#old anitami

[in-a-narrow-land]

Old Anitami, Part Five: Pronouns

Ask and you shall receive! I was going to continue with the verb sequence, but everyone wants to hear about pronouns work. First, the good news: personal pronouns behave like vastly simplified i-group nouns (see here for an explanation of what that means).   Pronouns in the nominative, accusative, and thematic (“primary” or “topical” case) take the nominative endings (nothing in the singular, -enai in the plural). Pronouns in the genitive, dative, instrumental, and locative (“secondary” cases) take the dative endings –iet and –itei.  

Purposive and essive are a little weird. (As a reminder, the purposive is used to denote final causes and can usually be translated “for the sake of [x].” The essive does equation in lieu of a copula – “as an [x],” “in the capacity of a [y]”). The key distinction between primary and secondary cases is semantic: primary cases involve the main topic of the sentence (hence, topical); secondary cases involve things relating to that topic. Topic is actually a grammatical category in Anitami. The subject, object, and main verb are all topical, everything else in the clause is not. Topicality in verbs has some interesting syntactic implications that I’ll try and talk about next week.

See the problem? Okay, no, you don’t – it’s that the purposive and essive cases are grammatically secondary (they can’t be used for one of the three topical items in a sentence), but semantically primary (they’re often what the sentence is actually about).  In really old texts, this just isn’t standardized – they’ll take primary or secondary endings on a case-by-case basis, essentially at scribal discretion. There are still some purists who insist that they’re technically invariably primary, but that’s never actually reflected usage. The compromise reached after Talae Mowi language reforms, which is reflected in every introductory textbook, is that purposive and essive pronouns take secondary case endings along with the particle “ete” (which is usually nominalizing but in this case is topicalizing or emphatic).

… I don’t think I’ve explained Talae Mowi yet. Many of you may know that Anitam unified relatively late in its history.  Linguistic standardization has lots of contributing factors but the existence of a strong central government and major unitary cultural centers are certainly among the most important; until after the fall of the Oahk emptire, Anitam had neither. The dialects that eventually became standard spoken Anitami originated in Lina, in Aglende province, but the texts that provide out best witness to Old Anitami are largely from the ancient cities of Kisavai, Talelet, and Diwe, near modern-day Iltan.

For centuries before our political unification, Greens, Yellows and Blues used Old Anitami as a common language for literature and diplomacy (that is, when they weren’t using Tapap or Oahkar). Even the name “Old Anitami” is part of the political project of unification – the people who originally spoke it were a branch of the Anaita, but they called themselves the Tatali and their language Tatai. Talae Mowi wrote the book on Tatai grammar and usage in 2750 (it wasn’t yet called “Old Anitami”), and despite a few philological advances, it’s mostly the standard today. If any of you are wondering, this why Anitami greens still sound like they’re from Iltan, or why Iltanis all sound green.

But I digress. On the topic at hand – as in modern Anitami, personal pronouns have two axes: status and familiarity. Persons of higher status than the speaker are addressed by the root pronoun “ayo” (the final “o” drops out when case endings are added, and y + i elide to long i. Ayo becomes ayenai, aiet, aitei) Persons of the the same social status as the speaker are addressed as either “ato” (formal, distant), or. “oto” (familiar). Persons of lower status are addressed as “tiye” (familiar) or “tayi” (insulting).  

Old Anitami doesn’t distinguish between second and third person pronouns. If you want to sound really archaic, you can combine a pronoun with the deictic particle “di” to mean something like “this person I’m addressing.”   “They (high-status) made a decree” would use “ayenai,” “You (plural, high-status) may command me” could be expressed with “ayenai di.”

Personal pronouns also encode status. A person of lower-status than their addressee would use “teyo.” If they’re of equal status, they’d refer to themselves as “odo” (personal pronouns don’t encode familiarity). High-status personal pronouns are less contextual. A person who refers to themselves as “yali” would probably be rather die than use anything else.

Possessive pronouns are simply formed by adding the genitival suffix –n to any pronominal form. Demonstrative pronouns are also wonderfully simple, they’re simply the normal i-group case endings without any root attached!

[steel-and-toe]

Epilogue

Yvalta decontaminates, House by House, in fits and starts.

*** Nachen and her husband visit Ylanta in between shows.  She meets aunts and grandparents and one cousin she never knew she had.  It's somewhat awkward.

*** One of the last holdouts gets new, young, progressive leadership very suddenly, after two conveniently timed heart attacks and one yachting accident claim the old guard.  The other two Houses dragging their feet on decontamination hurriedly reverse course.

*** Even in a national crisis, people still need to eat.  Her husband gets his first permission right on schedule, although her in-laws' fishing fleet somehow winds up with an extra hand or two per boat who spend more time poking around the hold checking for stowaways than they do actually working. *** Myo Talking Spectaculars folds before Nachen can finish the first round of her contract, unable to reconfigure its policies to cope with the brain drain once other countries and planets start accepting immigrants.  Before it collapses, though, she traces a meteoric rise through the dance corps, only partially due to dancers above her in the hierarchy emigrating or switching careers, and the resume boost helps her lands a choice role in a touring company shortly afterward.

*** Butterfly and Reprise host a large and quietly teary potluck.  Two months later, they go on a camping trip and, after a tense couple of weeks, send a goodbye message from the DUS spaceport.

*** Nachen and her husband talk about emigrating some nights, after their daughter is in bed, but idly- there's no urgent need for dancers on colony worlds, and you can't (or at least really shouldn't) put a fishing fleet on a spaceship.  They'd be starting over almost from scratch, and neither of them especially wants to take on a new contract for passage to some unknown quantity of a planet.

*** They get a second permission from her husband's contract; it's not renewed for a third.  They do, however, get another two children by special arrangement under her mother's contract, once she's too old to have her own.

*** Years of pushing her body to its limits start to catch up to Nachen; she has to start taking on fewer shows and waiting longer between them.  By seventeen she’s transitioned to teaching full-time, reasonably gracefully. She dabbles in choreography but never catches the public imagination enough to make a career out of it.  

*** When they're twenty-five and past being troubled by permaspring and the political situation has shaken itself out, Nachen and her husband move offworld to join their oldest daughter, settled down after a short stint as a cosmonaut with two spouses and five children between them.  She takes an intensive physical therapy course before they leave- it's an established colony but still too small to support a full-time dance teacher.

It's a lovely world, all rolling plains and shallow seas, closely orbiting a red dwarf star.   Nachen puts together a solo performance almost as soon as they arrive, sends video home of low-gravity leaps in the eternal sunset- and a longer video for distribution on dance student forums, where she talks frankly about the work that went into setting up the shoot and how often she took breaks between cuts to pace herself. *** She teaches in Valtaz all her life, although her Oahkar gets much better and she eventually picks up some broken Anitami.  She includes little lessons on grey culture with her older students- the colony isn't exactly casteless but it's fairly flexible, and she worries sometimes about what they’re losing.  (She does cut out the Yvaltan history lessons once enough parents complain.  The universities can handle that one better than she can anyway.)

*** When Nachen is thirty-seven, she finds a nice young green to ghostwrite her memoirs.  He has a hard time understanding how anyone didn't realize reds were people.

[openamenta]

I miss never having to worry about anyone’s caste background.

