#other times the vowels are like shifted around lol

[cerealmonster15]

knowing a decent chunk of Spanish really does help with Portuguese 🙏 but also sometimes in practice I’ll forget what exactly the term is in thinking of so I’ll just say what the Spanish word is cuz it’s all I can remember @-@

[bmpmp3]

i keep choosing like the hardest songs possible to try to learn to make midis for vocal synth covers on. why do i keep doing this to myself. like is that reverb doubling back creating noise, vocal doubling, or a harmony. if its a harmony i'll explode on impact

[gredi-bird]

hi there, fellow ND with a linguistics degree here, I've got an answer for you that might be extremely unsatisfying!

tl;dr: The problem is that pronunciation doesn't come from spelling, it's something we're supposed to automatically pick up, like social cues.

We actually pronounce karaoke as "care-ee-okie" to be more consistent with pronunciation, because spoken and written English are separate. Spoken language is alive and constantly changing, but our writing system is based on standards set before Shakespeare.

Our system of vowels has changed so much since then, spelling is really more of a hint at pronunciation than anything else. Folks that automatically conform with ppl around them often don't ever realize this, leading to things like the "readers accent" in those of us who doggedly tried to sound everything out like we were told to.

pretty color-coded breakdown of how karaoke turned into ke-ri-yo-ki below the break

pls read it i worked way too hard on it lol

Our karaoke and coyote are borrowed from other languages, but as they became familiar they've subtly shifted to fit the pronunciation patterns of modern English.

To do some armchair historical linguistics, let's look at karaoke.

(note: if the phonetic sound spellings don't make sense, try it in an American accent. I didn't do it in IPA to make it accessible to non-linguists, which unfortunately means localizing it)

(note 2: this is a quick and dirty no-research analysis for demonstration purposes. my intent is just to show how sound change works in general. pls be kind to me if you see my mistakes lol)

original Japanese: ka-ra-o-ke

add English stress patterns: KA-ra-O-ke

English vowels have different versions for different stress levels: KEH-ra-O-kuh

but the original "e" at the end is reminiscent of the common "-y" ending: KEH-ra-O-kee

now we've got "a" and "o" right next to each other, which is very Not English, so we add in a sneaky consonant: KEH-ra-YO-kee

but if you say that fast a few times, that de-stressed "a" there gets sort of assimilated into the Y to make a lil internal rhyme, and all of a sudden we've got our familiar: KEH-ree-YO-kee

if you think that's complicated, just be glad we didn't stop at "KEH-ra-YO-kuh".

So we're not saying a Japanese word wrong, it's taking on English sounds bit by bit as it makes itself at home in our language

the more i learn bits and pieces of other languages the more annoyed i get with english

[theboombutton]

Please say more about aspirated medial stops, I was talking with my brother in law the other day about how we (Californians) don't say t's in the middle of words and I'm really curious about why that is and if this is a universal thing in all accents of English now

Disclaimer: I do have a Bachelor's in linguistics, but I got it more than a decade ago so it is possible that some of the information in this post will be misremembered or out of date.

tl;dr

Knowing how to pronounce t in different locations in different dialects is a nightmare. Old-fashioned British Received Pronunciation pronounced t in the middle of words, but there's a UK language drift called T-glottalization in which ts except at the start of words are often being replaced with glottal stops? It's really obvious in lower-status dialects but it's been creeping into RP as well.

American English usually does a weird muscle flex called a "flap" or a "tap" that's something like a really short d, or a single roll of a rolled r. I think there are some UK dialects that use this tap as well.

I belieeeeeve that Indian English usually pronounces word-medial ts, but I haven't run an actual analysis on the applicable coworkers' speech because that'd be kind of creepy?

No idea about Australia or New Zealand.

As far as I know, there's no special reason why these particular drifts are happening. Linguistic drift and accent shifts are just something that happens with living languages. If anything, we have immensely slowed the natural process of language change through the invention and widespread teaching of standardized writing.

Glossary

Sorry, I tried doing this without a glossary but I kept having to do weird info cul-de-sacs to explain myself. I've ordered them according to approximately when they'll come up?

lol I failed so hard at this, about halfway through the post I started using words without putting them in the glossary first and man idk I've been working on this post for 4 hours now and I don't want to go back through and put definitions for some of this shit, sorry

Phoneme - A single language sound, as it is stored in your brain. Represented with slashes around it, e.g. /t/.

Phone - A language sound as it actually comes out of your mouth. Represented with square brackets around it, e.g. [t].

Phonology - The study of speech sounds, from internal representation to external expression, but not including the study of how they are physically created in the mouth (that's phonetics). Not to be confused with phrenology, the racist pseudoscience of head shape.

Word - Can have a few different meanings in a linguistic context. In this post, will usually refer to either a lexeme or a phonological word. You should be able to tell from the context.

Phonological Word - What you probably think of when you think of a "word." A unit of speech that you could naturally pause on either side of, but could not naturally pause inside.

Lexeme/Semantic Word - A single phonological word and its attached meaning; or, phrase of multiple phonological words, which holds a meaning which is different than the sum of its parts. For example, "Carry the bucket" is not a single lexeme; but "Kick the bucket" is.

Voiced/Voiceless - A sound is voiced if you use your vocal cords to make it, and voiceless if you don't.

Stop - Also called a plosive. A stop is a kind of consonant you make by stopping all air flow. The stops English uses are p, b, t, d, k, g, and the glottal stop.

Aspiration - A puff of air following a sound, usually a voiceless stop. In phonetic notation, it is indicated by a superscript h following the consonant, like [pʰ].

IPA - International Phonetic Alphabet. A standard set of symbols based on the Roman alphabet and used to refer to roughly the same sounds regardless of language.

Glottal stop - A stop which is performed not by your tongue, as in most stops, but by your vocal cords. Think of the word "Uh-oh" - the way you completely stop airflow after the "Uh" instead of just letting it flow into the "oh." That's a glottal stop.

Praat - An audio analysis program tailored specifically for viewing waveforms of speech sounds.

INFODUMP TIME

So the thing about saying words is that the ideas of sounds that you have in your head ("phonemes") don't translate one-to-one to the sounds that come out of your mouth ("phones"); and the ways that these sounds get modified vary between different dialects.

Please keep in mind that when you try to speak slowly or clearly, the sounds that you make change. Linguists are primarily interested in natural speech patterns, not what we do when we're trying to enunciate.

Tater-Tot

Let's take the lexeme tater-tot, because it's the first word I can think of that has all 3 of the major weird things that /t/ does that vary by dialect.

Let's start with the word-initial t. Phonologically there are actually two word-initial t's in tater-tot, the one at the beginning of 'tater,' and the one at the beginning of 'tot.' This is because "tater-tot" is two phonological words despite being one semantic word.

In American and British English, we aspirate our word-initial voiceless stops if they're immediately followed by a vowel, which means we pronounce /p/, /t/, and /k/ as [pʰ], [tʰ] and [kʰ] respectively if they're the first sound in a word (and immediately followed by a vowel). This means we add in a little puff of air following the consonant if it's the first sound in the word. In Indian English, they don't do this - a word-initial /t/ is pronounced [t], without the extra puff of air. To American & British English speakers it can almost sound like they're saying [d], because we're not used to hearing a word-initial /t/ without aspiration.

Next we've got a word-medial t, the second t of "tater." Here, Indian and British RP English speakers pronounce it as a plain [t], with no aspiration. American English speakers pronounce it as what's called a tap or a flap, which is sort of like a half-formed [d] but is actually more like a single roll of a rolled r - and so its IPA symbol is [ɾ]. And many less prestigious British dialects, including Cockney and I believe Scouse, replace it with a glottal stop, with IPA symbol [ʔ].

And our final t is the word-final t of tot. This is a tricky one to peel apart. English generally doesn't release word-final stops - that is, you put your tongue in the correct place to stop airflow to create the stop, but you never actually move your tongue out of the way to "release" the airflow you stopped. So the easy read on the word-final t's pronunciation is that it's [t̚], an unreleased t. However, in many dialects and situations /t/ is replaced with or co-articulated with a glottal stop - for example, after an [n] or an [m], /t/ is almost always pronounced as [ʔ] in English. But unreleased stops after an oral vowel are difficult to tell apart, and if the tongue is in t position while the glottis cuts off airflow - I genuinely don't know.

Tuck/Stuck

These are good for a comparison between an aspirated [tʰ] and an unaspirated [t]. In American English, tuck is [tʰʌk] and stuck is [stʌk].

Truck

American English does weird things with syllable-initial /tr/.

I want to introduce you to the "sh" symbol, ʃ. ʃ is a voiceless postalveolar fricative, which means it's created by air rushing through a narrow space when your tongue is behind the alveolar ridge. Incidentally, when you move your tongue from [t] position to [ɹ̠] position (ɹ̠ being the symbol for the version of non-rolled r that most English dialects use), it will naturally create the ʃ sound as it moves.

We have a special letter combination to the phonemic /tʃ/ in English. It's "ch". As in "change."

You almost certainly pronounce "truck" as [tʃɹ̠ʌk] "chruck" and just don't notice.

So what's going on with Martin?

So first off, Jonny is probably wrong about how the Archivist says "Martin." Complete deletion of the r in that position is standard in RP. I haven't fed The Magnus Archives into Praat or anything, so it's possible he's letting a hint of a rhotic accent bleed in to the Archivist's RP - but I really doubt it.

This isn't unusual! It's very common for people's internal concept of what sounds they mean to make, to get in the way of them accurately identifying what sounds they're actually making. No one thinks they've ever said "chruck" until you point it out to them.

I would probably transcribe the Archivist saying "Martin" as [mɑ:tɪn].

Jonny's attempt at saying "Martin" in an American accent was something more like [mɑ˞ɹ̠tʰɪn]. He did a good job of rhoticizing the vowel, but in his focus on the r completely messed up the second syllable.

I'd transcribe my own pronunciation of "Martin" as something like [mɑ˞ɹ̠ʔn]. It's been my observation that t-glottalization in American English is especially common when adjacent to nasals - and if there's one thing American English likes, it's syllabifying liquids in word-final syllables.

OK I've run out of steam now

This was fun. Sorry about the declining quality of explanation. Please feel free to ask more if you dare to reignite the flames of infodump

[frangipanidownunder]

There’s an Australian woman on the morning news here, and every time I hear her speak I think of you (even though I know your Aussie accent can’t be quite that thick 😂) ❤️❤️❤️

G'day, mate! Is she a regular or a guest? Aussies get around and you can always find one on your travels, lol. Although, we are not allowed to leave the country (or our states) at the moment. 😔

My accent is mangled south London, home counties and Australian now, and the way I say some vowel sounds has changed, probably permanently. Yet other sounds remain stubbornly the same.

I have been listening to audiobooks recently amd two have featured Australian minor characters. The narrators, one an American, the other a Brit (Carey Mulligan, divine!) but neither could do the Aussie accent. The American's attempt was atrocious and sounded like a cross between South African, Irish and Cockney. I laughed out loud the first time I heard it and then just cringed. It's hard to pull off. Kate Winslet did a good job in The Dressmaker, but mostly, actors trash it.

Will your accent change in your new home? It creeps up on you in time and certsin words come out of your mouth differently.

I notice Gillian Anderson's American accent is different now to when she played Scully in the OG run. I noticed the change in IWTB, after she'd lived in the UK for a number of years. It's so weird when you try to shift back to how you did talk, and find you can no longer form the sounds in the same way.

Hope you are okay. 💜

[harringrovetrashrat]

hi hi! i'm a new follower! i'm not sure if you're doing request rn or not :) first u are an AMAZING writer i spent all day reading ur works! and second !! i i'm in love w the head cannon of steve having a stutter and i was wondering if you could write more abt that? maybe like billy lives w hopper and they're snugglin in billy's room n hopper comes in and steve gets really nervous and his stutter comes out?? idk lol !! i love ur work tho !! sorry this was so long :)

Hi hi!  Hope you’re still around, since it’s taken ages for me to get to prompts and requests.  Never apologize for a long ask!  I love them and love you and thank you for reading my stuff ;w;

I adore the idea of Steve with a stutter omg,,, I hope you enjoy this!

“So you’re telling me that Batman could beat Superman--”

“It’s not just about strength--”

“Those nerds have gotten in your head, baby,” Billy groaned, rolling on his back to cover his eyes.  Steve shifted, turning around so he could pout into Billy’s shoulder.  Well, more like armpit.

