#lexemes

[mashkaroom]

Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, “His wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor”

It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.

Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate -- it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:

“[K]eeping it real meant performing an individual’s experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasn’t recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to ‘forge a parallel system of meaning,’ according to cultural critic Mich Nyawalo...The phrase’s roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ’80s....Keeping it real in this context indicated a performance done so well that audiences could forget it was a performance.This version of keeping it real wasn’t about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.”

One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings -- the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.

Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that don’t necessarily exist in other languages -- a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these -- how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?

In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story -- what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? -- or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.

Yiddish first:

זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים

צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.

tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil

This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish -- tsits -- but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication -- his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.

Vitish -- Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך --  witsch -- נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark -- which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) -- and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different -- like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has -- keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.

The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.

Ok, now Russian

женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками

чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу

zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.

shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu

In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here -- since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:

“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”

So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth -- that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying -- is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is -- an encounter without deeper significance?

Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history --  i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you. 

Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one -- perhaps even the dominant one -- but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” -- the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” -- as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good -- we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.

Ok, chintz: I chose the word “финтифлюшки” (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.

Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz -- and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch -- they want to do the latter but not the former.

As for register -- “shtob” is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the “mat” words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)

Ok i think that’s all the comments i have!

[poppletonink]

Best Quotes From 'If We Were Villains'

"You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough."

"You can't quantify humanity. You can't measure it - not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them."

"I don't know, it's like I look at you and the sonnets make sense. The good ones, anyway."

"Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?" The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can't help but suppress a smile. "I blame him for all of it."

'She says, “Were you in love with him?” “Yes,” I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. “Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.'

'I need language to live like food - lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.'

'Below was the motto: Per aspera ad astra. I'd heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns to the stars.'

"We cracked up. [...] But we didn't really shatter until we were all back together again."

'The clock on the mantel struck twelve, and we stirred, one by one, like seven statues coming to life.'

'Actors are by nature volatile - alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.'

[soracities]

One thing I'm sure [he] will never understand is that I need language to live, like food--lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt this before.

M. L. Rio, If We Were Villains

[official-linguistics-post]

Homographs in a text are different lexemes, but would you say they are different types as well?

Have a nice day! ☀️

(unrelated fun fact: autocorrect wanted me to write exams, lenses or legumes instead of lexemes)

i'm not sure what you mean by "types" here?

[cowboybrunch]

currently reading If We Were Villains by M.L Rio and

oh my god

"...I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone has felt it before."

oh my GOD

[bitchwhoreofastorm]

.

"Are you awake?" she asks when she cracks open the door.

His room is dark, he is tangled in his own bedsheets, his face half-buried in a pillow when he replies, "Indubitably."

The door opens fully, then shuts again, and a few moments later Sotha Sil feels Almalexia crawling into his bed. He tries to remember when she started doing this, simply inviting herself into his space without permission, and he realises that she's been doing it since they were children, and it's far too late in their lives for him to reprimand her on the concept of personal space. He feels her arranging herself in his unwashed blankets, feels a strand of her Queenly hair fall over his pillow and hit the back of his neck. He waits patiently for her to make herself comfortable.

"How long have you been in bed?" she finally asks. "It reeks in here."

"Twenty-six hours and thirty-seven minutes," Sotha Sil replies. "Excluding brief excursions to attend to basic bodily functions."

"Why are you talking like an arcane manual?"

"Only those of insufficient intellect find my locution abstruse. Contemplate acquiring a thesaurus."

"Sil." And he feels her roll over to face him. "You're the one being abstruse."

"Incorrect utilisation of that lexeme."

"You're an incorrect utilisation of a lexeme."

"A clumsy attempt to flirt with me, if that's the purpose for which you've intercalated yourself within my location of slumber."

"Go outside," Almalexia complains. "See the sunlight. Interact with a woman. Or let me bring you something to read that's not a dictionary."

"I'm still practising my Dwemeris," Sotha Sil rebuts, though his voice has sunk down to a sleepy mumble again. "Perusing the dictionary is a credible use of my temporal imprisonment within the mortal sphere."

Mercifully for the both of them, Almalexia lets him lapse into silence.

And it's almost cozy, the two of them lying there, even though they do not touch.

And finally Almalexia asks, "Does staying in bed help you?"

"It's not meant to help," Sotha Sil replies.

"Would you like me to take you somewhere?"

"You'll carry me-- where, the council-room? I wouldn't be a welcome sight in a meeting, like this."

