indicolite

When thinking about past lives, I always get the image of me being a male doctor who was killed in a helicopter crash.

Can't say where, or when. And I am not afraid of helicopters. I like them a lot. But that's what I intuitively feel.

*smiles sweetly* Of COURSE you're keeping Intro to Linguistics, aren't you?

Hehe, I've had some brief contact with the East Coast mathematical biology network - its Ottawa U end, that is - but since Ottawa U has one of the province's largest med schools, and have recently cheerfully announced that they are pumping money into new campus buildings and research like there's no tomorrow, most of which is going to biomed, I suspect it's more than a blip on the radar. But I can't tell ribosomes from RNA, so what do I know?

*drops furtive hint Goth Hobbit and her lover might move to Canada, although resigned that this is very very unlikely.*

Coming back after a weekend away to hear such terrific news! Congratulations and wishing you many many years of happiness together!

I have finally found this blog!

And I am touched that you are quoting me!

I don't know if you're doing it already, but if you bend your knees on the downstroke, straightening them on the upstroke, you both (a) add power to your technique since you add another downward vector (easiest way I can explain it) if you are actually ever considering chopping wood/enemies ( end up working the thighs and butt as well, with many repetitions.

Swords cover the three a's: arms, abs and ass. Who knew?

And you can work the sides of your body by alternating diagonal cuts (as if you are cleaving your enemy from right shoulder to left hip and vice versa).

Details! I want details!

 

 

I love da GEEK!!!

You want geek, honey? I'll give you geek, and I am not a geek since a geek drinks blood at carnival sideshows and although I am far from vegan I do not drink blood...

Here is some of my music to write by, and it is as cheery as yours...isn't. It is not a playlist, as I just randomly pick mp3s from my desktop.

The Beatles: Back In The USSR, She Loves You, I Feel Fine, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and the exception that proves the rule: Girl.

Queen: Don't Stop Me Now, The Seven Seas of Rhye

Boney M: Sunny

Afric Simone: Hafanana

Adriano Celentano: Stivali e Colbacco

Army of Lovers: La plage de St. Tropez

Ace of Base: Travel to Romantis, and another exception that proves the rule, My Deja Vu (how do you do accents in this great interface?)

Shakira: Suerte and Wherever Whenever, depending on what language I am in the mood for

Savage Garden: I Want You (the last time I actually cared what was the hip music was when they were the hip music, and I like it for the lines "I don't even try to explain, I just hold on tight, and if it happens again I may move so slightly...Come stand a little bit closer, breathe in and get a bit higher, you'll never know what hit you when I get to you." They summarise aikido quite well for me.)

Vanessa Mae: Red Hot, Contradanza, Classical Gas, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (the latter I have on CDs in several arrangements, but only the VM one on mp3 so far)

V.Monti: Czardas (my version is by Leahy, whose other songs I despise, but I will listen to Czardas by even my high school's intermediate orchestra)

Nightwish: Moondance

Mozart (Capella Istropolitana): Symphony 25

Darkmateria: The Picard Song, The Worf Song; no I am NOT a Trekkie. As proof of my non-Trekkieness, I misheard "I am Locutus of Borg" on the Picard Song as "I am as cute as a ball" for a very long time... until my brother corrected me (and I transcribe audio text for my living, or at least my jewelry); and I like Worf simply for the line

"I now take my place as first officer. I serve the captain, but I stand for the crew. It is clear to me that none of you are worthy of my blood or my life; but I will stand for you."

Lordi: Hard Rock Hallelujah from Eurovision 2006

Dschingis Khan: Dschingis Khan, Moskau, Hachi Alef Omar, Corrida

And the rest of the stuff I have no hope of you ever hearing of, but I occasionally translate on my blog. Conclusion: I like to get up and dance when writing; it relaxes me. And if I like eurodisco to dance to, I stand by my choice! I also found "Without Me" by Eminem to be very danceable, but

Step right up with a playlist that beats the revealed part of mine for geekiness.

I was about to say I have no musical training but then I remembered that I know how to play the harp and guitar.

I am jealous now. I have always wanted to be able to play a guitar to sing along with. Since I spent twelve years being forced into and later courting the violin, the upper strings should not be a steep learning curve if it is tuned in fifths; trouble is, my hands are small (I am small and my hands are smaller. Though stretchy), so all of the guitars I have held twist my left hand in an awkward position I do not like. A ukulele would work, but saying I can play the ukulele is not quite the same.

Is it Celtic or concert harp? A girl I went to school with started playing the Celtic harp in grade 6. Now she is in McGill University's music program (really really good) and earns ridiculous money playing at weddings, the casino, and other events. Sigh.

