#i think the problem is that i’m pronouncing the phonemes on their own

[flecks-of-stardust]

me, at 2 am, testing out the /ç/ and /x/ phonemes that german has to myself:

[1kook]

new parent syndrome

— kim namjoon x (f) reader

SUMMARY You love Namjoon, honest. But you love your daughter Hyejoo even more— it’s not a controversial sentiment when you know he’s the same way! —and going back to a regular adult life sans kids absolutely sucks. (Or so you thought.) WARNINGS dilf!joon, dreamy husband joon, loving parents au, jimin is also a dad, bathtub sexy times, exhibitionism 😳 kinda sorta, tiny praise kink, joon calls her wifey TT, fingering, cunninglingus, doggy style, it’s kinda cheesy n romantic /.\, unprotected sex, …. impreg kink RATINGS m (18+) WC 9.5k 

NOTES writing parent fics is harder than i thought :/ i had this idea last week n was like yes, lets write this fic that absolutely no one asked for... except me! <3 so here we are, fantasizing about dreamy dad joon.... as always i have to thank rumu ( @kigurumu​ ) who is kind enough to edit these n b like that don't make no sense -_- anyway lemme know what u think !! enjoy !!

No matter how hard you try, the letter f refuses to fit itself into Hyejoo’s phonemic understanding. She’s a growing toddler so it’s only normal that there are sounds she still can’t pronounce, words she doesn’t quite get. But her inability to say food or family or friends, which are undoubtedly the three most important things in her three year-old world right now, is definitely a setback you didn’t see coming. 

Your worrywart husband has taken matters into his own hands, using the power of Google and about twelve parenting books to create an extensive, one-hour-a-day, mini lesson to try and increase her pronunciation skills. Of course, Hyejoo already attends daycare in the mornings while you and Namjoon are off at work, and gets sufficient learning done there. So she can’t exactly sit through Joon’s lectures, no matter how pretty he tries to decorate her flashcards. She’s still tiny— she’s still your baby, and you want her to enjoy the last of her daycare years before you’re forced to submit her to the worst twelve years of her life (also known as compulsory education). 

But as you’ve mentioned before, Namjoon doesn’t quite feel the same way. 

“She can’t sound out the letter,” he mopes in bed that night. He’s laying down beside you, face smushed against your thigh. The lamp on your side of the bed is the only thing on, casting a faint golden hue on his cheeks.

This conversation has occurred a variety of times these past few weeks, and you’ve just about ran out of every comforting reassurance possible. You settle on stroking a hand through his hair. There are emails to respond to and clients to check in with, but there’s also a huffy husband in bed beside you who quite pitifully crawls up into your arms. 

It’s with his face between your boobs that he speaks again. “What if she’s getting made fun of at school? Or her teachers think she’s dumb?” You roll your eyes. “My baby is not dumb, __,” he says, as if you don’t know. “Her IQ came back above average when I took her to the development specialist that one time, remember?” You have half the mind to tell him an IQ test on a three year old isn’t exactly valid, but there’s already enough stacked on his plate. Finding out he wasted a hundred bucks for an invalid test would just be the cherry on top of all his worries. 

Water clings to the very tips of his hair, remnants of his bath with Hyejoo. Namjoon is getting older now, nothing like the dashing grad student you had met what feels like a lifetime ago. There’s bags under his eyes, bags that surpass any all-nighter-pulling college student’s, induced by none other than the sheer power of becoming a parent. And still, he retains his beauty, looks like a doll with his skin so dewy from his skincare routine, lips puffy and red and kissable. 

He looks up, and you take the opportunity to place a kiss on his lips, his familiar scent making you melt into his arms. When he pulls away, there’s still a subtle furrow between his brows. 

“Hyejoo is fine,” you reassure him, carding his brown hair out of his face. He leans into the touch, eyes falling shut. “Our girl is the smartest three year-old out there,” you huff, feeling the slightest bit annoyed that he could even insinuate otherwise. “And if she was having problems at school, you know I would be the first one in there, fighting all the other moms.” 

Namjoon relents, face falling back into its haven between your tits. “Okay,” he mumbles, muffled from the way his plush lips drag against the soft skin over your sternum. 

The subject of Namjoon’s worries is in the other room sound asleep, not the least bit concerned with measly letters and sounds. It’s really only Namjoon who is, his stack of letter flashcards glaring at you from on top of the dresser. “Your mother hen is showing,” you tease as he slips beneath the covers, leaning over you to flick off your lamp. Just like everything else in your house, his t-shirt smells like him. It’s a natural, woodsy scent that floods your nostrils and makes your toes curl when he comes so close. 

Namjoon snorts as he settles beside you, beefy arm pillowing your head as he pulls you close. “I’m not a mother hen,” he says, hand on your waist, the tantalizing expanse of his neck before your eyes. “I’m the rooster— the cock,” he snickers, and you reward his terrible attempt at a joke with a pinch to his side that has him retreating to the other end of the bed. 

Hyejoo’s best friend in the entire world— or, as she says, her best pren in the entire world —is none other than Park Yerin from daycare. As the universe would have it, Park Yerin is also the one and only daughter of your college philosophy seat neighbor, Park Jimin. 

Crossing paths with him later down the road was not something you could ever anticipate, especially when you and Jimin were never that close in college to begin with. It was the only class you had with him in all four years, one where you had quietly acknowledged his charisma and occasionally shared homework answers, before never speaking to him again. You could have greeted him on campus, as you often crossed paths. But Park Jimin was a walking friendship magnet who seemed to bring with him a parade of followers everywhere he went, and approaching him required three layers of strategic planning if you wanted to catch him alone. 

So bumping into him at the entrance of Hyejoo’s daycare six years later comes as a bit of a shock. You had never pegged him as the type to settle down so quickly— you don’t mean to label him, but there were certain college stereotypes that he fit like a glove —but there he was, carrying the tiny love of his life who’s currently dressed in a bright pink Minnie Mouse dress. 

Unsurprisingly, just like her father, Park Yerin has the same enthralling personality that makes everyone in the three to four year-old daycare class want to be her friend, and your sweet little Hyejoo is not exempt. 

Long story short, out of all the kids at Sunny Side Daycare, Yerin is Hyejoo’s favorite, and Hyejoo is Yerin’s favorite. 

So now it’s been a little over a year since the two girls have established their friendship, which means it’s been a little over a year of acquainting yourself with Jimin again. He’s a house husband, something you never expected, and he loves his daughter like no other. Some afternoons after daycare are spent with Jimin and Yerin at the nearest coffee shop, watching the girls haphazardly scribble over every piece of paper they can get their hands on while the two of you catch up. 

Overall, you’re happy Hyejoo can have a friend like Yerin, and secretly, you're also happy you can finally befriend a fellow parent as nice and put together as Jimin. On top of that, Namjoon’s liked him on the few occasions he’s met him; the two have even gone out for drinks. 

However, befriending Jimin and Yerin comes at a cost, and that cost is seeing your little girl grow up.  

It’s your turn to mope. 

“Yerin asked her to sleepover,” you groan, sadly patting in your skincare routine the next night. Namjoon is somewhere behind you, his naked back glaring at you through the reflection of your vanity mirror. He’s so broad and big, sleep shorts clinging to his waist as he lotions up his body post-shower. There’s a thin gold chain around his neck that glints everytime he moves around, biceps flexing and bulging in plain view until he finally slips his shirt on. There was a time in your life where his back could not go more than two days unscathed, your rabid (read: horny) claw marks painting rosy trails down his spine. These days, you can barely remember the last time he’s held your hand. 

“Who?” he asks once he’s settled beneath the covers with whatever book he’s reading now and his thick-rimmed reading glasses. 

“Who else,” you say, tugging your night robe closer to your chest as if it’ll prevent your heart from breaking anymore than it already was. “Hyejoo’s first sleepover,” you sigh. 

You take it harder than you imagined. In the back of your mind, you’ve always known your little girl was growing up— hello, you were literally watching her grow more and more inches every single day —but you had convinced yourself she would stay your baby for a little while longer. As much as you wanted her to see and learn about the world, you selfishly wanted to keep her home too. She was your baby, your only one at that.

At least Namjoon feels the same way. “Absolutely not,” he squawks, abruptly slamming his book shut. He’s usually really meticulous about lining up his fancy bookmark right on the line he left off on, so his sudden carelessness tells you all you need to know about how he feels. 

You sit down beside him, hand over his. “It’s Yerin’s birthday,” you inform him in what you hope is a comforting tone; unbeknownst to him, you’re trying to reassure yourself as well. “And Jimin said he and his wife are gonna be there the whole night.” You trust Jimin, you really do. If there’s anyone who’s more in love with their kid than you and Namjoon, it’s Jimin. He would never let anything happen to his Yerin, and by extension, he would never let anything happen to your Hyejoo. He’s a good dad. 

Namjoon rubs at his eyes. In the span of two minutes, he’s aged about five years. “No,” he sighs softly, squeezing your hand tightly. “Once she starts going to sleepovers she’ll start wearing makeup and getting into relationships and having her heart broken—“ 

A kiss is enough to silence him when he gets like this, his warm breath fanning across your bottom lip when you pull away. “She just wants to wear tutus and sing Baby Shark right now,” you murmur, hand creeping up over his chest. His heart is beating fast as hell beneath his t-shirt, feels like it’ll burst straight out of his chest if you don’t calm him down. 

He’s the bigger worrier out of the two of you, has a classic case of paranoid parent syndrome. 

It’s no secret that Namjoon has a big brain; he’s an educated man with a respectable job. For every problem he encounters, he can procure a variety of solutions with different approaches. He’s always prepared and part of you thinks he’s a huge reason you managed to survive those first few weeks as a mom. Unlike you, who had attended a whopping two mommy classes in preparation for your upcoming child, Namjoon had studied up on parenting. A lot. He had read books and reviewed scientific studies, had learned about development on the chemistry level and the social level, did all he could until he was confident in his own dad abilities. 

But, for every solution Namjoon can find, there are always twenty-eight other factors to worry about. 

“What if she has an allergic reaction and Jimin doesn’t know what to do,” he pales, death grip on your hand. His matching wedding band digs into your skin and you have to wrestle his hand away before he accidentally breaks your finger. He nearly broke your neck once when you were in college, had almost sent you to the ER mid-thrust because he had underestimated his own strength while trying to choke you.

“Hyejoo doesn’t have any allergies,” you remind him, giving up on your awkward half-seated position as you clamber over him. His thighs are full beneath you, tense up as you move over him and he manhandles you into his chest. 

He’s not done. “What if she asks Jimin for a fizzy drink and he can’t understand her?” His eyes are owlish beneath his glasses, covered in what you can only describe as a visible sheen of absolute terror. “What if he thinks she’s saying ‘pissy’ not ‘fizzy,’ __— what then?” It’s amazing, really, how a man who graduated cum laude can hypothesize this many disasters pertaining to a four year-old’s sleepover. 

In the other room, Hyejoo calls for you, so you gladly take the opportunity to remove yourself from Namjoon and his spiraling thoughts. “Look,” you say, tightening the sash of your robe as you get back up. “I’m gonna go tell her that she can go to Yerin’s sleepover tomorrow,” you tell him, giving him exactly three seconds to groan dramatically, before continuing, “and you figure out how to turn that big brain off by the time I come back.” 

Luckily, the cause of Hyejoo’s sudden wake up is a tiny bug bite she got from playing outside that just won’t stop itching. “Mommy, it hurts,” she whines, digging her nails into the tiny red mark by her knee. 

“Uh huh, lemme see,” you order, turning on her bedside lamp to illuminate the space. Her room is the prettiest shade of yellow, fitting for a ball of sunshine such as herself. “Were you playing by the flowerbeds?” You ask, running a finger over the mark a little too weird looking to simply be another mosquito bite. 

She knows she’s not supposed to play near the flowers— the bugs like her a little too much. It’s with a hesitant little nod that she confesses to it. You give her a pointed look. “You’re not supposed to play too close to the flowers,” you remind her, a tiny scolding for now. 

With a sniffle she responds, “not by the plowers.” 

A little bit of anti-itch cream has her settling, and by the time you return to your bedroom, Namjoon is out cold. 

“How old is Yerin turning?” Namjoon asks her at the door, heartbreak clearly painting his features as you help Hyejoo into her shoes. 

“Pour,” she beams, her tiny hand held up to show four stubby fingers. She has Namjoon’s pretty smile, an honest look in her eyes that makes you want to put her in your pocket and never let her go. Alas, Yerin’s sleepover party starts at five and Hyejoo has been trying to leave since noon. 

“Pour,” Namjoon repeats, shooting you a pointed look as if to say see. He had fought the decision up until the end, had even tried to tactically convince your daughter to stay home by getting a head start on preparing her favorite food. And well. She said no. So now the two of you are stuck having dinosaur chicken nuggets for dinner without her. 

