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[reptilielem]

Just in case anyone cared (this blog is new so probably nobody actually sees it??? But just in case)

As of tomorrow I'm going to be living in a car without reliable access to electricity, so I might not post the 2x a week I had hoped to... Idk how long it'll be until one of the shelters responds but until then, I might not be on much...

[reptilielem]

So, how is my conlang going to work?

I'm working on a Fusional, Ergative-Absolutive conlang. The writing system will hopefully function like Hangul (though I haven't actually finished it yet).

So what do these things mean? (I'm just explaining how it relates to my own conlang, also I'm not an expert in this so I might not be explaining them perfectly)

Fusional: some languages will tack on units of meaning (morphemes) to change the meaning of a word, they will have, say, a base word for run and then tack on a morpheme that means past tense, one that negates it, one that indicates that it was not the speaker, and one that indicates that it was plural. This would change that base word to mean "you all didn't run". In my language, I would instead conjugate "run" to mean all of those things using one morpheme and all of those other meanings are combined into the one, you can't separate them out and apply them separately. (Though technically in my language you don't conjugate to show who was doing the thing or how many people were doing the thing, that's going to be a conjugation on the pronoun/do-er word instead). So basically you have multiple meanings fused into one to change the words. The other example where you just tack on the different morphemes and they all only have singular meanings is called an Agglutinative language.

Ergative-absolutive: so, most natural languages are what's called nominative-accusative. This has to do with how the arguments of a verb are treated. (I'm not going to go super deep into transitive vs intransitive right now I'm just going to give brief examples and show how it works on examples). With verbs, there tends to be two types, and depending on which type the verb is, the arguments being input into it are called different things:

"I taught him" this verb has an agent and an object:

-I - agent, the do-er of the action

-Him - object, the one receiving the action or the one the action is being done on/to

So this kind of verb has two main arguments, an agent (A) that is doing the action and an object (O) receiving the action.

The other type of verb is like "I walked." There isn't an Object of the sentence - nothing is receiving the action or having the action being done to it. In this case, "I" is the subject of the verb instead of the agent.

In nominative-accusative languages, A and S get treated the same:

I (A) taught him (O). (The agent is in the Nominative case, and the object is in the Accusative case)

I (S) walked. (The subject is in the Accusative case)

He (A) hugged me (O).

He (S) skated.

In Ergative-Absolutive languages, S and O get treated the same:

I (A) taught him (O). (The agent is in the Ergative case, and the object is in the Absolutive case)

Me (S) walked. (The subject is in the Absolutive case)

He (A) hugged me (O).

Him (S) skated.

The writing system will work like Hangul: in Hangul (the Korean writing system) there are individual characters that represent different soundsㅓ, ㄱ, ㅂ, ㅇ, ㅌ, but you don't write them in their own, instead they combine:헝,뽕,험,뎃, etc. (I absolutely love the Korean writing system it's amazing and it's the first writing system I learned besides the ones for the languages my family speaks (English and Japanese)). Honestly, I would just use hangul for my language except that I want to learn Korean some day and I don't want to keep getting confused with my conlang and Korean writings... But I think I'm going to do all the vowels in my language as curvy characters (like the ㅇ) and all the consonants as blocky characters (like the ㅐ,ㅣ).

[reptilielem]

conlanging is like. I need a different word for Fish I should come up w a new word for Fish. and then a day later I have words for River, Lake; Aquatic Animal, Land Animal, Marine Animal; Mammal, Aquatic Mammal, Land Mammal, Marine Mammal, and still, none for Fish,

[reptilielem]

What do you think would be the most practical if there were an official common language for global travel? Like, alphabetically, phonetically and grammatically speaking?

Mmmm... I'm afraid this is a question that people have been struggling to answer for well over a few centuries.

What you're asking is to create a universal Lingua Franca. A language that is simple to learn, easy for most people to pronounce, and has the potential of making global communication easier.

Well, the issue is that... asking that question is kinda like asking the question "Which color is the most universal color?"