“You’ve said numerous times, it’s not about what you have, it’s about how you use it--” Steve began, but Billy cut him off with a laugh.

“Yeah, about dicks!” Billy pulled Steve in closer with his arm, tangling their legs together again.  “Not about superhero powers.” Steve squirmed, pretending like he wanted to get away, but his arm wrapping around Billy’s middle to hold him closer kinda broke the facade.

“It still applies,” he mumbled into Billy’s skin, lips dragging along and making Billy shiver.  Billy scoffed.

“Not when it’s against Superman.  I mean, come on, the guy only has one weakness, and there’s no way Batman is gonna get his hands on kryptonite.” Their conversation was abruptly cut short when Hopper opened the door, cheeks going pink as the boys froze on the bed.  Billy knew that Hopper wasn’t Neil -- there was a reason he was living with him -- but still.  Getting caught set off all the warnings in his head.  Hopper gave an awkward cough and gestured at the door.

“Uh,” he put his hands on his hips, then crossed them, then put them back on his hips, like he couldn’t find a way to stand in the doorway that didn’t feel imposing or nonthreatening.  It made Billy relax, just a bit.  “So,” Hopper said, drawing out the vowel.  “You two are uh,” he gestured kinda lamely at the two of them, still cuddled together on Billy’s bed.

“That a problem?” Billy bit out.  Hop wasn’t his father, he knew that.  But it wasn’t like Neil had particularly radical ideas about being gay.  Wasn’t like every other cop Billy’d encountered had made sure he knew exactly what they thought of his kind.

“No, no,” Hop said, holding his hands out in surrender and shaking his head.  “Not a problem just, uh, not what I expected, I guess.” He scratched the back of his head.  Steve was still frozen next to Billy, taking controlled breaths.  Billy pulled him a little closer.  “We’ll have to talk about this.” Hop winced at his words, not hearing how they sounded until he said them.  “I mean, you know the three inch rule for Mike and Jane,” he said, face going redder.  It was actually kinda funny.  “But you two are older so, uh--” Hopper stopped then, mouth going in a thin line as he stared to the right of the bed.  “Yeah.  Just wanted to see if you wanted pizza for dinner.  Jane’s been craving it, so I thought since it’s a Friday we could eat out.” Hopper finally, painfully dragged his eyes back to the boys.  “And uh, you can stay for dinner, Steve.  If you’d like.”

“Sure,” he replied, face bright red and body still tense.  “Just no-- no-- no mushrooms, please.” Billy frowned a little, turning to look at Steve’s face.  His eyes were tightly shut, mouth in a thin line.  Hopper nodded, giving Steve a worried glance, before nodding to Billy.

“And no olives or anchovies for you.” He grabbed the door knob, giving another awkward nod to the boys.  “I’ll get you when it’s ready.” And with that, he closed the door until a three inch gap remained.  It kinda warmed Billy’s heart.  Like, a lot.

But he could think about that later.

“You okay?” He murmured against Steve’s temple.

“I know he-- he-- he’s not like our da-- da-- da--” Steve took a shuddery breath, “Dads,” he said, words pushed out of him like they were getting stuck behind his teeth.  “But fuck.  I wasn’t read-- read-- ready.” He let out a whoosh of air, a strong sigh that left his whole body sagged into the bed.  “My heart nearly burst-- burst-- burst outta my chest.” Billy hummed, sad and understanding.

“I know what you mean,” he mumbled.  He ran his fingers through Steve’s hair, pushing it back as he pressed a gentle kiss to the top of his head.  “Can I help at all?”

“You are,” Steve replied with a sigh, content and less shaky than before.  His stutter came out when he was stressed, though he usually had it managed.  The words got stuck in his throat, behind his teeth, on his tongue, and it took a couple of tries to get past a word he got stuck on.  The first time it had happened, after a big fight with his dad, Steve had worried that Billy would make fun of him.  Would think he was dumb or broken.

Which, Billy would never.

But Steve’s dad did a number on him, albeit in a different way than Billy’s.  Left him in need of support and unconditional emotional love.  And, well, Billy wasn’t gonna say no to providing that to Steve.

“It was kinda funny though,” Billy finally said.  “God, I’ve never seen Hop so red.” That made Steve snicker, moving so he could actually see Billy’s face.

“I thought he was gon-- gon-- gonna like, try and have a talk right then,” Steve whispered.  “And, no offense, I definitely would have-- have-- have tried to leave.”

“So would I,” Billy replied, poking at the soft part of Steve’s belly until he was batting at his hand.  “You should have seen him when Jane asked about babies.”

“Now, I’d actually pay to see that.”

[purplesurveys]

1131

survey by lilprincess

Approx. Time you began this survey: 6:46 on a Wednesday evening.

Describe your mood right now: Erm, a bit exhausted because I just ended a work shift; but content for the same reason. Right now I’m simply looking forward to dinner and crashing on the couch or my bed, wherever I feel like sleeping tonight.

Spell your first name without vowels: Rbn. Let’s just also remove y for this one.

Age you will be on your next birthday: 23.

Zodiac Sign: Taurus.

Do you believe what your horoscope says about your sign? I do not believe in astrology whatsoever.

What state/region do you live in? Somewhere in the Philippines somewhere close to Metro Manila.

Height: Like 5′1″ ish. I had a massive growth spurt in 4th grade that also ended in 4th grade, which will always be a funny story to tell people lmao. I went from being placed at the back of the class line to the front really quickly.

Do you smoke? Super occasionally. My last cigarette was like...all the way back in February last year. It was easier to hide the smell around my family before, but because my parents and siblings have mostly been staying at home in the last year it would be so easy to weed out the smell. I never feel like smoking anyway since I vape, so there’s been no reason to seek it out.

Do you drink? Yeah, sometimes socially and sometimes on my own if I wanna unwind and feel a lil buzz come through.

What's your ethnic background? Southeast Asian, specifically Filipino.

What's your religious background? Technically my ~background~ would be Catholic since I was born and baptized in that faith, but I’ve long let go of this. Excluding one very brief period in high school, religion was something I never held much belief and faith in, even if I've been taken to literally every Sunday mass for the last 23 years and even if I was enrolled in Catholic school from preschool to high school.

What's your natural hair color? Black.

What;s your natural eye color? Dark brown, almost black.

Do you have any bad habits you want to break? I do overtime work a lot but used to seldom file it on our company shift log sheet because I get shy that they must think I’m doing it just to be paid more, lol. I’m starting to file them every time I do OT though because fuck it, pay me.

Name a few of your positive habits. I like that I always find a way to meet deadlines. I like that I’m selfless, even though some would see it as a flaw. I’d rather do too much than say I never did anything at all.

Have you ever lived in a foreign country? No, the most I’ve done was travel to one for a week.

Did you vote in the Nov. 6 2012 presidential election? No because I am not American -___- The last election that took place before I was eligible was in 2010, and had I been able to vote then, I would’ve given mine to Gibo Teodoro, who I believe was the most qualified at the time.

Are you even eligible to vote? Yeah, I’ve been for the last 5 years. I’ve voted twice - once for the presidential elections back in 2016, and the next was for the senatorial elections in 2019.

Are you right handed or left handed? Right-handed.

When you write, is your penmanship usually neat or do you tend to scribble? It starts off neat for the most part, but it gradually gets messy and becomes more like a scribble if we’re talking about writing several essays in one sitting, which was usually the case in my exams in college.

Have you ever experienced an accident? (of any type): Sure, I’ve been in car accidents before. I’ve also been shocked once.

Do you have/want children? They would be nice to have, yeah. 

Are you environmentally conscious? For the most part, yeah. But there are some things that can’t be helped, like me driving. Unless the government does something about the shitty public transport system that we have and have had for decades, I refuse to take it.

What's your favorite mode of transportation? Like I said, my own car. If I’m traveling, by plane.

Do you prefer 80's - 90's music compared to today's music? Eh, not at all. I prefer music produced these days.

Are you more of an introvert (quiet/shy), or extrovert (social butterfly)? I’ve been more of an extrovert in the last few years but I will always be shy at first upon meeting new people, like that will never change. I warm up a lot quickly now, though.

What's your favorite emoticon? :)

Do you miss the good old days of hand-written letters? I caught the super super super last part of this era, so I didn’t even get to experience it. I know snail mail was still kind of a thing when I was a kid, but at the same time that was happening my mom was also already using email to keep in touch with my dad, so.

Nowadays, though, when I do write letters to loved ones, I will still prefer to make handwritten ones, especially for a significant other or best friend. I don’t think I’ve ever sent out a computerized long letter.

Do you enjoy receiving or giving more? Giving, but it’s nice to be treated too sometimes.

Are you good at keeping secrets? Sure.

Do you take or give advice more often? I don’t usually get into situations wherein I’d have to do either, but I think I’ve been asking for advice more, especially over the last few months.

Do you have your driver's license? “I got my driver’s license last week, just like we always talked about...” Haha this question made me sing a bit. Anyway, yeah, I got it shortly after I turned 18 since I needed to quickly learn before college started.

Would you rather be poor & happy or rich but miserable? Rich but miserable. Soz but I’d solve 4854983594857 of my problems if I never had to worry about money.

Have you ever had a pregnancy scare? Never.

Have you ever blocked someone on Facebook? Probably not blocked, but I’ve unfollowed some current Facebook friends and unfriended others entirely.

Do you think recreational marijuana should be nationally legalized? Idk much about the topic since it’s taboo enough where I live, but sure, I guess?I haven’t heard one bad word about the effects of marijuana.

Describe your perfect first date. I’ve never really had a first date, but I imagine an ideal one would be pretty lowkey, just a stroll around a nice city and maybe have fancyish dinner somewhere.

Have you ever been high? Nope.

Have you ever watched a NC-17 rated film? Sure. A good handful of Kubrick films pass for NC-17, right? I’d be surprised if they weren’t, lol. I’ve been scarred by some of them for sure.

If you ever become reincarnated as an animal, what would you want it to be? A dog.

Do you remember where you were/what you were doing on September 11, 2001? No; I was 2 years old. I did ask my parents where they were in those moments, and my mom understandably missed most of it since the entire thing unfolded in the late evening in the Philippines. The only thing she can recall was being insanely worried for my dad, who had just started to work in the US back then.

Do you ever wish you were of a different nationality/religion? Yeah, to a certain extent, just because the political and socioeconomic situation here is very messy and it doesn’t really give us the nicest reputation in front of the world. I’m proud of my Filipino culture and heritage though.

Are you more of a junk food addict or health nut? Health nut is the last thing anyone should be calling me. But I’m not so much a junk food addict either? I do like spoiling myself with food, but I still monitor my intake.

Do you believe Antarctica should be considered the 7th world continent? Isn’t it already though?? We’ve always been taught there were 7 continents and Antarctica is one of them lol.

Describe your own sense of humor in 1 word: Gen-Z, if that counts as one word.

Have you ever quoted the Bible (or any other Holy Book)? If I ever did it was probably meant to be sarcasm.

Have you ever completed a Sudoku puzzle? No. Never figured out how to play it either.

Would you rather be a nuclear physicist or marine biologist? Marine biologist. That’s one step closer to one of my loves, biology. Plus I was never any good with physics, so.

Do you have a deep, dark secret you're hiding from every one? I guess.

Would you rather be able to soar like an eagle or swim like a dolphin? I’d make my childhood self happy and go with flight.

If you wanted to learn a foreign language, what would it be? Korean so I can finally stop reading subs, hahah.

Are you bi-curious? No.

Did you watch the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon more as a kid? The Nickelodeon cartoons were far more interesting to me. I think I only got into Disney when I got a little bit older, once I was able to appreciate the more mature content in shows like The Suite Life, That’s So Raven, etc. But for the most part our TV was always tuned into Nick Jr., Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron and the other Nick shows.

Name 5 films that were made the year you were born: American History X (great watch), The Truman Show, Mulan, La Vita e Bella if I’m not mistaken (one of my faves, no matter how gut-wrenching it is), and Shakespeare in Love.

Did you have a lot of friends in high school? Yes, eventually I did.

Do you rely more on the newspaper, Internet or TV as your news source? Social media these days since I find that online writers are far more discerning in their reporting than TV anchors, who stay neutral at best.

True or false: Bigger is better. Very vaguely put, but not always, I guess.

Do you think religion is the primary cause of war? No? There’ve been plenty other reasons for war.

