Storytelling Secrets
Hah, I hadn’t realized this was a pass-it-on type of thing until I was looking back at @townsenddecades’s posts. Considering I’m still sorta finishing up the next few UDC posts, take this as a treat!
1. Originally, I had a story in mind for Marci and Gloria to come together to solve their differences and stuff, but I had procrastinated for far too long, and, well, it never happened. Along with that, it’s also why it’s taken so long for Dayana to marry — I just got absorbed in the Kensington’s day-to-day life and neglected my side households. Dayana’s plot line was supposed to start in 1302, where she was initially supposed to be sixteen at the time until I pushed it back.
2. I’ve been keeping news on the royal family pretty vague (cough, King ‘Edworth’ and Queen ‘Isabel’) so as not to lock myself into replicating the actual shenanigans happening during the 1310s. Nonetheless, things are happening behind the scenes that I just don’t feel fit the story right now. By the 1320s, however, the family will definitely be mentioned in detail - just by very morbid news. As of right now, though? The Crown Prince has just married a noblewoman, and his parents are multiplying children like crazy given I haven’t applied any birth rolls to them.
3. Speaking of the royal family, my thought process for Kurtis’ latest knight tournament was that it was brought together in celebration of Queen Isabel’s 16th birthday. Luckily, I had thought far enough to not write that down, because the in-game royal family really doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Isabella or Edward the II.
4. Kerstan Lassiter never existed. When I first started UDC, I had very surface-level teachings of the medieval times, so I wasn’t really following the most realistic situations for my sims. This is the main reason why I have little to no pictures outside of big events. 1) I had never expected to start blogging so I barely screenshots. 2) A lot of development for the side households never happened in-game and was only recently written down for a more coherent story. Trying to justify little things unthought of back then has been pretty fun, though! I literally rethought the (Gen 0) Lottway’s entire backstory just to justify Kurtis’ existence as a knight.
5. Though Lord Kerstan doesn’t exist, his son does. I don’t think it was well explained in my 1310 Kensington post, but after his death, Samir Lassiter - in his early 20s - takes his father’s place. Like the royal family, he won’t have a role to play until after the Great Famine, when he decides to show his face a lot more often. Spoilers, he’s very much an asshole.
6. I don’t know if I’ll ever mention this in Lottway posts but, funnily enough, there was a period of time when Kurtis and Casandra would visit the Kensingtons constantly by themselves. Anytime Casandra visited at the same time as Kurtis? Kurtis decided to leave. It’s actually why I’ve interpreted their relationship as a downward spiral. To make matters worse for the Lottways, per the RPO mod, Kurtis initially never wanted kids, and therefore, Brynn was born as an unwanted child. Yet, one day, after updating the mod, everyone’s thoughts on children refreshed which left Kurtis’ opinion on having kids neutral, AKA leaving Brynn as literally the only child he did not want.
Anyway, this was fun! I can’t wait to talk about the 1320s/1330s. I’m passing this on to @abigailsultimatedecadesblog (I don’t know how but I hadn’t fully realized you had a udc blog?!?) and @soffiisims (welcome back again!).
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how about anne carson? funny, witty, tragic, and not at all straightforward. autobiography of red and antigone feel like they could be up your alley.
also the market is oversaturated with mediocre greek retellings which lack any nuance as of now. i curse rick riordan for this.
i'll look into her!!! admittedly i do find plays/poetry a little hard to get into (and atm i am throwing myself headfirst into Complete Twilight Immersion but as more of a social studies thing than a literature thing), but it's always nice to have a few suggestions on the backlog <3
i was also just,,, the biggest rick riordan kid growing up, so it might just be my bias speaking, but i feel like his books were actually pretty good myth adaptions? he clearly goes through a lot of effort to actually take the framework of a given mythology and make something new from it, rather than just,,, copying the names and aesthetics or formatting the myths as they are in modern language with minimal changes to the actual subject matter. the first one can be kind of fun, but i simply,,, do not have enough in common with ancient greek poets to really enjoy the latter. the idea of odysseus just pisses me tf off too but i think that might just be a me issue.
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Do you have any literature on sound changes involving ejective consonants? Specifically ejective consonants changing into something else?
I don't know of any general surveys, but several individual cases are of course found in literature in more detail. It would be worthwhile to have some compiled data on this though! For a start I'll collect some examples in this post.
The best-described case might be Semitic, where any handbook (or even just the Wikipedia article) will inform you about *kʼ > q, tsʼ > (t)s etc. being attested in Arabic / Aramaic / Hebrew. Offhand I don't know if there is a particular locus classicus on the issue of reconstructing ejectives for Proto-Semitic, though.
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Cushitic, which I've been recently talking about, has open questions remaining especially in what exactly to reconstruct for various correspondences involving ejective affricates, but at least the development of the ejective stops seems to be well-established. Going first mainly per Sasse (1979), The Consonant Phonemes of Proto-East Cushitic, Afroasiatic Linguistics 7/1, three developments into something else appear across East Cushitic for *tʼ:
*tʼ > /ɗ/ (alveolar implosive): Oromo, Boni, Arboroid (Arbore, Daasenech, Elmolo), Dullay, Yaaku and, at least word-internally, Highland East Cushitic.