I'm not asking for a witty reply here, so hold your horses before you type 'ultraviolet' or 'magenta, because it doesn't exist'.

The fact of the matter is, color (and language) exists on a spectrum much like this ever-looping ring of hues. They all have their specific properties, grammars, pronunciations, etc... but none of them are 'average', you know? It's not really a useful way to think about language.

In fact, people have been TRYING to invent this type of language forever - check out Esperanto, the one that has been around since 1887, and the other 500-some documented attempts (source).

But despite all these apparently 'universal' languages existing, they've universally never gotten very far. I bet you've never heard of most of them!

Why?

Well, for one thing, creating a 'common' or 'practical' language is a matter of subjective opinion. Practical for whom?

Esperanto is meant to be universal, but it's primarily based on Latin, and other European languages - romance languages, with some Germanic and Slavic words mixed in. That is to say - for someone who is a native speaker of a Bantu language like Swahili, it will be just as difficult to acquire as any other given European language. Similarly, no matter how 'universal' your southasian-based language is, someone who only speaks, say, Arabic, will still struggle to immediately communicate with it.

Just look at this list and you'll get a very quick sense of what language families these 'universal' languages tend to favor.

Now, I'm not saying 'wow, universal languages are bad, because people are using only western languages'. It's common sense, when you create a language, to draw on your own experience.

But it's very clearly not a 'universal' language if you lean too hard one way or another. *If you want to learn more about this, I HEAVILY recommend the book In The Land of Invented Languages by Annika Okrent, which goes much deeper into this topic.

So can we meet in the middle?

With the way languages work, by and large, no.

There is no 'central' grammar - all languages are on a spinning ring of agglutinative or fusion languages, and recent research suggests that languages become more one or another naturally over time. Similarly, phonetics doesn't have a 'standard' phoneme set. Most languages tend to have a specific set of common vowels, but consonants are more tricky, and you cannot guarantee a set that'll please everyone.

And the problem is, because it's all on a gradient, there is no 'middle' to work towards. A universal language would be no language at all.

So... in conclusion... is there a practical language for global travel?

Yes! It's English.

Is it practical because it's easy to learn?

No.

Is it practical because it is 'phonetically accessible'?

Not at all. In fact, the opposite might be true.

But the fact of the matter is, English is a lingua franca because it's attached to political and corporate and economic power. And that, more than any practicality, moves it to the forefront.

..............

Anyway, actually there IS a somewhat universal language, but it's not one you can read. The most universal thing in the world would probably be this.

[reptilielem]

@normal-horoscopes

[reptilielem]

Let's talk about conlangs! First off: what is a conlang?

Conlang stands for Constructed Language. It is a language that was deliberately made, instead of evolving naturally over long periods of time. Klingon is a pretty famous example of a conlang that was made for Star Trek. In the language community, Esperanto is another famous example. Esperanto is a language designed for world wide use with people from many different countries (as a politically neutral middle ground - everybody is using a second language, not their native language), designed specifically to be easy to learn. Most languages have rules, but those rules often have many exceptions: maybe many verbs conjugate this way EXCEPT such and such, or maybe most of the time when you read xyz, it is this, but IN THIS CASE, it's different, etc. Esperanto was designed so that the rules are always consistent.

If you look at this website , it explains a lot of different qualities of the language itself and where different parts of it are drawn from (including Russian, German, English, Japanese, Swahili, French, Italian). (This website is also where I found a lot of the information on the reasoning behind the creation of Esperanto, and it also has a lot of history of Esperanto).

I am actually in the process of making my own conlang! My autistic brain understands a lot of concepts that just don't exist in any of the language that I personally know, so I've always wanted to make a language that has those concepts just built into it. I can also design it to not really so heavily on tone and facial expressions, so that I don't have to struggle to communicate with people so much as I do in my native language.

My next few posts will be about my conlang (which I have yet to name 😅) and what decisions I made for it and why.