And I at first could not tell whether you were being sarcastic or not because I could not recognise the songs. Then I realised that hey, I do know "Sweet Dreams Are Made of These" (somehow I have heard this song a lot in shoe stores, of all places) and I have heard "Everybody Knows" although I kind of prefer the Leonard Cohen version. Deep deep voice talking, basically.

Edit: and of course I have heard "House of the Rising Sun."

That was a beautifully written and saddening post.

What I'd like to think is that the world is getting better, actually. After all, right now violence makes headlines - at least, thank goodness, in Ottawa it does. Only a few decades ago, and it is still that way in many places in the world, if someone got killed, people would just shrug: kids got killed every day. Only a few decades ago, people dying of flu, plague, smallpox, polio, take your pick, were the norm, and people who lived to 50 were the exception. Now someone dying of a heart attack or cancer at fifty gets mourned and buried and people have walks and campaigns for heart disease; only a century ago it would probably have been viewed as dying of "deserved old age."

If we are sensitive enough to notice something and be shocked by it, that means it is not the expected thing; that means it occurs rarely. I can imagine, though I don't want to, a world where the shooting you saw would only get press if it was a white man getting shot: the deaths of blacks, Asians, women would be beneath notice. I can imagine, though I do not want to, a world where you would not even rush to the window when you hear a gunshot, and simply say "Oh, those (insert epithet which is now, thank god, unprintable) are at it again," and get back to your work, and the very idea that this situation is wrong, that those (insert same epithet) are people with dreams who do not want to die, would not cross your mind.

It does in this place and at this time. We have built a world where people do care about those less well off than them, and have enough energy left from scrabbling after their own survival to be indignant at the plight of the less fortunate and to take action about it. There are places where this is still not the case, and it is a sign that we have done well that we can actually see that this is wrong, and those places are growing fewer with each passing year.

We may not have seen that we still have a long way to go. And I do not want to imagine that.

In phonetics class they told us that listening to music with lyrics in it while studying or doing something that involves language is not a good idea, since your brain gets distracted analysing the lyrics. But then, if you have enough musical training, if you listen to any music, your brain gets distracted analysing the music! (raises hand ) So I guess if it works for you, go for it. I can't live without a soundtrack, as my coffeeshop coworkers knew - I make my own if I don't have one, and I bet they thank their lucky stars that I do have a somewhat okay voice and pitch. I abused iTunes relentlessly while making a Keynote slideshow (and I had ulterior motives in wondering if my friend who owns the iMac would freak out at the weird music I like. He didn't, the resistant creature) listening mostly to Russian and Italian stuff that I now firmly associate with that setting.

Edited 'cause me can't talk English

I tell people I don't have a TV and they just look at me like I'm some crazy woman who probably has a cabin in the woods and her own manifesto on the evils of technology. And then I have to reassure them that I still have the internet and I still have video games, and I'm not saying I'm better, just that I don't have time for that many screens starring back at me.

I hear ya. I tell people who are ranting about Lost or Desperate Housewives or whatever that I do not watch TV. If they look at me strangely, I tell them that my TV gets exactly TWO channels, and one of them is in French, and to get any kind of picture quality (as I wanted for the Winter Olympics, because I am an Olympics nut) the bunny ears are festooned with enough foil for a cross between a monochromtic Christmas tree and a kinetic sculpture of an octopus and it still doesn't work. The nice TV is for the DVD player, so I can wait until some dear friend of mine burns me a DVD of whatever show season I may want.

This weekend, though, staying in a hotel, I watched TV for hours: my annual overcompensation. And discovered I don't like Seinfeld that much.

I have read about people feeling like they had ADD until they covered the moving headline strip on CNN, and I agree. I hate that strip, trying to give you hockey scores while the main part talks about terrorism and a little bit in the corner gives stock indices. Hate it hate it hate it.

"TV will never replace the newspaper. You can't swat a fly with a rolled-up television."

Or line rabbit cages with it, either. Or cover the windows. And - bliss! - you can flip through the paper, and read the articles that catch your eye. Again and again. Without any network telling you what and in what order you should learn about the world.

Fantastic post, Indicolite. Thanks!

I go around explaining the Great Language Change Clock to everyone I meet: Greek Orthodox seminarians, math geeks... Someone hold me in before I become a wandering preacher. "Languages change, ye sinners! Repent ere you lose your V-to-I movement*!"

I had a bit of a brainstorm last night, so I'm currently in the process of classifying phonetic sounds by elemental type (a whole lot of things in my fantasy world are divided up by classical Greek elemental division: air, earth, fire, water.) So I had this idea that instead of a male/female division of noun gender, that I might have an elemental division. Still playing with the idea to see if it will work. Ideally, I want it to be there but not hit people over the head with it.