What's your favorite pizza topping? ...Cheese.

Think of your wardrobe. What color do you wear the most? It’s still black, I think.

Have you ever been to a planetarium? Just once, on a middle school field trip. I’d love to come back, though.

Do you feel like you connect more with animals or other people? I don’t get to be with animals a lot other than my dogs, so I’ll go with people.

Do you feel like sometimes you have to lie in order to protect yourself? Wow so dramatically put haha but yeah, I suppose it does feel that way sometimes.

How often do you exercise? Literally never. I’ve stopped working out this year since I didn’t see the point, and I’ve stopped feeling like I had to ‘get back’ at my ex just by getting a more toned figure. I’m totally at peace with how my body looks, plus I never want to give up on my favorite foods and snacks lol so there’s that.

Can you swear in a different language? Putangina mong bobo kang gago ka. That’s three for ya.

Do you think teachers/doctors deserve to get paid more than pro athletes? Everyone deserves to be paid fairly to the point that no comparison should be necessary, period.

From a scale of 1- 5, you would rate this survey: Erm, a 4.5. I had to delete some questions I didn’t feel comfortable answering or that I found a little meh, but the rest I fairly enjoyed.

Do you think most of these questions were more original or more ordinary? It’s a bit in between.

Approx. time you completed this survey: Hahahahah 10:38 PM. I took a million breaks.

[coraxaviary]

Spier(s)

Summary: A discussion about the name Speirs, and what it implies.

Word Count: 1.5K

Author’s Note: At end

Warnings: Basically none.

Taglist: I don’t think this kind of fic is what taglists are for

.

“So uh, you ever wonder why his name is Speirs?” Skip says from one of the barn beams, far above. He has a single straw of hay between his teeth, and he talks around it, slurring slightly.

“Whatcha mean?” responds Malarkey, who lazily cranes to look up at Skip, whose legs are dangling so he can’t see his face. Malarkey absently worries his rifle strap between his fingers, and lays farther back into the hay. “You mean his first name?”

“Nah, his name. Speirs,” says Skip back with overly hollowed-out vowels, and he spits out the hay. “Like, why?”

“Don’t think it does good to wonder anything ‘bout him,” says Penkala, sitting against the wall, fiddling with a field ration package. The sky is darkening outside, and there are only a few rays of sunlight that slip through the cracks between the wooden slats in the barn. Soon there would be none. Penkala moves into the spotlight of one last white streak of light, and makes small foil crunching sounds until the bag opens.

“His name is Speirs. But, like,” says Skip, echoing from above. “Two of ‘em. Two Speirs.”

“It’s not spelled the same,” says Malarkey. The barn door creaks open, and the three men see a pair of silhouettes slip inside and close the door.

“Hey fellas,” says a strange voice. It’s not exactly deep, but it is familiar.

“Sir?” says Penkala, straightening in sudden fear.

“Hell naw,” says Luz, bursting out in laughter. The other tall man -- Toye, it seems -- laughs quietly behind Luz. “It was that good?”

“Yeah,” says Penkala shortly, and he goes to sit back down in the hay.

“Hear y’all talking about Speirs,” says Luz loudly, and all the other men shush him. “Not like he’s gonna appear if ya say his name.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” says Skip.

“How’d ya get up there?” asks Toye, looking up at Skip, who is swinging his legs but not really able to do anything but sit.

“Ova there,” says Skip, pointing to a ladder that leads to a shallow loft. “Climbed on the beam.” Skip looks down at the ground, a long distance away. “Maybe I should get back, huh. Should get some sleep.”

Toye doesn’t say anything, just hums in passive agreement. Penkala eats his rations, staring somewhere distant.

“So, whatcha think, Luz?” says Skip, voice moving back eerily in the barn as he scoots along the beam back to the loft. “Why ‘Speirs?’ Why ain’t he named ‘Speir?’“

Malarkey snorts. Penkala chews. Toye moves around fluffing up hay to find a good place to sleep, and Luz shuffles.

“Ain’t names just... passed down?” says Luz. Malarkey mm-hmms in agreement.

“I guess,” says Skip, who is now trying to dismount from the beam and get into the loft, hanging awkwardly with one leg and both arms hooked over the beam, and his other leg -- too short -- scooping for purchase, inches away from the loft floor. He untangles himself, hangs by only his arms, and makes it onto the loft with a hollow bang and a cloud of dust. “But his name. Implies there may be a Speir. A single Speir.”

There’s silence, broken at this point only by Skip thumping down the creaking ladder and Penkala spooning more rations into his mouth with a clack of teeth on metal.

Luz makes a sound of revelation. “I got a story.”

“Thought you were gonna answer my question, Luz, but okay--”

“It’s the answer.”

“Oh, alright,” says Skip, finally on the floor, and he crashes down next to Malarkey, sending flicks of hay into the air. Malarkey coughs, waving a hand uselessly through the dust.

“So, uh,” says Luz. “I read somewhere in an article or something--”

“Didn’t know you read, Luz,” interrupts Malarkey.

Luz continues, unperturbed. “That sometimes you got siblings, like twins or something. But one’a them doesn’t make it. Dies, I think. Can’t exactly remember.”

Penkala shifts uncomfortably, and shoots a glance out a crack in the wooden panels to look in the general direction of Dog Company.

“So, like, inside the mom, like... the womb,” says Luz, “One’a them eats the other. And they become, like, uh, one kid.”

There is silence for a few beats.

“You’re saying his name is Speirs because he ate his twin in the womb,” Malarkey says sarcastically, not so much a question as a sarcastic statement of conformation.

Luz nods uselessly in the darkness. “Yeah.”

Malarkey turns to Skip. “Ask dumb questions, get dumb answers,” he says.

Penkala suddenly laughs through a mouthful of food. “So there were two’a them Speirs and then he ate one? He’s actually two combined separate Speirses?”

“Well, where else would he get his creepy personality?” says Luz.

“Hey, he’s not creepy,” interjects Toye. “Just got some dark rumors around him.”

“Rumors which are based on reality,” says Malarkey. “Remember I told you, when I was walkin’ away after he handed ‘em all--”

“Yeah, yeah, you told us this story a thousand times, Malark,” says Skip. “But I mean, it would explain some things if he did eat a twin in the womb--”

“Wait, wait,” says Penkala. “You got this all wrong. For Speirs to have his name, it got passed down by his dad, right?”

The men chorus a series of mm-hmms, except for Malarkey, who sighs.

“So it was someone way before his dad. The original Speirs. The original Speirs started out a Speir, and it was him who ate his twin.”

“Hey, this is all based on an assumption,” Malarkey begins, sitting up straight with his M-1 in his lap. “I’m sure Luz isn’t even right about eating babies. It sounds like bullshit news to me--”

The barn door creaks, and all the men go quiet, eyeing the door with trepidation. It’s someone tall and straight-backed, an officer. Toye stands up, and all the others do too, until a voice from the door tells them to go back to whatever they were doing.

“Just checking up,” says Winters with a comforting nod that is lost in the dark to half of the men. He gives no sign that he had heard their conversation, except perhaps a slightly raised eyebrow. The men who notice tell themselves that they are overreacting. Winters wouldn’t believe they were seriously discussing the eating of babies, would he? He drums on the door with his fingers, and starts to close it. “Goodnight, boys.”

“ ‘Night, sir,” the enlisted men say, and the door shuts with a creak and a small thud. The men stay in silence for a while, thinking, and the sound of crickets rises in the distance. Someone shifts against the hay, and Penkala rustles with the last of his ration pack, and clangs around with his spoon.

“Hey, guys?” says the voice of Skip into the silence. Malarkey groans, already thinking he knows what Skip is going to say. If it isn’t what he predicts, it would probably still be a brain-dead statement anyway. “If Speirs ate the other Speir and that’s why his name is Speirs, then did Winters eat a Winter?”

The silence that follows is short and shocked. Penkala and Luz gasp momentarily, and Toye sputters out a sound of indignance.

“Oh my God,” said Malarkey, and he settles back deeper into the piles of hay, trying to close his eyes and drift off to sleep.

The sounds of argument drift far over the barn and out past the thin wood slats, carried by the cold French wind eastwards over Dog Company. Ronald Speirs, at the edge of his company, sitting by himself with a can of rations, wonders what the men in the barn are talking about.

He lights a cigarette for himself, and takes a drag, feeling the burn in his lungs and the smoke going down and then circling in his sinuses when he blows it out through his nose. Someone on the border of Easy stumbles by in the deep, murky darkness, and he swears to himself, kicking at the rock in his path. Speirs can’t tell who it is, but he still keeps his cigarette case in his hand, knowing the low flame-colored glow of his lit one will illuminate a small area in the relative dark.

“Cigarette?” asks Speirs into the impenetrable black of night.

“N-no, sir,” gets out the man, who lingers for a second before absconding westwards into the safety of his company and the seeing eyes of the watchers stationed around the border.

Speirs almost smiles to himself, tucking the case back into his pocket, and he enjoys the cigarette while it lasts. It doesn’t last long, like most things, and he drops it onto the ground and watches it sputter before grinding it into the dirt with the heel of his boot.

He listens to the drifting conversation of the East men in the barn until it becomes wavering static, and the sky and its stars become too bright.

And he thinks briefly of his family -- Mother, Father, and the four others. He lays down in the grass and dirt, and then thinks of the one who had been.

It is not now, and yet a part of him. He smiles, eyes sparkling and teeth gleaming, and he lets himself dig deep, for a millisecond, for the other.

And then they sleep.

.

Hi, this is a 2:00 am random idea that me and my sister were scream-laughing about: Why is Speirs plural? And what do the men think about it?

I don’t usually write in present tense, but today it kind of came out and I think it lends the prose a kinda weird, immediate, present feel, kinda like you enter the void of starless night where you encounter Keter-class abominations and eldritch terrors for one dream a day and then this strange universe that contains a nightmare Speirs is what plays in your head lol

As always, this is not meant to reference the real historical soldiers. This is based on the fictionalized HBO versions.

I made art for this, by the way.

.

[starwarsfic]

I.47

Originally posted September 20, 2020

Summary: Jango has an unusual stowaway.

Details: Mandalorian and Sith Empires AU. Shadow Obi-Wan AU.

xxxxxx

They didn't realize anyone else was on the ship until they had left the system, but in retrospect Jango assumed that's the way it was suppose to be.

He even recognized them--one of the less annoying Sith Lords he regularly saw during his talks with them.

"Kenobi, what is the meaning of this?"

The Sith was very calm, considering they had a dozen supercommandos pointing blasters at them and didn't even have their lightsaber in hand.

"I'm smuggling myself out of Sith territory, my dear." Their accent slipped, something Jango had noticed a few times, from the harsh vowels of Mustafar to the softer lilt of Coruscant, a mark that a Sith had once been a Jedi.

"And why," Myles looked about two seconds from pulling the trigger regardless of what Kenobi said, because there was a Sith on their ship and none of them had even known until now, "would you be doing that?"

Kenobi gave one of the charming smiles they were known for, as they worked a room and flirted with whatever officials the Sith wanted to distract. Jango had been on the other side of that look, had once tracked Kenobi all night and realized he got it more than anyone else in the room. He'd figured they liked the challenge he represented and he wasn't about to say no to their attention, even if he wouldn't fuck a Sith under any circumstances.

"Ah...I'm defecting?"

"Defecting. A darjetii is defecting."

They looked to the side, seeming to debate about something, before turning their attention back to Jango. "Actually...an undercover Jedi is defecting."

Their private comms erupted with chatter as his team reacted to that. He forced himself to stay calm, as his father had taught him. Jango was the heir apparent to the Mandalorian Empire, he had to always represent them as well as he could, he could handle this, too.

"Your cover was blown?" It was the most likely solution he could think of, though why a Jedi would come up with a story about defecting as opposed to just sneaking back to Republic territory was still a question.

Kenobi rolled their eyes. "My cover is airtight, because as far as the Sith are concerned, I didn't need much of one." They paused, then continued when they most likely realized they'd grill them for more information, anyway. "Xanatos was a Jedi, as well. He was...the equivalent to my older brother. And the equivalent to our father is...not a good man. A very effective Jedi, but not someone that should continually be trusted with children." The Mandalorians shifted, not particularly liking that idea. "He did something awful to me, at the end of my apprenticeship. I was recruited by the Shadows and we decided to use that to give me an excuse to run to Xanatos."

