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prayandfeast · 1 year ago

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✩ Character Creation: FUTURUS ✩

Again, this information is coming directly from my big twitter thread. But I like sharing my useless thought process on character design.

Please beware that there might be some spoilers down below. Also, this post is very, very long.

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✩ CREATION BREAKDOWN ✩

When originally coming up with his design, I wanted to try to keep to the "P"/"Pro" theme. Mostly, I was trying to play with Prompto's name. I ended up following around with the etymology and synonyms to bring forth the same effect.

'Proximo' and 'Ultimo' were words that kept coming around during those times; there were a sea of other candidates, but I ended up landing on 'Proximo' for a short while. Unfortunately, it didn't sound great when saying it beside Prompto's own name. I switched gears, and tried someone who would match Prompto's personality, something positive and uplifting. "Sunshine" was where I started, and then I started branching into other words of hope and good will.

Being sold on this, how did I end up on 'Futurus' after so long? Well, I had a name map that I started off with (with Prompto being the base tree). I kept coming back to the basis of 'promptus' and how it just meant to push into action and how that could inspire the movement of going forward.

I bounced across a number of languages and kept picking at the meaning of Prompto's first and last name to get the effect I wanted. It took a few days of nonstop thinking before I landed on "Futurus~"

(You can clearly see that he was in the top three names. The others just didn't sound as great with the Argentum surname!)

✩ LET'S TALK: WEAPONS ✩

I love the idea of these two being contrasts, and you'll see that as we go on. One of the contrasts is that he is the primary sniper. He can use a wide range of firearms like his brother, but because of some… incidents, he developed a proficiency. (I developed Futurus fully before I even got my hands on the game, so imagine my delight of seeing Prompto with a sniper.)

Futurus' proficiency with bioweapons also comes from his extended time in Gralea/Niflheim. However, because of the weapons that he can use best (MT weaponry), he tries to stay away from using them where others can see or suspect him. There are also specific tools in Zegnautus Keep that he's particularly deft in. They're also last resort weapons.

Explosives are really my parenthetical weapon. Depending on whatever AU he's in, it's possible that he'll use this over bioweapons. He's great at making small scale infiltration explosives or just making a bang.

✩ LET'S TALK: SKILLS ✩

Just like his weaponry, it depends on what AU he's in. One was developed a bit later in his life while the other came about once he was, hm, retrieved. So we'll start with the first.

Futurus ended up developing additional skills once he rejected his…. retraining. He was supposed to be an evolved for of what they were currently testing in the Empire, so he ended up developing his skills of Kinesics as a child.

He became very good at reading people and working around them, but he's no good at connecting with them. He's very slow to really build a meaningful connection with people outside of Prompto, who he's determined to rebuild a bond with to make up for lost time. If someone sees through him (read: Ignis), he's either impressed or he doubles down and shuts himself out of his own emotional processing. He's very much a "use 'em and lose 'em", heartbreaker, playboy type.

Alternatively, driving! Driving was something he was taught out to do as soon as he was tall enough to reach the peddles. As he progresses down the skill ladder, he becomes more adept at various vehicle types, conquers different terrain, etc. He starts off being able to highjack most basic vehicles (trucks and cars) and he's adept at high speed getaway driving. It's what he was quite literally what he was (re)born to do. At some point later, I'll come up with a real skill ladder for him.

✩ LET'S TALK: FOODS ✩

Futurus' S-rank food is cotton cheesecake with chocolate-coffee ganache. He loves the fine things in life. He had this once in Lestallum after his escape and shortly after he joined the Hunters.

↓↓Food Rankings (not on Iggy's list!)↓↓

A-Rank: Wild Steak and Potatoes with Cream Sauce

B-Rank: Roast on Toast

C-Rank: Convenience Store Bento

↓↓Food Rankings (based on Iggy's recipes)↓↓

A-Rank: Elegant Orange Cake

B-Rank: Oil-Drizzled Steamed Fish

C-Rank: Fried Rookie on Rice

D-Rank: Creamy Bisque, Packed Mushroom Stew, Crown City Roast

✩ ELABORATED BACKSTORY ✩

After he and his brother were taken from the Empire to the Crown City, they grew up together in a quiet part of town. (What passes as the suburbs in a place like this.) Futurus was inquisitive, good at getting his way, but ultimately, the younger brother.

It showed in the way he kept close to Prompto, learning his interests, and mimicking them half-heartedly before finding things that he enjoyed himself. He clung to small things, and early on in his life, however amateurishly, he took up scrapbooking.

However, Futurus also had a bad habit of wandering. If there was a hobby that he enjoyed more than scrapbooking or collecting, it was taking off on his own to go explore the city he lived in. When he was caught in the day time, he would start to leave at night. (Imagine seeing a blond four year old just toddling around the city alone.)

One day at around nine years old, Futurus had taken off on his usual excursions, since he and his brother were primarily alone at this point, he left in the day as was his wont. He ended up getting caught by some agents who had come looking for the missing boys.

Futurus lied and said that Prompto had died in the trip; he was the only one left. Being that he was a young child, it was easy for him to pretend to be distressed. (It wasn't all an act; the idea of losing his only bond terrified him. Still does.)

They went for him, and he ran away. At first, he was going back home, but he realised that if they caught Prompto too, he wasn't sure what they'd do to him. So, he ran somewhere he could make a call, left a message on the house voicemail, and then allowed himself to be taken.

"Hey, Prom. 'm sorry I ran away. But you should be safe now."

It was the last thing Prompto heard from his brother. Futurus was taken back to Niflheim and "reeducated" to follow his original purpose. However, he had a strong sense of will after being out in the world for a brief time. He was, however, still responding to the re-training. This proved promising. They could work with this.

Around sixteen, he ended up reprogramming some MTs to cause chaos and then fucked off for as long as he could. He almost died in Gralea trying to escape, but he would have preferred that over life under the Empire's thumb.

He did end up escaping in something of a haze. When he finally woke up, he was in Accordo. It was the last place he'd ever think to end up, and it was probably better that way. He gathered his life placing bets and warming himself up to the extravagant folk who lived there.

After getting enough money, he scoured around for work until he found a mercenary who was heading back to the mainland to continue her business. He decided to go with and showed off his ability by smooth talking them into a ride back at a reduced rate. She was all in for that.

