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rigelmejo · 3 years

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December Goals Update

Time to round up the stuff I got done! This one is a big update, despite both accomplishments and this january’s goals being quite straightforward this time. ^-^)/

I already know - I ended up focusing on one very specific goal, and made significant progress JUST in that. And... if I do what I am PLANNING for January... then hopefully I’ll make more progress. But lol, we’ll see. We know how much I suck at sticking to my plans >o>

Things accomplished:

Chinese novel chapters read in December: 20 (Tian Ya Ke - 19, aka read about 24% of the novel this past month! This was the big goal I ended up focusing on - I want to finish reading through my first full novel this year! I did a majority of those chapters in the last 2 weeks, so if I get motivated again, I might really reach this goal. We’ll see. I REALLY do want to break the milestone of getting through one complete novel soon, and it being a priest one would be icing on the cake. Reading method - intensively, using Pleco Reader, looking up all unknown words. I picked up a significant amount of words so far, but it’s still a big challenge lol).

Chapters I studied with Listening-Reading Method: 8 (Most of these were Tian Ya Ke, and dmbj 2. I ended up getting really into reading though, and skipping this step later on as it slowed down my reading time. This January, I would like to do l-r method MORE, because I’ve finally got Guardian all prepped to do that novel with it. I’d love to do l-r method all the way through the novel guardian... I hope I manage it... avenuex did a beautiful audiobook for it, and I’d love to work through it. The only demotivating factor? l-r method takes a big time dedication - 5-10 minutes to read a chapter in english, 20 minutes to listen to the chapter while looking at the english text, 20 minutes to listen to the chapter while looking at the chinese text... so around 50 minutes to do a single chapter. And guardian has 106+ chapters ToT. That said, imagine how improved my listening skills would be after roughly 88* hours of listening to chinese I can mostly comprehend? Considering just a handful hours of l-r method has already bumped my listening skills up noticeably to me. In addition to Guardian, I would very much like to do l-r method with Silent Reading as an excuse to re-read the novel and listen to the audiobook - which is around 66 free chapters available at least. I figure l-r method with priest novels, in combo with reading priest novels like Tian Ya Ke, will help with picking up vocabulary in reading and listening a bit. Plus, I plan to do l-r method in the order: listen to english, then listen to chinese, which tends to help me pick up more reading comprehension better than the reverse order.)

Chinese audio listened to: 14 (a surprisingly large number? I don’t remember doing this much lol? I think some of this is me listening to dmbj audios, and some was other chinese things, and a tiny bit was restarting the spoonful chinese audio. Again, I think listening more has been helping out a lot)

shows watched in only chinese: roughly 2 (I watched a bit of a few eps of border town prodigal, some tlt3 raws, some short vids, half of anti fraud league ep 1, half of some spy show, basically i was not in a focused mood lol)

Personal goals met:

finally got my stomach to stop hurting! i guess it wanted less carbs. also debloated 10 lbs so i guess its happier lol. still not sure what else it wants from me.

started writing a personal story, period piece with pirates and bisexual messes and i’m quite excited tbh. So now this story, and Nanase, are active original wips

handled doctor stuff wooh!

read more of my cpstd book and made more comprehensive plans on what to do when i get emotional flashbacks - and i think the prep work has been really helpful so far, i’m hopeful my lowered stress now is a part of that lol

formatted 2 books! WOOH! in process of formatting 2 more, and learning how the fuck to do a parallel text - anyone know how??? I’m having a nightmare, I’d love to do left page english right page chinese, but all I’m finding are how to use columns to do dual texts beside each other on the same page. Which is much more cramped to read... but I suppose I can live with it if it’s the only option I have.

Goals for January will be pretty straightforward to be honest. I am in a very reading-focused mood. (I mean we’ll see how long that lasts, ToT since my attention jumps randomly, but I’ve got everything Prepped to lean heavy into reading for my studying for the foreseeable future). I plan to focus on reading as my main study method, to cover listening and reading and picking up vocabulary/hanzi. Optionally, I might listen to chinese audio in the background to further help with listening/vocabulary (like Chinese Spoonfed Audio, or audiobooks), or I might watch a show in chinese (whether I do this completely depends on if I feel like it).

Later on in the year, if reading is getting easier - then long term, I think I’ll want to go back to Alan Hoenig’s Chinese Characters book and read through it for a solid foundation to fill in gaps, read my chinese grammar books for same reason, use my pronunciation app... and then dive into both language exchange apps and tutors more firmly for actual writing and speaking and interacting with others. Basically, long term, I’d like to work on filling in my gaps and correcting any mistakes I haven’t figured out, then work on production more which will be significantly weaker skills by then. But in the immediate, I want to just focus on what I enjoy - reading - and use it to pick up as many words as possible.

Goals for January:

Continue reading Tian Ya Ke. Work on reading through my first complete novel in chinese. Continue counting chapters read, as I might look at a few novels - but sincerely, I WANT to focus on one book so Tian Ya Ke is the GOAL. I will be quite happy if I can get the book to 50% read by the end of this month, but we’ll see... and quite honestly I’ll be floored if I get to 100% within the month - but if it gets easier as I pick up more words, anything’s possible. Ideally, I would like to l-r method a few chapters. I do think it speeds up my reading speed because it makes me keep up with the narration, and it also helps me cement new words into my memory better. I remember words better when I hear them. However like - chapters tend to take me 40 minutes to read, and l-r method takes usually 15-20 minutes because of how dense priest’s chapters are. So... l-r method chapters take 1 hour a piece... if I get into a reading mood, I’ll ultimately probably just primarily focus on the reading.

Secondary goal, not as important, I will start this if desired but it might wait until February+. Listen-Read Method Guardian, until I’ve gotten through the entire novel. I finally have all the translations gathered up, I’ve got my chinese copy of the novel, and avenuex’s audiobook. I have everything ready to simply start. However, as mentioned, this is a time heavy activity. I do think it will be very helpful for improving my listening skills, and to a degree also - helping retain my reading skills, push my reading speed up a little, and maybe help me pick up some new words. I think it will be a very compatible activity with goal 1, or a nice follow up activity to goal 1. Also it is the DREAM, as that novel is what pushed me to start learning chinese initially... so I am very excited to read through it. Ideally, I start this activity AFTER Tian Ya Ke, and I do a full readthrough of the chapters like: read in english, audio with english, audio with chinese, read intensively in chinese. Basically, I would love to include a full intensive read through of Zhen Hun at the same time I’m l-r method’ing it. However that will be Even more time sapping, so that’s not necessarily gonna happen unless my reading speed for priest novels is a little better after Tian Ya Ke. I need to get through the chapters read in chinese in closer to 20 minutes instead of the current 40 minutes it takes me.

Optional. Listen to chinese when I can - in the background like Chinese Spoonfed, audio books, audio dramas, and by watching shows in only chinese. If I have time, and I feel like doing these, I will. It’s easy to add doing this to my day, so when I remember to do them, they’re helpful.

Main Goal for January - continue reading Tian Ya Ke. <3

Once that’s completed, next main goal - Listen-Read Method with Guardian.

See? Really extremely straightforward goal for January. Simply keep reading! I think the more I read, the easier it will get, the faster it will get, and the quicker I’ll be able to get through a LOT of the novels I want to check out. So... I have to start doing it, if I intend to get better.

Unrelated notes:

I’ve gotten really into Drakengard 3 lately. Which by extension, means really into Nier Automata again, Nier (Nier Replicant remaster is releasing and I am getting the version with the scriptbooks and am intensely excited), and Drakengard. Yoko Taro’s wild concepts and fascinating characterizations and way of telling stories has sucked me in again. And I am reminded how very much eventually learning to read Japanese IS still a long term goal of mine. I’m back to playing like 3 games right now I could so easily be practicing my japanese with... if I remembered any japanese ToT. It’s like at the edges of my brain... I remember the hiragana and katakana after a minute or two... the kanji I’ve completely forgotten, but since I know a lot of the meanings from chinese now, I can often parse out the meaning of sentences in manga I’ve got... I can’t remember the particles off the top of my head or when I listen, but when I read their meaning clicks again fast... I know that when I go back, its just a matter of a crash course and then diving in again. And wow am I eager. But I know myself, and japanese is gonna take a WHILE. And chinese is currently taking a LOT of dedication, I don’t even really have time to work on my french reading lol. So I would really prefer to get at least another year in chinese before even trying to start studying japanese again. (And realistically 2-3 more years of chinese, because I genuinely think a solid basis in speaking skills/basic listening skills, and generally Competent webnovel reading skills I want before I stop actively studying chinese... because by that time I’ll want to keep reading/listening to chinese for pleasure, chatting when needed, and if I stop studying before that point I know I personally will just end up needing to relearn some big chunks. I also think if I try to go back to japanese before that point, I will have major issues confusing the two when reading. My japanese was upper-beginner when I quit, and when I started chinese I sped past that point in chinese to the point pretty quickly chinese blocked out what japanese i knew and it made japanese reading easier but only to a point. My chinese I’d put at ‘beginner’ still?? But compared to my japanese its significantly farther - in chinese I can currently read manhua without a dictionary and get enough to translate most of it myself, and read simpler novels and get most of it, and read more complex novels and get the gist main idea even if its a slog.

With japanese? Ahahahahahah! I was able to read the very simplest of manga and only get the very bare main idea gist, could NOT even comprehend any novel, and could play a video game on MEMORY of what i knew the context was, only picking out quite basic words. However, even though my chinese has gotten a fair bit further... I want it even further before I stop actively studying it so much. I want it to the point its where my french reading level was at about 2.5 years into french (or honestly, a bit Better than my french was tbh). I want my chinese to be to the point, where I recognize enough hanzi that I can guess the meaning of some new words, that I can look up most new words with with pinyin because i at Least know the pinyin for most hanzi i see, and where in most not-too-difficult webnovels i read, I know enough of the words, that i can comfortably follow the gist of the main plot without too much strain even if i miss details. so at that point, I’ll still likely want to build up my vocabulary more - so that i can learn to translate, and so that i can pick up details easier, and read faster. But I’ll at least be at a point where i can easily maintain the skills i have and improve them a bit naturally by just continuing to read. I mean... realistically even, I should try to keep studying chinese a lot at that point... I really, really want to be able to read chinese novels. But that’s probably the minimum at which I’d feel quite comfortable focusing on another language intensively.

With japanese, I already have a study plan too! A study plan I know works for me! It’ll be so simple! Parts 1-4 would be structured study, parts marked + would be options to move onto, and parts marked * would be activities that could be done concurrently.

The japanese study plan, whatever year I finally can get to it:

Listen to Japanese Audio Lessons (japaneseaudiolessons.com). I did this before, and it helped my listening comprehension/vocabulary pick up so much.

Read Learn to Read in Japanese Vol I, II, III (by the same people). I loved these books back when I started them, the best mnemonics that I’d found for myself to pick up the kanji - easiest way for me to pick them up without brute forcing it.

(concurrently with above) go through Nukemarines LLJ memrise decks. Literally, just CRAM through those. I did that at the 2+ year mark for japanese, and that was REALLY when I was finally able to start reading and trying video games, so it clearly was what worked for me.

Read my book Read Japanese. Haven’t tried this yet, but it looks like a good place to progress, This would be done after step 1+2, either concurrently with Nukemarine or after Nukemarine depending on how much is done. Just cram Through this book since it’s got a lot of basics in the beginning. Its in the same structure as my DeFrancis Chinese Readers and very well suited to my learning style.

Read my Tuttle Read Japanese book. More difficult, goes into like 2000 kanji, a ton of vocab, and most people who read this said afterward reading regular japanese material was quite doable.

+If my Nukemarine deck is completed - move onto one of my japanese decks with more words, or Clozemaster Japanese sentences.

+If my japanese audio lessons are completed - move onto one of my other japanese audio collections like the japanese pimsleur that was condensed, or that website with a ton of condensed audio of episodes (https://www.paliss.com/). Or youtube channels like Game Gengo (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT12i1gB38HG1olutL08nID8gaGWHZS4v).

+at the point Nukemarine’s deck is done, Listening-Reading method with japanese novels is an option.

+at the point I’m done with all Read Japanese books, may read through some other japanese textbooks I have, starting with: Japanese Particles and Common Sentence Structures, Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Guide.

*Find a japanese reader equivalent to Pleco (check subreddit r/learnjapanese, r/refold, r/massimmersionapproach). Start reading whatever japanese novels I want. Which knowing me, will probably be light novels, maybe some visual novels, and video game related materials. *Ideally this step would be done last, but knowing me, it’ll be done whenever i feel like starting - could be attempted as early as midway through the Nukemarine decks.

*Listen to japanese - so many options here, realistically it would be me playing video games in japanese, watching jdramas, watching/listening to spinoff material of stories I like like the YorHa stage plays etc. Can be attempted as early as midway through Nukemarine decks.

*reading manga could be anywhere in this list, although I don’t do it much anymore. But I was just getting to being able to try this last time I was studying japanese, so I could start up again whenever. Only negative, I would say, is I think my improvement suffered back then because I was too scared to try reading actual novels. So novels are prioritized as reading material. It would be nice to help translate some mangas though - so there’s an option.

*maybe try translating some japanese things i have interest in, at a late point.

I think maybe, the biggest thing studying chinese has taught me about how i learn languages, is that I improve faster when challenged. I learn better when challenged. I tried to read Chinese novels from the first few months (not well, but i tried lol), I watched chinese dramas from day one, and I tried to watch chinese shows only in chinese from month 5 onward. From month 5 onward I started trying to talk/write with people (knowing maybe 400 words at first, quickly bumping up to 1000 words in a month cause of just needing it, so it definitely helped me). And when I started listening to audio more, my listening skill noticeably improved within a few months. As a result, my chinese in a little over a year is taking much less time to improve then I projected it was going to (I figured the progress I’ve made so far, was going to take 3-4 years). Whereas with japanese, I didn’t try to start reading or playing video games or listening a lot until 2 years into studying... and I also didn’t make any noticeable improvement until then. So going into any language study moving forward, I’ll do more to challenge myself earlier. Since clearly its helpful to me.

#december progress #december goals #japanese #japanese study plan #study plan #u can really tell japanese has been on my mind lately lol #chinese study plan #to be honest though i feel really happy with my chinese right now #i have been working for a YEAR to get to this point in chinese #to where i can primarily make my studying be reading. and i'm definitely here.#i can just keep reading and listening for a few months for chinese. i dont really need to work on varying it anymore #since my vocab foundation is decent now.#in a while like i said - long term - i'd like to do a readthrough of my textbooks #to catch onto errors i make and to iron out any points i still am not clear on #and really HAMMER in knowledge of basics #and then i want to focus a lot of my study on producing the language/communicating #i am hoping by that point my reading skills will be fast enough i'll be able to just read for pleasure #in some down time. and listen to audio dramas in downtime. to retain #what gains i've made there.#but production i'm happy to put off for a while so this plan seems good to me.

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felassan · 3 years

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DA4 Lead Producer Scylla Costa’s BIG Festival talk, “Challenges of Dragon Age production during the pandemic”, can currently be rewatched on YouTube here starting roughly at timestamp 8:57:02 after a lil presenter blurb/intro. It’s 1 hour long. When it was streamed live, there was an English translation ‘voiceover’. There isn’t in this vid, however I want to post the link for Portuguese speakers, and also it’s neat for everyone to be able to see all the slides he presented with for themselves in context.

I don’t know if an English-language version will get put up so I’m sharing the notes I took during the talk below, in case anyone’s interested and because I might as well since I wrote them. The rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

Edit: Found a place to re-watch the English version of the talk

(Quick note: I didn’t note down everything, mostly things that caught my interest, so this isn’t exhaustive, and when I was watching I was real tired, so pls bear that in mind and don’t take these notes as bullet-proof 100% accurate gospel or direct quotes. If you watched it and think I’ve written down something wrong/misunderstood, let me know and I’ll fix. Also if you’re a Portuguese speaker and I’ve gotten something incorrect or missed something important etc, again just let me know.) **

** Edit: I’ve now gone through my notes while watching the talk again. I’ve filled in some of the gaps (although they still don’t cover everything said) and so forth, and now I’m no longer worried about there being possible errors in this post.

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For some context, this slide contained the breakdown of the talk’s structure. Bear in mind there are other slides present in the talk than the ones I’ve posted here, I didn’t include caps of all of them, just ones which were of note to me.

In the talk, chief Producer Scylla goes over challenges of DA4 production during the pandemic. He discusses the adaptations - necessary skills and learning from remote work - and he ponders on the future of teamwork.

After the launch of ME3 he became a producer, all his MMO and other experience helped a lot. He was on DAI for 3 years and MEA for 9 months, then Anthem. Today, on DA4, Scylla and another Lead Producer were the heads of the whole project, and there is his boss is the Executive Producer Christian Dailey.

^ the usual AAA game development cycle (brief introduction)

AAA games are games that are launched for several platforms simultaneously.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase of the game development cycle can have from 5 - 30 people, and up to almost 60 people when they’re just about to go through the gate to production.

In the pre-production phase, they go through the game’s concepts and prototypes and start developing systems. They seek the game’s concept and focus, and its key features. They do lots of market research. In the case of BioWare, all their games are strong in narrative, so they have lots of tools related to game narratives and supporting the development of a narrative (cinematic design, dialogue system etc) that get focused on in this phase. Other parts of the team such as writers and cinematic design need these systems to do their own roles.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase through to launch can take 4 - 6 years, but it does depend on the size of the team during development.

With regards to Dragon Age 4, they were coming close to the time when they would shift from pre-production to the production stage when the pandemic hit.

During the production phase is when the development of content and features takes place, with the systems mostly already existing from the pre-production phase. A few new systems may be developed in this phase. In the production phase is when things start escalating, and the team really starts growing, to like 2- or 3-fold the prior pre-production phase size.

(DA4 is currently in the production phase.)

In the alpha phase, features have to be fully implemented and systems all have to be running / working. All the game features should already be in the game by now. They test from pre-production onwards, but this phase is when they run heavy technical tests with lots of players trying to play at the same time. In the beta phase, the idea is that you should now have full content and that now you’re balancing it and running more and lots of different tests with players before launch. There are final tweaks and then the final launch, when in the weeks prior to launch, all the different business units and areas e.g. marketing team, technology team, publishing team, get together once a day and all of the game’s issues are reported and brought to the table to be prioritized. Then they decide the next steps re: these issues (this is known as ‘the war room’).

After the launch there are usually patches like day zero patches and other patches, this being standard industry practise. The last stage is the new content stage where there are DLCs and a game with more content.

On March 12th 2020, the team gathered to review the DA4 story in the new office. Everyone was very excited. (They had spent over 10 years in their last building and had noticed that with the team growing they needed more space. In August 2019 they found the new studio in the city center.)

Anyway that evening, they got an email from the CEO which contained instructions and said that due to the pandemic, they should from now all start working remotely. They had known that this happening was a possibility so they had been planning on how to have all the devs working from home, but initially less than 50% of the devs were able to work from home successfully/efficiently due to various issues e.g. you need a VPN to be able to log in remotely to do your job normally, varying home office setups. The day after this, the office was basically deserted, except for Scylla, the IT infrastructure people and one or two odd devs.

Scylla was part of the team that was working on allowing the devs to work from home. They first started looking at the short-term changes they needed to make to allow this.

“First, take care of our developers”.

When the pandemic first hit, their and Scylla’s [as Lead Producer] first priority was to look after the devs. Many of them are parents (schools and day-cares were shut, children were studying from home), others have relatives living with them, others have other personal circumstances which of course need to be taken into account when it comes to assessing what needs to be taken into consideration for this new scenario. So, they looked at each dev on a case-by-case basis in order to evaluate, speaking to each one and asking them what they could do to support them.

One of the first changes/adaptations they could implement was flexible working hours and flexibility around deadlines. Generally speaking the devs got a lot of support, EA was really good and really supported the devs especially in the first months of the pandemic (and they are still supporting them). Initially not all devs had suitable office spaces at home, some were working from the living room from laptops or at the kitchen table. The whole covid situation basically just happened over night and nobody was really ready to deal with that change. So their first step was to enable their devs to work remotely. As a producer, Scylla’s main task is to communicate with the team such as via a number of daily meetings. He doesn’t depend so much on powerful hardware.

“Enable developers to work remotely”.

This slide shows some of a BioWare audio team. Different teams have varying and specific needs in order to do their jobs and therefore in order to do them remotely. For example, the audio team need good-quality speakers and amplifiers, while the lighting and art teams need other specific equipment such as tablets and large screens. So there was a lot of work they had to do to go through each dev to understand their individual needs and what needed to be done for them. ‘Could they download the builds? Did they have the right performance [tech-wise]? Could they submit their changelists, their codes to the server?’

Some devs needed a more powerful internet connection as it would take 6-8 hours to download a build (some devs live rurally). Some needed a lot of cable, as they were working far away from their routers (sometimes up to 50m). As time went by things got better and better.

The chair devs work from is also important; a kitchen able chair etc is not suitable to sit in for long-term desk work, possibly leading to health issues like back ache and blood circulation problems in the legs.

Every 3 months they had money given to help devs buy new mice, keyboards, monitors - anything they needed really in order for their office setting at home to be improved. For a while, because lots of people [generally, in society] were needing and buying them, it was quite hard to buy things like webcams and microphones.

On mid- and long-term changes:

In terms of DA, we have to look at this from 2 perspectives, the change in the personal and the professional environments.

As a consequence of working from home, people tend to be less active during the day (even in an office, you go between meeting rooms, up and down stairs etc). Physical activity supports life quality and therefore work quality. Scylla noticed that he began to feel listless and such, and found that he needed to change his routine that he had initially developed when he started working from home, for example; having a normal start time (as in, have a semblance of structure in your day as if you were still working in the office site), get dressed at the normal time, not having meetings over lunch etc. This wasn’t just him, lots of other devs encountered this and had this experience too. Devs which adapted faster had better productivity and became more productive faster.

Scylla bought a stand-up desk which he can raise up and down, and at meetings he would be delivering a talk while standing or even while walking on a treadmill. Other devs also got stand-up desks. He tracked his body’s data on a Fitbit. These sorts of things helped improve physical and mental wellbeing. Other devs did similar things, like starting going out for jogs or began practising yoga. Essentially, everyone needed to make changes to their daily routine in comparison to what they had been doing prior to the pandemic.

The pandemic has been a thing for over a year now. In their location, every couple of weeks a new restriction is put into place or a rule is changed, and every two weeks there’s a new thing that you can and can’t do. Scylla also started moving around his property. He worked on his desk, fixed it up and painted - taking up a new hobby. Other devs picked up new hobbies too. These are good ways to be active and also to be somewhere else, i.e. to break up the working day and not be spending it all in one home office-type location. Scylla found that when he made these sorts of changes to his routine to improve his lifestyle, the data output by his Fitbit as indicators of his health/wellbeing etc improved, e.g. number of steps taken in a day, heartbeats per minute while at rest. As stated many of the other devs went through a similar process.

On the professional side of things:

They had to improve remote delivery of builds. Accessing things from home as a dev requires a VPN. They need to download a build every day and then upload it to the server after making their changes to the game. They had to work with infrastructure and research other tech, such as streaming tech to allow remote console access, in order to better facilitate this process. For remote access, they also had to work on adapting communications channels.

“Adapting channels of communication.”

In this slide, the team are working on the storyboards. Before you can implement motion capture & performance capture, you have to ‘run the storyboards’ like this. These are small illustrating drawings which reflect the drafts and are meant to quickly reflect the intention of the scenes that are to be built. Before the pandemic, the team would go to meeting rooms like this, sit down, talk and interact in person. After the pandemic, the question became ‘How do you do this over Zoom?’ You can, but it’s not quite the same; it’s harder to see peoples’ expressions, some people are embarrassed speaking over Zoom etc. Therefore they had to adapt their communications systems, and unlearn the ways in which they developed before in order to relearn and learn new ways of communicating.