[reptilielem]

papyrus says fuck but not in front of kids because he is a responsible adult who does not want to be a bad influence on the very young. you think he can’t say fuck because you ignore the fact that in the game you only see him through the eyes of a child. you follow frisk around, not papyrus. there’s no reason to assume he keeps curse words and mature content out of his vocabulary when the kids aren’t around. i’m sure he can put together a whole paragraph constructed entirely of curse words if he’s not in front of kids.

[reptilielem]

One of my favorite types of video games is, for lack of a better term for it, historical fantasy/sci fi/etc. It's not historical in the sense of looking at the actual history of Earth, but it's historical in the sense that you are in a new kind of world/environment and a large part of the game (if not the entire game) involves you learning about and finding little hints and having to piece together the history of this place. I love piecing together these histories and learning about all this stuff that happened long before I (as the character) arrived. Some good examples of this are Subnautica and Outer Wilds. (Spoiler warning below the cut for those two games)

Disclaimer: I might be misremembering some of this

In Subnautica, your ship crashed on a deserted planet. You are trying to escape said planet and trying to figure out if anyone else has survived the crash. As you go through the world finding materials and looking for the other escape pods, you find bits of alien technology that is completely different from your own. You also find old, broken down, abandoned bases that are very similar to what you have.

Eventually you figure out that your ship is not the first ship to have crashed here, the Degasi came first and there were a few survivors for a while. In fact, both ships crashed because of the same thing: a gun designed to keep any ship from entering or leaving the planet. This giant gun is ancient technology made by a species of aliens who had been here a loooooong time ago. You learn that the aliens were struggling with a disease and trying to find a cure for it. They put the planet into quarantine to keep this disease from spreading, and that gun is the "Quarantine Enforcement Platform". You try to disable the gun but it tests you and you are sick with the disease, you can only disable it if you aren't sick (aka if a cure has been found).

There are multiple different (terrifying) Leviathan class species on this planet and the aliens were studying those as well. The Sea Dragon Leviathan is very aggressive. The aliens had taken one of their eggs to study it, and the parent of this egg rammed it's head into the facility where they were keeping the egg to get their baby back. The facility was destroyed but the Dragon also died during this. The Sea Emperor Leviathan is bigger than the Dragon, but very peaceful, similar to whales feeding on plankton.

The aliens figured out that the Emperor species produced an enzyme that cured the disease and there was one Emperor left, as well as her eggs. The Emperor that the aliens had found and contained was old, only seeming to survive because she needed to wait for her babies to hatch, and for some reason they weren't hatching. That is why they had the Dragon's egg te other facility: to see if they could figure out how they hatch, the aliens had collected many eggs from many different species to try to figure this out. The Emperor isn't a viable source of the enzyme for the cure, since she's so weak, however the creatures in her enclosure with her aren't sick and the fish that swim in and out of it help circulate little tiny bits of cure, as she trained them to do.

The Sea Emperor Leviathan is telepathic and throughout the game she contacts you multiple times. It seems the previous researchers couldn't hear her, though, or didn't listen, and they all died of the disease before they could synthesize the cure. She gives you the knowledge of how to hatch her babies and when her babies hatch, she collapses: her job is finally done and she can finally rest. Her babies produce the enzyme enough to help cure the planet - and the player, so you can now escape the planet. The Emperor sends you one last telepathic message before she dies.

Now, onto Outer Wilds:

Outer Wilds is my favorite game, and I know I put a spoiler warning above the cut, but I'm really trying not to spoil all of the secrets of this game, so I'm mostly sticking to explaining the history that you find along the way, as that is the feature I'm talking about in this post.

In Outer Wilds, you are from a recently space-faring race, on your first spaceflight. You travel around your solar system exploring and finding all the other members of your species who have gone into space. You learn that there was another species here before you, the Nomai. The Nomai had detected a signal that was older than the universe itself and were worried that they would lose it if they waited too long, so they warped without telling anyone where they were going. They ended up in your solar system without a way back home. Their ship was stuck and they ejected multiple escape pods and set up two colonies on different planets in your solar system. They started trying to meet up with these colonies, as well as continuing to look for the Eye of the Universe, as they named the signal.