She’s got her little travel bag on now, tiny feet stuffed into her ladybug rain boots because it had rained last night and she’s awfully addicted to jumping in muddy puddles. She’s absolutely adorable, your little girl, and you think Namjoon might’ve let out a tiny sob earlier. (Or maybe it was you.)

Namjoon joins you at the front door. “Be good,” he warns her. His eyes are suspiciously wet, but you don’t say anything because yours are too. You’re both crouched in front of her, her big eyes glancing back and forth between the two of you without a care in the world. Mixing your self-assured personality with Namjoon’s (mostly) composed attitude was quite possibly the worst genetic crossover to ever happen; Hyejoo doesn’t even seem remotely bothered by the fact she’s spending her first night away from home. Meanwhile, you and Namjoon are on the verge of a joint breakdown. 

Anyway, Namjoon gives in first. “Love you forever, princess,” he tells her, their ritual expression, and kisses her forehead. 

She accepts it and then, in an unexpected turn of events, surges forward to hug him around the neck. “Love you pporever, daddy,” she repeats, and your heart feels so painfully full at the sight, like you just unlocked a new life achievement from seeing your daughter and her father be so cute together. You don’t get to coo at them for long, because then she’s giving you a warm hug as well, the same phrase muttered in your ear. 

It’s the hardest thing about parenting. 

Seeing your kid slowly broaden their horizons, meeting new people and learning new things. Leaving home. (Granted, she’ll be back by tomorrow afternoon but even that feels like an eternity away to the dramatic parents you and Namjoon have become.) The second goodbye on Jimin’s doorstep isn’t any easier, especially when Hyejoo tugs on your arm and asks you to “say night to daddy please” for her, and your heart breaks just a little more. Jimin flashes you an understanding smile but all you want to do is punch him in the nose for ever telling Yerin what a sleepover is. 

You get home and Namjoon is in a calmer state by now, some old sitcom he hates playing on the TV. Usually, this time of day is reserved for his daily phonemic lessons with Hyejoo, drilling the f sound into her tiny brain, so you guess this is his preferred method of coping in its place: torturing himself with some boring television show. 

“Hey,” he says, and you crawl into his lap with a sad sniffle. “Shh,” he soothes, hand on the back of your head as he guides you into his chest. You’re actually crying now, which is super embarrassing in itself considering you scolded Namjoon for this exact behavior last night. He doesn’t mention it as he pats your back, stupid sitcom paused in favor of soothing you with the deep vibrations of his voice. “Hye’s gonna be back tomorrow, baby.”

“I want her back now,” you huff, vaguely aware of how childish and silly you sound. The tables have turned, and you find yourself wishing you had the same emotional fortitude as Namjoon now. All those parenting books have clearly amounted for something. Somehow, you will the feeling back into your body and pull away from his chest. You must look a mess because he doesn’t even try to hide the amusement on his face. “This is the worst day of my life.” 

Namjoon laughs, deep and hearty, with his eyes squeezing shut from the force. “Come on, wifey, those chicken nuggets aren’t gonna eat themselves.”

It’s quite possibly the most boring evening you’ve had in years. 

(The internet calls it new parent syndrome, where you’re so undeniably in love with your first child and the parenting experience that the rest of the world is put on pause.)

You love Namjoon, honest. But you love your daughter Hyejoo even more— it’s not a controversial sentiment when you know he’s the same way! —and going back to a regular adult life sans kids absolutely sucks. (Or so you thought.)

Kids are prone to asking weirdly philosophical questions, a fact that had greatly delighted you when Hyejoo first started speaking. Who am I? What’s money? Why not? It could get annoying sometimes, trying to answer all of Hyejoo’s curiosities. But as you begin on your second batch of dinosaur chicken nuggets, all you can think about is how Jimin gets to answer them tonight. 

Anyway, seven rolls around and you and Namjoon are bored. You can only watch so many episodes of Seinfield before you get tired of feigning interest, so you retire from the living room for the night. “I’m gonna take a bath,” you tell him, but he’s as brain dead as you by now. 

A second later, “lemme join.” 

It’s been a while since the two of you have squeezed into the bathtub together, usually assigning each other days to individually join Hyejoo. So it’s really not either of your faults when you realize a second too late how small the space is. One on each end, feet bumping into each other with every movement, it’s like trying to squeeze two feet into one shoe. You try to readjust yourself, but the bath flooring is slippery and you nearly take away Namjoon’s procreative abilities with a mighty kick. 

To make a long story short, you end up pressed against his chest, Namjoon’s thick thighs framing you as you relax into the steaming water. Instinctively, he reaches for Hyejoo’s bottle of baby shampoo that sits on the tub’s ledge and only catches himself just as the first droplet is meeting his palm. “Oh, fuck,” he sighs, quickly closing the lid before he can waste any more precious product. “Shit, I’m so sad.”

You snort, sinking farther back into his chest. He’s warm and soft in all the right ways, the hot water making him slippery. “What did we even do before Hyejoo?” you ask, reaching into the deepest crevices of your mind for answers. Namjoon’s hand comes around, fingers sprawled out over your knee, the one you have propped up and breaking the water’s surface 

He makes a rather vague sound, something like I don’t know, as he lolls forward, forehead on your shoulder. “Go on dates,” he responds eventually. “Fuck like crazy.” 

You roll your eyes. “Besides that,” you chide, pinching the back of his palm. “Don’t we have any hobbies? Any interests?” He doesn’t answer, which is all the answer you need. Why didn’t you get into puzzle solving back when it was a trend? “Is this what our life has become? Crying in a bathtub at seven pm because our emotional support child isn’t here?”

“Our only child,” he corrects. Namjoon tries to placate your looming existential crisis with a kiss to your shoulder, lips against wet skin, that he trails up to your neck. “And what’s wrong with going on dates and fucking?” he murmurs, hands around your stomach. “That’s how we got here,” he teases, and you’re not sure if it’s the warm water or the way his voice is like melted chocolate dripping down your body, but you become all too aware of his presence at that moment. Particularly, of the plush lips mindlessly kissing your shoulder, the wet smack of their motions. 

Another kiss, this time right below your ear. It has your head rolling to the side, exposing more skin for him to kiss up on. There’s still that overwhelming cloud of worry in the back of your mind, but it’s gradually nudged away by Namjoon’s warm hands on your skin. Sensing your weakening resolve, Namjoon strikes again. A hand slips down over your stomach, brushes over your belly button and finds itself between your thighs. “You used to love date nights, baby,” he says, the pad of his pointer finger grazing your clit. 

It’s been so long since you and Namjoon have been alone like this, months since you’ve been able to touch him beyond a simple make out session, a halfhearted grope beneath the sheets. Your daughter, as much as you loved her, made intimacy impossible for the two of you. She was always around, always looking for one or the both of you, so there was never time to even think about getting frisky. 

Only now, with his finger circling your clit, do you realize the blessing in disguise that was your daughter’s first slumber party away from home. 

His finger nudges your clit, flicks it teasingly. “Why don’t you let me take care of you, hm?” he hums, the hand that had been soothingly stroking the inside of your thigh coming up to rub at your breasts. 

“Yes, please,” you whine. Resting your head on his shoulder leaves Namjoon with a clear view down your front, lips kissing and sucking along your neck. His huge hand palms your breast, massaging the sensitive skin. You hadn’t realized how sore you’d been until now, his nimble fingers pressing deliciously into the skin. If your nipples weren’t already hard before, they certainly were now. 

He traps one pearled nipple between two fingers, the sudden pinch making you hiss. “Easy, now,” he chuckles, his low tenor paired with his wandering hands making your eyes roll back. 

Namjoon liked to use a higher tone around the house. He read somewhere that children prefer lighter, sweeter tones, so the last few years have been spent listening to him lighten the tone of his voice for the sake of your daughter. The deeper, growlier voice that had first made you fall in love with him became a rarity in your household, reserved for quiet nights in the living room or long drives where Hyejoo was asleep in the backseat. Only then does he unleash the gravelly qualities of his voice. 

Then, and apparently, now. 

His doll-like lips press against your jaw, suck lightly enough to make your body tingle. “Do you remember how it was the first time?” he says suddenly, his hot breath against your neck. 

Namjoon’s got your clit trapped between two wandering fingers, has your pussy twitching with the vibrations of his voice alone. And for some reason, he’s trying to reminisce about your first time sleeping together. 

“N- Not really,” you confess, subtly reaching down. You cover his palm with yours, hoping your touch will encourage him to carry on with his actions. It doesn’t. It just leaves both your hands hovering over your pussy, your thighs instinctively closing in on them to keep him there. Namjoon responds to that, releasing the breast he had been gently massaging in order to pry your legs apart. He does it so easily, despite the way your legs feel tight as hell, and the fact makes you whimper. 

Once he’s got his hands back between your thighs— this time, he uses one hand to carefully part your quivering lips, the other one gingerly pressing down against your clit to draw the most heavenly sensations out of you —Namjoon feels the need to dive into a recap of your first fuck. “You were so cute,” he laughs, and you don’t know if you should take offense. Well, considering you're married and have a kid now, it’s probably too late to say anything anyway. His hand suddenly switches gears, three fingers joining together to begin caressing them over your throbbing clit. “Kept talking to me so politely, even when you were creaming my cock.”

You scoff, but it gets cancelled out by the moan he draws out of you. “D- Didn’t know you that well,” you remind him, your thighs twitching. You desperately want to buck forward into his giving hands, want to feel the true power of those long, pretty fingers on your cunt. 

Behind you, Namjoon’s cock grows thick, his breathing a slow and steady pace by your ear. You can already imagine how heavy he is, the vein that runs along the underside and throbs with each new bit of stimulus he receives. Normally you would reach back and try to offer him the same helping hand he gives you, but your thighs feel wobbly already. Your libido has been dormant for so long that even just the barest flick of his thumb has you dissolving into his arms like this is your first time. 

It’s as if Namjoon’s sensing your inner battle, a muffled laugh against the side of your neck. “This is about you,” he reminds you. As much as you want to protest, a sudden hard rub against your quivering lips has you gasping for breath. “Give me a kiss,” he commands softly, nudging his nose against the side of your face. It takes a second for you to ground yourself, draw yourself away from your building pleasure, to turn toward his waiting lips. 

Namjoon kisses you slowly, like he’s taking his time with you. For the first time in a long time, he truly can. He doesn’t have to worry about a certain someone waking up in the middle of the night or walking in or anything along those lines, lips molding against yours. Plush as always, the faint taste of dinosaur chicken nuggets clinging to his lips. It makes you laugh a little, drawing away with an airy giggle. Namjoon smiles at your reaction, murmuring a soft, “what is it?”

You shake your head, eyes fluttering shut as he continues his circular motions against your clit. “Nothing,” you pant, finally getting in your first thrust against his fingers. “I just really need you,” you say instead, pushing his hand harder down against you. 

You’re feeling a little antsy, having been deprived of this sensation for so long. Namjoon knows this, which is why he very purposely slows down. “There’s no rush,” he smirks, placing a kiss against your chin. “How do you want it, baby?”

The inside of your brain is a scrambled mess, filled with fantasies and ideas that have been plaguing you for months. There’s so much you want to do, want to try, but it’s like your brain completely blanks out when he asks. It’s just as you’re beginning to formulate a thought that you’re interrupted by the sound of your ringtone in the other room. Your husband’s arms tighten around you. “Don’t go,” he says quietly, the tip of his nose running along your neck. It’s so tempting to stay here, to let yourself go in his arms and chase the pleasure you’ve been craving for so long. 

But the endless possibilities of who exactly could be calling wins over. Was it work? Was it your parents? Jimin?

It is with a heavy sigh that you reach for Namjoon’s hand, slowly pushing him away from your cunt. “I’m sorry, honey,” you frown, standing up out of the tub. Your legs really do feel like jelly, and you nearly slip and crack your skull on the porcelain edge. Luckily, Namjoon is there to steady you with two secure hands on your waist. “I’ll make it quick,” you reassure him, dropping a kiss on his pouty lips as you fasten a towel around your body. 

The phone is just starting up its final ring when you reach it. It’s Jimin, and you’re torn between being thankful that you’re getting word on Hyejoo and full blown panic from the fact Jimin is calling you while Hyejoo is in his care. The unease has you accepting the call without a second more to waste. “Hello?” you say, hand tightening on the front of your towel. Stray water droplets trace ticklish trails down the backs of your thighs.

“__?” comes Jimin’s sweet voice. It’s normally soothing, but right now it has every hair on your body standing on end. Before you can even respond, Jimin is jumping headfirst into a whirlwind of a conversation. “Sorry for calling so late, but I just wanted to check in on you, babe. I know you were really panicked about Hye’s first night away from home, but don’t worry! Me and the missus are doing everything we can to make sure she’s fine.”

His confidence reassures you, lessens the weight that had been sitting on your chest all afternoon. But at the same time, you find yourself wanting to throttle him. 