"There's no meetings, the council won't be in session for a few months yet. We have nothing to do."

"I'm content here, thank you."

And, funnily enough, she seems to be, too. She does not move, but she does not argue with him either. Though the bed is not large, they still do not touch.

"You're welcome to experiment," Sotha Sil finally says.

"Experiment."

"With lying here. See what the outcome might be."

"You said it doesn't help."

Finally, he finds a modicum of life somewhere in his tired dead limbs. Finally, he rolls over to face her. He's surprised to find that Almalexia has been lying very close to his back, her face is now only inches from his. As if skeptical of her existence he presses a thumb gently against her cheek, and finds it warm, and a little damp, and real.

She mistakes this investigation for an invitation; she draws him into an embrace, folds him into her chest. He feels her breath in his greasy hair, and her sharp fingernails somewhere behind his shoulder-blades. He settles his face into the space under her neck and feels very resigned.

"I'm going insane again," Almalexia confesses.

She admits this with terrible reluctance. Sotha Sil can only assume it's quite frustrating for a megalomaniac to be betrayed by her own mind, just as he, the artificer, is endlessly frustrated by the betrayals of his own body.

"I know," he says.

"I thought I'd lie here with you, until it… resolves itself."

"Insanity is not influenza." Sotha Sil mumbles into her chest. "I doubt the ailment may be rectified by a little rest. Start with a different hypothesis."

"I'm not expecting it to help... What would you say if I confessed that I'm scared of hurting someone?"

"I would be flattered that you chose me as acceptable collateral."

She doesn't even bother to reassure him as to his collateral status. "Just," she begins. Then she pauses. Then she says, "Please stop me if I do try to hurt someone."

"I don't care if you do," Sotha Sil replies.

"Seht."

"Hurt everyone in the world if you wish. The world allowed House Sotha… it doesn't matter to me who suffers, I am incapable of caring about that or anything else."

Almalexia lets out a sigh so heavy that he feels her body sag around him. She holds him a little more tightly, shoves her Queenly face into his unkempt head and inhales.

"That's why I came to you," she admits, miserable. "I knew you'd give me permission."

[max1461]

hello, since you know a lot about linguistics (genuine compliment) i was wondering what your analysis of the phrase "[character] is so" (without any word after 'so') as so describe a character that is unusual/eccentric in a way the speaker likes. the adjective deletion feels weird. is there a plausible analysis based on "intentional abrupt end of speech" as a lexeme. please tell me there is.

I don't have a good analysis of this construction off the top of my head, although I can say that explaining it by positing an "abrupt end of sentence" lexeme is probably not the most parsimonious one. It looks to me like perhaps it's a headless adjective phrase, in the same way that something like "the blind" is a headless noun phrase.

[japhugmafia]

Mildly Interesting Reads: May 2024

Some Mildly Interesting books in mostly anthropology, linguistics & whatnot. It's the 15th and I have nitro so

Books

Schneider, David. Matrilineal Kinship. A book that discusses crosscultural comparisons in matrilinealities, and how they often interact with patriarchal structures of kinship

Haring, Lee. How to Read a Folktale: The Ibonia Epic from Madagascar This documents an oral epic from Madgascar.

Hunwick, John. Timbuktu and The Songhay Empire Discusses the chronology and kingsly lines of the rise of the Songhay Empire in the Inland Niger Delta.

Hardacre, Helen. Shintō: A History. As it says on the tin, the history of Shintō and the bases of its beliefs, and later its organization.

Stenzel, Kristine (ed.). On this and Other Worlds: Voices from Amazonia. A narrative and anthropological-oriented documentations of Amazonian narratives and devices thereof.

Nijdam, Han. Frisian Land Law. A book that focuses on the Frisian resistance to feudalism in medieval Europe as it kept Germanic laws akin to those in the north.

Kirch, Patrick & Green, Roger. Finding Hawaiki. A comparative cultural book that discusses about the origins and shared mythologies of Polynesian dispersal.

Papers

Stassen, Laurent. AND-languages and WITH-languages. A typological profile of conjunctives (think of Chinese as a WITH-language and English as an AND-language).

Blench, Roger. Things Your Classics Master Never Told You: A Borrowing from Trans-New-Guinea to Latin. On the standing of the lexeme *mugu "banana" and its diffusion to Latin musa, and by proxy Arabic muz

Helle, Sophus. Only in Dress?. A critical analysis at the assinu and the third genders in Mesopotamia.

Erhart, Kelsie. Assumptions About the Assinu. Another analysis of the assinu by Kelsie Erhart.