Slack was a tool that they adopted on this front. Communications channels can be confusing on Slack, so there was a need to develop structure. For example, how quickly should someone reply (as a recommended convention for the purposes of work)? They had to define the process/procedures for the channels so it was clear for the team as a whole how it would all flow (this is important especially if you have a team with say 30 people or as a whole hundreds of people). Before the pandemic, they had stand-up meetings where they’d go around in a circle every morning and talk about their activities - what they’re going to be working on, any roadblocks they had encountered etc. The question arose ‘How do you replace these?’ They ended up doing Slack messages at a certain time of day and updating their statuses with some details on what they’re working on and color-coding (green - fine, yellow - need help, red - busy/blocked out).

Another issue that they faced was unforeseen - the number of meetings that devs were having really shot through the roof. When there wasn’t a good structure of communications channels, any conversation would become a meeting. Everybody began scheduling meetings left and right, and at the end of the day they would have little time left in which to actually work on their to-do lists. Hence, they had to work with the team to really analyze and be very pragmatic. ‘Which meetings needed to happen? Which didn’t? Is a specific meeting really necessary? Which meetings should be recurring? What can be done over Slack?’ This guideline had to be given to the team to help, and it improved things a lot. The number of meetings decreased a lot and they got more effective. For example, by making sure to set an agenda for meetings beforehand, and by having meeting notes (then a dev who didn’t really need to be at a meeting could skip attending and just quickly review the notes output after instead). They also decreased the standard length of meeting times from the default Outlook blocks of 1 hour and 30 mins to 55 mins and 25 mins respectively. This 5 minute change gave devs time for things like bio breaks (also 4 hours in a row at a computer in a home office with one meeting after another just isn’t good for a person).

“Adapting p-cap and mocap”.

On content:

From a content point of view, the most difficult thing in terms of the pandemic was adapting p-cap and mocap (performance capture and motion capture). They hire actors and it’s a large studio. The pandemic meant big limits to what they could and couldn’t do. The actors had to be masked and 5 meters apart in distance (although it doesn’t look like it in some of these shots due to angles). Also there could be no other person around in the studio - only the actors. The directors instead would ‘patch’ in remotely on big screens (you can see this in the second photo in the top right).

Before the pandemic, they felt that they wouldn’t be able to do p-cap or mocap properly remotely, as the directors would usually stand right next to actors giving guidance on their performance. The techs would also usually be near. But they adapted! The keyword is adapting, changing process. It’s harder and it’s different, but it is possible, and people start rethinking what is possible. What was said to be impossible before now is possible.

P-cap differs to mocap in that it also captures voice and facial expressions.

On the future of work after covid:

There will probably be more working from home and more flexibility for workers e.g. being able to work say 3 out of 5 days from home. It does depend on what a dev’s specific job is however. For example, the audio engineers require lots of specialist equipment and said equipment is of higher quality and quantity in the office. So, depending on role, devs might be working more often or less often from home.

Another development is that lots of devs are moving house. In lockdown etc people started reassessing what’s most important in life. Some are moving further away from the studio to get a cheaper rent or for example couples who both needed an office space to work from home from but their current place only had one area. Others are moving closer to nature for a better quality of life, and still others have other different reasons for doing so. Over 10 devs that he knows in fact have recently moved, including Scylla himself.

The pandemic changed certain skills being used by people on a daily basis. Scylla used as an example of this one of his soft skills, being able to tell from looking/interacting in-person with someone if they are stressed out. Obviously it’s less easy to tell if someone is stressed out when you’re remote, so you adapt different ways of checking in with people in the new situation. To continue carrying out his role as Lead Producer, he began checking in with his team pro-actively on the new comms channels and asking how they were doing.

Also, now that companies are more open to working remotely, there is going to be increased competition for hiring devs. They saw both sides of this coin at BioWare. They were able to hire devs from many places that they couldn’t hire from before e.g. Montreal, Vancouver, the US, as there’s less need for devs to relocate to Edmonton or Austin. This opens up opportunities to hire really intelligent and skilled people that they would not have had access to before.

Question and answer segment:

The pre-production phase has been concluded. They’re in the production phase.

They are not giving out a lot of details yet but Scylla is really excited as a big fan of the whole series. He thinks that with DA4, they will have the opportunity/possibility to launch the best story out of all DA games. He feels that the characters they’re making are amazing. He’s dying to say more but can’t.

When you work from home you need to keep your team as productive as possible. During the pandemic, when people started working from home, they noticed that some people became more productive and some people became less productive. They were analyzing it on a case-by-case basis so as not to make assumptions. They were interested in seeing what they could do to help. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were looking at the devs as people and seeing what they needed.

Production of DA4 still needed to continue during the pandemic because they want to be able to launch the game.

This slide shows a writer. Writing is an example of a role which is more able to work from home easily.

Their productivity did go down in the first month of the pandemic. After adaptations, some people then became more productive than they were before (this was role and personal situation-dependent, examples of this being artists and coders who were able to art and code at home without being interrupted, thereby being able to produce more). Covid has affected productivity in general, but this is part of our new reality. They have adapted and adjusted some deadlines. They have enough data (Scylla LOVES data) now to understand how long it will take them/how long they’ll need to launch the game. They have always had historical data for this purpose, but they’re doing more of this sort of thing now to ensure that they are doing things at the right time.

Remote hiring opens up the door to more talent joining, so if someone has talent geography will hold them back less. Some companies though may choose not to hire people from other countries due to labor issues, cumbersome legal aspects, time zones. But even in such cases there are activities for example that can be carried out while the rest of the team is asleep such as testing or working on the build, or there are cases where those companies still will want to hire a specifically/highly talented person even in spite of the potential legal aspects and so on.

On mental health: People were affected. There is the mental, physical and social impacts of the pandemic situation on people. EA supported them during the pandemic in terms of their mental wellbeing, there are specific companies (services offered, speaking to a therapist) that they can contact if they need something or help. EA had always been good at supporting them with this sort of thing but this has improved further during the pandemic. Another change was that they could/can take a couple of days off if they needed/need to because of the pandemic e.g. to take care of children, who were obviously not at school at the time. As a producer he had to be very mindful of all of this. How much they were monitoring peoples’ wellbeing really went up during the pandemic.

A question that was asked - in terms of DA4′s storybeats, is there anything in there that they decided to change due to the pandemic as it wouldn’t be sensitive or appropriate to include anymore, for example a plague plotline or something? Scylla’s answer is that DA and ME are games in which they try to have narratives that are relatable, which include things which people will identify with, so that players understand what characters are going through etc. Nothing in DA4′s plotline/storybeats has been changed (in the frame of this question, relating to the pandemic), as it didn’t have anything in it that could be specifically or a directly connected to a pandemic-type situation or anything. Of course the DA story has Blights and the Taint, but these are different & fantastical things and existed long before the pandemic situation. So this wasn’t the case with DA4 and there was no need to change anything, but this has happened to other games where they decided to change a storyline due to a strong correlation with something in the real world.

There were then concluding/closing remarks. The message he wants to send is that a crisis will always spark opportunities. Look at a crisis and try to see how you can grow.

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[☕ found this post interesting or useful? my ko-fi is here if you feel inclined. thank you 🙏]

#dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #covid mention #long post #longpost #wanted to write these up properly and post them yesterday but wasn't able to #mass effect #anthem

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 54 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about how grammars come into existence. But first, we are doing a liveshow in April. We will be doing a liveshow recording on the internet so that we can all be in the same place at the same time on Saturday the 24th of April, Eastern Daylight Savings Time in North America, which will be early on a Sunday morning for us here Australia.

Gretchen: That’ll be 6:00 p.m. for me on Eastern Daylight Time. We will include a link to a time zone converter so you can figure out when that is for you.

Lauren: We’ll be doing the whole show about backchanneling, which is all those ways that you –

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: – actively listen to someone as they’re talking. Thank you for that excellent backchanneling, Gretchen. Something I think a lot about in our era of lots of video calls and online chats.

Gretchen: You can’t see me, but I’m doing a thumbs up right now.

Lauren: Excellent backchanneling.

Gretchen: These are some kinds of backchanneling. We’re gonna be talking about lots more. I think it’s fun to do a liveshow about backchanneling because it means that you get to backchannel in the chat while the show’s going on and chat with each other. That’ll be fun. We’re running the ticketing of the show through Patreon. If you’re a patron, you’ll automatically get a link to the liveshow to join. If you’d like to become a patron, you can also do that to get access to the liveshow stream.

Lauren: Patrons also get access to our recent bonus episode on reduplication as well as 48 other bonus episodes because we have almost 50 now.

Gretchen: That’s a lot! Lots of Lingthusiasm for patrons, which helps keep the show running.

Lauren: Our liveshow is part of LingFest, while will be taking place across the last week of April, which is an online series of events about linguistics. You can find out more about LingFest at lingcomm.org/lingfest.

Gretchen: That’s “comm” with two Ms as in “communication.” Speaking of LingComm, if you’re interested in communicating linguistics to broader audiences, you can also join the LingComm conference, which is a conference for practitioners of linguistics communication such as ourselves and many other cool LingCommers to learn from each other and help produce more interesting and engaging materials for all of you.

Lauren: LingComm, the conference, is taking place online the week of April the 19th.

Gretchen: You can also go to lingcomm.org/conference to see the schedule and other details there.

Lauren: That’s “comm” with two Ms.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, how many people would you say you know who have written a grammar of a language?

Lauren: Hmm, okay, well, both my PhD supervisors. I’d say half the people in the department that I current work in. I have written a grammar of a language. This is a perfectly common activity among my professional cohort. I assume it’s a thing most people do and know about, so we don’t really have to explain it for this episode at all. This is fine.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Yeah, I would say that at least several of the people that I went to grad school with – not necessarily at my university – people I knew from conferences, professors that I knew – one professor I knew had her grammar come out the same year that her baby came out, and she posted a photo of the grammar and the baby, which were about the same size, on Facebook after that happened. It was really cute.

Lauren: Grammars definitely take longer than nine months to gestate. I can definitely confirm that.

Gretchen: I have not written a grammar. So, when someone’s going about writing a grammar, what – okay, here’s a language. There isn’t a grammar written or the grammar that’s written of it is not adequate. What do I do to start?

Lauren: What you’re talking about is taking all of the amazing complexity of how humans use language and finding the rules that reoccur within a particular language and then finding a way of articulating that concisely in written form in a grammar so that, by the end, you’ve worked through most of the common features you find in this language – all of the variations and irregularities – and you’ve put that into some kind of readable book format for other people to then learn about how the grammar of this language works. That is the overarching aim of this endeavour.

Gretchen: I’ve consulted grammars in the process of doing linguistics. I have the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language sitting on my desk. When I was in grad school, I spent a lot of time consulting Valentine (2001)’s grammar of Nishnaabemwin. There are grammars that I’ve consulted. They’re 1,000 pages, 2,000 pages long. Sometimes you’ve got a really massive grammar. Sometimes you get a shorter sketch grammar. They have certain similarities in the structure and the types of things that people cover in a grammar.

Lauren: Absolutely. You tend to start, traditionally, with smaller bits and work upwards. You’re likely to find a description, if it’s a spoken language, of the sound system or, if it’s a signed language, of the hand shape and body space phonology at the beginning of the book and then work up to word-level – you probably expect if a language has adjectives, a section on adjectives, which we’ve talked about before.

Gretchen: We have talked a little bit about adjectives.

Lauren: And then if you’re look at sentence-level stuff, like asking a question, how you do that, it happens at the level of the sentence, that tends to be more towards the end. You’re going from smaller bits up to bigger bits. It really depends on the tradition. We talked about lumpers and splitters before. If you like to split things down, a grammar is great because you can have so many sub-headings. I remember reading the rules for one set of grammars where it was like, “Please do not go beyond five layers of headings,” and I was like, “That’s actually quite a challenge.”

Gretchen: Because you have your chapter level headings, and then you’re like, “Oh, okay, if this chapter’s about verbs, you’ve got this type of verbs and those type of verbs – within the transitive verbs, you’ve got this type of verbs and those type of verbs,” and so on and so forth.

Lauren: Then you’ve got the irregularities. They might need their own subset. You can go from – the table of contents, you can get this big picture and then go down and down and down into the different sections. The grammar that I wrote of Lamjung Yolmo was a sketch grammar, so it’s only a couple of hundred pages. It makes sure to knock over – it would be very weird to have nothing about nouns in a language that very obviously has nouns – but it doesn’t go into the deep level of detail on some things that a longer grammar gets to. There’s always more to be done as well.

Gretchen: Any grammar is gonna be incomplete – even these massive doorstop-sized grammars. You’re gonna leave some stuff out where you’re a speaker and you’re like, “I know this,” but you don’t necessarily include it in a grammar. I’ve also read, in grad school – I don’t remember what language it was of – but I picked up this grammar that was written in, like, I wanna say maybe the 70s or 80s. There was clearly some sort of fad for doing this very abstract schematic thing of sentences or verbs or something. It didn’t have any complete sentences or complete verbs just written there. It drew them all on this diagram that I have never encountered before or since where everything was piece-able together. I was like, “Oh, wow. You’re participating in some sort of grammatical tradition that I’m just not aware of here.”

Lauren: I mean, I think the important thing is that grammars are written by humans, and humans are trained by other humans within particular traditions. I remember when I was building my sketch grammar, it was while I was also working on my thesis because I was looking specifically at evidentials, but you can’t know what’s happening with evidentiality without understanding how verbs work and how verbs relate to other parts of the sentence. And then I realised I was accidentally on my way to writing out the bones of the grammar of Lamjung Yolmo.

Gretchen: Sometimes you just accidentally write a grammar.

Lauren: That is how I accidentally started and very deliberately finished writing that sketch grammar. But I remember talking to my supervisors. One of them found it quite unusual that I wanted to include the methodology in my grammar. I wanted to explain specifically who I’d worked with, what I’d recorded, what kinds of elicitation I’d used. That wasn’t in that supervisor’s grammar tradition, but it was something I wanted to include.

Gretchen: A lot of grammars aren’t gonna include the gestures of the language or something, which I know is one of your things that you enjoy.

Lauren: Yes. There are traditions that do focus more on narrative structure, and you might find more about the structure of narratives in a grammar, and others that focus more on verb structure. There’s a very brief few pages on phonetics and then a really massive chapter on verbs. It’s sometimes because the language has lots of really fun, complex things happening with the verbs, but sometimes it’s just because that’s what that person was interested in.

Gretchen: This person was a verb fan.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Some parts, you know, it’d be pretty hard to do a grammar without doing some level of phonology at the beginning. But, yeah, what level of pragmatic stuff at the end, discourse stuff, or like, “How do people of this language talk to children?” or something like that – that might not be in a grammar.

Lauren: I’m doing a paper with a colleague on onomatopoeia at the moment. Some grammars will have a separate section on that. Because it’s not as central to every single sentence as, say, nouns and verbs can be for a lot of languages, it doesn’t tend to crop up as its own specific subsection in a lot of grammars.

Gretchen: Which doesn’t necessarily mean that language doesn’t have onomatopoeia. It’s just that it didn’t get the focused attention that got put there.

Lauren: This is always the question that you have while reading a grammar, right. It’s about what makes it in, but it’s also what doesn’t. Sometimes things don’t make it in because of trends or because of what people are focusing on or sometimes just because they’re important but incredibly low-frequency things that happen. Or if someone is doing fieldwork, and they come into a community as a man, they might spend a lot of time around other men and recording a particular variety. That’s where the methodology was really important for me to make clear why I was making choices. Also, the title of a grammar – I find it really interesting whether people say, “The Grammar of” or “A Grammar of.” I, very consciously, called it, “A Grammar” or “A Sketch Grammar of Lamjung Yolmo” because this is just my analysis and my take. Other people might come to exactly the same data with different conclusions. Or they might be way more into adjectives than I am, and that section is way more fleshed out in someone else’s analysis.

Gretchen: That’s an interesting side effect, as you were saying about, okay, well, if we wanna look at onomatopoeia in a bunch of languages, or if you wanna look at any sort of thing whether it’s verbs or sounds or handshapes or something in a bunch of different languages, okay, how can – if you’re making those beautiful graphs like are in the WALS database, which we’ve mentioned before, or if you’re gonna write a Wikipedia article about like, “Here’s how this language works,” or “Here’s how this phenomenon works,” the grammars turn into this input material of what gets cited there.

Lauren: Those big overviews are often built up from these grammars of different languages. That’s where having structures that are easy for people to access in the table of contents becomes really easy because, just as a human writing the grammar, there’s another human reading that grammar to put into those databases.

Gretchen: Dictionaries are often a very collaborative project where you have a bunch of people contributing words or contributing entries. You can say, “Okay, you need to take care of the letter P and see what’s going on here.” But a grammar is often written by one person, and so it reflects that one person.

Lauren: Almost, like the very overwhelming majority of the time, it’s people who aren’t members of that community. It’s a linguist who’s trained as a linguist and then come into this community and often built incredibly long-term, deep relationships with those communities and speak the language but not always. I know I’m kind of – it’s very easy to over-problematise something you do and spend a lot of time thinking about but, again, it’s worth remembering while reading a grammar.

Gretchen: Right. And what types of things you think are interesting, what types of things you think are novel or worth drawing attention to, or what types of things you think are common is a function of what you’ve been exposed to from a grammatical tradition. I’ve been thinking a lot about this question of “What do we put in a grammar” and “How is a grammar constructed by the societal context in which it’s written” because I’ve been reading this book called, Grammar West to East, by Edward McDonald. The subtitle is “The Investigation of Linguistic Meaning in European and Chinese Traditions.”

Lauren: Cool.

Gretchen: I will say, at the beginning, this is an academic book. It is a monograph. If you don’t have a background in linguistics, you’ll find it fairly dense going, potentially. But, as someone who does, it’s really interesting.

Lauren: Awesome! Pick out the anecdotes for us.

Gretchen: One of the first observations that it makes – and, when you think about this, it’s totally true – is that – so the European grammatical tradition is based on Latin and Greek. Latin and Greek are languages where you do a lot of changing the endings on words – sometimes the prefixes, but often the endings – on words to make them do grammatical things. The European grammatical tradition is a lot about making tables of all of the different ways that a word can inflect and being like, “Well, it does this and it does this,” and giving names to the different sorts of groupings and patterns that you find out of that.

Lauren: Which is great, but doing those things, it makes it a little bit confusing sometimes when you apply it to a language like English that doesn’t have the same ending changes, but we give them the same labels. That’s because the analysis of English is very much in that Latin tradition.

Gretchen: It’s inherited from the Latin tradition. There’s a pedagogical motivation for some of this because Latin and Greek were not just the languages that started out analysing themselves, although they were that as well, but they were also considered prestigious languages that you needed to learn. So, a lot of the grammatical analysis of Greek and especially Latin were in terms of how to teach them to speakers of other European languages. And it’s like, “Here’s a bunch of endings, and you need to learn them, and you need to learn what they correspond to and what their function is.”

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: What’s interesting is that the grammar of Chinese is different from that. They don’t do endings. What they do instead is you have things that have a grammatical function, but they’re considered to have the same status as full words. And so, the Chinese grammatical tradition is concerned with looking at those particles that have grammatical functions but are hard to write definitions of and cataloguing them and figuring out what’s going on with them and grouping them into groups. There are some words in the European tradition that are invariant – they’re often all lumped together in “adjectives” – words like “often,” or “always,” or something like that, which are – they just look like that all the time. They don’t have endings like the verbs and the nouns do. The Latin tradition grammarians didn’t care about those words, and they were really into the endings. The Chinese grammarians were really interested in, first of all, this fundamental duality between words that had a meaning to them, had what they called, “full words,” and words that were only for their grammatical function, what they called, “empty words.”

Lauren: That is a great metaphor. I like it.

Gretchen: Also, because culturally they were really interested in dualities, you know, the sun and the moon, and the full words and the empty words, and having a nice, mirrored duality was really appealing to them for aesthetic reasons in the same way that the European grammatical tradition is often descended from the rhetorical tradition because they were really interested in the aesthetics of rhetoric when it came to doing that sort of analysis. What your culture’s into aesthetically brings forth, okay, what are we trying to explain this. So, both of these are sort of ancient history, you know. Around 2,000 years ago they were the beginnings of this doing their own analysis grammatical traditions. You get this really interesting descriptive grammar that was published in 1898 by China’s first grammarian, Ma Jianzhong, called, Mr Ma’s Compleat Grammar, which I think is great.

Lauren: That is an excellent late-1800s name of a book.

Gretchen: It is exactly of a particular era. It’s “compleat,” E-A-T, not E-T-E, which is just –

Lauren: Perfect.

Gretchen: He was a native speaker of Chinese who had also been educated by Jesuits in French, and so he had exposure to both the French and the Chinese grammatical traditions. He writes this grammar where he distinguishes between full and empty words the way that the Chinese had – introduced these particles to be these “empty words” – but he also further subdivides the full words into the lexical categories that Europeans had been doing, which are verbs and nouns and so on. This distinction between verbs and nouns and so on was really important to the Europeans because verbs and nouns have different types of endings. You know whether something’s a verb or a noun because the endings are all different because this is a really endings-based grammatical system. The modern linguistic conception of how languages and their structures work is, to a certain extent, a hybrid of that because these full and empty grammatical categories is now reflected in what linguists call, “content words” and “function words.”

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: You have words like, “dog,” and “cat,” and “run,” and “see,” and stuff like that where you can actually write a definition, and then you have your grammatical words like “of,” and “is,” and “to,” and stuff, which just have this grammatical function. So, this category that’s still really relevant in modern linguistics is there in one country’s grammatical tradition, but also modern linguistics does also still talk about “nouns” and “verbs.”

Lauren: Absolutely.

Gretchen: The history of the contact between these two grammatical traditions and how they figured out how to adapt things to each other is an interesting way of looking at what is it that we think of as important when we’re trying to write a grammar of a particular language or we’re trying to do grammar. A lot of ancient grammar traditions were really concerned with describing one very prestigious, golden-age language – or one or two – you’ve gotta write your grammar of Latin or of Greek or of Old Chinese because that’s the one everyone thinks is fancy. And the local vernacular that ordinary peoples talk, like, no, no one’s gonna write a grammar of that. It’s a very interesting way of thinking about, okay, what were people concerned about and how did those interests derive from the structure of the language or languages that they were familiar with.

Lauren: This book sounds so great, but I wonder if actually the title of it should be, “Grammars from East to West,” because if we look where our modern tradition of writing grammars in Europe is, it’s very much motivated by those Latin grammars and grammarians of old, but it’s also very influenced by Paṇini and the Sanskrit grammarian tradition that is two-and-a-half, three thousand years old as well.

Gretchen: One of the things that I was thinking about reading this, being like, “Wow!” – I knew some of the stuff about the European tradition, not all of it, but I didn’t know most of the stuff about ancient China – thinking, “I know that there was a really interesting grammatical tradition going on in India, like, right between these two major geographical regions.” There’s a bunch of stuff going on in Arabic as well, at a slightly later time. Can I have a book that writes about all four of these, please, in comparison to each other?

Lauren: Yeah. I know very little about the Arabic tradition. Most linguists at least know the name “Paṇini” That first N has a little dot under it in English, so it has a kind of palatalised vibe, but it also means his name is great. I know more than one university that has the “Paṇini Café and Sandwich Shop” because that’s a great multilingual pun to use.

Gretchen: Who can resist a pun? I learned a bit about the Arabic grammatical tradition when I was taking a bit of Arabic in undergrad. There are a whole bunch of things that that grammatical tradition does also in the tradition of “We’re going to look at our language and catalogue it in exhaustive detail and figure out exactly what’s going on in it.” One of the things that I remember was that there’s an exhaustive catalysation of what they call the “binyan,” which are the templates that you can slot your three-consonant roots into, and how you put the vowels in between them that mean all of these different things.

