mandoa-for-dummies

[mandoa-for-dummies]

Friendly reminder for the daylight crowd that although this is where I plan to do linguistics things, I have a sideblog where I a) write smutty fic in several fandoms including this one and b) kvetch obliquely about my life

I am so lonely! I don’t know anyone yet! Come say hi!

Fic: Nothing Ventured

Ship: Reader x Din

Rating: E/18+

Wordcount: 1.8K

Tags: AFAB reader, no y/n, PWP, frottage, mild dubcon, masturbation, sub/dom undertones, protective mando, age difference, daddy kink if you squint

You are a brat. You're driving Din crazy. It's too bad you're really good at killing things.

You don’t have to look over your shoulder at the beskar-clad figure stalking ten paces behind you to know that you’ve pissed the Mandalorian off. He catches up with you as you tap the dust off your boots on the edge of the Razor Crest’s ramp. You feel the sweep of his cloak as he pushes past you to unceremoniously dump the limp body thrown over his shoulder into the carbon freezer. He whirls around to intercept your trajectory to the cockpit, barring your path to the ladder and oh, yes, you are more acutely aware than you have been in weeks of just how tall and broad the tin can is. Your mouth goes dry.

“I should kick you off my ship right now,” he says.

You scoff. “For what? Bagging the target?”

His head-to-toe armor makes it impossible to tell just how angry your partner is with you. If the taut, deliberate tone of his voice is any indication, you’re on thin ice. “I told you to stay on surveillance.”

Kriff, the man—well, you’re pretty sure he’s a man—makes you nervous. You aren’t a rookie hunter by any means. You’re competent with blaster and vibroknife, you know how to hit a few dozen sapient lifeforms where it hurts, and you’ve fought your way white-knuckled out of more than one hairy situation. You don’t consider yourself easily intimidated, but you find yourself calculating how you might fend Mando off while you get the ramp open. Your odds don’t look great. You fold your arms, and your stuttering heart smooths out a little when you touch the knife hilt inside your jacket. “Wasn’t your call.”

“I had the situation under control. If the target’s associates had—“

You welcome the sting of anger that pierces your body. “They didn’t. I took a calculated risk and it paid off. You took me on as your partner, tin can. If you don’t trust my judgment—“

The derisive noise that crackles through Mando’s vocoder is dry kindling to your indignation. Of all the arrogant, stubborn— “I could pick you up and throw you farther than I’d trust your judgment,” he says.

You sneer. “Wouldn’t try it if you like having two hands.”

His grip on your forearm is sudden and crushingly strong. You hiss and twist away, scrambling for a second knife at your hip, but he’s snatched your wrist with his other hand before you can get there. He jerks you around and shoves you hard against the wall of the hold, twisting your arms painfully behind your back and forcing you to drop your weapon. You’re both breathing hard, but he is an immovable steel wall at your back. You stomp fruitlessly at his insole, more to salve your bruised ego than anything. He only kicks his feet wider and shoves you even harder against the wall in response. “Maker scrap you for parts,” you snarl.

Mando ignores you. “Listen carefully, because I’m only going to say this once,” he says, somewhere above your right ear, restored to a calm that would infuriate you if you weren’t suddenly so…distracted.

You give yourself a split second to confirm that that is really what you think it is. Interesting, you think. Then you cut him off. “Mando—are you hard right now?”

He twists your arms a little harder, ignoring your yelp. “You don’t seem to be taking this very seriously.”

You consider the odds of the Mandalorian actually breaking an arm. Highish, you’d wager. Well. Your mama always said you didn’t have the sense the Maker gave a marsh pig. You shift your hips experimentally, brushing your ass against what you are almost certain is not a blaster in Mando’s pocket.  His vocoder crackles—you could swear you hear his breath hitch. And if a little pool of warmth begins to gather in the pit of your stomach, you ignore it. You’d react if a Hutt ground his dick against you, at this point, you tell yourself. It’s been awhile. “Is this what turns you on?” you ask, wiggling against him again and grinning when, this time, he bites down on a groan. “I gotta say, I wouldn’t have pegged you for the type. It’s the other way around for most guys as completely fucking overbear—“

“If you pull a stunt like today again, you’re gone.” You’re pleased to hear the hairline fracture in the bounty hunter’s low voice. “I don’t care if we’re on Karnak and you forgot your life raft. You work for me. When I tell you to do something in the field, you do it. You’re my partner because it takes too long to say ‘an extra gun attached to a warm body’. Got it?”

