#singular noun

[auradaparanormal]

Me projecting my period cramps onto Commander Peepers

[swan2swan]

Really curious about Ben's use of "them" throughout the gas station thing.

Are the attendant's pronouns they/them? Doesn't really come up. Seems pretty he/they.

Were there supposed to be two attendants in the original script? Or a differently-modeled character? I don't think Brock Powell's pronouns are they/them. Maybe Ben's just really general with his pronouns.

[all-purpose-dish-soap]

Scuze me, I'm gonna need that lovely and well written soulmate au with our boy Soapy part 5 plz & gracious thank yous

i get the feeling a few of y'all are waiting on that one ;) i understand. soap is easy to love.

doing my best to finish up and get it posted this weekend! de nada ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿

[outfoxt]

everyone add another tally to the board, my brother asked me another question having to do with one person he heard one time and expected me to know the answer because "you're a linguist"

[doll3tt33]

I've been talking with your Austin Sommers bot, and he's absolutely ready to beat me up

Austin is ready to beat YOU up??? You sure not the other way around??? 😭😭😭😭 ((he’s hot but let’s be real. He’s a pain.

I’m curious cuz WHAT DID YOU DO??? Did you break his camera??? Cuz I mean, that’s one way to piss a paparazzo off

[pallases]

my professor gave me an 18/20 on my lab report for using “were” instead of “was” when the correct grammar is in fact “were” 😐

[ava-of-shenanigans]

Awhile ago I made a post saying that my favourite dualistic Horus and Set epithet was rHwy, but I have since learned that there’s another spell in the Pyramid Texts that calls them snwy (which is just the number two in Egyptian), so I’ve changed my mind, that’s my favourite one. A dou so iconic that the Ancient Egyptians will literally just call them “the two” and expect you to figure it out.

The translations of this spell add another word usually to make this make sense, like “the two (assailants)” or “the two (contestants),” but that is not there in the Egyptian.

(The spell in question is Pyramid Text spell number 407/Pharaoh Teti’s spell number 284, if you want to have fun figuring out the huge mess that is Pyramid Text spell numbering in order to find it. The line in spell where this occurs is about the pharaoh deciding court cases, so that does make it pretty obvious which two gods they must be talking about, but this is still very funny.)

[snrland]

Trying to figure out how drunk Russians were when they decided that три новых велосипеда is a reasonable declension and not a crime to humanity.

[commajade]

SURPRISE GUESTS HIS CATS AS ANIMATED CHARACTERS. WHO DESIGNED THESE CATS.

[astarionspocketpussy]

Thought too hard about how I name Tieflings and started considering the role of "common" in DND and how different real life languages might fit in that framework. Needless to say now I want to write an essay but alas. Its midnight.

[windmill-ghost]

Characters I’m including in Wayne Empire whose monikers are impossible to naturally say:

Onomatopoeia: I literally cannot imagine anyone taking the time to pronounce that shit.

Abuse: any sentence regarding this guy sounds terrible out-of-context, and honestly still weird in-context.

[mlentertainment]

my brother is the silliest most whimsical man i've ever met and i am gnashing my teeth at the world for trying to crush his spirit

[masked-disciple]

I both love and hate worldbuilding so much.

Like, I'm thinking about how I want to do languages in the Aethel, and I'm like, "there's language groups and usually language just drifts, it's rare people up and intentionally make a new language and it catches on, although trade and politics definitely can help a region's power swap from one common language to another" but if I want to make diverse languages, even if they don't actually appear front-and-centre, I have to do all this goddamn research.

Like, cuneiform looks like That because they used hexagonal 'pens' of sorts to press into clay, and kanji looks like That because they use brushes, and Irish ogham looks like That because it was typically carved into rocks, and Latin cursive looks like That because we used feather pens. But did we diverge alphabets from each other in the proto-indo-european days because of different tools, or was writing invented repeatedly in different places and that's why it's different?

Furthermore, what shapes language itself? Icelandic is a very gutteral language that hasn't really changed in a thousand years because it doesn't need to, but Japanese is a very melodic language with a very firm consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel structure. Why's that? They're both island cultures who kept to themselves for a good chunk of history. What made them different? Why is it that only like five languages use a tongue-click as a sound, and only some roll Rs? What happened to make these naturally happen, and why aren't they more common?

Why is it Japanese is an incredibly indirect language but also incredibly concise, whereas Hebrew and English are both typically pretty direct? Why do some languages not even have relational left/right, and only ever use cardinal directions? Aren't there a few completely atemporal languages? Why is it that English only has a few tonal indicators, but if you fuck up any tones at all in Cantonese, it changes everything you just said? Whose idea was that, and why did it stick around?

These are all questions that absolutely build and help make worldbuilding that much more natural and realistic. But answering them is going to require a goddamn linguistic anthropology degree. I can't just wikipedia this shit in one night and then keep going.

It's worse once you get different species in the mix. A draconic language is not likely to sound anything like a human language, and may not be at all possible for any human ever to speak. I've been writing Denellic almost entirely as "what if Icelandic people got the ability to roll every single consonant that exists, and also knew Latin, and aggressively wanted to insult Latin at every point, and was a language intentionally made to do so, but also the species that primarily speaks it has seven distinct arcanobiological genders with cultural meaning and expects you to stack them on every noun because being neutral on a topic is culturally unacceptable".

I'm literally dying. Am I having so so so much fun? Absolutely. But I'm also literally dying, and if anyone wants to help a worldbuilder out and knows the answers to some of these questions, please please please tell me it'll make my worldbuilding cooler.

[tolstoys-nemesis]

"but it wasn't like this in the books" and is the single (1) book used as direct source material (that you've definitely read) in the room with us now?