#animacies

[olreid]

feeling so incredibly unwell

[homonationalist]

Mel Y. Chen from Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, 2012

[hungwy]

i will admit when i first read this i was very confused about how animism (religion) could influence a genitive marker becoming a nominative marker

[swordatsunset]

Guyses… I’m beginning to think thsi academia thing is not so fun

[korrasamibottles]

Braiding Sweetgrass is making me insane

[cthulu-in-a-ballgown]

Verb-based languages are played out. Navajo, Lojban, give me a break! Instead, have a noun-based language, where the verb is suffixed to all nouns it acts on.

Wait, I hear you saying. How do you tell the subject from the object? Simple: animacy. The more animate thing always acts on the less animate thing.

But how is animacy decided? Well, ascribing your own motivations to something, anthropomorphizing it, turning it into a puppet to tell your stories. . . that's a pretty good way to get rid of something's inherent animacy. So the most animate things are the least frequently anthropomorphized, and vice versa.

LV1: non-moving non-conscious things

LV2: moving non-conscious things

LV3: moving conscious things.

So it's actually impossible to say something like "I watch TV." Instead, the TV watches you. 1.SG.LV3-watch tv-LV1-watch.

Welcome to Soviet Russia.

[velaraffricate]

i had this idea of verbs having multiple meanings depending on how they're conjugated - kind of an active/stative thing, but not in the morphosyntactic alignment way, more in the sense that the active verb would be a sort of intensified or more intentional version of the base stative verb. so one word could mean eat or devour, hear or listen, see or watch, etc. i think that could work, but i don't think i'll implement it into pyanli, i think it's already got enough other verb stuff going on

[kittoforos]

casual poll, throw your answers in the replies: what is your native language, and are you comfortable using ‘it’ to refer to a dog or cat? what about a specific dog, like idk your friend’s dog, Sparky? what about a child? what about a baby?

[overdramatics]

people really do underestimate plants & nonhuman animals. Where else do you think the ability to see, thing, feel, and communicate. How else could a being survive in a very complex world full of dangers except for being conscious

[the-calculus-of-chaos]

I'm reading this book, "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants" by Robin Wall Kimmerer and it's been really a journey. It's on the wake of reading books about indigenous movements in Kurdistan, Islamic Anarchism, and identifying and combatting Whiteness and it all just makes a really lovely and thought provoking arc for me.

I think the most important learning I've gleaned from this book, at least thus far, is what the author calls Animacy, but which I don't know how to differentiate from Animism, except that it somehow speaks to me / lands on me slightly differently. More squarely.

She paints a picture of the world as very much alive, especially illuminated through the explanation of her ancestor's indigenous language, Potawatomi, which has an emphasis on Verbs instead of Nouns. I can't do it justice and you should just read the book, but the example she uses is that there's no noun for river, but there's a verb for "to be a river". Because it could be something else. (The most common nouns are things more removed from nature, constructed by humans) The overall effect is one of subjectivizing the world rather than objectifying it. I've been practicing seeing the world as subjects and not objects, and it's immediately shifted my relationship with trees and dirt and therefore food, furniture, and so on.

And most recently I've been exploring how this mindset changes my relationship with Judaism. Whereas I've always shied away from the word Adonai and other hierarchical honorifics for Hashem, when I think of the world through the lens of Animacy and as a living manifestation of Hashem, I feel less repulsed by the hierarchical titles we ascribe to our god. Kimmerer cites the Haudenosaunee people, who acknowledge the Eagle is the Leader of the Birds and the Maple is the Leader of the Trees, and simultaneously have a consensus based human political structure.

There's no conclusion here, just that.

[olreid]

ik we were talking the other day about necromancers who refuse to eat their cavaliers [ntn spoilers at the link], but there is something also about a particular type of cavalier who doesn't refuse to be eaten so much as they remind everyone around them that what is being eaten when a cavalier dies is a full human being and not an animal or an object. even given the collective disgust at the eighth house's practice of soul siphoning, which is sort of taboo because of how indiscreet it is, there is rarely a recognition of colum as a fully agentic person, because he has been so carefully bred as battery and because he is so often drained of life as to be rendered inert and unspeaking. but there is something about ortus refusing the stoicism and eagerness for death that is typically expected from cavaliers, and something also about jeannemary's relative youth and resultant lack of composure which makes the people around them uncomfortable because they do not comport themselves like devoted servants or eager attack animals whose greatest wish is to be able to fight and die. they act like what they are; human beings who are caught in a web of dehumanization and death and devotion that is slowly killing them. there is so much cultural work invested into creating a discursive linkage between cavaliers and livestock and batteries and other things that are less human and more fuel, precisely so that those who take their lives do not have to reckon that exchange as a murder but as something rather less gruesome. and the horror that results when cavaliers fail to act the part is precisely because this threatens to shatter the illusion for everyone else, to peel the respectable veneer off the cultural practice of "training cavaliers" and reveal it for what it is; the cultivation of human beings for the express purpose of ritualized slaughter. there is something very noble, if ultimately futile, about a cavalier who says with their very mode of being: i refuse to be made anything less than human. you can kill me, but you'll know it for the murder it is.

[comicsans-apologists]

(idk if this exists already) but a language where animate nouns are inherently forbidden from serving as direct objects of verbs

so instead you have to use a comitative applicative to preserve the noun's agency

e.g. "I hit together with the man" instead of "I hit the man"

[1ore]

there's some kind of animacy and technology spectrum. On one end is the shinto-practicioner who fed her computer a grain of rice every time it booted (as thanks for its labor,) and on the other is the cult mechanicus breaking out the incense every time the printer makes a weird noise. and the difference is like night and day but im struggling to articulate What that is

[horizonandstar]

MerMoon doesn't realise at first the she/her are he/him but different gender, he just thinks Fem!Readers being a dick and trying to be different. He'll realise his mistake in 5 minutes time and lay in bed thinking about it for years.

tbh both of them are aware of grammatical gender, even if they dont grasp the gender aspect behind it at first

[shojoknife]

Nyx by 衿 (feat. 初音ミク)

[cthulu-in-a-ballgown]

ok so. I'm working on a conlang for some people in the future, who basically atrophied into nervous systems with gametes because they use apocalypse-leftover robots as their bodies.

They can temporarily disconnect from the bodies, so they know what it's like to go without "low fuel" or "high temp" signals: fucking AMAZING. Nobody likes the weakness of the flesh. Bodies are stubborn, they have minds of their own, one might even say they're. . . . animate.

The basic premise of this is, animate things interfere with each other's animacy. The more animate something is on its own, the less animate a group of those things will be. One example might be ~a species of individually smart hominids that nonetheless destroys their planet~~~

Long story short, the animacy hierarchy is bidirectional.

Level 1: robot bodies, robot-dependent brains, abstract ideas (bc all thoughts are intrusive to some degree). Systems of level 4 beings.

Level 2: things that actively optimize themselves for the environment, through behaviors: animals, plants, fungi. Systems of level 3 beings.

Level 3: things that passively optimize themselves for the environment, through attributes: tools and anything that is used as such. Systems of level 2 beings.

Level 4: everything else physical. Systems of level 1 beings.

Plurality is usually seen indirectly through animacy markers. One plant is LV2, two plants are level LV3. For cross-animacy groups, there is a plurality marker, but that's more of a literary thing, not used in everyday life.