Your gorgeous, sexy hunk of a husband is sitting in the other room, cock at full mast and ready to pleasure you to the moon and back, and here you are listening to Jimin brag about how good of a caretaker he is. You were definitely going to make Jimin pay for this. 

Deep breaths, you tell yourself, toying with a stray thread on your towel. “Really,” you drawl, and you can practically see Jimin’s ego swell over the line. 

“Yup,” Jimin agrees, and by the sounds of it, doesn’t seem like he’s hoping to end this call anytime soon. You want to shoulder part of the blame; you had been extra sad and mopey when you dropped your daughter off. On top of being a good dad, Jimin was also a good friend. It was only naturally he wanted to reassure you when he could. 

Still, the memory of Namjoon’s wet chest was calling out to you. 

“The girls are playing princess in the living room with the missus right now,” Jimin chats on. “New dresses and everything— the Yerin Birthday Special —and they asked me to be their handsome prince!” You sincerely cannot wait for the day you get to introduce Jimin to your right fist. 

“That’s great,” you offer, not that he’s really listening. He’s too busy talking about Yerin (and making sure to include Hyejoo in for your sake) and how amazing it is to watch your kids grow up before your very eyes. And while you agree with the sentiment, you really wish he had called you and told you this earlier, when you were at the peak of your motherly meltdown. Not now with Namjoon waiting for you in the bathtub. Was the water even warm anymore? 

The mind blowing orgasm practically slips from your fingertips the longer Jimin talks. “Anyway! Enough about them. I’m thinking of trying out that blueberry bread recipe that aired on TV last night. You know, the one they had that actress make.”

You’ve just about resigned yourself to listening to Jimin talk about his love for pastries for the next thirty minutes when something brushes up behind you. “What the fu—“

He’s so tall and broad, practically covers your entire frame when he stands so close. And his smile is so pretty when he aims it your way. “Sh,” Namjoon murmurs, gesturing towards your phone.  

“__?” Jimin calls. “Everything alright?” 

Namjoon nods eagerly, the hands on your waist properly positioning you in front of him. It’s with a shudder running down your spine that you respond. “I’m fine,” you tell Jimin, letting go of the front of your towel when Namjoon abruptly pushes you over. The white comforter infused with both of your scents comes all too close, your elbow barely managing to reach out in time to catch you.  

Wide eyed, you turn to throw Namjoon a scandalized look over your shoulder. He meets you with a close-mouthed smile, the dimples in his cheeks making themselves known. His chest is drier now, the smooth planes covered in a thin dewy glow and a spattering of droplets he missed. There’s a towel around his waist that’s barely doing its job, especially when you catch sight of the erection tenting beneath it. 

“As I was saying,” Jimin rambles on. Namjoon nods towards the device, refusing to move again until you finally turn back around to finish your conversation with Jimin. “That actress fucked it up so bad. They really give anyone with a pretty face screen time these days, huh? At least I know how to properly preheat an oven.”

You nod. “You do make the best cookies in town,” you respond, a ball of anticipation building in your throat from the mere fact Namjoon is standing behind you. 

It’s completely warranted once you feel two cold fingers trail up the back of your thigh, your towel gradually pushed up to drape around your waist. The air in your room is a little chilly, and the goosebumps that raise on your skin are partly due to that, as well as the ghostlike touch of Namjoon’s fingers. “Pretty,” he murmurs, so deep and gravelly it has you shuddering.  

Two fingers dance along your skin, and you subconsciously jolt away when they meet the tender skin around your pussy. By your ear, Jimin says, “if I completely fuck it up, we’ll just pretend this conversation never happened. Deal?”

Using your own body against you, Namjoon lets one finger dip just the smallest bit into your quivering hole. You clench up, thighs trembling when he eventually pulls it back out and traces your own wetness over your folds. “Perfect,” you bite out, clutching at the sheets beneath you as Namjoon reaches for your forgotten clit. It’s still so sensitive from your little fun in the bath, and it takes every ounce of strength in you to hold back the whiny gasp in your throat. 

Behind you, Namjoon suddenly presses in close. One hand on your hip, he gently encourages you onto the bed. Your knees sink into the mattress, one less strain on your legs. “Good girl,” he praises quietly, rewarding your behavior with a finger sinking into your cunt. 

“Joo—“ you almost slip, burying your face into the sheets just in time. 

A devastatingly slow pace, his finger just barely moving in and out of you. The bulk of your pleasure is coming from that bundle of nerves towards your front, but the teasing gesture isn’t appreciated anyway. When he leans over you, breath against your neck, you feel the length of his cock against your thigh. “He’s asking you a question,” Namjoon whispers, “answer him, baby.”

You nod, eyes rolling to the back of your head when he presses himself closer. Jimin hasn’t even noticed your lack of participation, mindlessly humming a song. The sounds of a running sink highlight his vocals. “Oh, absolutely,” you babble. “I wouldn’t tell a soul.” 

“Ha!” Jimin scoffs. “I knew I could always count on you, Miss __,” he snarks playfully. 

The hand toying with your clit comes around your waist, fingers stroking against your folds from this new angle. A silent moan has you writhing forward, unconsciously away from him as Jimin babbles on the other end of the line. He’s none the wiser to the lewd acts happening on the line, listening to the sound of his own voice. Namjoon lands a mean little bite against your shoulder, plunging his finger deeper inside of your clenching hole. 

Paired with his teasing fingers, it’s nearly impossible to withhold your moans, biting your lip until it stings. “Fuck, fuck,” you whimper against the sheets, holding your phone as far away as possible from your mouth as a litany of curse words spill from your lips. Namjoon chuckles at your dramatics, not like he has his fingers deep inside of you right now or anything. 

“So cute,” he hums, removing his hand from your clit to snatch your towel away. It gives way too easily, messily thrown over the edge of the bed. With your back completely exposed now, Namjoon wastes no time trailing a line of kisses up your spine, finishing off with an especially wet and hard one behind your ear. “Hang up now.”

His permission sets your body on edge, drawing your phone close again. Jimin is talking about dinner or something, you don’t even know. Not an ounce of remorse fills you when you clear your throat and hurriedly announce, “I have to—“ Namjoon’s cock, finally uncovered by his towel, presses against your folds and you nearly lose it. “—I have to go now, Jimin,” you say, leveling your breathing as best as you can. 

“Wait, what the fuck?” Jimin says, thrown off by your sudden departure. 

The mushroom tip of his cock kisses your clit. “Fuck— I really have to go.” And you hang up, chucking the phone off to the side hastily. With your hands both freed, you scramble onto your back, meeting the amused gaze of your husband behind you. “Fuck me, now.”

Namjoon laughs, reaching for the towel barely clinging onto his waist. One suave swoop later and it joins yours on the floor. “You did good,” he praises, lowering himself between your spread thighs. You roll your eyes, grabby hands reaching for his hips until he’s sitting snugly against you, cock resting over your throbbing cunt. 

“Yeah, yeah,” you snap, the tight feeling in your tummy growing with every second that passes. Namjoon isn’t as unaffected as he pretends to be, a pearly bead of cum appearing at the tip of his engorged cock. “Just fuck me now.”

He raises a brow. “Missionary?” As if it’s the first time. 

“Is there something wrong with it?” you ask anyway, self-consciously reaching an arm over yourself to cover your naked breasts. They’ve pebbled over just from his stare alone. 

Namjoon hesitates, the hand on your hip drawing slow circles with his thumb. Eventually, he responds with a halfhearted shrug. “It’s not the best.” This is news to you, and you find yourself sitting up at the sudden bomb he’s dropped. 

He’s still hard as rock between you, his dick laying almost artfully against your slit. You really just want to throw aside all reservations and begin grinding against him, penetration be damned, but now Namjoon’s got that thoughtful quirk to his lips. The one that usually accompanies any big brained idea, so you settle down, nudging him with your thigh until he’s looking at you again. “Penny for your thoughts?” What you really want to say is please fuck me like I’m just another cum rag of yours and make it hurt, but alas. 

Namjoon sits back on his haunches. “I read somewhere that on your hands and knees is the best way to get pregnant.” You choke on your own tongue, face ablaze from his forward statement. Meanwhile, Namjoon is looking as relaxed as ever. 

You hadn’t really discussed children after Hyejoo. The wordless agreement had been that sure, you were both down for another kid sometime in the future. But the exact date had sort of been murky. Hyejoo is three now, and you heard from another mom that it’s difficult for children with wide age gaps to get along. You don’t want her growing up being far removed from another sibling. 

But also, now?

It’s like Namjoon knows your thoughts before you even do. “Alright, wifey, say no more,” he says, leaning down to place a kiss against your lips. “I’ll get the condom, alright?”

And then he’s stepping off the bed, every muscle of his toned body flexing as he swaggers over towards the dresser. He’s a walking dream, the physical embodiment of all your crazy sex fantasies, and he wants to fuck a baby into you. Your pussy says yes, but your rationality is still on the fence. 

You roll onto your side, head propped into your open palm. “You want another baby?” you ask tentatively. Namjoon shrugs, carefully opening the new box of condoms you had bought half a year ago. 

“It wouldn’t hurt to have another kid,” he answers, procuring a tiny foil packet from the box and returning to his spot between your legs. It’s like staring at a marble statue from this angle, the defined planes of his chest and abdomen, the gorgeous slope of his nose, the sharp angles of his face. You really lucked out. 

Your decision comes just as he’s easing the rubber over the tip of his cock, the swollen head just barely enveloped. You place a hand against his wrist, earning his attention. “Take it off,” you mumble, and you swear on your entire life he swells another inch. 

“Oh, baby,” he groans, hastily throwing the condom somewhere across the room. He rolls over you, bulging arms sweeping you up into his embrace, lips capturing yours in a sloppy kiss. You whimper, letting his tongue push itself past your lips. When he pulls away, it’s with a wet pop and glistening lips. They’re so puffy now, flushed a nice rosy color, that makes him look even more handsome when he smiles down at you. “Gonna look so pretty all pregnant,” he beams, placing a chaste kiss against you one last time before he’s hurriedly rolling you onto your stomach. 

You hide your bashful expression against the sheets, suddenly feeling very shy before him. But then Namjoon’s cock is running along your lips and you’re left a shivering mess. “Please just fuck me,” you beg hoarsely, and Namjoon obeys. 

“Whatever you want, wifey,” he teases, and before you can call him out for his cheesiness, he’s pressing his thumb into your aching hole once more. “Is this okay?” he asks, somberly for the first time in what seems like forever. 

“I’m okay,” you confess, a little shyly now that you know his true motives.  

Namjoon chuckles, quickly removing his finger from inside of you to give your ass one soothing pat. “Going in,” he warns you, and finally, you’re rewarded for all your struggles. It’s only as his mushroom head squeezes in that you realize you could have done with a bit more stretching, but that thought fades away the more and more he pushes in. “Fuck,” he groans, the low intonation of his voice making your toes curl.

If it’s not his voice, it’s the sheer length of his cock inside of you. The girth makes your spine tingle, has you muffling a pitiful whimper into the comforter beneath you. “Relax for me,” he directs, and then suddenly he’s placing a palm against your back, pushing you further down. “Hips up.” 

You groan. The normally soft fabric of the blanket feels like hell on your sensitive breasts. “I’m trying,” you whine, pushing back onto him in an effort to familiarize yourself with his cock again. It’s been so long since he’s been inside of you like this, since he’s filled you so well, that your body acts a little stupid now. He hasn’t even begun thrusting and you already feel like you’ll cum just from this.  

The angle is different than your usual style, has him moving along every inch of you as he sinks in. Two big hands grab at your waist, manhandling you closer to him until you’re just like he wants you to be. “There we go,” he sighs, and with him motionless, you finally relax. It’s about a two second pause before he begins to draw himself back out. “How do you want it?” he grunts, but it’s lost beneath the moan that escapes you. It’s the same question he asked you in the tub, right before Jimin called, except this time you have an answer. 

“Fast,” you gasp, the pain from the stretch finally, finally, melting away as your body grows accustomed to his presence inside of you. “Do it fast, please.”

Namjoon does as he’s told, waiting until he’s pulled out until the tip to satisfy your requests. And then he’s off. 

Your body isn’t as young as it once was, left a little worn from the entire child-bearing process. Sometimes you wonder how exactly you and Namjoon would fuck until sunrise before, how your sex drive was so high that it allowed such a thing to happen. Admittedly, there’s currently a stiffness inside of you that has been there for a while now, and you barely remember how you got rid of it before. Apparently, this is how.

Namjoon’s hard cock rams into you once, makes you release the most embarrassingly loud moan at the sudden intrusion, and it’s like all those months of tension that built up in your body are melted away. His cock pushes past your folds, creating a lewd squelching sound that would otherwise leave you mortified to learn it came from your body. You shudder, desperately pushing your ass back against him in a feeble attempt to feel it again. 

“Still so fucking tight for me,” he growls, snapping his hips forwards. His skin slaps against yours, leaves you feeling tender from the brutal movements of his body. But at the same time, it feels absolutely terrific. 

