Notes:

⁰ Before we get into the other notes, I want to get ahead of the people wondering about 'ɶ'. Only ONE of the represented languages use that sound. It's on the main chart so you can know what fits in that space, but that's why it isn't coloured in.

¹ The number of languages varies wildly because the difference between languages and dialects is more political than practical.

² They aren't confusing. They make perfect sense. But my brain kicks up a fuss for some reason.

³ The shape of most charts is partially based on the average frequency of the first 2 peaks of vowels' acoustic spectrums - one acting as the y axis and the other as the x. These peaks are called 'formants'. My charts translate these values slightly more literally - which is why 'e' has a little corner to itself. But it's still stylized - the unrounded back vowels and rounded front vowels have both been pushed back towards the edges to leave some room in the centre. There are a LOT of central vowels!

⁴ If you go to the Google Sheet, you'll see that a few edge cases didn't make it in. I couldn't figure out how to fit them into an already packed space!

#linguistics #phonology #vowels #gecko's lists

7 notes · View notes

read-marx-and-lenin · 7 months ago

Text

It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, therefore, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and counterpose everything that is “in the consciousness of the individual” to everything that is outside this individual consciousness (this is hardly ever difficult to do), but to delimit the world of collectively acknowledged notions, that is, the whole socially organised world of intellectual culture with all its stable and materially established universal patterns, and the real world as it exists outside and apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of “experience”. It is here and only here that the distinction between the “ideal” and the “real” (“material”) acquires a serious scientific meaning because in practice the two are usually confused. Pointing out the fact that the thing and the form of the thing exist outside the individual consciousness and do not depend on individual will still does not solve the problem of their objectivity in its fully materialistic sense. And conversely, by no means all that people do not know, are unaware of, do not perceive as the forms of external things, is invention, the play of the imagination, a notion that exists merely in man’s head. It is because of this that the “sensible person”, to whose way of thinking Kant appeals with his example of the talers, is more often than other people deluded into taking the collectively acknowledged notions for objective reality, and the objective reality revealed by scientific research for subjective invention existing only in the heads of the “theoreticians”. It is the “sensible person”, daily observing the sun rising in the East and setting in the West, who protests that the system of Copernicus is an invention that contradicts the “obvious facts”. And in exactly the same way the ordinary person, drawn into the orbit of commodity-money relationships, regards money as a perfectly material thing, and value, which in fact finds its external expression in money, as a mere abstraction existing only in the heads of the theoreticians, only “ideally”. For this reason consistent materialism, faced with this kind of situation, could not define the “ideal” as that which exists in the consciousness of the individual, and the “material” as that which exists outside this consciousness, as the sensuously perceived form of the external thing, as a real corporeal form. The boundary between the two, between the “material” and the “ideal”, between the “thing in itself” and its representation in social consciousness could not pass along this line because, if it did, materialism would be completely helpless when confronted with the dialectics that Hegel had discovered in the relations between the “material” and the “ideal” (particularly, in the phenomena of fetishism of all kinds, from that of religion to that of commodity, and further, the fetishism of words, of language, symbols and signs).

