bócastréon

Old English term for the week: bócastréon,meaning “library, a place for books.” 

Bócais a form of the Old English for “book,” and it actually combines into a lot of other interesting compounds which I really like (I did an old post a while ago on  bóccræft, “literature, science or learning”).

Streónmeant “wealth, accumulation, treasure,” and the like, making for the entire word to imply a “treasured trove of books.” 

“Library” could also be referred to by the word bocchord, which I think is equally cute: hordis whence comes our modern English hoard,which makes a library sound like a dragon’s treasure, hidden under some misty mountains on the other side of the world. 

This is an interesting doublet because it is a great example of how English absorbs all sorts of lexical items from other languages even when it basically already has one in the same color. Also, it’s been barely a week and I miss Halloween. 

Spirit: “The soul of a person or another creature.” We can trace this back to the Middle English spirit, of several different additional meanings, including “vital breath, animation, divine, indescribable, immaterial creature.” English borrowed this from the Old French espirit,from the Latin spiritus.This Latin term was a derivative of another Latin word, spiro,meaning “I breathe, respire, live or blow.” 

Ultimately, the word is probably from the Proto-Indo-European root peisorspeis, “to blow.” 

Ghost: “The spirit, soul or animation of a man, the shadowy mirror image.” The modern English evolved from the Old English term gast, “breath, good or bad spirits, angels, demons.” Interestingly, in older translations of the Bible, since the English language had yet to adopt the Latin derived term spirit,any instances of spiritus were translated asgast,which is why most old Christian writing uses Holy Ghost. 

The Old English also has an additional meaning branch as well, which is “afraid, terrified,” related to the verb gaestan, “to frighten, afflict or torment.” We likely pulled this through Proto-Germanic from the Proto-Indo-European term gheis,meaning “shocked, agitated.” 

Spiritand ghostare now somewhat interchangeable, and we usually use them to refer to both the “souls of the deceased,” and “supernatural creatures.” I also find other languages’ ways of describing souls or spirits interesting: French revenant(literally “returning (from another world)”), Old English scinn(related to scinan, “to shine, illuminate”), Greek φάντασμα phantasma,(related to words for “light, sight, vision”), and French spectre (from the Latin spectrum,which is related to other Latin terms for “to see, appearance”). 

I am the first to admit I know next to nothing about German, but I keep stumbling into fascinating words and etymologies within it. Hence, this post for waldeinsamkeit,a German word meaning “woodland solitude, the feeling of being alone in a forest.” 

Waldeinsamkeitis primarily a compound of two halves, being waldandeinsamkeit. Wald comes from the Old High German wald,which is related to the Old English weald,both meaning “a forest, wood, grove, foliage.” Ultimately, possible from a Proto-Indo-European root u̯el,being “wool, grass, forest.” 

Einsamkeitis broadly translated as “loneliness, solitude,” but it can be broken into three smaller chunks:

Ein: meaning one. 

Sam: a suffix which is added to other lexical items to create adjectives, describing something as being of the quality of the attached word. In this case, creating the word “lonely, lone, solitary, single” out of its attachment to the word one, having the sense of “oneness, being of one.”  

Keit: an alternative form of the suffix -heit, which makes an adjective into a noun or a concrete noun into an abstract one, thus transforming our previous word of “lonely,” into “loneliness.” “Solitary,” into “solitude.” You can see it is similar to the English suffix -hood, we create childhoodthe same way German uses it to create Kindheit. 

Vespertineis a beautiful word meaning “of or related to the evening.” It is an old word, from the Middle English vespertyne,which is “belonging to evening, evening dew.” 

The Latin form from whence the English comes, was vespertinus,meaning strictly “evening.” This is an adjective version of the noun vesper,which was used to either describe “evening” or “the evening star,” an entity we now recognize as the planet Venus. The Latin was a cognate to the Ancient Greek ἕσπερος hesperos,of the same definition, which is visually a little closer to the Indo-European root, u̯esperos, “evening.” 

