tepat-side

[tepat-side]

word of the day: gvu

Today’s Valya word is gvu, meaning “leaf.”

This isn’t actually a new word, but I decided on a new meaning for it today. Originally, I had said that gvu means “piece” or “part.” But now I know that its older meaning is “leaf,” and that “piece” is an extension of that meaning. You might ask for another leaf of lettuce, in which case you’re asking for another piece of it. From there, you can start using gvu for pieces of other kinds of food, and then for pieces of anything.

This etymological retcon also happens to line up well with how I made the Valya term for coin, gvu vanyi. It’s literally a “piece of money,” but coins (especially older ones) have all sorts of shapes, so maybe the earliest coins used by Valya speakers were shaped like leaves!

Another slight change with gvu came about by accident, but I ended up liking the result. In this video, I ended with the sentence Nana, kidwanwa ra suga gvu klasti mu, tali kidwa ri ra suga klasti da ra. The first part of that translates to “Maybe tomorrow night I’ll dream their dream,” or more literally “Maybe tomorrow night I’ll see part of their dream.” When reading the line, though, I sort of forgot what the word gvu was doing in there, and pronounced it without stress, as if it were a preposition.

But that gave me an idea: if gvu is stressed, it means “a part of,” but if it’s unstressed, it’s more like “some of”—an unspecified amount, maybe multiple pieces, maybe a tiny nibble or a brief moment. In that sense, gvu can even work with mass nouns, so you could say that you’re drinking gvu the water to mean you’re drinking some of the water, even though “a piece of water” doesn’t make sense.

[tepat-side]

International Day of Slayer

It's that time of year again

[tepat-side]

So, the diacritic is kind of like (some of) the dots on silar-looking Arabic letters?

Thinking on how to adapt the Akka-tą́ sctipt of Ngįout to fit Kshafa.

It's not going to be a very hard proccess tbh, The vowels are going to be the easiest part, which is funny because they are imo one of the most complicated parts of Ngįout orthography, but not very suprizing considering it needs to represent 10 basic qualities for the language it was made for as opposed to just 5 when used for Kshafa.

The more compliceted part is the consonants. These are the consonants of Ngįout:

And these are Kshafa's (at the point of time I'm having Kshafa spelling be solidified):

The main difference is Kshafa's full palatal series, and the extra sibilant /ʂ/. Haven't thought yet of a solution for /ʂ/, but I do for the palatals.

There is already a 2 way destincition in coronal consonants in Ngįout - the stops vs the affricates. So what I have is use the letters for the affricates for the palatal stops (it also works historically because they arrose from palatalized alveolars):

Now because the letters for the affricates are basically just the stops plus a diacritic under them, this strategy spreads for most other palatals:

There is just one problem. /lʲ/. Because the diacritic is already used on the letter for /l/, and it turns it into /z/!

So, a different strategy has to be used - just having a digraph with the letter for /j/ 👍

This makes a very fun and ~quirky~ system, where all the palatals are just the alveolars + a diacritic, except /lʲ/, which is instead a cluster:

This system also shows a nice layering in the historical orthography, because the voiceless stops are actually historically also clusters - of the basic stop + a glottal stop. The thing is this is an old convention, and so they are just juxtaposed, as opposed to the new /lʲ/ cluster where the /l/ letter has the vowel deletion mark (Akka-tą́ is an abugida), and so is more transparently treated as a cluster. Very fun stuff indeed :)

[tepat-side]

Grimm's Law

“Back in the days when it was still of help to wish for a thing,” muttered Jacob Grimm, “a younger brother dragged his elder brother deep into the wild woods in an attempt to work witchcraft.”

Seven years ago, I posted this story about The Brothers Grimm using their knowledge of philology to communicate with ghosts and thereby do magic: read the story at danielmbensen.com/blog/grimms-law

[tepat-side]

Just scrolled down Tumblr through about 20 sponsored posts & still haven't seen one from someone I actually follow

[tepat-side]

I had just been thinking about PIE, and about why the collective became a feminine marker - like what is the semantic connection? Is this a normal thing? So it's intriguing to find out this happened independently in another family across the globe

I just learned about Khasian gender-genesis and I'm actually shaking right now how the fuck is this real.

"How the hell did an Austroasiatic language develop gender, it must be a contact situation or something"

But no actually it's much much worse.

Basically, the dual pronoun got reanalyzed to become a feminine pronoun. There are reports that in Plang, a neighboring language family, women with children are referred to with the dual pronoun. Therefore, in pre-Proto-Khasian, the dual became reanalyzed into a feminine pronoun.