Lauren: Because Arabic is very interested in what happens in shifting the vowels of the language rather than what happens at the end of a word like the Latin tradition.

Gretchen: It’s very relevant in Arabic all of the different things you can do with the vowels in between them and whether, maybe, you double a consonant in a particular context or you put this vowel here or that vowel there. The classic tri-consonantal root that everybody cites is K-T-B, /k/-/t/-/b/, which has to do with books and writing. “Kitab” is “a book,” and “kutub” is “books,” and “maktab is “office,” and “kataba” is “He writes.” You can do all sorts of things with those three consonants and how you arrange the vowels between them. There’s an abstract way of representing “Here’s what the patterns are” with a template verb that you can show all the patterns with and going through and exhaustively cataloguing the patterns. This is the exciting thing to do if you’re an ancient Arabic grammarian. I’m excited by just thinking about it. But that’s very much influenced by the structure of the language. I don’t know as much about what Paṇini was doing except for the fact that he gets cited in a lot of Intro Linguistics classes as the first grammarian.

Lauren: Part of why he gets cited a lot is because he’s excellent. I’ll talk about that. I think part of why as well is that Paṇini synthesized and brought together everything that had been happening in the Sanskrit grammar tradition. Sanskrit is kind of like the Indian linguistic area equivalent of Latin, which is that it was the language of sacred texts and religion. It’s a language that is still handed down. People still learn Sanskrit in the way they learn Latin. But in that area, languages like Hindi and Nepali, the Indo-Aryan languages, are all later siblings and children of Sanskrit. It’s a very convenient analogy to Latin to draw with Sanskrit. I think, also, the motivation for thinking a lot about the language came from a theological attempt within Hinduism to understand truth through language and understand how language works. It was one of the core areas of study within the larger religious tradition. So, that was the motivation. But Paṇini – we know his name. We know not too much else about him except that he wrote at least two-and-a-half thousand years ago. He synthesized this work, and he name drops ten other people whose work he draws on. We’ve lost the record of all of their work. I think he’s excellent. That’s not in dispute. But it’s also just a convenient prominence he receives through being the kind of earliest record we have when the work was going on for thousands of years behand.

Gretchen: The person whose manuscript survives with his name attached to it.

Lauren: Absolutely. A very convenient way to appear to be very excellent is just to have none of the foundational work you draw on exist still.

Gretchen: No. This is like the Library of Alexandria all over again.

Lauren: What made Paṇini’s approach really distinct – and distinct from what was happening with those learner-driven motivations for analysing Latin – is that there was a logical progress to how he set out his description of Sanskrit. Similar to what we talked about with modern grammars where you start with the base elements of the sound system and then build up to words and parts of words. If something goes on a word after another bit, so you’ll describe the earlier bits first and build outwards. It’s this logical order and progression.

Gretchen: In a very real sense, the order that Paṇini devised over 2,500 years ago is reflected in the order of the grammar that you wrote a few years ago?

Lauren: It’s absolutely not an accident. The early 20th Century linguists like Saussure, Franz Bopp, where directly reading Paṇini and going, “This guy was doing this stuff thousands of years before we started thinking about it” and were directly influenced by Paṇini’s approach to thinking about how the language worked and thinking about it very descriptively. This is why he’s known as the first grammarian within even the Western tradition because he was like, “Look, there’s these words and they have these histories, but actually, the important thing is that we think about how the words are being used by people now.” The funny thing is he wrote that about what we now think of as Classic Sanskrit. People have not moved on from thinking about Classical Sanskrit in that way, and it’s become a learning tool, but –

Gretchen: We should all just be speaking Classical Sanskrit.

Lauren: The motivation is exactly the same motivation we use in a descriptive grammar now. It’s not about setting out the rules of a language and how it has to work, it reflects how a linguist has analysed that people are using that system.

Gretchen: I think that’s one of the things that comes up when we talk about a grammar is, particularly because grammar in the Western tradition is associated with Latin, and, okay, you’re learning about the grammar of English only so that you can translation Latin into English better rather than learning about the grammar of English as an object of its own study. This translates into, “Okay, well, what if we made the grammar of English more like Latin because that would obviously be better.” That’s where this secondary meaning of “grammar” as, you know, “Thou shalt not split an infinitive,” does – because in Latin an infinitive is all just one word. You can’t split it. It’s just one word.

Lauren: You can’t split it.

Gretchen: This idea that grammar is a tool to beat people over the head with comes from this, “Well, you’ve got to learn this language in school because this is how you’re gonna access all these classical texts that you are supposed to access, and you need to do it a certain way because it’s dead now, and it’s not evolving, and so you’re just learning to do this very particular thing,” that’s where this additional connotation of grammar as a stick to beat people over the head with comes in.

Lauren: That’s that very Latin tradition that we still have.

Gretchen: And it’s not only English that had a grammar as a tool to stay in touch with a lost golden age. This is also what they were doing in ancient Chinese of like, here’s this older thing. One of the other interesting things that I learned about the Chinese grammatical tradition, in particular with the writing system – because the writing system in Chinese can obscure different pronunciations – you could have a poem that you could still read in the written sense that’s very old but, for a modern reader, it doesn’t necessarily rhyme. At a certain point, when they were doing more historical linguistics, they realised, “Oh, this poem actually rhymed back in the day.” The pronunciation has changed so much that we weren’t really thinking about it because the characters look the same, but it actually used to rhyme, which sometimes shows up when you’re reading Shakespeare or something, and it’s got “thrown” and “drown” or something. Like, “Wait, those probably were supposed to rhyme based on where they are in this poem.” You can use that to reconstruct what was going on.

Lauren: It can feel a bit anxiety-provoking about committing an analysis to paper because you are pinning a butterfly for a moment in time. People are still speaking the language, and it moves on. As long as you don’t think of the descriptive grammar as anything more canonical and authoritative than people’s actual intuitions, that’s an important thing to remember. Especially if you’re working with a grammar that’s more than a few generations old, it may be that the person didn’t quite capture what people were doing. It may be that the language has changed again.

Gretchen: Another thing that I found really interesting about “What are the ideas that people were thinking about at the time” – so this is from Grammar West to East again. The author points out that when Chinese characters first became known in Europe, it was late 16th Century and, in Europe, for unrelated reasons, the idea of a universal language was the hot philosophical topic. You had people like John Wilkins, who ultimately created Roget’s Thesaurus, but he was really just trying to make a universal taxonomy for understanding the world, he ended up making quite a nice thesaurus but not with making a universal way of understanding the world. What was actually going on in China at the time was that Classical Chinese was a scholarly and diplomatic lingua franca of the East Asian region. It was acquired as a learned language in the different parts of those regions. The Chinese words were given a local pronunciation. So, children in different parts of China would learn to read using a literary register of the local dialect, and there wasn’t the idea of a standard spoken language for the whole country. That’s a modern innovation. This is a situation that was a lot like Latin in Europe at the time. But Europe, you know, “Oh, you learn Latin in school so that you can do the literary thing.” But European scholars misunderstood the situation and thought that this meant that Chinese characters were interpretable by speakers of any language without them being based on one language, even though they were very much based on an ancestral language of the region.

Lauren: Oh dear. And their obsession with universality that they came to this very functional but still based on a language thing. Oh dear. I see exactly where this is going. That’s not good.

Gretchen: Also, they did the same thing with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had not yet been deciphered yet. They were like, “Guys, we found it! We found the universal language of ideas, and it’s not tied to a particular language!”

Lauren: Not translated adds an extra air of mystery.

Gretchen: European scholars thought this was great. Francis Bacon thought this was amazing. It’s interesting to see not just, okay, here’s this thing that was going on in China at the time, which is interesting, but also, here’s how these things get reflected and refracted, whether that’s the Europeans approaching Chinese grammar as maybe this is a thing that’s universal or this Chinese grammarian, Mr Ma, looking at it and saying, “Okay, how can I merge these two grammatical traditions of the full words versus the empty words?”, and then also “What if I have nouns and adjectives and stuff?”, and “How could I group them in ways that make sense for the grammar of the language?” Everyone’s bringing their own preconceived notions to this space.

Lauren: I think the descriptive grammar has really figured itself out as a genre in the 20th Century. A lot of the discussion around how to make sure people aren’t just bringing themselves to it has been to widen the scope of what gets included. One really big influence has been the idea that you need to have the grammar, but it has to be presented alongside the wordlists because the grammar just tells you the rules not which words go in which places and also a collection of texts that are broken down and translated so that people can access what’s happening in narratives. That solves a little bit of that what gets included problem.

Gretchen: Because somebody could always go back and look at the text again and say, “Well, what if I interpreted them differently or wrote this grammar differently based on what I can see here in this longer thing?”

Lauren: Yeah. “The author didn’t get around to a section on the use of particles in narratives, but there’s enough texts here I can see what’s happening.” This little trio of publications is sometimes known as the “Boasian trinity,” which sounds a little bit more pompous and religious than it actually is, but it’s part of this expanding what gets included.

Gretchen: This is after Boas, whose first name I have forgotten.

Lauren: Franz Boas.

Gretchen: Franz? Franz Boas. He was one of the early grammarians in this descriptive and comparative tradition where it’s not just, okay, every intellectual in this one country or this one society is devoting themselves to this one language but, “Oh, what if we looked at lots of languages? What if we compared them?” This goes along with the colonial project of like, “What if we went and conquered some people?”

Lauren: Yes, there’s a lot of scientific rationalism happening here.

Gretchen: This is not entirely unproblematic either. It is interesting how the forms of the grammars start shifting when it stops being this sort of seeking this one language of like, “Oh, everything descends from Greek” or “Everything descends from Sanskrit.” Even the Europeans, at a certain point, when they encountered Sanskrit, were like, “Oh, everything must descend from Sanskrit,” and said, “Okay, well, what if we realised that we can’t actually know what the first language was? This is lost in the midst of time,” and figured out “What can we know about relationships and what is the possibility space for what are different things that languages do?”

Lauren: I mean, I think it’s also worth pointing out a lot of 20th Century language description has happened to try and translate religious texts and political documents and that is a subset of problematic colonisation within the grammatical tradition.

Gretchen: The longest text that’s been written down in a lot of languages is the Bible, which has all sorts of really weird consequences when you start using those parallel texts as the input for something like machine translation because you can have machine translation systems start spitting out things that sound like religious prophecies because they’re just regurgitation versions of that Bible input, which is pretty weird.

Lauren: Such a weird consequence of a weird set of earlier decisions.

Gretchen: Exactly. Here was this earlier decision that maybe this was even a religious text that was created 100 years ago by some missionary, but it’s the longest text that’s available in this language, and the grammar is more or less accurate – and yet. It wasn’t trying to record the stories and the oral histories of the people who actually spoke that language that they cared about themselves, it was trying to introduce this foreign religion to them.

Lauren: Again, it’s one of those things that is hard to avoid and so it’s just important to be aware of when you’re looking at some grammars. They may have a lot of Christian religious texts. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the religion of the speakers so much as the religion of the person doing the documentation.

Gretchen: Going back to that theme of grammars that are made by people and sometimes people’s agendas for making a grammar is –

Lauren: A different endpoint.

Gretchen: It’s less about like, “Oh, I want to help this language be taught in schools and support its speakers in their own goals” and more “I wanna impose my goals on the speakers.”

Lauren: I think another important change that has happened across the 20th Century in terms of grammars is the increasing availability of recording equipment and, therefore, the ability to make recordings of the language as a fourth part of that three-part collection of what’s important when documenting a language.

Gretchen: There are some really interesting ancient recording technologies like the wax cylinders that were used –

Lauren: You say, “ancient,” but you mean, like, 150 years ago.

Gretchen: Yeah, not ancient compared to Paṇini.

Lauren: Not Paṇini ancient, just, it’s really that the story of the 20th Century descriptive tradition is the story of embracing these recording methods.

Gretchen: There was a really cool thing where they had these old, cracked wax cylinders, I think it was in the Smithsonian, and they couldn’t put them on a machine to read them because, obviously, the needle would stumble over the cracks. It’s kind of like a record.

Lauren: They just fall apart.

Gretchen: Picture it as a tall record with all the lines tall rather than a flat record. But it was cracked, so they couldn’t put it in the thing, and they eventually figured out a way with lasers to read the recordings. I got to hear, you know, here’s a song in this language that hasn’t been heard for 100 years because the cylinder cracked. If it’s online, I’ll try to find a link to it.

Lauren: With recording technology, early on, and even for some linguists, it’s mostly about doing recordings so you can go back and listen yourself and really identify that you’re correctly analysing structures. But I think the more exciting thing is that it lets you really observe more people using language in more natural ways. The “Can you say this?”, “Can you say that?”, “Does that sound grammatical?” way of eliciting stuff can lead to an unusual way of approaching the language, but really drawing on people singing songs and telling stories not only makes for a richer, more realistic grammatical description that allows you to see those fuzzier, more complicated bits of language, but it also means that you can make those recordings available for speakers who are interested in going back to an oral history of the language for people who might come in the future and go, “Ah, you didn’t look at the way people’s prosody goes up and down and their intonation changes in stories. I’m gonna look at that, and I have access to these recordings.” I think this is where grammars are more exciting as we integrate more of that richness of actual language and bringing the people who speak the language back into real prominence within the grammar document.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because there is a certain way of writing a grammar which is very old which just assumes that whatever bits you have about “Here’s how this language works,” that information just exists at this abstract level, and it’s not necessarily tied to particular speakers or particular communities, and saying, “Oh, it would be good to give credit to the speakers who were saying this, or to identify this is a particular way that a language is spoken in a particular region,” or “Here’s something that’s going on here.” There have been some initiatives to do things like pair people who are trying to revitalise their languages with linguists to try to understand what’s going on in some of these older grammars because they can be hard to decipher without the special training. The one that I’m familiar with is Breath of Life.

Lauren: There are the Paper and Talk Workshops in Australia as well where you’re coming full circle and making sure that you give people the tools that they need to access the materials about their own language because you can make grammars for many reasons, and we’ve discussed some of them but, at the end of the day, the most important reason to me is that speakers of a language can access the materials that were created for that language.

Gretchen: I think when we look at the multi-thousand-year-old history of making grammars and the very different sorts of questions that people had about language thousands of years ago, I find it very humbling because we can think about what are the questions that people might be asking in another thousand years, and how can we make things that would help with that?

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, schwa pins, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found at @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can get access to 49 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards, as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include reduplication, Q&A with a lexicographer, and a Q&A with the two of us in honour of our 100th episode. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #transcripts #episode 54 #podcasts #grammar

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scripttorture · 3 years

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I have no idea if you can help me, but I am working on a short story that starts after a Sami girl is recovering from being tortured by Christian police after her father is put on trial for witchcraft. This is during the witch trials in Norway. I wanted to focus on recovery in the community and her animistic religion. However, I don’t know what kind of torture she could realistically be recovering from and if, aside from punishment, it should religiously motivated. Do you have any English links?

I put this one off for a long time hoping that the virus situation would improve enough for me to a) have less stress at work and b) be able to access the university library in my town. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Norwegian history in the 1600s isn’t my strong suit. So my focus here is going to be advice on how to research this. I’ll also include the bits I found and some tortures so common that you can throw them in to virtually any setting without it standing out or being inaccurate.

Before I get any further I don’t know anything about Sami culture. I’d strongly recommend trying to find Sami sensitivity readers if you haven’t already. Because it can be bloody hard to get accurate information on some of Europe’s oppressed minorities and I’d say the Sami fall squarely into that category.

Historical research is fraught with pitfalls and when you’re starting out it can be really difficult to figure out which sources to trust. This only becomes worse when you’re working across a language barrier. And when the focus is torture it gets even more difficult.

Torture has always been a hot button issue.

The fact that virtually every culture has a history of torture doesn’t change that. Cultural ideas about what was ‘more painful’ or ‘more brutal’ or ‘shaming’ have all played a role in what was deemed ‘acceptable’ cruelty. So has the idea of who is an ‘acceptable’ or ‘deserving’ victim.

And that means that misrepresenting the typical tortures of different countries, cultures, religious groups or past regimes has been part of political practice for literally hundreds of years. It is a very easy way to direct people’s hate and elicit an emotional response.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to consider an author’s motivations, biases and abilities when you read historical sources.

Think about whether an author was actually there for the events they describe. Think about their political and religious positions and what they may have to gain by pushing a particular message.

Apologies if some of this comes across as teaching you how to suck eggs, but I know a lot of people don’t get this lesson in their history classes. So sources-

Historical sources can be broadly categorised into primary and secondary sources. A primary source is something produced at the time. A secondary source is something produced later.

Both can be untrustworthy/biased but a primary source gives you information about how events/practices were interpreted at the time, while a secondary sources tells you how they were remembered later.

Primary sources can be things like diaries, court records of witch trials and objects produced in areas like Finnmark (northern Norway where most of the witch trials took place) at the time. Secondary sources might be things like how the witch trials are discussed in Norwegian history books and local history or stories about the witch trials that are told today.

By reading about this in English you’re mostly being limited to secondary sources. The danger here is that secondary sources can misrepresent the time period they’re describing, deliberately or not. Authors make assumptions about how historical people lived, thought, what their actions meant and how their beliefs influenced their actions.

Primary sources can also misrepresent what happened (deliberately or not) but with primary sources they are at least displaying the biases and concerns of the time.

Generally historical research is about the collation and interpretation of primary sources. Which is a lot of work, requires a degree of expertise and often demands fluency in several languages.

That level of work and knowledge appeals to some authors of historical fiction. But it isn’t for everyone. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to rely on history textbooks and the like instead of digging through transcriptions of things written back in the 1600s.

Here’s the problem when you’re doing that for another country: English language sources are often very very biased in favour of other English language sources.

This means if some bored academic in the 1930s made up a bunch of fan theories based on very little evidence it will probably still be used as a source today.

And without having another language (with access to other sources it provides) it can be really difficult to spot that kind of fuckery.

I am not saying that you need to learn Norwegian and believe me as someone with only one spoken language I understand how tackling a new one can be crazy intimidating.

But I think you do need to know Norwegians. Particularly Norwegians with an interest in history.

That’s all general stuff about researching historical periods in different countries.

For torture in particular… I’m not gonna lie it’s a sack of angry snakes.

Both primary and secondary often have considerable motivation for lying about torture. Historical accounts routinely downplay or outright lie about the damage different tortures cause. They are heavily judgemental about victims.

And they run in to exactly the same issues we have trying to study use of different tortures today with the added difficulty that accounts from torturers are preserved far more frequently then accounts from survivors.

It’s only once you start getting to the 1900s that you really start to see multiple survivor accounts of events. For the 1600s as a general period I can think of witness accounts and multiple accounts from torturers or their bosses in various countries. But the testimony of survivors is very very rare.

This is an issue because we know from modern research that torturers routinely lie about what they do.

There were laws in most European countries in this period that cover torture. They tend to define a sort of ‘accepted practice’: what torturers were supposed to do and for how long. And don’t get me wrong these are useful historical sources.

But we know from comparing similar torture manuals used in the 1930s (and indeed more recently) to multiple accounts from torture survivors that torturers do not follow their own rules. I see no reason why torturers today would be less likely to follow ‘the rules’ then their historical predecessors.

Looking up the laws of the land at the historical time period you’re interested in is a good place to start. But it won’t actually tell you everything that torturers did and it may not represent the most common tortures.

It will give you a list of things that were definitely used at the time in that place though. Which isn’t a bad place to start.

Look for history books that cover crime and punishment. If you can’t find one broad enough to do that (or give you a helpful summary of laws at the time) then I’ve found that accounts of specific historical figures in the relevant area/time often contain some of that information.

The next major pitfall when researching historical torture is the bane of my existence: euphemisms.

A lot of historical sources use vague or euphemistic terms for different tortures and then leave it up to the reader to figure out what they mean. This was probably perfectly clear at the time but now… less so.

To use an example from something I’ve been trying to research for a while now I can tell you that the Ancient Egyptians definitely used torture. They say as much in surviving accounts of their justice system. They used it to punish, force confessions and attempt to gain information.

They definitely beat people with sticks. They say they did, in multiple accounts. There are also wall carvings and paintings that show prisoners of war and enslaved people being menaced with sticks.

However, I can’t find any definite suggestion that they used falaka, ie beating the soles of the feet with those sticks.

Did they just hit people at random? This seems unlikely from a practical viewpoint as that’s a very easy way to kill someone. Did they ignore the feet and concentrate on other areas of the body? Did they use falaka and also beat other areas? Do I bring too much bias into this question because I’d love to find a historical point of origin for a torture that’s common throughout the Middle East today?

Historical sources often just don’t contain the details we need to be certain about what torture they’re describing. Terminology is often vague. Descriptions can be contradictory. Often the only way to be certain is to come across an illustration or surviving device and even then this does not necessarily represent common practice and either piece of evidence could be contemporary propaganda rather then something that was actually used.

When you’re talking about historical torture it is essential to find multiple sources and make sure they agree.

Vague terminology like ‘water torture’ can cover a host of different sins. Finding a vague term or euphemism multiple times doesn’t even tell you if this was the same practice carried out in different areas or different practices with superficial similarities.

If a source doesn’t give you enough information to be sure don’t use it. If a source suggests the meaning of a euphemism based on no clear evidence from the time period don’t use it.

What I’ve found in my own small collection of books on witchcraft is very sparse on details.

One of the older books I have suggests that there were almost no witch hunts or witch trials in Scandinavia which is complete bollocks. The book was published in 1959, so I’d suggest being wary of English language sources from that date and earlier.

A much more recent (2017) Oxford University Press book on the subject gives an estimated 400-500 executions for witchcraft in Norway during the period of 1601-1670.

This might seem like a small number compared to the thousands that were executed throughout the Holy Roman Empire but it seems a significant number given that the Norwegian trials were so concentrated in a small, sparsely populated region.

Unfortunately this book is a very general overview of the perception of witchcraft and magic throughout Europe from the ancient world to the present. So it doesn’t really give any details of the kinds of tortures a Norwegian accused of witchcraft might endure.

The author of the chapter on the witch trials was Rita Voltmer, University of Trier in case that’s helpful. She has published several papers on witch trials and the use of torture and at least one on witch trials in Norway. However a lot of her work is in German.

These two papers/chapters in particular may be of interest: the english language document on torture and emotion in witch trials and the German paper on Norwegian and Danish witch trials.

Several of the books I’ve got access to confirmed that Norway burnt witches and provided stories focused on shapeshifting and causing storms at sea. They also confirmed the use of torture in witch trials but nothing so helpful as the kind of tortures employed.

I found multiple references to ‘water torture’. One of these implied that the particular torture was waterboarding alla the historical Dutch method. But the same source said this caused vomiting or possibly diarrhoea which seems to imply pumping.

At a guess I’d say pumping is less likely because waterboarding can cause vomiting and so far as I know pumping wasn’t common anywhere in Europe during this period. However absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

‘Water torture’ could also potentially refer to: a temperature torture, near drowning, a method of sleep deprivation or even dehydration. Without more detail it’s really hard to say which of these is being referenced.

I found one mention of ‘burning torture’ a reference that I think referred to tearing the flesh with hot pincers based on the description of a torn wound. However given I only found this referenced once and I’m unsure of the source I found it in, I would not say this is a good one to pick.

Which leaves me with common tortures.

Whatever the time period, whatever the place, beatings the most common torture. Easily.

If your character gets repeatedly hit, whether it’s clean or not, you are not being historically inaccurate. And I’ve got a lot of posts on beatings generally and clean beatings that can help you write that.

Starvation and dehydration are also both really common regardless of culture and time period. So are temperature tortures or exposure though I think different countries have favoured different methods at different times.

Torturous cell conditions were incredibly common across Europe historically. Lack of sanitation, wet cells, inadequate bedding, over crowding and conditions amounting to a temperature torture were all really common. They were also often happening alongside starvation.