Ooh, I love phonetics, how would that work, how would that work, how would that work?

PM me if you don't want to post your original ideas for everyone to see; I swear upon my imp of Dragon's Heart (few bigger things worth swearing by have arrived) that I do not steal people's ideas. Now taking them and running away with them and rolling them over and over until they are unrecognisable is different...everyone does that, but I will still put an acknowledgement in my first novel to my algebra professors who, not knowing it, gave me a nefarious idea to break a mathematical law. But stealing ideas requires acknowledging that I cannot do better, which is beyond the capacities of my ego.

I toyed with an element-based magic back when I was 13 and my world looked badly like Robert Jordan's, but the intervening years have transformed the Wild Magic into Bloodmagic, respectively, which works on very different underlying principles. If I ever do an elements-based fantasy motif, I would toss metal and stone in like the Chinese; more because I can't accept life without jewelry than anything else...you are giving me ideas...how do you want to be called in the acknowledgements section?

*The construction that makes "Go you to the movies?" a grammatical question, rather than "Are you going to the movies?"

So I have now created the proto-language of the common origin of the four main races of my book, and now need to drift that for the four species in the "modern" day. Create the equivalent of the romance languages, if you will, with some words occassionally cropping up that have changed little over the years and some borrowing occuring.

I got enough language change crammed into my head last semester that a lot of it was almost reflex. Basically, languages are divided into (1) those that change their words a lot to change their meaning, such as using cases, a lot of verb conjugations, etc. e.g. Russian, Latin; (2) those that change their sentences a lot and their words little i.e English, Chinese; (3) those that string together bits to a word to change it (without changing the inside word) e.g Turkish, Hungarian; (4) those that string together bits of word to make one big word that has the meaning of an entire sentence, e.g. Inuktitut.

No. 1, 2, 3 change into each other, in that order. First people keep on saying "he walked"; then they get bored, the 'ed" gets absorbed and vanishes (see African American English dialect for example), but to keep on conveying the meaning of 'past' they have to put more stuff in the sentence: "he walk yesterday". Then they keep on saying "he walk yesterday" for a few centuries, and gradually the word that meant "yesterday" shrinks down and becomes this bit you stick on the ends of verbs to make them past. And then, under a few more changes, "stand+yesterday" > "stand+past" > "stood" > "standed" (all the other verbs have -ed, why not this one?) > "stand yesterday" again.

Type 4 is pretty rare, by the way, and was not accounted for on the "clock cycle." My elves speak Type 4; don't know why, but I know they do. Tolkien's elves speak Type 1 - 2-ish, if I recall (goes to dig out Silmarillion...)

Of course, this is supersimplified, but those are the things that drive language change - English used to be (1) and is now heading for (2) at breakneck speed. Languages that arise as linguafrancas or pidgins (mixing together two languages to make different peoples understand each other somehow) usually start out in (2). One fact that may be useful is that Type 2 languages would tend to have longer sentences, in writing, than Type 1 or 3. According to my prof, the only language for which the entire cycle has been observed is Ancient Egypt's. But the different child languages of the same parent could go through the cycle at different rates: English, Swedish, German and Icelandic all started out in Type 1, and a thousand years later Icelandic is pretty much what it used to be, snug in Type 1, Swedish is farther along, so is German, and English is, of course...

One funky thing you may like, that I touched on earlier, is that sometimes words that originally had their own meanings end up as grammatical parts: see "yesterday" becoming the past tense. The French recent-past tense literally means "I'm just coming from doing x", and I am sure a lot of plural markers began life as the word "many."

But I never really thought of that as a linguistic constraint per se, just attentive writing and use of voice. (I have been known to slip up on this one though. Isn't re-writing grand? )

I found myself almost instinctively changing my tone and voice with changes in viewpoint character. Had an argument with one of my editors over the phrase "whatever the ancient Greeks used as shoelaces": "You know perfectly well what they used for shoelaces, put it in!" "I know. She (the character who is on camera now) doesn't."

You did all that language development last night? SO jealous...

Don't be. I do not recommend insomnia to anyone, even when cute worlds come out. I couldn't get to sleep anyway, so I found myself thinking about my intuitions concerning the different languages, and decided I better write those intuitions down. I get my best ideas when trying to get to sleep, but my 8:30 a.m school, 9:00 a.m work, etc. have no sympathy whatsoever.

*I avoided technical terms, but Type 1 (change words) is "inflectional languages"; Type 2 (change sentences) = "isolating / analytic"; Type 3 (pile together bits of word) = "agglutinative"; inflectional and agglutinative are both referred to as "synthetic"; and Type 4 of the mega-long words is "polysynthetic."