Misc

The Global Jukebox. A directory of a lot of crosscultural folk music.

[a-book-of-creatures]

Lexemes? More like flexemes amirite 💪💪💪

[mvximized]

bookmarked → if we were villains by m. l. rio

“I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”

[possessivesuffix]

I read somewhere (forgot where) that proto uralic may be constructed with having a base 6 number system. Is this bullshit or something to take seriously?

Basically bullshit. There's zero evidence whatsoever for 6 as a base, i.e. for expressions to the effect of 6+1, 6+1, 6×2, 6×3, 6×6… The actually published hypotheses that I'm aware of only makes any argument for a limited number system with unique terms ending at 6, supposedly with no firm evidence for how anything larger would have been expressed. The broken telephone transmission from here to various random lists of trivia is kinda like claiming that English "has a base 12 system" just because eleven and twelve are their own not-morphologically-analyzable lexemes (and ignoring that already thirteen is then 3+10 and not 1+12).

We have good odds for actually reconstructing the number 10, too, in Proto-Uralic (*luka); but it is apparently in some morphological relationship with 'to count' (*lukə-), so leaves open some room for independent parallel developments. There's even a candidate for 20, but it comes in a few variants (ca. #komćV ~ #koćV) and is proposed to be derived from 'man' (*kojə ~ *koj-ma) (i.e. '20 fingers and toes'?).

It is a stronger argument still, I think, for base 10 already in PU that 8 and 9 are very widely in Uralic derived from 2 and 1, i.e. as something like "two short [of base]", "one short [of base]". As the constructions in question tend to be kinda opaque, I suppose someone could try to plead that 8 originally meant instead 6+2 and was reanalyzed as 10-2 afterwards, and then inspired a new formation for 9… but at minimum I'd want some evidence for the actual appearence of the term for 6 in there too then, which is not at all the case. (One long-standing hypothesis of derivation is instead that a handful of them, like Finnish kahdeksan, contain the PIE root for 10.)

Some additional arguments exist for a special status of 60, based on Permic and Mansi, but this still implies 10 as the primary base and there's again no evidence whatsoever even for "secondary-base" expressions like 60+10 or 60×2.

— Kind of besides all this is that I think I have some very tentative reasons to suspect an earlier, maybe pre-Proto-Uralic, base 4 system instead (e.g. Proto-Ugric *ńëla '8' has already been noted to kind of look similar to *neljä '4').

[temozarela]

-> who are you, really?

GOJO SATORU CHARACTER STUDY loneliness, philosophy, ijichi, mentions of death, angst, morality

satoru didn’t want to die, but it’s not always that simple, is it?

WORD COUNT: 1.7k

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

The streets of Shibuya were bustling, the murmurs of passers-by and the low mumbling of traffic hanging in the air like steam, seeping through the earphones in Satoru’s ears. He was stood outside the train station, arms crossed over his chest as he waited for any sort of motivation to spark in his brain, to finally force him to text Ijichi for a ride home. Numbly, he stared at the ground, a frown tugging at his lips.

There were times, not often, where he’d entertain his brain, and let the cogs run wild until the metal grated against itself painfully, and the rust tarnished the surface. When allowed to, the brain catastrophises. It creates a network of tunnels as microscopic as a neutron, and as significant as a galaxy, and wriggles its way out of chronic stress. There are hundreds of thousands of people in Shibuya. Murderers, tourists, mothers, psychopaths, students, dentists, homeless... Personality is merely the colour you paint your walls, or the clothes you wear. When stripped away, it’s all the same: walls and a human body. That’s the way Satoru saw it. Everyone has the same brain. The same brain that burrows so many tunnels, and unknowingly digs its own grave. The ‘what if’s and ‘what then’s, the lefts and rights all lead to the same, inevitable outcome, the same full stop where the brain can no longer rip possibilities out from the ground. Death. Ironic, isn’t it? Satoru didn’t want to die, but it’s not always that simple, is it?

He had experienced his fair share of episodic stresses. It would be easy to blame his stress on the deaths of Amanai and Suguru. You wouldn’t be wrong, but the worst losses were the ones he never had. The absence of childhood, the absence of true freedom, the absence of being able to rebel, and say no, the absence of a life where he could have come home to parents who saw him as their boy. A lonely, inconsolable envy gnawed at his guts at the thought that Nanami was able to just… leave… and that it was ok. Millions of lives weren’t put in imminent danger, the lives of vulnerable students weren’t uselessly thrown away- Nanami could choose what he wanted. Satoru could never do that. It was an envy that was expertly hidden, and mistaken. He didn’t think too hard about feelings. Most likely the reason that when they caught up with him, it stung.

Wanting to die and wishing you could start again to live a different life are synonymous. Well, the intention is anyway. If he thought about it really hard, maybe he’d take a moment to imagine coming back to a home that smelled like homemade curry and fresh bread. The warm kitchen lights would be on, and maybe there’d be arms wide open to embrace him. If he tried to visualise the figure waiting for him, he probably wouldn’t be able to. His albino eyebrows would furrow and his lips would twitch as he’d try to think harder. Yet, the grey fuzzy arms around him and the grey fuzzy face tucked into the crook of his neck would refuse to contort into the features of a face he could recognise or love. If he tried again, the figure would probably change size. Perhaps into something more masculine. It wouldn't matter much to him. If he really thought about it, he probably could’ve been a high school teacher. Maybe physics.

The greatest pleasure of Satoru’s childhood was being a problem child. The pure joy of watching rage spread across Yaga’s brutish face was unrivaled, but unlike most, his childhood only lasted two years. According to modern scientists, the personality is set in stone at 6, as is your frontal lobe at 25. Yet at 6, he was silent, uptight, and prickly. At 16, he was flippant, annoying, and chaotic, and at 26, he was spontaneous, childish, and aloof. In that case, what even was personality, if not the lexemes others would describe you with? Satoru didn’t know. The words he learned to respond with and the jokes he learned to tell were simply a result of successful interactions observed from others. The few interests he had were those of the people he’d met. The people he liked were those who didn’t inconvenience him. Most would probably say the same thing, so who was he, really? If you were to ask those he knew, he’d be convinced that they’d all say the same thing.

He’s the strongest.

That’s who he was, right?

He didn’t fuss with the details: what he wore, how he decorated, how he acted… it didn’t matter. He was defined by one word. It didn’t matter who he told people he was, who people said he was, the personality tests, MBTI and astrological signs were useless. Satoru didn’t stress it, after all, he’s never had to introduce himself in his life.

Infinite Void was cold. Space must’ve been cold, because Infinite Void was freezing. His skin would prickle as smudges of stars, galaxies, and planets would engulf him in a rapid blur that would give any normal person chronic vertigo. Unlike the icy breezes of midwinter Tokyo, the chill of Infinite Void was still- a sudden existence of negative temperatures that just appeared, as if a switch had been flicked. The cold was infectious. It would seep through his pores, before winding around his skeleton like a boa constrictor, milking out the warmth from his muscles. It wasn’t the kind of cold that makes your fingertips go numb, and your cheeks to flush. Rather, it went straight to the heart in a way which made his stomach churn. To Satoru, it could only really be compared to the feeling of desperately dry heaving with an empty stomach. Apparently, the victim’s experience is tenfold.

Sometimes he’s reminded of the time when Suguru showed him the trolley problem at 15.

“Huh? That’s so stupid!”

“Just answer the question!”

“Who the hell chooses to kill more people?”

“Satoru, why is their life worth more than theirs?”

“Never said theirs was, just said there are less of them.”

“The larger row may consist of terrible people though.”

“The fuck you want me to do? Stop the trolly and get to know them? At that point, I might as well not hit anyone.”

“…Satoru, I don’t think you’re getting this.”

“I think you’re getting far more than there actually is, Suguru.”

“Come on, Satoru.”

“Though… if I swerve, I can get all of them.”

“You’re awful.”

And again, a year later.

“Should we kill them all?”

And again, 12 years later.

“The execution is still on, but I got your sentence suspended.”

“Suspended? So you’re not killing me right away?”

Again and again, despite everyone, he always ended up trying to choose the option that cost the least lives. It never seemed to work out in the end though. Would it have been easier to stray from the school and go rogue with Suguru? Probably. Would it have been easier to execute the boy who consumed Sukuna’s finger? Definitely. It was so easy to see in hindsight, but every time he still took off in the same direction. Satoru felt like a dog nipping at his own tail. The solution was so close, yet so far. He knew exactly what it was, but it seemed he never learned.

When he was a teenager, he overheard muffled voices of Yaga and the higher-ups.

“…Too much responsibility for one boy.”

It was foreign to his ears, hearing someone say that about him. It never occurred to him that it was something that could be said about him. Satoru had never been a boy before. In the Gojo estate, he had often wondered what boys even did. When he had asked Suguru, he had earned a strange look.

“What do you even mean by that?”

“‘Dunno, just answer.”

“Nagged my mother and kicked a ball around the garden for a bit.”

“Huh? When did you train?”

“I… didn’t?”

“Oh.”

…Was that what it meant to a boy?

To say the least, when it came to be, Satoru was delighted to be a boy. To hear it bellowed from Yaga’s office after he started a fire in the kitchens, to hear it scowled from an elder’s lips after he refused work. It was his pleasure.

Even at his adult age, hearing Shoko say ‘he has the body of a man and the mind of a boy’ was some sort of sad comfort. Really, he never placed his finger on why, but he was sure he could if he wanted to.

Suddenly, Satoru was snapped back to reality. His phone, of which he had been haphazardly dangling between his thumb and forefinger, vibrated with a message- from Ijichi.

I didn’t hear from you so I came anyway. I’m outside.

Satoru tucked his phone into his pocket, stretching his arms in front of him. Sure enough, through the mess of pedestrians, he could see the glistening, black Mercedes parked by the curb.

It was almost as if he were a mind-reader. Despite his seemingly perpetual nerves, Ijichi was almost like a lifeline for Satoru. He was one of the consistent pillars of his life. From underwhelming dates to gruelling missions, Satoru knew that it would always end in the passenger seat of Ijichi’s Mercedes. It’s just how it was. Seemingly, even with minimal genuine and meaningful interaction, a lonely string of childish trust connected Satoru to him, albeit perhaps unrequited.

Another wave of chattering pedestrians flooded towards Satoru as the traffic lights turned red. He tensed, awkwardly wading through the crowd as he approached Ijichi. At his arrival, the passenger side window rolled down.

“Home?” Ijichi asked, leaning over the passenger seat to address him.

Satoru shook his head, “The school, Ijichi.”

Ijichi muttered something under his breath as he adjusted his posture, allowing Satoru to get in.

“Got something to say, Ijichi?” He teased him, lightly.

“No!” Ijichi spluttered, clumsily starting the engine.

Satoru closed his eyes as Ijichi pulled away from the curb, joining the queue of city traffic. He could trust that Ijichi wouldn’t attempt to start any small talk. The cogs in his brain clanged, grating to a stop as the comforting spell of lavender sleep washed over him. Usually, he didn’t let his mind run away from him, but when he did- man was it exhausting.

[bonefall]

How do you like the different cat word for humans and their things? Are there any you would add or change? (Seeing as phones are glowstones which i love!) I think more of these lexemes should differ from group to group like twoleg vs house-/workfolk

I don't like that they call them Twolegs. Humans should be abundant enough in their surroundings for them to have a unique word for them; I would have them call the basic animal a 'human' or even just 'man'.

They would have individual words for certain human careers, mostly the ones they see the most often

Miller = Tree-man

Boater = River-man (Also becomes the word for lake boaters)

Farmer: Sheep = Wool-man

Farmer: Crops = Wheat-man

Dog-walker, horse-rider, car-driver = Monster-man

So the workmen who destroy the forest would come to be known as Monstermen, or Treemen. Treemen used to only cut in the Tallpines, but the word describes the humans with chainsaws as well.

The Clans wouldn't understand that they're working, or even that they have a goal in mind. As far as they know, they're just cutting trees to feed to their big monsters.

There's also some confusion with campers; they probably didn't have twolegs who would stay in the Forest territories overnight, since it's so close to suburbs. Over time, Riverman probably comes to mean any human hanging out for a recreational purpose, but would still have the linguistic root in River-Human.

But anyway I'd call them Camper or Campman for simplicity sake.

[dedalvs]

Hi David! I've been rewatching some ASOIAF content again and it remided me how much I love Valyrian. But... I have not run into a word like "letter" and I'm curious. After all, in medieval period letters with riders and ravens is very important.

Is there a term/word for "message" or "letter"?

Huh, really? It's taught as a lexem in the Duolingo course. The word is rūniapos. And yeah, it's around. Always be sure to check my wiki (which is at https://wiki.languageinvention.com/), which should be quite up-to-date for High Valyrian, at least.

[orsinium]

some interesting comparisons between riekling and gremlin-- surprised to see the continuity actually given how little there is of each language

laloo/kaloo highlighted more for the suffixing\lexeme similarity than the whole word

[sabakos]

The existence of Joyo kanji is very satisfying to me, I wish there were something standard like that for Ancient Greek based on common lexemes but as far as I can tell there is not.