There are bits of his life that are still being detailed in Lackspurs and Marigold, but he ended up finding a place with the Meldacio Hunters. They ended someone to watch their back; he was their guy. He ended up getting a car of his own, something functional that could take a good amount of a beating but was covert. Funnily, he ended up meeting Cid and Cindy during a mission to retrieve some missing parts for some wayward soul.

The Aurums are one of the few hands that he lets touch his car with any promise of success. Other than that, he has someone in the Cleigne who knows a thing or two. (This contact travels a lot and is modeled loosely off FFX's Yojimbo design.)

There are two main ways that the twins reunited. The first is in L&M, where Futurus gathers his courage and goes into the Crown City and find his brother himself.

The other, which is in another story called Twin Pistols (in development) where they meet during a base busting mission.

Prompto is the only person that Futurus has a soft spot for and goes to pieces for because he already lived through losing him once. And unlike Prompto, Futurus hasn't tried to heal that emotional hole by making new friends. If anything, he's relied on himself far, far too much for far, far too long. At this point in his life, he, truthfully, doesn't even know how to rely on people in an emotional way. For as world weary as he is and for as much as he's seen, it's always the genuine and personal that scares him.

It's all too easy for him to take his role as "the younger sibling" when he's around Prompto. (They're gremlins together. Often fucking around and acting out like nothing changed.) In truth, he's incredibly worried about Prompto's safety with Crowned folk.

Gladio is someone he's very rarely off his guard around. By game standards, it's because he's blunt and aggressive (they did you dirty, baby. I'm sorry.), but overall, he just has that bodyguard vibe. He's dangerous.

Noctis is a prince; one wag of his finger and a whole town can burn. That's just how Futurus sees it. He doesn't trust Noctis to be genuine; he could be seeing Prompto as a way to just keep his image clean. "I don't hate poor people; I have a friend who's poor..."

Ignis... Now that's a man Futurus doesn't want to turn his back to. He and Ignis are on the same wavelength, and that makes him Futurus Enemy #1. As an advisor, tactician, and diplomat, Ignis is Mister Suave, but he's the one who could make people disappear if he wanted.

But seeing Prompto well and truly genuinely happy is what sets some of Futurus' nerves at ease. Even more so, he can see how they act together, but when the ribbing turns a bit mean, he's very defensive. 0 to 100, immediately.

The three aren't entirely certain about him either because who knows what could have happened to him. This could all be some ruse. The fact that they're incredibly protective over Prompto in return (specifically Noctis) is heart-warming. But only just.

It does take some one-on-one time with each of them or some far away observance for him to see the good in any of them. Even still, he has a healthy amount of reservations.

It's not until they either leave the Crown City or run into Cindy that barriers properly break with any of them. If I go into anymore detail, I'll just have to go back to writing L&M. Also, Twin Pistols is the """"canon"""" ending with him, and why would I hurt myself like this? It's not happy at all.

L&M has far happier connotations for his future with his brother and other people. It's incredibly healing and about a process of relearning and acceptance.

#&creation logs;#raise hell;#Final Fantasy OCs #Futurus Argentum #futurus;

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svartikotturinn · 5 years ago

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My speaker attitudes towards dialects

(Adapted from a Reddit comment of mine.)

People who think they know a thing or two about linguistics often tend to chastise others for their prescriptivism, especially others who know a thing or two about linguistics (and I should know—I got my BA in linguistics and East Asian studies). What they tend to ignore, however, is that a key part of linguistics is sociolinguistics, and a key part of that is speakers’ attitudes.

We are speakers. We live in a society where our language is spoken, and we know when and where certain features are used, and our attitude changes accordingly. It’s as inevitable as the change in language itself. Of course, sometimes it’s blatantly classist/racist/sexist, but that’s another issue. Oftentimes it’s purely æsthetic or something related to other issues.

So what about me as a speaker?

Generally I prefer conservative dialects of just about any language, as they maintain certain distinctions that others lose (which can lead to confusion or just less intuitive spelling and murkier etymology).

So, I’ll address the phonological level first.

In English, I like dialects that don’t mix up words like these:¹

Consonants:

Unstressed syllables:

ladder–latter

winner–winter

Syllable finally:

father–farther

Elsewhere:

wine–whine

Vowels:

Before ‹r›

marry–merry–Mary

higher–hire

coyer–coir

flower–flour

horse–hoarse

irk–erk, earn–urn, fur–fir²

Before ‹l›

vial–vile

real–reel

‹u…e›, ‹ew› after coronals

through–threw

you–yew

choose–chews

loot–lute

do–dew

toon–tune

Diphthongs:

wait–weight

Wales–wails

tow–toe

Unstressed syllables:

emission–a mission–omission

Pharaoh–farrow

shivaree–shivery

Otherwise:

cot–caught

meet–meat

The whole just makes so much more sense this way, especially if you’re teaching the language to learners, because that way there’s more of a 1:1 correspondence between orthography and spelling so there’s less memorizing involved (speaking as an English tutor and enthusiastic language learner).

It also helps when there’s a certain ‘symmetry’ in the vowel system, like when both ‹a…e› and ‹o…e› are pronounced as mid-high–high diphthongs (or just long mid-high vowels), one front and the other back; in the eastern half of the US and in the UK, that’s not really the case. Also the tense ‹a› vowel being pronounced the same in all environments makes it much less confusing to teach; in most American dialects, it tends to vary based on the sounds that follow it and whether it’s in a closed or open syllable, and in Australia (and I think certain places in the US) there’s an inconsistent split into two categories among the words. Shifts like those sometimes make more such distinctions (e.g. mad–Madd, and also put–putt for most dialects), but they can be a real headache to teach.

Similarly, I prefer to keep the vowel distinction of hurry–furry, as it makes morpheme boundaries clearer. The same for keeping the first vowel of sorry in words like corridor or horror, because it makes the orthography more consistent, following a clear rule:

A vowel letter before ‹rr› in an open syllable (within morpheme boundaries) is pronounced like a normal tense vowel.