Interestingly,vesperwas also adopted into English apart from it’s descriptive form, and has been used to refer to the “evening star” as well as “church services held during the evening.” 

area51-narutorun:

brightlotusmoon:

spinachandhoney:

understuckphanuniverse:

r4cs0:

flakmaniak:

sirnekomeowinton:

charlesoberonn:

Whenever I do worldbuilding I try to keep this image in mind

i hate this fucking site so much *clicks reblog*

Funniest shit I’ve ever seen.

Ah, the Mary Suez.

hundreds of years of language evolution and innumerable events had to line up in the exactright order for that pun to make sense.

kendallroy:

kendallroy:

kendallroy:

idk who needs to hear this but when your english teacher asks you to explain why an author chose to use a specific metaphor or literary device, it’s not because you won’t be able to function in real-world society without the essential knowledge of gatsby’s green light or whatever, it’s because that process develops your abilities to parse a text for meaning and fill in gaps in information by yourself, and if you’re wondering what happens when you DON’T develop an adult level of reading comprehension, look no further than the dizzying array of examples right here on tumblr dot com

this post went from 600 to 2400 notes in the time it took me to write 3 emails. i’m already terrified for what’s going to happen in there

k but also, as an addendum, the reason we study literary analysis is because everything an author writes has meaning, whether it was intentional or not, and their biases and agendas are often reflected in their choice of language and literary devices and so forth! and that ties directly into being able to identify, for example, the racist and antisemitic dogwhistles often employed by the right wing, or the subconscious word choices that can unintentionally illustrate someone’s bias or blind spot. LANGUAGE HAS WEIGHT AND MEANING! the way we communicate is a reflection of our inner selves, and that’s true regardless of whether it’s a short story or a novel or a blog post or a tweet. instead of taking a piece of writing at face value and stopping there, assuming that there is no deeper meaning or thought behind the words on the page, ask yourself these two questions instead:

1. what is the author tryingto say?
2. what does the author maybe not realize they’re saying?

because the most interesting reading of any piece of literature, imho, usually occupies the space in between those questions.

reflet-de-la-lune:

Milou dans toutes les langues

Milouuuuuu

Arabic dialects

Arabic is spoken by around 369.8 million people and is the official language in 24 countries, in a geographical area that stretches from Morocco to Oman.

It is subdivided into three main varieties: Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and spoken Arabic. Classical Arabic, also known as Quranic Arabic, is the written language of the Quran. It is no longer a spoken language and is used only for religious purposes.

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), or fusha, derives from Classical Arabic and is the foundation of all dialects. It is used in formal meetings, politics, media, and books.

Spoken Arabic refers to the Arabic dialects used in everyday life for daily tasks and to communicate informally with other people. They do not have a standardized written form.

Compared to MSA, it has a simpler grammatical structure and a more casual vocabulary and style. Some lettersarepronounced differently.

Dialects vary considerably from region and region and are not always mutually intelligible. There are 25of them, classified into five groups: Maghrebi, Egyptic, Mesopotamian, Levantine, and Peninsular.

Two main groups were formerly distinguished: Mashriqi(eastern), which includes Peninsular, Mesopotamian, Levant, and Egyptic Arabic, and Maghrebi(western) dialects. Mutual intelligibilityishigh within each of the groups, while intelligibility betweenthem is asymmetric: Maghrebi speakers are more likely to understand Mashriqi than vice versa.

Maghrebi Arabic

Maghrebi Arabic includes Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Libyan, Hassaniya, and Saharan. These varieties have been influenced by Punic andtheAmazigh and Romance languages. They are collectively known as Darija, also written as Derija or Derja.

Darija has over 100 million speakers across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania. It is known to sound very fast and to be difficult to understand for other Arabic speakers. One of its most remarkable characteristics is the integration of English and French words in technical fields.