I have a masterpost on starvation and tags covering temperature tortures, exposure and prisons. I think the ‘prisons’ tag should give you most of the posts covering poor cell conditions, ‘historical torture’ and ‘historical fiction’ may also be helpful to you.

I’m sorry I couldn’t come up with anything more specific.

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

Edit: So this should be my week off the blog but I’ve seen a lot of the responses to this. Most of them are extremely helpful, thank you to everyone who knows Norwegian that is offering to help.

However: if your instinct is to say that any torturer, historical or recent, is ‘honourable’ and follows a code of conduct then this blog is not the place for you. I don’t tolerate that kind of apologia or people using my work to spread it.

#writing advice #tw torture #tw racism #tw sectarian violence #historical torture #historical fiction #Norway #witch trials #witchcraft #historical research #behaviour of torturers #attitudes towards torture #National Styles #writing victims #writing torture #Sami #the inconsistencies in this field in academia #and the lack of adequate accessible translations #will eventually make me turn into a livid ticking column of smoke

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theramseyloft · 4 years

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what the story behind kou?

I have been the columbid specialist volunteer for the local wildlife rehab for almost as long as I have had doves.

Most of what they got in were orphaned or injured Mourning and Collared doves, so I primarily fostered the Mourning pweeps for soft release and found homes for the collared doves.

Feral pigeons didn’t come in as often, but my specialization in hand rearing columbids meant those came to me too.

This is 5 week old Ankhou next to a two week old mourning dove the day we got them.

Some kind soul saw him running circles around the base of a lamp post in a parking lot, screaming for parents who were anxiously watching him, but has no way to get him off the ground to safety.

Instead of leaving him, they scooped him up and rushed him to Highland’s wildlife center, who immediately called me to come get him.

For reference, the Billboard Babies, Dodger and Alex, were 5 weeks old when they arrived.

This is what Ankhou SHOULD have looked like.

But his parents simply had not been able to find enough to feed him.

This is him the same day after his first meal.

You can see down on his head in that photo, meaning that he didn’t lose those feathers he’s missing.

He is so emaciated that his body had to prioritize growing bones over growing feathers because he simply did not have the building materials to produce both at the same time.

Here he is a week later, and you can just see him finally getting some pins on his wee head.

We had ankhou before we had the incubator, so he spent a lot of time on me to stay warm.

As he grew, I talked him through everything like a toddler.

I had read this study on Pigeon cognition pointing out that they learn the equivalent of words by the same mechanic as human children.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150204184447.htm

And I was curious to see if that could be done in real time by supplying him the names of objects he was looking at or interacting with, describing his actions, asking about his mood, and describing mine.

To my surprise and delight, he started responding logically to sentences directed at him in such a way that I could tell which words registered correctly and which ones didn’t quite mean anything to him yet.

He has a rudimentary capacity to answer yes or no questions, and understands pretty abstract concepts like help, apology, and consent.

Along with language, though, he was picking up on my behavior patterns.

A little back ground...

I am an autistic woman with ADHD, PTSD, and pretty severe general anxiety.

Those last two things largely from a long history of systematic physical and emotional abuse by my parents, guardians, and peers.

I am nonverbal most of the time because I don’t think in words. I think in pictures, sounds, and sensations and have to manually translate them into words before I can verbally articulate them.

Under sufficient duress, my throat physically closes, and I can’t mechanically speak.

I can usually type or write fine under that circumstance, but if something distresses me enough beyond that point, my connection to language severs completely and I no longer have access to my proverbial internal word bank.

At that point, I understand actions and tone of voice, and that is it.

The problem is that I can’t tell when I am bordering that state of shut down, so, from my perspective, I can be out in public and suddenly just cease to function with no warning or discernible cause.

Ankhou is practically hard wired to pick up on my tells.

And me shutting down freaks him right tf out.

So he has two levels of alerts he taught himself to perform.

If I’m getting stressed at a rapid level, he will sit on my shoulder or knee and lean against my cheek or hand.

That’s my cue to stop what I’m dong to pet him and do my breathing exercises and practice mindful self evaluation.

Standing on my chest to stare me in the face is a much more urgent warning that I will shut down in the next 20-45 seconds, so I need to find a quiet place out of the way to sit down and focus on the softness of his feathers and my breathing exercises.

If he could not get to me before shut down, he will fuss with my hands until I move one, then bunt under it like a little feathered cat.

If he can get me to stroke him, that’s usually step one towards bringing me back down and getting me to where I can function.

He will lose interest and go do his own thing when I’m back to base line.

When we’re out in public, that usually means he leans to ask me to bring him closer to something he wants to look at.

He knows the difference between physically tired, shut down, and crashing from a blood sugar spike, which all look the same from the outside, and all feel the same to me.

If I’m crashing, he just will NOT let me fall asleep. What ever that takes.

Usually biting me in increasingly sensitive places until something rouses me.

If nothing does, he does looking for my husband or house mates and pitches an absolute fit until some one comes and checks on me.

Our training program here at the Ramsey Loft is designed around what we learned from the practical applications of all the studies I have read on pigeon cognition to communication with Ankhou.

It’s pretty much a constant shifting of applying every new thing we learn based on “What do I wish I had known when Ankhou was this age?”

Unfortunately, only a dog, or in some place a miniature horse can have the legal distinction of Service Animal.

But pigeons are uniquely suited because of their natural sociology and cognition to a wide variety of mental illness specific service and therapy work, so we are researching to try to eventually get the laws changed to include pigeons as potential Service Animals.

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theweasleyslytherin · 3 years

Text

i knew you (ron weasley x reader) part 13

part 1/masterlist

summary: Ron inexplicably broke up with Cassiah Black of Slytherin house just days before their final year at Hogwarts, leaving them both with broken hearts and no future plans, but too stubborn and too proud to fix things. Will they find their way back together before the year ends, or will the end of their time at Hogwarts be the last time they ever see the each other?

general fic warnings: smut, drug/alcohol use, language

CHAPTER 13 - screaming color

But it's not forever But it's just tonight Oh, we're still the greatest The greatest ___________________________

Ron had avoided hanging out with Cassiah for a few days after the naked Quidditch incident. Frankly, he couldn't shake the image of her naked body out of his head and he knew he'd start blushing tomato-red from head to toe the moment he looked at her. Cassiah knew him so well and was so good at reading people that she would have known instantly why he was flushing. Just the idea of that brand of embarrassment had Ron's face flaming.

He recovered from his funk fairly quickly though, aided by copious amounts of bud and extensive, vivid sexual fantasies about imaginary women. Embarrassing? Yes. Effective? ...Also yes, apparently.

Just in time, too, because there was another Potions test coming up that week and after his humongous flunk on the last test, he needed Cassiah's help more than ever to bring his grade back up. She was such a good teacher; she was always so patient with him. In the past, she'd rewarded correct answers with kisses or by removing articles of clothing, but Ron had a sneaking suspicion that was off the table this time.

The point was, no matter how smart Cassiah was and how easily this stuff came to her, she never for a second made Ron feel stupid. On the contrary, she made him feel confident. She was the first person to ever make him realize that he was smart; he was a great communicator and very intuitive. Just because he wasn't a good tester didn't mean he wasn't intelligent. Cassiah had told him that he was smart in ways she could never be. That made Ron feel good.

And if Ron did a little advanced reading before their scheduled study session just to impress her... that was nobody's bloody business.

Despite the fact that he'd spent the last few days completely entranced by the thought of Cassiah, Ron actually felt pretty relaxed on his way to the Slytherin dorms. Even when there were underlying and confusing thoughts, things felt natural between them. There was an organic quality to their dynamic that he didn't even realize himself and wouldn't have been able to describe even if he did. All he knew was hanging out with Cassiah was easy and fun.

_____

Cassiah was surprised to find that Ron had beaten her to the dorms. She could see his ruffled red hair from down the hall, waiting out in the hallway for her to let him in. While Cassiah knew the password to the Gryffindor dorms ("Quidditch" wasn't super difficult to guess), Ron had no idea what the Slytherin passcode was. Because of Ron's never-ending feud with Malfoy, they hadn't hung out in the Slytherin dorms often enough for her to bother telling him.

They always studied at night, after the library was closed, so common rooms were pretty much the only option. This time around, however, they were meeting in the Slytherin dorms because Cassiah really didn't feel like running into Ginny or Hermione sober. This left Draco as the more amicable option, and he'd agreed to basically vacate the premises or hide in his room while Ron was there, and make sure the others did the same. The promise that he wouldn't get called a blood traitor by any random students really eased Ron's nerves about coming to see Cassiah in the dungeons, and he'd agreed.

And now this was going to be their first time hanging out alone since the breakup.

"Hey Ronald," she said in greeting, bumping into him lightly. "You weren't waiting long, were you?"

"Only a couple hours; don't worry," Ron deadpanned in return. She punched him in the arm – a very hard, muscled arm – for his sarcasm, but she also couldn't help but laugh. He never failed to make her laugh.

"Shut the fuck up," she shook her head, but she was smiling widely as she leaned in and whispered the password.

"No way! Your password is Quidditch, too?" Ron gasped with excitement as they stepped into the common room.

Cassiah looked at him like he had seven heads. "Merlin, no. Are you hard of hearing, Weasley?" she teased, "It's in Latin. It's practically impossible to guess unless you speak the language. Which I clearly don't, based on my marks in that class."

"Bloody hell, Cassie. You got a B–. Plus, we were fourteen. That was four years ago. Quit it with the melodrama," Ron rolled his eyes but his tone was playful so Cassiah knew he wasn't actually annoyed. She could probably count on one hand the number of times Ron had been genuinely annoyed with her.

Cassiah huffed and placed her books down on the coffee table, organizing them in neat stacks: "Just sit before I change my mind about tutoring you."

"Yes, sir," Ron joked, carelessly dropping his beat-up book bag onto the floor beside the couch and scooping out the contents before plopping them haphazardly onto the table. Cassiah winced at the pile of crinkled papers and bent notebook covers. Ron was so messy sometimes.

Cassiah wasn't a neat freak herself, but she liked to keep most of her belongings in pristine condition. She squinted and was pretty sure one of the notebooks had "PENIS" scrawled across it in Ron's abominable handwriting and then "BOOBIES" in Harry's neat block-print. But what else could she expect? Sure, they were in their last year and not children anymore, but Ron and Harry were going to be like this forever, probably.

"Where do you want to start?" she asked Ron, flipping through her notes quickly. They were color-coordinated.

"Everything," Ron grumbled, "I don't get the whole lot of it. Even when Neville and I are paying attention, I only remember the stuff when I'm doing it, and then I forget it the moment we walk out the door."

"Must be all the weed," Cassiah teased. But she was also probably just the slightest bit right.

"Very funny," Ron snorted, "Seriously, though. I have some notes, but I just never can tell what the important stuff is going to be, so I just end up copying almost the entire thing and I'm back at square one."

"Okay," Cassiah leveled with him, "Then we'll start at the beginning of this unit and just try to decide what's going to be important enough to be on the test. We'll focus on actually remembering the stuff later. Now c'mere."

Ron scooted closer to her on the couch and leaned over to share the textbook. They worked quietly for about forty minutes, completely focused. They had always worked fairly well together. Ron even corrected Cassiah on a few things, which made his chest swell up with pride.

After they finished one of the chapters, Ron leaned back against the couch, exhaling heavily. "I'm getting hungry. Do you have any study snacks?" he asked. When Cassiah just looked at him for a moment, he shrugged his shoulders, "Nevermind, I brought my own."

He reached into his bag and produced a whole array of sweet and salty snacks, spreading them out on the coffee table on top of the notebooks. "Snack break?"

"I guess it wouldn't hurt," Cassiah wagered, "Oh! Do you have–"

Ron beat her to it, holding up a bag of butterbeer popcorn. "Of course I do," he grinned.

She squealed with delight, grabbing the bag and opening it immediately. "Mmm," she murmured as she popped the first one into her mouth, "I hardly ever have these but Merlin they're good."

"Oh, trust me. I know," Ron agreed, stuffing his hand into the bag on Cassiah's lap, causing her to shriek and giggle as she batted his hand away.

"It's so good to be hanging out again," Ron said after Cassiah's laughter died down, "I really wasn't sure if we ever would after everything that happened."

"Well, we were friends first, right?" Cassiah gave him a half-grin through a mouthful of popcorn.

Ron scoffed. "Yeah, but I wasn't sure if you were going to ever want to be friends with me again after the fit I threw over you and Malfoy," he explained, and then fell silent. After a moment, he asked cautiously, "Whatever became of that anyways? When I asked him about it he just gave me some vague, non-answer about your relationship not being what it appeared to be."

Cassiah was floored. "You talked to him?"

"Long story. But answer my question!"

She sighed. "Well, I guess his answer was right. Draco and I were never like that in the way that you thought. We're just friends – entirely platonic."

Ron furrowed his brow, clearly perplexed, "So you guys never...?"

Cassiah snorted, burying her face in her hands in embarrassment. "Merlin, no, Ron. Nothing romantic ever happened between us. Or sexual, for that matter," she reassured him, and then added, half under her breath, "Nothing sexual has happened for me in a looong time."

"Hah. Me neither," Ron groaned, leaning back in his seat a little bit.

Cassiah's eyes widened a bit. She wasn't entirely expecting Ron to hear her. But to hear that he hadn't been with another girl was definitely an interesting surprise.

Ron must've been thinking the same thing: "I kind of would've thought that you would have, you know, been with someone. Malfoy or MacMillan or someone. I mean, guys were always hitting on you even when we were together. You have plenty of options."

She raised her eyebrows and grunted, "No opportunities have really presented themselves, unfortunately. It's just me and my lonesome."

Ron chuckled at that. "Bloody hell, tell me about it," he murmured. He waited a second, considering, and then said, "It's really hard, you know? Going from have sex every day or at least once or twice a week to just... nothing."

"Yeah, I'm sure it's really hard," Cassiah joked and Ron shoved her in the arm for her pun. "But I know what you mean. Sometimes it drives me crazy. I got so spoiled that now I feel like I need sex and I can't have it."

Cassiah looked up from her lap to see Ron's face aflame, suddenly aware of how close together they were on the couch. Ron was clearly caught off guard by how candid she was being about her needs. She knew she normally didn't talk like this, but he'd started it and it felt good to just vent.*

"That was never our problem, was it?" Ron said. The sentence itself was a joke but his tone was completely serious. "Sex, I mean..." his tone was gruff, almost a whisper.

Cassiah felt the energy shift in the room and her nerves start tingling. "No," she manages to squeak out, "Definitely not... You knew me in that way like nobody else."

She could've sworn she heard Ron let out the smallest groan. He always liked the praise.

Cassiah looked up at him through her lashes, feeling her heart pounding in her chest and hearing both of their breathing become a bit ragged. Ron was staring back at her with a look in his eyes that she couldn't quite comprehend. Needy but also controlled and–

"Oh, fuck it," heard him mutter and suddenly his hands were grabbing her face and his lips were crashing into hers and bloody fuck this time it was real, not a dream or a memory.

His hands on her face and gripping the back of her hair were rough as his lips slid against hers, his tongue licking against hers.

"Oh, Ron," she murmured into his mouth immediately and he let out a loud, unbridled groan at the sound of his name on her lips. That sound sent heat straight in between Cassiah's legs and she rolled her hips into the couch.

"C'mere," he growled, his voice gruffer than she'd ever heard as Cassiah felt his big hands grab onto her waist and roughly guide her into his lap. She let out a low whine when she could feel his length already hard and pressing up against her core. She rolled her hips down and shocks of electricity sparked through her body as she felt his hardness brush against her through the crotch of her leggings. The friction was so delicious that she kept rolling her hips again and again with Ron's hands on her waist guiding her in the figure eights he always used to like.

"Bloody fucking hell. I didn't know how long I've been wanting this until now," Ron panted, thrusting his hips up to make contact with the apex of her thighs. Cassiah ground down against him, coaxing a long, low moan out of him.

Ron reached up and moved his hands from her hips to her breasts, squeezing roughly and kneading his fingers into her flesh through her bra. He pulled the hemline of her shirt up to reveal her bra and then pushed her bra down as far as he could. He licked a circle around her nipple before roughly sucking it into his mouth, flicking his tongue over it again and again. Cassiah tangled her head in Ron's hair, panting heavily as she watched him. He was looking up at her with big blue-green eyes as he sucked her nipple into his mouth.

And then she was tugging his head back up to her mouth, reconnecting their lips briefly before pulling away again to say breathlessly, "Get me ready for you, Ron."

Rom growled, and Cassiah felt him throbbing at the mere thought of being inside her again after so long. She felt his lips trail over to the nape of her neck where he began sucking a harsh mark in just the right spot to send shivers down her spine. He licked a thick stripe over the mark before quickly turned to suck the lobe of her ear into her mouth.

"Ah," Cassiah gasped, the combination of his tongue and his hot breath on the shell of her ear making her wetter by the second. She could feel her slick forming a wet stain on the lap of Ron's slacks but she knew he'd love it when he realized. There was never anything that turned him on more than seeing how wet she got for him.

Cassiah didn't let up on the rotation of her hips on his thick length. She could feel him hot and ready in his pants. She had half a mind to climb off him so she could unbutton his pants and take him into her mouth so she could hear him completely lose control, but she wanted him inside of her even more.

She reached down in between them and cupped him over his pants, causing him to hold his breath. She gripped his length and gave it a squeeze. It felt huge and hard even through the fabric and Ron sucked in a breath at the contact.

She kept rubbing him in circles through his pants, pressing her thumb over where she knew the tip was every now and then.

"Harder. More. Tighter, fuck, Cassie, please," Ron was chanting, his lips still attached to her neck, which was covered in huge, dark bruises by now. Just the thought of that had her growing slick.

She pressed harder against his length, now running her hands up and down his shaft through his pants. She couldn't stand the tension and heat in her core anymore and started grinding down against his thigh as best as she could.

"Bloody hell, are you getting yourself off?" Ron moaned and when Cassiah gave him a wicked smile in response, he gripped onto her hips hard enough to bruise and let his head fall back as he let out a long, quiet "fuck yeah."

"You're so dirty," he continued, his voice ragged and rushed as Cassiah kept rubbing him faster, "So fucking desperate for me that you're fucking yourself on my thigh. I'm gonna make you feel so bloody good, Cassie."

His filthy words sent fiery heat all over her body and egged her on.

"O- Cassie, I-" Ron stuttered bucking his hips against hers. "Stop stop stop stop, I'm–"

But she didn't listen. His whines and his hot breath were too delicious and sinful for her to just stop. She never wanted him to stop making those greedy little sounds. It was rare he completely lost control like this.

And then she felt him go completely rigid, his fingers digging into her waist and his head falling back as he let out a choked "Ohhhh" and squeezed his eyes shut.

She didn't realize at first and kept pumping him through his pants until he rushed to say, "Merlin. Stopstopstop, just– Give me a minute, bloody hell..."

That's when she felt the rapidly growing wet spot on the front of his pants, and it wasn't from her. She stared down at it in shock. That had certainly never happened before.

When she looked up, Ron's face was flaming red. Before she could say anything, he was grabbing the blanket off the back of the couch and shoving it over his crotch as best as he could with Cassiah still on his lap. "B-bloody hell, Cassie, I'm so sorry. You know I never do that; it's just been so long that I just couldn't hold off. I-I tried to tell you to stop but–"

"Ron," she soothed, giggling softly, "It's okay."

"It's bloody humiliating. I'm a grown-ass adult and I just shot a load in my pants."

"Felt good though, didn't it?" she asked, and Ron nodded enthusiastically. "Plus," she added, "You know you'd think it was hot if I did that. And I happen to find it unbearably hot when you can't control yourself because I make you feel so good."

Ron stared up at her, the mischievous glint beginning to return to his eyes.

"Prove it."

Cassiah grabbed his hand from where it was resting on her waist and took two of his fingers in her own. She guided his hand down into her leggings, slipping his fingers under her panties. She shimmied a bit and then swiped their fingers through her sex. He groaned when he felt that she was dripping for him between her legs, his fingers becoming coated in her slick. They brushed against her swollen clit as he removed them from her panties and Cassiah let out a needy, high-pitched whine.

Ron locked his eyes with her and he brought her fingers to his lips, sticking them in his mouth and sucking them clean of her juices. That visual paired with the intense eye contact had Cassiah's sex throbbing between her legs.

"Wh-" she started, her voice shaky, "Why don't you take care of me until you're ready for round two?"

"If I fuck you after I just came I'm gonna last–"

"I know," Cassiah blurted out and blushed, ducking her head in slight embarrassment at the memory. There was a time over the summer when they'd gone for a second round immediately after Ron had finished and he'd lasted so long that she'd come about four times before he'd finished and she'd actually been crying from how oversensitive and fucked out she was.

"You naughty little slut," Ron murmured, his eyes bright with admiration, "I'm going to make you scream."

Before she could even respond, he grabbed her and swung her around, pressing her back into the cool leather of the couch as she pinned her wrists above her head with just one hand. She struggled against him, loving the thrill of the fact that his one hand could hold her down.

Ron roughly pulled her leggings and panties down in one motion, leaving them pooled around her ankles as she wrapped her legs around the back of his head.

She crawled up so her core was aligned with her face and he stared at her wetness with a hungry, animal look. He licked his lips and groaned, "Fuck, I missed this pretty pussy."

He delivered a tiny slap to her dripping lips and clit before running a finger through her slick and spreading it over her swollen clitoris. She was already a needy mess under him, whining and whimpering.

"How fast can I make you come for me?" Ron wondered aloud, "No one's touched you like this in so long." He circled his finger over her clit at an agonizingly slow pace and she rotated her hips, signaling for him to spread up.

"Have you been touching yourself?" he questioned her and she nodded quickly and desperately, wanting to answer his question so that he'd pick up his pace and give her a release.

"Merlin, you're so bad, Cassie. Such a bad girl, I fucking love it. I'm gonna fucking destroy you," he promised and she moaned.

Ron sped his fingers up to a torturously fast pace and Cassiah felt herself hurtling towards the edge. Her legs started to shake uncontrollably and her thighs clenched around Ron. Her back arched and her head shot back as she chanted, "Ronronron, bloody hell, I'm coming, I'm coming Ron..."

He kept stroking her through her climax until he could tell her was done, completely spent and relaxed back against the couch. But he wasn't even half done with her, and she knew it as he loomed over her, shucking off his stained slacks and his wet underwear.

He stroked over his aching cock as he towered over her, already hard and leaking at the tip after she'd made him come just minutes ago.

"On your hands and knees," Ron demanded, pumping his thick length expertly in his hand. Cassiah felt her heartbeat between her legs at the sight of him touching himself and immediately moved to follow his orders.

Cassiah braced herself on her elbows, leaning to arch her back and push herself closer to him. She looked back over her shoulder and saw Ron shifting to move up behind her. She bit her lip and looked up at him.

"Fuck," Ron murmured at the sight. "Get ready, baby. I'm not going slow with you," he said as he linked his tip up with her entrance.

"Would never want you to," she countered, pushing back against him, silently begging him to put it in.

Without any warning, he thrust into her in one push, giving her no time to adjust and as a result earning him a winded, shrill, "Ron!"

She could hear him chuckle slightly behind her and knew he smiling as he palmed the thick flesh of her ass in his hands, kneading it between his fingers as he caught his breath.

"Merlin, Cassie, you f-feel tighter than ever," he stammered as he started moving his hips, keeping up his promise of not going slow with her. His thrusts were short and rough. When he hit the right spot deep inside her, Cassiah cried out and pushed back against him to take him deeper and he kept up angling for that spot, earning the same reaction every time.

"Merlin, Ron, right there," she begged, circling her hips, "Please don't stop. Keep going."

"I couldn't stop if I wanted to baby. You feel so good," Ron responded, the loud smack of his hips slamming into her over and over echoing throughout the room.

Cassiah began to whine almost non-stop, obviously losing control, and he quickened his pace and went even harder on her than before, knowing from experience that this was just what she needed to come.