That was smart, if it was true. Ruthless in a way the Jedi were known for--not caring if they were taking advantage of their younger members, if they were abusing them.

Still... "Then why are you defecting?"

"I haven't heard from my handler in months. I've attempted using the emergency codes I was given for such a situation and...nothing. They're supposed to be in regular contact with the Temple and if something happens to them, the Temple is supposed to find a way to get that information to me and either pull me out or set me up with a new handler." Their expression soured. "Or, that's what I've been told. This is my first mission for them."

"They sent you undercover with the darjetiise as your first mission?" Arla's voice dripped with a disdain Jango agreed with.

Kriffing Jedi. Kenobi, if they were as human as they looked, couldn't be more than their mid-twenties and Jango had seen them around the Sith for at least two years. That was ridiculously young for the sorts of things they had to face, had to do as even a fake Sith.

From the look on Kenobi's face, they agreed with Jango. "So, as you can see, I've decided to...cut my losses. I have no interest in actually being a Sith and the Jedi have abandoned me." If Jango hadn't been watching them so closely, he thought he would have missed the flash of vulnerability that etched across Kenobi's eyes. "I've seen the way you interact with the Sith and I've heard a lot about you. I can't risk staying in Sith territory or returning to the Republic once the Jedi find out I skipped out."

"You really want to become a Mandalorian? You're not just planning on using us until you can get away at a port and head home?"

They shook their head. "I don't...there's nothing left for me back there. Nothing but duty. That's why Xanatos believed me so easily." Their hand motioned to their side--a pouch on their belt. "I have information, the data I was collecting for the Jedi."

There was a lot he still had to find out, but that should be handled by experts, not Jango. If Kenobi was telling the truth, and he thought they could come up with better lies than this if they had to, he couldn't deny them passage, couldn't, as a Mandalorian, prevent anyone from their cin vhetin.

"You'll hand over all your weapons and information, you'll be watched at all times," he stated, only realizing just how tense Kenobi was when they visibly relaxed. "You'll be shackled, you won't make any attempts to remove them." A nod in agreement, then Jango added, partially to see how Kenobi would react, "You'll stay in my room during the night cycles so I can keep an eye on you."

Kenobi's raised an eyebrow, gaze heating up. "I assure you, you won't regret keeping me around."

Maybe Jango had other reasons to want to trust Kenobi, but he knew himself well enough to give it a shot.

xxxxxx

A/N: Idk kinda convoluted lol

[manrocket-mo]

Momma’s Home - Morgan Rielly

requested: yes (by anon) and no (lol) 

prompt(s): “Daddy Mo and his babies picking mommy up from the airport” + my extraneous twist

word count: 1,822

author’s note: I’ve been trying to crank out Mo content for you all! Hope you enjoy! I have another one coming tomorrow leading up the Raptors game and Leave the Light On (Part 4) on Tuesday! Leave me some Mo asks, blurbs, etc. and I’ll be answering some tomorrow night during game 5!

Morgan had always been so supportive of your professional development, from the time you were in university to when you were working in the industry to now when you had expressed interest in attending a conference that would sharpen your skills and reignite the passion for marketing. You were three years out of the industry, taking a break to raise a family of your own but that didn’t mean that you didn’t want to continue to grow in your field or at least just catch up.

Once Morgan caught wind of it and heard just how passionate you were and how sad you were that you couldn’t go, he convinced you otherwise. He loved watching you learn and grow and thrive and this was no exception. He was willing to do whatever it took to send you to that conference.

However, that meant that for the first time, you’d have to leave your two babies for more than 24 hours at a time. Yeah, you were used to having Nana and Papa take them for sleepovers on the weekends every now and then but you don’t think you’ve ever truly been a far distance away where you couldn’t just drive over to pick them up. This trip would require you to be in Indianapolis for four days. And just the thought of being in another country away from your boys hurt your heart. Lukas was only two and a half, very mobile and very much living up to the Terrible Twos face and Levi was only six months old and highly dependent on his momma. You weren’t sure how it was going to work but Morgan shushed you, booked your plane ticket and walked you to security boys in tow and sent you on your un-merry way to the US.

Four days later, you returned to Vancouver inspired and full of knowledge and passion but missing your boys most of all. Morgan tried not to overwhelm you with videos and texts of what they were up to during your seminars but you couldn’t help it when you opened those sporadic messages. Seeing their little faces climbing all over your husband, spitting up on him and making a mess made you miss them all the more. The FOMO was very much real.

So as soon as you got off the plane, you couldn’t help but sprint through the airport, your backpack bobbing behind you, in search of your little family. You were hoping to beat the customs line and when you finally did after the longest line you’ve ever seen in YVR, you took off for the escalators.

You couldn’t even describe the giddiness, the aching in your heart, the want to just be home to snuggle with your family.

And when you saw them, at the base of the elevator, you heart burst. Levi was all snuggled up in Morgan’s arms and Lukas was bouncing on his feet with a “Welcome Home, Momma” sign, written sloppily in Crayola marker, by Morgan’s side and you knew instantly that this was where your heart belonged.

“My boys!” You squealed, running up to where they stood and scooping up your son and pressing a big kiss to his cheek.

“Momma, momma,” Lukas chanted, getting your attention. “Miss you!”

You smile at him and dropped another kiss to his forehead, melting as your little man snuggled up into you. “Missed you, Lulu!”

And then you look to your husband and your heart bursts with thankfulness and gratitude. He’s holding Levi’s tiny baby hand in his with a bouquet of peonies outstretched in your direction.

“Welcome home, momma,” he smiles, his arm winding around your waist and pulling you in for a kiss. “We missed our girl, didn’t we, Levi!”

You throw your arms around his waist and hugged him to you. “Missed my boys more than anything in the world,” you mumble into his neck. “I’m so glad to be back home with you.”

He presses one last kiss to your temple before stepping back. “Let’s get your bag off the belt so we can get you home for a good cuddle session, k?” You let a wiggley Lukas down and nod, extending your arms for your baby boy, letting Morgan go to grab your bag off the revolving belt, your two and a half year old in tow.

You cuddle Levi to your chest, his head tucked tiredly under your chin. You press a gentle kiss to his tuft of blonde hair and enjoy his soft breaths against your skin as you rub up and down his back comfortingly. “Momma’s back, baby boy.”

You lament on the long weekend behind you and although you had the best time, learning from the greats in the marketing industry and teaming up with the up and coming from around North America, you knew that the workplace was no longer for you, at least for now. You belonged here, with your youngest baby cuddled up in your arms, watching as your husband swung your toddler up and onto your luggage, rolling him along, squeals of excitement in the air. You knew you belonged with them, no matter where that was: at home, at the airport, in Vancouver, in Toronto, at the rink, on vacation. With your boys, that’s where you wanted to be.

“Ready to go?” Morgan asks as he nears you and you nod, taking his hand in yours and walking toward the parking garage.

After tucking in the boys into their car seats, you got into the front seat.

“Mo, is this Ice Cap for me?” you wonder, staring down at the frozen beverage sitting in the cup holder.

Morgan joins you in the front seat and grins at you. “Yeah, I had my morning coffees, thought you’d need your caffeine fix, too.”

You brighten up, taking a much needed sip and moaning at the caffeine jolt. “How’d you know I’d need this?”

“Well, Lulu here wanted a doughnut on the way and you know I can’t resist doughnuts...” you roll your eyes but giggle at the admission. “And I remember what you were like after our honeymoon, so...”

“Okay, to be fair, we were flying from Italy. The jet lag was insane.”

“...And every time we fly from Toronto to Vancouver...” he laughs and you shove at his arm.

“Shut up and just take me home, Mo,” you grumble, taking another sip. “Can’t even save me a donut...”

“What do you think I am, a monster?” your husband challenged, reaching back and throwing a paper bag your way. “Chocolate frosted with sprinkles, baby. Your favorite.”

“Lulu’s favorite, too!” Your toddler chimes in from his car seat.

“You boys are buttering me up... What’s going on?” you mumble, narrowing your eyes.

“We just miss momma, don’t we?”

Levi’s coos fill the car as if agreeing with Mo and you all laugh.

“But I guess you’ll just have to see when you get home.”

When you got home, the scene before you was enough to drive you to tears. You walked into the entryway of your home with your baby boy sleeping soundly in your arms to a huge banner strung across the foyer reading “Welcome home, momma!” in paint, Levi and Lukas’ hand and footprints making all the vowels.

“Oh my god, Morgan!” You cried. “This is too sweet! I can’t imagine how hard it was!”

“Oh, yeah. Lulu over there finished his handprints and took off to the nearest white wall he could. Grabbed him last minute.” But you were thankful nonetheless. “Come on, got another surprise for you!”

Morgan grabbed you by the hand and led you into the study.

“What could you—“ and you were speechless.

What once was the room that held Morgan’s extra gear was now an actual study, outfitted with books and decor in the built ins, a brand new desk and sitting area. It was straight out of a catalogue.

“My mom helped me clean and decorate it. Thought, you know, since you’re serious about going back to work that you’d need an office of your own.”

“Morgan, that’s not—“

“I already have some interior designers back scheduled to visit the house in Toronto in a few weeks. It should be all done before we get back!”

“Mo...” you didn’t know what else to do but hug your husband, so you did. You held him tight, careful not to disturb your son sleeping in your arms. “Thank you. Thank you.”

“Anything for my girl,” he whispers against your head. “Come on, I got dinner ready. Let’s go, you must be starving.”

And you were. You scarfed down the home cooked meal like it was your last, the lasagna rich and warm in your belly.

“Thank you, Momo,” you murmured, resting against your husband, his arm wound around you as you laid back and watched Moana for what was probably the hundredth time with your boys all cuddled up on the couch.

“For what?” he asks, absentmindedly, one hand playing in your hair, the other cradling Levi.

“For this. The trip, the conference, taking care of the boys on your own while I was away, dinner, the sign, the study! This was all too much!”

His gaze shifts to you tenderly and he watches you tenderly. “You spend all your time supporting me and my career and sacrificing everything... that this, this is the very least I can do and the very beginning of a lifelong devotion to thanking you for what you do for me, for us... I can’t imagine what it must be like to give up something you love, your dream job and I don’t want you to—“

“Morgan...”

“You had fun, right? This weekend, you had fun?”

“I mean, yeah. I had fun, I learned a lot. But, Morgan... that was my past life. This, here, with you and the boys... this is where I belong. There is nowhere else I’d rather be.”

The way he looked at you... you didn’t think he could ever look softer, more tender, more in love.

“I love our babies, our family more than any job, any position, anything else. I will always pick our family over anything. Momma is the title that was meant for me.”

And in the dimness, the flickering of the television with Moana score playing in the background, your children surrounding you, Morgan leaned in to press a kiss to your lips.

“I love you, Y/N.”

“I love you, too, Momo.”

And with that, you snuggle up, pulling the blanket further over you and Luke who was cuddled into your side.

“But Mo?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“I can take a trip every now and then if that means coming back home to this sweetness every time... and to dinner and a clean house and a chocolate frosted sprinkle doughnut.”

Mo chuckles at your statement, presses a kiss to your temple and murmurs, “that can be arranged.”

[imuybemovoko]

Some info about Aylaan

Since I use some of this conlang in my title thingy and the banner image, I figure it might as well be the first one I start to explain. 

Most of my conlangs are a part of a setting I’ve been slowly developing for years that’s an alternate future of Earth where some apocalyptic shit happens and it gets so bad that some people lose their spoken languages and replace them a few generations later. I might explain that more in a different post. Aylaan is a descendant of one of the languages that finds its origin in this time. I’ll discuss it at the time of humanity’s largest interstellar war to date, which is a war between a colony that fell victim to a cult’s control and the rest of our inhabited stars. It’s the most commonly spoken language in a large part of North America, centered around the southwestern United States but extending as far as the Mississippi River. Aylaan is written with the Hacik alphabet, which first came into use sometime shortly after the Great Collapse. I don’t have a good digital representation of it yet (the sample in the banner image was hand drawn in paint.net) so maybe I’ll discuss it in more detail later. The grammar gets kinda crazy so I’ll probably discuss it one piece at a time over a bunch of different posts. For now, I’ll just cover the phonology and the romanization and some other basics. 

