#is this a linguistics q. idk. whatever

[spacetravels]

i was requested to ask this in poll form cause our group chat sample size is too small to see if this is a specific regional divide or something. this is targeted @ usamericans & aussies but i’d LOVE a global sample size pls do reblog if you’d like to help us be less confused 😭

[sachermorte]

so the thing about english is that people think it's so divorced from other germanic languages based on like. words. I've even heard people try to insist that english is a romance language. because of that whole messy business in 1066 with out-of-wedlock willy and his band of naughty normans. and now a good chunk of the vocabulary is french or whatever and they're prestigious so not using them makes you sound like a rube and this and that and the other

and yes william the conqueror will never be safe from me. I will have my revenge on him. he fucked up a perfectly good germanic language is what he did. this will be me in hell

but the thing is that most words in, say, german do have a one to one english equivalent. not all hope is lost, for those who still dare to see it. it's just that you 1066pilled normancels aren't looking in the right place

dog (en) ≠ der Hund (de) but der Hund (de) -> hound (en)

look with your special eyes. that one was easier. not all of them are this intuitive because of semantic narrowing and broadening and waltzing and hokey-pokeying and whatever else. I'll give you a few more

animal (en) ≠ das Tier (de)

aha! you think. I've got him on the ropes now.

but then

das Tier (de) -> deer (en)

nooooo!! you whine and cry in gay baby jail. the consonants are different!!! listen to me. listen, I say, putting both my hands on your shoulder. /t/and /d/ are the same sound. you just put your voice behind one of them.

nooooooooo!! you wail. deer are animals but not all animals are deer!!! listen to me. LISTEN. they used to be. animals used to be deer. that's just what we called them. it was a long time ago. it was a weird time in all our lives. it's okay.

let's try for a verb this time

to die (en) ≠ sterben (de) but sterben (de) -> to starve

same principle with the consonants, we're just changing a stop (where we completely stop the airflow and then let it through) for a fricative (where we still let some air go through. idk where it's going. maybe to its job or something.)

to starve used to mean generally to die, not just to die of malnourishment. we do that a lot. we take one word for a lot of things and make it mean one thing. or take one word for one thing and make it mean a lot of things. this is common and normal.

"okay but roland," you say, suddenly coming up with an argument. "what about tree? trees are super common. I don't think we'd fuck around too much with that. the german word is baum! what about THAT?"

"when did you learn german?" I ask, but then decide it isn't relevant right at this very moment. but fine.

tree (en) ≠ der Baum (de) but der Baum (de) -> beam (en)

beam??? you ask incredulously. beam???? BEAM?????? you continue with the same tone and cadence of captain holt from brooklyn 99.

yes. beam. like the evil beams from my eye I'm going to hit you with if you don't stop shouting.

but the vowels!!! you howl.

listen. listen to me. the vowels mean nothing. absolutely nothing. they're fluid like water. it got raised in english.

"WHAT DOES RAISED MEAN"

it doesn't matter right now. they were raised better than you, at least. stop shouting. open your eyes and see what god has given you. they're the same word.

"they're NOT the same word. they mean different things!"

we've been over this. they didn't used to. a beam was (and is) a long solid piece of wood. much like the long solid piece of wood I showed your mother last night.

FAQ:

Q: could english be some kind of germanic-romance hybrid?

A: do you become a sexy thing from the black lagoon just because you dressed up as one for halloween? english may have gotten a lot of vocabulary from norman french, but its history and syntax are distinctly germanic. that's what we base these things on.

Q: okay but what does it matter? this doesn't actually affect my day to day life

A: you come into my house? you come into my house, the house of an autistic man living in vienna austria and studying english linguistics and you ask me what does it matter? sit back down. I was going to let you go but now I have powerpoints to show you

Q: you're stupid and wrong and gay and a bad person

A: I know it's you, Willy

[eri-pl]

Tengwar <3

It's the best thing Feanor made. Seriously. Nobody will murder you for using Tengwar. Nobody will hack your brain when you use Tengwar in the wrong moment. (The lamps are ok, but kinda meh, Tengwar is better)

Did you know, just did you know, that every consonant has a name, and the name is a noun, and some are really cool (and foreshadowing)? (chart and translations below the cut)

So, if you want a chart, here is a chart. And the names are (I don't have diacritics, so I just double the long vowels) (Quenya mode, with some historical notes from LotR appendix and elvish.org):

"Normal stuff Feanor had on his desk" row:

T tinco - metal

P parma - book

K calma - lamp (like those Feanor made? Or... like those Aule made)

Q quesse - feather (birds are important!)