Here's Ring (2020)'s paper talking about it.

Then, these third person pronouns became slapped onto nouns so that they agree with the gender of the specific noun or even proper noun of the argument. Basically, it became a gendered article too.

Here's an excerpt from Ring's thesis (2015) of how these genders are used. They now apply to both the masc/fem biological gender and also nominal gender too. Like what the fuck. This is like PIE collective > feminine thing again.

[tepat-side]

It's really fun when an originally regular paradigm just goes nuts through sound change. For example the noun *mitkon (no meaning yet) in proto-Kshafa develops 2 very distinct stems:

mikven-

ngun-

(the singular absolutive in some consonant stem nouns is "irregularly" formed by ablauting the final stem vowel to /a/)

[tepat-side]

Tyuns is a collaborative map-based worldbuilding and conlanging game hosted on Discord, all about working together to build a vibrant world with interwoven cultures and telling stories in highly regionalized languages.

As a player, you control the shape and destiny of a culture, and the many states that may arise within it throughout its history. Will you work with other players to forge a great empire, create a maritime culture engaging in trade across continents, or play a pastoralist group at the edge of a great and harsh desert? All of this, and more, is possible - imagination truly is the only limit!

Join Tyuns today, and play with a multitude of other players in the bronze and iron age as you navigate your culture through the ages across a fully customized map, with an in-depth technology system for your culture to engage in, and with a system to create customized states that rise and fall across your culture! https://discord.gg/tDfBRg665W

Thank you to Peregrine, Madam Kali, Cted, Gieko, Spath, Nei Leung, Thebigarchitect, Hazel, Tassem, Magpie, Sol Invictus, MokhaFrappe, Gelobranos, Piestag, and Atyx for letting me use the art and scripts they made for this game in this ad.

[tepat-side]

What if you don't know who started it?

“It doesn’t matter who started it” are probably six of most insidious words in the English language. Of course it matters.

– David Graeber, "The Bully’s Pulpit: On the elementary structure of domination" (2015)

[tepat-side]

From Anja Siger's 14 Virtuous Undesirables.

[tepat-side]

Giving me very Mayan vibes!

Starting to wrap up the writing system on my new language. Hope I can share what I have (relatively) soon! For now here's a sneak peak

[tepat-side]

Wisdom from a man who by all accounts wasn't very pleasant himself

“Everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are now. Everything is like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in ecstasy, and ask that they, too, should forgive your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

[tepat-side]

Everybody loves to say I told you so. But everybody hates to be TOLD I told you so. This is a big reason why people stick to their groups and won't admit to changing their minds. If this guy is changing his mind & talking about it, great. I'm happy for any MAGA whoever who's open to reconsidering their position & doing something about it. I don't bite.

The pettiness is just 👌😂

[tepat-side]

Punishment also teaches people to hide mistakes rather than fix them. If bringing attention to a problem is gonna get you smacked for it, you're going to shift the blame for it, ignore, or better yet, hide it, and hope it goes away on its own. Or at least don't hit you personally with the consequences. Punishment doesn't necessarily teach responsibility, in fact it often undermines it

"Punishment works!!!" We're drowning in three to four generations of people so pants-shittingly terrified of ever being wrong that half of everyone has constructed a worldview wherein they never even consider the possibility that they could be wrong and the other half behaves like one wrong move will make anything or anyone explode violently into a million irreperable pieces. I don't think it works guys

[tepat-side]

Guys, I need some help.

I want to write a story. I know I can write stories. I also know that original plots? I am not so good at. I like making continuations, alterations, additions. And those won’t work for a fantasy world of my own, at least as it stands.

I want to write a story. I don’t know what story to write. I have the world, and I like the world. I don’t have ways to make people within it tell a story worth telling.

…suppose what I need is someone to make a request of me. Stupid as that sounds. Make the request, and I’ll write you the story.

Thanks, guys.

[tepat-side]

Farewell online privacy

[tepat-side]

Hello! I wanted to ask what kind of sites do you work on in Germany and what are the conditions like when you excavate? Also are there some artefacts that are more common to find then others?

Hi @ioniccolumns, thanks for the question and sorry for the delay!

Again, Mod V supplying the first part of the answer, since Mod A is currently still huddled under 1000 blankets and drinking vast amounts of tea.

EDIT MANY WEEKS LATER: Double sorry for the double delay, Mod A answered his part, I wanted to edit some things in mine, and then Term Paper Hell happened. Ask me about medieval slate roofing if you want to hear the rant of a lifetime, I dare you.

