#prosodiical

[official-linguistics-post]

I know you said not to ask you about the hyoid bone post because you’re not an anatomist but I have a question relating to it that I think you’d be equipped to answer: Are vowels actually necessary for speech? Could a language exist without them?

i mean... in the most technical sense, i guess it could, but... why. vowels are foundational sounds - literally, they're the first sounds we figure out how to make before all the rest of the articulatory system gets involved as motor skills improve. and you'd be absolutely nerfing the number of possible distinct words, especially if you consider that vowels often carry suprasegmental information like tone and length that most consonants can't express.

[mrfancyfoot]

I headcanon that Raphael is all about cheesy, romantic things (for better or worse). Being the visage of a perfect gentleman. Swooping in as the gallant, princely savior. Being chosen over other suitors.

He'd shower you in roses and gifts. He'd set up scenarios for himself to be the hero. He'd meticulously take note of little things he notices about you through direct interaction or spying to exploit later. Obsessively writing about you in his little diary from bed while giddily kicking his feet.

Those gifts might be finery (perhaps taken from some unfortunate soul), questionable poetry, and the heart of your enemy, but any way you cut it, everything is about showing off his prowess, his status, his ability to provide, and why he's better. He likes his complex games and the slow pursuit.

I think he'd be pretty devoted if only to maintain that image of being perfect. At least while his focus is on you. He might have some dumpster fires behind curtains, don't look there.

The mortal part of him may even crave true affection, devotion, and a coy, storybook courtship. Very much a "only soft for" vibe. That he can slowly corrupt. He'd love someone who could match a lot of his energy and ambition. Someone he can show off and have on his arm.

It could also explain why he (at least publicly) dresses more conservatively and akin to a human noble instead of like many other cambions and devils. While it probably helps disarm his targets to look more like a human noble when they first meet him, he could also enjoy the romantics it allows (he's into a lot of mortal things despite his denial of his own mortal blood). I have a related pet theory that his comfort with mortals/mortal things may come from being raised or forced to live in the Material Plane for at least a time. He really likes lullabies.

Would he be a good lover in bed? That is up to anyone's interpretation but I personally think it's likely that there isn't much love between him and Haarlep and not many probably match up to the standards of an experienced incubus (one of these days I'll go on my spiel about Haarlep). Haarlep's a cheeky devil themself. At the very least, Raphael probably thinks himself fantastic in bed and a perfectly giving lover (even if he's not).

He'd be the big, evil devil guarding the gilded cage he's put his beloved in from do-gooders and the covetous.

[chicago-geniza]

Was still in panic attack aftermath mode and thought "I am a person the state wants to kill" and immediately afterward, like some kind of ingrained meter-reflex, my brain went "same cadence and syllabic emphasis as The Lorax (I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees)" and I fucking lost my shit laughing. Thank you Terminal Meter Brain

[babeluda]

I finally figured out what weirded me out about Brennan Lee Mulligan's euro-inspired accents : his German and French accents flow over into each other all the time. This realisation comes courtesy of the undead dwarves in Neverafter whose voices are driving me nuts ^^'

[frenchiepal]

20.7.23 ⛅ this might be my least aesthetic post yet but i mean :') there's nothing to romanticise about a phonetic experiment. i got everything done though and the results look promising, definitely like something i can work with 🎉

[beingharsh]

I did not know a body / could be killed multiple times / I think this might be one such attempt

"Eleanor as a Sixteen Year Old Murdered Trans Girl, What is Known", Rachel Mann, Eleanor Among the Saints

[bellshazes]

Dark Souls 4...

surprise! it's stupid fucking distant stations chapter on being creatively unsatisfied that i'm deeply creatively unsatisfied with. usually living in bdubs' narrative brain is a joy but this? well. anyway. here's the distant stations take on the when god made adam parable of the sand.