"Things that keep you trapped" row:

ND ando - gate (like... the Door of Night?)

MB umbar - doom (doesn't need a comment...)

NG anga - iron (also, used in sword names, even for non-iron swords)

NGW (in TA changed to NW) ungwe - spider's web (foreshadowingsight on Feanor's part? :) )

"Mountain things???" row

S suule - spirit or breath (Manwe Sulimo... king of winds and stuff...) | TH thuule - spirit or breath, but I'm a Feanorian, or at least I'm a linguistics geek and love the phonetic scheme (me! but otoh it sounds dumb :( ), or I love the Teleri and/or Sindar, who use it as th (Finarfin, iirc).

F formen - north

H (h before t) harma (voiceless velar fricative phonetically /x/... I think. the sources are confusing. In TA mostly softened into a breath h.) - treasure (my precious Silmarills...) | aha (later renamed, idk when) - rage (my Silmarils! and, even more importantly, my father!)

HW (like "wh" in "why" especially the fancy British way of saying it where it's actyally h-w, not w-h) hwesta - breeze

"We need to name a row after places of articulation" row

NT anto - mouth (couldn't you think of a better name? I get it's a place-of-articulation row, but i don't like it anyway)

MP ampa - hook

NC anca - jaw

NQ unque - hole

"Things that Melkor likes" row:

N nuumen - west (Numenor...)

M malta - gold

NG (by TA: N) noldo - Noldo, as in type of Elf. Yes, it was initially Ngoldo. I mean, initially initially it was a gnome, so...

NW nwalme - tornment

"I have no idea but vaguely positive-metaphysical?..." row

R (pre-consonant or end-of-the-word R | non-vibrating r, whatever this means. My bet is that it's "r" as in Japanese --- position like "r", movement like "d") oore - heart (or: rising. Guess whose name includes this component. funny that it's the same word as heart, especially given that heart is also defined as conscience here)

V vala - power (duh.)

Y (? it has some history) [there was a consonant here]anna - gift (totally not made into a sus word by now...)

W/V (Initially W, by TA changed to V) wilya - air / lower sky (funny how those two names are next to one another. )

"Really, I think Feanor ran out of ideas for coherent name sets" row

R (vibrating, typpical "rrr") romen - east (the same sound being written with "East" and with a word alternatively translating to "heart" or part of Melkor's name --- I love it! Why? See my recent post. I love that. Call it a coincidence, but I love it)

RD arda - realm

L lambe - speech

LD alda - tree (!)

Now we are not in regular rows, so, the extra letters:

S silme - starlight (or... metaphysically important light in general? because guess what word is connected to this one. Also, funny how it's just after "tree"). It's always S, never TH.

(nuquerma is just "flipped" or something I guess)

Z aaze - day / sunlight (in Noldorin changed to Z - aare) | SS esse (Numenor and later, because they did not use the "z" sound, I think) - name

HY (Numenor and later: H) hywarmen - south

I yanta - bridge

U uure - heat

(doesn't have a sound, in Sindarin it's A) osse - terror (I guess he isn't a very nice Maia?)

H (voiceless h: /h/ not /x/; in TA replaced by harmen) halla - tall | gasdil - stop

(short wovel carrier) telco - stem

(long carrier) aara - dawn

The Tengwa names after directions are also used as marks in the compass (like we use NSWE) And snarky comments aside, I love the schema and how the names connect into many interesting and often Silm-events-related patterns. I love how each (almost) row is named after a set of similar things.

I'm not an expert, and if I made some mistakes, I'll be grateful for corrections.