It is a fact that like the icon or the gold coin, any word (term or combination of terms) is primarily a “thing” that exists outside the consciousness of the individual, possesses perfectly real bodily properties and is sensuously perceived. According to the old classification accepted by everyone, including Kant, words clearly come under the category of the “material” with just as much justification as stones or flowers, bread or a bottle of wine, the guillotine or the printing press. Surely then, in contrast to these things, what we call the “ideal” is their subjective image in the head of the individual, in the individual consciousness. But here we are immediately confronted with the trickiness of this distinction, which is fully provided for by the Hegelian school and its conception of the “materialisation”, the “alienation”, the “reification” of universal notions. As a result of this process which takes place “behind the back of the individual consciousness”, the individual is confronted in the form of an “external thing” with people’s general (i.e., collectively acknowledged) representation, which has absolutely nothing in common with the sensuously perceived bodily form in which it is “represented”. For example, the name “Peter” is in its sensuously perceived bodily form absolutely unlike the real Peter, the person it designates, or the sensuously represented image of Peter which other people have of him. The relationship is the same between the gold coin and the goods that can be bought with it, goods (commodities), whose universal representative is the coin or (later) the banknote. The coin represents not itself but “another” in the very sense in which a diplomat represents not his own person but his country, which has authorised him to do so. The same may be said of the word, the verbal symbol or sign, or any combination of such signs and the syntactical pattern of this combination. This relationship of representation is a relationship in which one sensuously perceived thing performs the role or function of representative of quite another thing, and, to be even more precise, the universal nature of that other thing, that is, something “other” which in sensuous, bodily terms is quite unlike it, and it was this relationship that in the Hegelian terminological tradition acquired the title of “ideality”. In Capital Marx quite consciously uses the term “ideal” in this formal meaning that it was given by Hegel, and not in the sense in which it was used by the whole pre-Hegelian tradition, including Kant, although the philosophical-theoretical interpretation of the range of phenomena which in both cases is similarly designated “ideal” is diametrically opposed to its Hegelian interpretation. The meaning of the term “ideal” in Marx and Hegel is the same, but the concepts, i.e., the ways of understanding this “same” meaning are profoundly different. After all, the word “concept” in dialectically interpreted logic is a synonym for understanding of the essence of the matter, the essence of phenomena which are only outlined by a given term; it is by no means a synonym for “the meaning of the term”, which may be formally interpreted as the sum-total of “attributes” of the phenomena to which the term is applied. It was for this reason that Marx, like any genuine theoretician, preferred not to change the historically formed “meanings of terms”, the established nomenclature of phenomena, but, while making strict and rigorous use of it, proposed a quite different understanding of these phenomena that was actually the opposite of the traditional understanding. In Capital, when analysing money – that familiar and yet mysterious category of social phenomena – Marx describes as “ideal” nothing more or less than the value-form of the products of labour in general (die Wertform überhaupt).

The Concept of the Ideal, E. V. Ilyenkov, Problems of Dialectical Materialism, 1977

#marxism #communism #socialism #dialectical materialism #marxism leninism

15 notes · View notes

thatcrazypoppiigirl · 2 months ago

Text

Okay, so, per my post a few weeks ago, I'm going to start posting more stuff about my book. So for the very first post about it, the pitch notwithstanding, here's the character sheet for my main character Ash at the very beginning of the series. I'm going to do a cut here, because this thing is long as hell. I'm also unapologetically sharing with everyone the character sheet from my Creative Writing degree out of my worldbuilding courses.

THE BASICS:

Character Name: Aisling Caireach Hayes

Nickname: Ash, Phoenix

Origin of Nickname: Shortened first name, vigilante alias

Birthdate: 3/21/1998 (25 in universe)

Place of Birth: Columbus, Ohio

Ethnicity: Irish, Scottish, and mixed Northern European

Religion: N/A

Height:5’2”

Weight: 95lbs

Body Type: Ectomorph, triangular (wider hips than chest)

Eye Color: Amber Gold

Glasses or Vision Enhancements: N/A

Hair Color: Orange-red

Hairstyle: Long, waist-length spiral curls

Grooming: Has trouble upkeeping her hair due to lack of giving a fuck

Skin Tone (pale, tan, olive, brown, etc): Pale Ivory

Face Shape: (round, square, oval, chubby, heart-shaped): Heart-shaped

Prominent Features: Freckles, button nose, roundish-almond eyes

Tattoos or Distinguishing Marks: Watercolor phoenix tattoo across her back, overlapping sun and moon tattoo at the base of her neck

General Health: Never gets sick.

Disabilities, Illnesses, or Weaknesses: Always on the verge of starving due to her high metabolism.

Fashion and Style (what do they wear, how do they wear it?): Dresses in a gothic punk style. Lacy dresses and blouses paired with ripped jeans and fishnets, combat boots, and a leather or suede jacket.

Special Jewelry: A small ring in the shape of an A made of aquamarines

COMMUNICATION SKILLS:

Languages Spoken: English, German, Spanish

Accent or Dialect: Newscaster accent

Favorite Phrases: “Oh, for the love of fuck.”