In Hebrew, I have a special appreciation for ethnolects that maintain the distinction between:

uvular and pharyngeal voiceless fricatives, e.g. כָּךְ /käχ/ ‘thus’ vs. קַח /kä/ ‘take! masc. sing.’

glottal stops and voiced pharyngeal fricatives, e.g. אֵד /ʔe̞d/ ‘vapour’ vs. עֵד /ʕe̞d/ ‘witness’

velar and uvular plosives, e.g. כָּל /ko̞l/ ‘every’ vs. קוֹל /qo̞l/ ‘voice’³

plain and pharyngealized voiceless coronal plosives, e.g. תְּבִיעָה /tvi.ˈʕä/ ‘lawsuit’ vs. טְבִיעָה /tˤvi.ˈʕä/ ‘drowning’

plain vs. pharyngealized voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate, e.g. צָאר /t͡säʁ̞/ ‘tsar’ vs. צַר /t͡sˤäʁ̞/ ‘narrow masc. sing.’⁴

simple vs. geminate consonants, e.g. גָּמָל /gä.ˈmäl/ ‘camel’ vs. גַּמָּל /gäm.ˈmäl/ ‘(literary) camel driver’

There are other distinctions that I omitted here, mostly in terms of vowel length and quality: back in the times of the Mishna, Hebrew dialects had up to 7 or 8 different vowels and as many as 3 or even 4 different vowel lengths, but in Modern Israeli Hebrew, the vowels have coalesced into a system of five vowels with no length distinctions. However, those are pretty much obsolete except in liturgical uses, and I don’t care much for liturgical use except for academic interest because I have a very, very negative view of Orthodox Judaism. I somewhat lament the loss of such distinctions to that realm, especially since the loss of those distinctions means that a lot of Hebrew morphology and phonology no longer makes any immediate, intuitive sense (at least until you learn the logic behind it—then it makes a lot more sense but it’s still very mechanical), and is now basically the bane of every highschooler’s existence.

In Japanese, I like dialects which, unlike Standard Japanese (which is based on the Tokyo dialect and serves as the basis for transliteration and standard kana orthography), maintain the traditional distinction between:

Consonants:

plain vs. labialized velar plosives (both voiced and voiceless), e.g.

家事 /kaʑi/ ‘housework’ vs. 火事 /kʷaʑi/ ‘conflagration’

both normally transcribed kaji

雅歌 /gaka/ ‘elegant song’ vs. 画家 /gʷaka/ ‘painter’

both normally transcirbed gaka

voiced sibilant affricates vs. fricatives, e.g.:

alveolo-palatal ones: 地震 /d͡ʑiɕiɴ/ ‘earthquake’ vs. 自信 /ʑiɕiɴ/ ‘confidence’

both normally transcribed jishin

alveolar ones: 数 /käzɯᵝ/ ‘number’ vs. 下図 /käd͡zɯᵝ/ ‘the illustration below’

both normally transcribed jouzu or jōzu

/o/ vs. /wo/:

折る /oɾɯ/ ‘to fold’ vs. 居る /woɾɯ/ ‘to be’

both normally transcribed as oru

Vowels:

long mid-low and mid-high rounded vowels, e.g.:

～長 /–t͡ʃɔː/ ‘head or leader of’ vs. ～庁 /–t͡ʃoː/ ‘government office of’

both normally transcribed as chou or chō, pronounced /–t͡ʃo̞ː/ in Tokyo

In addition, I also like how the Kansai dialect allows for more varied pitch accent patterns than the Tokyo dialect. Distinctions like these, along with those mentioned above, could be immensely helpful in mitigating the preposterous amount of homophones it has (especially among Sino-Japanese loanwords) which make it so, so much harder for learners to master listening comprehension (and for native speakers to understand spoken academic or technical texts), but alas. It also makes the connection between less intuitive go-on & kan-on pairs, which generally remain a mystery to anyone who hasn’t researched them in depth or has any background in Chinese.

In other languages, I naturally prefer other such distinctions, e.g.:

Spanish dialects with lleísmo and distinción

French dialects that preserve all the vowels that Parisian French no longer does, and also between mid-high and mid-low vowels

Portuguese dialects that resist as many of the plethora of mergers other dialects have as possible

Italian dialects that distinguish between mid-high and mid-low vowels; examples of minimal pairs here

The North-central dialect of Vietnamese

Korean dialects that preserve vital distinctions in terms of vowel length and quality as well as pitch accent, and also initial /l/ in loanwords

Mandarin dialects that retain retroflex consonants, rather than merge them into alveolar sibilants (like in Taiwan and southern Mandarin dialects)

Cantonese dialects that retain the difference between

Tones

high and high-falling tones, e.g. 衫 /saːm⁵⁵/ ‘shirt’ vs. 三 /saːm⁵³/ ‘three’

Consonants

plain and labialized velar plosives, e.g. 各 /kɔk̚³/ ‘every, each’ vs. 國 /kwɔk̚³/ ‘country; national’

alveolar laterals and nasals, e.g. 里 /lei̯¹³/ ‘li’ vs. 你 /nei̯¹³/ ‘you sing.’

But at the same time, I’m not above political or regional biases, e.g.:

I like Arabic dialects that maintain the wide array of consonants of Modern Standard Arabic, but I feel very connected to my city of residence Haifa, so I prefer the dialects spoken in this region.

Also, I prefer Standard Taiwanese Mandarin (think Pearl in the Taiwanese dub of Steven Universe) over PRC Mandarin partially because, well, fuck Winnie the Pooh.

On a grammatical level, I love how dialects create subtler distinctions in terms of tense and aspect or pragmatic distinctions:

For example, while African–American English exhibits a wide array of phonological mergers (e.g. fin–thin, den–then), it also exhibits far subtler distinctions of tense and aspect that ‘Standard’ English lacks: compare the short AAE been knew vs. the much longer SE have known for a long time.

Another example is the modern ‘vocal fry’ (a.k.a. creaky voice) that some American girls have started using in the past few years, which marks parenthetical information in a sentence.

This is also why I like German dialects that have a wider use of the preterite (i.e. more northern ones), as opposed to those that have merged them entirely into the present perfect (e.g. in Bavaria). It’s also why I’m somewhat miffed by the merger of the 1st. sing. fut. conjugation of Hebrew verbs into the 3rd. masc. sing. fut. one, e.g. יַסְבִּיר /jäs.ˈbiʁ̞/ ‘[he] will explain’ vs. אַסְבִּיר /ʔäs.ˈbiʁ̞/ ‘[I] will explain’.