[cyclesprefectpress]

[image description: a proof of a font of handset type for letterpress printing, displaying every letter, symbol, and special character in the font. it's called "Sixteenth Century Roman," 24 pt., and is a rough-edged serif font with a deliberately worn look. end description.]

hello hello i am return from a deep dive into several reference materials that assumed a little bit more knowledge about how Medieval Latin works than i actually have, but, it was all exTREMEly inch resting to me. i am absolutely not a historian but here we are, a speedrun of my pinballing around trying to ensure that I know what the fuck im storing in my type corridor:

so 16th Cent. Roman, i already knew, was a font Paul Duensing designed based on this incomplete set of old Italian punches he acquired (punches, the first step of old school typecasting, where you carve the relief letter shape into the end of a stick of steel, and you uuuh punch that into the copper matrix, which is then the negative mould-shape you use to cast multiple copies of the lead sorts with hot metal; surviving punches are precious artifacts not the least because they are. they’re hand-carved!! often by the type designer themselves. historical and also wildly cool craftsmanship). these punches were all beat up and probably water damaged, fucky and rough-edged, so he re-did and filled in the gaps in the alphabet with similarly styled letters of his own. very cool. an extremely nerdy lil passion project of a typecaster in the 1960s, very typical of type people. we all find a Thing to obsess over, and sometimes it's reviving an incomplete set of punches from the 1500s that you found in, idk, it's usually a bucket in somebody's basement.

anyway it's got a bunch of ligatures and the long s, sure sure sure, but WHAT are all these gibberish characters with tildas and lines thru the stems of ps and qs and such—

Duensing's full font is in Mac McGrew's specimen book, great, i have that, except McGrew's book has complete proofs and a little bit of history for each font but doesn't always cover what each symbol in a unique alphabet is for, and i knew just enough about Latin to guess that they were abbreviations but not what each of them stood for. a little bit of searching got me this far, which is to say, "Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography," a translation of an Italian essay on the subject from 1929. It is prefaced by the translators with gems like: "Take a foreign language, write it in an unfamiliar script, abbreviating every third word, and you have the compound puzzle that is the medieval Latin manuscript." Scribes writing in medieval Latin just tossed out letters they didn't care to deal with, constantly, and had stand-in special characters and abbreviations for syllables/words/particles and there were intuitive rules but way too many variations in time and place and person to make a reasonably-sized, static lexicon. amazing. hope all u paleographers are having fun over there.

the essay has a great big glossary of truncations and abbreviations and so on which clearly cover most of the figures in Duensing's font:

[image description: screenshots of the essay, with various symbols and the Latin syllables they abbreviated. an m with a bar over it, ex., stood in for men or mun. end description.]

ok! BUT this q with a little swoop off the end kept bugging me!! for all these dead-use symbols this essay is using handwritten samples, obviously, and there's clearly variation in execution and also typographers take liberties, and i just thought, sure my piece of type looks a lot like the quod here but it does link the staff to the swoop where the handwritten sample doesn't, and it could just as well be a fanciful ligature for qn which apparently can stand in for quando, and i have no idea which is a more common-use syllable likely to be cast in the font if you're only going to pick your top 14, and i just like to be sure about things.

SO. i went to double-check with Johnson’s Typographia. Johnson made like a thousand pages of printing manuals set in tiny tiny type in the 1820s which are rad as hell and tell you all sorts of things about how to run a shop and build your own press and cast type and going rates for work and employment and also, the alphabets/type case layout for whatever language or symbol set you might have to set type in, when handsetting type was mostly the only way to get stuff printed—English, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, musical notation, astronomical signs, aaaand it’s got a section for "Marks & characters used in the Domesday Book & other ancient records.”