“How alive you are is not based on if you get to die,�� Bdubs shouted. “If you know you’re doomed, it doesn’t make you more alive for knowing, it just makes you - you're already dead, and you have to walk around, you got to do something! And that’s more than living, if you manage to do something with your stupid waste of a - that’s - it’s -” It’s more important, he doesn't say. There's no other choice, to know your ending and try to make something of it. If you didn’t make something of yourself before your time finally ran out, what was the point of everything before? He didn't finish the sentence. After a disrespectfully long and lonely silence, the fifth thing with his face said, "So I won't spend my time gathering sand." And so he learned that self-flagellation was robbed of even its virtue when the self you were winding up to hit could argue back.

[paradife-loft]

so this "ethics & legal requirements for research involving human subjects" course I'm doing for class rn hasn't figured out that you don't hyphenate "cisgender," and yet has still somehow heard of "trans broken arm syndrome" and wants to inform us about it being a source of distrust in medical professionals among some trans people. what's happening here....

[neuxue]

lhjc ch 73:

手‌头沾着露水的花没来得及开，就被‌盛灵渊识海里的黑暗不耐烦地一口吞噬 // The dew-kissed flowers had not even had time to bloom before they were swallowed by the pitiless black sea of Sheng Lingyuan's consciousness.

lhjc ch 121:

��望很小……只是‌寿终正寝前，亲眼看‌见他穷尽毕生心‌血浇灌的花绽放一次。而已。// His wish was a small thing... merely to witness, just once before his life came to an end, the blooming of the flowers he had spent his heart's blood to water. Nothing more.

I'll just leave these here.

[addverrbb]

Here's my first exercise of poetry I worked on. I'm not super attached to it, but I do think I did alright.

I started by just trying to pick out sounds I wanted to include line by line—that's what's going on in that first kinda fucked up section. the goal with the sounds was originally to make the sounds get quieter and darker (dark like tone, not dark like edgy) until the end surprises you with a bright punch

after that, I tried to add some words. I had no idea what I would write about going into the poem, which left me a lot of room to tinker. I eventually settled on the second section of the picture here.

Next, I wanted to add some clarifying stuff and make the poem more legible. punctuation made a big difference here I think. I also made some line-edits because I think some semblance of clarity should supersede the exact sounds I set out for ahead of time.

Finally, I just went through and made personal edits. I'm trying to make my word choice less old-timey and be a little more scrupulous of my em-dash usage. Looking right now, I think I would remove the em-dash in the second to last line.

Overall, I like how this came out. It's just a technique exercise, so I don't have my soul stored in these words or anything, but I think I found a sense of a deeper truth and made the words sound nice and pretty.

I think my own analysis of the poem would be something along the lines of "Sound is more than just sound; respect it and value the beauty of it while you can."

What do my loyal followers think? I'm interested in improving it and potentially trying to make something better out of it.

[losergender]

*writing solangelo fic* aaaaand check for the mandatory southern accent mention!

[mrfancyfoot]

Evie's Pickup Skills

Her: Spontaneously wanted to see if she could lift the devil.

Him: Baffled, yet amused.

Sometimes Evie channels 8 INT Tav, she's just lucky Raphael's quite fond of his little fox.

[chicago-geniza]

Genuinely shook me to my core to learn that some people cannot hear meter when every minute of my thrice-damned life is exactly like this

[mumblelard]

saving the world one couch nap at a time and also happy friday imaginary constructs

i dreamt i got hired to do public relations for a collective of sentient alleyways. in the course of interviewing them for their press release i discovered something startling, then i woke up

[eastern-lights]

Fellas, friends, pray for me, for I have state exams in English philology in a week and I will randomly pick a question from either phonetics, lexicology or stylistics and it’s not that I suck at phonetics or stylistics per se but...

I FUCKING LOVE LEXICOLOGY AND I WANT TO GET TO RANT ABOUT IT FOR 20 MINUTES BEFORE A COMMITTEE

so please fingers crossed that I pick lexicology, pretty please

[allarrows]

i need john waters or someone to like emerge from a bush to tell me "it's unseasonal to be this neurotic in summer"