Maghrebi dialects use n- as the first-person singular prefix on verbs instead of a-. In Moroccan Arabic,short vowels areweakened, and double consonantsarenever simplified.

Egyptic

Egyptic Arabic comprises Sudanese, Juba, Egyptian, Sa’idi, and Chadian. Sudanese and Juba Arabic are influenced by the Nubian languages, while the rest have been shaped by Coptic.

They are spoken in Sudan, South Sudan, Egypt, and Chad. Egyptian Arabic alone is spoken by 83 million people and is the most widely spoken dialect. Its grammaris significantly differentfrom that of MSA, and it has 10 vowels instead of six.

Sudanese Arabic has 32 million speakers and has some unique characteristics. For example, the letter جis pronounced like“g”instead of “sh” like in other Arabic dialects.

Mesopotamian

Mesopotamian Arabic includes North Mesopotamian, Cypriot Maronite, Iraqi, and South Mesopotamian. It is spoken by almost 50 million people in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Israel, and Kuwait.

They have been influenced by Turkish,Iranian languages,andMesopotamian languages like Akkadian, Aramaic, and Sumerian.

Iraqi Arabic has more than 40 million speakers. It has more consonants and long vowels than MSA. Furthermore, words end in consonants rather than vowels.

Levantine

Levantine Arabic can be further divided into North and South. North Levantine, spoken by 25 million, includes Syrian and Lebanese, and South Levantine, with 12 million speakers, comprises Palestinian and Jordanian. Northwest Arabian Arabic, or Bedawi, forms its own group and has more than 2 million speakers.

Levantine varieties are influenced by the Canaanite and Western Aramaic languages and to a lesser extent by Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Persian, Turkish.

It has unique phonological, lexical, and grammatical features. For example, personal pronouns can take up to 12 different forms depending on the dialect.

Lebanese Arabic has a simpler morphology than MSA, but its syllablesare more complex.Palestinian Arabic is the closest dialect to Modern Standard Arabic, but still differs in morphology.

Peninsular

Peninsular Arabic includes the following dialects: Najdi, Gulf, Bahrani, Hejazi, Yemeni, Omani, Dhofari, Shihhi, and Bareqi. It has more than 40 million speakers. Some varieties were influenced by the extinct South Arabian languages.

It is mainly spoken in the Arabian Peninsula and its neighboring regions. Peninsular Arabic has fewer loanwords than other dialects. Gulf Arabicdiffers in phonology and lexicon from MSA. It is mostly mutually intelligible with Egyptian Arabic, but unlike it, pronounces ج like “j”.

Yemeni Arabic, on the other hand, retains many classical features that are not used in other parts of the Arabic-speaking world, such as the -k suffix.

Here is a comparison of how interrogative pronouns are said in each dialect:

(what - where - when - how - why - who)

• MSA:maatha-ayna-mataa-kayf-limaatha-man
• Egyptian:eih-feen-imta-izzayy-leih-miin
• Levantine:shoo-wayn-imta- keef - leesh-meen
• Maghrebi:shnoo-feen-foquash-kifash-3lash-shkoon
• Peninsular:maa aysh-ayn-mata-layf-limih-man

Language typology

Syntax

You can read more about syntax here.

Languages can also be categorized based on whether the three essential elements of a sentence—the subject, verb, and object—have a fixed order orarefreely ordered. For example, English uses subject-verb-object order to make sentences like “The dog chased the squirrel.”

Fixed word order

In languages with fixed word order, the relative orderof the subject (S),object (O), and verb (V) is normally the same. Fixed word order languages fall into one of six types according to how they order these three elements, as follows:

• SOV(Japanese):John-gategemi-oyon-da. (John-subject letter-object read-past) — John read the letter.
• SVO(Mandarin): Zhāngsānshōudào-leyī-fēng xìn.(Zhangsan receive-perfective one-classifier letter) — Zhangsan received a letter.
• VSO(Irish):Léanna sagairtna leabhair.(read-present the priests the books) — The priests are reading the books.
• VOS(Nias):Irinovakheina-gu. (cook rice mother-my) — My mother cooked rice.
• OVS(Hixkaryana):Tototahosā-yekamara. (man grab-distant past jaguar) — The jaguar grabbed the man.
• OSV(Nadëb): AwadkalapééhapUh. (jaguar child see) — The child sees the jaguar.