He leaned over her, his chest hovering just over her back so that he could place sloppy kisses along the back of her neck and her shoulders. She turned her head to kiss him but Ron had reached underneath her to begin playing her clit and instead, her mouth fell open and her eyes rolled back into her head. She came hard with a sob, her walls pulsing around.

But she knew Ron wouldn't be done with her yet. He started back up with slower, more thorough thrusts, pulling almost all the way out every time before pushing back in at an agonizing pace, but still just as hard as before. Their bodies jerked with every movement.

Ron fathered Cassiah's hair in a fist behind her head and yanked, pulling her head back and coaxing a sharp cry out of her. He was finally able to kiss her, and he pressed his lips sensually to hers. She moaned as he licked into her mouth, just as needy as she was.

She could feel her third orgasm coming on and knew that she wouldn't be able to hold out or handle another afterward. She clenched around Ron, circling her hips in rhythm with him, and panted, "Come for me, Ron. You know you want to. You've made me come twice, you're gonna make me come a third. You deserve it."

She knew his praise kink would take him right over the edge and it did. He let out an earth-shattering groan and cried out her name, finishing inside her and giving a few final thrusts before going still and collapsing on top of her back. They stayed there for a moment, no sound but the sound of them catching their breath for several moments.

"Bloody hell," he panted, peeling himself off of her sweaty back and sitting back on the couch.

She gingerly sat up too, still over-sensitive, and faced him. "You can say that again," she murmured.

"Bloody hell," he repeated, and Cassiah barked out a laugh, weakly punching him in the arm and telling him to shut up.

"You're so right," she conceded, "We may have had little disagreements every now and then, and you had to do what was best for you and end things but... Sex was never our weak point."

"Definitely not," Ron agreed, pushing his sweaty hair back off of his forehead before starting to get redressed. "Merlin, can we please keep doing this? I don't think I'll be able to handle it going back to my hand after this. I had no idea how much tension had built up until now," he admitted – more like pleaded.

"One hundred percent. Trust me, Ron. You know I always needed this just as much as you did," Cassiah said, fully dressed and pulling her hair on top of her head in a messy bun. "We just have to be cool about it. Friends can definitely have passionate sex and then be just that – friends," she explained to him, but it felt more like she was trying to convince herself.

"Totally," Ron was quick to agree, staring forward in a sexed-out daze.

"So long as nobody finds out, there will be no weirdness. Just two friends who also happen to enjoy having sex with each other in secret."

"Amazing, mind-blowing sex," he added.

"Uh-huh," Cassiah agreed, still not entirely recovered, "So it's deal."

"Yes," Ron finalized it, "It's a deal. Now let's get out stuff and get out of this common room before they get tired of being holes up in their dorms and wander in here. We've already pushed our luck enough."

Cassiah nodded, grabbing her books, "I suppose we have. But what about the test? We didn't finish studying."

"Cassie," Ron answered earnestly, grabbing her hand, "I don't care if I never pass a test again if I'm having sex that good."

______________

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!

i think this is the most sinful, blasphemous thing i've ever written in my life and i really hope you guys enjoyed it lol.

all my love! xx

tag list: @ickleronniekinsemotionalrange @girl22334 @mariellelovescupcakes @lateautumn @heartofcanvas @gloryekaterina @mackaywhore

Published on my Wattpad and my Tumblr (theweasleyslytherin).

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schraubd · 3 years

Text

ACES Wild

Last we encountered the "Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies" (ACES), they were pushing fabricated evidence and wild screeds against "critical race theory" in a failed attempt to derail the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum after it was reformed in accord with tremendous efforts by a range of California Jewish (and non-Jewish) organizations.

Now they're back in action, and this time their target is California's new draft Mathematical Framework. What horrors are contained inside? Let's look!

The first draft of the California Mathematics Framework is out for review, and it includes as a resource "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction," a guide that labels teaching practices like "addressing mistakes" and "focus on the right answer" as "white supremacy culture."

This is critical race theory.

This is discrimination.

(Is this "critical race theory"? Nope, not going to get sucked into that).

Unfortunately, as was the case in the ESMC debacle, we are given only the thinnest possible citations to the primary sources for the alleged offending content. The link to the CMF draft goes to a website offering a thirteen chapter document, all in separate documents, comprised of hundreds of page, with no indication of where in the morass the "Pathway" document is included. The link to the Pathway itself, for its part, goes to a site that contains five separate documents, again totaling hundreds of pages, with nary a clue as to where this language about "addressing mistakes" might be found. All of this, I suppose, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well, I may not be a math expert, but I have gotten familiar enough with the strategies of ACES and its friends to know better than to accept what they say on faith. So I went in search of this resource and this language, to see if it is as scary and offensive as they say.

I want to begin with some good news: unlike the Ethnic Studies case, ACES and its allies do not appear to have completely fabricated the inclusion of the putatively offensive material. Congratulations, ACES! This is a big step forward for you as an organization, and you should give yourself a hearty pat on the back.

Alas, if we ask for more than "not fabricated" and stretch all the way out to "not abjectly misleading", things get dimmer.

Start with the CMF draft. From what I can tell, the section they refer to (where the Pathway document is "included as a resource") is on page 44 of chapter two (lines 1010-13). Here, in its totality, is what's included:

Other resources for teaching mathematics with a social justice perspective include... The five strides of Equitable Math.org: https://ift.tt/3qNG3O2

That's it (The website "Equitablemath.org" is titled "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction"). It is mentioned, unadorned, in the "other resources" conclusion -- and as far as I can tell, nowhere else. Wowzers. I can feel the racial divisiveness cracking up from here.

One thing I'll observe on this is that often times one hears critics of "critical race theory" (or whatever random buzzword they're using today to connote "scary left-wing idea with a vaguely identity-politics kick") say that their problem isn't that the idea is included, but only that its indoctrinated -- it's not one perspective of many, it's the only perspective on offer. This protestation was always rather thin -- the many many bills banning "critical race theory" are decidedly not about ensuring viewpoint diversity -- and one sees just how hollow it is here. The raw, unadorned inclusion of the Equitable Math resource -- as part of a broader whole, not even quoted from directly -- is too much for these people to tolerate. This is not about ideological heterodoxy. This is about censoring ideas, full stop.

But maybe Equitable Math is such an awful or inane document that it would be wrong to include it, even as one resource among many. The way it's described, after all, makes it sound like Equitable Math is a group of hippies saying "2+2 = 4 is the white man's answer, man! Fight the power!" Is that what's happening? Is this a fever dream of post-modernism where nothing is true and everything is permitted?

Once again, I had to dig for myself to figure out where this content was so I could see it in context. The answer appears to be the first document on the site, titled "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics", on pages 65-68. Do they deny that there are such things as "right" answers in math? No: "Of course, most math problems have correct answers," but there are math problems (particularly word problems, but also data analysis) that can be interpreted in different ways that yield different "right" conclusions, and students and teachers should be attentive to that possibility. Do they say one should never "address mistakes"? No again, but mistakes should not simply be called out flatly but rather used as "opportunities for learning" with an emphasis on building on what the student does understand to lead them to recognize what they misapprehend.

I don't teach math, obviously, but there are many occasions where I'll say "such-and-such is the doctrinally correct answer -- but if we look at the problem from this other vantage, doesn't this other position become more plausible?" So when the Equitable Math site suggests, as an alternative to obsessive focus on the one correct answer, classroom activities like " Using a set of data, analyze it in multiple ways to draw different conclusions" -- well, that doesn't seem weird to me. Certainly, as someone who is also trained as a social scientist, I can say confidently that it's quite valuable to anyone who has seen how the same dataset can be deployed by different people with different priors to support different agendas.

Even more than that, the suggestions around "addressing mistakes" resonate with how I try to teach in my classrooms. Sometimes my students say something wrong. When they do so, for the most part I don't say "bzzzt" and move on, instead I try to guide them to the correct answer by having them unpack their own thinking. There's a lot of "I see what you mean by [X], but suppose ..." and ask questions which hone in on the problems or misunderstandings latent in what they're saying. And eventually they get there, hopefully without feeling like they've just been put inside an Iron Maiden for daring speak up.

Admittedly, I've never thought of what I'm doing as "dismantling White supremacy" -- I just viewed it as good pedagogy. But then again, that's kind of what I've always thought when asked about such subjects -- we act as if there's this deep magic to fostering equity and inclusion in the classroom, when really it's employing the basic strategies of being a good teacher, one of which is declining to engage in a measuring contest where you prove you know more than the student does. Obviously I know more than the student does. I don't need to prove anything. So if they say something wrong, I do not gleefully pounce on them for it, I do my best to build on what they do know to get them to a position of right. Is that so outrageous?

Finally, ACES in its tweet identifies one other area of crazy-lefty-craziness in this resource: "the incorporation of 'Ethnomathematics'". What does that mean? They don't say, correctly surmising that fevered imaginations will produce something far worse than anything they might quote. So I'll do the quoting for them (this comes from page 8):

Center Ethnomathematics:

• Recognize the ways that communities of color engage in mathematics and problem solving in their everyday lives.

• Teach that mathematics can help solve problems affecting students’ communities. Model the use of math as a solution to their immediate problems, needs, or desires.

• Identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.

• Teach the value of math as both an abstract concept and as a useful everyday tool.

• Expose students to examples of people who have used math as resistance. Provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance.

I know, I know -- we're all going to pitch a fit about challenging "capitalist views". But apart from that, this seems ... very normal? We all know, to the point of cliche, that a barrier to getting kids interested in math is that they fail to see how it's useful to them or "in the real world". So they advise that math be taught in a way that resonates with real world experience. And likewise, sometimes, for some people "in the real world", math can feel like an enemy (think "am I just a statistic to you?"). So figure out ways to name that and challenge that. For the most part, "ethnomathematics" just reads as a particular social justice gloss on "being a good teacher", as applied to teaching in diverse communities.

Now perhaps one disagrees with these concepts as pedagogical best practice. I'm not a math teacher, I'm not going to claim direct experience here. But that goes back to the intensity of the backlash -- that these ideas need to be banned, that they are outright dangerous and unacceptable and neo-racism. Can that be right? Surely, these ideas are not so outlandish that we should pitch a fit about their being (deep breath) single elements of an 80 page document which is itself part of a five part series being incorporated as a single "see also" bullet point in the second chapter of a thirteen chapter model state framework. Seriously? That's where we're landing? That's what's going to drive us into a valley of racial division and despair?

It's wild. The people engaged in this obsessive crusade to make Everest size mountains over backyard anthills are nothing short of wild.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/39P79OA

#academia #education #math #racism

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mma3youf · 3 years

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FA222 ,principles of graphic design:

Instructor: mr.munwar mukhtar

@uob-funoon @mnwrzmn

Project 1 : interviews

What is your given name, and user name on ZBrush Central?

My name is Khalid Abdulla Al-Muharraqi, my ZBrush Central user name is "Khalid72".

Tell us about your company, how did you start?

I set up Muharraqi-Studios to continue my family's history in the creative world and I am trying to continue to build on what my father started. The company was set up about two years ago after I left the commercial world of advertising with my partner Rashad who decided to leave a career in banking. We wanted to get together to make a place that allows us to be more creative. Since then we have been fortunate enough to work on some of the biggest projects in the middle east, and also continue working on our ideas and concepts, like our movie project. The most important thing for me is the work I do and that's what we are all about.

What is the size of your company?

The company is me and my partner, oh and our secretary... Keesha, a German Shepard! I am a hand's on guy and I do all the creative work myself. At first, I thought it was normal to carry that load because of the speed I work in, but later found out that I am actually very fast compared with bigger teams of artists in other studios. Finally I understood what people were telling me when they said I was 'unusual'. That’s why some of the CG magazines in Europe were amazed that a lot of our work is done by a one man team that puts all the 3D components together into a visualization. I work about 13 to 18 hours a day, I love 3D work, so my hobby and my work has joined into one, so … yes, very little time for a normal life.

What type of projects do you work on?

Well, I have been working on Architectural Visualizations since we started a couple of years ago, but I try to satisfy my urge to do what I really like, art!

You're located in Bahrain, somewhere most of us don't know about. Can you tell us how you learned your trade?

I love this question, Yes Bahrain is a small Island in the Persian gulf, we speak Arabic as our main language and English for the second, I will answer the second part in two parts, If you mean The art... I would say that I come from an artistic family, my father is one of the most well known artists in this part of the world, you can say that he is a household name in these parts. If you are asking were did I learn the 3D or CG art, I would say that I learned it by practicing for 8 hours a day after my official day of work, so I guess you can say I have been my own teacher in the industry.

Tell us a bit about your client base, mostly local, or do you have clients in Europe, Asia, America?

We serve clients from the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, I would say that I have been fortunate enough to have worked with some of the top people in the architectural industry, most of our clients are attracted to the type of work that we produce.

ow long have you been an artist?

Since I was six...I think! Well, the first painting I have sold when I was eleven. I was always painting and trying to find new techniques that will help create the concept in my mind.

Tell us about your background, your education, your mentors...

I studied art in Houston Texas for over seven years between interior decoration, photography, Visual communication, and digital enhancement or photo retouching, from there I have continued my working career in the commercial world. My first mentor would have to be my father, learned everything I know from him. He gave me the push start into the art world and made me feel it. There are also the books and artwork he has exposed me too with some of the top art in the world. A lot of names come to mind but I would say Frank Farazeta, Boris, The Creepy magazine and of course all the original Mad magazines and books that were very hot in the early 80's.

When you became an artist, did you first use traditional media?

For sure, I started with Pencil then got into crosshatching with ink, then I started painting with water colors and gouaches. I finally got into air brush art before I tried CG art.

What was your first CG package? What is your first 3D Package?

Nice question... first CG software was PSD, version 2, it was like magic... It felt strange especially that I was a traditional artist at the time. My first 3D package would be Alias Sketch for the Mac since I was a Mac user for a long time and did not have much 3D developers for Mac at the time. It was a new world for me and I think I still have a dusty copy of it today even after the software was canceled back in the early 90's, it just reminds me of my past.

How long have you been using ZBrush?

It has only been about six months, but I was up and running almost a few hours after I purchased it.

What made you try ZBrush?

I was watching some of the tutorial videos on how to paint details on the Gnomon training DVD's, and that's when I was shocked to see that it is art on the computer! I did not believe it at first, but It was one of the happiest moments when I first installed my first copy of ZBrush and started painting geometry for the first time, it reminded me with the days when I was pushing and pulling real clay to make a small creature of my imagination when I was a kid.

What's your favorite ZBrush feature?

The ability to paint geometry like it is physically in my hands.

How has ZBrush enabled you to express yourself in ways other packages couldn't?

Well you cant really compare it with any other software, it's simply too different! It changes how a CG artist works, it changes how he looks at things, has changed the industry to the next future leap, and who would want to go back to the past....? I would simply say that the concept of the software is very smart and impressive, my only wish to add on it is to have a bigger view port :)

Now onto "Floating Islands"Tell us about your creative process, how did this concept emerge?

One evening when I was stuck in the studio waiting for clients approval on a project that I was preparing for the kingdom of Bahrain, I was trying to get free again and relax my mind from all boundaries, I started to sketch a concept that has bean in my mind since I was a kid, the island that was then discovered to be on the back of a whale, these were some of the old middle eastern stories about Sinbad's magical voyages.

Do ideas just come to you out of nowhere, or are there particular artists or work you are inspired by?

I am always inspired by everything that is beautiful, whether it is an artist or a design or just Gods creation, I would also say that I have always had my own style in my work and almost never try to follow a certain style that I have seen.

I love this piece, can you tell me about the process of creating it? Have you explored this style before? Or was this created for something specific?

The process was, a sketch or the map as I would call it, and that would be the basis of my creation, I almost never start without it, once I crack the direction then I would start thinking about the execution and the path to take. About the style, well I don't think of my work as style, I think it is more towards I do what I feel, it is only when I am finished with it that I say "Yes! That's what I was tying to do". I almost never tried to repeat a style that I have seen elsewhere on my work. I feel that It is like a code of respect between artists.

In your image "Floating Islands" where was ZBrush used?

ZBrush helped me sculpt the geometry and take it to the next level in a short time. Modeling, UVs, Painting and scenes setups was between Lightwave and Modo. With ZBrush I was able to put the final touches that would make it come to life. ZBrush helped me start painting the UV map textures and setting up the foundation of the look and feel. I also generated some of the whales textures by the amazing ZMapper ;)

Tell us about your pipeline.

I start with Modo, then go to ZBrush, then finally render with Lightwave. The thing with software today is that they work hand in hand to complete each other, for instance ZBrush is very specialized in what it does, it focuses on the need of the artist and helps the creator to complete his task sufficiently with a smooth flow, artists have never had it this good.

What projects are you working on now?

We have just completed the visualization for the Master Plan for the Kingdom of Bahrain with one of the leading Architectural firms in the world, we have helped restructure and rebuild old and new cities for the country. Now I will be working more onto the movie project that we have been trying to get the time to start, hopefully I will be able to focus more on creating more Characters and environments for the movie.

Any last comments for us?

I would like to say Thank you to Manuel at Pixologic and Pixologic for appreciating the work I do. I would also like to thank all the development team and staff at Pixologic for there dedication to work together to help create some of the best tools ever created for the CG industry, I always expect the ideas to be fresh and most importantly designed for the end user, the artist, allowing the artist to continue being an artist without the restrictions and boundaries of a computer.

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blkgirlsinthefuture · 3 years

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Kindred Words are Key

Week 3: Black Women of the Past By Keyyatta Bonds

To better organize my thoughts, I am going to layout my discussion points first (just so there’s a through-line): 1) Afrofuturism vs. Speculative Fiction 2) Reflection on BodyMinds, specifically how language choices and definitions guide a narrative 3) Hot Take about Kindred

After reading about Afrofuturism, (Black) speculative literature seems to be underneath its umbrella. The category itself doesn’t have many rules, as Schalk describes speculative literature as “allow[ing] us to imagine otherwise.” However, even though it seems boundless, in comparison to the realms described within Afrofuturism, it seems smaller and more compact to me. If you ask me for a particular point to make that distinction, I sadly could not tell you; but Afrofuturism seems to be a more complete encompassing of stories centered in Blackness. It may be the terms themselves as Afrofuturism’s name lends itself to its identity as a genre and (Black) speculative is very generic.

----

Schalk does a great job in the Introduction of BodyMinds in clearly defining her terms. Schalk, inadvertently, illuminated for me the faults of current literary evaluations and reviews. Not to get very English-majory, but a lot of descriptions used in storytelling and describing the stories thereafter are very static or fluff-filled. I would expect literary-minded folks to be more deliberate in how they relay, and especially, critique stories; but I have noticed that stories exploring ‘deep’ topics in fiction are often watered down to 2D descriptions OR overexplained and picked apart to the point that real messages get lost in the wordiness of it all. Moreover, if evaluations of a text go beyond the typical -isms, the relationships are explained very shallowly. To give a short example, Kindred could be described as a story about race and gender and racism – all of which are correct observations but provide no depth or intimacy within the story or its characters, which in my eyes, is doing it a grand disservice.

In this evaluation of the text, even though those topics can be seen as themes, it gives no clue to what characters are participating in these systems and the effects of these systems on the characters. Literary evaluations are meant to go that extra mile and provide a greater analysis of the text – but many people are attempting to discuss these topics without having (access to) the language to adequately support their ideas. [This line of thinking – in my mind – also greatly aligns with Schalk’s mention abut Barbara Christian’s approach to theory in that it does not have to be done in a certain way to “produce knowledge” and new idea do not need to be created but just looked at through a Black feminist lens.] I could get into my academia rant but I’ll save that for another day.

So, moving into Schalk’s definitions, I loved how she used and described bodymind. In lieu of Kindred, the word ‘bodymind’ perfectly gives way to what we already discuss as we analyze Black people and their relationship to slavery without the wordiness of it all. Schalk fills in that language gap and gives us the vocabulary to more adequately navigate the conversation without losing its sincerity. The word bodymind – alone – provides an intimacy and depth in relation to whatever character may be referenced. It more successfully explains how the two are connected and constantly interacting, even when we may think that an action – let’s take whippings for example – may only affect the body. It provides nuance to conversations and concepts we have likely discussed before, especially when talking about literature centered around the Black experience.

Traditionally, talking about slavery is already a large task, so to add psychological effects then generational trauma and so many other layers leads to an ever weaving web of conversations. The experiences are all connected but there’s a better way to describe the interconnectedness, which can lead into Schlack view on intersectionality. Her takes on these fairly new, but truly old, ideas is very refreshing – as I am finding a new and more effective way to discuss such heavy topics.

----

I am running out of words – but I had to touch on this. I absolutely despise, hate, cannot stand the white man saving Black woman narrative. I fully realize Kindred is much deeper than that and the focus is on Dana’s journey as a free Black woman now experiencing life as a slave – I get it and there’s a lot to unpack there. I am not trying to reduce the story to this one narrative at all. However comma, I could not focus on Dana because this white man is just taking over the story.

This is interesting to read because my friends and I have been recently trying to analyze why outspoken, “revolutionary,” smart Black women always end up in relationships with white men. Here’s my mini-theory: White men are the first, in that Black woman’s life, to acknowledge their words and talents over their looks; and for a Black woman, who is discouraged by her community like Dana, it is an overwhelmingly validating experience. The white man compliments their intellect from the very beginning, along with their initial attraction of course, but the white man is willing to listen to the Black woman’s story because they have no experience with it and appreciate a new perspective. (And we can see this in Kindred when Dana is trying to explain to Kevin the plantation dynamics and Kevin is not getting it until he arrives there with her.) The Black woman is over the moon that someone is listening to her thoughts and ideas and BOOM – they’re in a damn relationship just because they were appreciated. I need someone to do a case study because the correlation has got to be there.

Again, I have better takes on Kindred but that is something I wanted some outside perspective on.

#kindred #bodymind #afrofuturism #relationships #words #speculative fiction

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superlinguo · 4 years

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Linguistics Jobs: Interview with an Exhibition Content Manager

I was first introduced to Emily Gref, this month’s linguist, in a Linguistics Job Interview she did for All Things Linguistic back in 2015 when she worked as a literary agent. Emily did her MA at SOAS while I was working there, and has gone on to use her skills to support minority language publishing, help us set up transcripts for Lingthusiasm, and, in her current role, participate in the development of Planet Word as their Exhibition Content Manager.

Planet Word is a language museum, opening in Washington D.C. on May 31, 2020.

What did you study at university?

I received my BA from McGill University with a major in Linguistics and a minor in Anthropology. My focus was pretty theoretical at the time — my honours thesis was on morpho-syntax in Austronesian languages — but one of my favorite courses was field linguistics. I definitely wanted to go to SOAS, University of London, or the University of Hawai'i and learn how to document languages after that course. I ultimately decided I didn't want to stay in academia, though, so after graduating I took a detour and spent several years in book publishing. But I missed linguistics too much! So in 2015 I went for my MA in Language Documentation and Description at SOAS. There my focus was primarily on language revitalization (though I also dipped a toe into some other schools of syntax, because I love it), and my dissertation was about what kinds of books are being published in Indigenous languages of North America and how and why. It was a way to combine my love of linguistics and books with my expertise in publishing. (I've also helped to publish some books in minority languages.)

What is your job?