Your lips are still coated in your own wetness, have him noisily moving in and out. “J- Joon,” you whimper softly, but you doubt he hears it over the sound of his own labored breathing. “More.”

He responds with a sudden piston inside of you that has the tip of his cock nearly kissing your cervix. “More?” he huffs, the hand on your back pressing down until you fear you’ll become one with the mattress. “You want more?” You nod hurriedly, somehow managing to stretch a hand down between you to toy with your clit. The brush of your own fingers has you bucking back onto him in surprise.

Wordlessly, he speeds up his pace, thrusting his hips into your velvety walls at a faster speed than before. It’s a weird sensation, a sort of ticklish feeling m that makes you tremble with each roll forward. You can’t say the two of you have done it in this position a lot, always preferring the more romantic missionary position to anything else, but this experience was quickly making you an avid believer of its validity as a top tier sex position. 

You swirl your pointer finger around your clit, trying to sync up your shaky touch with his steady thrusts. It’s useless, because every time you feel like you’ve gotten into the same groove, Namjoon one ups you by hauling you back against him. “Oh, f- fuck,” you sob, clawing at the sheets beneath you. 

Namjoon groans, momentarily pausing his rapid thrusts to roll his buried cock against you. “Come on, baby,” he husks, the hilt of his cock kissing your folds. 

There’s a lot of built up sexual tension inside of you, months on top of months of nothingness. Not to mention that little scene in the bathtub just now. So you’re not really surprised that your orgasm rears its head so early, curling up tightly in your stomach the longer Namjoon fucks you. He’s back to thrusting now, shallow little movements that make you see stars every time his cock glides inside of you. “Joon, I'm gonna...” you rasp out pitifully, grinding back against him. 

“Whenever you want,” he murmurs, leaning forward to press a kiss against your shoulder. It’s sweet, but on top of that, it has him pushing in further than before, finally pressed against that sensitive spot inside of you that makes your entire body lock up. You sob, thighs quivering when he reaches an arm around you. It’s almost romantic how your hands meet, his fingers covering yours as he guides them over your clit slowly. “Give it to me, baby,” he croons, lips pressed securely against your neck. He leaves soft kisses there, smooches really, that make you melt. 

Another shallow buck of his hips forward and you’re cumming, breaths picking up until they accumulate into a choked wail against the sheets. “Fuck— oh, fuck,” you cry, your thighs spasming from the force of your first satisfying orgasm in months. Namjoon holds you through it, slowly thrusting inside of you until he’s drawn out your entire orgasm.

The new added pleasure makes his movements sound even wetter, dirtier even. “That’s it,” he purrs, pushing himself back up to his full height behind you. You feel absolutely boneless beneath him, laying limply against the mattress as Namjoon repositions your hips for himself. “Can I finish like this, sweetheart?” he asks anyway, thumbs drawing a soothing pattern along your hip. 

You can barely catch your breath, so you settle on a halfhearted nod that has him huffing out a laugh. 

For some reason, Namjoon fucks you harder once he knows you’ve had your fill. Like he’s trying to draw another orgasm out of you, but is also the least bit concerned with you. Honestly, it works. He moves fast and hard, like he has no regard for your pleasure, and for some reason that turns you on more than it should. It’s this weird fantasy of yours, to be mistreated by a man as respectful as Namjoon, and you find yourself weirdly fulfilling it now as he fucks his cock into you. 

His fingers dig into your skin, wildly bucking into you as he chases his own high, and it’s embarrassing how quickly a second one builds up for you. You moan at one particular thrust, body sensitive all over. “Oh,” you whimper, “Namjoon.”

He grunts, your cries fueling him on as he continues his mad race to the end. “Gonna cum with me again?” he pants, his quick pace rocking you forward. You nod, using your killer grip on the sheets to ground yourself as you weakly attempt to meet his thrusts. “Aren’t you the sweetest,” he hums, and doesn’t let you respond as he continues to jackhammer his way into your pussy at a bruising pace. 

It takes a few more thrusts, and one whiny cry of his name— “come on, Joonie,” you whimper, turning to throw him a teary-eyed gaze over your shoulder; he shudders at the sight —until Namjoon is finally tipped over the edge, shooting his pleasure deep into you on the next thrust. It’s warm, paints your walls and threatens to spill out when he finally pulls out. 

But Namjoon has read up, using those big strong arms of his to keep you from collapsing onto your tummy as he scrambles around for something to keep your hips up. “It sticks better this way,” he says, a sheen of sweat against his temples when he flops down beside you. 

“What sticks better,” you groan, the achy feeling of just having your world rocked quickly settling into your bones. 

Namjoon leans forward and places a kiss against your lips, as if saying here, for all your hard work. “You know... it,” he shrugs, hands behind his head as he prepares himself to supervise your post-sex nap, just to make sure you don’t accidentally move around and let his cum leak out. “You did good, wifey,” he praises with another smooch. “Maybe we should let Hyejoo sleep over at Jimin’s more.”

Hyejoo’s return is the highlight of the year. 

You pick her up around noon, and your heart nearly grows ten sizes when you see her come running down Jimin’s front steps and into your arms. “Hi, mommy,” she beams, the same smile as Namjoon. And just like Namjoon, you can’t stop yourself from covering her face in tiny kisses. She says they tickle and squirms and squeals in your embrace. 

Jimin’s at the door with this weirdly blank look on his face. “Hey, Jimin,” you call out, helping Hyejoo load her bag into the backseat.

“Hey…” he greets, just as Hyejoo frantically begins calling for you to buckle her in. “Um, __,” Jimin says, but you’re a little busy securing the tiny love of your life into her booster seat, so you just throw him a quick glance to let him know you’re listening. Kinda. “There’s something I have to tell you—“

“I wanna see daddy!” Hyejoo babbles from the backseat, wildly waving her hands around as you finally close the door on her. With it shut, her loud voice is drowned out and you’re left raising a brow at Jimin as you round the front of the car. 

“What’s up?” you ask. 

Jimin comes down the steps, awkwardly hovering by the front of your car. “Um, when we were on the phone—“ Hyejoo knocks her tiny hands against the window, gesturing for you to hurry up. You flash Jimin an apologetic frown at the interruption. “Well, you see. She kinda heard us— well, me—” 

Another flurry of knocks, and you can’t wait to relay to Namjoon how excited your daughter had been to see him again. It’ll boost his ego, not that he really needs it to be any bigger. “That’s fine,” you tell Jimin, swinging your door open. Immediately, Hyejoo’s high-pitched voice fills the space between you and Jimin. “You know I don’t mind talking to the missus,” you joke, nudging his side. “She’s my friend too, ya know.”

“Gotta show daddy something!” Hyejoo shouts from the backseat, has this big smile on her face that makes you smile as well. 

Beside you, Jimin is quickly falling apart. “No, well—” you drop down into your seat “it wasn’t her who heard—“ You shut the door, lowering the window to thank Jimin one more time. Hyejoo beats you to it.

“Bye, Mr. Jimin!” she says, tiny legs kicking around all wildly in her excitement. You shake your head with a grin, waving goodbye to Jimin one last time as you pull out of his driveway. 

“Daddy!” Hyejoo shrieks upon entering your home. Her tiny overnight bag is tossed down at the entryway, ladybug rain boots haphazardly kicked towards the general direction of the shoe closet. Namjoon had been upstairs in his study when you left, but he now comes bounding down the steps at the sound of your daughter’s voice. He cries out a dopey, “princess”, as he scoops her up in his big arms. He does a twirl and everything, so dramatic. But it makes Hyejoo giggle like crazy. 

She allows one big fat kiss against her chubby cheeks before she’s shushing him with the news of her announcement. “Daddy, look,” she beams, holding his face between her tiny hands. “I can say the f sound now!”

Namjoon has been avidly working towards this ability for months now. Namjoon, who has spent nights reading every page of every child development book possible, who has spent hours decorating pretty flashcards for her, who has sectioned off time from his busy schedule everyday just to go over lessons with her. Well, Namjoon looks over the goddamn moon at the news. 

“Let’s hear it, honey,” you urge, stepping in when his happiness renders him incapable of speech. So he just nods along, looks like a bobblehead doll beside you. 

And with both of her proud, sometimes overprotective, parents standing before her, Hyejoo puts on a big grin and says, “fuck.”

Copyright © 2020, 1kook on tumblr. absolutely NO reposts allowed.

[uiruu]

long post with phonology stuff dont read if you arent interested lol

hey so i have a conlang, and i wanna borrow loanwords from korean, but i’m having trouble deciding which vowel phonemes i should use to represent certain korean vowels. 

here is the korean vowel inventory: /i e̞ a o u ʌ̹ ɯ/ (with some speakers having a length distinction in initial syllables, and many if not most young speakers having no such distinction) (im not counting ø and y because theyve turned into we and ɥi for most modern speakers, and im not treating e and ɛ as distinct, cause again, they arent for most speakers)

here is my conlang’s vowel inventory: /i e a o u ə~ɘ/, as well as long versions of each. the long version of /ə~ɘ/ is /ɨ:/, though the rest of the long/short pairs have the same vowel quality. in the fictional history of my conlang, the original vowel was /ɨ/, and the short version has lowered to somewhere around /ə/ or /ɘ/. short /i/ and /u/ might also be lowering, but in the language’s fictional history, the lowering of /ɨ/ occurred first, and that’s the state that the language is in right now. 

so.... some of these are easy, right? /a/ for /a/, /e/ for /e/, /o/ for /o/, etc. the problem lies in the korean vowels /ʌ̹/ and /ɯ/. now, if i want to keep these vowels distinct from others as they are in korean, i could represent /ʌ̹/ with /ə~ɘ/, and /ɯ/ with /ɨ:/, since they have similar vowel qualities. but... the problem is... often my /ə~ɘ/ vowel is more like /ɘ/ and just sounds better that way to me, which is noticeably higher than /ʌ̹/, and doesnt feel like a perfect match. and i dont want to lower that vowel to a /ə/ in every situation just because i wanna capture the sounds of korean lol, just for a couple loanwords and proper names.... the other problem is that /ɨ:/ is inherently always long, and /ɯ/ isn’t. i’ve been toying with the idea of getting rid of phonemic vowel length and having long vowels have different vowel qualities from their short counterparts so they arent just merged, but historically long vowels would still affect the stress of a word in my language. so, a korean name like /t͡ɕinsʰoɭ/ would be /t͡sinsol/, and inflecting that name for the genitive case would result in /ˈt͡sinsolen/, but a name like /hasʰɯɭ/ would be /hasɨ:l/ and thus /haˈsɨ:len/, with the stress on the penultimate long vowel. that’s not a huge deal, but it just doesnt sound right to me, i dont like that lol.

another option is to just merge the two vowels into the short /ɘ/, which is fair, but.... sigh.... when it comes to things like this, i want to be as perfect as possible, and something about this solution just rubs me the wrong way. same with treating /ɯ/ as /ɘ/ and /ʌ̹/ as /o/, i don’t like that solution. this feels like something i should just get over though... it’s okay if i dont have a perfect one-to-one representation for all of another languages phonemes... sometimes i’m just gonna have to merge them. i hate doing it, but it works, and it’s not like it can’t lead to other interesting alterations and such... idk... 

i think i’m leaning towards treating them both as /ɘ/, unless an instance of /ɯ/ is word initial, in which case it could be /ɨ:/, but i’m not sure.

i’ve made other decisions to preserve the korean sound as much as possible already though, like for instance using /t͡s/ for /t͡ɕ/ even though i have /t͡ʃ/ in my language... partially because i’ve actually started to want to pronounce /t͡ʃ/ as /ʈ͡ʂ/, and palatalize /t͡si/ and possibly /ki/ into /t͡ɕi/ anyway, so using /t͡s/ to represent /t͡ɕ/ makes more sense to me than using /ʈ͡ʂ/. the problem is when it’s not korean /t͡ɕi/, but rather something like /t͡ɕu/.... do i go with /t͡su/ or /t͡sju/? on the one hand, /t͡sju/ could turn into /t͡ɕu/ if it palatalizes, but on the other hand, that’s not how languages ever borrow words haha, they borrow based on the sounds that are closest at the time of borrowing, and then sounds may change further afterwards, causing the original and borrowed versions of the word to deviate. i’m undecided on this, cause /t͡ɕ/ could be reasonably borrowed as /t͡s/, /t͡sj/, or /t͡ʃ~ʈ͡ʂ/ even without the idea that the language could have its own /t͡ɕ/ one day. 

i have merged things in some areas though, when it’s unavoidable. merging the two /e/s is fine, korean does that anyway most of the time. i’m not sure if i should treat the fortis consonants as geminates, but i cant have geminates word initially in my language anyway, and i dont distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated, so all three serieses of korean obstruents are merged word-initially. 가, 카, and 까 would all be /ka/ in my language. 아가, 아카, and 아까 might differ though, being /aga/, /aka/, and either /aka/ or /ak:a/. i’m not gonna create aspiration in my language or fortis stops just in order to romanize/conlang-ize korean words haha. this isn’t a conlang based on korean, i’m just trying to figure out how to do loanwords and proper nouns. 

any thoughts or opinions or feedback from phonology people who do conlangs and know about korean? phonology is my main area of interest in linguistics, and much of the reason i even have a conlang is for it to a playground for me to experiment with different ideas i have for sound changes and things like that. so yeah, i’m trying to figure out what i want to do about this instead of just going “eh, whatever”, because this is the interesting part to me haha. 