On the other hand, being non-binary, I have a special distaste for gendered morphology. This is why I came up with this system to do away with the last bit of gendering in English, and why although I find non-native speakers crude attempts at reinventing Hebrew morphology extremely distasteful (seriously, shit like that is why I say American Jews are, first and foremost, American),⁵ I do rejoice at any erosion I see of gender distinctions in Hebrew. It’s also why I like most sign languages so much—I say ‘most’, because Japanese SL, for example, has gendered pronouns (unlike ASL or Israeli SL, for example), and why I resent the Western influence that led to gendered pronouns becoming a thing in Japanese and Chinese, and why I often think about learning Finnish properly.⁶

On a lexical level, I have a particular affinity for archaisms, or more lexically conservative languages.

In the case of English:

I like dialects that preserve Old English archaisms, words from Old English that have been displaced by Latinate cognates, holding on like the Gaulish village of Astérix and Obelix. Words like gome and blee fascinate me and I wish they were in more common use, which is why I like the idea of Anglish so much.

I also like dialects that maintain mostly obsolete ‘irregular’ forms of verbs, for example clumb as the past participle of climb, as they provide a rare insight into the development of English.

And I most certainly like dialects that still use some variation of thou, like tha in Yorkshire or thee in Lancashire.

Hebrew, on the other hand, doesn’t really have any dialectical variations per se to speak of, or any ‘archaisms’ that they preserve, as it was pretty much dormant for nearly two millennia. Back when Jesus was still around, there was some regional variation among Hebrew speakers—this can be seen in the New Testament, for example, when people confront Simon Peter after Jesus is arrested and claim that his accent gives away the fact that he was one of Jesus’ men. For example, different accents of the time had notably different vowel systems, for example, which is why there were three different systems (roughly speaking) to indicate them at the time, and this is before we’ve even considered Samaritan Hebrew, which is about as comprehensible to a Modern Hebrew speaker as Doric (or even Frisian) is to an English speaker. Hebrew speakers borrow phrases extensively from their traditional literature, much like Chinese people with their four-character idioms, and often use more literary language in tongue-in-cheek, so it’s not really comparable. However, there is some amount of sociolinguistic variation as to doing so, but I would say it has more to do with religious and socio-economic status than ethnolect and certainly regional variation (which is far more limited in Hebrew than in English, mostly confined to rather small subsets of regionalisms), and I do like it when people do use these.

This is why I appreciate Québec French, for all its overzealously purist and prescriptivist faults. It’s often a wonderful museum of words of bygone days, from dialects that the efforts to standardize French have nearly if not completely exterminated. As an English speaker in particular, it’s interesting to see Norman remnants in the language.

On the other hand, it always fascinates me when languages borrow words for concepts they already have, and use the loanword for a more specific concept therein. Consider, for example, the English words kingly (Germanic), royal (Norman), and regal (Latin), or these fascinating examples.

The problem is that many of these features are fairly stigmatized.

In terms of phonology, I make a conscious effort to maintain most of the distinctions above when I speak English, but on the other hand I flap my ‹t›s and ��d›s in rapid speech to avoid sounding like a stuck-up prick. Similarly, I don’t maintain the wine–whine distinction, for example, unless, say, I’m working with a student on a story that takes place in the Southern US, because I would sound like a dick who’s trying to sound like a Southern gentleman or something. I still teach the distinction, if only to explain why there is such a difference in the orthography to begin with even if I tell students not to observe it when actually speaking. When I speak Hebrew, I most certainly don’t make those traditional ethnolect distinctions—that would come across as being either unbelievably pedantic or outright mocking. When I speak Japanese or other languages, well, I generally don’t know them well enough to maintain all the distinctions as I would like to, even those that aren’t stigmatized, but I do make an effort to at least observe those distinctions when the orthography makes them clear enough (and stick to the standard in Japanese).

In terms of grammar, I don’t teach dialectical English irregular forms. At most, I gloss over them with a sentence or two, and leave it at that. I assume my average student would hardly read books or watch films or TV shows that take place in Appalachia or what-have-you, certainly not without subtitles anyway. If I ever got a particularly advanced student, however… I would still be reluctant, as I am hardly over-familiar with those dialects myself, and don’t want to mislead them. In Hebrew, on the other hand, my grammar and spelling do tend to be very conservative to the point of anachronism sometimes (like, I generally follow the BuMP rule when I speak; most Israelis don’t), but I balance it out with a decent amount of slang.

In terms of lexical items, I pretty much avoid teaching dialectical archaisms altogether. Those are almost entirely useless for students, and I don’t even speak the dialects that use them, so I can’t say for a fact which dialecticalisms are even in current use. In Hebrew, I might make some detours, but that’s because truly archaic words, that wouldn’t even be used in tongue-in-cheek, are a rarity, and oftentimes they share roots with more common words, so they can cement the understanding of those roots more readily.

If no socio-linguistic considerations (or my own fluency) were a complete non-issue?

In English:

I’d make an effort to maintain all of the distinctions mentioned above, including those that are observed today only by a handful of older people from rural areas.

I’d pronounce ‹gh› in words like right and weight to tell them apart from rite and wait.

I’d use thou and AAE grammar and any dialectical archaism or even Anglish coinage I could get away with.

And, of course, I’d use my gender-neutral pronoun system for everyone except trans people who might get dysphoric.

In Hebrew:

I’d speak Hebrew with extremely conservative pronunciation, like BCE-level ancient, making all of the distinctions mentioned above.

On top of those, I would distinguish between the voiceless alveolar sibilant and lateral fricatives (which was lost very early on), so I pronounce סוֹרֵר /soː.ˈreːr/ ‘unruly, recalcitrant’ and שׂוֹרֵר /ɬoː.ˈreːr/ ‘existing, prevailing’ (both in masc. sing.) differently (rather than pronounce both like the first).

I’d reintroduce syllable-final glottal stops so that the orthography and grammar finally make a lick of sense.

On the other hand, I would think of a system to do away with gendered language in Hebrew that still made internal sense.

In Japanese:

I’d speak Japanese with all of the distinctions mentioned above, the fact that they characterize two parts of Japan that are practically on oppsite ends of the country be damned.

I might maybe even bring back a few obsolete features, like nasal vowels or the syllable ye and palatalized consonants before e (when applicable), because they make go-on and kan-on relationships clearer, and also clear up their relationship to Mandarin and other languages with extensive Sinitic vocabulary. (Although I doubt there are modern dialects that do that today, certainly not in a discriminating way, so I might give up on that.)