As for titanium (1) I want to read your book NOW; I love titanium and I love that idea (2) I would advise, if you don't have a good name already, to either name it after another mythology's giant race (which may be a little odd-sounding because why name almost the lightest practical metal after big hulkin' heavy guys? Sprite metal?) or name it after one of the titans. Rhea's iron

Dear Macha, I am now addicted to your blog. I read the language post, and smiled at the coincidence, for yesterday, from 2:30 to 3:15 a.m., I sat on my bed with my notebook, and planned out the language development in my fantasy world.

Not just place names or character names (I like the Ford Ford Ford Ford, it is so true); I am a fourth-year linguistics student who loved historical linguistics more than any other kind, so I sketched out how the language of the dying empire turned into the common tongue by losing all of its case system and most of its verbs, how many tones the elven language has, and why an interspecies language would have no 'r', 'l' or 'y' sounds (the other species doesn't have the flexible tongue necessary to make those), which happened to annoy most of my main characters who have those sounds in their names. I don't just have maps; by the time I talked myself into going back to bed, I had a language family tree, with dates of separation from the proto-language. And it was fun.

A very important point is how different social classes would differentiate themselves through the way they speak; for example, in areas of the U.S. omitting the 'r' in words like 'door' is a lower-class feature, while in Britain it is a mark of the higher class Queen's English. My sociolinguistics professor said that in Barbados, the Canadian accent is considered a prestige accent. This leads me to think how warriors would speak differently from traders, from priests, from courtesans. That was one thing I admire Tolkien for: you can tell at once who was speaking, the hobbits or the elves, unlike certain novels, where they all seem to have come from the same university.

I better shut up now before writing an essay on "The Loss of Animate Subject Differentiation in the Subjunctive Verbal Paradigm of Pre-Cataclysm Dark Elvish"...

I read two very interesting essays by Ursula Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves" and "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie"; the former is about how she built Earthsea, the latter is about use of language in fantasy in general. I do not agree with some of her points, but I find her arguments quite salient for the most part.

Earthsea, if I recall correctly, started with one island in the story "The Rule of Names" (which tells of an early adventure of the dragon Yevaud). From there came wondering about how is it a wizard becomes a wizard, which became the story of Ged. It kind of developed that it was an archipelago.

She did mention that she put quite a lot of thought in her Hain cycle as well, saying that at one point she knew enough of the language of Karhide (from The Left Hand of Darkness) to write poems in it; however denying that she went into as much work with languages as Tolkien did; Tolkien was a professional linguist. However, her parents were anthropologists, so Le Guin probably absorbed anthropology with her mother's milk - useful in a fantasy writer.

As for my own writing: the novel I actually finished takes place in the world my friend and I made up, but a thousand years later and changed far beyond recognition - I simply had two stories and an urge to consolidate and recycle. That one I began writing in 2000 and finished actual writing in 2002. Then came the rewrites, and then came all the people telling me all the things wrong with it, and then came more rewrites as I figured out the magic, belatedly, and then more rewrites and people telling me all the things still wrong with it and the fact that I can't talk English good. Now it has passed its ordeal, is formatted (I may be the only fnatasy writer to format manuscripts in the mathematical markup language LaTeX) and all that is keeping me from submitting it to a publisher this instant and taking the plunge is that I tell myself "One more check, one more looking over, you know this chapter is not your strongest, you've got to have learned by now what to do about it..." And the fact that I've got to buy some paper and a bunch of envelopes and stamps.

Meanwhile I amuse myself writing about the stuff that happened a thousand years before, and stuff in another world entirely; I found that once I knew how their magic worked, it imposed a bunch of rules upon me which, though they saved me making stuff up and justifying it to myself, left me longing for some time in a world with a different freedom.

Sorry, long story.

In my experience, it is interesting when the world itself gives you ideas on what is going to happen. I built a world in collaboration with my best friend in eighth grade - astonishingly enough, some pieces of it are still salvageable! - and we had some ideas of different governments we wanted to kick around with. Once she drew the map, suddenly I knew a lot more about what was going on in those countries: "Ok, whoever held that fertile valley was sitting pretty, so those two countries had fought wars over this land...and still don't like each other: problem when hero from country A meets heroine from country B; cool! And I see why this mountain range would keep this culture isolated...and self-sifficient...and xenophobic..."

I love world-making - that is, taking a concept and going with it, and discovering stuff along the way. Although I had to rewrite a great of my novel once I figured out HOW magic worked (mine takes one mathematical law, violates it, and sees what happens). But there is a thrilling feeling when everything fits together and makes sense instead of being slapped together because you thought it would look cool. When you know that, yes, it goes that way because it has to.

Wishing you all the best in your writing.