rale:
it’s kinda cool how our generation has created actual tone in the way we write online. like whether we: write properly with perfect grammar, shrthnd everythin, use capitals to emphasise The Point, use extra letters or characters for emotion!!!!!, and much more – it means we can have casual conversations, effectively make jokes using things like sarcasm that’s usually hard to understand without context and much more. this “incorrect English” has really opened avenues of online conversation that isn’t accessible with “correct English” which is pretty interesting
#like see that’s different to saying ’’there are rules” (tags via @soaringsparrows)
My class and I literally taught some of the nuances of this to our english teacher, things such as the difference between “yes” and “yes.” or “..” and “…”. It makes perfect sense linguistically that we would create this complexity to ease communication in a medium without body language and tone, but what my teacher was really floored about was that none of this had ever “learned” it, we’re “native speakers” of a whole new type of english.
I was thinking about Tolkien and accents today, and I really like this idea that even within the Fellowship, you’ve got this happy cacophony of different accents. Boromir speaking Sindarin with a distinctly Gondorian lilt, his Westron a functional thing cobbled-together from the slang of his men and what he learned in order to speak with traders, messengers, foreigners.
Aragorn, so widely-traveled, being an excellent mimic—he can speak Dalish like a man of Laketown or a Haradrim like trader from South Gondor, but in moments of sincerity or seriousness, he slips into the tones of Rivendell, with all the careful articulation of someone who was scoffed at for every slip into the harsher pronunciation of Arnor.
Legolas who speaks Sindarin as his mother-tongue cool and green and fine, but whose Westron is harshly-accented, borrowed from fishermen and dwarves.
Gimli who speaks Khuzdul with that particular Longbeard cadence, which not even growing up in the Iron Hills as part of the Erebor diaspora could shake from him. Exile from Erebor forced many of the dwarves to become, if not fluent, then at least conversant in the languages of Men, in order to trade and travel on soil not their own—Gimli is no exception. (It amuses him to no end to speak to Aragorn in Dalish, and have Legolas puff up, offended not to be part of the conversation.)
Merry and Frodo and Pippin and Sam speaking Westron like the country bumpkins they are, all rounded vowels and drawls, but happy to learn all the languages that fly about them, laughing with their fellows when they mangle even the simplest of Sindarin words.
All of them sitting around the fire, telling stories, laughing at Gandalf when he can’t remember the Westron word for the Sindarin word for the Quendian word for the Valarin, who protests that he is an old man and has known too many tongues, so stop laughing, Peregrin Took, you are spraying crumbs everywhere.
Old English just has some wonderful words and kennings. I mean, really:
Their word for sea? It was often swan-rad or “road of the swan.” Spider was gangelwaefre, literally “the walking weaver.” They had the simple and now-obsolete word uht, which describes that time just before sunrise when mist still hangs heavy over all the fields and lakes and the last few stars are still out.
…Also, they didn’t say body. They said ban-cofan, which means “bone-cave,” and if you don’t think that’s some hardcore shit right there then you need to get out of my face before I turn your skull into a mead-cup.
Disclaimer: this knowledge is from long ago and probably has holes and inaccuracies in it. I would appreciate correction if needed, and I would appreciate non-dickhead correction even more!
These kinds of kennings were probably not used in regular everyday speech, but were used in poetry to A) make the poem sound cool (because they do sound very cool,) and B) help with alliteration. Anglo-Saxon poets did not make their poems rhyme the way we do these days. Instead, there was alliteration within each line of the poem. For example, this is the opening of Beowulf:
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
I’ve bolded the alliterated words. As you can see, not every word had to be alliterative, and “all vowels plus H” counted. (Which seems legit. I’m not gonna judge an Anglo-Saxon poet for taking a shortcut.)
The name Beowulf (which is the name of the hero of the poem) is itself a kenning. It means bear and directly translates to bee-wolf. (Since bears would come and take honey from bees like a wolf taking livestock from people.)
If you read some of the poems in LotR (the ones shared between Merry and Pippin and the Ents come to mind,) they’re structured like this but written in modern English.
*lays my head on @janeymac-ie‘s chest* keep talking you’re making me feel better
the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” is actually not the full phrase it actually is “curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back” so don’t let anyone tell you not to be a curious little baby okay go and be interested in the world uwu
See also:
Blood is thicker than waterThe blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.Meaning that relationships formed by choice are stronger than those formed by birth.
Let’s not forget that
“Jack of all trades, master of none” ends with “But better than a master of one.”It means that being equally good/average at everything is much better than being perfect at one thing and sucking at everything else. So don’t worry if you’re not perfect at something you do! Being okay is better!
These made me feel better
Steve’s internal monologue
P.S. I love Nick, Sharon & Tony and I know Steve respects all of them!! But just maybe…not in these particular moments 😛
(Source: http://jamesrbarnes.tumblr.com/)
but-the-library-of-alexandria:
the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise – what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that
Tolkien had the time apparently
LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
I find it interesting to watch @linmanuel speak in interviews and things because we’re about the same age (he’s a year younger then me), but we’re both pretty steeped in Internet culture and on top of current stuff with ‘the youth’ (like tumblr here), so he’ll throw memes and slang and stuff into conversation sometimes without even thinking about it and I do the same thing. And somehow it doesn’t sound like a parent trying too hard to be ‘cool’.
Old English just has some wonderful words and kennings. I mean, really:
Their word for sea? It was often swan-rad or “road of the swan.” Spider was gangelwaefre, literally “the walking weaver.” They had the simple and now-obsolete word uht, which describes that time just before sunrise when mist still hangs heavy over all the fields and lakes and the last few stars are still out.
…Also, they didn’t say body. They said ban-cofan, which means “bone-cave,” and if you don’t think that’s some hardcore shit right there then you need to get out of my face before I turn your skull into a mead-cup.
Synonyms are weird because if you invite someone to your cottage in the forest that just sounds nice and cozy, but if I invite you to my cabin in the woods you’re going to die.
My favourite is explaining the difference between a butt dial and a booty call