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#gallifreyan
linguistwho · 1 day
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Phonetic Gallifreyan Weekend - Sentence 72:
"Most of the universe is knackered, babe." - The Doctor
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northernfireart · 6 months
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my most recent random thing ive been thinking about is the idea that Doctor flirts with Rose in gallifreyan the way some people flirt with their partners in their home language even though their partner doesn't speak it and i have been obsessed with this thought ever since
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thefiresofpompeii · 6 days
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circular gallifreyan is circular because doctor who is a circular narrative 🌀 when you are a time-sensitive like them you conceptualise everything as a cycle with no beginning or end. including language. which is also music. yay
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justletmeramble1701 · 2 months
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Do you guys subscribe to the theory that (at least, starting in NuWho) the Doctor can, somewhat, subconsciously control his regenerations?
Like, of course, 8 wanted to be a warrior, so he became the War Doctor (I know that he drank a potion for that, but that might’ve just been lemonade according to the Target Novelization).
War wanted to be the hero, to earn the title, the Doctor, again, so he became 9.
9 wanted to be someone who was the perfect partner to Rose (human), so he became 10.
10, in his vanity, wanted his final regeneration to be young, so he became 11.
11, after all the heartache, wanted to be more distant (and also what they said in series 8), so he became 12.
12 wanted a kind, fresh start, so he became 13.
13 wanted to open up to someone, so she became 14.
14 wanted time to heal, so he split off 15.
This is not an original theory, and I'm not even saying that I buy into it fully it, but it's interesting. It would be interesting if the Doctor had a tiny bit of control over their regeneration (Romana did, somehow) and most of the time his wants either backfire or only half work.
What do you think?
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gallifreyanhotfive · 28 days
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Oh by the way Old High Gallifreyan canonically sounds like music, if you all care about that sort of thing. It sounds like a song of gibberish words. It sounds like a nursery rhyme
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justgallifreyanthings · 5 months
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The sharpness of the tongue defeats the sharpness of the warrior
Because I’m a petty asshole, I took an hour and pulled together my own version of the proverb on the new Sonic Screwdriver. Let me know if any of y’all want this as a sticker or something, and I’ll digitize it when I have a chance.
ETA: now available as a sticker! Links are shared on my blog :)
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Random headcanon I came up with early this morning, because I’ve been thinking about Gallifreyan language recently:
The reason why so many Time Lord things are decorated with circular Gallifreyan, often too impractically to actually be read (eg. on the Moment), is because it’s a cultural touchstone that remains from pre-/early-Pythian Gallifrey’s use of magical runes and sigils.
Presumably it was more typically Old High Gallifreyan used in that time (though The Timeless Children does seemingly confirm circular Gallifreyan existed at least as far back as Rassilon's time, if not earlier), however. Twelve describes it as ‘the language of the Pythia’ in The Lost Magic, and as Eleven says in The Time of Angels:
ELEVEN: There were days, there were many days, these words could burn stars and raise up empires, and topple gods.
This is obviously very reminescent of the Carrionites' (themselves from the Dark Times too) "word-based science" from The Shakespeare Code:
MARTHA: What did you do? TEN: I named her. The power of a name. That's old magic. MARTHA: But there's no such thing as magic. TEN: Well, it's just a different sort of science. You lot, you chose mathematics. Given the right string of numbers, the right equation, you can split the atom. Carrionites use words instead.
In other words, while they probably weren't actually intended as such and may have their own specific meaning, whether they be poetry, namesakes, histories, instructions, whatever... these are basically protective wards:
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[ID: Five screenshots of Circular Gallifreyan in New Who.
1. Rassilon's Inner High Council meeting in The End of Time Part 2. The table and headrests are inscribed with circular Gallifreyan.
2. The Moment in Day of the Doctor. Gallifreyan writing bends round the edges of the wooden frame.
3. The 'whirligig' rotar in Eleven's second TARDIS, inscribed with individual Gallifreyan symbols.
4. Set photo of the glowing Gallifreyan writing on the steps of Thirteen's TARDIS.
5. Tecteun's laboratory in The Timeless Children. Circular Gallifreyan lines the light above her, and a door in the background.]
As a side note - if they actually are kind-of intended as a form of protection, perhaps this is why we were only introduced to Circular Gallifreyan in New Who, despite it seemingly existing through Gallifreyan history. Because it was retroactively inserted into Gallifreyan culture as a form of defense during the War in Heaven / Last Great Time War?
Regardless, this also opens up questions how many other Time Lord traditions are holdovers from the Dark Times.
For example, who's to say that the renegade naming tradition didn't begin as a form of protection from hexes - either from hostile forces in the pre-anchoring universe, or from oppressive magic-users back on the homeworld? This may also be connected to the change in Gallifreyan name format before and after the Intuitive Revelation (eg. ancestral -sti and -sor names), though shifting power structures, gender roles etc. presumably played a role too.
Heck, is this one reason why Gallifrey's own name has changed over its history? From Jewel to Gallifrey in Rassilon's time to try and protect it from vengeful Pythian curses. From Gallifrey to just 'the Homeworld' in the War to protect it from new rituals of alternative histories and paradox?
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lissagreenleafholmes · 4 months
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Behold! To be or not to be translated into circular Gallifreyan by yours truly!
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circles-of-gallifrey · 5 months
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Sun - Mercury - Venus - Earth (Moon) -Mars - Jupiter - Saturn - Uranus - Neptune - Pluto
(yes I can count, and had to add in two extra planets 😅)
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paul mcgann eats a rat .mp3 in circular gallifreyan
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radio-ghost-cooks · 4 months
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the Hole's ideas abt Gallifrey/Gallifreyan
spoken Gallifreyan sounds like song
there's some telepathic layer to it that humans/non-telepathic races can't pick up
in a brighter timeline the Master sings their childhood lullabies to the Doctor to help her sleep
the telepathic element makes it capable of soothing or causing physical harm
the Doctor's brain is so quiet now that Gallifrey is gone
not only are the Time Lords and Gallifreyans gone but so too is their culture
the Doctor scouring the TARDIS for the remaining seeds and saplings of her home, now endangered like she is
in one version of things the Doctor is a horrible gardener, in the other she's fantastic
either way the Master is the best with them
she saves the plants for when she gets the Master back (she never does)
the Master hates human Christmas because it can never go back to Gallifrey and enjoy the foods it loved as a child alongside its family. the Time War took that away.
the Theta Sigma used to bake Koschei a cake each year and now that Gallifrey is gone, the Master wakes up to a cake every year and it's not as pink as it was before and there are substitutions in the flour and it's not the same frosting as the kind from Low Town but it still tastes exactly the same
Gallifrey doesn't die with the Doctor, it dies with the Master.
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linguistwho · 2 days
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Phonetic Gallifreyan Weekend - 72: Knackered
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autumn-doodles · 6 months
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After I have no idea how long I FINALLY finished transcribing the tensimm speech in EoT into Gallifreyan oh my god-
For the design, i wanted to differentiate dr’s and master’s speech, so I made master’s writing white on black and doc black on white. You may not notice it but I also slightly altered the way I wrote for each of them. The doctor’s speech is full of curved lines and all the dots seen in his speech get larger/smaller in circles, I thought it was a bit more playful like the dr. The master on the other hand has super straight lines and similarly sized dots since master is a lot harsher.
The writing along the outside also reads “End of Time” bc I thought that circle needed something so I just wrote the ep title this speech was from in some weird improvised linear gallifreyan-
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And this is how you would read it, each circle is read anti-clockwise from the bottom unless you see the little ‘start here’ symbol: —(•
(If you can be bothered tho lol, I know it’s a bit of an effort)
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And now my watermark which I also wrote in gallifreyan for authenticity’s sake
Sadly I can’t post each of the sentences separately but if people are interested I could try sending them in the reblogs!
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mcytgallificated · 3 months
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Life Series in your style- except I wrote the names in Gallifreyan.
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salmonidos · 4 months
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Technically since Gallifreyans are a telepathic species, their language should have telepathic elements right? Telepathy doesn't work the same way as spoken language, so when talking about telepathic communication in a spoken or written way, there'd probably be a lot of language that would be hard for us humans to understand. Then... verb tenses and time-travel plus fixed and non-fixed points, things that never happened but they did. And personal pronouns and incarnations.
I also wonder if there'd be words derived of Rassilon with so many Things Of Rassilon. Like perhaps a shorter word that just means Of Rassilon, or a specific sound. Talking of sounds, perhaps there's two sounds that sound the same to a non-telepathic species but they have a telepathic element and you get /a/ (feels like lavender) and /a/ (feels like burning inside a volcano) ?? Microtelepathy-
Yeah it'd be a whole mess. Imagine studying that. You thought Spanish verb tenses and gendered words were hard? French sounds?? yeah well
In fact I'm more inclined to think the funny circles we see in the series aren't phonetically equivalent to words but telepathically equivalent to concepts. I do love having the circular phonetic gallifreyan stuff around but I don't think it'd be phonetic in their universe at all.
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bisexualamy · 11 months
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thinking again about the idea that gallifreyan would have temporal pronouns that references an individual time lord ‘in general’ as opposed to referencing a specific rengeneration. and how the gallifreyan language probably has complex verb tenses or conjugations around not when events take place in the timestream but also tenses relating to where two time lords are in relation to each other.
in this vein, i love the idea that gallifreyan has three conjugations or words for the concept of “i can’t do or tell you that”:
“i am physically unable to do that / I don’t have the info you need”
“i am choosing to withhold this information and/or not do this / i promised i would not do or reveal this”
“i cannot tell you or do this because it would violate the laws of time / it gives you too much foreknowledge / it’s likely to cause a paradox”
while #1 and #2 can intersect, it makes sense to me that #3 would be its own separate concept or word. that it’s not just that you’re choosing to withhold something: you are bound by the laws of time to withhold it. you may badly, desperately, want to help this person change their future, but you know doing so could cause incredible damage to the timestream. “i’m so sorry. if it were up to me, i would tell you, but the universe won’t allow me to say.”
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