My official title is Exhibition Content Manager at Planet Word, a new museum about words and language in Washington, D.C. Pretty much anything and everything to do with the exhibits and all the content within them falls under my list of responsibilities! That means 10 main exhibits, and 17 auxiliary exhibits, all about everything from child language acquisition to the history of the English language to language diversity around the world to literature to songwriting and everything in between. Practically, what that means is I do a lot of liaising with our exhibit designers and media producers and our founder to make sure the material we're presenting at the museum is accurate, engaging, and accessible to the general public, especially our core audience of 10- to 12-year-olds. A lot of that is project management stuff (keeping track of licensed assets, streamlining approvals on deliverables, managing outside contractors and consultants, and updating many, many spreadsheets) but I also do a lot of fact-checking, copy editing, and some research and scripting as well, particularly for the linguistic diversity gallery (my personal favorite). How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

Although all of my colleagues share of love of words and language (as you would expect), most of them are more from the museum world than the linguistics world. And although most of our main experiences aren't linguistics-heavy (we're a language arts museum rather than a linguistics museum), I'm the one that takes the first pass at content to ensure that it's correct and uses the most up-to-date research. So I've had to draw heavily on my general linguistics knowledge — Planet Word is incredibly privileged to have an advisory board full of amazing linguists, but I'm sort of the "resident" linguistics expert!

Because the museum is for a young, general audience, it's been really fun to try and get back to a beginner's mind — thinking about the things that most excited me about learning linguistics, or even learning about other languages, or weird facts about English. This has really informed some of the experiences we've created, and it's pretty gratifying to test them out on non-linguists and see them get excited and interested. (Although I will fully admit that I have advocated for some... esoteric aspects of language that nobody but me was excited about. They did not make the cut, and it's for the better, but hopefully some visitors will be inspired and find out more about linguistics for themselves!)

On a more granular level, having the research skills honed by two degrees in linguistics has been invaluable, as well as the data management skills I acquired mostly during my MA. (Hello, database of 2,000+ books.) Knowing about phonetics is also pretty handy when you're trying to coach a voice actor (most of our experiences are auditory and interactive) on how to pronounce non-English words! I have also spent an incredible amount of time with the OED and Etymonline, looking up etymologies for various exhibit-related reasons.

Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

Linguistics is such a funny field. I don't think there are a lot of people who end up in it by accident, or just because they've always loved that subject in high school, so they might as well continue it in college/university. Really, you discover by happenstance that it exists and then you fall for it hard. But that means there's almost a sort of assumption that if you're going to Do Linguistics, you're going to be an academic for the long haul. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case. That's why resources like this interview series are so great, but I do wish there was more support within degree programs for connecting linguistics people with jobs that aren't necessarily academia, or computational linguistics, or speech pathology. This is not really advice, sorry! But if I were going to turn it into advice, I'd say: ask early and often what graduates from your program have gone on to do that aren't "traditional" linguist jobs. Any other thoughts or comments?

If I could help open language museums for the rest of my life, I absolutely would. This has been a dream job, and I'm so very lucky. Unfortunately it's a bit of niche field, but I have learned so much by leveraging my linguistics knowledge and skills into a job that opens up many more opportunities.

Recently:

Interview with a Community Outreach Coordinator

Interview with a Marketing Content Specialist

Interview with a Software Engineer

Interview with a Product Manager

Interview with a Communications Specialist

Check out the Linguist Jobs Master List and the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews

#language #linguistics #careers #planet word #museum #linguistics job #linguistics jobs #job #linguist job #linguist career

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lilmajorshawty · 5 years

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Saturn In the Houses : Where Are You Years Ahead Of Your Time

Saturn In the First House : The Mountain Snake

(Resident Evil Retribution - Flying Through The Air)

Saturn in the first house is all about world, and how it views them. now in saying this i don’t mean in a conceded sense nor do i mean that they only prioritize themselves in the way others view them or experience them, rather, these natives have a indomitable drive to be seen as both an intellectual and someone of class and deem-able respect. They strive to build on their own and have no trouble carrying the load on their own, in fact this trait is so pronounced that they actually find it impossible to rely on others no matter how impossible the task. this placement of Saturn can make the warrior spirit more grounded and earthy in it’s appeal by giving these natives a rugged and rather stoic look. the men can sport rough facial hair and gorgeously dim faces with arches and ridges that seem to structure the face like fine wine. the women can be beautiful, sporting a strong head of hair and often the hair is unruly or rater natural in it’s expression. the eyes for men and women here are piercing and can seem to stare past your soul. they age as if they’ve been swimming in the fountain of youth which is saying that they age faster in youth and slower as they get older. They are incredibly ambitious and many of them set a lot of stepping stones for others around them with their rather impulsive and direct manner of creating a life for themselves. they don’t wait for the world to give them a sign, rather they make one. they can have an outwardly cold and stoic energy that seems both intimidating and detached to those who are viewing them for the first time. many of these natives have a jarring and rather complex energy and can often carry the energy of someone carrying a burden as old as time itself. they say this placement is associated with a past life in battle, but many fights fought in the past allow this native now in their present life to structure the violence, anger, wrath and passion of the past life. they can become more merciless and driven as they age, willing to do what is necessary at any cost. they are lovely to have on your side in times of crisis and dangerous to have as an enemy. they are never going to be set back by any amount of malice or short comings and dare i say that is one of their most freighting aspects, they cannot be defeated. these natives tend to take a while to build their sense of self but once they do it’s unbreakable and they will and shall preserve over all of the set backs in their life. The desire to reach the highest of heights is at their forefront and their ability to use strands and straws to build a temple or a grand spectral of architecture is one of their finest traits.

Who has It : Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Monica Bellucci, Russell Crowe, John Lennon, Cher, Alexander the Great, Ellen De Generes. Kesha, Usher.

Motto :

“Even if i must drag my fragmented bones through the wet mud, even if i must tear my limbs from this body, even if i loose my sight, my hearing and my soul, i shall annihilate all who stand in the way of My truth”

Key Expression : Ruthlessness, Self reliance, Tenacious, Hungry, Self critical, Emotionally Unavailable.

Saturn In the Second House : The African Rock Python

(Resident Evil Afterlife - The Outsider(Reholder Apocalypse Mix)

Saturn in the second house is something a bit more quiet and seldom. These people are calculating and extremely intelligent. the mind is often cautiously taking note, watching, understanding and digging. they are pragmatic and business oriented both literally and metaphorically speaking. they place a serious eye and value over the things they possess and hold a rather uncompromising and blunt image of themselves and their self worth which makes it incredibly hard for them to jump into any type of friendship or relationship “unless” they deem themselves as worthy or ready for that matter for something of that nature. They take intimacy and relating to others seriously and can at times seem very distant and short when they address others. to these natives the home they need to focus on maintaining is that of their own inner realm. they don’y care for lavish clothing, they want something that will stand the test of time. they don’t care for quantity, they crave something that can maintain it’s bountiful and rather serene look through and through. they are not ones to sugar coat disasters or short comings in their personality and because of this can take on a rather cruel or mean view towards themselves. they feel a strong desire for inner equilibrium and have a hard time adjusting to society or the world around them when they are internally imbalanced. as lovers they can be SERIOUS. they are are not immediately affectionate which may through people off on the onset of courting stages. they show their interest by making time for you and being dependable and consistent, aside from that they keep a steady face and remain loyal and very dedicated to their unions albeit more difficult than most when it comes to introducing psychical intimacy. These natives are also very reclusive and self invested, though this isn’t in an arian self invested way, it’s more so a self preservation way. they need to feel secure and fight long and hard to create security in themselves first before they look for it in other people. They might seem aloof or impersonal to the naked eye but deep down they are massively sympathetic to an almost tragic level for the woes of others. they genuinely care for people but can be very closed and inward about this. sexually they are passionate and deeply sensual, but these natives will not initiate intimacy or sex unless they are stable on a mental and emotional level as they place their well being and the persons above all else before actively making moves towards deepening or satisfying their needs. these natives are normally shy, timid and quiet. they normally like and need time to recharge from the public. The voices can often be raspy and low/stretched in a way as if the natives are tired. the neck is often small or short and thick. in my experience men and women here are very self aware.

Who Has It : Jesus Christ, Brad pitt, Kanye West, Justin timberlake, Prince, Jennifer Lawarence, Mark Zuckerberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, jessica alba, Mila jovovich

motto :

“When everything lay to waste, their will be no lover, no mother, no children, no sky, no sea, their shall be only me and where i to have no peace with me, i too would become the ruin”

Key expression: Quiet, isolated, personal, emotionally heavy, very guarded, Loyal to their detriment.

Saturn In The Third House : The Rattlesnake

(Bjork - Army Of Me Sucker Punch Remix)

Saturn in this house can produce someone with a rather complex mind. Information is dispensed in such a way that it can be rather difficult for these natives to learn in school via the ordinary means. these natives may even in some cases have a hard time multi-tasking or working on other things whilst in school due to how much of their mental faculties are eaten up when they focus on one thing. these natives also sport a immense reservoir of memory and spatial awareness skills. they can piece things together or pieces of information from bits and pieces of fragmented knowledge. the rather unnerving thing about this position is the incredible minds that these natives have, their minds move fundamentally different from the rest of us, even more so then Uranus or mercury here information is packaged and tossed deep in the brain where it festers and bunches up with other mental storage. these natives can almost be a walking photo camera the older they get as Saturn here rewards study, and effort put into memorization. the natives often keep things short and sweet and refrain from digging to deep or revealing to much when they are speaking to others. their incredibly mature and wise and can easily convey emotions or feelings without the use of very many words at all. they are truly masters of language and can navigate through words and mannerisms quick enough to decipher your intent and inner workings at the drop of a hat. these natives possess a keen interest in deepening their mental capacity and tend to be advent readers, conspiracy theorist or the types to watch documentaries and or find learning and researching history and ancient mythos(especially roman and Greek). The men and women can sport rather small/fragile hands and a rather constrained or slow manner of speaking. in many cases the eyes can be alluring but cold, they seem impersonal or rather calm with a sadness. these natives are very self critical of their academic habits and can be vulnerable in this area but as they age it becomes their greatest area of talent. these natives can loathe meaningless chit chat and very rarely indulge in it unless it makes sense for the circumstance they happen to be in.

Who Has it : Steve Jobs, Justin bieber, Kylie Jenner, Bjork, Bruce Willis, Jake gyllenhall, tom hanks, penelope cruz, Matt damon

motto:

“ I wish for the day my presence is that of the written word. i angst for the day of paint and scroll held above cloud, where the spoken and the scribbling of said to be madmen and women illuminate all in the blackness of the hour”

Key phrases: Detached, Strange, Poetic, Blunt, short and low paced speech, Sad eyes. mental boredom.

Saturn In The Fourth House : The Copperhead snake

(Florence And the Machine - Seven Devils)

Saturn in the fourth house is something that feels like a massive weight on ones inner world, your core, your vulnerability locked away like some sacred prisoner of the odalisque. This placement often makes these natives emotionally closed, stoic and very emotionally unavailable. these natives don’t spill or open up, not at bonfires or community gatherings, not at family reunions or to long time lovers rather they keep a huge portion of their inner world deeply nestled and hidden away in their heart of hearts. These natives can have a streak for coldness and and even larger one for emotional distance which i might add isn’t something that is done out of self protection or manipulation rather it’s a very deep unconscious wound that these natives carry with them from a past life. wounds of a unimaginable level were placed on the natives, these wounds can be rooted to family as well even when the home life is well. these natives cannot shake the heavy and almost suffocating presence of being home, the parents the family and at times the home itself. these natives may not truly feel comfortable or “themselves” unless they are away from home or home alone away from others. these natives loathe a breach in their privacy and because of this a great deal of them is practically a mystery due to how little of themselves they are actually okay with divulging. it can take them years and sometimes decades before they feel comfortable enough to open up with you about their emotions and this is something that can carry on for quite sometime. These natives do have very deep and very structured emotions that are well beyond their years. they grew up quickly on a mental and emotional level and it’s something you can see in their actions and decisions. these natives can be worries and suffer from extensive bouts of depression and societal isolation especially if Saturn is harshly aspected. these natives can go into what i like to call hibernation periods in which they go missing or disengage from society for periods of time and depending on who you are, you might not hear from them for quite a bit. these natives are almost nomadic like and seem to have a rather serious and intense relationship with their emotional realm. they want to be truly seen and understood on a deep emotional level but they often realize that their emotional nature is so complex and deep that it can be hard to find that understanding. compassion and intimacy are hallmarks of their true nature but are also aspects you might never see in them until they make the choice to make it so. the chest for the women with this placement unless having Venus, moon or a naturally watery or earth sign on the cusp tend to be rather petite. while men here can also have a rather fragile and or boney chest. these natives may have a very serous family as the IC rules family heritage. so the family could be hardworking and very critical. These natives can also be remarkably ambitious and deeply grounded people deep down no matter how lighthearted and unpredictable they may seem with other placements in their chart. these natives despite their deep seriousness have a very caring and emotive nature and a love for nature and all people but they also in a sense lack the means to express this.

Who Has It: Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Tom cruise, Drake, Gwen Stefani, Ashton Kutcher, john travolta, Yoko ono

Motto:

“ I’ve been locked away with my demons for such a time now that i too have become them, but I've also claimed the lantern god left so fervently”

Key Phrase: Intense, Cold, Sympathetic, Nurturing, Provider, Stoic, Closed off.

Saturn In The Fifth House: The Forest Cobra

(The Rocket Builder - Johann Johannsson)

In The case of Saturn in the 5th one is always catered to the question, to love or to isolate. these natives can struggle with the idea of children, the concept of innocence and the childlike ignorance to the hardships of life almost seem like a unthinkable medium to them. in reality despite their rather stoic and tempered view towards children, children are no less motivated to be around these natives. these natives inspire youth and can have quite the powerful effect on the motivations and aspirations of children. these natives see a limit to themselves while the rest of the world sees color and something intangible, like gold and god. these natives have a strong romantic nature but one that is old and timeless like the sands of time. they don’t open their heart easily nor do they seek commitment or sexual expression for the sake of self validation, they need depth and true consistency to commit to anyone otherwise the journey is meaningless. these natives have a very tragic and often times harsh relationship with self expression. either they are incredibly artistic or they are unconsciously limiting these talents. if there is any representation i could use i would compare these natives to the angels. they are very spiritual and innately 4D types who constantly dissociate and travel amongst dimensions making them seem rather jaded or strangely misaligned. these natives read vibrations more than they do words and actions and can often be very quick to annihilate a bond or situation the moment they sense a fallacy in the way your energy is being dispensed. intimacy and sex is often reserved for long time lovers and is very rarely, if at all something these natives spend their time begging the stars for. they are never short of admirers or sexual invitations due to being preserved as “hard to get” but the actuality is that they spend more time protecting their inner sense of peace then they do capitalizing on superficial tropes. these natives are extremely patient and slow with their works and can work on projects for years. having children is normally something these natives postpone until later in life, and if they do have them young it’ll be an area of constant growth until later in life as parenting might not be an immediate skill. dating runs slow and can be rather shy and quiet in the start but much like Lilith here these natives tend to marry the people they date or meet in the realm of the 5th house due to the longevity of Saturn.

Who Has It : Shakira, Bill gates, Heath ledger, Chris brown, Bruce lee, Mel Gibson, Emma stone, Isaac Newton, Mike Tyson, Niall Horan.

Motto:

“ Everything good in this world takes getting used to.”

Key Phrase: Deep, Earthy, Sensuous, curious, Blunt, isolated, free, inspiring, devoted, persistent, giving, understanding, forgiving.

Saturn In The Sixth House : The Pit Viper Snake

( West-world Soundtrack - This World)

Saturn In the 6th House Can create a native who is the high end architect of both their life and the life of others. they build, they build the scene, the work environment, they build their health, they build their reputation and their fundamentals as if it were all parts of one big house. they have a deep inner grounded sense of stability and home that often makes them seem unphased or rather lacking in emotional turbulence when dealing with others or even in some ways with themselves. they don’t acknowledge weaknesses in themselves and in a darker twist of fate they go to great lengths to eliminate any short comings both emotionally and physically that they deem toxic or unhealthy to their well being. for this reason these natives normally are remarkably fit and steer clear of any major aliments. this is for good reason as these natives tend to hold on to sickness for a while once it makes its way into the body. this can mean prolonged fights with colds that last well over their designated time or sometimes in some cases this can mean damage to the joints or bones. that being said Saturn here works hard to repair the body anytime scenarios like this do come about. these natives work incredibly hard and even if Saturn is afflicted here these natives are able to remain remarkably steady and grounded in their daily lives. these natives tend to plan quite a bit and can have a hard time dealing with people or situations that lack a plan or a sort of well rehearsed background. schooling can also be a source of irritation as these natives can be incredibly picky on how they prefer to be taught. teachers with quirks or little nuances in their teaching tend to cause these natives irritation as their isn’t a stable or straight forward approach in this teaching style. these natives are very reasonable when it comes to others but they also value their Independence and sense of self highly so they can be incredibly hard to tie down or create a long lasting union with due to how high of a bar they’ve set for themselves. don’t be mistaken, it’s not that these natives are arrogant rather it’s that these natives place a special value on loving the self before you’re able to love anyone else. They may want bonds or love, but they need stability and true heartfelt connectivity before they can even fathom the depth of such a connection with another person. their co-workers are often serious, grounded and mature types who have high plans for their future. they often inspire the native to rise in ranks or in positions. these natives tend to navigate away from people who are co-dependent or emotionally weak. they can have an aura of toughness and seem rather unapproachable but it’s really just that these natives feel the inner desire to carry themselves with respect and caution to the outside world. their bone structure similar to Saturn in the 10th house is incredibly well made and proportioned. the hips and lower spine can be arched in a rather coiled snake like manner. the skin can also be oily for many with this placement. the stomach is very strong and these natives usually are blessed with a good digestive system which(is great for acne and emotional stress levels.) another side note is that these natives NAP a lot. they tend to be easily worn out or tired due to Saturn low energy levels.

Who has it : Lady gaga, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Aniston, Keanu reeves, Amy Winehouse, Lindsey Lohan, Orlando Bloom, Adele, Jimi hendrix, Demi lovato

Motto :

“ Order outside will generate order inside.”

Key Phrase: Mesmerizing, commanding, Astute, tempered, sloths, bored

Saturn In The Seventh House : Eastern Green Mamba Snake

(Annihilation Ost - The Alien )

relationships play out in a rather heavy manner for these natives, be it years in the making or be it that they themselves can’t readily open up to the opportunity. Saturn here acts as the father, in spirit it halts the sphere of connectivity between these natives and the people they interact with in a shadow sense. these natives may notice that people view them in a serious manner or suddenly may become more intense and more stoic in their presence. the honest truth is that Saturn here surrounds the environment in this candid and rather suffocating weight. mind you this is not bad at all, it’s only Saturn ensuring that the energy and the people brought into these natives lives is real, honest and pure in intention. that being said these natives have a natural guardian that brings the shadows to light, be it addictions, crime, manipulation, and so forth. Saturn here works for the individual by showing them the bad in others, the real part of others, the honest aspect of others in order to help these natives grow. connections can be difficult to form because it seems as though everyone is running away from these natives which isn’t so far from the truth. i’ll be honest in saying Saturn energy scares some people due to how deep and intense it really can be. it forces everyone to confront a side of themselves they might not have ever considered before and it also forces everyone to mature and face the music. this is not bad at all, rather these natives are blessed with the ability to attract the very real and bare versions of people instead of their performances, or their masks...these natives get to see behind the curtain and this is their superpower. dating can be hard as the typical fun flirting is absent until a later part of the relationship. Saturn does things backwards here and forces the more deep and heavy aspect of relating to someone else to come up first before the more lighthearted and playful part. the reason being is Saturn wants that deep and guarded intimacy, the kind people build stories utop of. so due to this Saturn doesn’t mind to reverse roles and cause a longer courting stage if it means true connections and bonds being formed. forming friendships or even any type of relationship for that matter can take years or months depending on Saturn well being aspect wise. these natives prefer long lasting unions and usually get that. the marriage is often very resilient and deeply fulfilling for the natives! they often marry very loving and nurturing despite the partners serious and stoic nature. these natives are also on the more serious side themselves even though they might not see it in within them. they tend to have more petite butts that can be on the more angular side of things. Saturn makes the butt look great here even if it might be on the smaller side. it really depends on the other planets here though. the partner will often have Saturn in their chart or in aspect to their natal planets. it’s also common to attract someone with strong 10th house energy. Saturn here makes things petite and since the 7th house rules the pelvis and buttocks, one can have a very well shaped butt and may even have a lovely structure to it as well. relationships can be very handwork here but they are incredibly rewarding and these natives should always wait to marry if they can or make sure that the person you’re marrying has strong Saturn contacts to you. That being said they are very loving and tender people despite their rather cool and aloof outward energy.

Who has it: Johnny Depp, Kurt Cobain, Christina Aguilera, Selena Gomez, Eminem, David Bowe, Ryan gosling, Jud Law, Sylvester Stallone, Gerad Butler

Motto :

“I was already on the other side, i had been there from the start like a cold reflection in cement...i was already there.”

Key phrases : Intense, depressive, closed, tense, anxious, stable, steady, rigorous, emotionally unavailable(in the beginning), transparent.

Saturn In The Eighth House : The Black Mamba Snake

(West-World Soundtrack - This world)

with Saturn in the Eighth house the native can feel like a disconnected, fragmented disarray. They may not easily confide in others and can have an extended “getting to know each other” stage with seemingly no ending in sight. These natives can seem detached and extremely emotionally absent especially in moments where emotional softness and kindness may be necessary. These natives do not mean to seem this way, it’s sadly just that in many cases these natives where put last as far as emotions go and due to earlier experiences these natives have learned to barricade their true feelings and vulnerabilities behind a steel door. Pushing them to hard to open up to soon often makes them shut down and place a superficial mask to make the invasion go away. These natives are keen on human nature and know how to pretend and play the naive or weak minded role that the people ask of them. beneath this facade lies a strong energy, a seemingly intangible reservoir of depth and intensity that would make Pluto, Hades and Lilith cower. These natives grapple with the idea of power and it’s place in their life and the lives of others. They may shift between vulnerable and innocent to dominant and wise. This is actually a prelude to the expression of their sexuality, they tend to derive their pleasure of BDSM and or more aggressive and control themes in sexual encounters because of their ociliating nature. they associate sexual expression and their desire for it in a complex way. on one end they hate their sexual desires and wish to repress them and on the other hand the repression creates an almost animalistic desire for “TRUE” sexual expression. For this reason these natives tend to have the most powerful, earthy sexual drive of the zodiac. Sex for them is something that is flesh to flesh, true intimacy and relating and something they cannot and will not just have with anyone. they can also be very hard to get intimate with because of hoe seriously they take revealing that hidden aspect of themselves. these natives can be very dark and have a sort of heaviness to their nature that seeps out here and there as an ominous or heavy serious air. They loathe superficiality but they feed it to the people they interact because they secretly fear their true nature is boring, stagnate and far to intense for people to handle. they can handle finances very seriously and no matter how afflicted Saturn is, these natives take time to grow money and are cautious about any inheritance or scams. they aren’t the types to spend money on others unless you’ve earned their trust and loyalty, till then they can seem cheap and Grinch like about money usage. they can last for hours in sex and have stamina unheard of, in men and women the size of the genitals can be small or Tight for women. in men it can make the member small but this isn’t always the case especially if other planets are here, the sign on the cusp and aspects to Saturn itself. These natives will live long lives and may outlive their partners. The desire for the real and honest aspects of life are real and these people can be very turned off by immaturity or a lack of stability in any of their interactions. a strange thing here is that Saturn from this spot ages the whole chart so it can cause other planetary placements to act more mature or less lighthearted even if Saturn is not touching them.

