#i will say the middle english -> modern english translation is mine

[silverskye13]

Helsknight showing up bloody at Welsknight’s base please I need suffering 🙏

There was something to be said about the stupid things he was willing to do in the name of self preservation. Damn his fears, and the unfairness of the universe, and the uncertainty of living [and dying] and everything else. The unknown had always been his greatest weakness, his greatest betrayer. Pity it was also one of the few inescapable things about living in general.

To say Helsknight stepped into Hermitcraft would be a terrible injustice of what stepping normally, let alone gracefully, looked like. What he actually did was stagger and drag himself into Hermitcraft on unsteady and shaking limbs. There were holes in him. He hadn't really taken inventory of them yet. Admitting he had a wound [or several] was enough. The minute he admitted the wounds were bad, in certain terms his mind could comprehend, was the minute shock would steal his senses. He was on Hermitcraft for the specific reason of dodging death, and it seemed to him shock, on any level, meant dying. If he wanted to die and roll the dice of respawn, he would have died in hels, in the alley he'd been jumped in, where he could at least take comfort in familiar cobblestones and the knowledge he'd dragged all his attackers down with him. But he didn't want to die, so he was here.

It was dark. He was inside a building. He was bleeding. Wels was nearby. Those were the only things he needed to know for certain. Helsknight looked around, trying to ignore the sluggish tilt his vision offered when he moved too quickly. The double vision of trying to parse memories of a place that weren't his battled with his wounded animal double vision and together they made him feel nauseous, more so than his wounding already did. Helsknight balled a fist against his sternum, like he could hold himself together that way, and concentrated very hard on walking and nothing else.

Helsknight didn't like being this close to Wels. Not while he was this injured. He could feel the awareness of his other half like a spider on his skin. There was a reflex-like urge to shout and try to shake it off, the instinct-like certainty that if it rested on him long enough it would find a reason to bite him. And he knew, in the way only experience could teach, that if he could feel Wels, Wels could feel him. Helsknight had the sensation of walking a tightrope: his body insisted speed was the only thing that could save him, while his mind insisted he must stay unnoticed. He must balance necessity with making his thoughts and emotions small, and it was hard work to do when he was losing blood.

Helsknight blinked slowly, tiredly. He picked a direction and walked, a hand pressed to the wall, keeping himself upright. Wels's potion room was nearby, a borrowed half-memory informed him, he just had to get there. He searched his drifting thoughts for a poem to repeat in his head, to keep fear and uncertainty from rising. His heartbeat was quickening, a symptom of something; panic, or fear, or blood loss, or all three combined. He was fixing one of those things. He needed to carefully manage the other two, before Wels felt them. The only poem he could think of was in Middle English, and mostly gibberish to him, which told him it came from Wels's memories somewhere.

Why have ye no routhe on my child?

Have routhe on me ful of mourning;

Tak doun o rode my derworth child,

Or prik me o rode with my derling!

[Rhyming child with child was a lazy, but this was written back when one could convincingly spell "down" as "doun" so he supposed he shouldn't be overly critical. The real trick was figuring out if "derling" was supposed to mean "darling", or some other archaic word lost to time. He could only figure out so much from context clues. "Mourning" apparently transcended centuries, and that seemed fitting. Everyone knew mourning, in some form or another.]

An ache opened up beneath his clenched fist, or it had always been there, and his body was only just now reinforcing the fact that it was important. It felt like the mother of all cramps in his muscles, and he stubbornly pretended that's what it was. He needed more potassium in his diet or something, and the gods would forgive him the smear he left on the wall when he leaned on it, waiting on the intensity of his pain to ebb. The doorway he was walking towards seemed close, but also very, very far. Closing distance with it was going a lot slower than he thought it would, and it was only one short hallway. He was glad he'd decided to do this, instead of his other half-considered option of attempting to walk across hels to the Colosseum. He wouldn't have made it.

Dread pooled in his stomach. Dread, and other more physical things, like blood, probably, but he pretended the dread bit was more important. He could feel Wels pricking on his skin again, an insistent spider twitching at a breath on his web. Helsknight breathed out the steadiest breath he could manage.

More pine ne may me ben y-don

Than lete me live in sorwe and shame;

As love me bindëth to my sone,

So let us deyen bothe y-same.

[Sorwe. What medieval idiot thought "sorrow" was spelled like "sorwe"? Maybe it had something to do with inflection. Poetry was half words, half rhythm. Maybe "sorwe" was supposed to indicate they wanted the reader to pronounce "sorrow" as a single syllable, so it sounded more like "sore". That's also probably why "bothe y-same" was sitting there like word vomit. They meant "both the same", but wanted it read without a pause between the first two words. It was really the method for the madness that mattered with poetry.]