Consonants: 

/m n ŋ p t k q t͡s t͡ʃ pʼ tʼ kʼ t͡sʼ t͡ʃʼ ɸ θ ð s z ʃ ʒ x ʕ h r l j/ <m n ň p t k q c ć ṗ ṭ ḳ c̣ ć̣ f þ ð s z ś ź ç ɣ r l y> /m n ŋ p t k q l/ may be geminate between syllables ...I go back and forth on whether to list [w] as a phoneme and the diphthongs involving it as vowel-consonant sequences or to list it as an allophone of /ʊ/ when it occurs in diphthongs. In my documentation I use w in the romanization but I go back and forth between w and u in actual practice, so a sequence [aw] may be written <aw> or <au>. I suppose I’d be more inclined to analyze some dialects one way and others the other way, there’s a bit of variation in how vowels are treated. Yes I romanized x as ç, it was an early aesthetic choice which I’m less sure about now but haven’t bothered to change, don’t @ me lol

Vowels:

Vowels vary somewhat by dialect. In most cases the vowels can be listed as simply /a e i o u/ with long and short variations, but in the standard dialect, short vowels have quality differences too and in western dialects, the quality distinction is used to the exclusion of length. (The further east you go, the more it relies on length, until in the far east, the quality shifts haven’t actually taken place and the sole distinction is length.) I will therefore list the vowels as they occur in the standard dialect: /a ɒː ɛ eː ɪ iː ɤ oː ʊ uː/ Diphthongs may only form in short vowels, and only pairs of short i or short u and a different vowel may exist (hence my indecision when it comes to listing these as vowel pairs or sequences of a consonant and a vowel.) I’ve used w and j in the phonemic transcription here, and I’ve also used the short-vowel qualities, mostly for my sanity. /ja aj jɛ ɛj jʊ ʊj jɤ ɤj wa aw wɪ ��w wɤ ɤw wɛ ɛw/ <ya ay ye ey yu uy yo oy wa aw wi iw wo ow we ew>

Primary stress falls on the first long vowel or diphthong, before the first geminate consonant, or, if none are present, the initial syllable. 

Syllables can have an onset containing up to two consonants which either follow a sonority hierarchy or are a reversal of a voiceless stop /p t k q/ and a sibilant fricative /s ʃ/, i.e. a cluster like /st/ and an onset of up to two consonants which also follow sonority hierarchy. This may result in gemination if the onset of one syllable and the coda of the previous match and are single consonants. Long vowels never precede geminates. 

Word order is verb-initial with descriptors that follow what they modify, indirect object (...usually) last, and some complexity involving obviation and a person hierarchy. Basically, the lower one on the hierarchy must be after the higher one in the word order, then agent and patient is marked by direct or inverse voice. The lower in the hierarchy is typically marked with an obviate, but a special proximate marker only occurs in inverse voice. Subject pronouns most often drop in direct voice. I’ll give an example of each with the same nouns and verb: Mene þaayareň. seek-1S ring-OBV Menoþelir ňa e þaayareň. seek-3S-INV PROX 1S ring-OBV “The ring seeks me.” Since an inanimate object seeking someone is unusual, this takes a lot of funky marking to indicate that this is actually what’s happening. This is of course not a full explanation of this system, that would take a lot of space that I don’t want to use here. 

This language has been in progress for close to 15 months I think. It’s the most developed in its family. I started the proto-language sometime early last spring. I have several other languages that are related to this one and I’ve been slowly expanding the family. I’ll showcase its relatives, and my other conlangs, like this at some point.

[sunshineandfangs]

Klarosummer - Lemon Squares || Sauveuse et Bourreau

@klarosummerbingo

Sorry, I was late, but this is my latest entry to “My-Brain-Needs-to-Chill” a memo to myself. 

Warnings: brief but graphic depictions of gore and mentions of abuse.

Klaus narrowed his eyes listening to the fearful and angry mutterings of one of the corner tables. He traced the edge of his brandy glass, not particularly impressed by its strength. Gulping the last mouthful, he set the glass on the bar and sauntered over to the table.

“Why so glum?”

They eyed him warily, noting the higher quality of his clothes. Wondering if he came from the lord’s castle, if he was there to question their recent lack of tribute.

To their noticeable surprise, he instead snagged a nearby chair, pulling it over to sprawl in, knowing it would make him seem less threatening. He could compel the answers from them if he had to, but compulsion was a blunt tool, made far less effective if he didn’t know precisely what he wanted.

And in fact, he didn’t. Klaus had only recently arrived in the little hamlet, intending to pass through on his way to a larger city. But the stench of fear and hate had been near palpable, and he couldn’t help his curiosity.

What manner of monster was tormenting this little town?

---

He raised his eyebrow, allowing his face to portray an air of curious concern. Waited patiently as the table shifted with unease. The silence stretched as the men exchanged a series of looks, before one of them reluctantly started to speak.

“There’s been trouble recently, sir. And if you are wise, you’ll heed our advice and leave this place as soon as you can.”

“Is the concern truly so great that you would advise travelers leave?”

Klaus’ curiosity and intrigue only grew as the men simply nodded solemnly at his words. Little hamlets like these needed some manner of foot traffic to sustain themselves these days, as the exchange of goods became ever more prevalent.

They literally should not be able to turn away strangers, and yet that was precisely what they were attempting to do.

His eyes dilated as his gaze carefully locked with each man in turn, knowing they would close ranks and refuse to divulge whatever secret this town held. Likely afraid that whatever horror had visited them would deter strangers forever. A true death sentence.

“Tell me, what is this cause for concern?”

Klaus felt his eyebrows creep steadily higher as a wild tale unfolded.

---

Three Months Ago

A scream tore through the still morning air, dawn’s first tendrils of light only beginning to creep over the land.

Nearby farmers that had already started their morning stilled in their fields and barns, clenching their pitchforks and hoes as they ventured toward the source of the noise. 

It had been a feminine cry, a woman’s hysterics they were all hoping, even as uneasy shivers crawled down their spines. Even for a woman, that shriek had been terrible, invoking sparks of primal fear.

And they didn’t like that. 

They should have no need to fear anything. Strong and capable as they were, protecting and providing for their women and children.

Yet when they came across the source of those screams, most shouted out themselves. One of the younger ones, only just out of his boyhood years, wretched into the grass, spiting up bile onto the dirt.

For there in the entryway of a small two-person cottage was a man.

Or the remains of a man rather, his body cut into more bloody chunks and ribbons that any of the men could count. The rest of him was smeared across the floor in pools of blood, offal such as intestines and stomach and liver intact, but gruesomely displayed just out side the door.

And just beyond the open door, the wood left open from where the woman had coming charging out the house, was a head. Standing on its bloody stump and smiling a too wide grin, lips peeled back to reveal rotting teeth. His eyes seemed to bulge from the graying flesh, eyelids similarly removed.

By God, none of them had seen anything like it.

--

More and more bodies were found by panicked villagers, many ending up near catatonic after seeing such horrors. No display was alike, each corpse cut and desecrated in new ways.

With the townspeople panicking, hostilely eyeing neighbors and strangers alike, it was no wonder that it took several weeks to realize one other fact.

Children were going missing.

And it was always a child related to one of the dead...

Then, whispers and rumors starting circulating. Of strange women being seen with the newly departed not long before their demise. Sometimes fair of hair and other times black. A few times red of hair even, a mark of devilry if there ever was one.

But no matter how cautious, people kept dying and children kept vanishing.

---

Now, Klaus wasn’t one to care for the concerns or problems of humans. More often than not he may have even been the cause of them himself. That being said, such elaborate and macabre displays weren’t really to his taste. He could appreciate the gruesome creativity he supposed, but that was really more his brother’s style. 

What did actually upset him was the children. Cruel as it sounded, death was often the kindest fate that awaited those in the clutches of monsters. And such things were not tolerated by him or his siblings when a child was involved.

A second compulsion blurred his table mate's memories of his appearance and questions, as he blurred away a moment later. Hunting for the creature whose death he would relish.

---

Somewhere deep in the woods a beautiful blonde woman smiled at a tiny, slip of a girl. Her frock a bit dirty and worn, her face drawn and tired.

The blonde extended a hand to the little girl, waiting patiently as the child considered.

Small fingers eventually reached out to twine with the blonde’s her eyes large and hopeful as she followed the woman inside, lured by promises of warmth and comfort and food.

---

Caroline paused, brow furrowed, lemon rind still pressed against the metal grater. She had conned Klaus into helping her with the Mystic Falls Bake Sale, an annual charity drive that donated its funds to Families Forward Virginia. And as always, Caroline was on a spree, making batch after batch of the famous Forbes Lemon Squares.

A baking spree, Klaus just disrupted with his disturbing choice in storytelling.

“What the hell, Klaus?! Why would I want to hear your creepy recounting of personal history?” 

She whirled around to make sure he could properly see her angry gesturing, her pointed stares as she glance between his eyes and the abandoned mixing bowl on his side of the counter.

He offered a dim half-smile, his normal amusement from her reactions quelled by an odd, uncharacteristic sadness. Though he obligingly returned to his designated mixing, staring into the batter as he whisked.

“Apologies, sweetheart, I find I’m in a bit of a mood today.” He shook his head, tone returning to the normal soft and weird affection he spoke to her with. “What you’re doing though is admirable, Caroline. We both know monsters will continue to exist for eternity, but you’ve found a way to aid the survivors.”

The two lapsed into silence, the kitchen filled with only the sounds of their baking.

“I never found her you know?”

“...What?”

“Whoever was terrorizing that town. She disappeared not long after I started hunting for her.”

“Why were you? Hunting her, I mean?”

Klaus whirled to face the blonde, a little hurt despite himself at her continued low opinion of him.

“Caroline,” he stated quite seriously, voice low and a bit harsh, “there are lines even I do not cross.”

She didn’t look at him, pouring mix over the prepared sugary crust, though her voice was soft when she finally replied.

“I know.” She paused. “But what if you were wrong?”

He stilled, confused by the shift.

“I mean think about it. You just told me she suddenly stopped and the children’s bodies were never found. After her rather,” Caroline’s nose wrinkled, “colorful displays she certainly didn’t seem to be ashamed of her actions. So, perhaps she wasn’t harming the kids, Klaus.”

He shook his head. “Your faith is misplaced, love.”

Caroline finally turned to him an odd expression on her face. She cocked her head looking thoughtful.

“Is it? I think La sorcière de Pierre,” the French easily rolling off her tongue to Klaus’ utter shock, “was just dramatic, not evil.”

Caroline left to relax in the living room, the squares set to bake in the oven, Klaus stood stunned still for several long moments before he bolted after her.

“What did you just say?” He whispered hoarsely.

“They were the monsters, Klaus. Molesters and brutes all.” She spoke this calmly, Old French elongating the vowels of her words.

And Klaus stared, mouth slightly agape, at the woman he had failed to find all those centuries ago.

---

Author’s Note: To my irritation several words in English translate to French with the same spelling which ruins the point. Anyway, this one is “Savior and Executioner” in French. I already used German so despite some Hansel and Gretel similarities it’s French. Apparently there was a similar tale from France circa 1697 so good enough for me!  Plus, I set it in France. So there lol

La sorcière de Pierre = The witch of Pierre

FYI that’s a real charity to aid children, I don’t know how reputable that particular one is, but considering donating to such funds if you have the means.

[uiruu]

The video 'why is english spelling so weird' on the Langfocus youtube channel, talks all about some of the stuff you're wondering about, at around the 5:40 mark he talks specifically about the Great Vowel shift, a time when many of the vowels changed pronunciation at the same time as the popularization of the printing press froze the spelling of many words, which along with the deliberate changing of certain words' spelling led to many of these kind of misalignments!

oh no sorry i know about that stuff lol, i’m interested in the exceptions and further developments from that though. like, the great vowel shift would’ve resulted in “blood”, “book”, and “hoop” all rhyming with each other, but various further sound changes made them not rhyme anymore. anyway like, i’m sorry aaa i really really don’t wanna sound like i’m being arrogant or something but like, i’m a linguist so i know about that stuff wiejfpowegkpoewrkg. i’m sorry, i dont want that to come across like i’m saying “duh” or something lol, cause i dont mean it that way, i just mean that i’ve spent a lot of time studying that. i think its awesome when people are interested in language and linguistics though! so like, hell yeah im glad you found that video and this topic interesting!!!! genuinely! that’s why channels like langfocus are so great, they help convey these topics in easy-to-understand ways, we always always always need more people doing things like that, in every discipline not just linguistics of course. so i dont wanna sound ungrateful for this ask haha, thank you for mentioning that! but yeah

[11toe11-blog]

Covid Sitayana

Ramayana was an epic scale epic. Since we did not have the bandwidth for more than one Ramayana or Mahabharata - we decided to ensure another Ramayana never happens. 