[eldritchsurveys]

691.

Do you listen to music while you fill out surveys? >> Sometimes.

In the past week, what song have you listened to the most often? >> I don’t think I’ve listened to any song more often than any other on my playlist this past week.

What was the last thing you shared with someone else? >> I don’t remember.

While playing video games, do you prefer being first or second player? >> I don’t usually play co-op games, but on the occasion that I do, I don’t care which player I am.

What is the most difficult word for you to pronounce? >> I can’t think of any words that I have difficulty pronouncing aside from words in languages I don’t speak and don’t have experience articulating the phonemes in.

What did you have to do for the last homework you were assigned? >> ---

You've planned a roadtrip. Where are you going, and who's coming too? >> I don’t know, I wouldn’t be planning any roadtrips because I don’t drive.

Do you have an overactive imagination? >> It’s not overactive, it’s just active.

What was the last important thing that you thought about? >> I don’t know.

Generally, do you call people, or wait for them to call you? >> Generally, I don’t talk on the phone, period.

On average, how many texts do you send out each day? >> Usually zero, but sometimes two or three.

If a cop pulled you over for speeding, how would you respond? >> ---

Has anyone ever questioned your sanity? >> I don’t have to question it, I know it’s not up to social standard.

How many people do you depend on? >> Hm.

How many people do you think depend on you? >> ---

What is the worst color combination? >> I don’t like orange and blue, but it’s okay when Heartman does it.

Have you ever injured yourself walking around in the dark? >> I mean, probably.

When you get a papercut, how do you react? >> Er... “ouch”?

Can you type without looking down at the keyboard? >> Yeah.

At what age did you develop an interest in the opposite [or same] sex? >> Oh, who knows.

Are you or members of your family religious? >> I am not religious.

What is your opinion on religions other than your own? >> I find all religion to be of endless interest.

What's so scary about clowns, anyway? >> I don’t know, I’m not afraid of them. Maybe it’s some kind of uncanny valley effect.

When was the last time you acted like someone you're not? >> ---

Have you ever wished that something bad would happen to someone else? >> Of course.

When was the last time that you cleaned your room? >> It’s been a while, because usually all it needs is a quick vacuum and tidy. I’ll probably do a more extensive cleanout when it gets a little warmer.

How many hats do you own/wear? >> One.

What was the last thing that you printed? >> ---

Did the last song you listened to hold any special meaning? >> No, and I didn’t particularly like the song either.

Are you experiencing problems within a current relationship? >> I’m... experiencing problems with a relationship that I’m not having in this lifetime, but is still bothering me in this lifetime. Although “problems” is a weird way to put it, really. The “problem” is just bottomless grief.

When you're upset, who do you turn to? >> Can Calah. Does winter weather depress you? >> Yeah, it does. It never used to, and then I moved the fuck out here.

Who was the last person that you called? >> ---

What product was being advertised on the last commercial you saw? >> The last commercial I saw was on YouTube (on the television app, where ads aren’t blocked), and I don’t remember what it was for because we skipped it as soon as we could.

Do you ever wonder who sings the catchy commercial jingles? >> No. I’m pretty sure I could find out if I cared, but I don’t.

When you think about your last relationship, what song comes to mind? >> ---

Are there any lyrics to describe your current crush/relationship? >> No.

Who in your life makes you the most uncomfortable? >> No one in my life makes me uncomfortable, or they wouldn’t be there. There are people I see occasionally, or incidentally, that make me uncomfortable, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re “in my life”.

Do you ever receive comments on your weight? >> Not now.

Is there anything that you do just to make other people happy? >> Not solely for that reason, no.

When you need a temporary escape, what do you do? >> Go Inworld, I guess.

What was the last lie that you believed in? >> That I could use the beacon at the heart of Inworld to lure Heartman here. I really believed in it, and I really wanted it, for all of Our sakes. But the odds of that are so miniscule that it really wasn’t worth the mana drain, so I had to give up. And it kills me.

How long did your last feelings of heartbreak last? >> My last feelings of heartbreak are still here.

Is there any sport that you would want to learn to play? >> No.

What band would you most like to meet? >> I’ve met a lot of bands. The novelty has worn off.

Do you ever have difficulty opening pill-bottle caps? >> Occasionally, especially those ones where you have to line up the arrows and then pop the lid. Those are just so annoying.

Do you gain weight around the holidays? >> Not really. I also don’t eat much more than I usually do on the holidays, though.

Are you related to anyone famous, or to any historical figure? >> No.

If it was an option, would you take a trip into outerspace? >> I would desperately want to.

What was the last thing that you wrote down [with a pen/pencil]? >> I filled out that card they give you when I went to vote.

Has anyone told you that you have a nice smile? >> Yeah.

Are you uncomfortable with being photographed? >> Nowadays, yeah. Unless I’ve given explicit consent.

How vivid are your memories? >> It varies.

What's the earliest you've woken up in the past week? >> Four AM.

How many people have you talked to today? >> Just one.

What was the last reason behind why you went to the hospital? >> Again, I’m not telling this story.

When journaling, are you honest when documenting your feelings? >> I try to be, but I have a habit of being vicious to myself about my own feelings, which makes it difficult for me to even acknowledge their existence, let alone their depth. So it can be a struggle.

If you have a journal, do you ever worry others might find it? >> I mean, no. It’s online, people can find it. But the contents are only visible to either my friends list or myself, depending on what permissions I set individual entries to.

When you go camping, do you sleep in a tent or an RV? >> I’ve always camped in tents.

What's one ridiculous thing that you do? >> Hm.

Do you feel that you must wear make up to be attractive? >> No. If I already felt unattractive, makeup wouldn’t do shit to change my mind...

What was the last thing [other than the keyboard] that you touched? >> A tissue.

Ever done anything dangerous while driving with someone else in the car? >> I don’t drive.

Name someone you wish you could be closer with? >> ---

Have you ever played the license plate game on long car-trips? >> Yeah, I used to play it all the time as a kid. I kept charts (basically spreadsheets but hand-drawn) and everything.

Are you a secretive person, or are you open with your thoughts? >> I am... reserved, and distrustful, but not necessarily... not-open. It’s complicated, I guess.

What is the worst question that someone could ask you? >> I don’t know.

Do you talk to your pets? >> I talk to anyone’s pets.

Do you have a least favorite day of the year? >> No.

What traits do you look for in a potential BF/GF? >> ---

Would you date someone that had a different religion from you? >> I don’t date, but religious difference only matters to me if the other person is a fundamentalist or extremist member of their religion.

Right now, what's in your bookbag/backpack? >> A smaller backpack, lmao.

What's unique about your city or town? >> I don’t know what’s unique about Grand Rapids. It’s not the kind of place that you’d attribute uniqueness to, because it’s a very cookie-cutter, “we followed all the current urban trends” type of city. Being a “Beer City” isn’t even unique, because there are a few of those in the United States.

If you could say something to the world, what would you say? >> ---

[thepokeduck]

Zettai Tsuyoku Narimasu: You will definitely become strong

For most of my life, I've had a pretty disfavorable relationship with productivity. As a kid I was a lazy, dismotivated, never-crastinator. I seldom completed my homework, coasting by with mostly passable grades due to good test taking. I wouldn't do my chores, racking up punishments for weeks. Despite an exhaustion that I experienced nearly every day, I couldn't get myself off the computer and into bed until the small hours of the night. My first semester in college, I got such poor grades that I was placed on academic probation.

"You're so smart; I know you're capable of doing better. " My mom told me. "Sometimes you just have to sit down and get a thing done," my dad told me.

My dad ran his own company and my mom was a math and science teacher. Being naturally driven, self-motivated, and organized people, they didn't know how to help me. I'm not sure they even believed me when I told them that I really did want to do my homework, and to go to sleep early.  But none of the advice seemed to help me improve. Nothing I did seemed to break the cycle of procrastination.  I felt like a failure.

Tsuyoku Naritai ( 強くなりたい ) means "I want to become stronger." The Tsu is pronounced like the last phoneme of the word cats. Cats. Catsu. Tsuyoku. The R in Naritai is trickier. Think of the way you pronounce a soft t (or T-flap, for you linguistics nerds) in the word water or letter. Nari. Naritai. Tsuyoku Naritai.

Like I mentioned, I desperately wanted to become stronger. But nothing I tried solved my problems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I gravitated towards Japanese media which, as Eliezer Yudkowsky famously wrote, “Embodies the spirit of Tsuyoku Naritai more intensely than in any Western literature.”(x) One of my favorite things was the Pokémon anime. In the early episodes of the show the main character Ash oversleeps, struggles to catch Pokémon, and fails in understanding even the basic principles of a Pokémon type match up, sending in Electric type Pikachu against a fully resistant ground type in his first big match. Over the course of the series however, he catches more Pokémon, wins more battles, and finally learns how to use strategy to choose the best Pokémon for the match.

It was undoubtedly cathartic for me to see Ash Ketchum grow from a flailing disaster child to a somewhat competent Pokémon Trainer. Perhaps it gave me hope. Or maybe I just liked the cute monsters and the badly translated puns.

Fast forward a number of years. I was thinking of applying to programming bootcamp.  During a phone call with my mom, I expressed my worries: I did so poorly in school, collapsing under the workload. How would I manage in a rigorous bootcamp environment?

To my complete surprise she replied, "Honey, I should have said it more often but I'm so so proud of you. When you were facing dropping out of college, you turned things around and graduated. I was way too hard on you because of my own mindset and I really regret it."

Like a seismic tremor, my foundation of self-image was shaken, as the entire way I had framed my academic abilities seemed to flip in that moment. Could it have been true that I actually did quite well in school? Were there some beliefs about how far I ought to have progressed, or what skills I ought to have mastered that were making me miserable?

I called my dad to talk about the bootcamp idea. He too, was confident I could do it. "Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, " he said, "and underestimate what they can do in a year."

I think that was my problem. Each and every day, I saw myself undershoot my goals. I had this firmly held image of success and what that would be like, and every day that didn't fit that description was a failure.

Fueled by the newfound belief in my ability to succeed, and my plan to measure my progress over months not days,  I launched into my work. I set intermediate checkpoints along the way to keep myself on task. I gave myself permission to write code sitting sideways on a couch, and I finally taught myself how to say no to requests for my time and energy.

And as of last week, I have graduated from my full stack programming bootcamp in San Francisco, Hackbright Academy.

And so I think I can say with confidence, looking back over my entire life, that I am longer quite the flailing disaster child I used to be. (Even though I still have a ways to go ;) )

So, do not let a thought like "I'm not strong yet" or "I didn't do enough" color your perception of your journey. You may not see it, but every day that you don’t give up is the practice of tsuyoku naritai, ("I want to become strong.") And trust me, you will definitely become strong. "Zettai tsuyoku narimasu."

[dedalvs]

Övüsi: The Elvish Language from Bright

The Elves in Bright run the world. They’re literally in charge of everything, and they look down on everyone else. They’ve always been around (which is another way of saying I’ve now forgotten where geographically they were supposed to have originated), and though their language has changed, the Elves have prevented borrowings from other languages from “tainting” the “purity” of theirs.

The language itself has changed over the centuries, but older words have been preserved in their original forms for use in magic. Both modern Elvish and a couple of words of older Elvish appear in the film. The name of the language is Övüsi Kieru, which literally means “Elvish Tongue”, and despite having 9 vowel qualities, it does not have vowel harmony. The language is SOV and strongly head-final with thirteen cases and a verb system which is weird (I honestly still don’t get it).

Remember previously when I said I designed the Castithan language from Defiance to be spoken quickly—and how I failed? This time I tried to do it right—and I think I succeeded. You can really pick up some speed speaking this language, and the tongue twisters are minimal.

The orthography is a bit of a story. I created it to be excessively indulgent, and I think I succeed in that. When I showed the art department, though, they said it wasn’t excessively indulgent enough. They wanted more stuff about. So I had to take what, to my mind, was already a ridiculously gaudy writing system and make it gaudier. The result is, in my opinion, just silly in places. I suppose it’s in keeping with the Elves’ style of dress, but some of its excesses really tax credulity. You’ll see.

Below is the phonology and orthography of Övüsi:

Couple things here. First, you’ll notice long vowels for everything but mid vowels. This is my “Don’t make actors pronounce ee as anything other than [i]” sound change. Old long mid vowels broke, becoming a high vowel followed by a mid vowel, as in Finnish (so ie, üö, ïë, and uo).