Helsknight blinked. He was in the potion room. He couldn't fully remember the walk down the hallway, but that didn't matter. What mattered was there should be health potions in here somewhere, his salvation. Relief edged his vision in stars, and he once again felt Wels's attention cant in his direction, confused and curious. Wels didn't associate feelings of relief with Helsknight. It wasn't an emotion they felt in each other's presence, and it was far too strong to be muffled by the distance to hels.

[He knows I'm here.]

Helsknight opened a chest and rifled through it. His vision was protesting. Stars and tilting that would turn to spinning soon made a clutter of his eyes. It got hard to distinguish the colors of the stoppered bottles. He picked up one that felt overly warm to his cold and shaking fingers. He was pretty sure it was a health potion. It felt too hot, but he reminded himself he was cold from losing blood, so it should feel hot. Hesitantly removed his fist from where it was balled in front of his sternum, and let his eyes unfocus when he grasped the bottle's stopper. His hands were so unsteady, it took a couple tries just to grab it, and when he pulled on the cork, his fingers slipped off weakly. He tried again, eyes closed with concentration, pouring every ounce of his strength into the act of pulling a stopper out of a bottle, only for his hand to slip right off again.

Frustrated, nearing desperate, he looked down at himself for a clean place to wipe his hand on his tunic. It was a mistake. He knew it as soon as he did it. His eyes were inexorably drawn from the fabric to the poke-holes in it, to the wine-dark stain that flowed down his front and still dripped tak-tak-tak slow and inexorable onto the floor. It was a woeful amount of blood. He was honestly surprised he wasn't dead yet. Chalk it up to fortitude, and ignorance, and size. He had more blood to lose than some people did.

Helsknight's world suddenly gave an awful twist, vertigo and the crescendoing, cramping agony of his wounds, only staved off by how his now shattered ignorance, kicking him off his feet just as surely as a horse could. He slumped against the wall, and then to the floor, and the awful jarring of it hurt him worse. Half a dozen other wounds on him aired their grievances, and the big one near his sternum pushed blood onto his fist when he clutched it. Helsknight sat pinned, unable to breathe for many long seconds, feeling a bit like he'd been struck by lightning. The pain was blinding and numbing and overwhelming all at once.

Why-- have no-- have ye no-- something something...

[Words. Breathe. Think of words.]

[Gods... But it hurts......]

Why have ye no routhe on my child?

Have routhe on me ful of mourning;

[And what the hels did "routhe" mean, anyway? He knew the word "route". He knew the name "Ruth". Neither of them fit, unless his bloodless brain was missing something. There was a chance "routhe" was supposed to be read like "bothe", as a double word slurred together, but that still left "routhe the" which made less sense in context than "routhe" did.]

Right. He was supposed to be doing something other than bleeding to death on the floor. Helsknight blinked, looked down at his hand and realized the health potion he'd grabbed was gone. He must have dropped it when he slumped over. Looking around, he spotted it just to the side of his left boot, unbroken, thankfully, but it might as well be a lifetime away for all the good it did him. Helsknight knew without a shadow of a doubt he couldn't reach it. The idea of tensing his muscles and dragging himself forward to reach was exhausting, and he hurt so much he knew the movement would feel like tearing himself in half, and there were just some things a mind couldn't power through. Helsknight laughed dismally and let his head fall onto his chest. Both motions were white hot agonies, but all his pains were starting to blur together into a smear of overwhelming sensation that took thought away. It occurred to him he was breathing too fast, like he'd run too far too fast, and his fluttering heartbeat agreed.

[... It hurts...]

[Gods and saints it hurts.]

[I'm dying.]

A feeling he could only describe as doom fell on his shoulders, a cold grasp of fear that wrapped stony hands around his heart and squeezed. He'd heard of this. Never felt it himself. The utter sureness that if he didn't do something now, he would die. All the unconscious bits in his body in charge of keeping him working all unanimously agreeing they needed divine intervention, preferably right now, before they started shutting down. It wasn't something he often had occasion to feel, though he had heard people tell of it after particularly grizzly matches and bloody tournaments. Death was normally too quick in the Colosseum, or else he'd won his match, and even if he was falling to pieces there was a health potion too close to hand to let him dwell on his harms. This was so terribly different. Death stalked toward him unhurried and unbothered, waiting on him to finish drowning in blood. He might panic, if he wasn't already so cold and scared.