Who has it: Martin Luther King, Jay-Z, Kristen Stewart, Robert Downey Jr, Khloe Kardashian, Salvador Dali, Michael Jordan, Virgin Mary, Michael Fassbender, Dwayne Johnson, Frida kahlo, Henry cavil, Franklin D Roosevelt, Liz Greene

Motto :

“Power is Power”

Key phrases: Concrete, sensual, Horny, intellectual, dark, melancholic, sorrow, the maid/The Military general duality, intensity, DEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

Saturn In The Ninth House : The Jamesons Mamba

(The Gazelle Twins - The Entire City)

With Saturn in the ninth house the term Maneater comes into mind. these natives can have a rampaging mind. they are often dancing between ideals and philosophies and working tirelessly to give them footing, grounding or a sense of transparency. they may maintain an air of stoicism or clandestine projection when they express their values and interpretations of faith but it’s merely because they themselves feel as though believing in some un-palpable force is like playing Russian roulette. they want some sort of grounding and reliability in the “word” and “pen” and because of this they approach these matters with seriousness and intensity as they seek to find the source of the matter. These natives can be relatively to them selves at university and college and might even major in law or seek to pioneer their own business or work in architecture as these natives have quite the eye for beauty and reconstruction due to how differently their minds operate. the natives are tenacious and a tad abrasive when expressing their disdain or disapproval of faulty belief systems in others and it can be a deal breaker for them if your beliefs fail to meet them in the middle in some way. They tend to have a strong desire to learn, understand and register information. in many ways Saturn can make the thighs smaller or more petite but the shaping and angular standing of the thighs to hip will be amazing. their is an earthy look to the individuals and longer more ruffled looks are common in men and shorter more androgynous looks are preferred for the women. their can be a closed or serious nature towards experimentation and towards luck as these natives feel like one should never solely rely on luck to make things pan out. these natives because of this tend to be go getters and can place quite a bit of passion and drive into much of their efforts which often wins them admiration and respect from those who watch in the shadows. these natives can constantly stay working or struggle with giving themselves a brake but for a good cause as these natives tend to do remarkable in their college endeavors. their oversee voyages tend to be a serious event and the encounters they have can leave a huge mark on them emotionally, they tend to travel seldom when younger and this increases following the nearing of the Saturn return. these natives can feel powerful and don’t hold on to people or situations as to them people and situations change all the time, why waste time that could be spent working, growing and thriving on a choice that fell through the cracks in a carefully made bridge only continuing to grow in size.

Who Has it: Rihanna, Hillary Clinton, Julia Roberts, Uma Thurman, Nicki Minaj, 14th Dalai Lama, Prince William, Prince Harry(explains their controversial Interracial marriages), Jared leto, Paul McCarthy

Motto :

“The Fire Never Goes out”

Key Phrases: Keen, ardent, impatient, BLUNT, impulsive, critical, private, compassionate, REAL

Saturn In The Tenth House : The King Cobra Snake

(The Smiths - How Soon Is Now?)

These natives are the epitome of Saturn, the ooze it, they embody it they express it like an extension of their spiritual being and for that reason they can seem like an authoritative energy without even trying. People respect them, but people also fear them the same way we fear our boss, our parents, our obligations, our shortcomings or our real self. They are stable at the core and very easily lay the stepping stones necessary to achieve, though with Saturn's energy here success often does come later in life but when it does it is usually following very rigorous work and dedication from the individual in question. These natives are competitive but in a very quiet and restrained way, for them coming in second place or being told it was “good” or hearing the words “i enjoyed..” irritates them. They in a sense care little for public validation, and more about their own ability to surpass the limitations they set for themselves. they tend to treat life and it’s circumstances like a game of cards, and can often have a manipulative or “business as usual” approach when it comes to dealing with the public or confidants. To them unless it had to do with the work, the quality, or the means of the end, they’d rather not waste their time. These natives can be advent global warming fighters, as this position creates a very strong tie to the earth itself. these natives care deeply about the animals and the environment and can be very aggressive and even volatile towards people who fail to treat the environment with respect. these natives often dress to impress and even when they’re dressing down they have this patriarch like air to them as if the world was waiting for them to arrive. these natives have a swagger to them, as if they have the whole room gripping and swaying to their movement. Their is a strong need to dissociate and disappear with this placement so often these natives can go MIA for days or weeks at a time depending on what wave of melancholy or project has them all caught up now. These natives have beautiful smiles and can have incredible bone structures. They do care about how they are portrayed by the media or by others in public so they tend to keep a low profile. These natives can be very frank and tel you how it is, so if you are sensitive you might want to keep it short with them. These natives tend to be drawn to fashion, Acting, ,modeling, directing, and so on. In fact Saturn on the MC or in aspect to the MC is common amongst models and or designers. the ability to make money and capital out of nothing but water and a dog bone is strong as shit here and these natives will indeed outsell, outsway, out publish, out swim, and overall outdo you with both legs and arms tied behind their back because they are literally just that driven. the impact they leave on the world lat decades and even ions after they’ve longed been buried in the soil.

Who has it: Michael Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus, Leonardo DaVinci, Oprah Winfrey, Paris Hilton, Al Pacino, Celine dion, Bill Clinton, Mila kunis, James dean

Motto:

“I’d eat the nation if i could, I’ll eat the world because i can”

Key phrases: Mysterious, Distant, polite, imperialistic, ambitious, competitive, altruistic, Black Seminole

Saturn In The Eleventh House : The Atheris hispida Snake

(Cocteau twins - But Im Not )

These Natives can Be everything that opposes culture and societal up charge. They possess a strong spacious air to them as if they are this cosmic force on earth. They can be magnetic, prophetic, dark, enticing and deeply revolutionary. These natives have a natural talent for leadership and crowd attracting as they understand the intricate parts of human interaction, they understand the crowd, the outsiders because they themselves despise the insiders, the people pleasers and the followers. they aren’t the types to beg for acceptance but in their early years they often did, the spent their time trying so hard to fit in, to be welcomed and accepted but sadly they were rejected and often times bullied for their giving and loving nature. as these natives age they learn ruthlessness and they learn to express themselves no matter the recoil. they value people who are new, different and stable in their concept of “themselves.” Saturn is remarkably comfy in this house due to the fact that the 11th house and Aquarius are both co-ruled by Saturn. So these natives despite their electric and rather tethered nature can be serious, detached and highly dissociated from the world around them. they like the aloofness and lighthearted nature of connecting with others because it fulfills their need to understand, meet and converge. they actually despise people and are not very good at hiding it once an interaction that should’ve lasted a few days turns into something that becomes consistent. they can amputate relationships both romantic and platonic and even familial as if it were a house fly on their shoulder. They are not evil or cold, rather they just learned early on not to dig to deep into people or their intentions and as a result they keep a blockaded on their more compassionate and loving traits. these natives tend to be skeptics and harshly critical of civil rights movements or cultural uprisings in general because they hate crowd and mob mentality, to them any organized revolution needs grounding and a deeper meaning behind it’s efforts otherwise it’s childish and a waste of time. these natives also hold a great deal of their emotions within and because of this they can see,m unloving or out of reach to loved ones or friends even if it’s been years of knowing them. They tend to prefer authentic friendships and will bend over backwards for friends, lovers and so on so long as you prove to them your loyalty, patience and time. they wont open up for a while and can take years before they do and they’ll disappear and ghost you constantly till then because they’ve been hurt more than most in the area where most of us see our future and are most optimistic. they may seem pessimistic or stoic but it’s merely their desire for the truth and authenticity that causes this. they normally are very big on being ones true self and in the presence of people who struggle with this they can take on a colder air and seem rather unmoved or disgusted at the pity party. they are passionate but far away. the calves and ankles are often small and boney but very sturdy and sensual. The legs in general are amazing to look at.

Who has it: Donald trump, George Clooney, Cameron Diaz, Freddie Mercury, Natalie portman, Megan Fox, Cristiano Ronaldo, Pamela Anderson, Marlon Brando, robin Williams, Vincent Van Gogh, Charlize Theron, Charles Manson, Zac effron, Halle berry, Ryan reynolds, Joaquin Phoenix, Jessica Biel

Motto :

“I could stand in a room of millions gathered all for me and i’d still feel alone”

Key phrases: Lonely, detached(very), impersonal, electric, bubbly, frank, honest, Free spirit, dark, melancholy, mean spirited. compassionate and caring.

Saturn In The 12th House : The Spider-tailed horned viper Snake (Cocteau Twins - Alice)

Saturn in The 12th house can feel like a heavy weight on the soul, as if the soul’s been drained of it’s life force before it even took a breath. their is a constant feeling of exhaustion or need to recuperate. There can be periods of extreme anxiety, depression, manic episodes or heightened states of mental awareness and emotional energy and then suddenly “nada.” everything goes quiet and everything can seem like a empty opera room with a photo camera going off. there is a sense of being grounded but never really “expressing” or “feeling” this security in a tangible form. these natives can seem a bit disorganized, restless or moody upon meeting them, hell they may even seem like they’re hiding things or being fraudulent and or deceptive due to the blurry and rather incomplete personality they present. They are remarkably deep and have a immense empathetic nature that can make even the strongest of strong men buckle. they are very sweet but they are not always able to control when this side of them comes out. unfortunately their more serious and cautious nature blurs the line between duty, love, duty, relationships, duty, trauma, duty, and so on in a cycle. they can often be very private and reclusive, preferring to be alone with themselves or nature. they often have very beautiful inner worlds and can give so much of themselves to the environment and the world at large. They usually have a fine list of artistic abilities but it takes them time to bring them out into the world. art, singing, dancing, and so on are brilliant gate ways to expressing that inner burden in their hearts. These natives can constantly feel like there is an inner voice telling them they wont amount to anything or are not good enough which is often the main debilitating force for these natives. They are so kind and genuinely soft spirited and these natives have a hard time doing wrong as Saturn reminds them constantly off errors or short comings. These natives value the flaws just as much as the beauty in others and often push for a more accepting environment and world. these natives don’t see color, sexual orientation, or status which is often why they feel conflicted because Saturn feels like things need order and classification but the 12th house blurs those lines. Their can be trouble dreaming or in some cases dreams of being trapped, restricted or in a different body are common. The feet tend to be small :) but this is very cute! this placement can be hard for women as it makes them unable to differentiate the feeling of duty from pleasure which unconsciously places them into unhappiness or unhealthy expectations of themselves. For men it can be Even worse as it can lead to melancholy, depression and emotional confusion that being said we all have our battles and Saturn in the 12th housers are amazing because Saturn as they age teaches them to handle their mind, their mental health and their conscious self and soul. so they tend to have strong minds and comprehensive abilities even as they age. These natives tend to express an air of happiness and optomisim though on an outward level and for the most part you’ll never real know their struggles or pain because of how genuinely positive and good willed these people are.

Who has it: Barack Obama, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce knowles, Scarlett johnasson, Vladmir Putin, Mariah carey, Whitney Houston, Zayn malik, Will smith, Kendall jenner, Ben Affleck, tyra banks, Robert De Niro, Ted Bundy, George W. Bush

Motto :

“Deception is the only Felony”

Key Phrases : introspective, spiritual, hermit, persistent, tired, lazy, caught up in the past

Final Notes: If you look at the celebrities that share the particular Saturn placement you’ll notice familiarties with them, you’ll notice nuances and small call back of energy! this is why i find astrology so interesting, were all connected.

#Mine #saturn through the houses

5K notes · View notes

scripttorture · 4 years

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I'm curious about the the mental processes that makes torturers do their work. Is that akin to the process that allowed the "Teacher" to press the supposedly shock-inducing button in the Milgram Experiment? Do they blame their victims for "making them torture them"? Does dehumanisation play a role? What do symptoms look like on a torturer? Thank you in advance.

These are all good questions but a lack of research means it’s difficult to answer them definitely.

I’ll start by saying that the Milgram experiments are a steaming pile of… insults to the scientific community shall we say. Honestly as a scientist the Milgram experiments make me angry because they are just so darned sloppy. They are terrible. They cherry picked data. They applied significant coercion to the ‘teachers’ while claiming they didn’t. They failed to record the ways ‘teachers’ tried to trick the system (especially those who pretended to press the button but did not actually do so).

And they also didn’t bother to check whether the ‘teachers’ believed they were actually administering electric shocks. When a follow up study asked these people about it later they found that the majority of people who pressed the button didn’t believe the button caused electric shocks.

Essentially- Milgram can’t tell us shit about why this happens. Those experiments were too sloppy and poorly conducted for us to draw any conclusions.

So what do we actually have that can tell us about torturers?

There are a lot of interviews conducted by non-specialists; mostly journalists. There are works torturers published. I consider both of these sources useful but biased. Torturers have repeatedly shown that they don’t provide accurate accounts of events or their own actions. So – I take these accounts with a pinch of salt and try to be critical.

When it comes to actual specialists providing notes on torturers- I’ve only really found two sources: Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth contains notes on torturers he treated after the Franco-Algerian war, and Sironi’s body of work studying torturers. Which is only available in French and is print on demand.

Yes I am still bitter, moving on!

Where does all this leave us?

Well it means that we don’t have enough good quality studies to be absolutely sure. It means most of what we ‘know’ is educated guess work, based on the little bit of research and anecdotal accounts.

It’s frustrating. We need more data. And the result is that most of what I can say here is ‘may bes’.

Dehumanisation probably does play a role, but it may not be as great a role as we tend to assume. Studies of the effects of hate speech in Rwanda in the lead-up to the genocide (along with what we know about ICURE techniques) do suggest that dehumanisation makes atrocities more likely. But they don’t necessarily make torture specifically more likely and many torturers will acknowledge the humanity of their victims.

Some torturers do use language that blames their victims but- not in quite the way you’ve put it here. They don’t tend to say victim’s ‘made them’ torture. Instead they tend to suggest that the victims put themselves in a position where they knew they were going to be tortured.

‘A kid that colour walking around in that part of town at night? What did he expect!’

That kind of phrasing is something I see more regularly.

Another common one is torturers suggesting the victims ‘deserved it’ because of a particular characteristic: ie race, sexuality, gender, homelessness, disability. Arguing that a victim was ‘probably guilty’ or is actually guilty of a crime and therefore ‘should’ be tortured is also pretty common among torturers.

But- I also get the impression that most torturers just don’t think about their victims much. Not as human individuals anyway. They don’t seem to consider the lasting impact they have on other people in any meaningful way.

I think this is easiest to illustrate by looking at the way torturers express regret. Because they do often express regret for what they did.

But it’s not expressed as them primarily being sorry they hurt so many people. Instead it’s- they regret what they did because they have nightmares about it. Because they’re ill and the symptoms are terrible. Because they lost their job. Because they’re socially isolated.

It’s regret focused on the consequences of torture for the torturer rather then an acknowledgement of the scale of harm they caused their victims.

I often get asks that suggest this as an inherent characteristic that ‘makes’ people torturers but there’s no evidence to support that. I personally believe this lack of empathy is an effect of torture rather then something that leads to torture.

I guess what I’m driving at here is that there is a rather selfish focus in torturers. But beyond that symptoms in torturers look pretty much the same as symptoms in everyone else.

My impression, based on the interviews I’ve read, is that unless the subject of torture comes up torturers come across as trauma survivors. Asshole trauma survivors but still trauma survivors.

They tend to be rather convinced of their own importance. I’m unsure where this personality trait comes from but it does seem common. It could be a product of the sub-culture torturers create.

And that brings me more or less to- well the answer to the big question here: why do they do it? How can they do it?

My opinion is that the answer has little to do with individuals and everything to do with organisations.

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: Torturers do not work alone.

Torture by it’s definition and nature is a function of groups, of broken systems.

Torturers are not individuals who arbitrarily decide to abuse someone. They are police officers with little training and no funding instructed to ‘do something now’. They are soldiers who’ve been taught over a lifetime that the ‘enemy would do the same to us’. They are teachers told to ‘control the class or else’.

They’re groups of people in an environment that has a huge pressure to produce ‘results’ while also being under trained, under staffed, under funded and unsupervised. Into this already unhealthy mix throw the persistent background cultural lie that torture is a short cut to the results they want.

Hell the persistent cultural message that violence is any kind of answer.

Is it really a surprise that our police turn to torture when we don’t teach them to interrogate and our news outlets, our politics, our fiction is full of apologia telling them that abuse will get them the results they want?

The mindset that let’s torturers abuse other people does rely on assumptions that some people are ‘lesser’ or otherwise ‘deserve’ to be abused. But the bit most fiction doesn’t capture is the social aspect.

The way torturers egg each other on and the way they compete. The way they gradually become more or less the entirety of each other’s social circles. The fear they have of each other, which can trap them in the abusive role they’ve taken on. The way they lose other skills, making it feel impossible to switch. The way they seem to feel that stopping represents both personal failure and letting down the only people they still count as ‘friends’.

The closest I’ve seen a movie come to this was The Shape of Water, the villain brilliantly captured the bizarre mix of self importance, incompetence and intense environmental stress that characterises torturers.

Torturers say that they start because ‘there’s no other choice’. I don’t know how much they believe that piece of apologia.

I do know that in any organisation that tortures there is often incredibly intense pressure to participate in, or at least ignore, torture. Refusal often leads to a person leaving an organisation, sometimes feet first.

But the reasons they continue are complicated. For some of them they probably do believe the apologia, that they’re ‘doing necessary work’. Some of them definitely see their victims as less then human.

All of them are caught in a... societal trap not unlike a cult. They’re isolated from non-torturers. They’re constantly fed the message that torturing is right. They’re threatened if they try to leave.

I think that, whether they acknowledge it or not, the main reason torturers continue is because they know they’re at risk if they stop and they know they’ll be completely socially isolated if they stop.

Of course sooner or later they do stop. It’s completely unsustainable.

When they do they generally report isolation, low self esteem and difficulty functioning in society. They struggle to find and keep work. They struggle to form or maintain relationships. It wrecks their lives; the organisation chews them up and spits them out mangled to a point where they can’t navigate society.

And because they rarely come to terms with what they’ve done they rarely recover.

Availableon Wordpress.

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Transcript Episode 43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 43 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr Kirby Conrod who’s a linguist at the University of Washington. But first, some announcements. The LingComm grant is still open until June 1st. You should apply for that if you have a linguistics communication project that you think will helped by a bit of money and a bit of support. There’s more details for that on the website at lingcomm.org. That’s “comm” with two Ms as in “communication.” We’ll link to that in the description as well.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Kirby! Welcome to the podcast.

Kirby: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Gretchen: Thank you so much for coming. I wanna start with the first question that we ask all of our guests which is, how did you get interested in linguistics?

Kirby: I have to preface this by saying that I didn’t know I was going to major in linguistics when I went to my undergrad for my four-year college. I got into UC Santa Cruz. It was lower on the list, but I ended up having an amazing time. When I was applying to colleges from high school, I thought I wanted to be an English major. I got to UC Santa Cruz and I realised, “Oh, my gosh! You guys don’t have an English major.” It’s just not a program that they have. So, I was like, “Okay. Well, I’m gonna make my own English major out of spare parts.” What I did was I decided, “Okay. I’m gonna double-major in literature and linguistics and that will make an English major.” What ended up happening was I essentially made, somehow, the opposite of an English major. It really ended up being the absolute perfect thing for me.

What really cemented, like, linguistics is where I was going to stay for sure was my first syntax class in my first year of undergrad. The first day of class my professor, Jim McCloskey, walks into the class and says – and I’m a freshman. I’m a little baby at this point. He walks into the class and says, “This is probably the hardest class that this university offers. Please don’t take it for a grade.” I have to say it was good advice. It was very hard. Taking it pass/fail meant that I could really focus on what I was learning. This was a Syntax 1 class. Syntax is all about the idea that we can make an equation to put words together to produce only the real sentences of language and not the sentences that don’t happen in language. By the end of the quarter, you have a pretty good working model of what sentences can be. It’s not complete yet. It’s always an ongoing project.

The other thing that really drew me to linguistics was that my instructors in undergrad were always really honest about this, and I try to be really honest too, about this is not a solved problem. This happens constantly – now that I’m teaching Syntax 1 and I’m on the other side of the room – it happens constantly that students will ask me questions that the answers don’t exist yet. It’s not that the answers aren’t out there. It’s that we haven’t figured it out yet. This happens all the time. As a student, to me, that was really moving and exciting of feeling like I could contribute something. There’s a lot that needs to be contributed. In undergrad, my instructors were very upfront about this of undergrads can and do produce new knowledge in their linguistics classes. Sometimes, undergrads go to conferences, present their work, do original research. It happens because there’s just a lot of unexplored space.

Gretchen: This was something I found really exciting as an undergrad as well that I can be looking at things and no one else has looked at this.

Kirby: It’s really, really cool. It’s one of these things that it gives you goose bumps to be sitting in a class and realise if I have an idea of how to deal with this, then I’m the first person to have this idea. I don’t have to just go back into the literature and find So-and-So has already solved this problem. It’s a matter of I can solve this problem. That’s really, really compelling.

Gretchen: You don’t have to go through 200 years or 500 years or 1,000 years of intellectual tradition of “I need to learn this entire history” before I can possibly make any sort of contribution to this area. It’s like this is a young field and there’s still stuff to do that.

Kirby: It feels like a math class where math isn’t finished being invented.

Gretchen: I guess there are still mathematicians who are inventing math, but you have to have a PhD in math before you know what math hasn’t been done yet.

Kirby: Whereas, very much it is the case that Syntax 1 students will run into new math in terms of syntax. It’s really cool and compelling to me.

Gretchen: This gets us into the next question which is, how did you get into your current research topic? What was the new thing that you were trying to figure out?

Kirby: I got into my current research topic when I got to grad school. I already knew that I wanted to study syntax, so I was taking syntax classes. In my first year of grad school was the first year that I was out as nonbinary and asking people to call me “they” and really being a participant in the trans community. Most of my friends were trans. The nonbinary stuff and the grad school in linguistics happened to me at the same time.

What this meant was I was sitting in semantics or syntax classes and reading stuff in our textbooks about pronouns that I could just say, “Well, that’s factually wrong. That’s descriptively just not what happens.” The reason that I knew this was that I was in this situation where being very newly out as nonbinary and being very newly asking people to use these pronouns, it was the situation where people would use just sort of random pronouns about me. I got the full spread of the three big ones of people would call me “he” or “she” or “they” sort of at random.

The other thing is that people would switch pronouns in the middle of the conversation and not necessarily notice it. Or I would constantly be having a conversation where one speaker – talking about the same person – one speaker is using one set of pronouns and the other speaker is using the other set of pronouns. None of this is something that can be adequately described in your grad school semantics or syntax textbook. What you’re going to see is something like, “Mary likes himself,” marked as ungrammatical. They’re gonna put the star on it and they’re gonna say, “This doesn’t happen.” As a trans person and as somebody with ears, I could just factually say that’s not true.

Gretchen: Because people are saying sentences like this all the time.

Kirby: People are saying sentences like this all the time. One of the things where I had this perspective that previous linguists had not had. So, I was really pulled to say I want syntax and semantics and sociolinguistics – I really want us to be able to explain this. Our theory is inadequate if we are throwing out data. This is something where the only time I would see this mentioned would be in footnotes of like, “Well, that’s not really relevant.” I was really pulled to say that is relevant. It’s relevant to me every day. I can’t get away from it. I came in knowing that I liked syntax first and being pulled towards thinking about gender and pronouns second because it was this apparently over-simplified area that left a lot of questions unanswered for me.

Gretchen: You’re like, “Look! I have this data and our current theory doesn’t account for that.”

Kirby: Exactly. That’s the thing that all syntacticians are doing all the time. It’s why we get really rowdy when you get a bunch of them in a room is because we all feel that excitement of there’s something that you can’t explain. You’ve given me an explanation that doesn’t explain everything. I have to make sure that people know about this.

Gretchen: And this idea that syntax should also be taking into consideration the variation in terms of how people use language and how different groups of people use language and learning from sociolinguistics about addressing these types of things better.

Kirby: Yeah. This is something where at my graduate institution where I got my PhD there is a lot of sociolinguistics. There is several sociolinguistic faculty. We have a lab. In my undergrad, we didn’t have sociolinguistics as a focus. We didn’t have any sociolinguistics faculty. It was very new to me. I was really excited by it because it feels like, yes, here’s all the complexity and diversity that my experience as a language user tells me it’s out there. Here's a way of thinking about it. As a syntactician, I’m really interested in incorporating the stuff that people are doing socially with language because I think if we’re building our model, our algorithm, of what are possible things to do, it is a little bit dishonest to be like, “Oh, but if you have this certain dialect, that’s a different thing and we’re just gonna ignore that data.” That feels a little dishonest. Then, the other thing is that it’s not the case that anybody speaks just one exact English. Everybody has some level of variation or multi-lectalism or your big box of forms that you have as an option.