You’ll also notice some unrounded back vowels. I was nervous about trying to do unrounded back vowels, but I figured since I was going to have constant access to the actors, I’d give it a shot. Turns out I had nothing to worry about. Those unrounded vowels are super easy for English speakers to pronounce. Basically I just said, “These are pronounced like this”, and then they said, “Oh”, and did them right every time. The front rounded vowels still caused problems, but the back unrounded vowels did not. I used diereses to indicate the unrounded back vowels for parallelism. It seems to have worked.

As a final note, the long opposite-rounding vowels have no separate form. This is because though the long vowels are phonemic (in that there are places where you must pronounce, e.g., üü as opposed to ü), there’s actually no way to write them in the orthography. Everything else that has a distinguishable form (as you’ll see) is either a form that was a licit long vowel at one time, or was (or currently is) a licit diphthong. That left nothing for the long opposite rounding vowels.

Here are the aforementioned diphthongs:

If you look at the forms for ie and uo, they should look rather familiar. That’s because these used to be the forms for *ee and *oo, and they’re simply read differently now. You’ll also notice that the forms for üö and ïë are identical to the forms for ö and ë, respectively. That’s because there’s no way to indicate the long form for these vowels, and those are the readings of the long forms of those vowels.

As you look at these, by the way, most of the extra lines and weird swooshes you see were added by request.

The consonantal base forms are as follows:

You can ignore the blue box; that was my bad there (screen cap). So like...stuff happened here. Basically, the short forms of stops became fricatives, but then there already was a *th, so all those words just got respelled. So the form with the three asterisks is usually pronounced [s] before [i], and elsewhere it’s [θ], but it’s not used word-initially, unless it’s before [i]. The form with four asterisks is an old consonant that’s no longer pronounced (it’s just regular [h] now), and so there are two [h]’s in this thing.

I added those ridiculous half moons because most stuff was wanted. Also, I thought r was fine on its own, but they wanted the bottom part to extend, so I extended it, along with l. Same extension happened with the word-initial flourish on f and v and like forms. I’m just looking at this now, and I’m like...seems unnecessary...

Anyway, the system is an abugida, which means there’s an inherent vowel, and modifications are added for other vowels. The inherent vowel in this system is short e. This is a fully executed consonant that’s hopefully large enough that you can see it:

You can also see the “capital” versions that occur for some consonant/vowel combinations above. Basically, when one of these occurs as the first character of a word, there’s an extra flourish. Where there are two glyphs above, the first has the flourish, and so is an initial form, and the other would appear elsewhere in the word. I had a lot of fun coming up with these, but now looking at the extra half moons, the extra loops, the extra double lines on bö... It’s just all too extra for me. But I know what it originally looked like, so I always have something to compare it to in my mind.

Now for the sake of completeness, though it’s going to make this really long, here is the fully executed version of every glyph split into two tables. Here’s table one:

And here’s table two:

Huh. Weird error in the rei cell... Included one two many r’s it appears... The character’s still there, though. (By the way, the keystrokes are written on the left there. This is for the font. What’s “z” there is the weird old *t sound that’s become [θ] and [s].)

There’s also a geminate marker that, when you see it, you’ll be able to recognize as a reference to Castithan. I’ll show it to you in an example later.

Nouns in Övüsi have a bunch of different declensions. It’s all based on whether the original form ended in a vowel of some kind or a consonant. At this stage of the language, no word can end in a consonant, and the only codas are reserved for the first member of a geminate, so lots of different things happened to these consonant-final forms. There’s no room to show every declension, but I can at least give you one, and give you a sense of the cases themselves. Here they are (singular/plural):

NOMINATIVE:  thuoke/thuoki “bird(s)”

ACCUSATIVE: thuokie/thuokii “bird(s) (direct object)”

GENITIVE: thuoka/thuokai “bird’s/birds’”

INSTRUMENTAL: thuoku/thuokï “with the bird(s)”

LOCATIVE: thuokö/thuokü “near the bird(s)”

ABLATIVE: thuokau/thuokavi “away from the bird(s)”

ALLATIVE: thuokaalou/thuokaalli “towards the bird(s)”

INESSIVE: thuokannö/thuokannü “inside the bird(s)”

ILLATIVE: thuokou/thuokoli “into the bird(s)”

ELATIVE: thuokannau/thuokannavi “out of the bird(s)”

PERLATIVE: thuokausu/thuokausï “by way of the bird(s)”

AVERSIVE: thuokasshu/thuokasshï “avoiding the bird(s)”

VOCATIVE: thuokuo/thuokorii “O, bird(s)!”

If you look at these cases, you can probably recognize some of my favorite sound changes, and guess how some of them evolved (and in what order). The nice thing about having a nice big case system like that is it’s just there for you, like your best friend. You don’t really need to fuss about how to say stuff. Your best friend just says, “Shh, shh... Let me show you my cases.” And you take one and you’re good. Like hot cocoa in winter.

Now the verbs...

On a macro level, verbs agree with their subjects in person and number in the first person and sometimes the imperative, and just in person otherwise. Each verb has three stems: the imperfect, the perfect, and the future. Then, depending on whether the verb is dynamic or stative, there are three modes: the indicative, the passive, and the potential (statives lack the passive mode). A copula is used for emphasis, negation, and equation.

It’s best to see an example, and with verbs, the easiest to tease apart are the vowel-final ones. Here’s a table to consider:

This is the verb mikaa, which means “to say” (most of the time the infinitive ends in -ie; it’s just non-e V-final stems that are different). As you can see, the stem part here is probably -i for imperfect; -has for perfect; and, of all things, bare for future. Then there are some more or less predictable suffixes added in the three modes. To those can be added agreement affixes, but they can also be left off. Depending on whether or not they’re added the end of the form changes. The first items in each pair are how the form ends if nothing is added. I’ll show you each in a sec here. First, here’s the agreement paradigm:

Now that you’ve got that, here are two examples (and I’ll show you the orthographic forms, too):

That’s Kenie mikaithorï super large, apparently. Kenie is the third person pronoun in the accusative. Mikaithorï has a third person subject, and is in the potential indicative. Now if you use the emphatic copula instead...

That’s Kenie mikaithou shï! which is “I must say it!” Now, of course there’s nothing in here anywhere that corresponds to “must”: It’s simply the interpretation. These examples show how you use the form with the agreement suffix and without.

(Also, see the geminate thingy in there? The spelling in this one is weird.)

That’s a basic intro to this thing. It was actually a pain in the butt to use, but fun to speak. All in all pretty good. Though weird.

This is a piece the art department put together for Édgar Ramírez’s Kandomere to wear. I thought it looked pretty boss:

Looks pretty cool, until you realize it says the following...

And he’s one of the good Elves! lol This was one of my favorite pieces. That art department was amazing.

So that was what I was up to this time last year. Again, if you get a chance to see the movie, I hope you enjoy it! Süvorii!

[amygdalalangblr]

This Is Halloween - Samhain in Latin

#OMG YESSS #LINGUA LATINA #LATIN #HIC EST SAMHAIN #WOULD THE ROMANS SPELL IT LIKE THAT OR WOULD THEY LATINICIZE IT? #LIKE WOULD IT BE SĀVIN OR SĀVEN #IF IT WERE SĀVEN THEN IT COULD DECLINE LIKE A THIRD DECLENSION NEUTER #SĀVEN SĀVINIS SĀVINĪ SĀVEN SĀVĪNE SĀVINA #OR MAYBE EVEN SAUVEN #RIP IDK (x)

Thank you for reblogging my post @linguafreund! <3 I usually try to latinize as much as possible (because tbh it’s fun and Romans did it a lot themselves), but in this case I didn’t try to latinize either “Samhain” or “bean sidhe” because of the cultural roots of the holiday - Romans did occasionally keep a word from a foreign language and messed with its declinations a bit (hi, Greek) - and because Gaelic’s phonemes are a pain for me, personally, to integrate into Latin. You made a really good point, though, so I’d like to at least give it a shot.

Aside from that, I had pulled the pronunciation for Samhain from the English entry on Wiktionary, mostly because it was the only one with the audio file, but also because it has mostly the same pronunciation as Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

Latin has the drawback of not doing well when it comes to 3+ vowels in a row, something that is frequently seen in Celtic languages, regardless of how it’s written with a Latin alphabet. Because of that, I think the pause in ˈsaʊ.wɛn would present a unique difficulty when transcribing the word into Latin.

I see where you’re going with sāven and sāvin! Depending on which Gaelic you’re looking at - and even the region - it could end in either “-en” or “-in”. The “ā” and “v”/“uv” are logical, and at first glance I agree, but after investigating a bit further I think we both missed some key things.

My first thought was to write it as “sawen” because it was the easiest transcription to write. Very lazy, yes, but gotta start somewhere.

A little bit of poking reveals that the letter W was originally a digraph used in Medieval Latin to compensate for the lack of the /w/ phoneme in Latin when writing Germanic words (it’s not Celtic, but they’re very similar sounding). /w/ was also sometimes written using the Greek Upsilon (uppercase Υ, lowercase υ). Interestingly, this phoneme was represented in Elder Futhark as the letter Wynn (Ƿ ƿ) - a Germanic writing system by which this letter has had fluctuating usage until ultimately usurped by W due, ironically, to the prevailing popularity of French orthography.

Since Latin is known for adopting letters from other languages, primarily Greek, this opens up a few possibilities. A triple-vowel word with a diphthong that isn’t available in Latin means that each of the vowels would need to be spelled out. Here are some options:

savven

sawen

saυen

saƿen

sauen

I’m ignoring stresses for the moment. Because of the diphthong problem, “savven” would be a good place to start, because it uses letters Latin is already familiar with, and the hiccup of “ʊ.w” is easily solved by doubling up on V.

The only problem with this would be what age of Latin you’re wishing to emulate - /w/ was until the first century considered an approximation before borrowing from Greek, and “vv” was only seen in Greek loanwords, something we would see written as “ὔ” (read more at the last bullet point here). I’m very much guilty of completely ignoring the different eras of Latin when making neologisms in favour of expediency, but it’s an interesting point to consider.

This segues into “sawen” and “saυen” because they’re two parallel alternates of how “savven” might evolve. Do we want to go the Germanic route or the Greek? Both are equally as viable, and really the only points to consider are legibility to the (presumably Anglophone) audience, integrity to Roman and Celtic cultures, and plain ol’ aesthetic appeal.

Knowing what we do now, “sawen” is perfectly legitimate and would only need some extra inspection to see if diacritics are necessary.

As for “saυen”, it could work as is, but given that Latin saw fit to add a mark over “υ” when taking words straight from Greek and merely latinizing their appearance, I think this would instead be written as “saὔen” - this is for now still ignoring what stresses a hypothetical Roman would be pronouncing it with.

If we wanted to delve further into keeping Celtic ways, using the letter Wynn is another option; “saƿen” marries both languages and honors the ideal of borrowing letters where Latin has no suitable equivalent. However, because of its liability to confuse some audiences that are unfamiliar with runic characters, I would unfortunately advise against this variation.

This leaves “sauen”. It’s nice and easy, using letters native to Latin and kindly staying away from argument-laden things like doubled vowels and foreign letters. To the ears of an English speaker, this pretty much hits the nail on the head for how Samhain sounds. Because Latin relies on stress patterns, either “a” or “e” would need a macron, but that’s a pretty easy fix.

Now for the hard part.

Regardless of what is used for “-ʊ.w-”, it’s gotta be stressed somewhere. Latin changed its rules on stress patterns, and has its own set of exceptions for elision and poetry.

The only two options on this are “ā” and “ē”. In Gaelic, the stress sounds to be on the last syllable. This conflicts with “ā”, though - were you meaning on using it because of how long that vowel sounds, maybe? I can see why, if so; “ˈsaʊ” is not-quite a diphthong, and “ā” is a nice compromise between the two languages.

Honestly, I’m not versed well enough in linguistics to make a decisive statement on where the stress would be - it might well be on both, considering that “ā” is softer than “ē”, but... I just don’t know for certain. Someone who knows better than me would be able to make a more precise assessment.

I’m leery of breaking up the diphthong, but it’s not feasible to keep in Latin, and there’s many other factors to consider, possibly with a few that I haven’t even thought of in this post.

So right now there are both more and less options (arranged by stress-first, stress-last, and stress-both):

sāwen |  sawēn |  sāwēn

sāὔen |  saὔēn |  sāὔēn

sāuen |  sauēn |  sāuēn

What do you think of them?

