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lacrimosathedark · 3 years

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Who'd like some good old fashioned name analysis?

Okay, so, I been doing so much research for Resident Evil stuff and learning shit about fairy tales and timelines and genome editing and searching for impossible Romanian poetry I got overwhelmed and went, fuck it. Why not just look at their names? Maybe I'll learn something there.

So, here I have done it. Name meanings for characters of the Mold Saga so far aka 7 and 8 aka Biohazard and Village.

(Sorry I'm on mobile I'll put a cut here when I can)

Ethan: Firm, enduring, strong, impetuous, long-lived. An incredibly consistently common and popular name. E name just like Eveline, so could be a successor of sorts to the mold.

Mia: Derivative of numerous other names of many possibilities. Mia as a word means “mine” in Italian and Spanish. Mamma Mia is a well known Italian phrase, particularly due to the ABBA song and musical of the same name, and it being the catchphrase of the Nintendo character Mario. The phrase means “my mom”.

Winters: First and last season of the year where everything becomes dormant and cold and either dies or sleeps.

Eveline: Contains “Eve”, as in both the biblical first woman. Also means a night before an event, and the game takes place in the span of one night. The name Eve means “ life”, “living one”, “mother of life”, or “giver of life”. Another possible name origin is as a variant of Aveline, which is a diminutive of Ava, which is the same pronunciation as the name Eva as pronounced in Village.

Baker: Occupational surname. In older times consider an upper-middle class job, much like the family. Also adds the emphasis of the “food” and also how they essentially make more molded.

Jack: God is gracious, supplanter. A nickname for John and other related names, but also a name in itself. It is also a word with a couple meanings, including a heavy lifting tool, to steal something, to take control of something, or an everyman.

Margueritte: Pearl. French name for ox-eyed daisy. Derived from Margaret. Sounds like maggot.

Lucas: Light. Derived from Lucius which means “the bright one” or “the one born at dawn”. Luke is also an Apostle of Jesus and was a physician.

Zoe: Life. Came from the name Eve. Fitting as Zoe was practically pushed out of the family after Eveline’s arrival, replaced as the daughter of the family.

Joe: He will add. Was added as DLC. Short for Joseph. Joseph is the name of multiple biblical figures. One is a child of Jacob and Rachel and Jacob’s favorite son in Genesis (note: Jack is a nickname for Jacob) who was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, but rose to become vizier, the most powerful position nest to the Pharoah, and forgave his family and brought them to Egypt. One is the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who loved and raised a child he knew was not his against social norms. Another is a disciple known as Joseph of Arimathea who notably took Jesus down from the cross for his burial and testified when he revived and was gone.

Rosemary: Dew of the sea. Combination of Rose and Mary or the plant rosemary. Roses as a plant vary in meaning depending on color. Mary and its variations have many differing meanings, among them being, “beloved”, “love”, “bitter”, “rebellious”, “wished-for child”, and “drop of the sea”. There are also the allusions to Mary, mother of Jesus as she is sometimes worshipped with roses, and you say Hail Marys on your rosary which is only two letters from her name. In regards to the plant, it is relatively resistant to drought and cold, though some breeds are susceptible to frost and they don’t like too much water. They have fibrous roots, so they spread and fan out like we see with the mold. They thrive in more alkaline soils and seem to have been named by a taxonomist named Carl Linnaeus. In stories, folklore, and tradition, the plants or flowers are often used for remembrance, specifically for the dead. It’s also been used as a spice and in medicine.

Miranda: Worthy of admiration. Latin in origin. Character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and whether she is a strong female character or not is highly debated, as she frequently defies men like her father, but often when they expect and/or want her to. She is otherwise compassionate and naive. The titular character of a Polish novel in which everyone is a mage and Miranda is a medium connected to another character, Damayanti, who is portrayed as the ideal woman and has a romance with the male protagonist, yet sacrifices her body so her spirit can experience a higher state of consciousness. Miranda can contact her soul, and disappears when she dies. Miranda in the US refers to the required practice by police of reading suspects their rights before interrogation.

Eva: Latin form of “Eve” and meaning “life”, “mother of life”, or “giver of life”.

Duke: A ruler of a duchy. A title bestowed by royalty or passed through family, often given to royalty or nobility, but can be given to anyone. In France, the peerage system was abolished in 1789 (vive la révolution), brought back in 1814, and finally perma-abolished in 1848.

(Note: While the wife of a duke becomes a duchess, the husband of a duchess does not become a duke. At least, from what I gather. This shit is confusing.)

Alcina: Strong-willed. Greek origin. There are two operas using the same story about a sorceress named Alcina who lives on an island with her sister Morgana and seduces every knight who comes to the island, but turns them into plants, animals, or stones when she bores of them. When the source of her power is destroyed, she, her sister, and their palace crumble to dust. The Hungarian name for Alțâna, a commune in Sibiu County, Romania in the historical region of Transylvania.

Bela: Bela Lugosi was an actor who famously portrayed Dracula. His name is Hungarian and meant to be spelled Béla meaning “heart”, “insides”, or “intestines”, roughly translating to “having heart” or “having guts” in modern terminology, as in being brave. However it is considered a male name and as Bela is female there is also the possibility of the influence of the name Bella short an l, Bella an Italian name meaning “beautiful”.

Cassandra: The one who shines and excels over men. Name of a Trojan princess and priestess in Greek mythology. She was given her gift of prophecy by the god Apollo but, in most versions of the tale, he asks for sexual favors in return, and she initially agrees but then rejects him once she’s gotten her gift. In anger he cursed her to always tell true prophecies that no one would believe and was thus thought a madwoman. She served a temple of Athena, goddess of wisdom, handicraft, and warfare. When Cassandra was assaulted and possibly raped in Athena’s temple and dragged out while desperately clinging to Athena’s statue, Athena was so enraged by the damage done to her temple and/or her priestess that she enlisted the help of both Zeus and Poseiden to exact revenge on the Greeks for failing to punish the man who attacked Cassandra and caused the resulting damage. Zeus gave her one of his own bolts of lightning and she struck them down at sea. While Cassandra was never believed, she was always right.

Daniela: God is my judge. Feminine form of Daniel. Daniela is also a genus of moth with only one species in the genus, Daniela viridis. It is also another name for the Italian wine grape Prè blanc.

Dimitrescu: Child of Dimitri. -escu suffixes in Romanian are like -son suffixes in English, it derives from parentage (ex. Jackson is Jack’s son, Dimitrescu is Dimitri’s child). Dimitri means “devoted to Demeter”. Demeter is the Greek goddess of the harvest, agriculture, sacred law (i.e. cycle of life and death), fertility, and the earth. Like many Greek myths, she is repeatedly wronged, and rather severely, by multiple male figures. Demeter in particular is a mother who has her daughter Kore, later known as Persephone, stolen away from her and goes on a rampage searching for her and those responsible.

(Note: Considering the founders had these names it’s a bit dumb seeing as this trend of parentage -escu names supposedly came about mid 19th century (1800s for those who find that confusing cuz I do), long after the Village was founded)

Donna: Lady or lady of the home. Italian name and a title of respect. Derives from the Latin term Dominus. The Romanian form of the word (not the name) is Doamnã. The Atropa belladonna aka deadly nightshade have berries and foliage that contain tropane alkaloids including atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine which are extremely toxic and can cause hallucinations and delirium, but are also used in pharmaceutical anticholinergics. Throughout history people cluelessly used the berry juice as eye drops to cosmetically dilate their pupils, giving them a seductive doll-eyed appearance. Symptoms of belladonna poisoning are dilated pupils, sensitivity to light, blurred vision, tachycardia, loss of balance, staggering, headache, rash, flushing, severely dry mouth and throat, slurred speech, urinary retention, constipation, confusion, hallucinations, delirium, and convulsions. The plant's deadly symptoms are in atropine’s ability to disrupt the parasympathetic nervous system’s involuntary regulation like sweating, breathing, and heartbeat.

Angie: Diminutive of many names containing “angel”. Angels are messengers and warriors of Heaven, a realm souls go after death. Angel statues are also common grave markers. Children are also often told they have guardian angels, a being watching over them to protect them.

Claudia: No sure meaning has been found, but some think it comes from claudus, meaning “lame”, “limping”, or “crippled”, or clausus, which means “shut” or “closed”.

Beneviento: Good wind. Neapolitan spelling of Benevento, the name of both a province and its capital city, located in the Campania region of Italy.

Salvatore: Savior. Italian name. In the movie version (I specify as I have not read the book and the movie synopsis has more on the characters) of The Name of the Rose, the character Salvatore is hunch-backed and twisted, and has a history of not-really-acceptable religious beliefs. He was also tortured and falsely accused of witchcraft. He dies when a library is set on fire.

Moreau: Moorish, dark-skinned. French surname. Titular doctor in The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which said doctor performs disturbing and torturous experiments on people and animals, especially through vivisection, to make beastial humanoid creatures.

Karl: Free man, strong man, manly. Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who made notably important contributions to hydrodynamics, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles. Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, and socialist revolutionary who believed societies develop through class conflict, and in a capitalist society this is the “ruling” class (the bosses) having power over the working class. He believed people should have equal footing and should and would inevitably fight for it. Karl Jaspers was a German existentialist philosopher and psychiatrist. His humanist ideals had him dissatisfied with the medical community’s approach to mental health and worked to improve it, and philosophizing on it after.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: Since I’ve seen accusations of the RE character and his influences being so, I feel I must state it here. Karl Heisenberg is NOT a Nazi. Both Heisenberg and Jaspers lived through World War II and neither were Nazis. Jaspers was blackwalled because of his Jewish wife. Heisenberg was forcibly drafted into the Army Weapons Bureau, but pre-war he had been repeatedly slandered as a “white Jew” and his career held back, and post-war became more political, worked against traditional primacy in the education system, and actively protested the government considering equipping the army with American nuclear weapons. Capcom reps have also stated that Karl Heisenberg has nothing to do with Nazis.)

Heisenberg: Calling mountain (could not find a specific definition, “heisen” means “to call” and “berg” means “mountain or hill”). Reference to Werner Karl Heisenberg, (explained above). Likely unrelated, but another well-known (in the US at least) name thief of Heisenberg comes from the popular TV show Breaking Bad as the alias/street name for the main character Walter White who takes the name and starts selling drugs when he is unable to afford medical care for his in-need child, but grows more twisted throughout the series. Also place name.

Berengario: Italian form of Berengar, which is derived from Germanic root words meaning “bear” and “spear”.

Cesare: Italian form of the Latin word Caesar, which is an imperial title like an emperor or empress. The word Caesar itself may come from caesaries meaning “hairy”.

Guglielmo: Italian form of the Germanic William, meaning “vehement protector” or “desired helmet”

Nichola: Anglicized form of the Greek Nikolaos meaning “victory of the people”. Also a variant of Nicholas (Considered a female variant but fuck gender roles and the description says he.). This character is also referred to as Father like a priest I looked into saints and while I found no notable Saint Nichola (meaning on Wikipedia) there are multiple Saint Nicholases, most notably Saint Nicholas of Myra, also known as the Wonderworker and the model of Santa Claus. Stories of him include gifting gold coins through a window of a home for three nights to prevent three girls from being forced into prostitution, calming a storm at sea, saving three soldiers from execution, and chopping down a possessed tree. More connected to where his treasure is found, there is also a tale of him resurrecting three children who had been murdered by a butcher who had had intended to sell their meat as “pork” during the famine.

*BONUS TIME*

By that I mean these are less important so I did slightly less research and/or didn’t feel like typing all the research so there’s less info, but it’s still relevant, so here you go!

Chris: A rare name in its own right, often a shortened version of names like Christopher, meaning “Christ-bearer”, and Christian, as in the religion.

Redfield: Literally red field. Fitting for the trail of blood in his wake because have mercy on any of his enemies, but regrettably including many of his friends and allies (rip in peace Piers Nivans).

Elena: Shining light. Greek origin.

Leonardo: Strong as a lion. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese version of Leonard.

Lupu: Wolf. Romanian surname. Fitting as the surname of the man we saw become a lycan before our eyes.

Luiza: Renowned warrior. Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian name.

Iulian: Romanian name from the Greek iulius meaning “youthful” or “juvenile”, or ioulos meaning “downy-bearded”.

Vasile: Romanian name from the Greek basileus meaning ”king”. Vasile Voiculescu wrote a poem called Schimnicul, The Recluse in English, about varcolacul.

(Note: For those who don’t recall or didn’t notice his name in Ethan’s diary, this is Luiza’s husband.)

Rolando: Famous throughout the land. Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese variant of Roland.

Elba: Spanish form of Alba, which can mean “dawn”, “white”, or “elf”, depending on origin.

Dion: Shorter form of Greek Dionysios meaning “of Zeus”.

Wilson: Lineage surname, “Will’s son”. Very common surname in English.

Charlie: A name in itself but often a nickname for names like Charles meaning “man” or “warrior”

Graham: Gravelly homestead. Habitational surname, apparently derived from Grantham in Lincolnshire, England.

John: God is gracious. The most common name ever with the most variations.

Perlman: Ashkenazi Jewish surname. Also literal, “perl” possibly meaning “pearl” thus being an occupational name, or Perl being a woman’s name making it mean “husband of Perl”.

Emily: Rival. Latin name.

Berkoff: Could be Jewish, Dutch, or German surname. Definition not quite certain, but likely related to birch trees.

Josef: German, Czech, and Scandinavian version of Joseph.

Simon: He has heard. From Hebrew Shim’on.

Roxana: Bright, dawn. Latin form of Greek Rhoxane and Persian Roshanak.

Anton: Priceless, praiseworthy, flower.

Sebastian: From the Latin name Sebastianus which meant “from Sebaste”. Sebaste is a town in Asia Minor and comes from the Greek word sebastos meaning “venerable”.

Eugen: Well-born.Romanian form of Eugene. From the Greek name Eugenios.

(Note: This is the man who lived in the house with the red chimney.)

Ernest: Serious. Germanic name.

(Note: This man is noted to be missing in a letter to Luiza and his diary is found with the Cannibal’s Plunder in Otto’s Mill.)

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uthseikoashx-inflamedme · 3 years

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Summer of 1899 fanfictions: with Philosophy, ancient Greek and Latin, foreign languages and a bit of Literature

(note: by “Summer of 1899 fanfictions”, I refer to the summer of Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald’s meeting as teenagers)

(note: I am not a native speaker, so I apologise for the mistakes, inaccuracies, truly bad use of tenses and wrong phrases. I hope it won’t be too unpleasant. Let me know if something is really not understandable!)

What about philosphy, Latin, etc, but in 1899 fanfictions? (dark academia vibes, I know)

There are already quite a lot of fanfics about it but not enough - because it's so great, let me detail why it is (and expose my headcanons)

(the [1] and [2] are notes, check the end of the post to read them)

(tiny disclaimer: i am not at all an advanced scholar on any of the following topics, just studying that kind of subjects and loving to draw parallels with hp. i hope i won’t say too many wrong things, etc.)

Philosophy :

Moral philosophy

The theories and questions throughout the history of moral philosophy (as far as I know) fit so well with the concerns of our revolutionary boys.

Is there any moral duty? Knowing wizards and witches could solve an amount of muggles' problems, is this immoral for them to stay in the shadows? What about the means of the revolution - is this ok to kill for the Greater Good, to initiate injuries, doom and destruction to build a better world, which cost is acceptable? What about consequentialism, utilitarianism, moral of virtue, deontological philosophy, idk? What's good? What's fair?

More touchy question: the maj-people are able to perform marvellous things, so are they consequently more important than maj-people? Because of their capacities, should they be praised - considered as superior beings - as gods? But if yes, should they treat muggles differently than they would treat wizards? If wizards shouldn’t be considered as superior beings, are they equal to muggles anyway?

And what about the Hallows - is this moral to possess them, considering they mirror Gyges’ ring? Should Albus and Gellet keep them for themselves, use them for the Greater Good (yes they want to, it’s clearly exposed in DH)? Is the Quest important enough to justify sacrifices?

Also, what about Aristotle’s virtue system - being moderate and all, use our reason to be in the middle? Because I’m sure as hell Albus and even more Gellert would reject this idea: isn’t it a form of passivism? (no, but through their pov and situation, they might think that)

(by the way they both read passages of Bentham's and Mill's and Kant's and Plato's and Aristotle's books nobody can convince me otherwise)

(I never read Nietzsche’s extracts and haven’t even merely a define idea of his theories to be honest, except for a few uncertain glimpses of his philosophy - he disagrees with religious morality and is quite vehement about it, and praises an idea of a free human being, released from this moral of the weaks. And as far as I know, I’m pretty sure Gellert would agree with him.)

Political philosophy

I do have a headcanon: Albus and Gellert both read the Republic of Plato (initially because it’s well-known and they didn’t want to be ignorant about it and they surprised themselves being enthralled by Socrates reflexions) ; and quite a lot of their discussions about a perfect society instituted by themselves (and about what’s fair and what’s good) were underpinned by the book.

Is this ok to rule the world? Which system is the best - tyranny, democracy, oligarchy? Are the wizards just like the philosophers and, thus, are righteously meant to be the aristocrats at the top of the government? And are all the wizards as legitimate as Albus and Gellert to rule the world (no)? What’s the acceptable extent of power they should have on civilians? What’s the necessary authority they must be allowed to have on civilians? What about the freedom of the press, of speech (those themes are explored in the Republic and well-), of maj-people and non-maj-people?

Philosophy of desire, joy, pleasure, beauty, etc

Have you ever heard of Plato? (sorry, again, yes.) Well in several Socrates’ dialogs, themes of love and desire are developed (I particularly think about the Symposium) and Albus and Gellert could be convinced by it: the praise of relationships between men, of intellect, of beauty… but also by the myth of Aristophanes (people are halves and search their soulmate (more or less)). Besides, I’ll be quite curious about what Albus and Gellert may say about Alcibiades’ eulogy of Socrates and what they may think of their dynamics.

(long story short, Alcibiades is young and handsome and desires the ugly Socrates, is fascinated by his intellect and considers him as the most interessant man he knows, and can’t help but feeling inferior facing him and being deeply humiliated because Socrates rejects him (on top of that, Alcibiades is drunk and jealous - the parallels to draw between them and our revolutionary boys are bloody interesting but back to the point))

Also, I totally see Albus and Gellert as hedonists during their youth - justifying their immoral and unwise chase of pleasure and complaisance by an artificial sentiment of moderation, temperance, so not true hedonists, like they are not epicurean at all - and this is again something quite compelling, I must admit.

Ancient Greek and Latin :

Latin and ancient Greek at Hogwarts

Throughout the 19th century, the civilizations of antiquity increasingly fascinated the intellectuals - a phantasm around the topic grew and influenced artists and erudite persons, and was furthermore a mark of the cultural capital and level of education of somebody.

Although we haven’t any clue about the fact that Hogwarts changed the disciplines provided through the centuries, we know it is possible : Dumbledore himself almost dismissed divination studies and depending the demands of the students, 7th years can study alchemy (most likely thanks a teaching offered by Dumbledore himself).

And I do have the headcanon that Hogwarts was in the past not that far from studies dispensed in english colleges - or at least, proposed classes of British (magic) Literature, maybe Law (like an elitist subject but necessary to enter in the Ministry and consequently pure-blood kids are always following that course) and, of course, ancient Greek and Latin classes.

And it was necessary, because Latin is the language of spells and most of the magical essays written back in antiquity were in ancient Greek - furthermore, the more complex, ancient and ruthless spells and rituals were based on ancient Greek and not on Latin, more used in everyday, ordinary, common magic (it is again an hc).

(by the way, Arabic and Hebrew could be as well considered as ancient languages used in magic (again an headcanon, but it would underline how magic is complex and has multiple forms and is not just European-centred), but I have the slight feeling that the ideologies and culture of European countries combined with xenophobia and racism have excluded the study of those languages even though they are also vital in the history of magic you know)

Yes it’s based on nothing, but it would be so great and ask so many things about the Wizarding World back in the late 19th and early 20th century - especially about social and political struggle between the population - pure-blood families vs muggle born students, etc [1]. (And it would satisfy my dark academia aesthetic. But quite irrelevant here.)

What about Albus and Gellert then?

Durmstrang could also dispense Latin of Ancient Greek class, in my opinion, but I think (again, imo), it is a bit unlikely. But it does not change the fact that Gellert had always been attracted to Dark magic; so he could have learned the basis by himself in order to decipher ancient Dark ceremonies, etc.

That’s why I think both of them had learnt ancient languages. Maybe Albus took an interest in Celtic dialects (Merlin’s language?), and Gellert was familiar with Vicking Runes. It obviously helped them regarding a lot of their magical and academic performances. Indeed, the boys were able to understand old papers about the Hollows, but also ancient rituals, etc. And thus, had a wide access to a more dangerous, unstable, raw and primeral practice of magic: it was not like the average spells in Latin, but an intricate way to unleash their potential [2].

Besides, only few people - erudites - were as interested as the boys were in these old ways to use magic, and needless to say that neither of those persons were as powerful as Albus and Gellert were. Furthermore, the boys were able to keep a balance between the complexity of the enchantments and the instincts they both have regarding the expression of their magic. They accordingly thought of being more powerful than everybody else.

Foreign languages :

The languages in the schools

It is clear that Hogwarts is exclusively Anglophone. The school is quite small: 40 students per year, so 280 students in all, coming from Great Britain - England, Ireland, Scotland, Yales, so the isles. We could also think that the wizardkind living in the CommonWealth during the colonial age also studied in Hogwarts. (again a hc, but Henry Potter and his son Fleamont were both born in India, fight me)

Durmstrang, on the other hand, could host quite more nationalities. I imagine the school having three main languages: German, French and English. But in fact, English and French are more “officials”, used by administration and in some classes (French was quite important at the time, right? then it was English?). So the students most likely speak between them in German (Germany had been formed in 1871 and I think the Austrian-Ungarian Empire was also Germanophone?), Russian, Hungarian, Lithuanian… well, all the languages spoken in Easten Europe.

(and just to mention it, I believe that Beauxbâtons is a huge school, bigger than Hogwarts and Durmstrang, because we need logic at some point - anyway)

What about Albus and Gellert then, again?

Gellert was probably speaking German, English (obviously, he wrote letters in English, spoke in English with Albus and Aberforth…), maybe French, and maybe another language depending on his mother country. I headcanon him coming from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, but he might as well come from Denmark (the country of Mikkelsen?) or a Balkan State (there were wars here at the end of the 19th century, it could be an interesting theme), etc.

However, I doubt that Albus knew Danish or Hungarian, but he definitely spoke French rather well (he exchanged letters with Nicolas Flamel) and perhaps the basis of something else (Italian? German?).

I do not mention magical foreign languages they could have been familiar with - we know Albus is fluent in Goblegedook and Mermish in 1994, but I doubt he already was in 1899.

(Also, Albus’ mother came from America, so she might be originally from the Native American community and thus know an another language and let Albus know as well, but the fact that she is Christian (most likely, regarding what is her epitaph) let me doubtful; but I’m not enough informed about the Native American history to build meta, headcanon and theories, so I won’t explore this idea more.)

All in all, they are quite familiar with a lot of languages, and they certainly had a few conversations in what was not English (a mix of Latin, Ancient Greek, German and French, perhaps?) to infuriate Aberforth and not let him know about what they were talking about. (headcanon, again)

Literature :

We do not have a lot of clues about fiction - novels, theater or poetry - belonging to the wizarding universe - except Beedle’s Tales, of course. But we can imagine it exists.

Nevertheless, I am more interested in what Albus and Gellert might have read in the muggle literature. Besides, I think it is funny to consider that some writers or playwrights are known by muggles but are in reality wizards and witches - especially Braham Stoker, Mary Shelley… maybe Poe and Shakespeare as well.

So, I imagine that Albus and Gellert would have heard of Goethe, Heine, Novalis for German literature; maybe Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert for French literature… most likely Dante (definitely Dante). Though I honestly do not think they were fond of novels and literature, they could have been interested by it sometimes, when it echoed to something in them - Shakespeare, but also the story of Verlaine and Rimbaud, or Oscar Wilde’s story and unique novel.

There is also the theme of Oscar Wilde, homosexual writer, and his trial at the end of the 19th century, which are recurrent topics in 1899 fanfictions - a quite interesting one, imo. Have you ever read the Preface of the Picture of Dorian Gray? Definitely Albus and Gellert vibes.

All in all, I don’t think they may have been interested in literature for literature itself, but rather for the political aspect of it. (except for Shelley, Shakespeare and Dante which are a witch and two wizards, and are interested by the references to magic in the works themselves, again hc)

To conclude :

Even though 1899 fanfictions are great - and I thank you, 1899 fanfictions writers, you are amazing - I quite love the idea of all of this aesthetic that could developed. It is somehow prompt ideas.

(also I an studying humanities so it might be why I see those themes in 1899 fanfics so well, yes)

Thanks for reading! :)

Notes :

[1] : I wrote about the conservative Wizarding World and pure-blood families here: Why are the Weasleys poor? (eng&fr) (theories about pure-blood families, inheritance, etc) / How can everyone find their true-love and still be in love after years in HP? (”magic-soulmates” theory and conservative society)

[2] : I wrote about Dark magic and rituals in 1899 here: What if Antonio (Gellert Grindelwald’s chupacabra) had been created in 1899? / What about a dangerous, complicated and a bit gore alchemical experience tried by Albus and Gellert secretly?

And I posted quite a lot of things about GGAD, check the Table of contents if you are interested! :)

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rainydayhogwartsimagines · 4 years

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here to request fluffy fred as asked!! i was thinking about plant shopping, like it would be really fun taking fred magical plant shopping and he has no idea what anything is because he never paid attention in herbology and reader just laughs at him as he gets nipped n squealed at by everything

"I still don't know why we need a plant." Fred sighed. "Would you prefer to be selling kids dead Pygmy puffs? Is that what you want? Traumatizing events?" You asked. "No. But I still think that we should just go out and buy the feed ourselves." He whined as you drove. "It is cheaper to grow it and plus, I'm good with plants." You reminded. "Then you're taking care of this because I don't know a damn thing when it comes to plants." He admitted. You rose a brow as you pulled in and parked. "You took a class on this." You reminded. "I'm aware. And if I remember correctly I had a very very sexy partner who was distracting." He said. You snorted. "Babe... You're getting potions mixed up with herbology." you reminded. "then who was my herbology partner?" He asked. "....Neville." You said making him get out the car as you wheezed. "Still... Why must I come along for this?" Fred asked. "Because if I'm not available one day to do this, you need to know what to grab." You said. He huffed as you walked in. You seemed to already know your way around, moving through the aisles quickly. Fred cocked his head to the side, looking at a bouncing bulb. "What's this?" He asked. "Bouncing bulb. Careful... it will attack you if you get to close." you warned. "plants shouldn't attack anything." Fred shuddered, following you. "But they do. Wait till you see what we're actually going to be buying... I wonder if they have steel cases or something." You pondered. "What the fuck does it do for it to need a steel case?" Fred asked. "That's actually the tamest of the plants. Just makes you dizzy. Actually more of an equivalent of being drunk, I think it's used in truth serum" You said. "That's tame to you!?" "Fred we literally took care of screaming plants that would make you pass out without protection over the ears." You reminded. "I really should've gone to class." He said making you smack your head against a wall and let out a long groan. "....You've got to be kidding me." You sighed. "Remember that you love me." Fred said. You groaned. "I knew that would come back to bite me in the ass." You grumbled as you pushed the cart forward.

You got a ton of questions from Fred. "Love, what the fuck is that?" or "Princess, why does that look like it's ready to kill me?". You answered them, best to your ability but he still had a nasty habit of trying to touch the plants. You swore up and down he was mentally five. You finally found the plant and sure enough it was in a case. Which Fred opened. And oh boy.

He was stumbling around like a moron. "Baby... I feel so weird right now." He said looking at his hands as you paid for the plant. "...He opened the case didn't he?" The cashier asked. "Yep." You nodded. "Babe... I have hands..." He said making you snort. "Yes, we all do Fred." You said. "Woaaahhh" he gaped as you dragged him to the car. You put the case in the trunk and you sighed, looking up at how long the effects were for this. "Fifteen more minutes. Oh boy." You muttered. "I love you Y/nnnn." Fred said. You looked at him and laughed. "I love you too Freddie." You said. "You're so good to me-- and patient-- God I want you in my life forever." He said holding your hands. You chuckled. "Careful Fred, those effects are going to wear off soon and you're going to regret saying something." You warned. "No I'm not! I have a plaaannnn." He said making you raise a brow. "What?" You asked. "A pllaaaaannnnnnn" he repeated waving his hands around before playing with his seatbelt. You rose a brow and he chuckled. "I have a ring and eveerrryyytthhhinnng" he waved making you gape. "Fred stop talking." You said. "Do you not want to get marrrrieed--" "No I'm trying to stop you from ruining your 'plan'" you said putting a hand over his mouth. "RIIGGGHHTTT the plaaaannn" Fred nodded before conking out in the passenger seat.

Fred had no recollection of the conversation you had or why you were suddenly acting very strange around him. "Y/n, darling is everything alright?" Fred asked. "Ahahaha! Yesss. I am perfectly A okay!" You said, eye twitching slightly. This was mainly going to your head. When on earth was this happening!? How did you not see this coming!? I mean, of course you were going to say yes but honestly the idea of a proposal in a crowded restaurant terrified you. I mean what if you tripped mid proposal or some shit? What if you did something stupid-- WHAT IF YOU SNEEZED IN THE MIDDLE OF IT AND PEOPLE WERE WATCHING!? "Did you inhale some plant fumes or something--" "NOPE. I'M GOOD. EVERYTHING IS GOOD." you said making Fred confused. "Did I... Do something?" He asked. "No! No you're perfect! I'm just nervous about... My mandrakes! I should get a sign so that when I'm working you don't walk in and... Pass out or... Y'know. Die." You lied. "Is that that weird screaming plant you mentioned?" He asked. "Look at you paying attention!" You said with finger guns. What the fuck are you doing?

"Right... I was wondering if you wanted to go to the Burrow tonight?" Fred asked. "Yeah! Yeah sure I am coolio with that!" You said. Could you chill? Please? "... Alright then... I'll leave you to the screaming plant children." Fred said before kissing your head and walking out.

The door closed and Fred was confused even more. What the fuck was that? "Does she know?" George asked. "I don't think so? She's acting very strange though... She used finger guns at one point." Fred said. "Are you sure she doesn't know?" George asked quietly. "No I don't think--" then it hit him... "Oh no." Fred winced. "What?" George asked. "I fucked up." He groaned. "What did you do?" George asked. "Fucking plant fumes made me high and I think I let it slip that I had a plan." Fred groaned. "Fred calm down. We're used to improvising. So how do we go about this?" George said. "Uhmm... Hmm...."

You walked out a couple of hours later and Fred was looking at papers. "Look at you looking all professional over there." You chuckled. He smiled and blinked a few times. "What the hell happened to you?" He asked. "Mandrake bit me... Fell back on the devil's snare and almost got high from plant fumes-- the usual." You sighed, sliding off the apron you were wearing. You used a simple spell to clean yourself and stretched. "You said we were going to the burrow?" You asked. Did you not suspect anything? "Yeah, Charlie, Percy and Bill are visiting." Fred said. "...So... Your brother are going to... Be there..." You realized. Fred noticed the suspicion. "Percy is down because he has finally lodged the stick out of his ass, Charlie is down on business, something about a welsh dragon nearly attacking a muggle and Bill just likes to see mum every now and again." Fred said. You nodded but clearly still suspected something was happening. "I uhm... What will we be doing exactly?" You asked. "Mum wants you to teach her how to make pizza apparently." Fred said. Oh... Oh that's like the least engagement-y thing to do. Okay, stress gone. "Let's roll then. Is George riding with us?" You asked. "Yep." George said walking out of a backroom.

You all rode in the car in silence and George was looking at Fred like "Dude. Say something." Fred swallowed and fiddled with the ring in his pocket and you drove. "Soooo... Charlie found a common Welsh dragon?" You asked. "Oh don't tell me you freak out over dragons too!" George whined. "They're cool, but I most likely don't freak out like Charlie does." You shrugged. "you got that right. That man could go on for HOURS about fucking dragons." Fred nodded. "Meh. It's better than Draco's ass rambling on about 'pureblood customs'." You shrugged. "that's always true." George nodded. You pulled into the burrow and walked in. "Goodness darling you smell like pesticide." Molly said after hugging you. "I am so sorry--" "Would you like to shower upstairs? I'll wash your clothes while you do." She suggested. "Honestly... A bath sounds great." You nodded. "She can just borrow some of my clothes." Ginny shrugged.

And so the plan was afoot. Fred and George had to act quickly while you were taking a shower, telling the family to ACT. NORMAL. You soon came back down in a comfortable dress that wasn't too fancy and Charlie was rambling about dragons. "Change of plans, mom is making pot roast apparently." Fred said. "And the there's the hungarian Ridgeback--" "Charlie I love you. You know I do. But shut up." Bill winced. You snorted and Charlie looked over. "You must be Y/n!" He said hugging you. "Charlie right? Dragon obsessed?" You asked. "That's me!" He nodded. "We've met once right? You were Fred's plus one to my wedding?" Bill asked. "Yes, Fleur correct?" You asked, looking at her. "Yes that is me." She nodded. "She's getting better with her English." Bill said. "pas besoin de s'inquiéter. Je connais le français." You nodded making Fred and George raise a brow. "You know French?" George asked. "I usually have to order certain plants internationally so..." You shrugged. "oohh" George nodded. Ron came downstairs with Harry. "Hey you two!" You waved. "Y/n!" Both boys said before hugging you. "Boy this is a nice get together... Where is Percy?" You asked. "With Dad looking at something to make sure it is 'of the ministry standard'." Charlie gagged making you laugh. "Any special occasion I'm not aware of here orrr?" You asked. "....I caught my fiftieth dragon!" Charlie said. "congratulations. Was it the common Welsh that Fred mentioned earlier?" You asked. "Oh no." Bill winced. "You know dragons!?" Charlie asked. "Read about them... And had to help that idiot over there during the competition." You said pointing to Harry. "So what's you--" "PLEASE. DO NOT. START. WITH THE DRAGONS. AGAIN." Bill groaned. See this? This was normal. Hermione came down with a smile. "Thought I heard you!" She said. You hugged her and let out a relieved breath. "God it feels good to be around other females." You said. "Hey!" Fred and George said. "I can only take so much testosterone." You said. "testoster-- what?" George asked. "Science George. It's science." Ginny snorted.

You and the girls talked for a while and soon dinner came along. "So, how's business?" Molly asked George. "It's good. Y/n has figured out ways to save us money so we're doing REALLY right now." George nodded. "She's bloody brilliant." Fred said smiling at you. You smiled and shook your head. "Though her plants are freaky." Fred said. "They are not freaky." You laughed. "They are! What kind of plant screams!?" Fred asked. " A mandrake." Everyone at the table answered making him groan. You laughed and he shook his head. Arthur smiled watching you. "Ginny did you leave the pygmy puff unattended?" Ron asked. "Uhm... Yeah, it's in my--" there was a thud upstairs and she grumbled. "Room." She finished before going upstairs. "I better help her... Puffers tends to be aggressive after waking up." Hermione said before walking up. "Puffers?" You asked. "He was the first successful Pygmy puff we made. We just gave him to Ginny. Glad to see he's handling mating season well." George explained after hearing another thud. "RON. GET THIS THING PLEASE." Ginny called. Ron sighed and walked upstairs. "Wanna take a walk?" Fred asked after another loud thud. "Absolutely!" You nodded before walking outside. You two walked for a bit in silent, shivering as the air got colder. Fred took the ring out of his jacket pocket and switched it to his pants pocket before giving you the jacket. "It's pretty tonight." You breathed as you huddled into the jacket. He smiled. "Yeah, yeah it is." He said. You smiled and he kissed you, holding your face close. "I've got to know this before I ask you something." Fred said making you raise a brow. "Any reason why you've been nutty lately?" He asked. "Uh... No?" You lied. He gave you a "really?" Look and you sighed. "When the plant got you... Intoxicated? You kind of... Said something pertaining to marriage." You admitted. "Is that so bad?" Fred asked. "What? No-- no I'm just... Look, I am a fuck up. I am a clutz and I trip over air. I am terrified that if you proposed to me in a crowded area I'd literally fall on my ass." You admitted. "... That's it?" He asked. "Yeah." You nodded. "Y/n I know you hate crowds. Why do you think Ginny made an excuse for us to leave the house?" He said. "...Wait.." "Why do you think my family knows that we're out here and trying to make you feel comfortable?" Oh my God. "Why do you think I made sure you knew we were going to be away from other people?" Fred asked. "... You're a serial killer?" You joked, tears already forming. He chuckled and got down on one knee. "Oh my God." You breathed. "Y/n I love you so much. And I want you to always feel safe and always feel comfortable telling me things." Fred said. "And I want to spend the rest of my life making you feel safe." He added. "Will you marry me?" He asked. You nodded and cried as you wrapped your arms around him. He slid on the ring and he kissed your head, holding you close. "Oh don't cry princess! We're going to have cake! Or alcohol... Or both." Fred said making you laugh. "I'm so happy holy shit." You laughed. He smiled and then had an idea. "wanna screw with my family a little?"

You two walked back to the house and everyone was standing around as if they were waiting. "...Nice walk." Fred nodded. "Yeah, kind of cold though." You nodded acting nonchalant. Ron and Hermione exchanged a confused look. "here's your jacket." You said, making a point to show your hand with the ring on it as you handed back the jacket making them all scream. "MY GOD WERE YOU JUST GOING TO KEEP GOING WITH THE ACT!?" Molly said. "maybe?" You said before being engulfed into a hug with her and Fred. "Okay-- air mum-- air!" Fred said. You looked at the family around you with small smile tugging at your lips "Champagne? Anyone?" Bill said holding up a bottle. "Aayyee my brother knows me so well." Fred said laughing. You rolled your eyes as Fred linked his arm around you and pulled you close. You looked in his eyes and smiled. This was safe. This was your home. This was your family.

#fred weasley x reader #fred weasley x you #fred weasley

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ivy-kissobryos · 3 years

Text

Defining Witchcraft

This post is made in response to some topics I find commonly debated about within the Thai witchcraft community, but I want to post the English version here too. I will never tell someone who is or isn’t a witch- that is for you to decide. But if you claim to practice traditional witchcraft, especially those which lean towards western traditional witchcraft, then I will argue that the word ‘witch’ has a weight and history to it which you cannot ignore. It has a meaning.

A witch, traditionally, is someone to be feared. A witch to the common folk is a terrifying figure, at times appearing vindictive, ‘intent on wrecking economic and physical havoc’ (Tangherlini, 2000). As discovered from stories and court proceedings collected between the seventeenth century to early twentieth century, witches have been accused of horrific crimes, ranging from assult to sabotage, poisoning to larceny and kidnapping to murder (Tangherlini, 2000). The book by Bever (2008) also name the crimes commonly associated with witchcraft to include ‘harming livestock’, and ‘physical acts like poisoning and surreptitious battery of children and animals through ailments’, and ‘cursing’ through ways such as ‘subliminal forms of communication like eye contact’. Hence, a witch is someone who practices ‘maleficium’, a word which originally meant ‘wrongdoing’ or ‘mischief’, but later became specifically associated with harmful magic in Roman times (Bever, 2008). Between veneficium and casting the evil eye and worse, witches were never good.

The usage of natural materials within the casting of witches’ spells were also commonplace. Historians have found ‘various cursed things, or fatture,’ like ‘bones ... human nails ... seeds ... coals ... and the teeth of the dead’ which were ‘found in a sick woman’s mattress’ (Bever, 2008). Curses, as done in the past, were not pretty and palatable. Likewise, ‘a mixture called lazaro puzzolente containing quicksilver, urine, and asafetida resin was known to be made to work a similar magic when placed under victims’ thresholds’ (Bever, 2008). Bottling urine and harmful material under the ground of someone’s threshold is a classic method to curse an enemy. Historians had also discovered ‘spells, herbs, roots ... and hair’ believed to ‘cause hailstorms and untimely frosts, sickness in man and beast; impotence; miscarriage and death’, alongside other forms of sympathetic magic such as ‘cursing tablets’ where one sample was made with ‘the skin and bones of a frog, which had been pierced by several large pins’ found at the ‘bottom of a well’, and curse poppets were also found historically, an example being ‘a wax figure with a pin through it’ (Bever, 2008).

Witches also work with an otherworldly entity (or entities) who teaches them and guides them, the most infamous being the Devil. Who the Devil is is a question for you to discover on your own. Witches of the past has been reportedly flying to meet the Devil in what is called a Sabbath. Bever (2008) touches upon this, noting that ‘witches flew to Sabbaths to worship the Devil through a variety of obscene rites, including perversions of the Christian sacraments’. Those familiar with witchcraft may notice that the description of the ‘perversions of the Christian sacraments’ sound similar to what many practicing witches call the ‘red meal’, which can be one way to commune with otherworldly forces. There have also been numerous claims and confessions of those who claimed to have met the Devil.

A man named Hanß described the Devil to be ‘a black man with horns’, who had appeared ‘to him both day and night, scaring and threatening him’ until one night ‘he had finally agreed to give himself to the Devil, who thereupon carried him to the “merry and happy” festivities where he saw the women and the musician.’ This description of the Devil as a horned dark man fits traditional folklore well, and so does the tale of the Sabbath. In the tale, ‘at the dance, the Devil fussed over him, carried him on his shoulders, brought him bread and meat, “told him to call him father, and called him his son,” and eventually carried him back home’ (Bever, 2008). This correlates with how many traditional witches nowadays may associate the Devil with the Witchfather, the father of witches and maker of witches (as I have seen the term Witchmaker used too).

The relationship with the Devil may also be partly devotional, like a woman who claimed that ‘she did homage to him’ and prayed ‘I worship you, oh lord and Devil, attend my soul’. This is similar to the admission of Maria Gekin’s testimony, who claimed to have said an incantation that dedicated herself to him:

To the Devil I want to be, To the Devil I want to stay, To the Devil I want to be bound, To the Devil want never from his hand, The Devil has made me, The Devil has saved me, The Devil has sanctified me, In his hands I want to stay, To the Devil I want always and eternally to be.

All of the above claims are explored in Bever (2008).

Historically, there have been claims about uses of a salve: an ‘ointment witches reputedly used to travel to their dances’ (Bever, 2008). The witch Apolonia, whose case occurred late in the period of the witch trials, claimed to have used the ointment which is commonly referred to as the flying ointment. Moreover, Apolonia reported her ‘flights to the witch dances’ to have ‘merged dream content with reality’. The concept of an oneiric Sabbath is also commonplace today among currently practicing traditional witches, with groups such as the Cultus Sabbati placing a high importance on the concept of the dream Sabbaths. An interesting point that should be taken into account though is that in the past and in certain cultures, there is no difference between dreams and reality. Likewise, as stated in Bever (2008): ‘dreams in which the dreamer was transported to another place to participate in magical events and which the dreamer experienced as real rather than as dreams, were, as we have seen, experienced in other parts of early modern Europe, and indeed, were recorded in other cases in Württemberg, by younger people whose cerebral integrity was not in question.’ It can be concluded that these witches who flew in their dreams were not insane, and their experiences should not be dismissed just because they were dreams.

These spirit flights or dream flights were not also known to be just flights where witches fly to meet the Devil, but witchcraft can be accomplished through these journeys. Bever (2008) notes that ‘in Slovenia sorcerers flew to fight against each other in trance or dream, as some Siberian shamans claimed to, and some Hungarian witches both fell into trances to make soul journeys and also were said to abduct victims and transport them similarly to their revelries’. Similarly, ‘other Hungarian practitioners specialized in traveling to the land of the dead while in trance and in Milan, ‘four women claimed in the late 1300s that they had ‘ecstatic experiences with the ‘good lady and her folk’ and were therefore able to cure and to look into the future’. Soul flight can be used to connect all kinds of otherworldly forces, and knowledge can be gleaned and lessons learnt from these flights.

Aside from the aforementioned acts accomplished by the old witches, a concept which I believe is integral to walking the path of traditional witchcraft is the concept of initiation, through which a witch faces spirit death and their eventual rebirth. Not only were witches ‘thought to gain from their attendance at the Sabbaths the power and knowledge to commit maleficium’, some historians believed that ‘the next step in a witch’s initiation was to fly to a witch dance at which she worshipped the Devil with other witches.’ Other historians disagree, claiming that ‘shamanic initiation often, but not always, involves a ritual experience of death and rebirth, while a witch’s initiation did not’. Still, the author of the previous quote added that ‘the witch’s renunciation of her Christian identity and assumption of a new, diabolical one could be seen as a symbolic equivalent, and overall the parallels seem strong enough to raise the question of what possible connection there might be’ (Bever, 2008).

In my personal view, cutting off old vows, making new vows, initiating, dying and being reborn is vital to being a witch in the traditional sense. To quote Aaron Oberon, a practicing witch and author of Southern cunning:

Folkloric witchcraft in the American South: ‘initiation is a death [...] something in you has to die in order to be initiated, to be given the information or power these spirits have. Sometimes initiation can result in physical illness, life changing events, job losses, or emotional upheaval’. Oberon (2019) stated that ‘initiation comes from spirits, and so what the spirits put you through is going to be different for each person […] It is incredibly personal and involves being torn apart.’

I will not go into detail about my personal practice, but every word he says rings true. In my view, to have something bore your way through your very spirit and irrevocably change you is what it means to be a witch.

So far, my attempts to define witchcraft has been quite negative. Yet, a witch does more than maleficum too. To quote Vita Tortuosa, a book co-written by Daniel Schulke, the presiding Magister of Cultus Sabbati: the path he practices is the path which ‘serve with both hands alike’. To ‘serve with both hands’ is an idiom that is commonly said among the traditional witches I have known, meaning that a witch may do harm with one hand and give blessings with the other. Magic is manipulation and so is witchcraft. Bever (2008) had found from cases of witch trials that:

‘[...] among the manipulative uses of magic, healing was by far the most important, accounting for half the manipulative cases, or almost a third of all beneficent magical practices, and was almost as numerous as all types of divination combined. Furthermore, the other kinds of manipulative magic comprised a polyglot miscellany including various enhancements to normal human capacities like strength and marksmanship; a limited number of magical countermeasures against natural and supernatural aggression by others; exorcism of bothersome spirits; a few cases involving claims of truly supernatural powers; and a couple of occurrences that were anomalous even within the magical worldview of early modern Europe.’

Witches can heal and bless and are capable of more than harm, just as there is more to magic than cursing. Not all magical practitioners are witches, but witches are a type of magical practitioner. Moreso than hurting or blessing, witches are liminal creatures, dealing with life and death and spirits and ghosts and necromancy. Bever (2008) describes how ‘technically, necromancy meant conjuring the spirits of the dead, but in the late Middle Ages it was used more broadly to refer to conjuring spirits in general’. Witches are spirit workers, as modern occultists may say. To be a witch is to work with the Otherworld, to have a foot standing in this world and the other planted in another.

Witches historically have also used the power of words and poetry to their benefit. Take this case study explored in Bever (2008), done by the accused witch Maria who was said to use an incantation to keep a horse from eating. For the curious, the incantation went:

Your mouth must blocked be, Your mouth must stopped be, You are the Devil’s, You must bewitched be, You must the Devil’s be You won’t eat for 24 hours.

At the risk of providing a checklist and a box one must fit to be considered a ‘witch’, I want to again state that this essay is simply exploring what it means to be a witch from a historical perspective. You decide what it means for you, but to fly, to curse, to bless, to work with spirits, to deal with some Devil, to initiate and die and be reborn and more- that is what I mean when I say the word ‘witch’.

Diverging slightly from the main topic and venturing more into the area of UPG, I want to argue that at its core, this tradition of witchcraft has existed since over two thousand years ago. As explored in Ogden (2009), pharmakeia - which is the art of poison and magic from plants - has been practiced since the times of Ancient Greek. Likewise, there also existed the usage of bindings known as ‘katadeseis’, whether it be through binding tablets or kolossoi dolls. And so is the use of incantations, referred to as epoidai. Necromancy was also talked about in the past, with ‘divination from the dead’ described in Homer’s Odyssey. Hekate and Medea and Circe are witches and witch-goddesses people may typically think of when hearing about Ancient Greek witchcraft.

Moreover, consider this quote from Ogden (2009) by Ovid, writing about the drunken bawd-witches:

“She knows the craft of magic and Aeaean incantations. By her craft she turns flowing waters back to their source. She knows all too well the powers of the herb, the threads twisted by the spinning rhombos-wheel, and the secretion of the mare in love. At her wish, clouds crowd over the entire heaven; at her wish, the daylight shines in a clear sky. If you believe it, I have seen the stars dripping with blood. The face of the moon was deep red with blood. I suspect that she shape-shifts and flits about among the shades of the night and that her old body is covered with feathers. This is what I suspect, and this is what they say. Also, double pupils flash from her eyes, and the beams shine from twin circles. She calls forth great-grandfathers and the great-grandfathers of great-grandfathers from their ancient tombs and cleaves open the solid ground with a protracted incantation.”

The quote from a 1st-century BC poet bears striking resemblance to what I consider to be a witch of the traditional, crooked path. It describes a witch who uses incantations, who draws power from the herbs and natural materia, who commands the natural world like a witch commanding the wind to howl or rain to fall, someone who practices necromancy and perhaps ancestor veneration, and also perhaps what we now call spirit flight as she ‘shape-shifts and flits about among the shades of the night’ in a feathered form of a fetch. Personally, the description of the moon and stars dripping with blood reminds me chillingly of not just the witches of Thessaly but also the witches of America, as it speaks similarly of a ritual where a silver bullet is used to kill the moon and initiate the witch (Davis, 1975).

In conclusion, the craft has been alive far, far longer than we are. Therefore, there is a history associated with witchcraft, giving weight and meaning to the word ‘witch’ whose definition is both complex and particular.

Bibliography:

Bever, E. W. (2008). The realities of witchcraft and popular magic in early modern Europe: Culture, cognition and everyday life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Davis, H. J. (1975). The silver bullet, and other American witch stories. Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David.

Oberon, A. (2019). Southern cunning: Folkloric witchcraft in the American South. Winchester: Moon Books.

Ogden, D. (2009). Magic, witchcraft, and ghosts in the Greek and Roman worlds: A sourcebook. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schulke, D., & Fitzgerald, R. (2018). VIA TORTUOSA: An Exposition on Crooked Path Sorcery. Xoanon Publishing.

Tangherlini, T. (2000). "How Do You Know She's a Witch?": Witches, Cunning Folk, and Competition in Denmark. Western Folklore, 59(3/4), 279-303. doi:10.2307/1500237

#traditional witchcraft #greek magic #witchcraft #the devil #spirit flight

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xellandria · 3 years

Photo

Zmija Yilan was a temporary character I played towards the end of our Tomb of Annihilation campaign after my boy Alexus got petrified by a beholder somewhere deep in the bowels of the tomb itself. We were able to “salvage” both him and Amara (who had also gotten petrified in the same fight) by shoving them into the Bag of Holding, but short of having the two of us sit on the bench while the remaining two party members waddled back to town, we had to roll some new characters.

I spent most of the week between the petrification and the new characters appearing being mad at myself for not remembering I had Inspiration I could have used to reroll either of my failed dex saves and not being able to do much beyond that, but with less than 72 hours left until she had to debut, I finally pulled an idea out of my butt, ran it by the DM because it involved Shenanigans™, got the OK and started designing her. Thus was born Zmija Yilan, whose appearance was based partly on an old photo that was semi-viral on Tumblr several years prior and partly on Xelloss from Slayers because when I’m in a pinch, that’s always who I fall back on, and have been doing so for like, 20+ years at this point lmao. Personality-wise, there was a post floating around Tumblr that week about proverbs in various languages that, when translated literally or without context, made very little sense so she got a lot of that (and associated misunderstandings based on language mix-ups) mixed in with—again—Xelloss from Slayers, because I am a hack. I would probably never play her again because she was so firmly entrenched in that campaign and also there’s some parts of how I designed/played her that I look back on and am like “ehhh I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the optics of this,” but I enjoyed playing her a lot more than I expected, and I look back on the end of our Tomb campaign very fondly because of it.

I haven’t been able to talk about her in public both for a lack of reason to do so and because I didn’t want to “spoil” my group in case they found my various social media posts, but as it’s nearly a year since she was introduced and nine months since the campaign ended, I’m gonna absolutely wall of text the shit outta this bitch, rofl (that said there’s baby’s first nekkid pin-up under here so assuming Tumblr lets me actually post it, fair warning for that under the cut)

Zmija Yilan - level 8-10 Human* Warlock (Great Old Ones/Pact of the Tome) (usually this is where my D&D character posts put stats but I don’t actually have access to her character sheet anymore, so let’s just pretend she had something ridiculous like maxed Charisma because I remember my spell DC being ridiculously high)

Zmija Yilan is a traveler from the far-off land of Zemlya, and a disciple of Matrymriy, one of the "family" of five gods in the pantheon of that region. Matrymriy came to Zmija in a dream one night and told her to travel across the seas because She had a task for her, and that she would learn more once she reached her destination. She's been traveling around Faerun for seven or so years—reaching one place, being given hints to go to a specific location, and upon reaching it, being told to travel on without seeming to do much more than just Be There. Upon reaching Chult sometime within the last few months, her patron's hints indicated that she should travel to a place called Shilku Bay; she hired a guide (named Salida) and a bodyguard (a Fort Belurian mook) with what little locally-acceptable currency she had; they got separated after being attacked by a band of undead, and after failing to reunite with them, she was wandering around lost, trusting that Matrymriy will guide her where She desires her to go.

Part of her wandering had her end up in the Tomb of the Nine Gods itself, where she encountered our adventuring party (down two player characters) desperately trying to find their way out of the tomb in the hopes of returning to Port Nyanzaru to depetrify their friends. Our barbarian’s player immediately distrusted her because I’d drawn her tabletop token with her back to the camera, which was an awkward feeling almost immediately returned in-game because both the barbarian and paladin aren’t hardcore RPers but they had to carry all the RP weight as they were introduced to this new character and explain that they were there to destroy a lich (both because it was the source of all the bad undead in the area, and because they’d been promised a reward—a motivation Zmija understood, as “a hungry bear will not dance.”) Beyond the usual RP awkwardness there was an additional layer of awkwardness between the characters IC as at the time, Thokk was barely wearing more than a breastplate and loincloth, while Zmija was covered neck-to-ankle despite the heat and humidity of the region. She claimed that in the culture of Zemlya, having strangers see your skin was a mark of great shame and that modesty was of paramount importance, so seeing so much of him was very off-putting and threw her off-balance for much of their initial interactions.

Getting off on the “wrong” foot with the party and pushing as hard as I could into Zmija’s quirks (the weird proverbs, sprinkling in her Zemlyan vocabulary and making a point of her being from Very Far Away with Very Different Customs) meant I went a little too hard on them at the beginning, which is partly what I’d do differently and partly why the whole thing ended up working, so it’s a weird retrospective balance. If my partymates had ever shoved (almost) any of the names or places Zmija mentioned into google, they probably would have twigged to the scheme pretty dang fast.

In reality, Zmija is not a human traveler from Zemlya, because surprise! she's actually Zsaksatyi, a Chultian Yuan-Ti Pureblood under the command of Fenthaza. She worked as a bit of a double agent/interrogator within the Fane prior to her current assignment (hence her spell list's focus on information gathering, silent communication, and manipulation); she's been fleshing out her alternate persona for years and would occasionally pretend to be a captive and be thrown in one of those cells the party was in to get relevant information from the other prisoners, or assist others that were interrogating prisoners by more direct means (via Detect Thoughts). In-universe, the language she pretends to speak is mostly made up, and something she's been working on for years at this point—it's not a fully-fleshed conlang and she only has a couple hundred words and phrases but it's enough to be consistent and believable when she sprinkles it into regular speech. Since there's no real risk of running into anyone else from Zemlya (because it doesn't actually exist), it mostly didn't matter, and since there's actual meaning behind the words she does have, in theory it would have held up to a spell like Comprehend Languages as well. Out of universe, the language she speaks is an amalgamation of my own conlang stuff (which, like the in-universe version, is very limited and not complete) and various words and phrases pulled mostly from real-world Slavic languages (russian, croatian, hungarian, etc) with a little bit of Turkish thrown in when my English-only ear felt that it fit or when I had already used a word and needed another word for the same thing. Zsaksatyi (pronounced dzahk sot-YEE) is the only name/word in the whole mess that doesn’t actually mean something somewhere, and was a combination of syllables from an online Yuan-Ti name generator that I kinda liked together. If she had ever been outed, I would probably have come up with something a little less cumbersome for me and my (almost certainly wholly monolingual) D&D group to say... but she didn’t, so Zsaksatyi it stays!

She very much looks up to Fenthaza and almost idolizes and worships her—if she ever had to choose between Fenthaza or Dendar, things might have gotten a little bit rough for her (possibly no matter which way she ultimately jumped, though I imagine Dendar's vengeance would be more immediate, if Dendar's a hands-on sort of patron). Thankfully (for her), there was very little risk of that given that the party had left Fenthaza on reasonably neutral terms (having already helped her oust Ras Nsi from his position of power in the Fane and the party having essentially marked that dungeon as “cleared”). Fenthaza had sent her to scout the Tomb of the Nine Gods and locate (or steal) an artifact known as the Black Opal Crown, which will allow the Night Mother to emerge into the world. The group actually came across the crown pretty soon after Zmija (and our other new character, a firbolg druid named Mei Ren who replaced our cleric, Amara) joined them, but the party couldn’t figure out how to get it out of the room it was in and Zsaksatyi was content that it would be safe from both our group and other adventurers there while she found her way back to the Fane (though she Sent the location to Fenthaza in case she wasn’t able to make it back). That was actually like, halfway through the session right after she’d been introduced so having her sneak off that fast would have been absolutely wild, so I kept playing her as Zmija and while there were myriad opportunities for her to be discovered—including a hallway where any non-magical non-living thing got evaporated, up to and including clothing—she never was. The fact that the only spells she ever used spell slots on were Hex, Counterspell, and Identify never really got commented upon, because prior to her joining the party we didn’t have a source for any sort of utility magic and we’d been feeling the lack for a while. She was a lot of fun to play just as Zmija once I got the hang of her, but the hidden agenda that only our DM & I knew about was an extra layer of fun, too. It would have been neat to see how the party reacted to a reveal, but unless Jim wants to take us back to Chult to actually deal with the Night Mother’s return (because without having to keep up appearances and alignments, I’m pretty sure I could have gotten that crown out of there even before the weird teleport-defying magic of the Tomb got turned off), her story is over for us—taking her outside of the setting she was designed for would be weird... plus we already have two warlocks (well, one and a half) in a party of four PCs; adding a third would be a little bit bizarre, I think.

Her more Yuan-ti features include scales down her spine and across her shoulderblades, on the backs of her hands, and on her hips and thighs—mostly in reds, oranges, and browns, but as she increases in power and connection with the Night Mother, more of them are darkening to Her blue-black; it started right at that spot between the shoulderblades where you always picture being stabbed in the back, and has expanded from there; I imagine by level 20 all of her scales would be that blue-black and may have encroached further on the more human-y leather bits, probably encroaching on her face at the last, which would make being a spy a lot more difficult (even moreso than wearing as much clothing as she already does) but I guess at level 20, do you really need to be sneaking around pretending to be human?

In direct sunlight or other very bright light, her pupils constrict to slits, which is the real reason for her heavy eye makeup—between the distraction of it and the (somewhat exaggerated) squinting that such light induces, it often goes unnoticed, as it did with her character portrait (although to be fair to my party, Alexus also has slit eyes because that’s one of the traits of elves and half elves in D&D, and also I’m not sure if they ever saw her portrait any larger than 150x150 or whatever Roll20 shows them at). Both her top and bottom canine teeth are sharper, longer, and narrower than is typical for humans, and she is careful not to grin too widely and will cover her mouth when she laughs or yawns, whether she is in disguise or not. That part I’ve never drawn though, so I can’t really point to that as something the party overlooked, heh. In hindsight, I wish I'd given her more/heavier snake features but even the official art for Yuan-Ti player characters are very light on them and getting around the differences between human and yuan-ti racials without tipping off the party was hard enough as it was—I took the 120 feet of magic-ignoring darkvision invocation to disguise the fact that she innately had darkvision, I never used my racial spells and abilities unless I was willing to “use” a spell slot on them and had another plausible way to have obtained them, the one time I got hit with a poison ability (which she was immune to) I spent a lot of time “figuring out the math” on how much HP I had to drop, etc. I also wish I’d given her darker skin, as she is supposed to be Chultian but she is significantly lighter than all the NPCs we came across. Then again, I’m as white as a sheet soaked in bleach so there’s something weird about me RPing folks of colour regardless (especially given her fake backstory, agh agh agh) so yeah. Really enjoyed her, don’t regret her, will not ever play her again rofl

In our very last session of Tomb of Annhiliation, the party—fresh off the victory over the big bad lich whose name I can never spell and his weird world-eating fetus—headed back to Port Nyanzaru via the Aarakocra village of Kir Sabal, which the previous variant of the party (of whom only Thokk remained alive and mobile enough to talk to them) had helped out significantly earlier in the campaign, unlocking a flying ritual that we were like “man we’re not coming back here if we’re gonna use it we gotta do it now” to get us the rest of the way to the port. En route, Zmija tried to leave the group and rolled a secret 15 Stealth roll... contested by 17 and 18 perception rolls from Mei Ren and Thokk, but as she wasn’t carrying much of the party’s stuff and it was the end of the campaign, they kinda just let her give some line about seeing them again in the future maybe, the Mother’s will is unknowable, etc etc. I think if Duf and Kattii didn’t know that I wanted Alexus back as badly as I did and that we were like twenty minutes (real time) away from actually getting him back, they might have considered that more suspicious than they did.

Pronunciations (and translations): (mostly C&Ped from her bio, which is the only part of her character sheet I can still access on Roll20)

Zmija Yilan: zMEE-ah yee-LAHN. Because I'm subtle as hell, that's Croatian/Russian/Ukranian (first name) and Turkish (last name) for "snake/serpent," according to the internet. What do you mean Remus Lupin is a werewolf?!

Matrymriy: mah-tRRuh mRREE (Rs are rolled). Matrymriy is Zmija's claimed patron—one of five major Zemlyashan dieties—but she'll state that she doesn't know the name that she goes by in the local dialect. That's only partly true, of course—мати мрій is Ukranian for "Mother of Dreams" (at least according to google translate), which is close enough to her patron's actual names and titles (Dendar, the Night Mother) that she can get away with it without actually raising suspicions about the true source of her powers. She'll also do that thing where if someone tries to say the name back to her she'll "correct" them by saying it exactly the same four or five times and then "give up" and accept whatever "butchered" version the speaker comes up with, except she'll do it even if they're actually saying it perfectly correctly. She may do this with her own name as well (sorry, Jim. And Duf. And Dustin. And Kattii. And Kattii's coworker, if he ever joins us and I'm still playing this character by then, lmao.) (2021 addition: and literally everyone who has a name that isn’t typically pronounced by us English-only plebians, I am so sorry I’m not better at your language)

Zsaksatyi: dzahk sot-YEE. Zmija's real name, when she isn't pretending to be a human. That doesn't mean anything as far as I know, it was just a combination of some of the syllables the random Yuan-Ti name generator was coming up with that I liked (which is also where "Itszella" was from), lol. I may end up changing it to be less cumbersome at some point, unless it comes up before then and ends up written in stone, but I'm on a bit of a time crunch for the moment.

Zemlya: zem-lyah. If pressed for more detail on where in Zemlya she's from (e.g. by someone pretending to know details about her country), her home town is Fal'shyva (fall-sheh-VAH), southeast of the capital of Hayali (HI-yah-LEE) and just north of the port city of Farazi (fah-ra-DZI), which is where she originally sailed from seven years ago. фальшива земля is Ukranian for "fake land," Hayali is Turkish for "imaginary," and Farazi is Turkish for "hypothetical," lol.

Proverbs & (approximate) Pronounciations: (if I recall correctly, asterisks indicate ones I had used, so I didn’t repeat myself too frequently)

Wziąć się w garść (zvun shih garsch): lit. take the self into the fist (polish), pull yourself together Галопом по Zemlya (gal-OH-pohm poe zem-lyah): lit. galloping across Zemlya (russian), to be hasty/haphazard. * У кого немає собаки, полює з котом (Ooh koe-hoe meh-MIGH-eh soe-BAH-kay, poe-LOO-yay koh-tome): lit. who does not have dog, hunts with cat (ukranian, original proverb is portugese), make do with what you have. Z choinki się urwałaś? (dzi hoink-E she urr-vahl-wash): lit. did you fall from a Candlenights(aka Christmas) tree? (polish), you are obviously not well-informed; are you dumb? * Mi o vuku (MEE oh voo-koo): lit. to talk of the wolf (croatian), speak of the devil. * Thalai muzhuguthal (tha-LIE MOOz-GOO-thal): lit. pour water over someone's head (tamil), cut off a relationship. * Хоть кол на голове теши (coat-coal nah gohl-ehvee teh-SHEE): lit. you can sharpen an axe on this head (russian), a very stubborn person.

Other Languages Are Hard Today, Let’s Just Proverb It In English:

Cat's Forehead (japanese): a tiny space, usually used humbly to refer to owned land. It fell between chairs (swedish): group work that everyone assumed someone else would do, and didn't get done as a result * It gives me a beautiful leg (french): fat lot of good that'll do me Drown the fish (french): avoid a subject by talking about anything and everything else, confuse the issue In a river with piranhas, the alligator swims backstroke (brazil): protect your weaknesses * Accusation always follows the cat (iraqi): it's easy to blame someone who can't defend themselves The honey only sticks to the mustache of he who licked it (arabic): he who smelt it, dealt it * A hungry bear does not dance (greek): the reward must be worth the cost (or at least exist) * The crayfish sides with the crab (korean): people who have a lot in common stay friends * If you can't live longer, live deeper (italian): get the most of your time * A spoon does not know the taste of soup (welsh): intelligence is not wisdom Examine what is said, not who speaks (arab): don't take things at face value * Turn your face to the sun and the shadows will fall behind you (new zealand): have a positive outlook He who does not travel, does not know the value of men (moorish): wide experience is gr8 Do good and throw it in the sea (arab): don't expect anything back from kindness * Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is halved (swedish): friends make things better If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together (african): strength in numbers, speed on your own.

#xellart #dungeons and dragons #original characters #zmija yilan

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lingthusiasm · 4 years

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Transcript Episode 45: Tracing languages back before recorded history

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 45: Tracing languages back before recorded history. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 45 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about language families and reconstructing proto-languages. First, we’re excited to announce that the LingComm grants have been granted. We have amazing winners that are listed in the show notes page or on the website lingcomm.org.

Gretchen: You can stay tuned for further news from our four grantees. As their projects start coming out, we’ll be telling you about them as well.

Lauren: Speaking of things that are out and in the world, I’m very excited that P. M. Freestone’s Crown of Smoke, which is the conclusion to the Shadowscent duology, is now available. The UK edition is available worldwide. I created the Aramteskan language for those books. We talked about that for Book 1 in our Episode 37 about language and smell because it’s set in a world where scent is really evocative and powerful. If you want to know how that book series ends, you can get Book 2 now.

Gretchen: This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about linguistics with kids – books and activities and observations that you can do with kids to learn more about how they’re learning language or to incite a joy of language with kids.

Lauren: You can get this as one of 40 bonus episodes that we have available at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: We have over 40 bonus episodes. If you’ve listened to all of the main Lingthusiasm episodes and you’re like, “Oh no! I wish there were more Lingthusiasm,” good news – you can support the show and listen to so many bonus episodes that are right there waiting for you.

[Music]

Gretchen: While we’re talking about history and getting kids excited about linguistics, can we go back into really ancient history and talk about how I got into linguistics?

Lauren: Oh my gosh, yes.

Gretchen: I’ve told part of this story before. I first encountered linguistics when I was around 12 or 13, and I happened across a pop linguistics book on a bookshelf –

Lauren: Ah, so this was started by a specific book! How interesting.

Gretchen: This was started by a specific book that I still have. I came across this bookshelf, and I just sort of picked it up because it looked like pop science and I knew I liked pop science. Then, I got about halfway through it, and I was reading it and I was like, “This is so cool! This is the coolest thing! This book is never leaving my possession again!” Fortunately, it belonged to my grandparents and they were willing to let me steal it.

Lauren: Nice of them.

Gretchen: One of the things that really sparked my imagination when I was reading this pop linguistics book was that it had this chapter about proto-world.

Lauren: Proto-world?

Gretchen: I feel like you have to say it like that – PROTO-WOOOORLD.

Lauren: Ok, let me try. I was about PROTO-WOOOORLD!

Gretchen: Exactly. This is this tremendously exciting idea that maybe we could figure out what the oldest language in the world sounds like. To me, at the time, this seemed incredibly exciting. What an ambitious task. All of the 7,000 languages in the world, you could figure out what they might have in common. Unfortunately, as I discovered –

Lauren: I don’t want to disappoint 13-year-old Gretchen, but that’s a bit of a tall order.

Gretchen: Unfortunately, as I learned more about linguistics, I also learned that proto-world is not a thing.

Lauren: But, having said that, the ability to take what we know about languages now and work backwards is definitely a thing. That’s the field of historical linguistics.

Gretchen: Right! What we can do is we can go back at this time depth of a few thousand years – 2,000 years to maybe 5,000 years – and figure out what languages had in common there and figure out some larger language families. Fortunately, very interestingly, language is probably some hundreds of thousands of years old. There’s just no way of going back to that extreme time depth. But, for this couple thousand years that we can do, it’s super interesting.

Lauren: I think it’s worth explaining why things get too squishy to go back to PROTO-WOOOORLD by looking at how we start doing historical linguistics and why you can only go back so far.

Gretchen: Exactly. I think the language that a lot of people think of when we think about reconstructing historical languages is this language called Proto-Indo-European. You don’t have say to PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN because this one’s pretty solid.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: This is the reconstructed ancestor language of many of the languages that are spoken in Europe and the Indian subcontinent. Not all of them. There are some that aren’t related to this, like Basque and Hungarian. But most of the languages spoken in Europe, and a large number of languages spoken in India, all have this relationship.

Lauren: I think it’s not super surprising to people that languages are related. As an English speaker, if you hear German or Dutch, you’re like, “I can recognize some of those words. They’re easy.”

Gretchen: I don’t think it really takes a whole reconstructing proto-language to hear the English word “apple” and the German word “Apfel” and be like, “Hm, I wonder if there’s a connection there.”

Lauren: “Woah! They’re related?!”

Gretchen: Or even better, the Dutch word which is literally also “appel” but spelled differently. I don’t think that’s rocket science.

Lauren: What I think is impressive though, and where historical linguistics really came into its own, is looking at similarities but also differences and figuring out how those differences were systematic, so you can work back in time. If you think about as languages go on the sounds change so, if you put that in reverse, you can reverse those sound changes to figure out what an earlier version of the language might’ve sounded like.

Gretchen: You can make fun of this apple/Apfel example, but there are connections that are a little bit less intuitive. One of my favourite connections is you get these very large and elaborate tables, which we cannot convey tables in an audio podcast form –

Lauren: Not pleasantly, anyway.

Gretchen: – that go through and look at particular words. You have a word like “pater” in Latin and “father” in English and “pitar” in Sanskrit and “Vater” in German. You can look at then and be like, “Huh, all of those languages except for English have that T in the middle.” English has a /θ/ sound, which isn’t that different from a T. You have “padre” in Spanish. You’re like, “Uh, D, that’s not that different from a T.” Maybe there was an ancestor language that had a word like this for “father” that also had a T in the middle. Or if you have “pater” from Latin with a P, and Sanskrit both have a P, and German has a V, and English has an F, you can be like, okay, well, we have two Ps – well, several Ps – and a couple Fs and Vs. Maybe there was one of these, especially the P because Latin and Sanskrit are spoken pretty far apart – German and English are spoken pretty close together, just geographically – so maybe the ancestor language had a P there as well. You can do that comparison at this very, very nitty gritty level for a whole bunch of individual words and figure out which sounds change. Again, if you see P changing to F from Latin to English in “father,” you should also see P changing to F in other words. The Latin word “pes, pedes,” meaning “foot,” it’s cognate with foot because, again, there’s that P to F change. Well, German is “Fuß,” which isn’t a V, so, again, you have to account for this. You can go through and make these very elaborate tables with cross comparisons.

Lauren: My favourite historical sound change comparison, because I think it’s always good to have a favourite, is the – if you look across a lot of languages that are related to Latin, they have a /k/ sound where the German languages, which branched off at a slightly different time and in a slightly different way, have a /h/ sound, which means that the word “canine,” which is the Latin for “dog,” and the word “hound” are actually historically related. That /k/h/ is one example of the change.

Gretchen: Because they both have this N afterwards.

Lauren: Yeah. There’re other changes that happen as well. “Heart” and “cordial,” or “cordis,” which is where a lot of our medical words around “heart/coronary,” come from, that’s that Latin /k/ again.

Gretchen: My favourite example with English “heart” – which is, again, there’s your H – my favourite example of the specific /k/ to /h/ change is in “cornucopia” versus “horn of plenty.”

Lauren: It’s right there.

Gretchen: That “cornu-” at the beginning of “cornucopia,” that’s a horn! And the “-orn” part, “corn” and “horn,” you really see a lot of similarities because the rest of the sounds in those words haven’t changed as much.

Lauren: The nice thing about “cornucopia” is that we borrowed “copious” from Latin to mean “a lot.” Because it wasn’t just a word that stayed in English and had the systematic sound change, we didn’t borrow it as “hopious.” We just borrowed it with the Latin sound. That’s the difference between words that are borrowed and words that are related.

Gretchen: The neat thing about doing this comparative reconstruction is that you need to figure out, okay, first of all, what do we know about the history of this word? Because the word “copious” in English isn’t gonna give us evidence for what was going on in the ancestor language of the Germanic languages because we know that it was borrowed from Latin much more recently. First of all, figuring out where all these words came from and then doing the comparison only with that bit of core vocabulary that did have all of the sound changes happen to it. The fun thing is that, as an English speaker, because we’ve borrowed so many words from other European languages at various times, is that we can often see these sound changes happen even within English. Even if you don’t speak Latin, you can be like, “Oh, I know the word ‘cornucopia.’” You can see this happen within English as well because we’ve borrowed words at different time depths.

Lauren: One thing I’m always blown away with, with historical linguistics doing this comparison and then working backwards to reconstruct an older language, is just how many words it requires, how much knowledge of which words are a borrowing and which words are original to the language. For every sound rule there’s always these sub-rule exceptions because in front of some verb something doesn’t happen. It’s this meticulous work. As computers have become more advanced, the scale of the work has expanded so much because you can crunch more data. There’s very large spreadsheets and tables that happen to build these reconstructions. But even before that, people could go so far back to reconstruct what they think words were like before written records because writing is actually a relatively new invention, especially writing of sounds and not just images for words.

Gretchen: Writing is so new. It’s so interesting to look back at this part before written records exist. This is why people call them proto-languages. Any language that’s preceded by a “proto” is something that’s been reconstructed. Sometimes, you get Old English. We have records of that. We have books about it. But if it’s a proto-language, it’s specifically called that because we don’t have any sort of written records and it’s been figured out in that sort of way. I think what I really love about historical linguistics is the way that it pays attention – the people who do it – pay such close attention to what’s attested and what’s reconstructed and the sources of information. There’s this convention in historical linguistics to write an asterisk before proto-words. This confused me coming from the rest of linguistics because in the rest of linguistics, you put an asterisk before a word or sentence that’s not grammatical.

Lauren: Or like in my instant message chat where I frequently have to use an asterisk because I misspelt a word and need to correct it.

Gretchen: Well, okay, there’s that too. I think that is a bit later of a usage than the linguistic sense. Normally, in most of linguistics, an asterisk is used for “This is ungrammatical.” This is like “horn plenty of” or something like that, which you wouldn’t say those words in that order. Historical linguists use that asterisk as a reminder to themselves to be humble about it. It’s not that it’s ungrammatical; it’s that it’s unattested. “This one isn’t real” in the same sort of way as like, “This is ungrammatical. It’s negative evidence. This one isn’t real.” Except, for the historical linguists, it’s “We’ve put in a whole bunch of effort and we’ve had all these theoretical debates and we’ve come up with our best effort possible with a lot of sweat and tears to figure out this thing that we still want to acknowledge as not real.” The asterisk there is really a sort of intellectual humility.

Lauren: You begin to see why proto-world would be such a challenge because, by the time you get to Proto-Indo-European, which was probably spoken 4,000 years B.C.E. – so you’re looking at 5,000 to 6,000 years ago for Proto-Indo-European – you are making a lot of guesses to get to that point. Then, if you try and compare it to any other proto-language that’s been reconstructed, you’re now making guesses out of two guesses which becomes very slippery.

Gretchen: It’s like if you have one number that’s fairly uncertain that’s got a margin of error – you know, plus or minus 5% – and you have another number that also has a margin of error of plus or minus 5%, and then you multiply together, you suddenly have a number that has an error of, I think it’s plus or minus 25% because I think you also multiply the margins of errors. Don’t quote me on the statistics, but the point is you get a worse number – a less precise number that has a greater margin of error. The same thing happens when you try to do that. There are some attempts to say, “Okay, well, even if we can’t do PROTO-WOOOORLD, maybe we can find an ancestor language of Proto-Indo-European that is spoken in a slightly larger area,” but even that is still very speculative because of the time depth involved.

Lauren: Unless we discover some way that spoken and signed languages left fossils or we invent time travel, neither of which feel particularly plausible, we’re stuck with the –

Gretchen: I always say this is the first thing that I’m gonna do whenever I get my hands on a time machine is I’m gonna go back and retrace some language families. People just don’t seem to understand why this is such an important idea.

Lauren: So compelling. I would fund the heck out of that time travel research.

Gretchen: Thank you! I appreciate it. We need to write a grant. It’s still really neat. If you know a couple of Indo-European languages, you can use it to make nifty connections. I definitely managed to figure out some various Dutch vocabulary from my knowledge of English and German. I was able to be like, oh, I can probably triangulate on what this word means because I know what the sound changes have been. That’s really satisfying. I also think that when we talk about historical linguistics and comparative reconstruction, it’s easy to get down the Indo-European rabbit hole because it’s so satisfying to do this with languages where you already know potentially more than one of them or at least you have a bunch of borrowed cognate vocabulary to work with and to see these connections between languages that you’re maybe more familiar with. There’s a whole bunch of comparative reconstruction that’s also happened in language families in the rest of the world as well.

Lauren: Yes. I’d hate for people to think that this is the only language that this has happened for. It is an area where there has been a lot of written records, and I think that has helped drive a lot of that work and a lot of local interest from Europeans who are interested in tracing their own languages back.

Gretchen: I mean, the Indo-European languages have been written down longer than some languages, not as long as others. You could go pretty far back with Semitic languages too, I expect, because they’ve been written down for a long time. One thing that I find really interesting is – so Proto-Algonquian, which is the ancestor language of the Algonquian languages which are spoken in a large portion of Canada, especially – not in the north – but a large portion from British Columbia all the way to Nova Scotia and the Maritimes on the east and into the north-eastern United States in New England. There’s about 30 Algonquian languages. Proto-Algonquian is a really well attested, well reconstructed language family that is the ancestor language from which these languages are descended. The estimate’s that it was probably spoken around 2,000 to 3,000 years ago and, like with the apple/Apfel example, it’s very clear at a certain level to speakers that these languages are similar and that these languages feel like cousins. If you get some speakers of different Algonquian languages in a room together – and I’ve been to the Algonquian conference when I was in grad school and you had different speakers and different linguists who had researched these languages – sometimes they just sit around being like, “What’s your word for this? Oh, yeah, we have that.” It can be really fun.

Lauren: Okay. So, no one is like, surprised by Proto-Algonquian as a concept?

Gretchen: No one is surprised by Proto-Algonquian as a concept. I noticed when researching for this episode that there had actually been a linguist who had noticed this connection 10 years before one of the early famous speeches about Indo-European. Even if you want European intellectual tradition bragging rights, which are their own thing – it is definitely not where all knowledge comes from – but even if you want to participate in that tradition, this language family has been talked about for a long time.

Lauren: Cool!

Gretchen: I should probably mention a few of the names of the languages in Algonquian because many of them are languages that people have probably heard of – Ojibwe, Cree, Massachusett, Menominee, Wampanoag, Blackfoot, Mi’kmaq, Innu. There’re a whole bunch of languages that are in this family. A lot of words from them have been borrowed into English at this point. A lot of words for concepts that English speakers encountered in North America, things like “moose,” “chipmunk,” “moccasin,” “hickory,” “caribou,” “racoon,” “skunk,” “succotash,” “toboggin,” “woodchuck.” Some of these were reshaped on the model of more English-looking words. “Woodchuck” was reshaped. But a lot of words for animals and concepts in North America were ultimately borrowed from an Algonquian language.

Lauren: That’s really cool. I assume that place names are probably also somewhere this pops up a lot as well.

Gretchen: Tons of place names – “Ottawa,” “Massachusetts,” “Connecticut.” I mean, and there are other indigenous languages spoken in this area. Iroquoian languages are also spoken in this area and they’re not related, but they were some of the first languages that European settlers had contact with. A lot of their words for things in the North American continent became the English words for the items as well.

Lauren: Once you have a word for “raccoon,” you can take that word with you across the country.

Gretchen: What’s also really interesting is that these languages had structural and grammatical similarities as well.

Lauren: That’s cool because so far, we’ve only talked about doing historical work by comparing words and sounds and working backwards from them. Of course, we also have grammar, and grammar between closely related languages can be very similar and tends to be more similar. If you’ve learnt a language close to English or you’ve learnt English from the basis of speaking another Germanic language and then learnt a grammar of a very different language family, I think that’s probably something you’ve encountered before.

Gretchen: Indo-European languages, for example, often have a grammatical gender distinction between masculine, feminine, and neuter. Some of them have collapsed some of those genders into just masculine and feminine, or neuter and common, with common as the collapsed masculine-plus-feminine gender. Or in some cases, like English, they only retained relics of that on the pronoun system. Algonquian languages have an animate/inanimate contrast, which is also a way of splitting things up. They also do particular things with the verb depending on whether they’re dealing with animate nouns or inanimate nouns. There’s a lot of ways that that animate/inanimate contrast shows up and goes all the way through the grammar.

Lauren: A bit like with sounds we look for that systematic change with the grammar. We can look at systematic ways that it pops up across each individual language and then compare them to see if we can find commonalities.

Gretchen: Sometimes, reconstructing sounds can help us find bits of grammar. One of the ways where animate versus inanimate shows up in Algonquian languages is that the way of making the plural is different. If we can reconstruct a plural suffix for the animate nouns and we can reconstruct a plural suffix for the inanimate ones, then that must mean that they had this distinction between the two suffixes because otherwise they wouldn’t both exist and they wouldn’t exist in all the daughter languages.

Lauren: This is one of the fun things about historical linguistics is that it lets you dabble in all the different parts. You have to know a little bit about how sounds might work and change and how grammatical structures work and how they might change across languages as well. You get to look at all the different parts of how language works.

Gretchen: Indo-European languages in general don’t distinguish between inclusive and exclusive “we.” You know, “You and me, we’re going to go to the movies” versus “Me and this other person, we’re gonna go to the movies, and we’re leaving you behind.”

Lauren: Oh, okay. But at least I know. At least I’m not waiting for my invitation over here.

Gretchen: At least you know. You’re not waiting. The Algonquian languages all do make this distinction. That’s something you can reconstruct because all these related languages make it. Whereas, Indo-European languages, none of them make this distinction. This is the kinds of fine-grained grammatical stuff that can last for thousands of years that this distinction sticks around, or it doesn’t.

Lauren: So great.

Gretchen: There’s this really great website the Algonquian Linguistics Atlas that has audio files of speakers saying various words and phrases in different Algonquian languages. They’re kind of mapped around. You can click on sound files and hear what they sound like and how they’re written in various different areas. We’ll link to that.

Lauren: In Australia, you also have this one language family reconstructed that has a really large geographic spread. That’s known as the Pama-Nyungan language family, which is made up of the Pama languages, which is a subgroup, and the Nyungan ones. They’re just talked about together as a single group. In fact, it’s such a large group – it’s around 300 languages, we think – that the dozen or so other language families that sit across the top of Australia are all just known together as the Non-Pama-Nyungan languages. Even though they’re not related to each other, they’re just lumped into being not this major language family.

Gretchen: I feel like maybe I should clarify that the Algonquian language family is definitely not the only language family in North America. It’s a very big one, but there are a lot of languages, especially on the west coast, that are in smaller groups. In towards the south into the US, there are various other groups as well. It’s not quite as cohesive as the Australian picture.

Lauren: Yeah. It’s very diverse at the top of Australia. There’s a lot of diversity within this Pama-Nyungan language family, but it definitely dominates in terms of the number of languages in Australia. One thing that I obviously don’t just find upsetting because of its relevance to historical linguistics, but you’re really working with fragmented records in Australia in a way that is obviously because of a direct and traumatic experience of colonization where you had an incredibly rich oral tradition, and you still have an incredibly rich oral tradition across millennia. Oral traditions have incredible ways of conveying rich time depth of information. It’s just a very different experience to the written traditions we’re used to with things like Latin and Old English. It means that, when those channels of passing on knowledge and passing on language were lost, we really lost this ability to tell the full story of Australia. A lot of the work that’s done is done with very fragmentary records of word lists or, sometimes, just a couple of words we know – maybe a few key words in a particular language. When I read about historical linguistics in Australia, I’m always just left with this really heavy-hearted feeling about the stories that we’ve lost in being able to tell this big time-depth story.

Gretchen: That’s huge.

Lauren: Because we have these really fragmentary lists of data, a lot of what we can say for certain about similarities and the things that make up the Proto-Pama-Nyungan language is around the sounds that are in the language. Like many of the Pama-Nyungan languages spoken today, it was a language without fricatives, so it doesn’t have sounds like /s/ or /z/ that we take for granted in a lot of the other language families in the world and can make it very striking as a language family.

Gretchen: Interesting.

Lauren: It had three vowels which, again, is definitely on the smaller side for human languages.

Gretchen: Which three vowels – or is that not agreed on?

Lauren: An /i/, /a/, and /u/. The cool thing is, when you have fewer vowels, you do more interesting things with the vowel space.

Gretchen: When I was learning Arabic, which also only has three vowels, a lot of things that you might think of as different vowels in English are considered just like versions of the same vowel in Arabic.

Lauren: Yeah. It’s really neat.

Gretchen: I think I noticed when I was visiting Australia that a lot of the place names that were based on local languages had /ŋ/ sounds in them. Is that something that’s true of Pama-Nyungan?

Lauren: Yes. The velar nasal gets a lot of use. It’s in Proto-Pama-Nyungan as well. Although, when it occurs at the start of a word, we often have changed that so it’s easier for English speakers to pronounce.

Gretchen: Ah, yes. That old story. I mean, there are some languages in North America that were wiped out very early. We don’t have a lot of records. One of them is Beothuk, which was spoken in Newfoundland. We know that, but we don’t know very much about the language or the speakers in general. It’s not even clear whether it was Proto-Algonquian or not – whether it was its own language family. Another one, Wampanoag, has relatively recently been part of a pretty successful language revitalisation movement because they did leave written records – quite a lot of them – so speakers were able to bring the language of their ancestors back. Overall, a lot of the Algonquian languages still have at least some speakers around and many of them have revitalisation movements and these kinds of things because there is still sufficient language transmission happening or being very actively worked on to continue happening in a lot of these areas. It takes effort but it’s not down to the situation where you only have a couple word lists.

Lauren: Sometimes, when you see these very neat historical trees – much like animal evolution trees, people will draw these tress of the evolution of languages like Proto-Indo-European as they split off into all the language families and then the languages we know today – sometimes I feel like you can get so into paying attention to words in tables and sound comparisons you can kind of a forget that there’s a big story of human history that happens across thousands and thousands of years when you’re doing historical linguistics.

Gretchen: Yeah, and that languages have this history but a lot of this history, I think, to get back to this question what can we even know, is related to other types of activities that happen in the world, whether that’s conquest or war or people moving from one area to another. Those histories also show up in what we can know about language.

Lauren: So far, we’ve talked about sounds. We’ve talked about grammar. But we can also look at which words you end up being able to reconstruct all the way through to the proto-language. The word for “mobile phone” we’re not going to be able to reconstruct back to Old English even if we have records or not.

Gretchen: Oh, no! Really?

Lauren: The words that we can reconstruct can tell us potentially something about what people were talking about back in a language before we have written records of it.

Gretchen: Right. The idea being that if these languages all had a common ancestor word for “fish” or something, we know that people must have had fish because otherwise they wouldn’t have had a word for it.

Lauren: Yes. There’s been a lot of work on Proto-Indo-European for this just because there’s been a lot of work on Proto-Indo-European and there’s a lot of data for it. We know, for example, that words that we can reconstruct all the way back include domestic animals like “cow,” “sheep,” “goats,” and “pigs,” and words for dairy foods like “milk” and words for “wool.” That gives you an idea of the kind of agriculture they were performing.

Gretchen: The level of technology.

Lauren: Well, yeah, we can reconstruct a word “wagon,” and there’s an indication that they had access to the technology of the wheel.

Gretchen: That’s some technology right there.

Lauren: It’s an exciting technology back then.

Gretchen: They’re a couple hypotheses about where this means that Proto-Indo-European was spoken. I think a lot of people these days think that it was spoken in the steppe – the Pontic-Caspian steppes – zone in Eastern Europe. That’s around present-day Ukraine and southern Russian. There’s also a hypothesis that it was spoken in Anatolia, which is pretty much modern-day Turkey, somewhere in that general direction, but there’s still people doing archaeological research and various kinds of research to try to figure out exactly where. One thing you can do is say we’re quite sure that it wasn’t spoken on an ocean because there isn’t a Proto-Indo-European word for “ocean,” but there was for other smaller bodies of water. They had access to some water but not the big one. You can figure out things like that. For Proto-Algonquian, people think that it was spoken somewhere – I think the recent research suggests that it’s spoken immediately west of Lake Superior, based on looking at the names of plants and animals that are across the different Algonquian languages. Those are found in that particular area.

Lauren: Once again, you have to add some knowledge of semantics and then some botany and agriculture to your list of things you need to know about when figuring out proto-languages.

Gretchen: My favourite recent example of this is that a lot of people have been very excited these days about the fact that many European languages use a verb that’s like “to hamster” to mean “hoard.” German has “hamstern.” Dutch has something very similar. There’s a bunch of different languages – I think some Slavic languages have it. People were like, why doesn’t English have this great word “to hamster”? I was asking this on Twitter the other day and somebody pointed out to me that the range of the European wild hamster doesn’t extend into Britain. It’s only on the European continent.

Lauren: That is excellent. Maybe we have a hypothesis there about the extent of linguistic and hamster spreads.

Gretchen: Well, English does have the word “to squirrel,” which means something quite similar because we do have squirrels in English-speaking areas more than we used to have hamsters. No claims about Proto-Indo-European there, but it’s an interesting example of how geography and climate and animals and plants and botany and so on, the flora and fauna, can influence what we know about languages as well.

Lauren: We’ve talked about three different proto-groups. We haven’t even talked about isolate languages for which you can’t find any related languages to do any comparison. There are a whole bunch of other language families that have been constructed and reconstructed back to proto-forms. I work on Tibetan languages which are, depending on how far back you’re willing to make educated conjectures, are either part of the Tibeto-Burman family, which includes the languages of Tibet and the languages of Burma and that whole region, that some people claim we can reconstruct even further back to include the Sinosphere, so the languages of China, which would be a much larger and older group. That’s a part of the world that I work in directly in terms of proto-language reconstruction.

Gretchen: Another proto-language that I’m just a huge fan of is Proto-Bantu.

Lauren: Yeah, that’s a good one.

Gretchen: I studied a very, very small amount of Kinyarwanda when I was in undergrad. Ever since then I’ve been like, Bantu languages are great! Proto-Bantu is really neat because one of the things that a lot of people know about the Bantu languages is that they have all of these noun classes. It turns out like, yeah, you can reconstruct all of these noun classes. Of course, there’s controversy about exactly how many can be reconstructed to Proto-Bantu. A lot of the – there are a certain set that are very well-established, and then there’s another area where there’s more controversy. We can also reconstruct where people lived and what technology they had. Agriculture, fishing, and the use of boats based on the vocabulary were already known to the Bantu people before they started expanding into different areas and the languages started diverging, but iron working was something that showed up later once they’re already expanded. You can place the date of expansion between 3,000 and 800 B.C.E. These things you can know about these people so long ago is really neat.

Lauren: Gretchen, if we wanted to get to proto-world, we would have to take all of these proto-families that people have spent centuries now meticulously working back to these incredibly tentative hypotheses about how these languages work and you would have to go back even further to get to proto-world. How does grown-up Gretchen feel about 13-year-old Gretchen’s aspirations?

Gretchen: Well, I went back – and I still have this book – I went back, and I looked at it again for the first time in many, many years.

Lauren: Oh, my gosh, amazing! What was it like to revisit?

Gretchen: I mean, fortunately, the chapter was only nine pages long, so there was only so much damage they could do in nine pages. I’m not naming the book. It was a great book for getting a 12-year-old interested in linguistics.

Lauren: It served its purpose.

Gretchen: I haven’t read anything else of it in many years, but I was very willing to be very credulous about a lot of these statements. One of the things that I noticed is that, so we’re able to go back a couple thousand years by comparing what we have of existent languages or sometimes records of languages from a few hundred years ago or about 1,000/2,000 years ago you can go back an additional hop step of many 2,000 to 3,000 years. That’s where we can go. The problem is time depth-wise. It’s not just like, okay, well, what if we take each of these languages and compare them. Even if we could do all of this methodology, which we can’t always, that only takes us back another potential hop step of another couple thousand years. We need to go back, like, 100,000 years. We need to do this step, like, 50 times.

Lauren: We’re already in incredibly tenuous ground.

Gretchen: We just don’t have data at that point. Maybe 50 times, maybe 70 or 80 times, because we also don’t know how far we have to go back because speech and sign doesn’t leave fossils. Not only do we not know how far we have to go back, we start multiplying very approximate numbers by each other and then we just keep doing so and the inaccuracies just keep compounding. I’m glad that this book got me into linguistics, but I’m also glad to leave it safely on the shelf as a memento.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Have you listened to all of the Lingthusiasm episodes and wish there were more? You can get access to 40 bonus episodes right now to listen to at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards like helping to keep the show ad-free for everyone. Recent bonus topics include synaesthesia, numbers, and linguistics with kids. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #episode 45 #transcripts #protolanguage #proto language #proto world #proto-indo-european #proto indo european #proto algonquian #proto bantu #proto pama nyungan

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gwendolynlerman · 4 years

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Introduction to linguistics

Language and thought

Language planning and constructed languages

It is human nature to try and improve things, be it for better or worse. Politically, technically, even biologically, inviting both beauty and disaster. One of homo politicus’ favorite areas of tampering is language. Language provides different windows on reality and is a primary vehicle of social identity. It is a power tool and a tool of power. Therefore, politicians, linguists, philosophers, and writers have always tried to dictate language change rather than let it run free, to suppress one language and further another, to regulate spelling, or to introduce new euphemistic terms for negative concepts. With the advent of the nation state in Europe in the 19th and 20th century, national languages were favored at the expense of minority languages and sometimes purged of foreign words.

Thus, Hungarian replaced German and Latin words with indigenous ones, the Académie Française battles to keep English loanwords at bay (to no great avail), and for a long time Iceland forced immigrants to change their name into a germanically derivable one because of Icelandic’s system of patronyms. Obviously, literature (or the absence of it) has a great influence on the fate of a language, and a lively literature can help to define, change, or stabilize a language, as the example of 19th-century Slovak shows, where three versions of a literary language competed on the road to nationhood, with one of them finally giving rise to the modern Slovak language.

And it is not only about words, meanings and endless German spelling reforms—even languages as a whole are subject to planning, often with a political or ideological agenda. Thus, modern Hebrew was built from an ancient literary language together with the Jewish state, rather than letting Yiddish take its course, and the New Norwegian (nynorsk) project was a prime vehicle of Norwegian independence from Denmark, creating a new language norm from countryside dialects rather than letting the Danified language in the capital of Christiania (Oslo) run its course.

A special scenario of language planning and creation is cross-cultural communication (interlinguistics). While pidgins and creoles rose by themselves in the wake of post-Columbian European trading, slaving and settling, some languages were specifically standardized, simplified, or created to support cross-cultural communication. Examples of standardization of such auxiliary languages (auxlangs) are modern-day Swahili in Eastern Africa or the Jesuits’ Lingua Geral in colonial Brazil, which was built from indigenous Tupi and used widely in mixed families and for trade in the Amazonian backwaters. Planned simplification can be seen in projects like Basic English, Interlingua or Latino sine flexione, and professional jargons are often simplified in grammar, while rich in terms (e.g., aviation English).

Complete languages created on the basis of existing human languages are called a posteriori languages, while languages constructed on the basis of philosophical systems, logic, symbols, sound, etc. are called a priori. The same violent centuries that suffered under the whim and whip of nationalist language planning and cultural minority suppression also saw the advent of a counter-movement aimed at the creation of culturally-including a posteriori languages with a humanist agenda. The most successful of these projects, Esperanto, was launched in 1887 and draws its words and sound system from existing, mainly Romance languages, while using a completely regular grammar and a vocabulary-boosting system of affixes. Notwithstanding its regularity and focus on cross-cultural communication, Esperanto has since grown into a normal language in the sense that it has native speakers and poets and acquires new terms just like any other language, through loans or creative usage by its speech community, reducing the influence of further language planning, with an academy just as powerless as the Académie Française. In this sense, Esperanto is less of a planned language today than, for example, New Norwegian, which requires constant cleansing to safeguard its identity.

There are only a few known examples of truly independent a priori languages, but some of those are very colorful examples of how inventive, playful, and creative the human mind can be. Solresol, for instance, is based on musical note syllables and can be sung, whistled, or represented by colors or finger signs. Unlike the shepherds’ whistling language in the Canary Islands, Solresol has a consciously planned vocabulary.

People also invent languages for specific purposes only, one of them being secrecy rather than understanding. Most of those will be coded versions of existing languages, like Astrid Lindgren’s robber's language, but may also be a priori, like Hildegard von Bingen’s mystical Lingua Ignota, which used Latin grammar with invented words and letters. Some artists have gone to great lengths to enrich their artistic universe with so-called artlangs; famous examples include Tolkien’s Elfin and Goblin languages, alien Klingon in the Star Trek universe or more recent film languages like Na’vi (Avatar) and Dothraki (Game of Thrones). While all of the above still look and function much like ordinary languages, there are also languages that have been engineered on purely philosophical or logical grounds, aiming to comprehensively categorize concepts, such as Leibniz’s philosophical system in the 17th century or the modern Loglan and Lojban logical languages.

Finally, the kaleidoscope of language planning contains the field of terminology, where scientists such as chemists, biologists, geologists, or sociologists strive to wrench words free of the whims of everyday ambiguity and language change and to define their meaning unambiguously and once and for all. In some fields, terminology is complemented by a kind of scientific or professional grammar. A very regular example of the latter is the compounding of chemical terms, while a more natural-linguistic example is medical Latin that allows and standardizes longer expressions or even complete sentences. Inspired by such terminological work and the 19th-century encyclopedic movement, linguists have also tried to build linguistic ontologies and so-called word nets that do not define terms, but still strive to classify and link words (e.g., WordNet).

#langblr #lingblr

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missanthropicprinciple · 4 years

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personal aesthetic | cunning woman

[★ lengthy description under the cut, do not remove if you reblog, credits and more information under photos★ ]

I’ve been doing a lot of research into the cunning folk of Britain. Cunning folk, both women and men, have many names and existed (and I assume, still exist) all over Europe since the Late Medieval period. They were practitioners of folk or “low” magic, performing spells and charms. They were also more or less employed to function as fortune tellers, detectives (of a fashion), match makers, used herbal medicine, and worked against malicious forms of witchcraft. Their position in relation to Christianity and supposed Devil-worship is complex, as cunning folk were in most cases Christians themselves, yet the Church often grouped them in with Satanic witches. They were semi-literate and often of a slightly higher social position than the average laborer.

The only depiction of a cunning person that I am aware of is in the television series By the Sword Divided (1983-85) which centers on one fictional family’s experience in the English Civil Wars (1642-51). Created by producer John Hawkesworth, the show was deeply rooted in historical fact. The cunning woman of the household is Judith Crabbe, commonly known as “Minty” for her “skill in herbs.” Although she is a seemingly frail old woman, she lances boils, performs abortions, delivers babies, and is in possession of some deadly poisons. In the episode The Sound Of Drums, she instructs that a woman whose mother has just died of the plague should be stripped and washed and she herself gives the woman ragwort to “take away the poison,” and douses her head with dragonwort in order to “drive away all infection.” Although germs were not discovered until the 1850s, this fictional account implies there was knowledge of needing to cleanse and disinfect to prevent the spread of disease. In one deeply disturbing episode she is brought to trial during a brutal witch hunt, but survives. She explains that she is a cunning woman like her mother and that she knows charms and herbs and potions “all to do good.” Sadly, unlike Minty and genuine cunning folk who had actual herbal knowledge, many supposed cunning folk were profiteers, playing on the innocent and gullible common man.

In terms of my own identification with cunning folk I have spent a long time considering my connection with their practices. I decided that being a Wiccan is not for me. I have occasionally referred to myself as a witch. I am essentially a total skeptic, raised to question my half Catholic/half Church of England background, and never baptized. I am not a practicing Catholic, I prefer C of E in many ways but I have enjoyed the ritual of Catholic traditions and have found comfort in the Virgin Mary. However, if anyone asks about my faith I am certainly agnostic. I respect everyone’s religion and I stand by the fact that I personally cannot prove the existence or non-existence of a Christian God or any other Gods and Goddesses. I do not believe in or worship the Devil or any other deity. I have respect for many and find inspiration in them but that is where it ends. As a child I repeatedly tried to believe in ghosts, fairies, and God, but I am a non-believer. I do keep an open mind and often consider the presence of spirits and genius loci in terms of biological feedback, and/or other qualities of perception that humans possess that we are not yet aware of. While I am a non-believer I am a highly sensitive person and am learning to trust my own intuitive nature. I also take into account that knowledge of the human brain and body is somewhat limited; who knows what we will learn in the future.

As for practices, I conduct certain rituals similar to actual cunning folk. Divination is not something I wholly believe in, as I don’t particularly believe in magic beyond ones own powers of agency, instinct, and intentionality. I do, however work with tarot cards which have been in use since the mid-15th century. By all accounts they were based on playing cards, elements in nature, and even Christian symbolism. To me, they are tools with which to unlock ideas, knowledge, and wisdom in one’s own mind.

As far as crystals go, I do not know if they have any connection with cunning folk. The use of crystals in magic goes back thousands of years - people such as the Ancient Sumerians used them. Each gemstone or crystal is believed to have healing powers and I’m unsure if I believe in that but at the same time the symbolism of each stone is meaningful to me in the sense that it is a connection with a person’s intentionality. In general, intention is one of the most powerful aspects of a person’s journey, spiritual or otherwise. I have often employed nuummite which is an excellent and rare grounding stone. While it is unknown to me if stones have actual healing powers, just holding something that is thousands of years old is incredibly exciting and calming.

Tea is an important to me on multiple levels. I am mindful of the fact that tea was stollen by the British from India, China, and Japan and so while I am often noted for my “Britishness” when it comes to tea, I understand that it does not originate in my culture. I love Earl Grey, which is a powerful black tea most often made with Assam tea and oil of bergamot. To avoid the high levels of caffeine I usually steer towards camomile and am exploring other herbal options. Tea forms the intersection between comfort and health benefits. (Again, I am not aware that tea is in any way a part of cunning folk practices.)

Cooking is certainly a part of anyone’s life as we all have to eat, but in our current day a lot of us rely on take-out/take-away and restaurants rather than our own skills. I am lucky enough to come from a family who cooks a lot, or at least, has done in the past. My father was quite good at baking, particularly cheese scones (a WWII era family recipe), profiteroles, and quiche. His mother, from what I remember, was a great cook, making roast meals and cooking lots of vegetables for Dad and the family from the 1940s to the 1990s. My mother is a good cook as well and Dad and I noted how we were very lucky to have homemade meals most of the time, with quality meat and organic vegetables. My mom’s mother was a good cook and both her grandmothers were excellent cooks, especially great-grandmother Theresa. She cooked for her family as well as working as a cook for a wealthy local jewelry family. She specialized in traditional Swabian German and Hungarian dishes from our heritage. We still have her kitchen knife which we use regularly. I’m slowly working up to mastering my great-grandmother’s recipes, but so far I’ve only worked on some baking - popovers, sponge cake, and gluten free cookies. Next I’d like to make sticky ginger cake, focaccia, and other things like salsa and pickles. I don’t know of any explicit connection between cooking and cunning folk but food and healing go hand in hand to a certain extent and coupled with herbs and the like it seems fitting.

I’m not particularly skilled in herbs as yet but I’ve used a lot of rosemary, basil, and thyme in the last few years. My goal is to become thoroughly familiar with the use of herbs in cooking or in making any sort of mildly curative ointments in things. (However, I am a firm believer in modern medicine and science and aside from exercising great caution concocting any herbal remedies, I will always look to actual professionals if I am in need of serious medical attention.)

In conclusion, my journey to becoming a cunning woman or healing woman has no real end because as humans we never stop learning. As I study more about cunning folk, witchcraft, and herbalism I will have a better understanding of my direction and purpose.

#personal #long post #personal aesthetic #cunning woman #cunning folk

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gccdnews · 3 years

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Did you see JESSICA DREW from MARVEL walking around Limbo? The CISFEMALE looks like ALICIA VIKANDER, and is NINETY SEVEN years old. I’ve heard she can be VIRTUOUS & WITTY but also COCKSURE & REACTIVE. When I think of them I think of HELPING THE INNOCENT BY HOSPITALIZING THE GUILTY, RAISING SPIDER-BABY, THE GREATEST QUIPS OF ALL TIME BITCHCAKES. They’ve been here WITHOUT their memories as an PI & FIGHTER at BAKER STREET INVESTIGATIONS & UNDERGROUND FIGHT CLUB for SIX MONTHS. I heard they’re seeking a sanctum.

// whew. jess has a history™. it's long af and spans nearly a century so im not gonna go into crazy detail, but it's still lengthy. and i'm also gonna modify just a bit to fit in with the mcu for plotting reasons and stuff. if you don’t really care about her full history then there’s some bullet points toward the bottom.

she was born in england in 1924 and brought as a small child to the transia (it's a small, fictional slavic country) where her father was conducting research. unfortunately due to her being a small child, she contracted uranium poisoning from her father's work and had to be placed in a cryogenic chamber and treated with radiation and a highly experimental serum derived from the blood/genes of various species of spider.

she spent decades in stasis, educated subliminally with special tapes. when she was finally awakened she had only aged into her early teens, but she'd developed superhuman abilities.

grew up, moved away, met a dude, fell in love, then accidentally killed him with her powers. so yeah that kinda torments her still to this day. well, when she still remembered it anyway.

got recruited into hydra who she was led to believe were the good guys, had her memories suppressed, was told the high evolutionary basically a "god" figure, idek evolved her from a spider into a human woman, had an agent pretend to fall in love with her, etc etc. basically got gaslit and brainwashed into becoming a high ranking member until she was put out on a field assignment and told to assassinate nick fury. during the mission he told her what hydra really was and she dropped their asses.

got her memories back from mordred the mystic, then lived in a shitty apartment in london for a while. ended up breaking into a convenience store across the street at one point to get some food, but got noticed by shield agent jerry hunt who pretty much hounded her until she dyed her hair and created a secret identity to hide from him

did the hero thing for a while, moved to l.a., dated jerry, became a bounty hunter, moved to san francisco, became a p.i., superhero'd some more, met carol danvers 😍

went on a mission to finally take down longtime archenemy morgan le fay, and did so, but not before some morgan did some magic shit and separated her soul from her body ?? so she goes to the sorcerer magnus and has him cast a spell to make everyone who ever met her forget she existed.

not long later she was found and revived by two hero pals, breaking the spell, but she was left comatose. dr strange gets involved, abra cadabra, jess ain't a cadava'. but she is however, powerless.

continued working as a p.i. until an encounter with the new spider-woman mattie franklin somehow restored her powers, which came back slowly and were very unstable. meets jessica jones, accidentally zaps tf out of her, then works with her to save the new spider-woman.

eventually struck a deal with hydra to spy within shield so she could get her powers back but the skrull queen veranke was behind it and manipulating her so she could learn to perfectly impersonate jessica. jess ended up held captive for two years aboard a skrull spaceship while veranke took her place.

she and the rest of the captives got saved but because of the havoc veranke wreaked, she didn't exactly receive a warm welcome back.

spent some time rebuilding her reputation until she was invited to join the avengers (for avengers 1 in the mcu, let's say). they did some good work and she eventually fell for clint/hawkeye. they dated a while but things went sideways when he cheated on her (but obvs that's subject to change depending on who picks him up, just leaving that in for now bc it seems kinda noteworthy).

skipping comic spider-verse stuff bc how does that work with the rp, idek.

left the avengers after that and mostly stayed out of their business so she wasn't around for ultron or civil war and instead got back to her roots with some good ol fashioned p.i. work. may have crossed paths with the defenders and other street level heroes during this period.

then of course, came the snap. jess was one of the ones that vanished. using this instead of her death during secret wars in the comics. when everyone came back she joined all the others to fight thanos and damn right she was part of that moment with all the female heroes like she should have fucking been irl.

when things settled down after y'know, dying, she realized that she wanted to be a mother and raise a child, and almost never got that chance. instead of waiting, she got herself artificially inseminated. which was good too tbh because like, look at her luck with men and imagine getting stuck in one of those relationships she'd been in so far. way better off doing it on her own smh

got invited to an alpha flight maternity ward by her captain marvel but when she went there it ended up getting overrun by skrulls and being super fucking pregnant she called carol for help, but the maternity ward was apparently in a black hole?? bc ofc it was lol. so jess protected all the women there, had an emergency c-section to give birth to her son gerry, then popped right off the table to finish kicking skrull ass. carol got there just in time for jess to collapse into her arms after the fight. headcanon — there was always a crush there but this was the moment jess fell hard.

had a liiittle teensy falling out with carol tho so she ended up kissing roger gocking/porcupine right in front of her during a battle that ended up repairing their friendship. then she went on to have a party announcing she and roger were dating but lbr she did most of this sub/consciously hoping to get a rise out of carol. but her spider-baby ended up crawling out a window and roger was the one to find and save him and there were some actual feelings there too, so. complicated. she kind of distanced herself from everything else to focus on p.i. work and raising her son.

not much later, jess realized her radiation immunity was gone and her powers were killing her, so she had roger take gerry to an upstate farm in case her condition could potentially harm her son, then set out on the search for a cure. that search of course, leading her to limbo city, nevada.

upon her arrival however, her memories quickly started to fade and by the time she woke up the next morning she had no specific recollection of memories. just innate and instinctive knowledge like her emotions toward people she was familiar with, emotional trauma that manifests mostly in her dreams, maternal instincts/yearning, her abilities both physical and learned, her interests and likes/dislikes, etc. things that come naturally to her, for the most part.

interestingly though, the town’s magic seems to have cured her??

gonna say she speaks english, romanian, german, hungarian, symkarian, russian, bulgarian, polish and spanish fluently, and knows a bit about a number of other languages.

incredibly intelligent, she is after all the daughter of a genius, raised among scientists conducting research, and her knowledge/intelligence was only maximized by her stasis education tapes.

exudes a high concentration of pheromones that can attract or repulse people, to put it simply. and ignore the original heteronormative connotations bc women aren't typically the ones she wants to repulse, and men arent always the ones she wants to attract. it's difficult to control but she learned over the years. even now without her memories she has innate control over it, but if she manages to work up a sweat (which isn't all that easy for her tbh) or misses a shower or two, well… it's gonna kick in.

she probably can't do it anymore in limbo because she can't remember how, but with her pheromones she learned to control them so well she was able to elicit fear, anxiety, attraction, hatred, pleasure, etc. and even used them to convince the hulk to make her a sandwich once.

fucking loves butter. she's been known to eat the stuff straight up. and a lot of it. lucky thing she has a spider-metabolism.

hc: she loves making puns, especially spider related ones. she also likes to annoy her spider-friends by spider-throwing the word spider in front of everything though it's obviously a joke, unlike in her cartoon where im pretty sure she was dead serious lol

hates rats. so much. she will tear down a whole skrull army but if one shapeshifts into a rat it's over okay, she already lost.

allergic to flerkens. which is great for visiting her bestie/crush, and her pet flerken chewie.

still has her suit but hasn’t worn it yet in limbo. she found it under her bed a couple days after “waking up” in limbo but put it right back because she figured it was probably some weird sex thing and maybe wasn’t even hers so, gross, yknow?

#jessica drew.#limbchq: intro #jessica drew ( intro ).#death tw #gaslighting tw #captivity tw #pregnancy tw #i've come to love her so much in a short time

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mechdor-design · 4 years

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Top 08 Tyres Company In World.

What is tyre?

Firstly know the difference between Tire and Tyre. A Tire (American English) or Tyre (British English, see spelling difference). So, Tyre is a ring-shaped component that surrounds a wheel's rim to transfer a vehicle's load from the axle through the wheel to the ground and to provide traction on the surface over which the wheel travels. Most tyres, such as automobiles and bicycles are pneumatically inflated cushion that absorbs shocks as the tyre rolls over rough features in the surface. Tyres provide a footprint called a contact patch, that is designed to match the weight of the vehicle with the bearing strength of the surface that it rolls over by providing a bearing pressure that will not deform the surface excessively. Lets start the topic.

Top 08 Tyres Companies:-

Bridges-tone

Michelin

Goodyear

Pirelli

Apolo Tyres

MRF

Continental Tyre

Dunlop

Bridgestone-

Bridgestone corporation is a Japanese multinational auto and truck parts manufacturer established in 1,Jan,1931 by Shojiro Ishibashi in the city of Kurume, Fukuoka, Japan .The name Bridgestone comes from a Calque translation and transposition of ishibashi, meaning "stone bridge" in Japanese. Bridgestone business prensence more than 150 countries. The Bridgestone has 143,589 employees all over the world. The financial data of Bridgestone of Net sales 3,525.6 Yen in Billions ($33.82 in Billions) and the operating income is 326 Yen in Billions ($3.07 in Billions). Sales by markets:-

In Japan- 19%

In America- 47%

In EMEA- 19%

In China and Asia- 15%

As of 2017, the company is the largest manufacturer of tyres in the world, followed by Michelin (France),Goodyear (United States), Continental (Germany) and Pirelli (Italy).Bridgestone Group had production facilities in 24 countries as of July 2018.

Mechelin-

Mechelin is a French multinational tyre manufacturer based in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region of France. Mechelin is founded in 28/May/1889. It is the second largest tyre manufacturer in the world after Bridgestone and larder than both Goodyear and Continental. In addition to the Mechelin brand, it also owns the kleber tyres company, Uniroyal-Goodrich Tyre Company, SASCAR, Bookatableand and Camso brands. Michelin is also notable for its Red and Green travel guides, its roadmaps, the Michelin stars that the Red Guide awards to restaurants for their cooking, and for its company mascot Bibendum, colloquially known as the Michelin Man. Mechelin have the 112,800 number of employees in 2017.

Goodyear-

The Goodyear Tyre & Rubber Company is an American multinational tyre manufacturing company founded in Aug. 29, 1898 by Frank Seiberling based on Akron, Ohio. Goodyear manufactures tyres for automobiles, commercial truck, Light trucks, motorcycles, SUVs, race cars, airoplanes, farm equipment and heavy earth mover machinery. It also produced bicycle tyres from its founding until 1976. As of 2017, Goodyear is one of the top three tyre manufacturing along with Bridgestone (Japan), Mechelin (France) and Continental (Germany).

The company was named after American Charles Goodyear, Inventor of Vulcanized rubber. The first Goodyear tyres became popular because they were easily detachable and required little maintenance.

Goodyear is also known for the Goodyear Blimp. Through Goodyear had been manufacturing airships and ballons since the early 1900s, the first Goodyear advertising blimp flew in 1925. Today, it is one of the most recognizable advertising icons in America. The company is the most successful tyre supplier in Formula one history, with more starts, wins, and constructors championships than any other tyre supplier. They pulled out of the sport after the 1998 season. It is the sole tyre supplier for NASCAR series.

Pirelli-

Pirelli is a Italian multinational company based in Milan, Italy, listed on the Milan Stock Exchange since 1922 with a temporary privatization period by the consortium led by the chinese state-owned enterprise Chemchina. The Pirelli was founded in 1872. The company is the top Largest tyre manufacturer behind Bridgestone, Michelin, Goodyear, Continential, Sumitomo and Hankook and is focused on the consumer business . Its is present in Europe, the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, North America and ex-USSR, operating commercially in over 160 countries. Its has 19 manufacturing sites in 13 countries and a network of around 14,600 Distributors and retailers.

Pirelli has been sponsoring sport competitions since 1907 and is the exclusive tyre partner for the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series for 2008-2010. FIA Formula One World Championship for 2011-2023 and for the FIM World Superbike Championship. Pirelli headquarters are located in Milan's Bicocca district. In the past it has been involved in Fashion and Operated in renewable energy and sustainable mobility.

Apollo Tyres-

Apollo Tyres ltd is the world's largest tyre manufacturer, with annual consolidated revenues of US$2.46 billion in March 2018. It was incorporated in 1972. Its first plant was commissioned in Perambra Thissur, Kerala, India. The companynow has four manufacturing units in India, one in Netherlands and one in Hungery. It has a network of nearly 5,000 dealerships in India, of which over 2,500 are exclusive outlets.Number of employees at this organisation is 16,000. It gets 69% of its revenues from India, 26% from Europe and 5%from other geographies.

Apollo announced its entry into the two wheeler tyre segment with contact manufacturing in March 2016. In November 2016, the company signed a MoU with the government of Andhra Pradesh to set up a new factory in Andhra Pradesh to Manufacture tyres for two wheelers and pick up trucks. The company second plant in Europe, was inaugurated by the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban in April 2017. Apollo Tyres opens its first service centre in Malaysia.

MRF-

MRF Limited is an Indian multinational and the largest manufacturer of tyres in India. The MRF in founded in 1946, Tiruvottiyur, Madras, Tamil Nadu, Indiia. The founder of MRF in K M . Mammen Mappillai.. Its headquartered in Chennai, India. The company manufacturer rubber products including tyres, treads, tubes and conveyor belts, plant and touys. MRF also runs the MRF pace Foundation Chennai and MRF Challenge in motorsport.

Continental Tyres-

Continental AG commonly known as Continental, is a German Multinational automotive parts manufacturing company specializing in brake system, interior electronics, automotive safety, powertrain and other parts for the automotive and transportation industries. Continental is based in Hanover, Lower Saxony, Germany. Continental is the world's fourth largest tyre manufacturing.

Continental was founded in 1871 as a rubber manufacturer. Continental Caoutchouc and Gutta-Percha Compagine. In 1898, Continental started development and production of the vehicle tyre with plan tread, which was the major success of the brand.In 1904, Continental became the first company in the world to manufacture grooved vehicle tyres. Another major product Continental invented was detachable wheel tyres that was made for touring vehicles. In the late 1920s, Continental merged with several other major rubber industry companies to form the largest rubber company in Germany "Continental Gummi-Werke AG". As with many other German companies during World War ll, Continental used salve labor provided by the Nazi Party in their factory in the 1940s at Hannover-Stocken, Hannover-Limmer, Hannover-Ahlem, and others, all offshoots of the Neuengamme concentration camp.

Dunlop Tyres-

Dunlop Tyres is a brand of tyres owned by Various companies around the world. Founded by Pneumatic tyre pioneer John Boyd Dunlop in Dublin, Ireland in 1890, It is owned and operated by Goodyear tyre and Rubber Company in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In India, the brand is owned by Dunlop India Ltd. whose parent company in the Ruia Group. In several Other Asian countries (Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand and Russia), Africa and Latin America ( except Mexiao) it is operated by Sumitomo Rubber industries. In Malaysia, the Dunlop Tyres brand has, since 2012, been wholly owned by Continental AG , which manufactures Dunlop branded tyres for sale in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.

In 1985, Dunlop Rubber Company was acquired by BTR PLC and Sumitomo acquired the rights to manufacture and market Dunlop branded road tyres. Sumitomo did not acquire any Dunlop company. In 1997. Sumitomo gained agreement to use the Dinlop name in its corporate name, and changed the name of its UK subsidary to Dunlop Tyres Ltd.

In 1999, Sumitomo and Goodyear began a joint venture by which Sumitomo continued to manufacture all Japanese made tyres under the Dunlop name, while Goodyear tyre and Rubber Company nought 75% of the European and North American tyre businesses of Sumitomo.

The company has extensive manufacturing operations throughout the world. With the closure of the Washington Plant in 2006, Goodyear Dunlop Ceased mainstream car and lorry tyre production in the UK.

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