*tʼ >> /ᶑ/ (retroflex implosive): Konsoid (Konso, Dirasha a.k.a. Gidole, Bussa). (As per Tesfaye 2020, The Comparative Phonology of Konsoid, Macrolinguistics 8/2. Some other descriptions give these too as alveolar /ɗ/.)
*tʼ >>> /ɖ/ (retroflex voiced plosive): Saho–Afar, Somali, Rendille.
Presumably these all happen along a common path *tʼ > ⁽*⁾ɗ > ⁽*⁾ᶑ > ɖ. Note though that Sasse reconstructs *ɗ and not *tʼ — but comparison with the case of *kʼ, the cognates elsewhere in Cushitic, and /tʼ/ in Dahalo and word-initially in Highland East Cushitic I think all point to *tʼ in the last common ancestor of East Cushitic. (As per other literature, I don't think East Cushitic is necessarily a valid subgroup and so this last common ancestor may also be ancestral to some of the other branches of Cushitic.)
For *kʼ there is a wide variety of secondary reflexes:
Saho–Afar: *kʼ > /k/ ~ /ʔ/ ~ zero (unclear conditions).
Konso: *kʼ > /ʛ/ (no change in Bussa & Dirasha).
Daasenech: *kʼ > /ɠ/ word-initially, else > /ʔ/.
Elmolo: *kʼ > zero word-initially, else > /ɠ/.
Bayso: *kʼ > zero.
Somali: *kʼ > /q/, which varies as [q], [ɢ] etc.; merges in Southern Somali into /x/). Before front vowels, > /dʒ/.
Rendille: *kʼ > /x/.
Boni: *kʼ > /ʔ/.
though some of them again could be grouped along common pathways like *kʼ > *q > *χ > x, *kʼ > *ʔ > zero.
*čʼ > /ʄ/ happens at minimum in Konso (corresponds to /tʃʼ/ in Bussa & Dirasha). Proposed developments of a type *čʼ >> /ɗ/ in some other languages could go thru a merger with *tʼ first of all.
No East Cushitic *pʼ seems to be reconstructible, but narrower groups show *pʼ > /ɓ/ in Konsoid (corresponds to Oromo /pʼ/) and maybe *pʼ > /ʔ/ in Sidaamo (corresponds to Gedeo /pʼ/; mainly in loans from Oromo).
There is also an unpublished PhD from University of California at LA: Linda Arvanites (1991), The Glottalic Phonemes of Proto-Eastern Cushitic. I would be interested if someone else has access to this (edit: has been procured, thank you!)
Secondary developments of *tʼ and *kʼ in the rest of Cushitic, per Ehret (1987), Proto-Cushitic Reconstruction, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 8 (he also reconstructs *pʼ *tsʼ *čʼ *tɬʼ, but I'm less trustful of their validity):
Beja: *tʼ > /s/, *kʼ > /k/.
Agaw: *tʼ > *ts (further > /ʃ/ in Bilin and Kemant), *kʼ > *q (further word-initially > /x/ in Xamtanga and Kemant, /ʁ/ in Awngi)
West Rift: *kʼ > *q (and *tʼ > *tsʼ).
(The tendency for assibilation of *tʼ is interesting; although plenty of Cushitic languages get rid of ejectives entirely, none seems to have a native sound change *tʼ > /t/.)
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The historical phonology of the largest Afrasian branch, Chadic, is much more of a work in progress, but I would trust at least the following points as noted e.g. by Russell Schuh (2017), A Chadic Cornucopia:
*tʼ > *ɗ perhaps already in Proto-Chadic (supposedly all Chadic languages have /ɗ/);
*kʼ > /ɠ/ in Tera (Central Chadic);
/tsʼ/ in Hausa and some other languages corresponds to /ʄ/ or /ʔʲ/ in some other West Chadic languages, not entirely clear though which side is more original.
Tera /ɠ/ alas does not seem to be discussed in detail in the Leiden University PhD thesis by Richard Gravina (2014), The phonology of Proto-Central Chadic; he e.g. asserts /ɠəɬ/ 'bone' to be an irregular development from *ɗiɬ, while Schuch takes it as a cognate of e.g. Hausa /kʼàʃī/ 'bone'. (Are there two etyma here, or might the other involved Central Chadic languages have *ɠ > /ɗ/?)
If Olga Stolbova (2016), Chadic Etymological Dictionary is to be trusted (I've not done any vetting of its quality) then Hausa /tsʼ/ is indeed already from Proto-Chadic *tsʼ, and elsewhere in Chadic often yields /s/, sometimes /ts/ or /h/. Her Proto-Chadic *kʼ mostly merges with /k/ when not surviving. (She also has an alleged *tʼ with no ejective reflexes anywhere, and alleged *čʼ and *tɬʼ which mostly fall together with *tsʼ, but also show some slightly divergent reflexes like /ʃ/, /ɬ/ respectively.)