"Ah. This makes some sense, anyway."

Helsknight, who had stopped seeing the world in front of himself without really closing his eyes, refocused his vision on the open doorway. Wels stood there, an angel of death in azure and silver, his sword in his hand. His eyes were the ruthless blue of hels freezing over and lifeless corpses, and Helsknight thought there was no one else in the world he would rather not watch him die. But the universe hated him, so here Wels was, just as surely as if he was fated.

"I didn't think all that fear could possibly be for me."

Helsknight tried to reply, but all he managed was a dying-animal noise that strangled itself out when he tried to breathe a little steadier. He tried again, and this time managed a very weak, but vaguely defiant, "Fuck off."

"Rude," Wels said chastisingly. A glow of something like smug satisfaction prickled Helsknight's skin. The feeling came from Wels. "Especially given I'm the only person who can save you."

Helsknight chuckled, and then stopped when his body seized painfully around the motion. "We both know you don't want to save me."

"No," Wels admitted. "But I don't want to do a lot of unpleasant things I agree to do anyway."

"How... charitable."

"It is a virtue."

"Sure."

Wels didn't move. Well, he did move, but only to sheath his sword. He crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame, the image of patience, as though they had all the time in the world.

[Hungry spider. Waiting on a web for something to struggle.]

"If you're waiting on me to beg," Helsknight informed him through staggering breaths, "I won't."

"Too prideful?"

Helsknight searched himself momentarily for pride, and came up short. Pride would've dictated he die in the alley, instead of here where Wels could lord it over him. This was something different than pride.

"No."

"Then why not?" Wels asked, raising an eyebrow. "It's easy. Just say, 'Welsknight, please give me a health potion'. Or if you're feeling monosyllabic, just 'please' will work."

Helsknight managed a smirk. "Why not help me out of the kindness of your heart?"

"I don't have any kindness for people like you."

[People like you. What a loaded phrase.]

Have ye no routhe on my child?

There was an entire philosophical debate that could happen in the phrase 'people like you' that Helsknight had neither the time or the energy to bother with. Besides, it was all words Wels knew. Wels pretended to be a chivalric knight. Chivalric knights helped the weak. Chivalric knights saved the defenseless. Helsknight, for all the grievances of his existence, was both right now. Then again, the chivalric knights were also supposed to make war against their enemies mercilessly, so he supposed Wels would be in his rights, as a chivalric knight, to walk away and let him die slowly and painfully on the ground.

As if sensing his thoughts, and likely because he could actually sense his thoughts a bit, Wels said, "You are always going on about how I need to be a better knight. There's something ironic here. No matter what I decide, I think you'll owe me an apology regardless."

The feeling of doom, of bone-deep, agonizing dying mantled over Helsknight again and Wels stopped existing to him. His sense of urgency, of desperation to live clawed its way up his throat. He tried to move his arm, his leg. He got his fingers to twitch. He tried to lean forward, to drag himself with willpower alone towards that stupid potion just out of reach. The potion he wasn't even strong enough to open. His vision collapsed in quickly, and he only knew he'd cried out because he was breathless. But he hadn't moved, besides managing to lull his head forward onto his chest again. Cold fear crawled around in his empty guts, a relentless, caged animal that refused to stop squirming.

[I'm dying.]

[Breathe.]

[I'm dying.]

A shadow fell over him, a presence freighted with hate, and deserving, and dissonant guilt. Wels had come forward, only to stop short when Helsknight's terror swept over him like a wave, and he stood baffled by it, and guilty for it. The fool knight probably thought Helsknight was scared of him. If only. Helsknight thought he would prefer that. At least then he could manage to die gracefully. Wels's fortitude bricked itself up against him then, a bitter soul trying to will itself to be cold and cruel, and Helsknight was thankful for it. It staved off his fear, if only a little.

"What did you do to bring this on, anyway?" Wels asked breathlessly, trying to recover his resolve. Looking for a reason to hate him.

"I was... walking home."

"That's it?" He sounded so skeptical, it was almost funny.

"I committed the terrible sin..." Helsknight laughed out a breath, "... of being fearless when I should have been cautious."

"Hubris."

"Habit."

"Yeah right."

"If I got stabbed like this every day, I wouldn't have come crawling here."

Wels glowered, parsing this statement for truth. Helsknight might have mustered some hate in him for it, if he wasn't so scared. His vision had taken on a permanent blur, and he was getting cold. He hadn't gone numb yet, which was something he found profoundly cruel. He wanted to be numb. To stop hurting. To stop fearing.