I passed someone on the street today who might have had red roots. I did a double take and tried not to wince but I couldn’t help but feel gross seeing them. I wondered all day what they might have touched, where they might have walked. (Yes, I understand that they’re clean. Animal feces is also clean.) It was really, really awful. I didn’t feel up for going to the park after all. I stayed home and looked at some old pictures of vacations.

One set was from before we started red transition in this country. I did a double-take at one of the purples in the background of one of the pictures. He had dyed his hair. His roots were showing. And I was upset to think that memory was ruined by an ex-red.

Then I remembered it was before we started red transition and I was even more upset, but I thought maybe he was an Anitami expat. I thought that sounded more plausible than a ~secret red~ but still statistically unlikely. And as I stared at his hair, I came to an entirely different realization.

His roots, if I looked carefully, were purple. He just naturally had a redder shade of purple than he liked and dyed it bluer. I would never have noticed it at the time. Why would I care about a reddish purple dyeing his hair bluish purple? It’s really none of my business. Even if his hair had been dyed an entirely different color, it’s still none of my business if someone’s natural hair doesn’t match their caste.

I don’t know if I passed an ex-red today. I don’t know that I didn’t flinch at an innocent orange. I wish I didn’t have to care about people’s roots like this, literally and metaphorically. I wish we had exterminated our reds so I could relax and be decent to everyone I meet, even if they have ambiguously reddish roots.

[strawberry-poison-frog]

I saw some my friends filling out this list but the original chain includes one of those spun-sugar ‘hypersenstives’ who can talk sh*t about cousins but wail if someone tries to correct them.  I’m not going to violate their boundaries but stars above, convenient 'illness’ those people have but I’ll blog it on its own for politeness.

dyed your hair, including a different shade of your natural color []  I am a disgrace to my national stereotype.   I have used coloured extensions and chalk for certain looks.

been to another country [x]  Evalee, Anitam, Miolee.  However, for a person of my demographic this doesn’t really count.  

gotten a tattoo []

had a major medical procedure [x] Deconam!

earned out-of-caste income [n/a]

hit the ooci cap [n/a]  But according to Anitami rules, I’ve been over every working year of my life.

saved someone’s life [?]  I donate to the decontamination fund so I’ve saved some fraction of a life by now.

caused someone’s death []

been arrested []

stayed up all night [x]  SPLURGE and also FOUNDING DAY

gotten married [x]  Legally, the big party is waiting on us flying in various relatives.

had a kid []  

been to the other hemisphere [x]  I have jumped back and forth over the equator like a two year old.

been to a moon []

been on public assistance []

learned another language [x]

looked up your name on citrus [x] 

fallen asleep at school [x]  In my defence, mother, this is when we were short on food!

met someone famous [x]

had a newspaper/magazine article written about you [x] I’ve been interviewed for a couple articles about Mioleen art scene, but I think they just wanted a fluent Anitami speaker.

[rusalkii]

I've made a blog to follow Amenta shadow tumblr without it filling up my regular blog, @castofthedie (it's a pun on dye, because I think I'm funny). It's empty right now, but I've been half considering making an amentumblr character to go with it. I don't even like Amenta much, it's just the format is such an interesting way of developing a setting and that sort of worldbuilding looks like it allows for fun tricks with the medium.

((When I say "half considering", of course, I mean I have four characters sketched out already, notes under the cut.))

If I play a green she's going to be kind of a caste stereotype, extremely pedantic, shy but prone to picking fights when people are Wrong On The Internet, studying math, hypersensitive, went to therapy for it, came to the conclusion that if she is expected to control her pollution instinct everyone else can too, emerged mostly for red rights and "yeah pollution's a social construct hut so're a lot of things" and therefore in favor of treating reds better because "they're gross" isn't an excuse but not integrating them or anything and the url's going to be disagreenment, because apparently all of my url ideas are puns now.

If I play a yellow she's going to be a paralegal if that's yellow and if not a low level bureaucrat of some sort, has a tiny box garden on her balcony and loves it, has really awful springs, lives near a red district because it's cheap and she's saving for a credit, thinks reds rights types clearly just haven't ever seen a red, ugh, really, all those out of touch green types, interacts with a lot of blues for her job, dating one but if it becomes serious is going to have a minor freakout about marrying out of caste, doesn't have many friends otherwise and doesn't really mind, reads a lot of nonfiction and kind of a law nerd (gets jokingly called green, gets defensive about it).

If I play a blue, she's going to hate being blue, it's responsibility over other people and power over them and social skills and expectations of making the decisions, and she can't just not care but she hates having to, her caste isn't a secret on tumblr but she avoids bringing it up unless it's directly relevant, hates blue culture and the fact that she implicitly has power over other castes, dysphoria about her hair but doesn't dye it, just cuts it short enough she doesn't have to see it, somewhere between bitter and burningly jealous of Afen Kistamti but doesn't really have a strong caste preference aside from not blue (or orange, she'd hate that), nevertheless against caste abolitionists and thinks you should just be able to test out or some other caste-flexible solution, Voan so she can be miserable about the pronoun thing, probably ~autistic, had a brother 7 years older, as close to "doesn't like kids" as an amentan gets, kind of the baby of the family, reads a lot (especially history, it's kind of an acceptable blue interest if you squint so she got shoved into it and has Complicated Feelings about this), avoids thinking about politics if she can help it which includes reds issues, but if you press her probably thinks you shouldn't mistreat them and obviously they're kind of people, but not people people, arguing they're the same as clean castes is obviously stupid. She probably gets the @castofthedie url.

If I play a red she's going to not reveal her caste, "how stupid are the reds on this site anyway?", justifiably paranoid, had a complicated purple backstory for herself worked out before she even made an account, does her best to avoid talking about reds at all, is on tumblr partly to get an idea how clean castes work and partly because she wants a context where people don't think she's unclean (she's kind of internalized it), Anitami, her mother did community organization before she was killed by a touchy blue, there was a two year old little sibling at home and their father was kind of useless and so she kind of raised them, is currently helping her grandfather with what used to be her mother's job, will take over for the small red district when he dies, probably.

[candle-in-a-coal-mine-blog]

I’m not claiming intercaste dating is wrong, just inadvisable. Starting relationships that you are going to have to end some day if you want kids (and don’t want mixed kids) is just opening the door to getting hurt later. I’m not saying people who are currently dating intercaste should stop, or that people who decide to are hurting anyone besides themselves, (assuming no kids) but it seems like a bad idea overall.

…OK, so, catching up - 

Tidal’s still around, everyone still seems to hate every little thing she does. Come on, guys, give a blue a break. She’s still getting reds murdered killed and bragging about it, which, OK, that’s a bit fucked up. 3cool5u is still missing-presumed-executed. Imraini’s still precious. It’s been almost half a year and everything’s basically the same.

in-a-narrow-land stiiiil hasn’t made another post in their Old Anitami series, but they’ve obviously been busy, with moving to Oahk (!) for research and with their…blue girlfriend???? Somehow this is really surprising.

The gross purples are getting married. Congrats?

As for the latest Discourse:

Intercaste dating is usually a pretty bad idea, dating blues is sometimes a worse idea than dating other castes depending on where you live and how much ability the blue in question has to ruin your life.

People’s posts about “help I am being abused by my blue partner how do I get out” are not the correct place to be arguing about whether or not blues in general tend to be abusive! This person is not dating blues in general! What the filth, people?