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Moving on, a few other examples I'm aware of OTTOMH include the cases of word-medial voicing in several Koman languages and in some branches of Northeast Caucasian (Chechen and Ingush in Nakh; *pʼ in most Lezgic languages). Also in NEC, the Lezgic group shows complicated decay of geminate ejectives, broadly:
> plain voiceless geminate in Lezgian, Tabassaran & Agul (same also in Tindi within the Andic group);
> voiceless singleton (aspirated) in Kryz & Budux;
Rutul & Tsaxur show some of both of the previous depending on the consonant, as well as word-initially *tsʼː > /d/ and *tɬʼː > /g/ — probably by feeding into the more general shift *voiceless geminate > *unaspirated > voiced (which happens in almost all of Lezgic).
in Udi, both short and geminate ejectives > plain voiceless geminates (plus a few POA quirks like *qʼʷ > /pː/, even though *qʷ > /q/).
Again I don't know if this has been described in better detail anywhere in literature, this is pulled just from the overviews in the North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary plus some review of the etymological data by myself.
Ejectives in Kartvelian are mostly stable in manner of articulation, but there's a minor sound correspondence between Karto-Zan *cʼ₁ (probably = /tʃʼ/) versus Svan /h/ that newer sources like Heinz Fähnrich (2007), Kartwelisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch for some reason reconstruct as *tɬʼ or *tɬ. The Svan development would then probably go as *tɬ⁽ʼ⁾ > *ɬ > /h/, after original PKv *ɬ > /l/.
I do not know very much about the historical phonology of any American languages, including if there's anything interesting happening to ejectives there; if someone else around here does, please do tell!
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Muir Uaigh
Muir Uaigh, or the Sepulchre Sea, also called the Buried Sea is a location within the Unseelie. The Buried Sea is its common name and merely refers to the fact that the sea, like the rest of Unseelie, is 'buried' beneath the mainland. It does indeed flow to the oceans. It is actually a little deeper than most of inhabited Unseelie. Yet paradoxically, as fae tend to be, the sea is not dark nor dreary. It's essentially their equivalent of beaches. There are geometrical rock structures that can serve as areas to rest, there are rich black sands that can be played and lie in. And the water is very navigable with the underwater scape its own marvel.
However, this is only one part of the Buried Sea. The part that the Unseelie have made habitable and safe. The other half is truly called Muir Uaigh and is meant to be treated like you would with fae...with caution. This part of the sea does appear similar to the main beach, in fact there are several other beaches that do exist but its protection is not nearly as strong as the Buried Sea. Protection from what?
Well, obvious are kelpies. While they cannot charm fae quite the same way, as they have similar mythical origins, they are can be quite aggressive if they are startled or feel that anyone is treading in their stomping grounds. As such they might pummel or trample unfortunate folks or just outright drag them out and drown them (fae are immortal in that they do not age, not that they cannot be killed). They are like other creatures in nature though to Unseelie.
No, the real issue comes with the mermaids. Yeah, yeah, everyone knows what they're like. Half-fish, half-humanoid. Can be good or bad. And yes, these kinds lean towards the siren sort of danger. But in a different way. See, the legend behind the mermaids that reside here and why it is called the Muir Uaigh is that this sea draws souls on the verge of being lost or wishing to be lost. So often it draws Unseelie that do not wish to live to its depths either by jumping from the cliffs to it or walking into the waters. It also draws souls that are in grief or suffering grave misfortune. It is release and freedom. Unfortunate to quote the song, it would take the suffering.
It is believed souls lost this way are reborn into mermaids that have a vagueness or no memory of their previous life. They seem to live normal lives in the sea and do not eat others. However, there are some that have this feeling within to relieve others. And its these...rather motivated mermaids that are a problem. Their songs reaches to find a being's longing. Whom or what they long for, positively or negatively. This what lures others into their depths to be drowned. Even if their bodies are retrieved, their 'soul' or 'essence' is stripped from them and thus can never be returned unless you, idk, risk fighting some fish people for the soul. To which, yeah, you could have time for that in theory. Once a body comes within the water, it is usually wreathed within the long and colorful seaweed to be anchored in place until, well, the soul releases.
Now, these mermaids aren't as irresistible as a siren so it's possible to escape but it's really a 'but would you risk it?' question. They also aren't very durable and can be injured and killed like any other creature. It's also, not every mermaid is like this. Some do just want to be left alone and some just want folks to heal. The latter of these are called caesg, mermaids that assist and actually travel very far (like to rivers and streams on the surface far). They can grant minor wishes to those that capture them. But the odds of getting a caesg vs a mermaid...is it really worth it?
So yeah, the naming sense is fitting in both senses. The Buried Sea is usually what's referring to safer areas, spots that either mermaids do not tend to frequent or have been repelled from. It is named such because it quite literally below the land. Muir Uaigh refers to the sea at large and is a 'sea of graves.' It is the part that fae are to be careful about.
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