[kingofthewilderwest]

I felt like talking about how science fiction alien names tend to contain underlying English sound patterns. So I did! Below, a transcript of what I basically said in the video:

One of the fun things about science fiction, fantasy, and other forms of fiction is the ability to create new worlds – and with it, new cultures. This often means creating new languages or at least new names for people, places, and special items. Something I’ve noticed from observing created names or alien languages… is that, even though they’re meant to sound “different” than English, they nevertheless retain a lot of innate principles and rules from the English language. Linguistic elements of the English language almost always seem to slip into these “different” alien words.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. I’m not even criticizing. I’m just observing, amused, as a linguist, what I see and hear. I don’t expect people to be accurate in how languages actually work when creating new, foreign names. In fact, it’s true that names are often modified by speakers of different languages to conform to their own language’s characteristics. English speakers say “France,” Tajik speakers say “Faronsa,” Khmer speakers say “Barang,” Amheric speakers say, “Ferenisayi,” and Nepali speakers say “Phrānsa.” Based upon the characteristics of each person’s language, how the word “France” is spoken by the French speakers gets modified into the new tongue. Languages that don’t have an “F” sound aren’t going to have an “f” at the start of their word for France. That’s how it works. So it’s not too terrible if a science fiction name has English characteristics; you could blame it on the “translation” from the alien language to how English speakers would pronounce it themselves.

However, if you happen to be curious about the discrepancies between how people create languages and names for their stories… versus what is linguistically accurate… I’m happy to share some of the common inaccuracies I’ve observed. You’re free - if you wish - to try to apply some of my commentary to your own worldbuilding to make your names feel more linguistically “realistic.” But I’m mostly just writing this for the fun of showing how a person’s innate, subconscious understanding of their native language (in this case, English) can influence how writers try to make alien names… and turn up just reproducing lots of the familiar rules from their native tongue. The internal grammar structure of English just keeps slipping in!

To make the content of this post more manageable, I’m only going to talk about inaccurate sound properties of science fiction names (that is, their phonetics and phonology). I don’t have time to talk about sentence structure or other linguistic elements. We’ll focus just on sound patterns here!

1. Stress systems identical to English

In English and many other languages, some syllables are stressed - or pronounced louder/longer/etc. - in words and sentences. For instance, the first syllable in “butter” is stressed and the second syllable in “computer” is stressed. Languages often have rules about what syllable gets stressed within a word and/or within a sentence, and it can admittedly get complex. Language stress systems vary pretty widely between languages.

But almost all science fiction and fantasy names I’ve come across use the exact same syllable structure as English. Somehow, though all the aliens you’ve met come from another solar system, their names reproduce the exact syllable structure as we hear in English. Whether it’s Kallo Jath or Kif Kroker or Mordin Solus or Garrus Vakarian or Ahsoka Tano or Gasgano or Jyn Erso or Yoda, I know immediately how to stress these “alien” words perfectly… because it’s how I’d naturally do it in my native language. English syllable rules reign supreme in all these names.

If you’re wondering why a name might sound “familiar” even if you made it up to sound alien, you could perhaps play with where you place primary stress. It doesn’t have to be complicated - some languages simply stress the final syllable of each word, for instance!

Let’s say I named a character “Matatari.” You probably automatically read the name to have the stress on the penultimate syllable. But you could test to see how it sounds with each of the different syllables stressed. The second-to-last syllable for English speakers might sound the most natural and “familiar” - but what happens if I made her name “MAtatari” or “matataRI”? Mátatari and Matatarí escape the rules of typical English stress.

2. Sound inventory identical to English.

All languages contain a finite set of sounds that combine into words. These sound units are called phonemes. A phoneme is like the b, e, and t sounds that combine to make the word “bet.”

Now, languages don’t all share the same phonemes, and they most certainly don’t have the same composite phonemic system. That is, languages might share some of the same sounds, but languages don’t have the entire same sound inventory. Think of a Venn diagram for two languages - some sounds will be in common in the center of the diagram, while other sounds will only appear in one of the languages.

When I hear people pronounce the names of their own alien languages, I hear… the phoneme system that English has. People just pick and use the sounds that are in the language they speak, whereas in truth, it’s most likely going to be the case that a foreign language lacks some of the sounds we have, and has some sounds we lack.

3. Use of cross-linguistically uncommon sounds.

Continuing off of #2… it turns out that some phonemes are more statistically likely to occur across all the world’s languages. How common a phoneme is cross-linguistically depends upon many factors, like how audibly discernible the phoneme is from other phonemes, how loud/quiet it is, and how easy it is to physiologically produce with our human anatomy (we tend to like to make sounds that are easy to make with our mouths, unsurprisingly). I’m not going to labor into the details of how something is common or how it isn’t, but I’m happy to list off some common and uncommon sounds cross-linguistically.

For one thing I notice in fantasy and science fiction names is the repeated use of sounds that are in English, but are actually very rare across the world’s languages. The sounds /f/ as in “fight” and /θ/ as in “thing” are very rare because they’re so quiet. They might be sounds in English, but most languages don’t have “f” and “th”! You’re also very unlikely to hear /ɛ/ as in “bet,” /ɪ/ as in “fish”, /l/ as in “lime,” and /ɹ/ as in “right.” (If you want an r sound, a rolled r is far more common - not that weird thing we have in English). I wouldn’t recommend /dʒ/ as in “jump” either.

So it’s actually slightly odd to see a bunch of characters named things like Worf or Kif or Sarek or Groot or Allura or Quark or Kit Fisto.

If you’re curious about sounds that are common, those are things like /k/ for “king,” /t/ for “tall,” /n/ for “no,” and actually a bunch of vowels that aren’t in English. If you know Spanish, think of the five main vowels a (as in “gato”), e (as in “tres”), i (as in “si”), o (as in “solo”), and u (as in “tu”). These vowels are the most common vowels cross-linguistically, and it’s actually pretty common for these to be THE five vowels in a language (with maybe a few diphthongs or something thrown in there). There’s also the schwa sound that you hear at the end of words like “para” - that baby gets heard a lot, too, for a variety of reasons.

4. Identical phonotactics.

Whether or not an individual sound is in a language is important. What also makes languages distinct is what sounds are “allowed” to be put next to each other. The rules for what sounds can go where in a word… is called phonotactics. What sounds are okay to put next to each other in one language might be entirely different in another language.

For instance, in English, there is no problem whatsoever with words like “string,” “sixths,” and “sounds” - words which have three or more consonants next to one another at the start or end of a syllable. However, having three consonants grouped together like s, t, and r in “string” might not be okay in another language. There are some languages, in fact, which don’t allow two consonants to be next to one another - you always have to have a vowel between consonants. This is why the word “Christmas” in English turns into “Kurisumasu” (クリスマス) in Japanese. The Japanese loan word takes the word “Christmas” and inserts vowels in between consonant clusters. And similarly, in English, we might have problems pronouncing some of the consonant clusters in Khmer words like “khnom” and “chngang.”

But we’d be very hard-pressed to find character names that flout the rules of English phonotactics.

Another thing to consider with phonotactics is where in the syllable a sound is “allowed” to occur. Sometimes there are different rules for what can go where depending upon whether it’s at the start of a syllable before the vowel (onset) or the end of a syllable after a vowel (coda). In English, we have the sound “ng”, like in “song” or “thing.” However, we cannot put “ng” at the start of a syllable in English. We can say “song” but not “ngos.” But, other languages like Vietnamese or Khmer have no problem putting the “ng” at the start of a syllable. Consider the common Vietnamese surname “Nguyen.” There’s that “ng” right at the start! Different languages have different rules.

And there’s all sort of variety: some languages only allow consonants at the start of a syllable but not the end of a syllable, some languages only allow certain consonants at the end of a syllable or a word, and some languages have specific restrictions about what consonant clusters are allowed. In general, it’s rare for long consonant clusters to be allowed (the word “sixths” in English is really unusual for what it allows).

I could probably keep going, but I imagine this gets the point across well enough. Again, this is not meant to be a criticism or evidence of shortcoming for writers. I don’t expect anyone to be experts in linguistics, and there is something to be said about readers getting frightened of printed words that look unpronounceable to them. Viewers also probably want to have an easy time pronouncing the names of characters they hear on screen. People are probably going to be happier to meet an alien named “Zarkon,” “Groot,” or “Morbo” than “Ng!lieng” or “O’kktroxnuo Khlebrrotk.”

However, I am writing this from an amused linguistic ramble about how our own native language’s rules seep into the subconscious. Even when people try to create “alien” names and words, we often find something far closer to home.

[conoscenze]

words & accents.

Considering every gal here comes from a different part of the globe, and even though most of them speak English, it doesn’t mean that their home places don’t show in their speech and / or in their pronunciation of something. This is a list regarding the accent (if any), the frequency, the presence of said accent… and anything else that might be of note.

salice.

Italian accent; sometimes it’s thick, sometimes it’s thin. It depends. It’s obvious with how she elongates the consonants sometimes and in how she doubles them in words which lack double consonants, and sometimes she purposefully accentuates “r”s and “s”s to make fun of how English-speaking people think that Italians speak. Professionally, she has a very good English pronunciation, although sometimes her Italian slips.

Native language pops up when she’s upset, or when she can’t find the right word in English. Very much swears in Italian when she’s fed up with a colleague (who doesn’t know the language) and can, at times, out of spite, end up speaking entirely in Italian to upset or tickle a person that’s irritating her. Very brief intermissions in Italian when she speaks with strangers (i.e.: “Today’s weather is… eh… come si dice “un casino”… cazzo. Um. It’s kinda bad, right?”).

Knows Croatian. Briefly. Enough to smooth talk you if you wish. Her mother taught her the strict necessary so to communicate properly with her now dead grandparents (aka her own parents), so she’s stuck with an extra language. It’s actually nice to talk further shit about someone and have them wonder what she’s on about.

When she speaks Italian, she has a strong Venetian accent and rhythm, inclusive of profanities and swearing. Very colorful in the latter thanks to her father’s creativity.

adona.

Italian accent, as Salice: except it’s visibly there, consistently, enough to make it obvious she’s a foreigner. She has difficulty in pronouncing “k”s (and thus “ch”s / hard “c”s in Italian) due to her Tuscan rhythm and dialect. Like Salice she loves accentuating consonants like “t” and “r”. Her English pronunciation isn’t terrible but her Italian is obvious enough to make the way she speaks pretty interesting.

Adona has a perfect mastery of English, despite the speaking, and if she ends up speaking Italian it’s rarely out of her control. When she does use her native tongue it’s on purpose, and she either does it to confuse her conversational partner or because she doesn’t feel like stirring her brain too much. She often directly skips some words in English and says them in Italian because she doesn’t want to waste time on trying to figure it out.

She loves to use Italian when giving people nicknames, most of the time. She really enjoys distorting someone’s name in something absolutely ridiculous.

Gets really angry when people don’t get an Italian name right. Stereotypes don’t affect her, but butchered pronunciations absolutely do.

When she speaks Italian, she has an evident Tuscan accent (now I’m not an expert but considering she’s from Lucca, she has terminologies that are typically from around there), which means she doesn’t pronounce hard “c”s at all and has a generally funny rhythm in her speech. Also interesting swearing—mostly consists of “boia” and “maremma [insert insulting adjective of choice here]”.

phoebe.

Very weak Russian accent (specifically from the Moscow / central Russia area). Considering her excellency in languages, most of the time her pronunciations are impeccable, though there are times in which she might slip—mostly on consonants. But as I said, it doesn’t happen often. When it does, she feels thoroughly embarrassed about it.

Considering the specific area she’s been born & raised in, Phoebe speaks Russian with an akanye inclination. Research informed that akanye is a language phenomenon in which there’s a vowel reduction; it means most vowels get replaced with “a” in the pronunciation, and a consonant addition. When she speaks her native language she does, in fact, substitute most vowels with “a”.

Rarely slips into actual Russian, but when she does it’s either because she’s in Russia or either because she feels like speaking it (reasons may vary). She has mostly perfect knowledge and restraint over her tongue—the only occasion in which she may erroneously talk in Russian may be when she’s tipsy, but it never happened, and it doubtly will happen in the future.

kaede.

In English, she has a somewhat evident Japanese accent, although she has a good pronunciation. She mostly has difficulty (like most Japanese) enunciating “l”s and sh / ch sounds, but otherwise, she’s pretty good.

Might slip into Japanese without acknowledging it. Despite her good knowledge on languages, she might still break into her mother tongue because of various reasons: her clinical forgetfulness, nervousness, and insecurity. She’s never once stepped out of Japan so she had little to no time to practice her actual grasp on foreign tongue, which means she is extremely anxious when testing it out—plus, as I mentioned, her memory conditions are also an obstacle. Her memory sometimes also fails her when it comes to Japanese, so go figure.

Has a Kanto accent, and it was very prominent once, although it is not so much as of now (not enough evident for me to have to write it out, so to speak). Kanto dialect consists in the lack of distinction between phonemes that are distinct in standard Japanese (i.e.: “shiohigari” → “shioshigari”, “Shinjuku” → “Shinjiku”, “shichi” → “hichi”). Most vocalic sounds are reduced to “e” (i.e.: “taihen da” → “teehen da”, “sugoi” → “sugee”), and since “r” sounds are associated vulgar connotations and insults, they’re replaced with “n”, meaning that “wakaranai” becomes “wakan’nee“ and “okaerinasai” becomes “okaen’nasai“. I know this is a bit to take in, but it’s important if she’s communicating with people that aren’t from the Kanto region, or from Tokyo in general. It dictates precisely where she’s from.

karmina.