Funnel plots are not that esoteric. Also, see the above point: It goes double for arguing over how esoteric funnel plots are.

Of course reds can read, don’t be stupid.

[suspected-spinozist]

[ooc: It’s @theunitofcaring‘s birthday! With love, always.] 

I almost can’t believe it. Makel Alasi’s writing his memoirs, and I have a friend who works for his publisher, and she managed to get me an advanced copy! I don’t want to leak too much, but this is one of my favorite parts. (Tagging @colorjustice since I know she’s a fan, even if she sometimes has trouble admitting it). 

“I could always write a movie soundtrack. I’ve never done one before, and it seems like it could be fun.”

“You know the difference between a movie and a music video, right?”

“Of course –“

“Because in a movie, the music’s generally supposed to stay in the background.”

“Not the way I write it.” – a matter of public record, incidentally. Just look up my film licensing agreements. “Anitami audiences have taste, Telkam. You can’t seriously believe they’d rather watch you than listen to me.”

“Yeah.”  

There wasn’t really much I could say to that, so I just let him sulk for a couple of minutes. I did apologize, eventually, I’m not heartless.

“It’s fine.” (It obviously wasn’t. What my brother lacks in eloquence, he more than makes up for in emotional volatility).

“No, it’s not. You know how I get when people imply I’m not talented.”

“Yeah. Makel, I’m not you.”

That’s obvious, I’ve heard him sing. “You’re still an artist. Well, in a manner of speaking –“ “What I am is I’m employed, that’s what I am.” He turned away. I think he may even have grunted.

“You’re really not happy, are you?”

“Guess not.”

“I just thought it would be nice to collaborate on a project with my little brother.”

***

We were all so relieved when Telkam told us he was going to be an actor. So, it seemed to come out of nowhere, so – and it’s not easy for me to admit – he’s not even that good. He’d get better. My father is always saying any of us could excel at anything we set our minds to.  Of course, it’s not like he tried especially hard to be the world’s best diplomat.

It was different with Aitim. I mean, when we first started to notice that Aitim wasn’t happy. Dad took it especially hard. He felt like he’d betrayed him; that is, like he’d broken the unspoken contract he’d signed when he bought his first credit that his children wouldn’t feel trapped the way he’d been trapped, and what’s worse, he felt like a failure. Failure makes him get all defensive, it’s not as if he’s had much practice.  Mom just didn’t get it. She sees politics as a kind of applied psychology, and both my parents tend to think of the applied sciences as things other people do after all the really interesting theoretical problems have already been solved. But Aitim had passion, he had ambitions, and he was willing to move metaphorical mountains – or at least sidestep social institutions – to fulfill them. That’s something they both understood.

*** I decided to visit Telkam at work, since I was curious, but mostly to fuck with him. They were shooting on some backlot in the middle of – and I do mean – nowhere, three hours outside of Lina by train, one of those depressing exurbs full of identical row-houses full of identical purples. It’s still mostly apartments out there, but no more than three or four families to a building. They’re all a dingy sort of off-white – the buildings, not the families – with squares of patchy grass and the occasional optimistic swing-set. I’ve heard people move out there for the space, but I can’t imagine they’d need it. I didn’t see any children. Then again, it was school hours.

The lot was easy enough to find. Telkam was wearing something that looked like a couple of old laundry machines wrapped in aluminum foil. (“Astronaut or sentient household appliance?” “Radiation suit, obviously”).  You couldn’t see his face, nor much of the rest of him, which meant either a surprising dedication to realistic radiation safety standards on the part of the producers or just plain stupidity – after all, they certainly aren’t paying him for his acting skills.

(You may think I’m habitually cruel to him – and I am, though not more than any older brother. Don’t misjudge me. The advance on my exclusive memoirs is going straight into a trust fund to pay for his first-born child. What? It’s not as if he’s going to earn one on his own.)    

In any case, I snuck in the back during a take, and watched him flail at a kind of rubbery-looking facsimile of a post-apocalyptic mutant organism for a little while before someone caught sight of me. She was a little yellow with a clipboard, clearly some species of assistant, and I must say she made a valiant effort to squeal in absolute silence. But then an electrician noticed her, and had to nudge his friend, who had to nudge her friend, and – well, have you ever seen a very, very quiet mob starting to assemble itself? Until then I hadn’t either, and it’s an experience Eventually the man with the puppet joined in and they had to stop filming. It took another ten minutes to get Telkam out of the suit.

“Congratulations, asshole. They’re going to lose the whole day, do you have any idea how much that costs?”

“Not as such, no.”

“It’s not a high-budget operation, but there’s still about 200 people working here, and they’ve all got salaries. And equipment, and renting the space –“

“I know I can pay the difference.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Sure it is. Just point me in the direction of your line producer and see what happens.”

“Fuck you.”

Articulate, isn’t he? “How do you feel about abandoning the land of the living laundry machines and taking the rest of the day off?”

“I don’t come and bother you where you work.”

“Not for lack of trying. And we both know that that’s not strictly true.”

“Makel – “

“Remember that time, you would have been, what, one and a half? And I was recording something at home, when suddenly I heard this banging – “

“Makel! Don't talk about that where there are people!” (And so I won’t – but you should really look up the video on MyStream.)

In the end, he did leave for the day, and since I’d given them permission to play my latest single over the opening credits, the director even thanked me. (Thematically, it’s completely inappropriate, but don’t we all make sacrifices for the sake of family?)

“Feel like telling me what that was all about?” – we’d been on the train to Lina for about two hours at this point, but when Telkam feels like sulking – as in all his endeavors – he commits.  

“I haven’t seen you for a while.” Which, for the record, is true.

“You’re not on a secret mission from mom and dad?”

“To, what, make sure you’re still alive. They’re not that neurotic, and they’re definitely not that subtle.”

“Aitim, then. But he probably already has spies.”

“Oh, Telkam. You’re assuming he cares.”

The thing about Telkam is that it’s impossible to guess what’s going to upset him. Most things that would reduce a reasonable person to tears just roll right off him, but he can be surprisingly vulnerable. Especially when it comes to family. So – “They all want you to be happy,” I say eventually. “They love you. For reasons that pass comprehension, admittedly – “

“I know I haven’t been home in a long time.” He hasn’t. I’m not even sure where he’s living right now, in fact, which is why I had go and kidnap him at work – “How’s Kantil?”

“He’s doing well. Math track, says he wants to do something practical. Dad’s hoping he’ll be an engineer, of course, but mom thinks economics. And Kefin’s talking.”

“I thought Kefin was talking months ago.”

“He was, but only in Anitami, and you know dad, that barely counts.” (My father raised all of his children to speak at least six languages – to varying degrees of success – and I’ll have you know that I translate all my own lyrics in four.)

“I’d visit more, but – “

“Yeah.”

“They might ask me how I am.”

***

I remember when Aitim went off to live with our grandfather (you may have heard of him?). I’ll never forget what it was like after he left. I don’t think the house has ever been so quiet, and that’s before or since. I did a lot of singing. My parents worked, somehow, even more than they usually do, and if I hadn’t been there I don’t think they’d have remembered to come home – this was just before Telkam.