So every other potential Sita was trained - a clear Line drawn - stand inside, well within the line. 

“How many times should i tell you! Stay inside”

Sita - “but the cow…”

“What cow? No cow! Stay inside. Always remember the line. Everything outside is Ravana.”

____

Notes on Kalari -- Dr. Priyadarshan Lal

Warm body- warm up

Being able to stand on two feet requires great balance. Not any other mammals other than humans - who start erect. Core- balance ( like cycle/swimming)

Drawing associations of etymology. Letter of Tamil are distinguished as.

Mei-ezhuthu-  Consonants. Mei --> Body

Uyir-ezhuthu - Vowels. Uyir-->Breath

---> Mei- payattu

8 types of postures:

Lion - cross legged and paw connect. Cross core

Elephant - simultaneous movements of the side. All of left shifts. Then all of right shifts.Strength.

Fish - turn. Flash turn.

Kukkuda/ rooster - flutter up and land

Horse straight

Boar -stright. lift.

Snake

Cat

All the postures appear in the meippayattu, obviously or subtly.

(*noticing how barteniff similarly constructed fundamentals based on evolutionary stages of embryo. In my experince so far, the manipulation of the jelly like that is strong and flexible and can contort and expand and realign etc, in connection with the breath, creates a posture if extended to the extremeties)

(pic courtesy: https://www.leisurepro.com/blog/explore-the-blue/5-harmless-species-jellyfish/) 

___

Empty handed combat. Win over the enemy without fighting. (*love and empathy)

___

Adhara chakra

(*he didnt elaborate, but from the adishakti workshop of many years ago i remember that each posture has an associated chakra basis. Maybe the movement originates or is held or passed through that particular chakra. Im yet to experience it. For fish and horse and elephant maybe i sense it, but i cant be sure)

___

I feel close to being done writing about myself. And my vantage at this point. I feel it would be nice to explore a subject in writing.

Like kalari. And where kalari meets ramana. Not scholarly sense, but for me. So that i can discover for myself the connections i have made. And the questions and blind spots are clearer to me. 

Looking at a dance journal called FUSE, i caught a glimpse of the dancer’s notes...the notes, the scores, seemed closer to my way of enquiring. Scores. Questions. Frames of observation.

What of the archetypes and narratives and characters? 

“We’ll isn't it interesting, that as well as you know your characters and the relationships between them, you aret compelled by dialogues - what they say to each other seems to be of no import to you.” 

 Yes. I cant seem to care much for dialogues insipte of all that auditory hallucinations. 

I feel - The dialogues are not spoken. They are actions. And in the body, their very being itself there is something alive and exchanging and transforming. SOmething that doesn't lean on words to do preliminary negotiations. Something that is, and goes in, and is being from the very start all they way.  Like mom keeps saying, actions speak louder than words.

Yes. And in their moving around and relating back and forth to the space and movements and changing landscape of their emotions/memories/ etc… changes takes place… in ascertain  kind of quietness. Cant call it silence.  Or in a certain kind of silence. Cant call it quietness. Or is it a certain kind of silence. 

But dialogues have no place there. Expect as inner soliloquies. May be as monologues. When it comes to rapid energy exchange, it physical. Not words.  Because words are diversions at best.

Most of the time. They appear when there is no choice, but to speak. And then  the words appear, and they appear crystal clear, to illuminate, to clarify. Not to veil and hide. 

___

Form is created by tension. Last night i was watching the mind. Or rather something was watching the mind. And i was in the mind trapped in its incessant chatter and looking from outside. The incessant chatter seemed to originate from a tension at the base of the skull. From something taut, like a string of a musical instrument. Though not wholly a pleasant feeling. 

In this tension, between this points of tension space is created and form appears. A is the tension between the two slanting lines whose base is pulled apart and wedged by a shot line. Form. Uyirzhuthu. K is the inclined upward and inclined downward push, directed to a particular single point on the vertical line.

Not sure if i would have been able to finally get a sense of the symbols used to denote english alphabets, if wasnt for my conversation with DK, aka Quirky.

Me: wait... i have more technical question ...how do you remember what you did on the floor?

and when does meaning emerge?

He: It's all in the flow

And it's the experience and the environment that the movement create that in turn gives the watching person to make meaning

Technically it's all about the flow and muscles memory

Me: but what of the mover? where is he/she finding meaning?

or is the meaning purely an experience of spatial truth?

He: Meaning is subjective isn't it

Me: yuss

He: It's like the color red and the redness of the read. Red

I guess redness of the red is what I am interested

Not what meanings people associated red with

Of course one can use association of the red to creat an emotion or mood but as a core the ness ness of something is the research

Me: do you at any point at all, as a mover dancer, remember being interested in what meanings people associated with red? or was it always about redness of red?

He: When is create it all about the Ness nesss but ofcourse once the composition and presentation of the idea start I do play with association of the given ideas or objects to create tention. 

But I also know if I considered the association I am closing a lot of other posibal reading

It's a balancing act

Me: mmmm

He: If I address the association more often them not I will be taking stands and sides

Which may be use full for certain works

But as a for being true to the work I find it enriching to look for the nessness of the idea

Me: Ness-ness is nice. very nice. i supoose it the most neutral position available to you while fully innit - if i must intellectualise. but ya... when i was asking you, how do you rember, i was coming from a simplistic space of notaton and mnenomics. but this redness of red gives me a btter answer tothe unasked question.

He: I don't remember I am not wired like that

Dicklessli. Lol

Its all in the flow and muscle memory

And ofcourse repetition

Me: relieff

just came acrosss this https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/63113284/fuse1

He: The useal lol . Gay and tamil mami

Lol. I know of the person who runs this project

Me: trust you to massacre! Nut!

___

I dint quite understand what he meant by this “ He: When is create it all about the Ness nesss but ofcourse once the composition and presentation of the idea start I do play with association of the given ideas or objects to create tention. “ yesterday.  This idea of creating tension using associations etc for the compositions and presentations and sharing… the point of outer reflection and feedback from the larger whole , as mirror.  Like R says, “only when the play meets the audience does it become a play”, audience provides that vital energy - that space- witness. ANd thats when the possibilities of the play star unfolding. 

What of traditional performers such as koodiyattam then? For whom the lamp is the only witness?

Also https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/06/the-aesthetic-of-silence-susan-sontag/

“Art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention… Once the artist’s task seemed to be simply that of opening up new areas and objects of attention. That task is still acknowledged, but it has become problematic. The very faculty of attention has come into question, and been subjected to more rigorous standards…

Perhaps the quality of the attention one brings to bear on something will be better (less contaminated, less distracted), the less one is offered. Furnished with impoverished art, purged by silence, one might then be able to begin to transcend the frustrating selectivity of attention, with its inevitable distortions of experience. Ideally, one should be able to pay attention to everything.”

“So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience… Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.”

Both of which i resonate with to whatever degree of my experience  has been. This struggle of audience. And a certain withdrawal and dismissal and a sense of pursuit of something much larger than popularity or appreciation of peers. Which is questioned very starkly here by Sontag like a slap on the hand

“

Sontag recognizes that the gesture of silence in abdication from society is still “a highly social gesture.” She writes:

An exemplary decision of this sort can be made only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively. Once he has surpassed his peers by the standards which he acknowledges, his pride has only one place left to go. For, to be a victim of the craving for silence is to be, in still a further sense, superior to everyone else. It suggests that the artist has had the wit to ask more questions than other people, and that he possesses stronger nerves and higher standards of excellence.”

Is that why i am still around. Hanging on nail and tooth. Because i havent proved myself in this world. That the way to Griffindor is through the corridors of Slytherine?

Ramana says, not necessary. 

Kalari says, if necessary, come to the pit.

Eitherways, the presence and absence of a living fluid core makes a difference to the experience and perception of reality and the energy to keep observing past its frames. So i show up the pit everyday. One way or the other.

[thetiniestcicada]

Early Morning Soup

Hi hi everyone, i am absolutely delighted to announce @jaggedarchetypes wrote a piece based on this comic and its?? so good??? and once again im absolutely at a loss for words & im so very touched oh my god?? please read it under the cut he captured the feeling so well!!!!

For one who felt so exhausted, actual rest sure seemed to allude Hanzo Shimada. Midnight had him tossing and turning, one AM had him pacing, two AM had him outside jogging and walking, and three AM had him resigned to the fate of another sleepless night. But at least, if not a relaxed mind, his exercise had worked up a sizable appetite.

By three fifteen, Hanzo was showered, and by three thirty he was glaring tiredly into a pot. He’d sampled his soup perhaps a dozen times, but the flavor stubbornly refused to be like the one of his childhood. So, Hanzo sent out a text. Then one more, just for good measure.

It was painfully likely Genji would be awake at this hour, considering that sleep wasn’t a thing that mostly-synthetic beings needed as much. And sure enough, immediately after the second, slightly rougher text, he received a response. He opened the app, and re-read his own messages first.

3:36 Hey how much dashi goes in miso again

3:38 Genji I know you are awake

Genji: 3:39 lol wat r u doing up @ 3am

Hanzo rolled his eyes, and began responding in kind, a sarcastic “What are yo” began by the time he got another, more cryptic message.

Genji: 3:39 Don’t move

Hanzo’s thumbs froze, and after a pause, one raised to rub at a bleary eye. What about miso necessitated standing still?  But before the gears in his brain could turn too much further, a tapping, quick sound came from the nearby window. Open, of course, as Gibraltar rarely got too cold, even in the middle of the night. Hanzo recognized, from experience, the sound of someone approaching the window, and as he began to turn, the sight of his brother appeared. Glowing vaguely greenish, even through his thin grey shirt. Why did Genji even bother with clothes? In any case, Hanzo flinched away with a hoarse sound. He did not scream, he did not scream, he totally screamed at the sudden robot ninja in the window. Genji’s greeting of “What’s up bro”, of course, reverberated over the sound of Hanzo regaining his breath and asking, “Genji, what the shit?!”

Genji leaned onto the windowsill, taking on the role of counsellor. “So.” He drew out the vowel, and Hanzo could easily sense the postponing of a stark observation in that lightly buzzing voice. “You’re making miso. At 3 AM.” Hanzo dodged the judgemental tone.

He was too tired, and too proud, to acknowledge the strangeness of his actions. “Please, get out of the window.” As Genji near-silently hauled himself in, Hanzo wondered if he might sit in silence. Wondered if Genji would actually be respectable of the night, and be respectful of Hanzo’s wish to not discuss this.

His hopes were emboldened as Genji hopped up onto the counter, leaning the edge of his face mask on his palm. Hanzo looked away, turning his attention back to the vegetables he’d been chopping a few minutes prior. He could practically feel Genji’s eyes on him, could practically see the bored expression of his younger brother.

“So.” Again with the interruptions. Hanzo pretended Genji hadn’t said anything, instead choosing to sweep the vegetable bits into a little pile. He dropped them into the pot, careful to avoid excess splattering of water.

“Can’t sleep?” If Genji weren’t behind Hanzo, he would have seen the hollow sadness that weighed down the elder Shimada’s expression. Hanzo withdrew his hand, took a deep breath, and sighed it out. How he felt about life was remarkably similar to how he felt about the soup, so he did his best to convey his true feelings through the soup’s.

Slowly, he started. “I can… never get it right, you know…” He paused for a length of time, but he was sure Genji could understand that his pauses came from needing time for his words, not being finished. Genji knew that Hanzo would reveal more in a longer time than if he was rushed. That would only result in clenched jaws and frustrated silence.

Hanzo continued, after a moment. “It’s just….” Another pause, but this one was shorter. “Not the same.” Life, when depressed, when really in the thick of it, wasn’t the same as it was for other people. It wasn’t the same as even his good days. “I’ve tried so many recipes…” Online therapeutic techniques, meditation, even yoga and ‘drawing his feelings’. “And yet, there’s always something off.” That weight on his shoulders, that hollowness in his heart. He would have likely withdrawn into his thoughts, were it not for the sound of Genji’s voice.