Themost frequent word order is SOV,followed by SVO—most fixed word orders have one of these two orders. SOVorder dominates Asia, Australia, and New Guinea, such as in Japanese, a Japonic language of Japan. SVOorder dominates sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and around the Mediterranean, as well as an area extending from China and Southeast Asia into Indonesia and the western Pacific, like Mandarin, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in China, Singapore, and Taiwan.

The next most common order is VSO, followed by VOS. VSOis found in eastern Africa, North Africa, the westernmost part of Europe, the Philippines, the Pacific, Mesoamerica, and the Pacific Northwest of North America, such as in Irish, an Indo-European language of Ireland. As for VOS, though it is less common, it is found pretty much everywhere except mainland Africa and Eurasia, like Nias, an Austronesian spoken in Indonesia.

The most infrequent word orders are OVS and OSV, with OVSlanguages mostly spoken in South America, such as Hixkaryana, a Carib language of Brazil, and OSVlanguages, like Nadëb, a Nadahup language spoken in Brazil, being very rare.

Free word order

In many languages, the order of words is not fixed. Such languages have free word order. In a sentence with a transitive verb, the sentence’s elements can appear in any of the six orders.

Here is the same Russian sentence in each of the possible word orders, meaning “I see the girl”, Явижудевушку:

• SOV:Yadevushkuvizhu. (I girl see)
• SVO:Yavizhudevushku. (I see girl)
• VSO:Vizhuyadevushku. (see I girl)
• VOS:Vizhudevushkuya. (see girl I)
• OVS:Devushkuvizhuya. (girl see I) 
• OSV:Devushkuyavizhu. (girl I see)

Head-initial versus head-final ordering

According to their syntax, languages can also be classified into head-initial and head-final ordering.

Each phrase in a sentence has a head: the head of a verb phrase is the verb; the head of a professional phrase is the proposition; the head of a noun phrase is a noun. Many languages with fixed word order fall into one of two types according to whether they position the head as the first or last element of the phrase.

For example, while the phrasal constituents of English are consistently head-initial, those of Japanese are consistently head-final:

• Englishis an SVO head-initial language: 

1. VP:boughtbooks(VNP)
2. PP:athome(PNP)
3. NP:footof the table(NPP)

• Japaneseis an SOV head-final language: 

1. VP:hon-okatta (“books bought”; NPV)
2. PP:jitakude (“home at”; NPP)
3. NP:tenureno ashy (“table of foot”; NPP)

However, many fixed word order languages mix it up a bit: Dutch, German, and Mandarin use a mixture of head-initial and head-final orders.

Language typology

Morphology

You can read more about morphology here.

Morphological typology groups languages on the basis of how they form words by combining morphemes. The three morphological types are analytic, synthetic, and polysynthetic.

Analytic languages

In analytic languages, each morphemeis an independent word and words tend to be uninflected. Grammatical categories are indicated by word order or by bringing in additional words. Therefore, context and syntax are more important than morphology.

Analytic languages include some of the major East Asian languages, like Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language of China, in all its varieties, but also Haitian Creole, an Indo-European language spoken in Haiti. Here is an example of a sentence in the latter:

Mariterenmen flè yo.

Marie past like flower plural

“Marie liked the flowers”

Some languages that are not considered analyticsharecertaintraitswith them, such as AfrikaansandEnglish, both Indo-European languages of South Africa and 59 countries, respectively.