[Breathe.]

Why have ye no routhe on my child?

Have routhe on me ful of mourning;

Tak doun o rode my derworth child,

Or prik me o rode with my derling!

[Derworth... "Dearworth", probably. Beloved. So "derling" was probably "dearling", which turned into "darling". Middle English was strange. Just slightly to the left of normal. He didn't think "tak" was a word anymore, except where it existed as pieces of words. "Tak" to "take", to take hold, maintain, maybe. "Tak" to "tack" like a nail. "Prik" also, like "pricking" flesh, like a point digging.]

"Hold down the road, my dearworth child," Helsknight muttered. "Or pick me a road with my darling."

"What?"

"Stupid poem."

"How much blood have you lost?"

Helsknight laughed, and his whole body flinched, and for a moment he couldn't breathe because his pain was so alive and electric it almost stopped being pain. The concern from Wels was laughable. He wished Wels would make up his mind about whether or not he cared. Then he could get on with dying, and the terror would stop, and the universe would take him or it wouldn't, and if it didn't, he would respawn and sleep for a week. He felt Wels's hand on his wrist, which was its own kind of hilarious.

"Trying to figure out how many heartbeats I have left?" Helsknight asked.

It would be nice to know. If Wels figured it out, he hoped he would share the information. Then Helsknight could keep count.

"Your heart's too fast."

"That happens."

Wels stood up and paced, all nervous energy, back and forth across the room.

"You don't deserve my help," Wels told him scathingly, angry for how conflicted he felt. "You don't. You've been nothing but cruel ever since we met."

More pine ne may me ben y-don

Than lete me live in sorwe and shame;

["Pine", like pining. Or pain. More pain? Punishment maybe. "Don" to done. Something like: More pain to me could not be done than to let me live in sorrow and shame.]

Helsknight decided whoever wrote this poem had never been stabbed. He'd felt both sorrow and shame, and neither of them packed quite this amount of punch, in his opinion.

"It probably goes against my tenets anyway," Wels continued, still pacing. "And yours too. Aren't you the one who follows some crazy death god?"

"... Saint... of Blood and Steel."

"He probably thinks dying in a puddle on my floor is glorious."

"... they."

As love me bindëth to my sone,

So let us deyen bothe y-same.

[Maybe he was just getting better at this, or maybe this part was just easy. "As love I'm bound to my son, so let us die, both the same." It didn't flow very neatly when it was simpler. Maybe Middle English wasn't that stupid.]

"I can't help but think you did this on purpose to... I don't know. Test me somehow. Prove you're better. Weak again, Welsknight! For helping your enemy when you should have let him die, or speed him along. Don't you know knights are supposed to be cruel?"

Helsknight tried to call up his own tenets, or Wels's tenets, or anything to do with knights and their duties. He got a little lost on his way, his thoughts meandering and dying, and gasping back to life again when they remembered they were supposed to be searching for something. Something he was scared of. Dying. A wave of fear crashing over him that made Wels flinch, and bid Helsknight keep breathing, because any agony was worth not confronting that one, great, crippling unknown.

"What would you do in my place?" Wels asked him suddenly. "Answer me that, perfect knight. What would you do if the person you hated most showed up one day bleeding on your floor?"

That... was an excellent question. Helsknight searched briefly for the answer, and found it wasn't very hard to find.

"I would help."

"You're lying," Wels said guardedly.

"I... can't lie."

"Then you're dodging the truth. What would you do?"

"I would heal you if I could. Or I would kill you if I couldn't." With strength he didn't know he even still had, Helsknight leaned his head back against the wall. It was easier to breathe that way. To talk.

"Why?"

"No creature is deserving of dishonor or pain."

"That's not a tenet."

"It's not a chivalric tenet." Helsknight shrugged one shoulder weakly. "Chivalry states you can hang my guts from the ceiling if I'm your enemy."

"It does not."

"It might as well."

Wels didn't seem to have a ready reply for that.

"What is routhe?"

Wels blinked down at him, guarded and confused. "Routhe?"

"Routhe." Helsknight repeated, as though it were helpful. "Middle English."

"As in?"

"Poetry."

"Use it in a sentence."

"Why have ye no routhe on my child?"

"Ruth." Wels said, a bit too quickly, like he'd known what Helsknight was asking and was trying to avoid the answer. "We don't use it as ruth anymore. It shows up in rue, like regret, or sorrow. And... ruthless."

"Merciless."

"Yes."

Why have you no mercy on my child?