Do they curse: Frequently

Demeanor: calming, severe, solemn, withdrawn (As Phoenix she’s brash, bright, and cheerful)

Mannerisms: Crosses her arms defensively, hums frequently when lost in thought, biting the inside of her cheek when tense

Gestures: Speaks with her hands a lot

Posture: Straight back, shoulders back.

LIVING CONDITIONS:

Place of Residence: 2214 Bridlewood Boulevard

Type of Residence: House

Surrounding Area (city, rural, etc): suburban

Describe Residence: Three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a small living room, and a connected kitchen with an open floor plan

Who do they live with: N/A

Pets: N/A

Overall quality of living conditions: Good, clean, everything in working order

Home Décor: Minimal, but dark colors and low lighting

Important features of the home: A horseshoe hung above the front entrance, left there by her grandmother.

Type of Vehicle: Emerald green Volkswagen New Beetle with seafoam detailing

Age of Vehicle: Made in 2001

Defining characteristics of the vehicle: A custom interior change- the front passenger seat flips up to reveal a secret compartment. There’s a single daisy flower decal near the license plate

Quality of Vehicle: Older but still going strong

Additional information: The Beetle belonged to Alyssa Shaw originally, and was left to Ash by Camilla Shaw.

PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS:

Marital Status: Single

Significant Partner(s): (Future partner) Harley Amin Fadel

How did they meet partner: You’ll just have to read the book for that.

Nickname for Partner: Lee

Previous romantic partners: None of significance

Important family:

Mother: Abigail Hayes

Age: 56

Living or deceased: Living

Mother’s occupation: Military Surplus Store Manager

Father: Jack Hayes

Age: 58

Living or deceased: Living

Father’s occupation: Tailor

Siblings: Rory Hayes

Describe the quality of relationship with any significant family members: Mother- Not on speaking terms. Father- Not on speaking terms. Rory- Not on speaking terms.

Children: N/A

Friends: Maggie Torres

Best Friend: Formerly, Alyssa “Alice” Shaw

Describe relationship with friend(s): Ash keeps few friends, if any. She self-isolates a lot, especially after Alice’s death. Alice was, as she put it, her “soulmate”.

CHARACTER PERSONALITY AND PSYCHOLOGY:

Any psychological issues or illnesses: Depression, Suicidal Idealization

Meyers Briggs Personality Type: Defender- ISFJ-T

What do they love: Life. Ash loves everything about life and living.

What is their passion: Folklore and linguistics, protecting others, and painting

What do they hate:

What would they die for: The people she loves, the people she protects.

What do they value: Authenticity, Determination, Loyalty, Love, Trustworthiness

Greatest strength: Her determination and strength of will

Greatest weakness or flaw: Her mercurial anger and her loving heart

Their favorite attribute: Her physical ability to help others

Least favorite attribute: Anything about her physical appearance

Biggest secret: Being a metahuman vigilante

Biggest fear: Losing another person she loves

Most likeable trait: Her honesty

Least likeable trait: Her… honesty

How are they perceived by others: Distant and impossible to nail down entirely.

Proudest accomplishment: This implies she’s satisfied with anything she does.

Other accomplishments: Maintaining her honors status at university while patrolling every evening as a vigilante seems like an accomplishment.

Biggest regret: Never telling Alice she was in love with her

Most embarrassing moment: The night her brother caught her trying to have a one-night stand. Trying is the keyword here.

Personality quirks: Makes snap decisions, is a perfectionist, can’t tell a lie to save her own life.

Would they like to change anything about themselves: Everything about herself.

Short term or long term goals: Her only goal is to dismantle the terrorist group Slate and finally get revenge on the man who killed Alice.

Obstacles: A lot of them, and they’re all named after different rocks.

Heroes or role models: Phantom Ox of Montana, and Seraphim and Archangel of New York City

Negative role models: N/A

Biggest life influence: Her parents had the biggest impact on her, followed tightly by Alyssa’s death

PAST HISTORY:

Hometown: Lockbourne, Ohio

Past relationships:

First love: Alice Shaw

First sexual experience: N/A

Major childhood events:

Best memory: Going to the beach in Florida with her parents and brother, and flipping off the camera with him when their father took a picture of them.