The only people who gossip more viciously than blues are green academics (and I know whereof I speak), so if you’ve had the misfortune to move in those rarified circles, don’t believe what they tell you – dad never tried to force him to stay. Once he was sure that it was what Aitim really wanted, he didn’t even try to persuade him. My father doesn’t understand why anyone who could be green would ever choose to be anything else, but he knows what it’s like to be forced to be something you’re not. Yes, it’s an unusual way of looking at caste, and for all I know it may be unique to my family, but I’ve always considered myself the better for it. Patrilineality be damned, I’m green. I know it. You know it, too – would you have picked up this book if you hadn’t heard me sing?

Aitim himself says much the same – not that he won’t deny it if you ask him.  At least he did one night a few months later, at dinner with just grandfather and his wife and the two of us and our cousin Kan, age three seasons, because sometimes even Fen Neli wants to see his grandchildren without having to smooth over some sort of familiar conflict.

“You’re not blue,” I told him between courses. “It doesn’t matter who our grandfather is. In our family we’re green.”

“Poor grandfather! Someone will have to tell him we’ve stopped being related.” This all happened years ago, six or seven at least, and I can’t recall if grandfather laughed, and ruffled Aitim’s hair. I like to think he did. “Besides, I don’t think I’m blue because our father is really blue – it’s just that some people will be more willing to work with me if they think I do, so that’s how I explain to them.”  

“That’s not what dad thinks.”

“Really?”

(Grandfather, not paying attention: “No, Kan, we don’t eat the flatware, yes, yes, that’s the way, or grandmother’s necklace – where did he get that? – Kan”)

“Really. He said so. And he’s so angry he’s not going to let you come home and you’re going to have to go live with Uncle Nolime ‘cause you think he’s so much better than us.”  

It would have been a fairly transparent lie even if you didn’t know our father well, or weren’t Aitim, but he did, and he was, and of course, being Aitim, he smiled. “If that’s so, then I suppose shall live with Uncle Nolime, but I’m afraid I should miss you all terribly.”

“Don’t you miss us now?” I think I mentioned, before, that father felt like he’d somehow betrayed his firstborn son. I was two years old, my big brother had just left for what seemed, at age two, to be forever, and I just felt betrayed.

“I know I’ll come back, Makel. And if I lived with Uncle Nolime, I don't think father and mother would visit me nearly as often.”

“He puts up with Entis” – Entis, thankfully, being too occupied by Kan to notice – “so why’d you do it, then?”

“Do what?”

“Be a blue, if it’s not because of dad.”

“Hmmm. Makel, why do you think we have castes?”

“Historical contingency, right? Societies that had castes hundreds of years ago did better than the ones that didn’t, and now we all have them. Except – well, I’ve always thought, we can’t know if they did better because they had castes, or because they matched particular castes to particular niches, or they just happened to have more resources to begin with, or something else entirely. There must be archeologists who know something about it, but it was so long ago – “

“There were confounding factors.”

“Right, that. And greens really are smarter than other people, even if they weren’t always, and grays really are stronger and faster, and blues are –“ Kan, seated directly across from me, was gnawing on the edge of the table – “well, blues are something, probably, but we don’t go around saying that especially smart people are really greens. Unless they’re dad.”

Aitim nodded. “What they’ll teach you – at least in blue school – is tat heredity obviously isn’t infallible, and sometimes people really might be more productive in different caste than the one they’re born to. But that’s so vanishingly rare – especially compared to the number of people who’d want to switch for more power, or prestige, or cheaper credits, or something else like that – that it’s a waste of resources to try and sort out all the valid claims. So we just don’t allow it.”

“Except for dad.”

“That’s right. And father didn’t get away with what he did because he was talented enough to justify it. He is, of course, but that isn’t why it worked.”  

(I’m going to have to interrupt my brother, here – just for a moment – because most of you don’t know him, and have consequently never heard him speak. I don’t remember his exact words, and I can’t explain how the looks in his eyes, and his gestures, and his tone made them seem so perfectly, irreproachably reasonable. People say I have the magic voice.)

“Father got away with it,” Aitim continued, “because there’s a certain way that people expect greens to act, and part of that – for better or for worse – is that they really don’t think they should have to follow the rules so long as they’re clever enough to get around them. All the things that would have made him a terrible blue – his impulsivity, his single-mindedness, his, ah, – “

“ –complete lack of social skills?”

“Yes, that – they’re not exactly virtues, in a green, but they make him seem more consistent with himself.”

“I don’t think dad cares about that.”

“Really? I think he cares a great deal. And other people care even more.”

“Is that why you want to be a blue? Because it makes you more consistent with yourself?”

“Yes. And no one really thinks that there’s anything ontologically significant about patrilineality or matrilineality, in a mixed-caste marriage. We simply need a way of deciding edge cases – that is, of determining who we should think of as blue. They’ll think of me as blue. That’s what matters.”

Grandfather must have gone upstairs to put cousin Kan to bed, because I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have had something to say to that.

“So it’s all in people’s heads?”

“The most real things usually are. You know –“ Aitim was looking at a framed photograph of our father as a child of one or two, sitting in grandfather’s lap and looking desperately unhappy – “the only thing that could have made the caste system look more arbitrary than letting father switch would have been making him stay. Can you imagine? It would have seemed so cruel, and so stupid –“

“It’s a good thing he left.”

And, after a while – “I think so too.”

I took a few moments to digest that, along with my dessert. “It sounds like you’re saying that it’s fine to ignore your birth caste, as long as you can get enough people to take you seriously.”

“I never said that.”

“You pretty much said –“

“Well, I won’t acknowledge it.” Even then, you see, he was already running for office.

***

“I don’t see why you had to tell me all that.”

We’re getting off the train in Lina, in my neighborhood, which is mostly green, when I start to notice the strange expressions on people’s faces. Of course, Telkam’s hair. Either he’s wearing a wig or he’s bleached it for the part.

“Why do you think the leads in action movies are always gray?”

“What?”

“Your hair, I just noticed – I mean, it would make sense if you were playing an astronaut or a soldier or something, but you’re the last survivor of a nuclear holocaust, it could really be anybody.” “I guess it’s just what people expect.”

“I suppose so.”

“Besides, if action hero were a job, it would definitely be gray.”

It’s a beautiful night, perfectly clear. The city sparkles, forty, fifty, a hundred stories tall, with little cracks of sky shining between the buildings in the hazy, reflective darkness. If you live near the river – and I do – you can see the lights reflected in the water, quavering and sinking and surfacing as the little waves calm, like the stars it’s always just too bright to see.

“I think you have more in common with Aitim than you’d like to admit,” I said.

“Oh?”

“That’s why I told you that story earlier.”

“Aitim’s blue.”

“Only because he wants to be.”

“He dyes his hair. I know he wants us to think it’s naturally coming in teal, but he last time he was home, I saw his roots showing.” A girl with pale jade-colored hair walks by, gives us a funny look, and scurries off. Telkam tosses his hair and blows her a kiss. “You know, I think I just might keep the gray? It suits me.”

[lethriloth]

Today IRL: I accidentally gave up on finding @suspected-spinozist's Old Anitami Quenya Easter eggs, but as it turns out, I'd found two and a half out of the three, so my honor[1] is basically restored. 83% restored, at any rate, which is enough to get by for a while. And now I have so much more attention to spend on other things.

Today in D&D: We did battle with a small colony of mind flayers, and in doing so helped saved the world from an Aboleth mind-control plot. My contribution to the final battle was flying around dispelling magic - which turned out to be kind of critical to our victory - and also glitterbombing our own bard, which resulted in his brain being extracted. (But may have also been critical to us winning in the end)

All in all, a pretty good day.