And, of course, I would do it all with Kansai pitch accent, or at least There are too many homophones, damnit, I gotta tell them apart SOMEHOW!

In Mandarin:

I’d speak Mandarin with Standard Taiwanese pronunciation.

Maybe I’d even use the Old National Pronunciation—what with my background in Japanese, it would save me a lot of memorizing, because I’d remember that all the characters that ended with a voiceless consonant in Japanese have the same tone in Mandarin.

Hell, I might even reintroduce the distinction between /e/, /ɔ/, and /a/.

In Cantonese:

I’d distinguish between the tones and the initial consonants, as mentioned above.

In addition, I might even bring back the distinction between alveolar and palato-alveolar sibilants that died in 1950—it’ll certainly make things easier for me, as I’ve learned some Mandarin in the past.

In Korean:

I’d speak a mix of dialects preserving all of the above distinctions and then some; I’d probably sound a lot like I were from North Korea, but in this scenario this wouldn’t matter.

In Vietnamese:

North-central dialect all the way.

In that scenario, the only thing that would stop me from talking like that would be comprehensibility. It would definitely be an issue—even today English speakers would probably be thrown off by pronouncing the ‹gh›, for one, and I’m sure my variety of Hebrew would be incomprehensible to most native speakers today.

But for now, I’ll make do with what I got, I guess.

—

Endnotes

¹ Most dialects that do mix them up generally pronounce them like the former in each pair.

² These distinction traditionally exists in Scotland; Ireland has a two-way split that works differently. On this note, I’d also count distinctions between e.g. wait and weight, but at this point it’s already Scots, not English. (Which is just another reason I love Scots so much, along with its lexical conservatism.)

³ This distinction, as well as the three that follow, are exceedingly rare.

⁴ The phranyngealized voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate was not preserved as such in any ethnolect: it either became a pharyngealized voiceless alveolar sibilant fricative (in Yemenite and Mizrahi Hebrew), or it simply lost its pharyngealization (in Sephardi and Ashkenazi Hebrew, and Modern Israeli Hebrew)—e.g. צַד /t͡sˤäd/ > /sˤäd/, /t͡säd/ ‘side’. Barring the exceedingly rare loanword, I could not think of a single minimal pair such as the one given above.

⁵ For the record: I was raised speaking English alongside Hebrew, albeit in a non-Anglophone country, and a lot of research went into my solution to ensure that it’s based on precedent rather than be a tasteless neologism.

⁶ There are other genderless languages as well, but they’re either super-niche or spoken by communities that aren’t as progressive, or both.

#linguistics #sociolinguistics #speaker attitude #personal #languages #dialects #dialectology

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dedalvs · 7 years ago

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I loved your conlanging book! Could you please elaborate on your actual grammar creation process though? I think in one of your videos you talked about using dummy words to work out the verbs and stuff, but it's all rather overwhelming Eg: whether the adjectives are inflected depends on how the nouns are used and whether I have cases affects word order and it seems like every piece of grammar depends on the rest (and I obviously can't make it up simultaneously) Help!

Yeah, you have to start somewhere. So start somewhere. Make that specific. Leave the rest blank. Like, say I wanted to create some kind of case system—say prefixal. I’ll probably decide, for the time being (since it’s easy), to do VSO, and come up with dummy sentences like this:

Sees X Y

Hugs X Y

Sleeps X

Gives X Y Z

It does not matter to me if “hug” is derived from something; it doesn’t matter if there’s different verbs for “see” depending on the duration; it doesn’t matter if there’s some importance difference in verbs of giving depending on what’s being given or who’s doing the given. Leave that for later. Doesn’t even matter what tenses there are, or what tenses these are in, for the moment. I can come up with dummy forms for them, but I don’t even need that: We can just use English for now so I know what they mean at a glance. What I want is a basic transitive verb (hug); a basic experiencer verb (see); a basic intransitive verb (sleep); and a basic ditransitive verb (give).

Next we come up with some nouns—usually something like “girl”, “fish”, “book”. These three nouns have a definite animacy hierarchy (girl > fish > book), modulo culture, which, again, we’re not dealing with right now. This language may not even end up having a word for “book”, but I don’t care at the moment. Come up with some forms for them in our phonology (imagining something that seems fun to me right now):

girl - ŋaɾe

fish - evi

book - pozu

We’re working with prefixes here, so I have three different onsets: Nasal onset (ŋ); vocalic onset (e); stop onset (p).

All right, so just throwing stuff out here, let’s say we want “touch” for a kind of accusative. So we have, at the very least:

Hug girl touch fish

Hug girl touch girl

Hug girl touch book

We know we’re going to have that. Also we know accusatives are very old, so for the time being, we’re not going to worry about verbal morphology. Let’s roll with this.

For an accusative, you want something easy and common—thinking [s]. So coming up with our old verb for “touch”, let’s say it’s something /sana/. Same vowel on either side of the /n/, and /n/ being an easily droppable consonant, we can see that reducing. So we get something like (for a start):

Hug ŋaɾe sanevi.

Hug ŋaɾe saŋŋaɾe(?)/saŋaɾe(?).

Hug ŋaɾe sapozu.

Easy start; pretty basic. Easy to see what’s going on here. Now we have options. Lots of possibilities here. For example, taking a look at the last one, if you have /sana + pozu/, you could do all the following:

sanapozu (no reduction)

saapozu (loss of /n/; long vowel retained)

sapozu (loss of /n/; vowel shortened)

spozu (reduction from 3)

sanpozu (loss of unstressed /a/)

sampozu (loss of unstressed /a/; assimilation of /n/)

sambozu (from 6, but /p/ voices)

sabozu (from 7, loss of /m/)

zbozu (from 8, loss of vowel, voicing of /s/)

samozu (from 7, loss of /b/)

mozu (from 10, now case just marked with consonant mutation)

smozu (from 10, loss of /a/)

zmozu (from 12, voicing of /s/)

So that’s plenty to think about. Tons of possibilities. And here I might pause and consider option 11. What if there were just consonant mutations? How would that work? We’d have a nasal consonant mutation for the accusative. This would mean are other accusatives would be:

ŋaɾe > ŋaɾe (no change)

evi > nevi (add /n-/)

That’s a possibility. Not sure if we want to go down that rabbit hole until we explore what we’re doing with the other cases, though, so let’s hang onto it and move on.