Worst memory: The death of Alice, and the helplessness of having to watch her die

Saddest memory: Her fight with Rory that led to the schism in her relationship with her family

Quality of childhood: Really good. Her family was happy and she was well-loved.

Educational experience/level: Junior at University

Significant school experiences: Growing up being “popular” at school- on the softball team, the track team, and a cheerleader, being known by everyone, but everyone being too afraid to be her friend

Special skills or training: Kickboxing, ballet training, Judo, some Muay Thai and Krav Maga.

Hobbies: Painting, reading, researching obscure folklore stories. Is vigilantism a hobby?

DAILY LIFE:

Morning routine: Wakes up at 6:30 am, eats a heavy breakfast, practices her stances and dance positions on days when she doesn’t have early classes, and then heads to school.

Afternoon routine: Spends most of the afternoon at class and the library, or working at the vintage record and book store. Rarely eats lunch.

Evening routine: Eats a heavy dinner, then heads out to patrol. Usually patrols until close to two AM.

Sleep habits: Sleeps between three and four hours a night.

Additional information: On rare occasions, Ash will head out to grab coffee with Maggie and they’ll update each other on their lives. They occasionally go drinking together.

POWERS AND ABILITIES:

Fire Manipulation - Due to an internal process, Ash’s body converts all unnecessary energy into heat. She naturally runs a temperature of about 101 Fahrenheit. Her body can withstand extreme temperatures (she’s handled molten glass with her bare hands before) without any issue, although if she gets too cold, her heat output is drastically lowered. Her heat is tied strongly to her emotions, and thus she burns hotter when angry and grows cold when sad. Through “vents” beneath her skin, she secretes a gas that’s undetectable to the human eye or nose, but that is highly flammable upon contact with air. She can open the “vents” at will and channel fire across her body, which does not burn.

She uses this ability in a multitude of ways, but her two favorites are super heating her hammer and creating hot air vortexes to “fly” inside. She can use heat waves to create mirages, and she can create quick walls of heat that deflect things moving below a certain velocity. This does not deflect bullets. It can slow them, but she can still be shot.

Accelerated Metabolic Rate - Ash has a heightened metabolism, which forces her to eat two to three times the amount of food a normal person needs to survive. While she could survive on the amount of food a normal person eats, she would be unable to use the majority of her abilities. In addition, she sleeps half the time a normal person would and heals at a faster rate. It's not instant, and she can still be injured just as easily as a normal person.

On the flip side, these abilities have left Ash rail thin. She is constantly on the edge of collapse at the end of the day, because she never quite eats enough. Her soft face is graced with heavy under-eye shadows from her pushing her already limited required sleeping to the edge, and her refusal to care for herself properly.

Durability - Through training, and helped by her enhanced body, she is faster and stronger than anyone her size should be. She can take bigger punches than people twice her size, but she suffers just as much damage as they would regardless. She’s more durable than the average human, and can fall as much as four stories without sustaining life-threatening damage. She might break her arm, but she’ll get up and walk away. She can heal fractures in a week, and fully broken bones in the span of a month or two, depending on the break. In the case of some breaks, she still requires medical attention, though she has been lucky to not have that level of damage as of yet.

Enhanced Senses - Although it is to a much lesser extent than her fellow metas, Ash has two enhanced senses. She has what equates to tremor-sense of up to twenty meters. She can sense direction and speed, and it's muffled by the addition of wearing boots. She also has what she refers to as "bird vision". She has telescopic vision and can pick people out for as far as four street blocks.

Vibe Checker - While not a thing she can really prove, Ash has what has been jokingly called the "Vibe Checker 9000". Ash is very good with vibes, and can easily tell when people are lying to her or hiding things. She has "clicks" where she can tell when things have fallen into place the way they're meant to.