Karmina possesses an anonymous Russian accent (as she’s not from any precise area) and has a mostly impeccable mastery on any language, meaning she never truly slips up in her “mother” language.

There’s not much to say about her because she possesses a multilingual ability which allows her to possess perfect knowledge on all languages in reading, listening, use and speaking—this means that as much as Russian is the language she’s grown up with, she’s as fluent in English like in French or in Greek.

Accents and dialects don’t apply to her. Like I said, anonymous accent. You can hear she’s from an Eastern European country but you can’t really tell exactly from where.

min-seo.

Korean accent, of course. She doesn’t have particular difficulty in pronouncing English words, however there might be times in which she fucks up because of her anxiety or her nervousness. Being dyslexic, she sometimes also ends up forming grammatically (structure-wise) incorrect sentences out of sheer confusion—this problem also happens in her mother tongue, of course.

She might slip into Korean only if very agitated or incapable of proper thinking and thus of translation from Korean to English. Probably will also pause and ramble in her mother tongue to remember words that are on the tip of her tongue.

She possesses, when speaking Korean, a Gyeonggi dialect, which means her manner of speaking is very laid back and informal (despite her antsy self). Postpositions ending with an “o” get often changed to “u” and the sentence final verbe “-yo” tends to become “-yeo”. The Gyeonggi dialect also adds “-nya?” at the end of questions (as funny as it may sound), and being born in a late generation, the pitch tends to go higher at the end of a sentence (this became common since the 1990′s).

Addresses “-unni” or “-oppa” whoever is older than her, even if just by a couple years—as much as she doesn’t care for people younger than her to do this in her regards, she feels like she has the duty to be courteous and polite, and thus addresses slightly older peers as such.

fujunko.

Her Japanese accent is evident but not enough to be made fun of. She mostly learned English because of the music she likes, which means she gained a somewhat decent pronunciation, but her emphasis on vowels and consonants is still there—much like Kaede, she has difficulty with “r”s and sh / ch sounds, but other than that, nothing else.

Completely aware of what language she speaks for the occasion. This means that if she talks Japanese with an English-speaking person, she’s doing it on purpose to destabilize them / confuse them. However there are times she talks Japanese to help herself remind of a word or an idiom she doesn’t quite remember.

Being born and raised mostly in Kyoto, she of course has an heavy Kansai dialect when speaking (a lot of Tokyo-born elders do in fact not really like this tendency of hers). Having the dialect a special rhythm pattern she’s easily recognizable, but since I don’t hate myself enough to want to determine exactly what pattern she possesses, I’ll be vague and simply list the differences that there are between standard Japanese and the Kansai dialect. While in standard vowel reduction is frequent, the Kansai dialect lacks it. “Desu” is not pronounced “des” but actually “desu”, for example; hiatuses are replaced by an “e” (same as the Tokyo dialect, best example is “sugoi” becoming “sugee”); short wovels in monosyllabic words are elongated (i.e.: “ki” → “kii”, “me” → “mee”), and long wovels are instead shortened (i.e.: “sou da” → “so ja / se ja”). They substitute “s” with “h” very often, meaning that “-san” becomes “-han”, “mahjo” becomes “masjo”, etcetera; “m” and “b” are often exchanged, consonants “z, d, r” are often confused with each other; and at last they often substitute “r” with “n” (i.e.: “nani siteru nen?” → “nani siten nen?”).

As I said earlier, this might sound stupid and complicated to point out, but it’s important if your muse is a Japanese native speaker! The dialects are all very much different from each other, and as research said, Kansai people are easy to detect simply because of the way they talk. Fujunko is perfectly identifiable because of how she speaks—every little bit of these listed details apply to her speech.

momoko.

When speaking English, Momoko is... passable. Her pronunciation is remarked by her Japanese accent (which always implies butchered “r”s and sh / ch sounds along with soft “z”s), and while she does know the language enough to substain a casual conversation, it’s very obvious that she hasn’t learned it at school, and that she is more or less self-taught in what she knows so far. This is mostly due to the fact that most of the websites she visits are in English: communication there is principally done via text, not speech.

Might easily slip into Japanese due to a myriad of reasons: she forgot the right word, she doesn’t know how to pronounce another, she’s nervous, and the list goes on. Momoko isn’t a conversationalist in general, let alone in a not-much-known language. She doesn’t have much control over switching from English to Japanese, but there are times in which she will change her language purposefully, either to spite or confuse the other person.

While conversing in Japanese, Momoko has a Kanto accent, much like Kaede. It isn’t super marked, but enough to make a person guess where she is from. Given her aggressive nature, her “r”s are much more marked and growly, and so are sounds like “p” and “t”.

marzanna.

Same case as Karmina: Marzanna’s origins can’t be pinpointed through observations on how she speaks, because she has a multilingual ability and an unspecified Eastern European accent. Some people have pointed out that she sounds a bit Polish, but in general her skill grants her perfect mastery on every modern tongue (including a few ancient ones).

This means she won’t slip in her “mother” language as she does not have a certain country of origin from the very start. If she changes language mid-conversation, it’s on purpose, with the main intention of concealing something or to tease her interlocutor.

Going by this logic, she has no accents or dialects to remark.

Perhaps the only odd thing that sometimes happens is when she erroneously uses in a phrase obsolete and archaic words that are no long part of the modern language she is speaking. A good example might be Japanese, like it could be Italian or English.

annaliese.

Annaliese is good at spoken English, but not excessively as to be good at handling casual conversation about anything. Her phrase structure might sometimes sound wonky and uncertain, since all she’s learned of the language is the very basics; all additional knowledge is all self-taught. She doesn’t regularly keep it up, however, since it isn’t all that important for her to know it. It’s rare for foreigners to step near the convent’s grounds.

Her German accent when conversing in English follows the three main stereotypical “rules”: almost every “w” is pronounced as “v”, sounds such as “b”, “d” and “g” are instead harsh “p”, “t”, and “k” (i.e.: “What's up, dog?” → “What's up, doc?”) and “sp”, “st”, “sk” become “ʃp”, “ʃt”, “ʃk” (with a SH sound instead of a plain S sound). A good extensive list on how it should sound like can be found here (x), but for simplicity you can keep in mind this info.

In German, Annaliese has a thick Central Thuringian accent, as she has been raised in Erfurt. In general, the Thuringian dialect is characterized by a rounding of the vowels, the weakening of consonants of Standard German (the lenition of the consonants “p”, “t” and “k”), a marked difference in the pronunciation of the “g” sound and a highly-idiosyncratic, melodic intonation of sentences. In many words, “b” is pronounced as “w”, “v” or “f” would be in Standard German (i.e.: “aber” (but) → “awer”).

Specifically present in the Central Thuringian are falling diphthongs (i.e.: “vater” → “voater”).

[othercat2]

fic: two for mirth 37/?

They’re in the Leones System for almost two weeks. Two interview programs, a number of public speaking engagements, some introductions to local dignitaries and tours of the various refugee communities. Karkat talks about the Empress’ reform efforts, trade and cultural exchange. He talks to various leaders in the refugee communities on Fatima and various stations in the Leones System, one of whom had made contact with Dave.

Jake English is tall for a human, with dark hair and green eyes. He belongs to a cultivar of the Christian religion and is a minister. He is also involved with an organization that shelters the homeless (many of whom are repatriated). English invites Dave and Karkat to speak at his church and to dinner at his home afterward.  Security is minimal, and unobtrusive.

At the church, Karkat ends up mostly talking about his books in a mix of Alternian, English and a little Spanish. He also talks a little bit about how Dave came to be living with him. (Dave interjects with comments about the books and the classes he’d been taking before the book tour that had led to the cultural exchange mission.) The dinner is more of the same, with some political discussion mixed in. Jake asks a lot of questions about the mission, offers advice and the names of people Karkat might want to contact. “One of them is my cousin Jade Harley,” he says. “She’s a minister too! I think she’ll especially want to speak to you, though she mentioned there might be legal difficulties.”

Karkat thinks about that for a second. “Your cousin is a Preceptor of the Signless Cult?” he asks in Alternian. “How did that happen?”

“Jade was raised by her Grampa a mechanic owned by the Chief Engineer of our AGRI-Station,” Jake says. “Though when I say raised by her Grandfather, she was mostly being raised by the Chief Engineer’s lusus and taught within the Signless Cult by the Chief. When the repatriations began, the Chief sent Jade along with our family. Gram English wasn’t happy that Jade was raised Signlessist, but the Signless Cult was at least respectable by her lights, so it wasn’t hard at all to let Jade go her own way, especially since an argument between Gram English and Jade would’ve been a battle between the unstoppable force and immovable object for certain.”

Jake smiled. “We had one hell of a time with the lusus though! The silly beast wouldn’t be parted from Jade, and we had to jump through all sorts of hoops to take Beck with us. The Chief was no help at all, ‘Dad adores her, and she needs someone to keep her out of trouble. ’”  

“The lusus was allowed accompany your cousin?” Karkat asks.

“I think we ended up being one of the precedents for dealing with lusii that’ve bonded with a human,” Jake says. “I don’t think it could be the same as the relationship between a Troll and their lusus, but Jade and Beck certainly seem like two peas in a pod!”

“Huh,” Karkat said. “What kinds of lusii usually bond with humans?” He asks curiously.

“Oh, usually the small to mid-sized pseudo-mammals,” Jake says.  “I’ve met a few people with avians of one type or another though. Generally the smaller ones.” He laughs. “That’s a bit of a tangent. Jade was able to get a scholarship to study comparative religions, met up with other Signlessists and became a bit of a globe trotter. I think she wants to get in touch with you, but there are legal reasons why she might not be able to?”

“I’m banned from speaking about the Signlessist Cult, or about the Signless,” Karkat says. “Not from speaking to individual or groups of Signlessists, as long as I don’t speak about the Cult. I’m, I guess you could say I’m ‘abdicated’ from any responsibilities associated with my alleged Ancestor.”

“Like Jesus’ Second Coming being building ships,” Dave says in English. He pronounces “Jesus” as almost “Zhaysh,” and there’s a lot of dropped consonants and broadened vowels. (John refers to Dave’s accent as “half Tex, kinda Mex and a lot of Alternian phonemes.”)

Karkat is a little bit worried that Dave might have committed blasphemy of some kind, but Jake laughs. “Well, He was a working man as much as a teacher,” Jake says. “If He wants to work in a shipyard, who would tell Him no? Your situation about your ‘alleged Ancestor’ seems to be a little different though, Mister Vantas. How did the legal restriction come about? Or is talking about it restricted?”

“No, that part isn’t restricted,” Karkat says. “The seeds started around the time my moirail and I went to confront the previous Grand Highblood.” Who had had a completely unexpected reaction to their presence in his throne room: instead of a confrontation followed by a battle, the Grand Highblood had immediately declared his support for the Heiress. (After laughing so hard he’d been barely able to stay on his throne.)

He talked about living with the Church of the Two Messiahs while Gamzee was being trained for his position. He talked about the debates and conversations between the previous Grand Highblood and the new Empress, and about the negotiation that had led to Karkat’s abdication. “They worked out the restrictions, and I made a speech that was mostly about rejecting the destinies other people made for you, and not being tied to completing the mission or purpose of your Ancestors, which had its own problems that the Empress had to make a series of sermons about later. It was recorded and broadcast, and for a while there was trouble from splinter groups, but eventually things calmed down, mostly because the Signless Cult wasn’t forbidden anymore.”

“See?” Dave asks Jake. “I’m right, aren’t I?”  

“No,” Karkat says, and Dave smirks.

Jake English snorts. “If Christ came and wanted a working vacation instead of the Last Trump, I’m sure no one would complain about it. Though I doubt He’d need to go through all that rigmarole to achieve it!”

They talk some more, Karkat making a tentative agreement to contact some of the people on the list (including the cousin) and then they head back to the ship. Dave gets buried in his bubblr mailbox for most of the night and Karkat ends up in a discussion with Egbert and Lalonde about the visit the next evening for “sociological research purposes.”

(Karkat makes an elaborate point that no one tried to buy Dave from him at the church or at the dinner. Dave: “Master, stop going black for your translator.”  Rose: “Since I’m already auspistizing for Dave and John, I don’t want to break my club.” Karkat: “I’m not flirting. I’m just pointing out the shocking lack of offers to take Dave off my hands.” John: “No one is flirting with anyone! Shut up Dave!” Dave: “Hahahahah. You’re not my master. I do what I want.” Karkat: “Dave stop going black for my translator.” John: “Argh!”)

Overall, the trip in the Leones system is successful, and the mission moves on.

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