"Why are you asking about Middle English while you're bleeding to death on my floor?"

Helsknight let out a breath. It hurt, but everything did. "Stupid poem."

"Can I hear it?"

"I'm busy bleeding to death on your floor."

"Tell me and I'll heal you."

There it was again, asking for an excuse. That was Wels's real cowardice, his failing as a knight. He was scared of making decisions. Scared of dealing with the consequences of his actions. Paralyzed by indecision. He wanted to hate Helsknight because it was justified. He wanted to watch him suffer, because hatred allows suffering. He didn't want to label himself cruel, nor be accused of weakness, or softheartedness, if he showed mercy. And he didn't want to pick up his sword and kill, if it meant killing someone defenseless. He wanted Helsknight to give him a reason to act, so he could blame it on him later if it turned out wrong. Given it would likely be Helsknight rubbing his nose in it later if it was wrong, he couldn't really blame him for that.

Helsknight closed his eyes and counted his heartbeats, and pretended he wasn't scared.

"Do what you will."

An hour long minute ticked by. Helsknight felt the time moving like it was physical, like he was falling through it and he couldn't catch himself, and he was nearing his limits. He thought the only thing stopping him from begging for it all to stop was the crushing weight of his fatigue, the exponential strength it took to take his next breath, and that stupid poem, skipping in a circle in his head. It kept his thoughts away from his fear, from bearing the weight of the unknown that came next. It was still there, a nameless, formless anxiety that formed the undercurrent of his thoughts. But he didn't have to think about it when he was busy being annoyed about a poem stuck in his head.

Wels moved. He stooped to pick up the potion Helsknight had dropped and unstoppered it deftly. He was surprisingly gentle as he helped him drink, aware that every movement could cause pain. Helsknight could feel Wels's caution in the air like wings, like a bird hovering before it lands. The first potion wasn't enough to heal him completely, so he got a second from his chests and helped him with that as well, one hand hovering over Helsknight's wounds, waiting on the skin to knit back together. Helsknight got to his feet, shaky, and feeling like he'd been wrung dry of all vitality. There was no pain to speak of, but he was thirsty, and hungry, and exhausted.

"You should rest before you go anywhere," Wels said, words of pragmatic care that sounded stilted coming from him. "I can get you some water."

"I'll be fine," Helsknight told him, allowing himself some hesitant pride now that the smothering pain was gone. Even exhausted, he could think so much more clearly now -- think at all, really. And he thought the longer he stayed here, the higher the chance Wels would come to regret his decision to heal him. They were not made to like each other. They didn't even respect each other as enemies. And Helsknight knew if they fought now, he would lose, and he might lose very badly, if Wels decided to leave him to bleed out again. It was something Wels had never done before, but if he could convince himself Helsknight deserved it, he would.

"Do what you will, then," Wels said, bitterness creeping into his tone. He probably thought he was being coy and ironic. Helsknight mostly thought it was annoying.

"The poem isn't mine," Helsknight said. "It's one you've read before. Middle English. Why have ye no routhe on my child. I don't know the title. It might just be the first line. I think it's a lament."

"... I see."

"Next time you find yourself bleeding out on someone's floor," Helsknight snorted, "Pick something stupid like that. It makes things... manageable."

"Right... manageable."

Helsknight gave a helpless sort of shrug, as though what he'd just said were perfectly normal.

Wels mustered an enviable facsimile of concern when he said, "I've never felt terror like that before."

Helsknight felt his already parched mouth somehow go drier. The sympathy he felt rolling off of Welsknight was sickening. Literally. He could feel himself becoming nauseous.

"What are you so scared of?"

Shame, red hot and searing, clawed at the inside of Helsknight's ribs. He wished so badly he could hide it. Distract himself from it. At least turn it into anger. But he was tired, and he didn't know how to bring his emotions back to heel, and Welsknight was already giving him an open, piteous look like maybe they'd stumbled onto something significant. He could feel hope there, like maybe there was a reason they hated each other like they did, and if Wels could figure out where that fear came from, they could find common ground -- or at least the leverage Wels needed to make Helsknight relent.

"I don't need your pity, white knight," Helsknight snarled. "Go sate your savior complex somewhere else."

Wels scowled. A cold wall of loathing, resigned and inevitable, closed itself around anything else he could possibly feel.

[As it should be.]

Hours later, home and safe, Helsknight cracked open his journal and wrote:

Why have you no mercy on my child?

Have mercy on me, so full of mourning;

Take down the road my dearworth child,

O give me a road with my darling!