[1] Or self-esteem, take your pick.

[in-a-narrow-land]

Some of you might remember from my last language post (I’ll get back to that eventually, I promise) that Old Anitami has two conjugations, dynamic and stative, each of which has their own set of endings for expressing perfective and progressive aspect. Historical linguists are pretty sure that the Anitami stative conjugation endings continue a perfect tense in Proto-Mentabi (the earliest reconstructable ancestor of the language family which includes Anitami, Tapai, Cenemi, etc.); in fact, they’re cognate to perfects in most of the other branches. 

What’s really confusing is where the dynamic verb endings come from. They don’t have cognates in any of the other branches: Anitami and Teyan are the only Mentabi languages to have a dynamic/stative distinction at all, and they lose most of the Proto-Mentabi tense/aspect system. But they’re clearly formally similar to the stative endings. What’s going on? 

Well, there’s new data from all those stellae they’re digging up near Kasan, and the hot new theory is that they developed from the particles *to and *ro (Mentabi *r becomes Anitami l). What these particles actually do is one of the great mysteries of early Anitami linguistics, but it’s most likely that they mark syntactic animacy on the part of the verb’s subject. That is, in Proto-Mentabi (and still in Tapai!), only grammatically animate nouns can be the subjects of verbs in the active voice. It’s fine to say that the tree (inanimate) grows, (since since that’s inherently mediopassive; yes, this category is related to the Anitami stative), but if it wants to fall over it needs to be specially marked somehow. Proto-Mentabi did that in a number of ways, including various particles. *To and *ro are both postpositional - that is, they occur immediately after the verb - and are in fact used for complete and incomplete aspects, respectively. And their declension looks a lot like the consonant shifts in the dynamic verb endings! 

Unusually, the Anitami “person” noun class isn’t a branch of the “animate” class, it’s an unrelated later development. So, in early stages of the language, people nouns required *to and *ro markers on active verbs, which gradually became endings, which developed into the modern conjugation through analogic remodelling - that is, they got restructured to look like the stative endings. 

[in-a-narrow-land]

Old Anitami, Part Two: Noun Classes

<<Previous: Orthography, Phonology, and Phonotactics

I initially wanted to spend only one week on nouns, but this is long enough as is, and now it looks like I might have to split up cases into two posts. So, noun classes! These categories mostly aren’t productive in modern Anitami, but we still have all the morphosyntactic residue left over.  It’s one of my favorite things to teach, at least to Anitami speakers, since it taps into a set of patterns we’re all vaguely aware of but don’t really have a solid grammatical explanation for.

There are five classes in total: animate, inanimate, human, abstract, and miscellaneous (which isn’t quite accurate, but I’ll get to that when I get to it). [ooc: amentans are not human, this is a translation convention]. Each one has a characteristic affix which appears in every case except the nominative, and a few have characteristic prefixes as well. Pronouns must agree with class, as well as object-markers on verbs (which are optional), the mandatory subject-markers need not. They’d all be class 1 or 3 in any case.

Class 1: Animate. This one is fairly straightforward – animate things all have some sort of internal vital force. The words for person (one of the few “human” words that isn’t in the human class), all animals, and ghosts and other supernatural beings are all prototypical examples. Fire, and by extension computers in modern Anitami (literally fire-ensouled things) are animate, but not other electrical appliances. The words for heart, lungs, brain, stomach, and blood are animate, but not other organs. A couple of virulently fast-growing species of plants are animate, but I can’t recall any off the top of my head.

The stem ending for this class is –(a)nen.  If the noun ends in a vowel, the a will usually drop out. The remaining vowel may shift around depending on additional case endings.

Vocabulary: Fila, human; Laman, animal; Halmi, fish; Anno, snake; Kisa, fire. Particular animals names are often prefixed with na- (as in Nalinwi, cat), and birds names are often prefixed with e- (Emala, owl), but these fall away in compounds. These would decline as Filanen-, Lamannen-, Kisanen-, etc.

Class 2: Inanimate. Even more self-explanatory than class 1. Inanimate nouns are concrete, tangible objects, which are not, even by metonymic extension, alive. This is also the default class for loanwords after about the middle of the classical period, even if they’re semantically abstract or animate, but this is mostly only relevant to technical or religious vocabulary. There are plenty of weird other weird exceptions, but they’ll all be covered as they come up in the other classes. It should probably go without saying, but classes are morphologically fixed and don’t vary with the particular semantic context. In a play about a walking, talking rock, the rock would still be grammatically inanimate.

The stem suffix for this class (i/a)l, depending on vowel harmony.

Vocabulary: Talla, tree; Ert, seed; Lothe, flower; Kalka, glass; Alash, stone; Kaimat, house; Maen, bread. Tallal, Ertil, Lothil, Kalkal, etc.

Class 3: Human. This class covers all caste names, all professions names with a couple of exceptions, the words for child, man, woman, etc., all family relationships, etc. – anything that a human being, and only a human being, could be.

The stem suffix for this class is –(a)nath.

Many nouns in this class end in the agentive suffix –mi (Kisantami, Lamenelmi, etc.), which roughly means a person who does/is x, and also shows up pretty frequently in personal names. It’s also the source of my favorite example of rebracketing in any language! As most of you probably know, the people who first spoke the language we now know as Anitami called themselves the Anaita. The word for a person form this group was, naturally, Anaitami (Anaita-mi). Later on, -mi ceased to be productive and lost its particular meaning, along with the other personalizing suffix (–li, meaning a person similar to x, also still found in personal names). Both began to merge semantically with –i, the class 5 stem ending (in that both indicate a particular instance of a large thing, but see my notes on class 5 nouns). Later still, the Anaita establish a nation, and contemporary speakers naturally break down their demonym as, not Anaita-mi, but Anaitam-i. Those of you who were paying attention last week will remember that Anaitam contains an illegal stress, therefore it must reduce, and it does – to Anitam.

Vocabulary: Alasi, singer; Aven, judge; Pallan, builder; Tis, actor.

Class 4: Abstract. Here, things start to get a little more complicated. Class 4 is defined as “abstract” in every grammar textbook, but it really has to do with collectivity. (I can’t claim any credit for this concept, or for my understand of class 5 nouns. I got it all from my first Oahkar professor, of all people, who’s actually Anitami and generally pretty fascinating).

The core abstract nouns – childhood, age, peace, war, guilt, contentment (and all emotional states), wisdom, talent, etc. – can be thought of as a kind of summation over a lot of specific instances of a thing. By identifying a shared property over series of specific things (children, time periods, attractive people, whatever), you arrive at the abstract, or collective, noun.

For the same reason, all gerunds are grammatically class 4. In this sense, they’re conceptualized as the summation of a bunch of individual instances of the verb they derive from – I enjoy eating, I need to practice swimming, reading helps one learn Anitami, etc. all imply repeated, habitual action. Nominalized adjectives (e.g. the poor, the rich, the beautiful) are almost all class 4.

Human collectives are also all class 4, with the exception of caste names, even if they’re arguably concrete. The words for family, nation, language, and ethnicity are class 4, and the names of all individual nations and languages and ethnicities gain a class 4 stem suffix as they decline. This is one of the few features of the noun class system that’s still productive in modern Anitami!