EQUIPMENT

A large, solid steel hammer in the form of a meat tenderizer with a full-length handle wrapped in black and red tape. the head weighs thirty-four pounds, and on one side is smooth and flat, while the other side is spiked with quarter-inch diamond-shaped studs. It has a red wristband that Phoenix usually keeps wrapped around her wrist. The hammer has a phoenix and flame print carved into the side. She also has a thigh and waist holster for the hammer, for when she’s flying or not fighting. Some other items on her include a police scanner, zip ties, duct tape, and a first aid kit, all neatly contained in the small backpack she carries with her everywhere she goes.

Her vigilante outfit consists of a black and red ceramic mask designed to look like feathers and a crest, and a black leather and Gore-tex jacket with a deep hood. She wears black Gore-tex pants with armored elbow and knee guards, gathered by her mother from the army manufacturer she works for. Underneath this, she wears a suit crafted with materials from her mother by her father, the tailor. It's simple, red and black, and shows at the edge of her sleeves and when she raises her arms. Her suit and boots are made of Gore-tex Crosstech and Kevlar materials and are made to her exact specifications. The suit is full body and covers all but feet, hands, and head. They took a pretty penny to acquire, but Ash takes safety very seriously.

BACKSTORY:

Ash’s head was spinning when she woke. She felt like a train had hit her head on, her body as achy as if she’d fallen off a building. And she had done that before, so she knew what that felt like. There were hushed voices off somewhere in the distance, but she didn’t care about that. She didn’t care about the bone-deep chill that was suppressing her heat either. Instead, she started tossing her head back and forth as she looked for her friend.

Alice wasn’t immediately within sight. That wasn’t necessarily a red flag, although she would look back on it later and realize it had been intentional. She thought nothing of it and assumed the older girl had simply managed to make it without getting injured this time. She let her eyes close for a moment and fell back unconscious.

Memories swirled through her head, interlaced with dreams. Memories of meeting Alice for the first time, and their first patrol together. Dreams of a hand reaching out to her and a scream. Memories of Alice bringing her meals during finals, of them celebrating her seventeenth birthday. Dreams of Alice’s body lying lifeless on the ground barely out of reach. Memories of the man consumed by shadow as he reached out and touched her, sucking the life and heat from her body.

She bolted awake, jolting upright. It hurt her entire body and she groaned. Hushed voices stopped and then hands were on her face and in her hair.

“Ash? Oh my god, Ash, baby, are you okay?” Her mother’s hands pushed her curls back from her face.

“We thought we were going to lose you, darling.” Her father’s hands tucked her hair back and held it there.

Ash coughed and felt her insides practically crack with the cold that was permeating her body. “Mom, Dad… where’s Alice? Is she okay? What happened to me?”

She saw her mother look over her head at her father, the two exchanging a look. Her mother swallowed, and her rough hands cupped Ash’s face. She had a sad smile on her face. “Your wristband’s automatic monitor sent out an SOS when your body temperature dropped to 80 degrees. We came as quickly as we could. You were so cold when we arrived that we thought you were dead. It wasn’t until we brought you home that you started to warm up. We didn’t know if you were going to make it.”

“Mom, where’s Alice? She was with me.” Her voice had a bit of edge to it, and she grabbed her mother’s hands, moving them away so she could look around their basement that had served as her base of operation for the last few years. The second cot had a body in it, and she saw long raven hair. She breathed out, and she reached her hand out to touch Alice’s shoulder.

“Wait, Ash, don’t–”

Her fingers met Alice’s shoulder and cold radiated outward and into her fingertips. A deep cold, a frostbiting cold. A dead cold. She felt her heart stop and she jerked her hand away before reaching back out and shaking the older girl’s shoulder. “Alice? Alice, wake up.”

Her father reached out and took her hand, pulling it back. She struggled against him, trying to reach for the girl as tears filled her eyes. “No, no, Alice, wake up! Alice, please, I know you can hear me, wake up!”

Her parents began to restrain her, and her father eventually slung her over his shoulder and started to carry her up the stairs. Tears fell from Ash’s eyes, warm, but not as warm as they should have been. She pounded weakly against her father’s shoulders. “No, let me go! Why isn’t she waking up? Why isn’t she waking up?”

“Ash… Alice is dead.”

The words froze her and she stopped moving as they left the basement, Alice’s body finally disappearing from view. Her father gently deposited her on the couch and her mother quickly came in to wrap a blanket around her shoulders, curling the edges in under each other to make sure it was secure.