The other two nouns are easier. With “fish” you’re going to have /sanevi/, /snevi/, /znevi/, or /nevi/ (or, if you want to go with extreme analogy, maybe even /sevi/). We haven’t touched on the possibility of vowels affective each other (i.e. sana + evi has two vowels next to one another), but /a/ coming before /e/ is not a good test case. If it were /sani/, maybe you’d get /saɲevi/. Something to hang onto; don’t want to go down that rabbit hole at the moment.

With ŋaɾe, pretty easy: saŋŋaɾe or saŋaɾe (probably the latter, for an accusative case which is going to enjoy a lot of use; not likely to produce a cluster there), or sŋaɾe or zŋaɾe. Right off the bat we’re dealing with a big question: Is this language going to allow /sC/ clusters? It’s good that this comes up now. This is an accusative case, which means you’re going to be using it and hearing it a lot. So do you like it? Do you like /sŋ/? Do you like /zŋ/ better if not? It’s a tradeoff. /spozu/ and /zŋaɾe/ or /sŋaɾe/ are shorter than /sapozu/ and /saŋaɾe/, so if you want your language to have that sound, it’ll save you some space.

Of course (and this is the best part), if you’re fine with that sound, but just don’t want it, you can take all this work that we’ve done and apply it to another less frequently used case. After all, we said /sana/ means “touch”, but we haven’t written down any words yet. Nothing’s in stone! You can say, “Okay, this is what my /s/ paradigm is going to sound like. Let’s decide what case it will be later.” Provided your proto-language isn’t published, you can still change it at this point.

Anyway, next place I would go is “see”, and if the etymology of my accusative is “touch”, I don’t like using that with “see”. It doesn’t make sense. This means we’re going to have a different etymological source for another objective case, and we’re creating two different classes of verbs: those whose objects take the accusative, and those that take this other one. Or maybe some take both, with an important change in meaning, or others can take both, with no one noticing the difference—or some it’s just a dialectal or prestige difference. Lots of possibilities! So this is cool. Now what for that other marker? Can do some sort of verb (maybe “take”, maybe “enter”, maybe “go”—I’m imagining conceptualizing seeing as an activity that emits some sort of ray, like a light, which goes into the object [note: on this, see Lila by Robert M. Pirsig]). “Go” is pretty simple, and can be reduced pretty easily. If we’re going with consonant mutation, it can’t have a nasal in a crucial position, otherwise we’re breaking our pattern. It could be something palatal, or maybe something vocalic. Working with the idea that it’s some kind of voiced palatal (something that kind of flits between being a stop, being an affricate, being a fricative, being a glide, and being a vowel—you know, that one), you could get something like this:

See ŋaɾe jevi.

See ŋaɾe iŋaɾe.

See ŋaɾe ipozu.

And here the possibilities are endless. Obviously, /p/ is going to resist palatalization, but it could voice, though that will suggest a certain outcome for the other paradigm. There could be any number of realizations for this palatal preceding /evi/. And with the nasal, you could get /ɲaɾe/. If you do, then the coronal nasal will probably assimilate too, but you could get away with not assimilating the labial nasal. That means 2/3 of nasal-initial forms will be indistinct in this experiential objective case, or whatever it ends up being called (if it’s “go”, it could double as an allative—or a dative. In fact, that may be what we have here: a language with three cases, nominative, accusative, and dative, where the dative case is used for the object of experiencer verbs! Hey, that sounds pretty good!).

In fact, jumping that parenthetical up to the non-parenthetical realm, if we roll with that, we can keep our consonant mutation, and have a palatal mutation for the dative (which will enjoy more use than other datives, since it’s marking some objects), and a nasal mutation for the accusative (nominative is unmarked).

So hey, that’s a fun place to start from!

So the next step would be to come up with noun forms that start with everything a consonant can start with, and doing some paradigms. What are the results? Are they any good? If yes, great! Next place to move onto is probably prepositions, to see if those noun cases are going to enjoy broad and interesting uses. If not, can we rescue it, or is it back to the drawing board?

Anyway, does that give you an idea? This was just a lark, but it’s about how it goes for me. Usually I have a much clearer idea of the kind of grammar I want, but even then, you sketch things out and you get a surprise every now and then. (I am probably going to use this three case consonant mutation system somewhere.) Then step by step you add in more stuff. I never talked about adjectives. Should there be adjectives? How will they work? Probably do verbs first. But anyway, yeah, just little by little. That’s all. Focus on the one part you’re doing, and don’t add anything else until you have to.

#conlang #language #realmachiavelli

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andthenthepigsranintothelake · 6 years ago

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That's not religion you idiot that's a culture. I could go through the church menorah and holiday thing for christianity and guess what they dont have any of that stuff engraved on it. I know several atheist Catholics and the vast majority of America now is christian culture atheists, my point is this shit isn't limited to Judaism. Neither the 3 "people on this website" or the 3 rebuttals.

The parenthetical gentile (really? Gentile? Should I call you a pharisee, a sadducee? Wtf man. Dont mean to offend so please correct me if I do. But gentile was practically etymologically invented as translation of goy and that's ...found pejorative? Of course its justified in the power dynamic. But as one, _I_ still find it offensive) wasnt an equivalence it was an apositive using christian as an example because guess what? It's my perspective and the context in my life in which I've most often heard "dumb person example" 1 and 2 and even 3. So I was offering my perspective which is christian influenced because. I. Live. In. The. Culture. Of. That. Religion. Like so many people in the United States, the country and culture I live in. I have also heard non christian culture atheists say everything on both sides (both strawman gentile and rebutting judaistic comment).

I dont want to get into this too much because I hate internet arguments and you are justified in the power dynamic you mentioned, but your gentiles are strawmen and to my knowledge only the first has been used to justify the horrible heartless atrocities done to jewish people. I was off base with that last sentence of my first response. I can however defend what I believe as a strawmanning of my views. I honestly just take issue with the person you thought I assumed was agnostic. I assumed they were not agnostic, but identified as true believers in the faith, albeit with doubt. This is how that paragraph reads so youre the only one to blame for that not being clarified. But the clarification makes it clear - and to drive my point home - they are still not religiously jewish. They are either culturally or ethnically jewish. If you're an atheist, and you participate in whatever ceremonies / rituals are of a religion such as either judaism or christianity, you are in its culture but you arent a follower of that religion because it. Is. So. Heavily. Theistic. Monotheistic even. There are religious atheists. There are many religions which do not hold a god as a main tenet. But there are no atheists who are members of the christian religion or atheists who are members of the judaistic religion. Cause the monotheism thing.