There was a comet that, at the time of the Nomai, had just entered the solar system, called the Interloper. Three of the Nomai went to explore it in one of their ships, one stayed in the ship and the other two went into the comet itself. They find this pocket of "exotic matter" in the core of the comet and they realize that if it were to rupture, it could kill all life in the solar system. You see their decision to go back and warn their people, but it was too late, it ruptured while they were still inside the comet due to its proximity to the sun at that point. Them and all their people, dead, because the Interloper got too close to the sun - something they couldn't control and had practically no warning that that's something they needed to worry about.

The player travels through all these different planets in this solar system, exploring all of them and finding these long abandoned research bases, cities, space ships, and the clothing of the Nomai in random places. You only find out later that they're so scattered because they all died at the same time due to the sudden freak accident of the Qua it ntum Matter explosion. You see writings of the children playing games, you are those same kids writings when they're talking when they're a bit older, later you meet one of them as an adult on the Quantum Moon (which has wacky effects on time and space, hence why she's still alive). You see multiple generations of Nomai talking. You see all of this hard work that these people have put into locating this signal, and then they just died, with no warning, with their work unfinished. It's unclear as to whether the Nomai you meet on the Quantum Moon knows that she's the last one alive and all her friends and family are gone.

Eventually, using their own ship, you make it to where they were trying to go: the Eye of the Universe.

Both of these games do such a good job giving you just little bits and pieces of this vast history, making you curious and making you want to keep going to finish putting the puzzle together. Outer Wilds especially does a great job at using this puzzle to evoke emotion: you see these writings, you see the Nomai's names over and over and then eventually you get to the planets that have their bodies on them and you realize that these are the people that you've been seeing the writings of, then you get into the comet and you realize that they all died due to that one accident, so sudden that they never got to say goodbye to each other and they never got to finish their work. When you get to their ship, you see communication from the rest of their people in the current time, talking about how this one clan went missing so long ago, and they're talking about the clan that you're seeing writings from all over the solar system. You never get to send a message to the current Nomai saying "they're here! I know where they went! I know what they were doing", to the current Nomai, they disappeared a long time ago and they'll never know what happened to them.

If you look up into space, throughout the game you can see stars changing brightness. You learn that the universe is dying, all the stars (that are big enough) are going supernova and going out. The current Nomai are facing their extinction with the end of the universe, as are your people (though, for the most part, they don't really know that).

None of the Nomai ever succeeded in making it to the Eye, none of the Precursors from Subnautica ever succeeded in synthesizing the cure. You, the player, succeed where they didn't, by piecing together their research and adding in your own. This style of storytelling, where you just get bits and pieces of everyday life from people that are long dead and don't know that anyone's paying attention, is just fascinating and if done right, can be so powerful. You have nobody to ask questions of, you may learn about things in the wrong order, and clarify other things long after you learned about it (for example, we knew that the Nomai weren't around anymore, then we learned that they were looking for this Eye, and you might think that "oh, they aren't here because they found it", and then later you learn that, no, actually they died before they ever got there). This style of storytelling allows you to show how you got to where you are (there's a moment in Outer Wilds where the Nomai comment on this new life form on your home planet - your species hasn't evolved into people yet). It's a really effective way to hint at things and then have the player find out the full story later, and make it interesting to just go through and learn about all these things that all these other people did.

[reptilielem]

the third outer wilds anniversary 🌠

[reptilielem]

Adorable... Though, do you think that they would have pictures and then have the spiral text connecting to the picture? Like the picture is in the center as a reference that that's what they're talking about?

first contact

[reptilielem]

Beautiful

05.04 - Taking a Breather

[reptilielem]

They don't even eat people, they eat plankton...