More pain to me could not be done

Than to let me live in sorrow and shame

As with love I am bound to my son,

So let us die then, both the same.

#Situations Asks #rns asks #anonymous #tw wounds #tw blood #tw dying #tw fear #welsknight #helsknight #[jazzhands] mind the tags she's an intense one! #And also very long #4k words woooo #The poem in Middle English is Why Have Ye No Routhe On My Child #it is supposedly from the 14th century #but i had a very very hard time finding sources for it #so take that with a heavy grain of salt #i will say the middle english -> modern english translation is mine #done using the Chaucer Dictionary from the University of Cambridge #As well as the Oxford Middle English Compendium #take the translation with a grain of salt its one of maybe twice i've done something like this #but i think it stayed decently faithful to the source material #as faithful as someone who sucks at reading Middle English can make a translation anyway #rns ficlet

[schrodingerscougar]

Note: Seriously, I have no excuse for the Toranaga fics. Here's a modern day one. Please, enjoy, then kindly point me in the direction of works from others.

..

Toranaga remained silent after Blackthorne finished talking and waited for Mariko to translate for him. You watched him with curious eyes, looking for small changes in his expression that would tell you what he was planning this time. Because you knew many things about him, one of them being the fact that he spoke English quite well.

Once the conversation was over, he asked Mariko to be with their guest for the rest of the day to help him communicate with others and get to know your customs better. After they left, he asked you to go to the roof with him so you could talk in private, away from the people who were dying to find out more about the outsider.

“Please, enlighten me. Why are you making the Englishman believe you don't speak English?” you asked Toranaga once you stepped next to him by the railing of the rooftop.

The man looked at you with a small smile as his fingers played with the small box he held in his hand. What it contained you didn't know, but something told you it was none of your business. “I believe I shouldn't make things easy for him just yet,” he said after a while.

You tried to resist, but your eyes kept falling on the box in his hand. It was a small and simple cardboard box, not something that would seem particularly precious. It was killing you that you had absolutely no clue what it was hiding, and why he had been playing with it ever since you joined him up here.

“You want to know what's inside, don't you?” Toranaga asked with a laugh as he opened his palm and held the box close to you. You shook your head without thinking, even reaching out to close his fingers around it, but he gently pulled your hand away and showed you the object once again. “Take it. It's yours anyway.”

“Mine?” He nodded with that kind smile still visible on his lips. So you took the box and opened it, only to find another box inside. But it wasn't another cardboard box, no. It was a blue jewelry box that had a beautiful white gold ring with a yellow diamond in the middle inside. “I don't understand, what is this?”

“I believe you already know. We've been together for long enough to understand what we want from this relationship. This is what I want,” he explained.

You didn't know what to say. These were trying times for all of you, a proposal wasn't something you could think about. There were people after him, his life was in danger, he had a strange Englishman as a guest, and he was thinking about this? If you didn't know any better, you would have assumed he went mad.

“You have nothing to say?” he asked, bringing you back to the conversation with only these five words.

“Why now in the middle of this mess?”

Toranaga decided to wrap an arm around your body and pull you into a kiss, probably hoping this would make you focus on his proposal instead of your fears regarding the future. His future. He was right as usual, you were terrified those idiots would get him killed.

“I want to hear you say yes before I die, that's all,” came his response as he placed a soft kiss on your cheek. “Don't you want to stay by my side as my wife?”

You flashed a delicate smile at him then put your arms around his neck to pull him against you. “That's all I want,” you whispered to him before burying your face into the crook of his neck.

People had warned you not to let him close, to keep a safe distance from this man who was way more powerful than you could handle. At first you followed the advice, especially because you saw what he could be like, how cold and scheming he was with others.

But then you saw a different side of him. A softer side, one he seemingly reserved for you, and only you. Gentle touches, romantic getaways, generous gifts; he did everything he could to sweep you off your feet. Maybe it was a trap, but maybe he was genuinely interested in you. Either way, you couldn't resist for long.

The two of you joined Blackthorne and Mariko for dinner in the evening, going to an excellent restaurant with a private room to talk a little more. Through the other woman, Toranaga asked a lot of questions about the Englishman's intentions. He assumed he came here looking for something that had been hidden a long time ago, a relic that held value only to a small circle of people.

You remained silent and listened. You weren't allowed to talk to the outsider yet because your fiancé wanted you to stay out of whatever mess he was here to cause. He would have rather thrown Mariko under the bus right now. It was cruel, but he was only protecting you, you knew that.

“Why don't you ask him about the relic? Go on, ask him about what object they've been hiding for a long time,” Blackthorne told Mariko once he had enough of the cross-examination.