[image description: a photo of a page of the manual, with similar but not always identical symbols for abbreviated use. many of these abbreviations are described as "a Domesday contraction." end description.]

and WHAT is a Domesday contraction, WELL, it's a contraction specifically from/prevalent in the Domesday book, a deeply boring and historically important tome about property distribution in England. It’s literally a survey. who owned what, in 1086. presumably mind-numbing. enormous, handwritten in Medieval Latin, EXTREMELY cool, go look at some images of it at least, very important to historians, economists, linguists, and a complete pain in the ass to set in type when that technology became available, having to cast any significant proportion of these variant characters in an alphabet. Johnson says, (in 1824) “It is an improvement of latter years only*, to have type cast to resemble the abbreviations used in the more ancient manuscripts; they being formerly rudely imitated, either from a common fount, or else were cut in wood for the purposes of any particular work.” wow that sucks. but in 1773 the government really wanted to be able to reproduce the Domesday Book in type, so a couple people tried to cut a set of punches for Domesday abbreviations and Joseph Jackson got it done and it only took 10 years to print an edited version of the manuscript. and then apparently all the type was destroyed in a fire in 1808. WOW that sucks.

but the point is, Johnson has a great big glossary of characters as they were translated into type in the making of the printed Domesday Book, and the Domesday punches were used or refrenced in the printing of other medieval latin works, which consequences a degree of standardization in the abbreviations used in those versions of the text that handwritten manuscripts never had or needed.

notably the Domesday quod looks even more different from my piece of type here which was pretty annoying, so what are the chances this thing is a quando, and anyway that's when my sister texted me back with better computer skills and a different search engine and found me a perfect match on the first try. it’s a quod. this National Diet Library digital exhibition has several different sample fonts, both black letter and roman, with quite consistent letter forms, if not choices about which abbreviations to bother casting.

*I don’t……exactly know what he means by this, since Gutenberg and contemporaries absolutely did cast many Medieval Latin abbreviations for their fonts nearly 400 years before this. His dismissal of “from a common fount” might be fair, since i think what he means by it is that you’d have a generic set of abbreviation characters which you would have to use in conjunction with whatever font was the main body of your text, and it’s messy to mix things that weren’t designed specifically to match. he may just mean that it’s new for his contemporary foundries to be casting all these expanded alphabets of abbreviations; Gutenberg didn’t have foundries to buy from and made his own type. he could include as many characters as he had the patience for. maybe Johnson is just a guy from the 1800s that didn’t have the internet and i shouldn’t jump down his throat for not knowing something. idk!! i have homework.

anyway that was my Friday!! feel free to correct me and/or suggest further reading if early typecasting is your Thing or. again. you just have better googling than me.

[purfectprincessgirl]

Sooo... TDP Season 3 is finally out and...

...I’ve got... SO many feels about it : o 

((SPOILERS BELOW))

Zym and Bait continue to be precious lil beans and I love em >w< Zym’s especially reminding me of my sis’ new pup irl so all his puppy-like cuteness kept killing me every dang time 😭❤️

Poor Rayla being so excluded from her own people like that... all over something her parents “supposedly” did that didn’t even turn out to be true ;-; Someone pls give her a hug 

RUNAAN’S HUSBAND ETHARI IS HERE AND HE’S SO PRECIOUS~! 💕Seeing that flashback of him and Runaan just being so soft and loving to eachother before this big mission... only for Runaan to befall a tragic fate and leaving Ethari so alone now q-q Luckily that one shot of Runaan’s flower faintly glowing underwater could give us some good hope of a reunion between them one day... T-T

Sooo, looks like Rayla and Callum are canon now? :O Huh, that’s cool ^^ Admittedly I wasn’t too big a shipper of them in the previous seasons so I was a bit unsure at first at how to take in all of this sudden ship-teasing in-between all this serious war stuff happening... but it all turned out surprisingly pretty heartfelt by the end and it’s at least refreshing that they didn’t wait til like, the very last season(s) to bring them together or whatever (unlike some other annoyingly-dragged out “will they/won’t they?” ships in certain other shows >.>). I wish these two the best of luck for the upcoming TDP season(s) 👍

Callum’s getting pretty powerful now with these new spells he’s learning... wonder if he’s gonna find any limit with that or if he’s gonna go the straight up Avatar route of just obtaining all the magic arcanums? Either way, I’m intrigued : o 

Also speaking of which did anyone else just scream at that lil boomerang mention? Aaaaa thank you for my daily Sokka feels T-T