Gretchen: I like to say that people talk differently to your boss than you do to your dog.

Kirby: Yeah. If I’m building a model that’s supposed to generate all the sentences, I wanna generate all the sentences. That includes ways of thinking about how you talk to your boss or your dog. For pronouns, this is so important because it does apparently seem to have grammatical consequences. It’s not just, “Oh, well, we’ll make the syntax part of it a little more vague and underspecified,” because there’re syntactic consequences where stuff has to agree with itself. If you use a pronoun in a sentence and then you’re gonna use another pronoun later, the rules are different than if you use a name and then use a pronoun later. The example I gave you of “Mary likes himself” where I said it sort of depends – I do hear people using pronouns in this way where it doesn’t seem to be totally linked to the name itself. A name is something that it really depends on who we’re thinking about in our mind. For example, my friend Rory who uses both “he” and “they,” you can say, “Rory likes themself,” and you can say, “Rory likes himself.” Those are both fine. Neither of them is misgendering them. But if I’m talking about Rory, even if we know that I’m talking about the same person – especially if we know that I’m talking about the same person – I can’t say, “He likes themself.”

Gretchen: Right. Because even though this person uses these two different pronouns, that makes it sound like you’re referring to two different people in the context of that one sentence.

Kirby: If I hold your head down and force you to say, “It’s the same person,” if I – like in my example – I’m like, “Okay. I put the little numbers on it to say I’m really talking about Rory both times,” then you’re gonna start saying, “Well, it’s ungrammatical. It’s weird to say this.” The rules seem to be really different for matching names and pronouns versus matching pronouns on pronouns, which indicates to me that there is something going on in the grammar itself, in the syntax part of it, and it’s not just social knowledge. It really has to be both parts of the puzzle to think about how we can explain what people are doing but also what people don’t do.

Gretchen: Because even within this “Oh, you have more options,” that doesn’t mean you have all of the possible hypothetical options.

Kirby: Yeah.

Gretchen: But you could do something like switching from one sentence to the next. Is that something people do? Like, “They like themself and he’s a good musician” or something like this.

Kirby: Yes. This is something where people do it about cis people – about not nonbinary people too. This is something where I noticed it in undergrad, actually. A friend of mine was telling us he had gone on a hot date last night. We knew what kind of gender that he was dating. So, it wasn’t that we didn’t know the likely gender of who he was talking about. But he was telling us the story about this hot date using “they” the whole time and saying, “Oh, yeah, they picked me up. They were driving this beautiful car” and stuff like this. Then, a ways into the story he started using “he” for a while, while talking about getting drinks at the bar of like, “Oh, he bought me this beautiful cocktail.” At the end of the story, he switched back to “they” of like, “I don’t know if I’m gonna text them again.”

Gretchen: Interesting. Like, as this person was getting more intimate in the story with this person they’re switching to a more, I guess, specific gender in this context. Then, when they’re saying, “Oh, I’m not sure if I’m gonna talk to them again” –

Kirby: This is something where it’s not the case that my friend’s date uses two sets of pronouns necessarily. The thing about “they” in particular is that it doesn’t tell you anything about the gender. It can imply things, but it can’t specifically tell you things. People have the option to use “they” pretty much all the time. People do use it to give you a little more detail and a little less detail. When they’re giving you more detail, sometimes that can give you additional of meaning of like, “I want you to know this is an important part of the kind of relationship that I’m talking about.” When they give you a little bit less detail, sometimes it’s like, “Well, gender’s kind of not relevant for this part. This is the part where I don’t think it’s important to talk about the specific gender of the person.”

It’s not that the gender stopped existing. It’s just that we have this option of turning the dial up of how much we wanna include. This opportunity to switch and change pronouns in some contexts but not others is something that also brought up a bunch of questions for me as a student in graduate school learning about sociolinguistics because the other thing is that sociolinguists talk about gender, but they talk about it in the very binary way – or up until a certain point. They’re starting to really grapple with this.

Reading my Sociolinguistics 1 and 2 papers, there’s a lot of, “Men do this, and women do this.” Or “Men mostly do this, and women mostly do this.” No mention of nonbinary people. For one thing, they did not include any in the study. For another thing, many of the authors of early sociolinguistics work just didn’t really have access to LGBT communities in the 60s and 70s. Or it was really separated from mainstream communities in a way that made it hard to compare directly. Reading these studies as an early student of sociolinguistics and being nonbinary in my first and second year of grad school, saying, “None of this applies to me. You can’t explain anything I do under this model” and really feeling like we have to develop the theory to be able to explain everything that’s happening not just the stuff that we don’t decide is weird.

Gretchen: Exactly. What’s the point in having a theory if you’re saying we’re only gonna try to explain some of this data and just ignore a whole bunch that doesn’t fit with the theory?

Kirby: My motivation for pursuing my work in pronouns, and especially my work with nonbinary and trans pronouns, has been all about answering those questions that came up for me very early in my graduate school and saying I think our way of doing this is not sophisticated enough. I really want to push us further.

Gretchen: What are some answers or glimmerings towards answers that you’ve ended up with?

Kirby: One of the things that I’m trying to discuss with people is that there’re a bunch of other kinds of pronouns in languages besides English, and English has had these in the past, but pronouns that encode this very social information in the way that gender is and still have grammatical consequences. We’ve just been not using this model to explain what’s going on with gender.

Gretchen: Things like formal versus informal “you” and these kinds of things?

Kirby: Exactly. One of the things that I’ve come up with is if we think of this existing thing, and there’s some really great research in Spanish of Latin America where people will switch between “tu” and “usted” and “voseo” – “tu” being the informal “you,” and “usted” being a formal “you,” and “voseo” is a form of the verb agreement. The verbs will change depending on the forms. There’s some great work within the last few years about, yeah, people totally switch in the middle of the conversation and they totally switch in the middle of the conversation as a way of accomplishing certain social goals.

This example given by Raymond 2016 where a 911 caller – he’s a tourist. He’s speaking Spanish and he’s calling and talking to the 911 dispatcher. At the beginning of the conversation, he’s trying to say, “I got scammed at this hotel.” He’s very indignant. He’s using “tu” to the dispatcher as a way of interacting of like, “You are a service person” in the way that you speak down to or, if you’re rude, you speak down to people who are providing you a service in certain ways.

Gretchen: Kind of registering his anger by not being polite.

Kirby: Yeah. Later in the conversation, when she’s starting to ask for paperwork or receipts or stuff and he’s starting to get nervous, he switches to the “usted” forms because – so Raymond conceptualises that the reason for this is that he now sees her as a gatekeeper to something that he wants. Now, he has to appease her rather than talk down to her. This is the thing of this all happens with gender too. It’s a little bit more abstract because the social relationships that we’re talking about are not up or down. You can map them onto hierarchies, but they don’t cleanly follow. Thinking about systems that refer to people’s gender, and especially systems that encode people’s gender directly into the grammar in some way, as more similar to systems that encode formality or honorific marking is a really useful model. It’s a really good way of getting away from the rigid binary models that we’ve looked at before.

Gretchen: Because the idea is that honorifics, everyone knows that they change in a given social interaction and people can switch to using a different form of “you” to address somebody or a different form of even “I” – like Japanese has all these different forms of “I” depending on how polite you wanna be.

Kirby: And depending on gender and depending on specific age – yeah. There’s a lot of rich expressive content there. Basically, the idea that comes out of my research is that you can use gender features – and I’m doing air quotes, “gender features” – where you can use pronouns in English but you can also use other parts of speech that are more grammatical to do that work via gender marking.

Gretchen: What’s an example of that?

Kirby: I’m gonna give you an example from Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

Gretchen: Excellent.

Kirby: This was very early on in a season. A contestant is not doing well. This is the contestant who is actually eliminated first. Have you watched Ru Paul’s Drag Race?

Gretchen: I may have seen an episode at some point but I’m not particularly familiar, so you should proceed as though I know nothing.

Kirby: One of things you’ll notice when you watch the show is that the contestants and the judges mostly use “she” for the contestants who are all drag queens but not always. It depends on how they feel about a particular queen.

What you see with this contestant who’s getting eliminated very early in the season, the lead up to her elimination is the usual reality TV of they do confessional shots where they’re talking about each other and then the judges are talking shit about contestants in the way that one does on reality TV. The contestant who’s going to get eliminated – I mean, they set this up pretty clearly. They’re going to eliminate her at the end of the episode. They talk a lot about how she is struggling with the performance. She’s not doing a good job with her costume construction or deciding how to do the performing art of drag. When they’re talking about her in her way of not being a good performer, they use “he.”

Gretchen: Okay. Like, “You’re not performing femininity well, so we’re not gonna use this pronoun”?

Kirby: It’s not exactly about not performing femininity well because none of them talk about her not being convincing as a drag queen. They’re mostly talking about her not being skilled as a drag queen. If you think about it as a type of performing art in the same way that opera or ballet or river dancing are all specific types of performing art that you can be good or bad at – and the specific thing about drag performance is that if you are good or bad at the specific performing art, you get different pronouns.

This contestant was not less feminine than the other drag queens. It’s that she was not good at dancing, which this is conceptually a little bit further away from she’s not very feminine. That was not the issue. It was not the issue that any of the judges or other contestants were talking about. They were talking about, you know, “She’s not good at dancing,” or “She’s not good at organising her time so she has enough time in the time period to construct a good costume out of garbage,” or whatever the reality TV challenge is – the thing of there’s always a time limit. Part of the thing of succeeding at the time limit is budgeting your time. If you’re not good at that, then you’re gonna do poorly in the contest.

Gretchen: That’s not really gender.

Kirby: It’s not gender. But using “he” as a way of layering meaning on top of that – and they didn’t call her “he” the whole episode. They did it only when they were specifically talking about her poor performance.

Gretchen: Interesting. So, it’s accomplishing this very specific sub-goal.

Kirby: Yes. This is obviously a very locally constrained use of that meaning, but it’s very productive – meaning that people can use those meanings to accomplish a lot of different goals and they can do it without really thinking about it. They can extend the meaning and be very creative with it. This is the thing that really, to me, indicates these are up for meaning making in the same way that “tu” and “usted” are up for meaning making which is sometimes “tu” and “usted” mean “I’m older and more senior than you,” but sometimes, they mean “I need something from you.

Gretchen: There’s this incredibly complicated flow chart about when to use “tu” versus “vous” in French. One of the questions is like, “Are you feeling lucky, punk?” and if you’re feeling lucky, you use “tu,” and if you’re not feeling lucky, you use “vous.” Sometimes, these decisions are microsocial decisions in a particular instance where you’re saying, “Here’s what I’m doing kind of.”

Kirby: Essentially, my contribution here is saying that that flow chart of “Are you feeling lucky, punk?” and a lot of microsocial decisions applies just as well to gender as it applies to formal pronouns. What this does is it means that we can conceptualise pronouns as more similar cross-linguistically rather than more different. This is a hard project because it doesn’t look like pronouns are a natural class – meaning that they’re not made out of the same stuff in every language. Languages generally need pronouns as a way to avoid saying the same name over and over again. What this ends up doing is encoding social information to varying degrees.

Gretchen: There are lots of languages that don’t have gender in pronouns at all.

Kirby: The majority of the world’s languages have no gender marking on their pronouns. The “he/she” thing in English, we’re in a minority position here.

Gretchen: It’s this weird artificial thing of Indo-European languages often have gender pronouns, but outside of Europe, very few languages do.

Kirby: If you’re gonna only compare cousins and then say that you found a fact about all humans, you have a pretty serious confound there in that they are related.

Gretchen: It turns out all humans have red hair.

Kirby: Yeah. Because I looked at all the Weasleys and they all have red hair and so all humans have red hair. It’s nonsensical to do that kind of comparison and only look at Indo-European languages because they are related. You are going to get some factors that there’s no reason to assume that’s universal.

Gretchen: You’ve done surveys of how English speakers use pronouns has been changing demographically as well – like by age.

Kirby: Yes. When I’ve been doing these surveys, my biggest survey was looking at “singular they.” Singular they has been in English for hundreds of years. There’s lots of work on this.

Gretchen: It’s in Shakespeare. It’s in Chaucer. All of this stuff.

Kirby: It’s been around. But the kind of singular they that’s been around is not the kind that I use as a nonbinary person. The different kinds of singular they are something like, okay, “Someone forgot their backpack.”

Gretchen: You don’t know whose backpack it is.

Kirby: Or “Each linguist should grab their nametag.”

Gretchen: I think the example from Shakespeare is, “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me as if were their well-acquainted friend.” Here, it’s interesting because you have “man” there, but he’s clearly this man in a somewhat generic sense and using the “they” there rather than, “There’s not a man I meet but does salute me as if I were his well-acquainted friend,” which would be more this specific “men.”

Kirby: This is interesting because you’ll also see sentences like, “Pregnant women should always be given their parental leave.” We’re definitely talking about women, so it’s not the case that it’s just like, “Oh, well, Shakespeare thinks that man is the default kind of person.” No. It’s also the case that you’ll see that kind of generic singular they with “woman,” but the thing is that we’re talking about a set of people. We’re talking about a bunch of people in a group and then saying each one does their thing, which is different than talking about a specific person.

The new use is something like, “Kirby forgot their backpack.” I’m a singular they user, meaning that I don’t want to be referred to by “he” or “she” or anything else. I want to be referred to by “they.” It is also the case that this can happen whether or not we’re talking about someone who prefers that. Using “they” about a particular person is syntactically different than using “they” about a group of people that is singular because I’m talking about each one individually. So, “Each student forgot their backpack” is different than “Kirby forgot their backpack.” “Kirby” is a specific person.

Gretchen: Right. We can point to that person. “Each person forgot their backpack” is, if I’m pointing to each person, I have to do a bunch of different pointing.

Kirby: Yes. When I did my big survey, what I found was that use of the specific one – and I tested it by using names. I actually tested it using a bunch of different gendered names and I compared it with other pronouns as well. I did masculine and feminine and gender-neutral names with “they” – singular – and “he” and “she” to just see if there’s a difference. What I found was that there is a difference, but not for everybody. Older speakers do find it a little bit less natural sounding when I use a name and singular they. It’s different than when I use a name and “he” or “she.” Younger speakers – and the age cut off is around 35, basically millennials on down – younger speakers really don’t have a problem with it en masse. Most of them find it fine and they’ll rate it as “This is just a normal sentence.” Obviously, there are individual people who are like, “No. That sounds weird to me.” But it’s not as many. When you chart it all out, it really looks like there’s a slope that, as you look at older people, they have a harder time accepting that as part of the grammar or part of their unconscious syntax.

Gretchen: Is this a thing that some older people are managing to do it, it depends on how queer friends they have? Or is it like a –

Kirby: The studies on this are very new. To sort of triangulate across my research and some of Lauren Ackerman’s and some of Evan Bradley’s, it looks like, in general, if you have more nonbinary friends then you’re better with singular they. That makes sense. That’s Lauren Ackerman’s study. In general, if you are trans or nonbinary yourself, you’re better with singular they. Binary trans men and women are, in general, better with singular they than cis people in general. Nonbinary people are sort of obviously fine with it.

Gretchen: Like, “Oh, look! I do this myself, so I guess I better practice it a lot” or whatever.

Kirby: The other thing that influences it then – I’m talking about three different studies. We haven’t combined forces yet. This is all stuff that’s been published within the last two years. It’s very, very fresh off the presses.

Gretchen: This is cutting-edge linguistic research.

Kirby: It’s extremely cutting edge. Lauren Ackerman’s stuff is saying if you have more nonbinary friends, you’re better with singular they. I can say, “Okay. If you’re younger and/or trans and/or nonbinary yourself, you’re better with singular they.” Evan Bradley has been looking at people’s feelings about prescriptivism and feelings about gender ideology. People who have more prescriptive opinions in general are worse with singular they. Also, people who have – this is what he calls “benevolent sexism,” which is not “Oh, I hate women and I’m gonna oppress them” –

Gretchen: It’s like, “I’m gonna hold open the door for all the women.”

Kirby: Yeah. Benevolent sexism is sort of “I think that people of different sexes have fundamental differences and different needs based on their sex.” If you have that benevolent sexism, you’re more likely to be worse at singular they. It’s related to this idea that there are binary baseline categories of people.

Gretchen: I found for me that acquiring singular they, which I feel like I’ve done in the past couple years because I know more nonbinary and agender people who use singular they as a pronoun, and at first it took a conscious thought, which is kind of like acquiring a language but in an easier way. I also have to do this conscious thought when I’m speaking French and I’m figuring out am I using “tu” or “vous” or am I doing this thing in French. It takes a bit off extra thought, but it doesn’t mean that adults can’t acquire a language because adults clearly do learn languages. This is not learning an entire language. It’s doing something like that, but I think I had to believe that it was worth doing this additional bit of conscious effort in order to actually do it.

Kirby: Yes. All the singular they researchers agree that the next step is figuring out, what is the factor that makes it easier for some people to learn it and not for other people? You’re not the first person that I’ve talked to who has said, “Yeah. I’ve learned it in the past couple years” or “I’ve made an effort to learn it.” I also have people who have said, “I just kind of picked it up from around me,” but as an adult. Not something where the Zoomers – the very young Gen Z people – who are coming into my freshman classes with singular they already. They’re acquiring it as children. They don’t have to do any work. They already have it.

It is the case that some adults seem to be able to acquire it on purpose, and some adults seem to want to acquire it but really can’t, or they report significant difficulty. You will get people – and it doesn’t seem to be correlated with age. We need to do studies about this. We haven’t done it yet because we all need some resources to be able to do that. But there are people who say, “I’m really trying to learn singular they, but I mess up often.” Well, people will frequently under-report how much they mess up. You will frequently say – if you look at somebody who is saying, “I’m trying to do better but I do make mistakes” – they’ll usually say, “Yeah. I make one or two mistakes.” Then, you’ll actually look at what they’ve said, and they mess up almost constantly. We don’t really know yet what the issue is that makes it easier for some people to learn it.

Gretchen: Or something like intimacy? I notice this on the internet especially because you don’t have as many cues on the internet. Oftentimes, if you’re referring to a commenter above you in a thread and all you know is that the commenter’s initials are J.D. or something, you really have no information about this commenter, people will often use “they” to refer to the previous commenter. Whereas, if somebody knows me, one of the ways that I can tell that they know me is that they’re actually using “she/her” for me as opposed to using the generic “they” of the comment thread. It maybe signals a kind of intimacy.

Kirby: This is something that Leah Velleman has talked about – I cite her in my dissertation because it’s a great idea – something called “distal they,” where it’s a use of singular they that ends up implying social distance, essentially what you explained of like, “Well, if they knew me, they would be using a more specific form.”

It’s in the same way that using someone’s name, and especially first name, implies familiarity. It’s not necessarily that a first name has some sort of grammatical feature of familiarity. It’s just that it implies that you have enough social contact to know their first name, also they’re not gonna get mad at you for using it and this sort of thing. That way of using “they” to mark social distance or social closeness, if you have an option of a more specific pronoun, is something that falls out of how specific and how much information am I giving you about this person’s social position. I assume if it were relevant or if you had more information, you would be giving me more information, and if you had less information, that might be why you’re using this underspecified, vague form.

Gretchen: We’ve talked about people acquiring singular they very consciously and putting in this effort to do that. Did you also study why people are putting in this effort to organise their syntax? People don’t do this all the time.

Kirby: I’m gonna do a rude thing to you. You told me that this is something that you have learned on purpose. You made an effort to learn it. Why did you do that?

Gretchen: I mean, it seemed like the polite thing to do – the “being a considerate human” thing to do. If someone says, “Please, call me this,” then I either need to do that or I need to accept this person’s not gonna like me anymore.

Kirby: That’s the motivation. As far as I can tell you, and I haven’t yet gotten into the formal research, but it seems like – people volunteer the information to me pretty frequently – that the reason somebody would decide to change their grammar on purpose is to avoid doing this thing that’s baked into their grammar that ends up being very rude. Misgendering somebody is very rude. It is rude whether you do it to a trans person or a cis person. It just so happens that it happens to trans people a lot more often.

You’re asking me, why are people acquiring this? And the answer that you had given me yourself is, “I don’t wanna misgender people. It’s rude.” It’s rude to call somebody by the wrong name. It’s rude to just decide to give somebody a name that they don’t identify with. I think that a lot of people can say, if you just come up to me and say, “Hey, I’m gonna call you ‘Champ,’” maybe I don’t want you to call me “Champ,” actually. Maybe I don’t like to be called “Champ.” People really don’t like that feeling of being called something that doesn’t reflect what you think you are. If you know any nonbinary people, you have this motivation to not misgender them.

A really sweet story that I can share, when my friend changed their pronouns to “they,” one of the things that their cis friends did was they decided, “Okay. We’re gonna hang out” – they all lived together. They were all roommates. “We’re gonna hang out today. We’re gonna all clean the house. We’re gonna talk about them all day and tell stories about them to practice – to practice where they don’t have to hear us mess up.”

Gretchen: Oh, nice. The friend wasn’t there. It was just all of their cis friends saying, “We’re gonna practice.”

Kirby: Yeah. This friend came back – came over the next week – and everybody was already perfect at it because they had dedicated an eight-hour day of just doing that and correcting each other and getting the practice out of the way before it’s gonna hurt somebody’s feelings. That practice phase is something that’s really useful. Asking a bunch of friends to spend eight hours cleaning is something that not everybody has time to do.

The other thing that you can do is something like tell a story about the person and encourage yourself to practice self-correcting because it’s in this way where you’re doing it not in front of them, so you can get all your mistakes out of your system not in front of them. You’re not asking the person to do the emotional labour of correcting you every time. You’re just doing it out of the way, so they don’t have to be on your case.

Gretchen: The social awkwardness of like, “Oh, do I speak up and then make this conversation about that or do I let it slide?” But then maybe they’ll keep doing it, and this is something that’s hurtful.

Kirby: You can do that work without burdening the person because, okay, for my example, if I spent as much time in the beginning of my transition and grad school at the same time, I spent a lot of time correcting people and sending emails and really insisting. It took up a lot of time. I have to do it –

Gretchen: You’re trying to do a whole bunch of other stuff as well.

Kirby: Also, I was in grad school. I was very busy. I had to do this with everybody. If people took it upon themselves to get good it on their own, that was one fewer of my friends and family that I had to worry about tutoring. My sister just did it on her own and practiced and doesn’t mess up in front of me. It’s fine. It means that I never have to put my mental time and budget for correcting.

Gretchen: I think there are a lot of tips that people can have of, “Oh, this does seem like a thing that I wanna do of like I do wanna respect people and I do wanna not hurt people,” but you’re the individual pieces of that. And you’re putting together a guide?

Kirby: It’s not just me. I am absolutely indebted to the work of Bronwyn Bjorkman and Lex Konnelly who put together the They 2019 conference, which was a linguistics conference and was focused completely on nonbinary and trans pronoun use. One of the outputs of this conference is that everybody who attends is collaborating on materials and ways that we’re going to share our research findings for people to use in their real lives.

We are putting together brochures of – how do you practice? How do you learn? How can you help people? These are something that we’re trying to make very accessible and trying to make it very straightforward and shame free and all about allowing people to decide what they want to accomplish with their grammar because deciding to acquire a grammatical feature on purpose is making the decision that you’re gonna rewrite something totally unconscious as a way to stop hurting people. That takes work. But even making the decision in the first place is really important.

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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book is Because Internet. You can follow Kirby Conrod, our guest, on Twitter as @kirbyconrod.

To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Current bonus topics include teaching advice for linguistics and a very special episode of Lingthusiasm written by robots. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, and our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is by The Triangles. I will leave you with our guest.

Kirby: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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