“Have you tried atsu age?” Hanzo turned, offered an appreciative look, and let conversation flow more easily. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to keep his mind occupied, before it could draw in tight and cold around itself. Genji’s chatter was helpful, and his storytelling of various antics were a welcome distraction as Hanzo continued to fine tune the lightly bubbling soup.

“-and then she handed me the chandelier.” A soft snort of laughter from Hanzo followed, and Genji was pleased that he’d earned this much out of him. But something caught his auditory-sensing-processors. Fake ears. Whatever. “Oh, fuck.” He pushed himself off the counter, scrambling for the window from which he’d entered. Before Hanzo could so much as process what was going on, Genji leapt from the window.

“… Genji?” He asked the empty window, but all that responded was a light breeze. And… the clink of spurs? For the second time that night, someone came up behind him. Another unexpected guest, with a voice as deep and rough as the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Someone who was also up at an ungodly hour, and who didn’t expect another person to be there.

“Oh, Hanzo, you’re up too?” Jesse spoke with a little bit of surprise, but nothing to the degree of heart-pounding anxiousness as what Hanzo was feeling. ‘Ah, right. Stay calm.’ Hanzo warned himself. Jesse approached him, peering into the pot. He didn’t seem to recognize it, judging by the fact that his exhausted expression didn’t shift much, besides to mild curiosity. “What’s that you’re making?” He asked gently, voice lowered so as to not spook the wild Shimada in his natural environment. After a beat, Hanzo got up the voice to respond.

“Miso soup…” He could feel that weariness, the one his brother had attempted to lift, press down on his back once more. Hanzo pushed his shoulders back, tried to bear it with pride. “I… make it when I feel… Troubled.” He explained, slowly. Jesse didn’t rush him. In fact, after a moment of quiet understanding, Jesse made a similar confession of ‘troubles’.

“Think I could use some right about now.” He admitted, a crooked frown indicating that he related. His tired eyes were downcast, and he, too, bore the dark circles of sleeplessness on his chestnut, freckled skin. Stepping a bit closer, Jesse reached for the ladle. “Do you mind?” He asked, a bit belatedly as it was already within his grasp.

Hanzo turned, welcoming Jesse into his space, “Ah - no.” He permitted the act, but as Jesse raised the deep spoon to his lips, Hanzo’s thoughts grew louder. A flood of them, all at once. ‘Wait!’ they begged, ‘No!’. Hanzo didn’t say anything, his eyes just fell unfocused to the counter in front of him. ‘No! It’s not good enough! It’s not- wait! It’s not the same!’ The thoughts turned onto Hanzo, cruel, ‘No! He’s going to hate it! No, no! He’s going to hate you! No! No! He’s-’. The words began to form on Hanzo’s lips, and they parted, “Wait-” but it never was voiced. He could only pause, heart pounding, as Jesse spoke again. Everything in Hanzo’s mind came to a screeching halt.

“Oh Hanzo,” That low voice was so close, and so warm. Jesse leaned onto him gently, resting his head atop Hanzo’s. “This here just about soothes my soul.”

Hanzo was motionless, for a second, the words sinking in like the warmth onto his frozen form. But when he understood, he relaxed, and the warmth spread to his cheeks and to his smile. “Oh,” he said quietly, reciprocating the little lean. Jesse put his arm around his shoulder, and he fairly melted.

“I’m glad.”

[ysawesomenotes]

The sound of 2066 (The Sound of Britain in 2066)

A report commissioned by HSBC

Written by Dominic Watt and Brendan Gunn

-

An Introduction

HSBC is launching voice biometrics as an element of its digital banking services.

The system verifes a caller’s identity using leading-edge voiceprint technology, allowing customers access to their accounts using a simple universal ‘pass phrase’.

As time goes on, voice-activated systems of this kind will be an ever more central part of our lives. 50 years from now, in 2066, we will only rarely interact with machines by pressing buttons, and the keyboard will have become obsolete.

Almost everyone can talk faster than they can type, and talking is the most natural communication system we possess. Speech recognition tools like Siri and Cortana are already part of our everyday lives, but these are only the beginning. Over the next decades the successors to these systems will become ever more reliable and ‘smarter’, as they take advantage of the boundless potential of the internet to train themselves to anticipate users’ needs and to respond effciently to our commands.

Our current speech technologies perform well under diffcult conditions. They can cope with high levels of background noise, or when the speaker has a head cold or a sore throat. Strong regional or foreign accents don’t affect their performance because the systems are trained to compensate for the numerous ways in which our speech varies. And impressive as these tools already are, they are improving all the time. In the future, our devices will understand everything we tell them. The way we interact with machines will converge on how we talk to other people, to the point where there will be no obvious differences between the two.

Balthazar Cohen, author of the ‘Totes Ridic-tionary’, described the internet as the place ‘where language goes to die’. In reality it’s just the opposite. The web is an inexhaustible wellspring of new words and phrases. Already we see how easily internet-inspired abbreviations like ‘LOL’ (laugh(ing) out loud), ‘FOMO’ (fear of missing out), ‘FOLO’ (fear of living of?ine), and ‘brb’ (be right back) have been turned into words (LOL to rhyme with ‘doll’, ‘brb’ with ‘curb’). These aren’t just confned to the speech of the young, either, as shown recently by the jokingly vengeful use of ‘LOL’ by a Scottish judge as he passed down a prison sentence. Emojis have been embraced as part of written English, to the extent that the Oxford Dictionaries UK Word of the Year in 2015 was the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ symbol. We will fnd ways of integrating them into our speech too. There is even the possibility that in the near future, our computers will themselves invent new words and phrases, ones which we’ll start to use ourselves because they seem especially useful or pithy.

We tend to think of computers as things that sit on our desks or that we carry around in our pockets, but they are of course already all around us: in car engines, inside our washing machines, or controlling the heating in our homes. Very soon all these systems will be connected together. The era of the ‘internet of things’ is all but upon us. Our homes, workplaces and means of transport will be ever more interconnected, with each appliance communicating with the other devices in its local network, and with the wider world via the web. In a sense, we ourselves will become elements of that network, while keeping executive control over the important decisions. Smart technologies will learn and adapt by tracking how we humans change in our preferences and our habits, and because we will give instructions using our voices they must of course keep pace with changes in our speech and language.

Languages change constantly, and they do so whether or not we want them to. New words replace old ones, grammatical rules arise and fade away, and the ways we pronounce vowels and consonants are always shifting and mutating. English has changed enormously over its 1,500-year history. Even in the last 50 years we have seen big changes in the accents and dialects of the language, including Standard English. This leads us to ask: what will English be like 50 years from now?

In this report, we make a number of predictions about how some key accents of British English might sound in half a century’s time. Some of the changes we identify have in fact already started. In other cases we’re being more speculative, but by looking at how English has changed over the last 50 years, we can identify patterns that seem to repeat. For one thing, people tend to like to make talking as easy for themselves as they can, but without making life too hard for the hearer. So they knock off sounds at the ends of words (‘tex’ for ‘text’, ‘vex’ for ‘vexed’), they simplify complicated sequences of consonants (hardly anyone says ‘syoot’ for ‘suit’ any more), and they rub the sharp corners off sounds by making them ‘softer’. For example, although we say electric with a hard /k/ on the end, we say electricity with an /s/, and electrician with a ‘sh’ sound.

Languages also change when they come into contact with one another. English has borrowed thousands of words from other languages: mainly French, Latin and Greek, but there are ‘loan words’ from dozens of other languages in the mix. For instance, we wouldn’t say we’d spilled chutney and shampoo on the veranda of the bungalow without frst having borrowed these words from Hindi.

Our speech and language patterns are absolutely central to our individual identities, and we exercise ‘consumer choice’ over which new linguistic trends we buy into, much as we do when choosing music or clothing. We adopt new ways of saying things because they’re fashionable or cool, or because we want to sound like we’re a member of a particular group of people. We use language to tell others something about ourselves in a way that costs nothing and is very immediate: uttering just a few syllables can be enough to signal where you come from, and what kind of social groups you identify with or admire. Young people often try very hard to sound different from people of their parents’ generation. Using the right sort of words and pronunciations can be an enormously powerful symbol of belonging, of being cool, of having the right sort of knowledge, of being ‘now’. However, in time what was once the height of linguistic fashion comes to seem stale, staid, and conventional, and so new trends must be followed by those who want to seem the most up-to-date and street-smart.

We must always allow for the unexpected, too: by 2066 English may have altered in ways we hadn’t seen coming. This endless cycle of innovation and renewal is what makes the study of language change so fascinating.

The Homogenisation of English?

We can think of the dialect map of the UK as a jigsaw in which the pieces were once very small. Individual districts, towns and villages had their own dialects. Over the last century or so, the jigsaw pieces have grown larger, as dialects have become more focussed on the bigger urban centres such as Newcastle or Manchester. These days it can be harder to tell where someone is from on the basis of his or her speech than it was a couple of generations ago: the dialect distinctions between Yorkshire and Lancashire, or between Merseyside and north Wales, are becoming more blurred. This is usually put down to greater mobility, with people moving sometimes quite large distances to other towns and cities to study or fnd work, or relocating from the cities into the countryside in search of a better quality of life or more affordable housing. But it isn’t the case that we’re all starting to sound alike. As we’ll see below, new varieties are taking root in different parts of the country. It’s mainly the traditional rural dialects that are becoming less distinct from one another.

We’re not all becoming more standard in our speech, either. Over the last 50 years we have also seen Standard English and Received Pronunciation (‘Queen’s English’) lose some of their status. Where once it was more or less obligatory to speak these for anyone wishing to enter the professions, the clergy, the upper ranks of the military, acting, or broadcasting, these days, non-standard accents and dialects are much more widely accepted. We’ve come to realise that speaking in such-and-such a way isn’t necessarily a sure sign of someone’s intelligence or competence. This improves opportunities for people from a wider variety of social and educational backgrounds. It’s sometimes forgotten that even the standard forms of English are always changing. Today we laugh at the way announcers spoke in TV news programmes from the 1960s because it seems so stiff and old-fashioned. It would sound odd if someone born in 1966 ? say, David Cameron ? were to speak like someone of his grandfather’s generation. We don’t expect young members of the Royal Family to speak in the same way as old ones do. The Queen’s English spoken by Prince George as he grows up is not going to be the same as the Queen’s English spoken by the Queen.

Looking more globally, Chinese and Spanish seem set to become yet more in?uential worldwide, leading to large numbers of words and phrases from these languages coming into mainstream use in English. Other major languages, such as Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic or Russian, may boost English vocabulary by donating names for new concepts.

‘Informalisation’ of English: talking to machines and listening to Americans

As we’ve seen, high technology is a very rich source of new words in English. In turn, English provides other languages with new terms they need in this area. Young people everywhere now use the English words app, troll, or hashtag rather than the equivalents in their own languages. English is the language of the latest trends in social media, and computer users know that being in command of the latest terms will allow them to participate in a globally connected world. Though the science that underlies systems such as Twitter and Facebook is advanced and hugely complex, the innovators and designers behind these brands want to keep the image of social media as relaxed and informal as possible. The terms that are used for common functions and ways users can interact (like, friend, follow, retweet, block) are therefore short, simple and memorable ones. The fact that so many innovations in computing come from California is undoubtedly linked to this relaxed and unpretentious approach.

A preference for informal, chatty and jokey language in the technological and scientifc domains is a recent phenomenon, but it’s one which makes these areas seem more accessible and less po-faced, and we are likely to see more and more of it. After all, there’s really no good reason we shouldn’t name features on the surface of Pluto and its moon Charon after characters from Star Wars, Star Trek or The Lord of the Rings, or call underground bacteria snottites because they look like nasal mucus dangling from cave roofs, or name an Antarctic research vessel Boaty McBoatface, just for the fun of it. A glance at the online Urbandictionary testifes to the endless creativity and humour of English speakers. Freeing ordinary language users up to invent and share new words and phrases like this is a mark of how much more democratic and liberated our linguistic lives have become.

With all of these factors in mind, we turn now to ask what the English of 2066 might sound like in different cities around the country.

London

It’s often said that traditional working-class London speech ? Cockney ? has more or less died out. We can now hear a hybrid accent known as ‘Estuary English’ (EE), which combines older London features with more standard-like speech forms. EE is recognisably south-eastern, but it can be very hard to locate a speaker within that region. It also seems to blur the class divide, leading to accusations that some middle-class speakers ? politicians such as Nigel Farage and celebrities like Jamie Oliver ? ‘dumb down’ their speech so as to conceal a privileged upbringing or to sound more like they are ‘one of the people’. EE has similarities to another newcomer on the UK dialect scene, ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE). MLE incorporates pronunciations from Englishes spoken by people from ethnic minority groups, particularly from the Caribbean, West African and Asian communities. Given this mix, and the status of London as the linguistically most in?uential city in the English-speaking world, we can expect to see signifcant changes between now and the middle of the century.