Concrete nouns that inherently refer to a something with a large number of smaller parts are often, though not always, class 4. The classic examples are hair, fur, feathers, dust, grass, and snow. Inclusions in this category aren’t consistent, and it’s best to just look up a list if you’re confused about whether a particular noun is class 4 or class 2.   Of course, this is utterly bizarre if you’re conceptualizing class 4 as abstract nouns, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it in terms of collectivity.

The stem suffix for this class is –(ik)at. This class includes an unusual number of words which include the stem in their nominative form; unlike the other classes, the first two characters don’t reduplicate. Estikat, but Peikatat, etc.

Vocabulary: Estik, knowledge; Menal, goodness; Peikat, strength; Yahai, childhood; Waln, fur.

Class 5: Miscellaneous. Not miscellaneous! The textbooks are wrong! Class 5 can see like a catchall, until you realize that the central metaphor involved in instantiation. Nouns in this class are individual instances of more comprehensive objects or processes. The most central examples are deverbal nouns – words which derive from verbs but behave grammatically as nouns – that refer to particular events or actions. Scratch (from “to scratch”), song (from “to sing”), promise,  reading (in the sense of “this passage has multiple readings,” or “he gave a reading of his poetry”), etc. Note that this only applies to nouns that are actually derived from verbs, and not nouns that sound similar to verbs because they share an etymological root. As with class 4, inclusions in this category really can’t be derived from first principles, and it’s always safer to consult a list.

Also by a similar process to class 4, singular things that ordinarily occur in groups are usually class 5. A blade of grass, a speck of dust, a snowflake, a puzzle piece, etc. Many class 5 nouns in this category don’t have class 4 equivalents, though, and vice versa.  By analogy, many partial, broken, or otherwise incomplete things are class 5 – fragment, shard, unfortunately lots of words for physical disabilities, etc. Adding the class 5 ending to other nouns is a really old-fashioned way of denoting that it’s broken.

Approaching the metaphor from another angle, things that are made are frequently class 5.  The idea is that they’re the material instantiation of an abstract idea, or in the case of more utilitarian objects, one example of a form that’s repeatedly instantiated. Painting, sculpture, carving (for more than one reason) are class 5. The words for characteristically earthenware utensils (like bowl) are class 5, but not the words for characteristically metal ones (knife). It’s not entirely clear why, but the leading theory is that it has something to do with the metalworking process inherently requiring more people.

All words for units of measure are class 5, and units of time are considered particularly paradigmatic. Finally, the words for ambassador and foreigner are class 5 – the only human words that aren’t class 3 – because they represent “instances” of a foreign people. Demonyms are also class 5, for the same reason.

All class 5 words end in –i in the nominative. The stem suffix is –min.

Vocabulary: Walni, bowl; Neloti, reading; Halti, scratch; Fayali, year; Lossi, snowflake.

Next: Case >> 

[in-a-narrow-land]

Old Anitami, Part Four: Verbs

<<Previous: Case

It’s been at least a season since my last grammar post. I don’t have an excuse (life caught up with me), but I’ll try and use my vacation to get back on track. 

Old Anitami usually follows Subject-Object-Verb word order. Sort of. Every verb in the language has two parts: the verb itself, and a corresponding tense marker (technically a tense/interval specifier), which (except in certain kinds of subordinate clauses) occurs at the beginning of the phrase. The tense/interval specifier contains information about when the verb occurred, and how long it took to do so.  There are many, but the most common are ka (simple present), ga (emphatic present), bi (simple/unspecified past), bei (distant past), ba (open past), beni (closed past), wa (open future), and wo (closed future). Ka and bi are sometimes called the “gnomic” specifiers – they can be used for statements that are generally true, without reference to a specific temporal context.

Closed tense markers mean that the action of the verb occurs over a closed time interval; open tense markers mean that it doesn’t. Note that this doesn’t quite map to the distinction between perfective and imperfective aspects. Openness has nothing to do with completeness – at least, not directly. Some combinations are logically impossible. It’s possible to use open markers with progressive verbs (“she was walking her dog”), but not perfective verbs. Closed markers can go either way: “she was walking her dog from noon until 2:00 pm” (progressive), or “she walked her dog to the park” (perfective). If no specific time interval is indicated, the primary purpose of closed tense markers is to indicate telicity – that is, does the verb represent an action being completed? “I was walking in the park” would use ba, but “I walked to the park” would use beni. It can also encode more subtle semantic distinctions. “Ba avikavoatei nei danitka pasela” means “I visited Voa twice this year (and might again)”, while “beni avikavoatei nei danitka pasela” means “I visited Voa twice this year (and I’m never going back).”

But let’s start with simpler sentence: “I am building the house,” or “ka kaimataleni aksula” (where kaimentaleni is a class 2 accusative noun and aksula is the 1st person active indicative progressive form of the dynamic verb aksu*). It’s easy to think of the tense marker as a little tag at the beginning of a sentence telling you when it takes place, instead of what it is, which is a weird bit of inflectional morphology. Its position is verb-dependent (more about this next week), it can only occur in verb phrases, the information it conveys only makes sense in the context of the rest of the verb.

Which brings us to the verb body: Old Anitami verbs come in two types, dynamic and stative, each with their own conjugation pattern. Dynamic verbs describe actions, stative verbs – predictably enough – describe states that maintain over time. Here’s how they conjugate in two of the simple aspects:

                             Dynamic                             Stative                    Perfective   Progressive    Perfective   Progressive 1st singular   - ta             -la                 -ko             -cho 2nd singular   -ti              -li                  -ke             -chei 3rd singular    -t               -n                 -k               -ch 1st plural       -dae           -lae               -go            -gho 2nd plural     -dei             -lei                -gei           -ghei 3rd plural      -dal             -len              -gol            -ghol

(Notice how the perfective endings are based on stops and the progressive endings are based on continuants!). The perfective aspect views the event of the verb as a completed whole (“he read the book”), while the progressive aspect describes events currently in progress (“he is reading the book”). The third simple aspect – the habitual – can be formed by conjugation a dynamic verb with stative endings. So, “kashala” means “I am eating,” while “kashacho” means “I am in the habit of eating” (and “kashako” would mean something like “I engage habitually in discrete acts of eating”).  The habitual progressive + any open tense marker can be used to express continuous aspect. The continuous is very similar to the progressive, but emphasizes the temporal/durative elements of the event rather than the fact of continuing action.  It’s used to talk about events that continue before and after another action, or that continue for some time - “I was attending college,” “I am working in Passende,” etc.

Any noun can take stative endings, to form a verb meaning “to be [noun].” In the present tense, this is redundant with the normal uses of the nominative and essive, but it’s the only way to express equivalences in the past or future (e.g. “beni avencho”, “I used to be a judge”). Anitami has very, very few adjectives - most of their meaning is expressed through stative verbs. 

I’m going to do a whole post on grammatical aspect at some point, but before I can explain the compound aspects, I need to introduce mood. More on that next week!  

[in-a-narrow-land]

Old Anitami, Part One: Orthography, Phonology, and Phonotactics

For once, I followed through. Let’s get started. 