To say what I personally believe, which is irrelevant but this isnt a snappy reblog anymore just because I didnt place the implied second religion after Judaism and christianity in the second sentence...: I agree with "nuanceless speaker 1", the God of the old testament is a cruel god. I agree with that to the point of gnosticism and exceptions cemented in the new testament dont make it up _for me_. That is the reason this post caught my eye (and ire) in the first place - your "gentile sentence to be rebutted by judaistic paragraph #1" is actually a core tenet of my religious belief. But im not gonna go after you for that cause theres truth on both sides. However, you cannot be an atheist and a member of a theistic religion. That's why I responded at all. You just cant. You can be a member of the culture, and go through the motions of religious life. But even the purest understanding of someone like the atheist in your synagogue, has to bring to mind the gentile #3's point of religious people blindly following what they're told, never questioning. I'm not saying one is right and the other is wrong, but I'm saying to not understand cultural participation in a religion such as the prayer shawl or say reverence for the madonna, even awe in the aisles of a beautiful synagogue or church, as the result of systematic "blind following" and suggestion is intellectually dishonest. It's the same as a questioning of beauty standards, like in magazines or movies. You may say it's nothing alike but my belief is in something like Tiferet - of beauty being the point where one is connected to the godhead. So it's actually not that far off, in my belief system. But also- who cares if its blind if it's what you've know your whole life and what comforts you in times of trouble, what structures the days and weeks of your life? And lastly I believe many people in religions blindly follow, and many have a deep and rich theosophical understanding of what they follow. Generally who preach are made up of these and then those who seek to control those who blindly follow.

gentiles on this website: “The Old Testament God is cruel and vengeful!” actual Jews in my synagogue yesterday: “My favorite part of the reading is when it says the Torah is not in heaven so it’s too far to reach, it’s not across the sea so we can’t get it, but that it’s in our hearts… the idea of having that be so close, of being so close to something divine, that thrills me.” “And here, where it says ‘the Lord will delight in you as he did in your fathers’, that’s such a beautiful thing. You know, God is this all-powering being, and God delights in us.”

gentiles on this website: “You can’t be an atheist and religious!” actual Jews in my synagogue yesterday: “I’m just not buying any of this. I was born during the Holocaust and I could never wrap my mind around this omnipotent all-seeing God, and usually I’m a little moved by this, I try to be hopeful, but when I look around the world now, I just don’t buy it! If I really believed there was a God, I would resent him.” [still wears a prayer shawl and attends synagogue regularly]

gentiles on this website: “Religious people never question what they’re told, they just followed blindly!” my actual rabbi: “Sometimes the Torah can be like an older relative whom we love dearly, and who has a lot of wisdom to give, but who also says things that cause us pain, that we find offensive or wrong. And I think the wrong instinct would be to pretend we don’t hear what they’re saying, or to cut them out entirely, or to be guided by them into thinking and behaving in offensive ways. What we need to do is engage the Torah. We need to wrestle with it, and try to understand it, to figure out where it’s coming from and learn how we can progress from it, because the Torah is not unchanging. It belongs in each of our hearts, and it changes for us as we study it, as each generation challenges its old assumptions.”

#this #is #not #the #response #you #are #sick #of #getting

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jackson38toh · 7 years ago

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Mother, can I?

Q: God only knows how many times my parents corrected me for using “can” instead of “may” to ask permission. I probably corrected my own children just as often, but I finally gave up. I assume this is a lost cause.

A: Yes, it’s a lost cause, as you learned from struggling with your children, and it was probably a lost cause when your parents were struggling with you.

The old rule is that “can” means “able to” and “may” means “permitted to.” For example, “Jesse can run fast” and “May I go for a jog, Mom?”

However, dictionaries now accept the use of both “can” and “may” as auxiliary verbs for asking permission, though some suggest that “can” here is informal.

As Merriam-Webster Unabridged explains, “The use of can to ask or grant permission has been common since the 19th century and is well established, although some commentators feel may is more appropriate in formal contexts.”

The M-W lexicographers suggest that the permission sense of “can” evolved from the use of both auxiliaries to express possibility, “because the possibility of one’s doing something may depend on another’s acquiescence.”

Although the use of “can” to indicate permission became more popular in the 19th century, the usage actually showed up hundreds of years earlier, initially as to grant permission.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyualrye, William Caxton’s 1489 translation from the French of a work by Christine de Pisan:

“Þe lawe saithe suche a man can not make noo testament nor mary himself nor entre in to religyon.” (The term “can not” here means “is not permitted to.”)

The first OED citation in which “can” is used to ask for permission, rather than to grant it, is from a 1677 French-English dictionary by the Swiss-born English writer Guy Miege:

“Y a-t-il moien que je lui parle? Can I speak with him?” (Literally, Y a-t-il moyen que je lui parle? means “Is there any way I can talk to her?”)

Although “may” has been used in the sense of granting permission since Anglo-Saxon times, it wasn’t used to ask for permission until the 17th century, according to citations in the OED.

At first it was used indirectly in parenthetical expressions, as in this example from Conjectura Cabbalistica, an essay by the English philosopher Henry More on cabbalistic views of Moses:

“Justice did but, if I may so speak, play and sport together in the businesse.”

As it turns out, the earliest Oxford citation for “may” used in the direct sense you’re asking about showed up two centuries after the dictionary’s first citation for “can” used that way:

“May we take your coach to town? I saw it in the hangar” (from The History of Henry Esmond, an 1852 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray).

Thus both etymology and common usage support using “can” to ask for permission.

So where did the old rule come from? Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says Samuel Johnson was one of the first language authorities to draw “a strict line of demarcation” between “can” and “may.”

The “can” entry in Johnson’s 1755 dictionary says: “It is distinguished from may, as power from permission; I can do it, it is within my power; I may do it, it is allowed to me: but in poetry they are confounded.”

The M-W usage guide says Johnson’s “definition of can shows that he was ignorant of the origin of the word” and didn’t know its earliest senses, “although such uses may have been the ‘confounded’ ones he found in poetry.”

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from Blog – Grammarphobia https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2017/10/can-may.html

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jackson38toh · 7 years ago

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Ego trip: “egoist” vs. “egotist”

Q: Is the proper form “egoist” or “egotist”? Without the “t” it always sounds wrong.