For example, there are signs that /h/ is being restored. Generations of Londoners have dropped /h/ from the beginnings of words like hat, Highgate, Harrods, Hampstead Heath, or Henry Higgins. Another feature of London speech is the treatment of the two ‘th’ dental consonants, as in words like thin and this. We see either ‘TH-stopping’ (dis and dat) or ‘TH-fronting’ (fnk for ‘think’, muvver for ‘mother’). In future we’re likely to see the standard ‘th’ sounds being lost altogether. Fin and thin will no longer be distinguished even in careful speech, and bother will always rhyme with hover. This may come as a relief to foreign learners of English, who struggle with the dentals more than any other pair of sounds.

Saying dook for ‘duke’ or nooze for ‘news’ is already pretty frmly established in London, but this habit, known as ‘yod-dropping’, may continue so that even words like cute or beauty are affected, as they are in East Anglia, where they’re pronounced the same as coot and booty. Simplifying clusters of consonants like this is one way English has changed over its history. We don’t say the /k/ at the beginning of ‘knee’ or ‘knight’ any more, or the /w/ that used to occur at the beginning of ‘wrong’ (these letters are now silent, but we haven’t ever bothered to change the spelling). We’ve lost some other great consonant clusters since the earliest days of English: the word for ‘to sneeze’ in Old English, for example, had a very sneezy-sounding /fn/ sequence at the beginning.

/w/ and /r/ are already very similar for many southern English talkers (e.g. Roy Hodgson, Chris Packham, Jonathan Ross), so the two may collapse together completely, so that wed and red are no longer distinct. We may also see consonant+/r/ clusters smushing together into sounds more like ‘ch’ and ‘j’, so trees and cheese, or dress and Jess, sound more alike.

At the ends of words, /r/ was dropped centuries ago, and /l/ is likely to follow suit by turning into a vowel. So words like Paul, paw and pool could be indistinguishable, as they already are in Cockney. Lastly, the glottal stop pronunciation of /t/ ? a brief catch in the throat rather than a sound which involves the tongue tip closing against the roof of the mouth ? will be the default pronunciation. People in 2066 will be mystifed as to why Tony Blair, Ed Miliband and George Osborne were slammed so mercilessly by the press for having been caught saying voters without using a ‘proper’ /t/ in the middle.

Liverpool

The Liverpool accent is highly distinctive but it’s not an especially old one. It mixes local Lancashire features with ones imported from Ireland during the 19th century. The in?uence of Liverpool speech is wide: there are towns on the coast of north Wales in which people speak with accents which are strongly coloured by Scouse. All the same, Liverpool speech will probably start to fall into line more closely with the accents of other major northern cities. The ‘tapped’ /r/ sound in words like green and brown, or four and five, is likely to go the way of this consonant in Scottish or Yorkshire English.

One of the very distinctive things about Scouse is the way that /k/ and the other ‘stopped’ consonants /p/ and /t/ are produced. At the end of back you’ll hear a ‘ch’ sound like the one in Scottish loch or German Bach. A lot of people say they dislike this habit, but it’s actually a very natural sound change, and quite common across other languages. It’s quite possible that we’ll see more of this softening of the stop consonants not just in Liverpool but in other accents around the country.

Liverpool, like all the other northern cities, has an accent in which pairs of words like put and putt are pronounced alike. A great number of the changes we see in current English involve a levelling out of local differences, however, and it’s possible that by 2066 the northern accents will have come into line with the global norm for these vowels. At present there are many northerners who would wince at the thought of saying cup or bus anything like southerners or Americans do, so as a compromise they may start to use some intermediate ‘fudged’ vowel in these and other putt-class words instead. The very suggestion that the north and the south could converge linguistically always meets with heated argument, but it’s not so outlandish an idea ? in fact, the process has already been happening for many centuries.

Glasgow

In Glasgow, and lowland Scotland generally, English sits at one end of a language spectrum. At the far end is the Scots dialect, which is so different from most sorts of English that some call Scots a full-blown language in its own right. It seems clear, though, that the urban Scots spoken in Glasgow is on the wane. Surveys of Scottish schoolchildren show that they aren’t familiar with many of the Scots words and phrases that their parents and grandparents would use (bampot, clarty, glaikit, stooshie, and thousands of others). Some of the dialect words will remain, though it’s impossible to say which will survive. Pronunciations like gless ‘glass’, hame ‘home’, bane ‘bone’, or ft ‘foot’ may soon come to seem too old-fashioned for young people to use.

Dropping of /r/ after a vowel is already well underway among working-class Glaswegians, meaning that pairs of words like hut and hurt can now be hard to tell apart. As in London, wordfnal /l/ is also disappearing (so Paul and paw are more alike), and the ‘th’ consonants are turning into /f/ and /v/.

On the other hand, if a second independence referendum were to go in favour of Scotland’s separation from the UK, the picture could be very different in the Glasgow of 2066. Because language and identity are so closely tied together, it might be that the Scots language lobby would step their efforts up a few gears, as a way of highlighting the separateness of Scotland’s culture and heritage. Making the language of the new state seem as distinctive as possible is exactly what the Norwegians did when they split from Denmark a hundred or so years ago. One of the big unknowns when trying to map out how languages will develop in the future is the effect of political upheavals. The history of English is full of these: think of the arrival of the Vikings, or the Norman Conquest.

Newcastle

British people tend to nominate one of two accents when they’re asked which is the hardest to understand. Glaswegian is one, and Geordie is the other. There are some in the north-east of England who claim that Geordie and the dialect of Northumbria are the closest forms of English to Anglo-Saxon. Though this is an exaggeration, there are features of Geordie which hark back to when Middle English was spoken (hoose for ‘house’, neet for ‘night’, and so on).

These are becoming scarcer, though. The general pattern is for Geordie to sound more like other northern dialects. The characteristic pronunciations of ‘face’ and ‘coat’ (‘fee-uss’, ‘coo-ut’) are much less common than they were two or three generations back. These days, more generic northern-sounding vowels are preferred. Over the next 50 years we predict that they will sound close to what is found in southern England. The characteristic ‘hiccuping’ Geordie pronunciation of /p/, /t/ and /k/ in words like caper, waiter, and baker may go the same way.

Geordies used to pronounce the vowel in words like ‘nurse’ as an ‘aw’ sound, so that shirt sounded the same as short. Words like ‘talk’ were pronounced ‘taak’. These differences are the basis of the story in which a Geordie with an injured leg goes to see the doctor. The doctor bandages the Geordie’s leg and says, “Now then, do you think you can walk?” The Geordie replies, in disbelief, “Walk? Ah can hordly waak!” (= “Work? I can hardly walk!”). These pronunciations can still be heard when you’re oot and aboot in the Toon, but they now have an old-fashioned ?avour. ‘Walk’ now tends to rhyme with ‘fork’, and ‘work’ with ‘jerk’. However, there’s a change going on in which the ‘jerk’ vowel is moving forward in the mouth. It seems to be linked to the habit of pronouncing the ‘coat’ vowel as something like ‘er’. So we fnd jokey spellings like ‘turtle’ for ‘total’, ‘terst’ for ‘toast’, ‘jerk’ for ‘joke’, ‘serp on a rerp’, and ‘The Perp’ (that’s the head of the Catholic church).

Manchester

Some of the same changes that we’ll see in Newcastle are also liable to take place in Manchester. ‘Turtle’ for ‘total’ has spread westward through urban Yorkshire and already seems to have crossed the Pennines into Manchester. The iconic vowel pronunciation at the end of Manchester (something like ‘Manchest-or’) seems fairly new, but whether it will last is an open question. Not all sound changes stick. Another feature of Manchester and other parts of the north-west (though not Liverpool) is the vowel at the ends of words like happy and city. At the moment, in Manchester it’s more ‘eh’-like than ‘ee’-like. The vowel in many British accents is now frmly an ‘ee’ sound ? happ-ee, rather than happ-ih. Mancunians may in time start to use the ‘happ-ee’ option, making them sound more like Scousers in this respect.

As mentioned earlier, the Liverpudlian habit of producing /k/ as the Scottish-like ‘ch’ is a very natural thing to do, phonetically speaking. So is saying /t/ as an ‘s’-like sound, so that ‘mat’ and ‘mass’ sound very alike. It’s conceivable that Mancunians could start producing these sounds the same way. This convergence might seem improbable, what with Mancs claiming to despise Scousers and vice versa, but in reality the rivalry between the two cities isn’t necessarily a barrier to their dialects becoming more similar. There are pairs of cities around the country in which people say they loathe one another (e.g. Derby and Nottingham), but the dialects spoken in them may become so alike that they’re hard to tell apart.

Birmingham

By virtue of being the closest to London of the cities listed above, Birmingham is likely to adopt the new trends in London speech before the others do. Examples might include the following.

If we are right about the restoration of /h/ in London, we might expect this to trickle down to Birmingham, so that by 2066 it’s being used in Brum with at least some consistency. Glottal stop for /t/ will be the default pronunciation (except at the beginnings of words; tea will still need a /t/, but won’t won’t!). TH-fronting (fng for ‘thing’, bovver for ‘bother’) has a frm foothold in the Midlands already, and a /w/-like pronunciation of /r/ is also common. These forms will increase in frequency, and the other features listed for London may also come to dominate Brummie speech.

We could see the phasing out of localised features like the ‘velar nasal plus’, where an audible /?/ is produced at the end of sing and wrong, and where singer (‘sing-guh’) and fnger rhyme. This habit is common in the West Midlands and in north-western cities including Manchester and Liverpool. People in these areas often say that they think they’re using the correct, standard way of saying ‘ng’ at the ends of words and syllables. In fact, it isn’t the way Standard English speakers pronounce these words. Brummies are probably being in?uenced by the spelling here, and so believe that the ‘proper’ pronunciation involves a sequence of two sounds at the end of sing instead of just one.

As with the northern varieties described above, we may see a split between the words of the put and putt sets, bringing the vowel system more closely into alignment with southern accents.

Conclusions

Over the course of the next ffty years, our lives will be transformed by technology at least as much as they were over the past ffty years.

We may see the rate of change accelerate, with each decade bringing an ever wider range of technologies to make our social and working lives easier, safer, and more effcient. The impact of these developments on society will result in new ways of using language. We will need to coin new terms for new inventions and concepts at a rapid pace, of course, but we will also interact with one another, and with the machines that will surround us in all areas of our lives, in ways that may at frst feel unfamiliar. The era of voice-activated computer systems, which are faster, smarter and more secure than ever before, is already upon us. These will not force us into particular ways of speaking, because they are designed to be responsive to our vocal patterns. They are not judgemental about how we speak and make no distinctions between accents or dialects: to them, all languages and their subvarieties are equal, and there is no ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ way of speaking. We can talk to them however we please. In short, the latest generation of secure voice biometrics systems will let you be you.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people for their input: Maciej Baranowski, David Britain, Georgina Brown, Urszula Clark, John Coleman, Karen Corrigan, Volker Dellwo, Holly Dunnett, Shivonne Gates, Philip Harrison, James Hoyle, Paul Kerswill, Adrian Leemann, Kirsty Malcolm, Alan Reading, Richard Rhodes, Devyani Sharma, Jane Stuart-Smith, Kim Witten, and Jessica Wormald.

Dominic Watt, Author of the report

Senior Lecturer

Department of Language and Linguistic Science

Dominic Watt was appointed Lecturer in Forensic Speech Science in 2007, and teaches mainly on its new MSc programme in that subject.

Watt has an MA (Hons) from Edinburgh and a PhD from Newcastle, and has held teaching and research positions in phonetics, speech acoustics and audiology, phonology and sociolinguistics at universities in Germany and around the UK, including York (2000-2002) and Aberdeen, where I was Director of the Phonetics Laboratory for five years.

Brendan Gunn, Co-author of the report

Brendan Gunn holds an MA and a PhD in linguistics. He began working as a Dialogue and Dialect Coach in 1986 after leaving the University of Ulster where he was a Lecturer in Linguistics.

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