Actually, an initial note - I know that many of you are reading this through machine translation. That should be fine for the most part, but my examples are all written in modern Anitami, and often rely on particular constructions whose grammatical nuances won’t carry over. I want this to be accessible to as many people as possible, so I won’t categorically advise everyone to turn off the translator, but it if you can read even a little Anitami I strongly recommend giving it a try. If anyone wants to volunteer to translate this guide into another language, please let me know! I’d love to collaborate, especially if it’s a language I speak.  

1. Orthography

I wasn’t sure about devoting a whole section to orthography, since it’s almost identical to modern Anitami, and the differences mostly have to do with phonetic shifts, which I’ll discuss below. Still, there are a couple of special characters to keep in mind.

First, the voiced dental fricative is represented by <ʋ>, or, more rarely, <ɹ̟>. Most browsers outside of Anitam and Tapa don’t support those characters, so I’ll transliterate them to th or dh (depending on context). Second, Old Anitam has a velar nasal (think the –ng in sing), which reduces to –n in the modern language.  It’s represented by an <ŋ>, but I’m using the more commonly supported ñ. Finally, the Anitami vowels <ae>, <ai>, and <ei> are often diphthongs in other writing systems, but they’re their own letters in ours. Old Anitami doesn’t have that many true diphthongs, and these aren’t them.

This is also as good a place as any for a historical note: most of the surviving Old Anitami manuscripts we have were written by greens, and written down by yellows. (The second thing is more variable in older texts – ‘scribe’ wasn’t a separate occupation for a long time, and it was initially fairly unclear which caste it was going to be). Obviously, our understanding of the language is mainly limited to green and to an extent blue (courtly) dialects. There’s a lot of interesting research being done in vernacular reconstruction, but it hasn’t hit the grammar books yet.

More relevant to today’s topic, all the evidence we have suggests that greens and yellows, then as now, had different accents. This means that almost everything we have from the classic period was transcribed by someone who would have heard it differently from poet or author who wrote and recited it (early Anitami literature: basically inseparable from performance). Reconstructing pronunciation is a pain at the best of times, and our analysis of e.g. vowel sounds is still fairly speculative.

2. Phonology

A caveat: I don’t like phonology. I can mostly regurgitate what I know, but I’m less equipped to go into detail about this than I am about almost any other aspect of Old Anitami. If you have a question about how something’s pronounced in a specific word, just ask, I don’t want to get into all the edge cases.

And now that I’ve established that I don’t actually know what I’m talking about and nobody else does either, let’s move forward! Old Anitami has 14 consonants: c, f, h, k, l, m, n, ñ, p, s, t, th, w, and y. With a couple of exceptions (in addition to the above mentioned), these are all pronounced as in the modern language. <c> is, of course, identical to <k>, though there’s some evidence that waaaaay back when it was a velar fricative. <th> in old Anitami is always voiced, it only loses its voicing much later in word-final positions or through assimilation to voiceless consonants.  Anitami-speakers will also notice the absence of <b> and <d>.

There are seven vowels: a, i, e, o, ei, ae, and ai. Old Anitami lost /u:/ at some point in its divergence from Proto-Anitami-Tapap and got it back from Tapap much later. <ei>, <ai>, and <ae> are always long by nature, the other vowels may be either short or long. The long vowels have all shifted a little. <ei> was initially pronounced as /ɛi/ (roughly ehh); it has since merged into <ai> (pronounced /aɪ/, rhymes with eye, then as now). <ae> in Old Anitami was prounced /æː/ (more like ahh), now /eɪ/ (ay).

The rules governing stresses and vowel shifts within words can get fairly complicated, and it’ll make more sense to bring them up as they become relevant, but a handful are relatively basic and consistent. Vowels in open syllables are necessarily long unless they’re between two consonants, vowels in closed syllables (that is, those ending in a consonant) are short unless they’re long by nature. <a> likes to be long, <i> and <e> don’t and generally won’t unless they’re word-final. Sometimes, long vowels are forced to reduce by phonetic circumstances; when this happens <ai> usually becomes <i> and <ae> becomes <a>.

Stress is lexical! It defaults to the penultimate syllable, unless that syllable is short, in which case it’ll will move to the final syllable, unless it’s also short, in which case the stress bounces back and the penultimate syllable lengthens (in poetry), or the stress stays on the antepenultimate syllable – of course, there are exceptions.

3. Phonotactics

Or, how syllables are made. (A note on phonotacic conventions: V stands for vowel, C stands for consonant). Old Anitami has a really restricted range of possible syllables: V, CV, VC, CVC, and, much more rarely CVCC. (There are like three cases of CCVC syllables in the entire language).  VC is also pretty rare – syllables strongly prefer to have onsets (initial consonants), and VC syllables can’t ever be stressed. Codas (the consonant or consonants at the end of a syllable) are almost never stops or fricatives. The only exceptions to this rule are in CVCC syllables, where the first syllable of the coda must be a nasal or an approximant, and the final consonant must be a stop or a fricative. By far the most common case is a sibilant (<s> etc.) following a nasal (<n>, <m> etc.). There are no restrictions on which sorts of consonants can be onsets.

Syllable divisions generally obey the maximal onset principle – that is,  consonants between vowels are assigned to the following vowel. Ki-san-ta-mi, not Kis-an-tami, Pa-sen-de, etc. All syllables must have a vowel. Sometimes two consecutive CVC syllables will give rise to consonant clusters that wouldn’t be permitted in a coda if broken up into a CVCC and a VC syllable. This is technically allowed but the language doesn’t like it, it’s common to insert a vowel in between them, and doing so sounds more natural.

And that’s enough to start learning words! Tune in next week for Noun Classes, Or: More Arbitrary Categories For People And Things, which we’re obviously all lacking in our daily lives.  

Next: Noun Classes >> 

[openamenta]

Behind the cut, a red responds to @3cool-5u‘s suggestion that she could marry an ex-red when cleaning comes to Baravi.

counting-windows: [brand new account] hey if you're looking for reds to marry after they aren't red any more why did you go through that anitami dude instead of your red friends?

3cool-5u: my friends are kinda mad at me

3cool-5u: it was a thing. it was a long time ago but it was a thing. i've talked about it on my blog

counting-windows: so you don't talk to them any more?

3cool-5u: not so much yeah

3cool-5u: for like a couple years

counting-windows: can you tell me who they are so I can check up on you?

counting-windows: like you seem reasonably legit apart from being extra crazy aged three but

counting-windows: you know

3cool-5u: uh i kinda try to not get people killed anymore and like

3cool-5u: idk who you are man

counting-windows: yeah idk if you gave me a city I could find them through the organizer if I dug around enough probably?

counting-windows: I dunno how to prove I'm red on the internet

counting-windows: I could take a picture of myself holding a sign between my teeth that says "this space for rent" but then I could just be somebody who was good at fucking with photos

3cool-5u: yeah ok i'm in [city in baravi] people uh probably remember me i was kinda memorable

3cool-5u: my friends are like mad at me and stuff but they're not gonna actually lie to you

3cool-5u: so you know

counting-windows: yeah I get it

counting-windows: if I were older I might have heard of stuff at the time but I'm a year younger than you and my parents kind of tried to shelter me since I wasn't gonna be doing outwork

counting-windows: so I didn't hear all the "excitement!  death!" whenever there was excitement/death

3cool-5u: yeah i get it about parents. sucks right

counting-windows: I like mine actually, is that a dealbreaker

3cool-5u: nah nbd

counting-windows: like I don't know that I would have wanted them to be like "by the way, tiny counting windows, everything sucks"

3cool-5u: yeah i mean i'm not on board with not telling kids stuff they wanna know but if you like your parents not my circus not my monkeys, my friends liked theirs plenty

counting-windows: so do you have like any guesses about whether baravi will do cleaning and if it does will they let anybody be blue?