“I’m so sorry, Ash. I’m so sorry. She was already gone by the time we got there. We couldn’t save her.” Her mother gently rubbed her shoulders through the blanket and shot her father a concerned look. “She’s still cold, Jack. What do we do about this?”

“We just wait. There’s nothing else we can do. We don’t even know what they were fighting.”

Ash’s eyes flashed up and she whispered, her voice hoarse, “It was like he was made of shadow. All the lights went out when he came in, and all the warmth disappeared. He was fast, faster than me. He sidestepped me and then reached out and touched me. I felt all the warmth in my body leave me, Mom. I got dizzy and I fell down. I think Alice tried to bend reality and he got to her first.”

Her voice broke when she said her friend’s name. Not her friend, her soul mate, her better half, the truest match for her in the whole world. She was in love with Alice, she loved Alice like the moon. She was the softness to Ash’s angles, the calm to her fury, and the deep night sky to her midday heat. Ash was the sun, and Alice was the moon, perfectly in balance with each other. Her perfect. Other. Half.

Gone now. Gone now, and leaving Ash all alone again.

“Her mother is going to be here soon, Ash. We called Mrs. Shaw.”

“Camilla is coming?” Before the words were even out of her mouth, there was a knock at the door. Ash felt her blood run even colder than it already was. She pushed the blankets aside as her father went to answer the door. Something stuck in her throat and she gasped in softly as the door opened. Camilla Shaw was a tall and regal version of her daughter, the same raven black hair and green eyes as the girl. Right then, those green eyes were sadder than Ash could ever remember them being.

She stepped inside the door, and even at that distance, she heard her softly say, “Where’s Aisling?”

“She’s over on the couch with Abigail. She only just woke up.” Camilla looked up and directly into the sitting room and into Ash’s soul, it seemed. Her eyes weren’t accusatory like Ash had been expecting. No, they were just sad. The woman stepped into the house and slowly walked to the sitting room, and Ash stood, unstable and clutching her stomach. She closed the distance between them.

“Camilla. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault. I should have- I should have–”

The woman entered Ash’s space and wrapped her arms around her shoulders, pulling her close. Ash felt tears hitting her shoulder, and the woman’s soft voice rang out in her ear. “This isn’t your fault, Aisling. Alice knew the risks. And she loved you dearly. She would be so happy you survived. Please don’t blame yourself.”

Ash immediately burst into tears and held the woman bone-crushingly tight, before letting up so she didn’t hurt her. She heard Camilla gasp slightly before sighing. She was still silently crying into Ash’s shoulder while Ash now bawled openly.

They held each other and cried for a while, and then they all went downstairs. Ash’s father and mother help Camilla carry the cot out to her van. Ash stayed in the room. As soon as they were past the doorway, she walked up to it and went to close it. She made eye contact with her father as he rounded the corner on his way out. He nodded sadly to her.

She shut the door and engaged the lock. A long time ago, they had rebuilt their basement, adding panels of industrial radiant heat transferring panels as the walls. They had exchanged the door for something heatproof and made sure it was a perfect seal.

Ash walked to the middle of the room and sat down. Her breathing, which had finally come under control, hitched and caught in her throat. She let it out. A blast of fire erupted out from her, lifting her hair into wild tangles in the air and blowing her clothing away from her. The cotton clothing caught fire, blazing up around her and falling away into ash. She screamed, her throat tearing and tasting of iron. She screamed and she screamed as the room got hotter and hotter. The plates of the room creaked as they started to radiate the heat into the earth, but not fast enough. The temperature of the room burned hotter than Ash had ever burned before as she screamed and cried out her despair.

Alice was gone.

Alice was GONE.

Ash screamed until she couldn’t scream anymore. Then she curled up on the floor, her vision blurry. She closed her eyes, and they stayed shut. She felt the last bit of strength in her body leave her, and then there was nothing.

Ash was alone again.

#writing #Phoenix Rising #Poppii's ramblings #Ash Hayes #character sheet #original character

10 notes · View notes