Isolating languages

Isolating languages have no inflectional morphology, unlike analytic ones, which have little or no inflection. Their morpheme-to-word ratio is close to one, so that each word almost always contains a single morpheme. Examples of isolating languages are Igbo, an Atlantic-Congo language spoken in Nigeria, and Vietnamese, an Austroasiatic language of Vietnam.

Synthetic languages

In synthetic languages, a rootcombines with several morphemes to form a word. The morphemes may be distinguishable from the root or not, and may be fused with it or among themselves. Word order is less important than in analytic languages, and there tends to be a high degree of agreement between different parts of the sentence.

Most Indo-European languages are synthetic. According to whether morphemes are clearly differentiable, two kinds of synthetic languages can be distinguished: agglutinative and fusional.

Agglutinative languages

In an agglutinative language, morpheme boundariesareclearly identifiable, and each morpheme represents only one meaning. Sometimes a word can represent a complete sentence.

Hungarian, a Uralic language spoken in Hungary, and Korean, a Koreanic language of North and South Korea, are examples of agglutinative languages.

This is an extremely long word in Hungarian:

legeslegmegszentségteleníttethetetlenebbjeitekként

leges-leg-meg-szent-ség-telen-ít-tet-het-etlen-ebb-je-i-tek-ként

“like those of you that are the very least possible to get desecrated”

Words of such length are not used in practice and are difficult to understand even for natives.

Fusional languages

In a fusional language, morpheme boundariescannotbeclearly identifiedbecausebits of meaningarefused together into a single word or affix. Morphemes may also be expressed by toneand vowel gradation, also known as ablaut.

Two examples of fusional languages are Ona, a Choan language that used to be spoken in Argentina and Chile, and Tigrinya, an Afro-Asiatic language of Eritrea and Ethiopia. The former codes evidentiality and gender in a single suffix:

Ya ktįmi xįnn nįy ya.

Ya k-tįmi x-įnn nį-y ya.

1st person relativizer-land go-certainty.masculine present-masc. 1P.

“I go to my land”

Polysynthetic languages

In polysynthetic languages, a word is a complete sentence and morphemes may modify the meaning of the root. These languages have a very high morpheme-to-word ratio. They can also be agglutinative or fusional.

Most of the indigenous languages of the Americas are polysynthetic, including Inuktitut, an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken in Canada, and Tiwi, a language isolate of Australia.

For example, this is a word-sentence in Tiwi:

Pitiwuliyondjirrurlimpirrani.

Pi-ti-wuliyondji-rrurlimpirr-ani.

3Pplural-3singular.feminine-dead.wallaby-carry.on.shoulders-past.habitual

“They would carry the dead wallaby on their shoulders”

Parameters of variation

There are two other types of morphological variation:

• Prefix/suffix differences:Manyprefixesdonot change the category of the word they attach to (“do” and “undo” are both verbs), while most suffixesarecategorychanging (“do” is a verb and “doer” is a noun). The latter are more frequent.
• Pronoun-drop (pro-drop): In languages where verbal inflectional morphology indicates the personandnumberof the subject, the subjectis often omitted. 

“Mun zol Soænt Inesk'vosær Siv'kor”

Sigil of the Ascending Root. 2022

Acrylic on Canvas- 24" x 24"

-

The latest sigil painting, finished and at this point travelling off to its new owner. This one was a little out of my usual stylings but I’m very pleased with the final result.

After several long years, I finally managed to put the entire video together, and at long last it’s published.
Enjoy, and feel closer to the Sul'voth runes as I take you on a small journey through the full pronunciation of my language.

The Dirokvul is once again available, complete in its final iteration.
You may find the free tome here:
https://ualthum.tumblr.com/Dirokvul

Access via desktop or browser to gain the link.
Out of respect, I kindly ask that anyone possessing any older version of The Dirokvul remove and delete out of date versions.
Thank you, blessings upon you.

prokopetz:

Random linguistic observation #137: in American English, depending on the tone, expression and posture with which it’s delivered, the word “yeah” can mean any of:

• That is correct.
• I approve.
• I don’t care.
  