She looked confused, hesitant to speak up at first. Knowing Toranaga understood everything made her more cautious and you couldn't blame her. Of course, Blackthorne didn't speak Japanese, so he wouldn't have understood what she said. But despite this, she was carefully choosing each word when she spoke up again.

“Lord Toranaga, the relic he's talking about… Is it real?” she asked.

“It is very much real, I can assure you,” he said before turning to his guest and switching to English. “I believe you are chasing a myth, Mr. Blackthorne. This relic went missing a long time ago.”

His lie made you nervous. What was he plotting this time? But the biggest surprise came from the other man whose jaw dropped upon hearing him speak his language.

“You bastard, you understood everything I said, didn't you?” he asked angrily before turning to you. “I bet you understand everything too.”

“Whether or not she understands you doesn't matter as I asked Mariko to translate, not her.”

Blackthorne laughed at this. “You don't want your lover to be involved? What are you afraid of? That she might realize what a manipulative piece of shit you are?”

Toranaga glanced over at you for a moment, then turned back to the Englishman. “You should learn to choose your words more carefully,” he warned him. “You saved my life, for which I'm grateful, and you are my guest, but I won't hesitate to get rid of you if you make the wrong choice.”

You shivered because of the way he talked to Blackthorne. This was the man people warned you about, the one who was usually nowhere to be found when you were around. He exchanged a few words with Mariko in Japanese, then stood up and extended a hand to help you up too. It was time to leave apparently.

Before you left the room, your eyes met Mariko’s and you couldn't hide your worry. She flashed a small smile at you then nodded to tell you she would be fine. You returned the smile then said goodbye and went after Toranaga. You didn't dare to resist.

#yoshii toranaga x reader #yoshii toranaga #toranaga #toranaga x reader #fx shogun #shogun fx #shogun #shogun 2024

[llyfrenfys]

I knew you were based in Aberystwyth, but I didn’t know you were linked with the university, or the Celtic Studies course for that matter either, which is a course I’m planning to apply for!

I’m not sure whether this is overstepping, but I was wondering if you have any advice for academic enrichment in the mean time- I have limited knowledge of Welsh itself because even though my dad can speak it, I was never really taught it. I went to the uni open day, and they recommended ‘Say Something in Welsh’ which looks like a really good resource, and I was wondering if you knew any sites (or books!) which could be good to further look into, especially if you know where I could find medieval Welsh literature in modern Welsh online.

Also, I’m interested in Welsh history and language conservation, and if you have any book recommendations on those I’d definitely check them out!

Sorry for the long ask, I hope this finds you well

I'm so sorry anon that I'm getting to this so late (it's been months -mae'n ddrwg gyda fi!) but I will try and answer some of your questions now.

The Celtic Studies department at Aberystwyth is really lovely and quite small so everyone kinda knows each other. My Welsh teacher and personal tutor was Simon Rodway - he's a really lovely guy and was the first member of staff I shared my chosen name with (he helped me find out how to change my name on the Uni systems to my chosen name as well).

I've heard good things about SaySomethingInWelsh - the Uni also does (in the Celtic Studies department) intense summer courses in Welsh in person and online (I did mine online because pandemic) with DysgyCymraeg, who I also recommend. I have a post about free Welsh learning resources here:

For Medieval Welsh literature in Modern Welsh - dafyddapgwilym.net has a collection of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poetry in the original Middle Welsh, Modern Welsh and in English translation. Just click Cymraeg or English, go to Y Cerddi/The Poems and select a poem from the drop-down menu. More options will come up when you do this (including notes and where you can find the manuscripts the poems are from). I'm not usually a Medievalist so I'm gonna ask if any of my followers/mutuals have any recommendations for this.

For Welsh language conservation- (or language conservation in general) I would check out the module "Language Revitalisation in a Global Context" - usually run by Ben (another really sound lad from the department who teaches Irish and Scottish Gaelic) - I think that module is available in Second and/or Third year. But I do recommend it!

Apologies for answering this so late - feel free to send another message if you have any more questions.

Cofion gorau!