A: The short answer is that you can’t go wrong with “egotist” unless you’re discussing philosophy or ethics.

Technically, “egoism” and “egotism” have different meanings, though the meanings differ from dictionary to dictionary and overlap considerably.

In fact, most people who use “egoist” (or “egoism”) actually mean “egotist” (or “egotism”), and standard dictionaries now accept that usage. However, some sticklers insist on preserving a distinction that has never been very distinct.

Oxford Dictionaries online, in its US and UK editions, defines “egotism” as the “practice of talking and thinking about oneself excessively because of an undue sense of self-importance.” It defines “egoism” as “another term for egotism,” or as an “ethical theory that treats self-interest as the foundation of morality.”

In a usage note in its UK edition, Oxford Dictionaries adds: “Strictly speaking, egoism is a term used in Ethics to mean ‘a theory that treats self-interest as the foundation of moral behaviour,’ although this sense is not dominant today; around 90 per cent of the citations for egoism in the Oxford English Corpus are for the meaning ‘excessive conceit.’ ”

Merriam-Webster Unabridged has similar definitions for the two words. But it adds that “egotism” may also mean self-centeredness and excessive pride, while “egoism” may refer to the doctrine in philosophy “that all the elements of knowledge are in the ego.”

Our own searches of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus agree with the results from the Oxford English Corpus: “egoism” is now usually used to mean “egotism,” especially in the self-centered sense.

R. W. Burchfield, writing in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), doesn’t quite endorse the use of “egoism” for “egotism,” but says:

“To the general educated public, at any rate those who are uninformed about the technical language of ethics and metaphysics, the net result is a residual and persistent belief that the words are more or less interchangeable.”

Burchfield notes that the “adjectives egoistic and egotistic are now under threat by the increasingly popular adjective egocentric,” which the Macmillan Dictionary defines as “behaving as if you are more important than other people, and need not care about them.”

In Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.), a more conservative reference book, Bryan A. Garner insists that “egoism” is a philosophical term and that its use for “egotism” is “widely shunned.” He says the use of “egoism” to mean selfishness “is a slipshod extension.”

What do we think? Well, we use “egotism” for boastfulness, selfishness, or excessive pride. We can’t remember the last time we used “egoism” in conversation or writing, other than in discussing the word’s usage.

As for the etymology, all these terms and their offshoots are ultimately derived from ego, Latin for “I.”

The first to show up in English, “egotism” and “egotist,” were used in reference to the “obtrusive or too frequent use of the pronoun of the first person singular: hence the practice of talking about oneself or one’s doings,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary’s earliest examples for both words are in a passage (which we’ve expanded) from an essay by Joseph Addison in the July 2, 1714, issue of the Spectator:

“The most violent egotism which I have met with in the course of my reading, is that of Cardinal Wolsey, Ego et rex meus (I and my king); as perhaps the most eminent egotist that ever appeared in the world was Montaigne, the author of the celebrated essays.”

Where did the intrusive “t” in “egotism” and “egotist” come from? “It seems probable,” the OED says, “that egotism was formed on the pattern of some older word [ending] in -otism; compare for example French idiotisme.”

In the late 1700s, the “t”-less terms “egoism” and “egoist” first appeared in English as terms in philosophy (they were later applied to a system of ethics).

In philosophy, the OED says, the words were used in reference to the “belief, on the part of an individual, that there is no proof that anything exists but his own mind,” and they were “chiefly applied to philosophical systems supposed by their adversaries logically to imply this conclusion.”

The OED parenthetically mentions a 1722 sighting of the Latin egoismo, from the title of a religious treatise by the German theologian Christoph Matthäus Pfaff: De Egoismo, Nova Philosophica Hæresi.

But in English, both “egoism” and “egoist” first showed up in Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785):

“I am left alone in that forlorn state of egoism,” and “A sect … called Egoists, who maintained that we have no evidence of the existence of anything but ourselves.”

Soon writers began using “egoism” and “egoist” to mean “egotism” and “egotist.”

For example, the OED says “egoist” means “one who talks much about himself” in this citation from a June 13, 1794, letter by William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland: “My next letter shall be less egoist.”

And the dictionary says “egoism” means “egotism” in this citation from a March 20, 1807, letter by Thomas Jefferson: “Pardon me these egoisms.”

The OED also cites an earlier Feb. 6, 1795, letter by Jefferson that uses “egoisms” to mean selfish acts: “It must be so extensive as that local egoisms may never reach its greater part.”

In the early 1800s, according to the dictionary, the term “egoism” came to be used in ethics for the “theory which regards self-interest as the foundation of morality. Also, in practical sense: Regard to one’s own interest, as the supreme guiding principle of action; systematic selfishness.”

The first Oxford example for the use of “egoism” in ethics is from an 1801 entry in The Annual Register, an annual record of world events published since the mid-19th century:

“Generous sentiment and affection in France … was lost in selfishness or according to their new word Egoism.”

However, writers continued to use “egoism” more widely to mean selfishness, self-importance, and self-centeredness throughout the 19th century, as in these examples from the dictionary:

“Hearsays, egoisms, purblind dilettantisms” (from Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, 1843; the OED says “egoisms” here are acts of selfishness).

“He is deprived of every shadow of a plea to impute fanaticism or any form of egoism” (from William E. Gladstone’s Church Principles, 1840).

“Note the egoism of this verse and of those preceding it” (from Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s The Treasury of David, 1871).

Interestingly, H. W. Fowler, in the first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), says, “Egoism is showing signs of ousting egotism” in popularity as a term for the “excessive use of I in speech or writing, & self-importance or self-centredness in character.”

It hasn’t happened yet, but “egoism” is still giving “egotism” a good run.

Our searches of the News on the Web corpus, which tracks online newspapers and magazines, show “egotism” ahead by about a third in popularity. Nearly all the citations for “egoism” use the term in the sense of “egotism.”

By the way, the newcomer, “egocentric,” showed up in the early 20th century as an ethnological or philosophical term, but it was soon being used popularly to mean self-centered.

We’ll end with this example from “The Gulf,” a poem by D. H. Lawrence that was published in 1932, two years after he died: “And then the hordes of the spawn of the machine, / the hordes of the egocentric, the robots.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language.

from Blog – Grammarphobia https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2017/06/egoist-egotist.html