• I am skeptical.
• I wasn’t listening.
  
• I agree to your proposal.
  
• I require additional information.
• I support you in this undertaking.
  
• I didn’t tell you because I thought it was obvious.
  
• I recognise the truth of your words, but fail to see their relevance.
• I am a sapient jug of fruit punch.

rei382:

THIS.

It’s sometimes impossible to pronounce names simply because you’re not familiar with the sounds (hell, some languages I literally do not hear the difference between certain vowels or constants because my language is rather poor in those and I literally never heard said sounds). But trying, that’s what counts.

And stop being little bitches when someone from a different culture tries but finds it impossible to pronounce your name. If they try and fail, they probably feel worse about it than you do.

prismatic-bell:

This is very true. I met a baby at my old store whose name was Navajo. I did my best and actually got a bit frustrated because there was a syllable I could NOT get, and her dad was like “it’s very hard if you don’t actually speak Diné, but thank you. Most people won’t even try.”

Be the one who tries.

symptomofsin:

there are over 2000 unique phonemes (individual sounds) in the world’s languages, and each language has anywhere from around 20 to 60. you stop learning new phonemes it’s theorized at around age 12. this is where accents come from – using your own language’s/region’s phonemes to speak

so no name is impossible to pronounce world-wide, but it is very easy to not have the linguistic archive necessary to pronounce a given name entirely correctly. it is a simple case of physically not knowing where to place your tongue, whether or not to vibrate your vocal chords, etc. the only one of the dictators of sound you could be shown is how to position your lips

that being said… obviously you should still try. saying a name as correctly as you physically can goes a long way for making someone feel respected and humanized, and dismissing a name entirely as too hard goes a long way to disrespect and dehumanize people. just also accept that someone’s accent interfering with their pronunciation isn’t a sign of lack of trying, but a sign of physical limits

sleepbby:

PSA: no name is impossible to pronounce. no name is too hard to learn, no name is justifiably butchered. kids with ‘different’ names should be taught again and again that being called by their name is a right, not a privilege

DrNightstone (@DrNightstone) | Twitter

I haven’t been that active here in reference to lore post, have been more focused on Twitter if anyone would like to follow me there! I recently made an interesting analysis on real world alphabet evolution and tried to apply it to Elder Scrolls scripts. I will still be active here too, reblogging neat stuff I find on TES, Anthropology, and things of that nature. Also will notify people here when I make a Reddit lore post.

shieldfoss:

crustacean-on-main:

shieldfoss:

cromulentenough:

shieldfoss:

cromulentenough:

I’ve noticed several Japanese properties make a distinction between fire and flame. Do they have different connotations in Japanese?

w…

wemake a distinction between fire and flame?

what i mean is that like, you have demon slayer where there’s various elemental affinities but they have fire and flame as separate, with fire users being like ‘i’m only a lowly fire user’ and being jealous of the flame users. And then i think elden ring also has fire and flame being different things but I haven’t double checked because i don’t want spoilers. And then jujutsu kaisen also made the distinction.

Original dark souls also has fire sorcery vs. regular pyromancy vs. chaos  pyromancy vs. the first flame with each kind of a weaker shadow of the next.

It seems like japanese might have ‘tiers’ of fire that’s lost in the translation?

huh ok

let me solve this riddle for you pictorially

fire: 火

flame: 炎

huh

ok

normal-horoscopes:

cultofplush:

@normal-horoscopes

WHAT??? BAYONETTA USES REAL ENOCHIAN??

Sonofabitch.

For those that don’t know, Enochian isn’t just a cipher. It’s an entire constructed language with syntax and grammar. Directly translating enochian can be difficult even with modern resources, and writing original sentences takes a significant amount of work. Someone on the Bayonetta staff almost definitely had to learn to read and write Enochian to make this and the implications of that are FASCINATING.