The short answer to your questions: It depends. 😅

The long answer:

We have a vast richness of time periods in Germany, and pretty much the whole country is covered in archaeology one way or another. It is entirely possible to start a dig going through 1920s scrap metal hoards, dig your way through a high medieval road, an early medieval settlement, and a roman villa rustica and end up in a neolithic causewayed ditch enclosure. In general: If you are digging in a city you'll probably find a latrine and/or a graveyard. You will find medieval ceramics and some kind of crop marks on many many fields. If you are within the bounds of the Roman empire you will most likely find Roman stuff, be that architecture or something else.

As to the conditions: How do you mean? Working conditions? (Imagine your average construction site, only with vastly more nerds.) Preservation conditions? (It varies greatly, we have everything from peat bogs to gravel plains to brown earth, it really depends on where you're digging. Though I WILL mention the Rhenish mining area for its particularly spectacular wood preservation. We literally got paleolithic hunting spears in pretty much working condition out of there.) Soil conditions? (It varies greatly, have a look at the Bodenatlas Deutschland if this particularly interests you!)

And artefacts - again, it depends xD. Though, most medieval digs will turn up incredible amounts of ceramics (my beloved), and it would be terrible of me not to show you our prime example of a find, especially if you're digging in prehistoric time periods: The Glorious Post Hole.

Foto by Brigitte Schlüter, liscence: CC BY-SA 3.0, online here [last viewed March 25, 2025].

~ Mod V

ETA: Mod A (that's me) Has Risen From The Dreadful Pits Of Illness!

In addition to So Many Time Periods in regards to sites, I feel I should mention that most excavations in Germany are so-called Verursachergrabungen (lit. person responsible [pays] excavations) meaning that whoever dug up the monument needs to pay for its excavation. Specific laws surrounding this differ by state, but usually the state office for heritage management will get involved. As V has mentioned, we also have a decent amount of rescue excavations, mainly associated with open-pit mining for gravel and coal, and numerous excavations of scientific interest - the big ones are usually focused on the formerly Roman parts of Germany.

The most common artefact is definitely pottery, followed by flint flakes and stone tools of all kinds. There is one find category that didn't get much attention for decades that actually should be really common though: burnt loam, also known as Hüttenlehm (lit. hut loam). This category covers daub, plaster and mud bricks, but for a long time only painted plaster was recognised because the others look too similar to normal soil - especially when wet. Only the impressions left by the wattle and the temper used to bind the clay of the mud bricks will give them away and all too often those are missed in non-university excavations.

Which brings me to the last part: work conditions! The excavations run by an university on its own are usually comprised of a team of students working towards their Bachelor's or Master's degree, headed by either a PhD student in cooperation with a teacher (who may or may not be a professor) or just a teacher (more likely not to be a professor). Occasionally there may be volunteers from the local archaeological society, but around here they are more closely connected with the state office.

On the excavations run by the state office or in cooperation with them you'll have excavation techs (aka shovelbums) and such fancy things as an excavator who takes care of the topsoil for you. So while the former is the "building site with an accumulation of nerds" V mentioned, the latter is more "building site with a few nerds and the usual annoying foreman who tells you that you're on a tight timetable". [Mod V would also like to mention that the state office does not do its own digs in all German states. If it does, you have to hire them if something turns up on your construction site. If not, they're technically involved from a legal standpoint, but you have your pick of commercial dig companies to do the actual excavating. The annoying foreman is a fixture of both versions.]

University excavations usually will work with more care for the preservation of artefacts while state department (and private excavation companies) will be able to cover more ground, but sometimes lead to damage on pottery and the like.

(In fact, getting an excavator license and specialising on archaeological digs is a very lucrative job because they are always needed, highly recompensated and some excavator drivers can work with mindblowing precision. Those are worth their weight in gold and will get recommended to the head archaeologist's colleagues.)

More specific conditions like accomodation, pay and adherence to OSHA depends on where you're digging (middle of nowhere, near a settlement, middle of the city, etc.), your degree, how much money the organiser was able to secure for financing the project, whether you're there as an intern (usually paid a pittance (i. e. my last intern dig was 3,13€/h paid as lump sum of 500€ at the end of the four weeks)) or as a hired worker (minimum wage, which currently is 12,82€/h). Student interns will usually get free accomodation of varying quality but have to do their own shopping, cooking and cleaning. Hired workers are expected to commute, so they'll usually be chosen for how close they live to the excavation site or will move there for the duration of the dig.

That's all I can think of for now! I hope I was able to answer your questions, let us know if there's more you'd like to know!

~ Mod A