3cool-5u: uhh mom and dad think they shouldn't and mom and dad are like always crazy wrong about this stuff so i kinda think they're leaning towards

counting-windows: that's good

3cool-5u: idk people don't really talk about it much so it's just people yelling on the internet and when has people yelling on the internet ever had anything to do with what actually happens

3cool-5u: so like knock on wood i guess

counting-windows: ~hopefully I won't die~

3cool-5u: yeah! no dying. dying = bad

counting-windows: dead people never look like they're having any fun

3cool-5u: lol

3cool-5u: anyway like. talk to the community people and stuff i guess? and we can work stuff out or w/e

counting-windows: yeah I emailed somebody there

3cool-5u: neat

eagles-wings: Hi! A friend gave me your address, he said you had some questions about an old friend of mine.

counting-windows: yeah apparently she wants to marry an ex-red once there are some here if we do that instead of all dying

counting-windows: so I am like, looking into her

eagles-wings: She wants to get married? That's, um. Surprising. I guess people change.

counting-windows: well, it would be a no kissing thing

counting-windows: apparently kids are a "maybe"

eagles-wings: Huh. Okay, that's less surprising. Still not exactly a thing I'd seen her going in for, but much less so. Maybe she's growing up a little. Good for her.

counting-windows: what happened with the guy who died?  I backscrolled her blog and it came up but not with any details

eagles-wings: She didn't kill him or anything, if that's what you're worried about. She's quite a person but that's not something she'd do.

eagles-wings: He was a friend of ours -- another red -- we all used to hang out, way back when. We were all kids.

eagles-wings: The police ended up coming down on us.

eagles-wings: Because of, you know, a blue kid hanging out in the red district.

eagles-wings: He didn't make it.

eagles-wings: Sorry. Still hard to talk about. If there's any details that would be helpful, I can give them.

counting-windows: did she do anything that was not "hang out in the red district, attract police attention by doing literally that"

eagles-wings: Um. She did other things but they were all pretty much along the same lines? She had a thing of red chalk graffiti in clean districts for a while.

eagles-wings: She and my sister used to build siege weaponry out of spare parts.

eagles-wings: That sort of thing.

counting-windows: I'm sorry your friend died

eagles-wings: Thanks.

counting-windows: is there anything else I should know about her?

eagles-wings: I don't think there's anything that isn't more or less implied by what you know. She's not stupid but she's really not great at making decisions. Hates feeling bossed around but she'll listen to advice sometimes if she feels like you're on her side.

eagles-wings: If you end up talking to her more, tell her I miss her?

counting-windows: okay

counting-windows: do you like, want her to email you, or to just know that you miss her and not do that

eagles-wings: I wouldn't mind if she emailed me but she's less likely to do it if you say so. So just that, I guess.

counting-windows: okay

eagles-wings: Thanks. Hope I helped.

counting-windows: you did, thanks

eagles-wings: Good luck.

counting-windows: apparently eagles-wings misses you

3cool-5u: oh. you talk to him then?

counting-windows: yeah somebody dug him up and he pinged me

counting-windows: he didn't seem mad really

3cool-5u: yeah he's, uh

3cool-5u: yk the thing parents do where they're like

3cool-5u: i'm not mad i'm just disappointed

3cool-5u: but they're totally mad

3cool-5u: he does that thing

counting-windows: oh

counting-windows: maybe it doesn't come across in text

counting-windows: anyway you seem like a fun person and kissing is overrated and if I don't die I think it would be fun to live in such a way that exactly and only assholes are constantly irritated by my existence, like shasali aven, and if they don't let us go blue marrying blue's close enough

3cool-5u: awesome

3cool-5u: this is a good life goal i like it

3cool-5u: you seem cool

3cool-5u: ping me whenever i guess

counting-windows: will do

counting-windows: my name's not really eb but people call me that

counting-windows: and so can you

3cool-5u: cool

3cool-5u: nickname's riz which is i guess not much more identifiable than my blog anyway

counting-windows: nice to meet you riz

3cool-5u: yeah you too!

[openamenta]

With the admittance of the first Evaleen reds into Anitami cleaning facilities, they have returned two of the blue children, the infant and Sabai Kev’s one-year-old.  They are being sent home immediately to be cleaned and returned to their families.  The other four are still hidden among the reds; spokesreds said that they will be returned as the families “hosting” them are admitted into cleaning.

[openamenta]

That post going round about in-a-narrow-land is *not true*. She is not blue! She (he) is secretly Afen Kisantami! She is pretending to be dating a blue because Afen Kisantami would never do that because everyone knows he hates blues and threw his son out of the house for being blue. That is why she knows so much about Makel Alasi's fiance! I know this because I saw a recorded lecture by Afen Kisantami about old Anitami and I recognized her!

[in-a-narrow-land]

curious why you think it should be legal to advocate breaking the law?

(This ask is two seasons old (sorry!), but I’ve been cleaning out my inbox, and this is something I’ve been meaning to talk about anyway).

Not all laws are just. This isn’t a controversial statement: I may have an unusually expansive view on the scope of laws that need changing, but not even the most hardline conservative believes that the powers that be are endowed with infinite wisdom. I don’t mean to accuse our blues of incompetence. After all, their perspective is inherently limited. Blues don’t interact with the legal system the same way as any other caste, even greens. And blue judges only see what happens when the laws are broken, not what it’s like to live under them. 

That’s why it’s important for the rest of us to protest. Our experiences contain valuable information about the real-world impacts of bad legislation. Open discontent helps public policy researchers discover new cause areas and direct their expertise towards solving the most important problems. Obviously policy decisions should still be data-driven, but the strength of public opinion for or against certain policies is itself data. 

The natural objection here is that merely objecting to a given law is legal in most circumstances, at least in Anitam. Practically speaking, the line isn’t so clear. The Solan Kiteli trial is still taught in Anitami schools as a landmark victory for purple rights, but I’ve met a shocking number of people who don’t know that he was only ever charged with advocating illegal subleasing. It’s still a common technique to quash activists (the ACLC has a couple relevant cases right now, see here and here). It’s even harder to legally criticize laws which themselves forbid speech acts. 

(For my non-Anitami readers: Solan Kiteli was an agricultural labor organizer and the leader of the Open Land movement in Liyala province. In the years immediately after unification, farmers in Liyala still leased their land from the local blues in family-line contracts. Farmers were bound to rent and a percentage of profits for nearly lifetime terms. If a farmer wanted to move to the city with her family and didn’t have a sibling or child to stay and inherit the contract, she’d still be on the hook for those dues - and couldn’t let the land to anyone outside her immediate family. Open Land fought for and won the right to legally sublease contracted farms. Kiteli’s work paved the way for major property rights reforms in the rest of Anitam, helping us develop the necessary labor mobility to become a modern nation). 

In short: most criminals don’t advocate breaking the law, they just do it. Law-abiding citizens with well-intentioned criticism of the government usually keep quiet, because they’re afraid of crossing what’s still a very ambiguous line. Legalizing the advocacy of illegal acts sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s just epistemic good practice.