Warning: Entering ecological dead zone. Adding report to databank.

[reptilielem]

HOW COULD YOU

DEVASTATING

[reptilielem]

[reptilielem]

[reptilielem]

AND THE UNIVERSE SAID I LOVE YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE LOVE minecraft end poem + outer wilds

[reptilielem]

So, first up: snake genetics! Mostly I'm talking about some of the main kinds of genes and one type of gene that much (but not all) of the snake community actually calls by the wrong name! I'm mostly going to be using Hognose snakes here as examples. This is a big long so I'm going to put it under the break.

First off, let me show you what a normal type, or wildtype, hognose looks like:

(source, ID in Alt text)

Snakes have the usual recessive and dominant genes that you hear about in small people science classes. With a recessive gene, you need one allele from both parents of that gene in order for the baby to show that trait. For example, the axanthic trait in hognoses, which reduces red pigment in the snake meaning you get snakes that look pretty greyscale (this is by far my favorite color morph). Here is a picture of an axanthic hognose:

(source, ID in Alt text)

If one parent is an axanthic and one parent is a normal type hognose without any axanthic genes, the kids will be all normal type with one axanthic gene. If those kids then had kids with each other, 25% of the babies would be completely wildtype, 25% would be axanthic, and 50% would be normal type with one axathic gene. There's also dominant genes, where it doesn't matter if you have one of the gene or two of them, you'll still look like you have that gene. The normal type gene is dominant. In the above example, even if you had just one normal type gene, the baby showed that phenotype over the axanthic. And if you have two, well, there's no question of what it would look like in that scenario.

Then you have the codominant genes. These ones are weird because they aren't actually codominant. To be codominant means that if paired with a recessive gene, it'll show up like a dominant gene, but if paired with another dominant gene, both of them will show in the snakes phenotype. Most people will think that the anaconda (conda) morph falls into this category and in the snake community often people do call it codominant, but what's actually happening with the conda morph is more accurately called incomplete dominance. With the conda morph, if you have a snake with one normal type gene and one conda gene, the resulting snake will have the same coloration as the wildtype gene (since conda isn't a coloration gene, it's just a pattern gene) but instead of having the full normal type pattern, the snake will have a reduced pattern with bigger, less defined spots that are spaced out more instead of the wildtype size and spacing of spots and the snake will also have a belly that is mostly if not completely black with white walls along each side.

Here is a morph, or conda phase, hognose:

(source, ID in Alt text)

Now, you might think this was a codominant gene since both dominant genes came through on the baby, however when you look at what happens when there's two of the conda gene, you'll see why it isn't: when there's two conda genes, the snake is completely patternless or very nearly completely patternless. This is called being super conda.

Here's a superconda hognose:

(source, ID in Alt text)

If this was a truly codominant gene, the snake with one of this gene and one of another dominant gene, the snake would have traits of both genes (separately) and when it had two of the codominant gene, the snake will only have traits of that gene. With incomplete dominance, the dominant trait is more blending with the incompletely dominant trait. So you'll see the traits blended together instead of showing up separately. There aren't any true examples of codominance in the hognose snake so I'm going to use dogs as an example. If you breed a white dog with a black dog and the resulting puppy has spots of white and black, the genes were codominant and you can see the traits of both the white and the black dog but they're still separate spots. However, if you breed a white dog and a black dog together and you get a grey dog, it's incompletely dominant. You're seeing both white and black traits blended together into a grey.

Because the incomplete dominant gene is partially blended and not at it's full strength, when you get two of them the incompletely dominant gene is fully expressed. This is actually what's going on in the conda gene, the full expression of that gene is a patternless gene, but when it gets blended with the wild type gene you end up with a partially patternless snake with bigger, further apart spots. Any gene that has the x version and then the super version such as this conda gene or the arctic/super arctic gene is really an incomplete dominant gene and not a codominant gene. (Though if you hear codominant in the snake community it's safe to assume that they're referencing incomplete dominance).