You bristle, opening your mouth to tell him exactly where he can stick his extra gun, when you feel him press his hips more firmly against you. Maker, he’s big. The warmth in your tummy flares through your chest and up the back of your neck. You’re getting wet, you realize. You’re determined to tilt a little power back in your favor, and trying not to look as unbalanced as you suddenly feel. “Yes,” you breathe. You rock your hips a little more firmly. Your voice is nauseatingly sweet when you add, “Sir.”

He jerks away, so abruptly that you stagger sideways and have to catch yourself against the cockpit ladder. “Don’t play games you can’t finish, little girl,” Mando says, voice dropped low and jagged in a way that raises the hairs on the back of your neck. Now you can see with your own eyes how very aroused he is. You watch the rise and fall of his chest underneath his cuirass. You wonder what it would take to get this iron-willed man to snap entirely, and wonder if you’d like to find out.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, old man,” you call after him when he wheels away, climbing the ladder to take you both into hyperspace. It’s only when you hear the telltale sounds of his pre-flight check that you bend to pick up your fallen knife. The smells of gunpowder and boiled wool linger in your nose. You tell yourself that your fingers are trembling because you’re coming down from an adrenaline high. You’re an adept at lying to yourself, but you know full well that you’re at least half full of shit.

***

You are going to be the kriffing death of him, Din thinks, some hours later. The complete darkness of his bunk feels stifling rather than safe, tonight. He shut himself in hours ago, offering you a curt goodnight as you unrolled your mat in the cargo bay. The smile that you offered him in return felt to Din like a combined invitation and slap across the face.

You are a distraction at the best of times and a liability at worst. You sing off-key in the ‘fresher. You clatter around the ship at odd hours of the night making yourself a snack. Your medical knowledge is rudimentary, your mechanical skill likewise, and you are, frankly, a disgraceful pilot for someone whose job requires so much travel. You don’t completely disassemble and clean your equipment nearly often enough, no matter how often Din nags you. He’s seen you flirt with warlords’ gun thugs and grizzled spice smugglers and now him, for kark’s sake. He didn’t expect you to be so…so unprofessional. There is nothing Mandalorian about you, your considerable talent for violence notwithstanding.

And yes, you are beautiful, in an unfaded way that makes Din feel his age. Good looks aren’t always an asset in this profession. Usually the reverse, in fact. Beauty draws attention, makes you conspicuous. It was stupid of him to take you on. He could have bought himself a tooka if what he wanted was something pretty, dangerous and complicated to look after. Any way you slice it, you’re more trouble than you’re worth.

He groans, pressing the heels of his palms hard enough into his closed eyes to see white. The…run-in today was a mistake, an embarrassing and regrettable lapse of self-discipline. You provoked him and he responded. He should have pushed you away the second you felt his erection. He shouldn’t have pressed himself so close against you in the first place, though that was more defensible—as far as Din knew, you were ready and willing to get a good shot in with that knife of yours…

He shouldn’t let his hand drift down to his aching cock, although he does. He should drop you off at the next refueling stop with a few hundred extra credits and never look back. He should not climb between your legs and fuck you into your sleeping mat until the arsenal of lethal sarcasm you seem to keep in reserve especially for him melts away. He shouldn’t want to know what’s left after he’s stripped the last of your defenses away. He shouldn’t want so badly to learn what you sound like when you come on his tongue and cock and fingers. He shouldn’t imagine how you sound, how the molten silk of your cunt would feel around him, the lingering scent of your sex trapped against his skin by his helmet.

Din pants and gasps as he fucks his fist, a little more urgently, now, his cock flushed deep with blood and smeared with his precum. He reminds himself that only a thin metal wall separates you from him. He has to be quiet. Unfortunately, the thought of you catching him only makes his cock twitch in his hand. No doubt you would relish every opportunity to needle him with that ammunition. Though you hadn’t seemed entirely unaffected, pressed beneath him the way he’d guiltily imagined at least once a day ever since the afternoon he hired you in a seedy Coruscantian dive bar. Your strong voice gone breathless, soft in a way he’d never heard it before, as you arched up against him like a kriffing animal in heat. Fuck, Din mouths at the ceiling, ah f-fuck, I need you, little girl. Just like that—just like that—

He bites into his fist to stifle his strangled moan when he finally comes, hips jerking hard as his seed splatters hot across his belly. When he’s cleaned himself up, he stares into the darkness of his bunk as though he could divine secrets from it, gone boneless and limber with pleasure but no closer to sleep. He shoves his sweat-dampened hair off of his forehead and waits. Waits for sleep or for the closest thing there is to morning in deep space. It doesn’t matter. He won’t go to you tonight, or any night. He won’t.

#personal #smut #fic #srsly I feel like I’m talking into the void come on down

[mandoa-for-dummies]

Making my nerdy conlang project my main was a mistake, but it’s TOO LATE. I want to get to know y’all! Go follow the account where I post filth (see above) and reblog things. 

Fic: The Law of Return

Relationship: Reader x Steven Grant

Wordcount: 4.5K

Rating: pure filth / E (18+ only)

Tags: unapologetically pro sex-worker so if you don’t like that, don’t read!; oral sex, cishet F! reader, mental illness/DID only treated very indirectly in fic, smut & fluff, oral sex, bountiful consent, like a metric fuckton of consent, fluff, a butterfly kiss of femdom, a whisper of hurt/comfort, but mostly this is just soft. This is the softest soft. I cannot overstate the soft.

You are a sex worker who offers unusually holistic services to inexperienced clients. Steven Grant pays you to take his virginity. You do, in the most wholesome and supportive way possible. That’s it. That’s the fic.

AO3

Keep reading

#personal #fic

[mandoa-for-dummies]

I am compiling a list of all of the graphemes that appear in the Mando’a lexicon so that I can start mucking around with the extant phonology. Because, you know, it’s Sunday and I should be getting ahead on my real homework.

The overall impression I’m getting as I do this is that anglophones want Mando’a to sound “pointy” to them. But also that anglophones do not want Mando’a to sound like Huttese, which to me is the Star Wars cipher where everybody says watutti frutti mi speedo until it’s time for the bar fight to break out in earnest

#the mandalorian #star wars #conlang

[mandoa-for-dummies]

waiting for my fiancé to wrap up his annual monolithic Spooky Things Only fixation so that we can watch Andor together like

#personal #andor #I can tell from the tumblr discourse that we're both gonna ugly cry about this show #on nov 1 OR ELSE

[mandoa-for-dummies]

Ancient Space Racists, History, and Other Initial Considerations

I am waiting for my big fat phonology handbook to ship in the mail. Until it gets here, let’s talk about Mando’a and some of the Canon Headaches that come along with it.

The biggest, baddest and (in my opinion) most interesting Canon Headache is that, as I mentioned in my introductory post, Mando’a is supposed to be an auxlang or auxiliary language. Why is this Canon Headache Number One?

Because auxlangs don’t work outside of societies of hobbyist nerds dedicated to learning and speaking them. They’ve never been widely adopted and naturalized, much less by an entire culture. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but a big one is that a technocratic fantasy that underpins the creation of many auxlangs is essentially that languages are complex because human beings are inefficient. This is just not fucking true. Languages are complex because human beings use language in breathtakingly complex ways. When real redundancy or irregularity occurs in a language, speakers tend to abandon that feature of the language over time, except in cases like Old Irish, where irregularity was artificially frozen in writing as a mark of class prestige. You can try to invent a language that does all of the things that natural languages do as “elegantly”, “regularly” or “simply” as possible, but you do tend to run into the problem of making normative judgments about what is elegant, regular or simple, probably from the unconscious perspective of your own native language use.

But we’re playing pretend, here, so let’s imagine that a society did come up with an auxlang and successfully implement it--or claim to have done so, anyways. They would almost certainly have to enforce this new language with violence. It would be a pretty fashy and authoritarian society. People will fight hard to speak their mother tongues, probably especially whatever highly collectivist society are the forerunners of Mandalorians. 

Well...it doesn’t not sound like Mandalore, so far.

Anyways, the official pretext for Mando’a (that it can be picked up easily by any convert to the Creed) is also outright nonsense. It presumes a humanoid facial structure, for one thing. What about Tuskens? What about any alien with keratinous beaks or mandibles, for whom all of those B and P sounds are going to be a serious hassle, if not damn near insurmountable? Then again, I’ve never seen in-canon representations of Mandalorians who aren’t humanoids. Maybe this is another political innovation of the ruling class of let’s say ~6000 BBY Mandalore. You say that the unifying feature of your society is religion and not race, and according to the letter of the law, that’s true. You say that your religion is enshrined in the Creed, which you’ve happened to rewrite in your newly-purified language. It’s very difficult for non-humans to speak it. Oops! Guess only a very select few can be full participants in the Creed. [shocked pikachu face]

But how long can a truly authoritarian regime really last without pushback? A few hundred years? Mando’a has evolved in the intervening millennia. Speakers quickly identify in everyday life where “official” Mando’a falls short. In the waning hours of old Mandalore, rebels, subversives and forward-thinkers adopt the “underground” borrowings from the linguistic ancestors of Aurebesh and Huttese as a political statement. By the time the reform government's new dynasty is well-established, there has been a massively popular and successful campaign to introduce a supplemental sign language to standard Mando’a, borrowed heavily from the Tuskens. Although Mandalorian society is still overwhelmingly humanoid, sign support is still considered an integral portion of Classical Mando’a--especially because, for a blip in Mando’a’s history, sign language enabled you to communicate in ways that the regime-sanctioned auxlang didn’t allow: and to do it, moreover, without being picked up by radio surveillance.

Maybe a cult like Din’s is trying to “restore” Classical Mando’a and looks favorably on avoiding “outside influences” to the language--especially now that the reality of its oppressive history has been blurred by romanticization and nostalgia for a past that never really existed--but it’s a lost cause, in the same way that trying to speak Old English in the 21st century to do 21st century things would be a lost cause. Mando’a as it is spoken in Din’s lifetime has evolved into a natural language with very little resemblance to Classical Mando’a. Most Mandalorians only use Classical Mando’a on ceremonial occasions of great significance. *cough* Like taking their wedding vows, for instance.

Stay tuned for the rudimentary stages of language building as we puzzle over a far less interesting canon headache: Goddamn Motherfucking Fantasy Language Apostrophes.

#star wars #the mandalorian #worldbuilding #sci fi #In which I try to make it make sense #long reads #I award myself a B- #this is probably the least labor-intensive work I'll ever do on this project lol

[mandoa-for-dummies]

What even is this?

This is the first in what I sure hope will be a series of entries documenting my progress as I attempt (attempt being the keyword) to transform Mando’a from what I’ve always thought was a pretty lackluster cipher of English into a conlang.

What’s the difference? A cipher uses one to one substitutions to turn the original language into the “new” language. Take this example:

“best of the best” in English becomes “jatnese be te jatnese” in Mando’a

As you can see, this is English with different syllables. We’ve got the affixed -se intensifier of the Mando’a word “jatne,” which differs from the irregular transformation of “good” into “better” (comparative) and “best” (superlative) in English, but other than that, we’ve preserved the English preposition and article.  That’s fine for a fly-by sentence in a movie or a novel! But we can do better than that.

By contradistinction, a conlang or constructed language has its own fully-imagined and developed grammar, vocabulary, style, idioms etc. Think Quenya or Klingon. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: there will be parts of speech. There might be a redesigned alphabet. I will definitely be playing fast and loose with the lexicon over at mandoa.org

There’s a third important category of artificial languages that I’ll be messing around with as I truck merrily along, and that is what is called an auxlang, or auxiliary language. These are artificial languages like Esperanto--designed for simplicity, regularity and maximum ease of adoption. Mando’a is canonically supposed to be an auxlang. I have some thoughts about this that I will develop in future updates.

Why do this? The simple answer is: for funsies and to teach myself how to build a conlang, a hobby I’ve admired from afar for a long time but hitherto haven’t dared to dip my toe into for real. I’m not a professional linguist. I’m just a language-loving dork who wants to take a passable but lazy sci-fi cipher and make it special. If someone else has been doing a version this work on Mando’a elsewhere, that’s great! I haven’t looked it up. I’m not doing this for posterity--this is entirely for my own amusement, baybeeeeee.

THAT SAID, HERE IS IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT USING WHATEVER YOU FIND HERE: you can incorporate anything you find on this tumblr into your own creative goings-on. You can also further modify or adjust it to suit your own needs and preferences. It’s yours! You’re welcome to it! All I ask is that you credit me.

You can expect updates every few weeks, since, lo, I am a sad and overworked grad student. The background research doesn’t do itself, dontcha know. It goes without saying that your questions, comments and feedback are always welcome.

#star wars #the mandalorian #worldbuilding #sci fi #linguistics #conlang #I'm in this to have a good time and cry a lot