I’m... really conflicted on how they handled Claudia here .-. I mean, I still love her as a whole and I’ll admit that I am pretty intrigued to see how she handles being on the same side as not just her dad but Aaravos as well now... but, I honestly feel like she was a bit too trusting of her dad here? ^^; Like, girl... you just saw Viren turn everyone into freaky lava monsters and the way he kept harshly brushing off Soren... why so quick to still take Viren’s side in all this? o.o Guess that’s an unfortunate side effect of having a manipulative prick like him as a father... I just hope she’ll somehow find the light of it by the next season or so. Poor thing deserves better :c 

On the plus side though, Soren was SUCH a pure bean here and I couldn’t be any prouder that he was able to break free on the good side now~ :D. Never stop being you, boi 💜

Viren’s still a stubborn jackass... surprise to no one ever lol Wonder how long he’ll be able to keep up this "having good intentions at heart” schtick... he doesn’t have much left now except his daughter and “little bug pal”, so... lol

Now Aarovos on the other hand... oooh was he just fun here~ ;p Being able to move around more freely in that spirit form as Viren prepared his army... lowkey acting like a playful troll the whole time (ex. laying around on his spirit-horse while Viren talked) but still putting up the “charming yet intimidating” villain card well when the time called for it. That very last cliffhanger tho... idk if this means his bug form is gonna grow into some freaky butterfly now or if Aaravos is actually regrowing his actual body in a physical form but either way, I’m hyyyped~ ;D ngl tho am I the only one who kinda thought at first Claudia killed his bug body to bring back her dad? lmao

The other characters were pretty entertaining here in their own ways too~ Love how Amaya was her usual bamf-ass self but yet still soft enough to convince Janai on her side :3. Poor Janai losing her sister though... arrogant or not, that was a pretty harsh fate she went through o.o 

Hurray for Gren coming back in one piece~! :3 And that Sunfire linguist that was helping to translate Amaya’s words for Janai was pretty cute too~ ^^

King Ezran is so strong and resourceful at his young age ;w; Harrow would be so proud~

Speaking of Harrow... whoa, that flashback with him and Viren though : o Twisting his grief over his deceased wife enough to convince Harrow to bring down Zym’s dad... ouch

Nyx was a fun little character with a pretty design... kinda wish she stuck around more for the end though, but hopefully we’ll see some more of her in the next volume? 

I... did NOT expect to see lil Aanya show up with her whole army with her... but boy was I hype for it~! 👏 Now THAT is a queen :D

Overall, I say it was a pretty fun season as a whole, and I can’t wait for the next to come (if it does soon) ^w^

[absentsun]

It’s officially been a year since this blog was first *established*, holy cow! I’ve met so many amazing people since then (a lot of which helped me figure out what the heck I wanted to do with my academic career) and I am ridiculously grateful. In a year, I’ve managed to (mysteriously/somehow/idk how) gain 1700+ followers, all of whom I am also extremely grateful for. 

SO! In order to celebrate with you, I would like to do blog rates and a Q&A.

Q&A:

For my Q&A you can ask me anything. I feel a bit guilty since theses days, my blog mostly runs on queue (I’m dying trying to earn this 4.0) so for the next few days, please ask me questions! Get to know me a little! You can ask anything, personal, academic, whatever. Ask me why I love yoongi so much, or about Chinese, Korean and Arabic! Ask me about linguistics!  Last time I did this people were only interested in the blog rates, but we’ll see how this goes.

Blog Rates:

RULES:

Reblog this post

Send an ask requesting a blog rate

No need to be following me

If your studyblr is a side blog state the name in your ask

If you have original content, also state it in your ask

Ill tag them as #br1700 so you can blacklist the tag that if you don’t want to see them.

FORMAT:

URL | idgi / average / nice / cute / amazing / so much heart eyes / trade. now.

ICON | nice/ cute / pretty / lovely / I really like it / so beautiful / epitome of perfection

THEME | default / okay / nice / lovely/ soo good / brb stealing

MOBILE THEME | okay / nice / lovely/ wow I really like it / perfection

ORIGINAL CONTENT | good / pretty / beautiful / aesthetic / can you just take over my blog?

POSTS | they are alright / good / interesting / on point / really good / really helpful / love them/ gonna just go and heart and reblog some of these..

FOLLOWING | no but ily and you’re doing a great job! / now i am! / of course /  how could i not be??

OVERALL | 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: