#linguistic shorthand

[brokendreamsandpyramidschemes]

I nuked my entire fantasy universe because I corrected a white friend while reading the menu to an authentic pakistani restaurant, from "naan bread" to "naan roti" and the fucker replied with "yes, I'll have the naan roti bread" without hesitation.

[shosta]

reading Dracula (and taking years and years of classes requiring tons of transcription) made me want to learn shorthand!! (i went with Gregg Simplified, but honestly I'm making up a fair amount of it for myself)

it's been speculated that Jonathan and Mina probably would have used Pitman, but i wanted something I could also use digitally :)

[transingthoseformers]

So, wanna know what I'm doing right now? I'm trying to make Cybertronian symbols for the ambersand (&), and so far because I can't choose worth shit, I've got four designs. A pair for the autobots and a pair for the Decepticons. Basically, each pair is an inverse of the other, and there are two meanings. The one that allows you to extend your sentences, and the one that expresses the question "And?". Because honestly that's a very interesting bit of "incorrect" grammer that's fairly common in our vernacular. Because there's a whole slew of unspoken sentences there with a certain 💫air💫 about them, such as:

"And, so what?"

"Why?"

"Elaborate further."

And more I cannot currently name. It's an exclamation, like how no and yes technically count as sentences. I fucking love it when you realize how fluid grammer is and how there's a scale between formal and informal. We already have several whole ass symbols for words (hashtag/pound/octothorp for #, cash for $, percent for %, ambersand for &, asterisk for *, legitimately all punctuation, at for @, dash for -, quotation for ", apostrophe for ', how @#$% full well reads as fuck, there's literally so fucking many) so why wouldn't Cybertronians? Especially after the war began, with codes, shorthand, and slang becoming more common, and the development of two alphabets for the same language. I find it akin to the difference between cannot and can't.

[jerichomere]

Say what you want about the anime facebook community, I love how whenever there was an uncredited screenshot or meme, everyone would simply comment “sauce”

[jaimehwatson]

me: Shorthand is basically a phonetic alphabet, so you can see that this curve downward here is the consonant sound at the beginning of the word, and then this loop is the vowel sound—

my weeb-ass boyfriend: So it’s like hiragana for English.

me: Well not really, I mean there are also tons of short forms you can use when you get good at it, you’d only really write out the whole word like this if it’s a bit less common or—ah fuck. So that’s like kanji. Fuck, you’re right.

[familyabolisher]

hi!! i hope you’re having a lovely day :-) i really enjoy reading your blog and how you pick apart Things & was wondering if you have any tips and guides for reading and analyzing poetry? ive always struggled w forming coherent thoughts abt poems and would love to know how you approach it. thank you sm for your time ✨

so the big thing that made poetry "click" for me was realising that i was trying to read it the way i might try to read a novel -- identify a discourse taking place, look for points in the text that supplement my argument, construct a position on what the piece is "about" based on these points -- all very undergrad essay-core and frankly a v boring way to think about novels as well, but like, completely mind-numbing when it came to poetry. i think a better approach is to interface with the poem at the level of language and technical construction. i find that it helps a lot to know the technical terms for particular phenomena in the language of poetry, but even without that shorthand knowledge, you'll get a lot out of poetry when you start looking at the choices being made at the level of individual words or even syllables. so instead of asking "what is this poem about?", we can start to ask, for instance:

what is the tone of this poem? is it sparing or loquacious? emotional or detached? asking questions or answering them? what's the vantage point - is this a detached omniscient third-person narrator making observations, or are we as the reader being guided towards a particular perspective on the part of the speaker?

what is the mouthfeel of this poem? can you find any 'shapes' -- any assonance, any internal rhyming, alliteration, anything that causes you to pay attention to particular words, phrasing, etc. why is your attention being called to those moments?

what is the rhythm of the poem? is it free verse -- if so, can you find any points in the piece where more or less attention to rhythm is being paid? why does the line break on this particular word? are the sentences short or long? how is the poet interfacing with their chosen meter? what does this meter lend to the poem? if you're reading multiple works by the same author, compare their use of meter -- do they use the same meter regularly or switch it up, and why were those switches made?

if you can annotate a poem, do so. note down anything which seems linguistically interesting, even if you don't know the "correct" technical word for it -- any clusters of words with similarities whose placement might be interesting (eg. what words are rhymed!), any noteworthy rhythmic discrepancies, placement of line breaks, anything that sticks out. i like to think of reading poetry as a playful exercise -- you're playing around with the words, seeing how they work, enjoying the rhythm and texture of the piece as it comes to you, and trying to construct "a reading" only after the fact.

i think there are times when the reading-for-a-discourse approach can be v helpful and illuminating, but it's best to stumble on those opportunities organically rather than focusing all your energy on trying to answer the "what is this trying to say?" question. if a particular discursive component of a poem sparks your interest (like eg. you read the rime of the ancient mariner and notice how the poem interfaces with contemporaneous abolitionist discourses as well as colonialist ideas about polynesia, just as an example), you've obviously got a compelling hook from which you can anchor a reading, but going in expecting such a reading to jump off the page will often just result in frustration.

this doesn't mean that we don't take the discourse of a poem seriously, or that we don't understand the "rules" of poetry to be postdiscursive phenomena highly contingent on social context. if anything, understanding poetry at a mechanical level opens up significant doors for answering these types of questions -- we can understand, for example, the reactionary nature of the academic revolt against free verse and the desire to return to metered poetry better once we understand the function of form and structure in fascist aesthetics. similarly, spending this kind of time with a poem makes it a lot easier to get a handle on what it might be "about," and what sort of choices are being made to render that "about"ness coherent.

also -- and this is true of anything, including poetry -- if a poet isn't working for you, try reading somebody else. a lot of poets that people will say are good and interesting are neither of those things. poetry has the advantage of being (usually!) a quick read compared to novels, so it's far easier to shop around, read widely, realise what you like and dislike, and engage accordingly.

one of my favourite pieces of literary criticism and examples of the value of this sort of reading practice comes from nabokov's epilogue to lolita, in which he both defends the novel in question against accusations of salacity and speaks very disparagingly of efforts to read a thesis statement into it. he writes:

Every serious writer, I dare say, is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting presence. Its pilot light is steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a mere touch applied to one’s private thermostat instantly results in a quiet little explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows. But even so, there are certain points, byroads, favorite hollows that one evokes more eagerly and enjoys moretenderly than the rest of one’s book. I have not reread Lolita since I went through the proofs in the spring of 1955 but I find it to be a delightful presence now that it quietly hangs about the house like a summer day which one knows to be bright behind the haze. And when I thus think of Lolita, I seem always to pick out for special delectation such images as Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying “waterproof,” or Lolita in slow motion advancing toward Humbert’s gifts, or the pictures decorating the stylized garret of Gaston Godin, or the Kasbeam barber (who cost me a month of work), or Lolita playing tennis, or the hospital at Elphinstone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star (the capital town of the book), or the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov). These are the nerves of the novel. These are the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted—although I realize very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over or not noticed, or never even reached, by those who begin reading the book under the impression that it is something on the lines of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Les Amours de Milord Grosvit. That my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a pervert is quite true. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author. And yet one of my very few intimate friends, after reading Lolita, was sincerely worried that I (I!) should be living “among such depressing people” —when the only discomfort I really experienced was to live in my workshop among discarded limbs and unfinished torsos.

[dodger-chan]

Did I procrastinate by writing steddie fic again? Maybe. In my defense, I think this is very funny. Also on AO3.

Warning for non graphic but frequent discussion of sex.

Like a good number of things, it was Wheeler’s fault.

Under normal circumstances, Eddie would have no problem sitting back in his throne and staying above the fray while his little sheep had their silly arguments. Talking is a free action, etc. etc. And they’d wrapped for the night, were only delaying clean-up. But Wheeler, pressed by his friends to join in the defense of their favorite paladin, had gone with a very explicable but awkward choice of phrasing.

“I mean, Steve doesn’t suck.”

Eddie bit down on his tongue. He wasn’t going to say anything. He was not.

Unfortunately, something about the tepidness, the lackluster nature of Wheeler’s tone only encouraged Gareth.

“Au contraire,” he said, standing and making a gesture that Eddie chose to interpret as homage rather than mockery. “Harrington most assuredly does suck.”

Eddie bit down harder. He couldn’t say anything.

Gareth then began to list a number of harms done to the members of Hellfire that were, for the most part, merely tangentially related to the actions or existence of one Steven Harrington.

Perhaps it had always been a little unfair, to blame the social strictures of highschool on one individual who had no part in designing them and had done little more than anyone else in the way of enforcement. But what was the point of a figurehead if not to take the blame?

Of course no part of Gareth’s speech addressed the one way in which Steve truly did suck dick: literally. Steve had taken to oral sodomy like a duck to water. Eddie would love to claim credit by citing his excellent tutelage - largely by example - but he suspected his boyfriend was a natural.

Eddie tasted blood in his mouth. He couldn't keep biting his tongue. But he also couldn't set the record straight, so to speak. Even if he could tell all of Hellfire that he and Steve were dating, it would be beyond inappropriate to discuss Steve's cocksucking acumen with the freshmen.

“It's an interesting linguistic phenomenon, wouldn't you say?” Eddie interrupted Gareth’s spiel. “You are debating the merits and acceptability of one Steve Harrington, but using as shorthand a term that refers to oral sex. A phrasing that suggests people who give head are lesser than those who do not.

“Without making too many assumptions, I feel safe in saying that most of us would like to enjoy a bit of oral sodomy in the future. Now, I may not be the smartest guy in town, but it seems to me that preemptively insulting the people who might suck your dick is a good way to ensure they never will.”

He gave them a moment to digest his speech.

“So I should have said Steve doesn’t blow?” Mike asked, tentatively.

“Blow comes from blow jobs, so that’s the same thing,” Dustin corrected. A little less confidently, he went on. “Bites, maybe? Biting’s not a sex thing, is it?”

Eddie sighed. Surely there were insults that didn’t reflect some aspect of his sex life. Though biting was, at minimum, not related to oral. And it would probably be easier not to brag about the number of little bruises he’d left on Steve’s neck. And shoulders. And chest. All over Steve’s body, really.

Who was he kidding? He needed to shut this whole conversation down yesterday.

(this now has a sequel)

[noandpickles]

Growing up in Mormonism, there's a phrase you hear all the time. We are meant to be "in the world, but not of the world." Part of why Mormons love this phrase is that they feel that the "in the world" bit distinguishes them from their less popular, more compound-inclined offshoot. But the primary purpose of the phrase is to emphasize that latter half.

"The world," in Mormon teachings, is often used as a shorthand for the devil and his forces, along with all the tricks and trappings of popular culture that he uses to ensnare souls. Where I lived, it meant everything from queer people to religious diversity to James Cameron's Titanic. Mortal existence was split between the church and the world, the church was run by god and the world was run by the devil. A major goal of spiritual life was to avoid being an active participant in secular culture because secular culture existed only to destroy your soul. It would never be phrased that bluntly, and there were no hard and fast rules, but remaining untainted by the world was a virtue that got hammered home hard.

It's taken me nearly a decade to recognize and unpack the shit I was taught growing up, and I'm still working on it. This piece in particular didn't occur to me until tonight. I think this is why I love cities so much, particularly cultural celebrations like pride. Standing in a crowd, seeing the throng of humanity all living and loving and experiencing and creating, it makes me so fucking happy I could cry. In a very real way, it feels like discovering an alien civilization. There's a whole world of vibrant life out here that I was always taught to fear and deride in equal measure. Getting to discover that world piece by piece is a wonder.

So I watched Die Hard on Christmas. I took as many anthropology and linguistics classes as I could fit in my college schedule. I sing karaoke at gay bars. I stand in a crowd in London, or Seattle, or New York, and I just breathe in the everyday marvel of humanity. I'd been culturally starved before, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of making up for that lost time.

[cryptotheism]

Apropos "Cryptically Written" Whats your opinion on the Voynich Manuscript? Is it someones genuine research/Notes? Or did some polymath/person with too much time just decide to make a book they fill with nice art and nonsense code? Or something else entirely?

Personally, I subscribe to the theory that it's a coded gynaecology textbook written in medical shorthand with many spelling errors.

There's some recent statistical linguistic analysis that points to it being an elaborate medieval hoax, but I'm not sure I buy that. The text itself is the result of over a thousand labor hours of dedicated work. If it is a hoax, it only raises more questions.

[gay-jewish-bucky]

Now for something lighthearted: Jewish acronyms!

[chick3nbot1000]

A comment on OSPs newest video made me realize something. Someone said that ATLA happens to fit almost all of the trope talks the channel does. It has always annoyed me a bit when people say that tropes are bad. Based on this idea, ATLA should be trash considering how many tropes it incorporates. Yet, it is an extremely renowned show. At the end of the day, tropes are just preexisting story elements, just like certain metaphors and figures of speech we frequently use in language. When someone says “don’t beat around the bush,” we know exactly what they mean. You could say that using that phrase is uncreative, and if you relegate your writing to only cut out phrases than it might be, but it does serve its purpose as linguistic shorthand.

In the same way, tropes aren’t inherently bad. They function perfectly well, and the true quality of ones writing comes not from how few or how many tropes are used, but instead the strength of their usage in the overall context of the story and how well they can harmonize with the authors original ideas and writing style.

[neechees]

Some important Cree words commonly used in conversation for you to use & remember:

Awîna: who

Tanite: where

Tanisi: how (also used as shorthand for "hello")

Tânêhki: why

Ispîhk/Tanispîhk: when, until

Cî: (question indicator added to the end of a sentence, used when the above words are not used & thus indicating a question)

Osâm: because, since, for

Kîkway: what

êwako: this (specific previously mentioned thing, for context)

Nîkân: first, foremost

êkwa: and, now, then

mîna: and, also, again (can be combined with êkwa to make "êkwa mîna")

Sêmâk: right now, immediately, quickly

Piko: only, or must, have to

Cêskwa: just wait, just a minute, soon

Awîyak: someone, somebody

Namakîkway: nothing, "I have nothing"

Mâka: but

Linguist & anthropologists stay off this post UNLESS you're Native.

[defining-trans]

Why is being transgender different that being trans-racial?

While race and gender are both social constructs, they are not equivalent. For one, race as we define it today is a concept created by and for the benefit of white people, the most privileged class within the racial hierarchy, with the sole intent of subjugating people of color. (This is not a perfect comparison, but think of it this way: there are hundreds of different names for types of servants in a castle, but only the royal family has titles like "king" and "queen.") Gender identity is and has historically been defined by individuals, primarily individuals who do not feel that they fall within the strict man/woman gender binary, or the male/female sex binary.

I can understand why there would be cause for confusion - many people use the terms 'sex' and 'gender' interchangeably, and the western, colonialist concept of sex we still use today has historically been used by the patriarchy to subjugate women.

In an unhelpful turn of linguistics, 'male' has become shorthand for 'man' and 'female' has become shorthand for 'woman,' and vice versa. (Which, of course, is why many trans men object to being called 'female,' many trans women object to being called 'male,' and many nonbinary people object to being called either - such language is often employed as a roundabout method of misgendering.)

Additionally, you should know that "transracial" can also refer to an orphan who was adopted by a parent and/or guardian that is of a different racial background. Unfortunately the term has become bastardized thanks to people like Rachel Dolezal.

So, in short, being transgender is different than calling yourself "transracial" (in the sense of "I was born [race A] but I now identify as [race B]") primarily because of the vastly different reasons behind the creation of gender and race, and the disparity in the impact of said concepts on marginalized people.

[epenethesis]

I wonder how many times people use "AAVE" as just a shorthand of "how black people speak" without any regard of a definition in a strict linguistic sense.

[linguistwho]

Introducing: The Linguist's Phonetic Gallifreyan

This is a modification of Brittany G.'s Doctor's Cot Gallifreyan, which reorganized the layout of the Consonants and Vowels tables, adjusted how punctuation works, and added two new mechanics for quality of life. Its full title is The Linguist's Phonetic Gallifreyan, but the shorthand, for lack of a better idea, is GalliPhon. Interested to know the details? Read on!

I started working in Doctor’s Cot a few months ago.  It’s interesting, and a fun change of pace from Sherman’s Circular, but it has a few flaws that have really started to dig at me.  Firstly, despite the system being made to represent any language, it still is clearly made with English in mind.  Nearly all English consonantal sounds are contained in the top left corner of the consonant table.  While it does not bother me all that much that the system is made with English as the primary use — I do primarily use Sherman’s Circular, after all — it leads to all the consonants looking samey, and the layout feeling otherwise purely random.  In a similar vein, all the English consonants being clustered together led to a lot of indistinguishable consonant pairs.  I have dealt with this by leaving lines unconnected on one side, or dots attached to their corresponding circle, but this feels cheap, as Brittany did specify that indistinguishable consonants should be separated into new circles, which I find tedious and aesthetically displeasing.  Another problem with the layout is that א’s circle ends up being a pain to make every time I need to write a word that starts with a vowel.  For these reasons, I decided to reorganize the charts to have a more logical layout.  And, while I was at it, I modified the formulation of punctuation to accommodate more punctuation marks and added two new mechanics to make formulating words less tedious: diphthong bridges and the reversal dot.  As a warning, this is NOT a guide to the use of Phonetic Gallifreyan.  To learn how to play, I would recommend checking out Brittany’s walkthrough, using my charts instead of the Doctor’s Cot ones.

The Consonant and Vowel Charts

They are now loosely organized based on the IPA categorizations in the 2020 chart.  Broadly speaking: a single thin line corresponds to trills, taps, and approximants; double thin lines corresponds to laterals; a thin outer line and thick inner line corresponds to unvoiced fricatives; a thick outer line and thin inner line corresponds to voiced fricatives; double thick lines corresponds to nasals; and a single thick line corresponds to plosives.  And for decorations (going from left to right in the chart because they are hard to describe): alveolar, retroflex, postalveolar, dental, “other symbols,” pharyngeal and glottal; labiodental; bilabial; uvular; velar; and palatal.  The symbols do not always correspond exactly, but that’s the general organization I worked off of.  For the vowels, I went easier on myself and organized them mostly by the English vowels, left-to-right O, U, A, I, and E.  Additionally, as there are 28 base IPA vowel sounds but 30 spaces, I included the two most common diphthongs, ai and au.  However, as I now have an option to make diphthongs, these are not recommended for use.

Diphthongs

I have added a function that will allow you to have two vowel sounds in a single circle, but only if they are part of a diphthong.  Distinct vowel sounds must be in different syllable circles, even if there is no consonant between them.  Two vowels in a dipthong, however, may be connected by a diphthong bridge, a line leading from the edge of the first vowel to the middle of the second.  An example of both a diphthong and a still separate vowel can be seen in Ohio: /oˈhaɪ o/

Vowel/Consonant Reversal

The other function I am adding is the reversal dot, necessitated by how annoying it is that words like “is,” “and,” and “or,” require two circles despite their simplicity.  So, in Phonetic Gallifreyan, you can add a filled dot to the center of a word circle to indicate it should be read vowel first.  Consonants still go outer circle first, then inner circle.  As an example: “and” /ænd/

Punctuation

The primary change is that they don’t consist of two circles, just one. This way, a limited pool of punctuation can be combined to create more punctuation, like combining a period and a comma to make a semicolon, or three periods to make an ellipsis, or even some rarer punctuation like the interrobang (‽)

Credit to Brittany G. for the basis, and to Wikipedia and Phoible for research on IPA, punctuation, and more.

[sqarletsworldlesswandering]

Also on the train of Starfolk languages, do they have a writing system? If so, tell us more about it if it's okay!

(AKA my speculative evolution/ Worldbuilding lover inside of me is going feral right now /pos)

Writing gets kinda interesting, because how we do writing is vastly less efficient than sonar. However, they do have written language because realistically, they need to store information.

For them, picking up a pen and paper is a drastically inefficient way of recording things they otherwise communicate within a second, so they wouldn't necessarily develop that - they look for a way to go straight from sonar to writing.

In a sense, Inkwells are a natural version of this: You send sonar to the Inkwell, the Inkwell records. The trouble is, Inkwells have their own shorthand that they and Libellits can read that stores information more efficiently, but it can't really be read by anyone else, for two reasons: 1, it's not a proper alphabet system, 2, the information is stored partly by means of the essence that makes the ink. Receiving a sonar ping lets the Inkwell infuse that information into the writing, and the actual symbols involved are short-script and not interpretable. Libellits can read and interpret the essence directly.

Starfolk took this idea, then turned it into actual technology - a receiver collects the sonar, then translates it, and sends it to a print module that writes it out. Visually, the the receiver is a small sphere with two ports - one for a direct transfer cord, and one for a storage crystal. Storage crystals can have the information inscribed on them and stored indefinitely. The direct transfer cord plugs into the receiver on one end, then in or onto the reading medium at the other. The reading medium is usually either a scroll or a stone tablet. If it's a scroll, simply press the end of the cord to the top, and it will start writing. The same goes for a tablet, unless it has a designated "port" carved into it. Specifically crafted tablets will have a reading port for crystals, with a rotating dial to let you peruse the contents. The "ink" used for this is colored light bound inside the crystal that writes out onto the surface. However, you can temporarily infuse the crystal with actual ink if you wish for a permanent copy.

From this format, the starfolk developed multiple different formats of the tool, some more compact, some larger scale, some as one item, some more complex, depending on the need.

As for the writing system itself, they use a hybrid of alphabet and "glyph". The letters of the alphabet stack and connect with each other to form the word, and the resulting word appears as a single image within a 2-inch diameter circle. These circles then have marks surrounding them to convey additional information where necessary: dots for number, dashes for person, vertical lines for tense, and rings around the circle for gender. Their system reads in concentric "orbits" - subject in the center, direct objects orbit the subject, indirect objects orbit direct objects, verbs orbit their direct objects (roughly. This is not a critically thought out linguistic system in the slightest). A full "solar system" is a sentence, and those systems are placed up-to-down on the reading surface. Later light projection technology allows them to stack the systems while laying each system flat like an actual solar system, and is vastly more space efficient.