#ask #gofyn #cwestiwn #luke's originals #Aberystwyth #Welsh #welsh language #cymblr

[autumnslance]

Hi! I always find your answers to writing questions enlightening, so I hope you can help me as well. I'm working on my first FFXIV fic, but English isn't my first language and I find staying true to canon characters speech pattern difficult (it's not really the English I'm used to) and I'm completely frightened by when I'll have to write Urianger. Do you have any resources or advice for that? Sorry for the weird question and thank you in advance ❤️

The language in FFXIV, in EN and as far as I know JP, is using a slightly archaic mode of speech that is even difficult for native speakers sometimes. So it's easy to feel confused and intimidated by it! Words like gaol, chirugeon, corse, swiving, and so on are are all real words that have fallen out of common use. The etymology of "gun" in the lore mirrors that of the real world (related to a queen's name). Even the Thieves Cant used by Limsa's Rogues Guild is based in reality (with some substitutions made), and can be looked up. The writers and translators are, funnily enough, language nerds. The names of various things/groups/etc usually actually mean something and aren't just made up entirely.

In universe, the reason EN Urianger talks in a version of Modern English (other translations of Urianger apparently don't go quite so archaic) is due of his childhood tendencies to self-isolate and read older books, adopting those speech patterns cuz he's a quirky nerd. Loiusoix gave that explanation in 1.x, and it's reiterated in Urianger's lorebook entry.

(Modern English starts in the late 14th century and early versions are recognizable if difficult to parse, versus Middle or Old English which are incomprehensible without study.)

Reading (or watching/listening) to Shakespearian English is a good way to get more used to Urianger's speech. Also they really are fun plays and poems; they were written for everyone to enjoy as popular entertainment, and are full of jokes and goofiness, even many of the tragedies. People think they're stuffy highbrow (they're not), and the cultural/social contexts are missing in a lot of cases anymore (the "William Shakespeare" tag on my main blog has more of that).

Writers off the top of my head to subscribe to who ship with the fortune-teller so write him often are @gunbun and @beetlebrownleaf; they've got his speech patterns and mannerisms pretty well down.

Here are some posts in my "language" tag (which I also often tag with Urianger and Midgardsormr, as he and some of the First Brood also speak a bit archaic):

Archaic Words - a short list of archaic words and their meanings.

Urianger Language Infographic - one fun way to try to learn the thy/thou/thee.

How To Thou/Thee/Thy/Thine/Ye Chart - what is says on the tin. Another handy method that may work for folks.

More Infographs - more silly pics explaining those pesky pronouns.

Discussion Thread on Modern English - random info thread from Tumblr users.

Urianger Discuss Thread - beetlebrownleaf and gunbun discussing Urianger-speak and some off-Tumblr resources they use when writing our favorite nerd.

One thing to remember about Modern/Shakespearian/Elizabethan English is "thee/thou/thy/thine" were actually informal, while "you" was formal. Like how some languages now have informal "you" versus formal "you." "Tu" versus "vous" in French, "tú" versus "usted" in Spanish, etc. And then we get into the plurals, and so on.

Which means Ye (subject)/You (object)/Your get used as both Plural and Formal.

Thou is Singular You as the Subject. Thee is Singular You as the Object. Thy is used for words starting with Consonants. Thine is used for words starting with Vowels ("H" counts).

If using "Thine", then that's when you'd use "Mine"; one of the links gives the example of "thine eyes" versus "mine eyes."

Doth = Does In fact, -eth and -th verb endings? It's just -es and -s endings.

Second person changes this up and we end up with "thou dost", "thou willt", "thou shallt".

"Ye" is actually not used for "The." That comes from an old letter no longer used in English, þ ("thorn"), that used to be the "th" sound, and as the letter fell out of use--especially in early printing--the letter "y" was substituted as a close visual equivalent but still pronounced "th". Which is why we have all those RenFaire signs.

There's more, so please check the links (especially gunbun's offsite resources) as of course there are irregular conjugations and exceptions and substitutions and special circumstances...but honestly for fanfic, just having "you" and basic verb conjugation sorted goes a long way to getting the correct "feel" of Urianger's EN speech.

In the end though: don't actually be intimidated by the language in FFXIV when it comes to writing fanfiction. Getting the NPCs to act and think in character regardless of language use is more important if aiming for authenticity. You can do your best with making the language sound close to the game's writing (avoid modern slang you don't see in game, for instance), but it's fanfic. Don't sweat it, ignore the grousing of your word doc's grammar check as needed, and it'll come easier in time with practice.

#Final Fantasy XIV #Lyn prompts #Urianger Augurelt #Writing #Language #Words #Definitions #Fanfiction #Resources #Reference

[wuxiaphoenix]

Worldbuilding: Some Writing References On The Little Ice Age

A reader asked for a list of what I was reading recently for an Idea. Specifically, someone dumped into a fantasy version of the 1600s near Korea. (The poor guy.) So I started pulling it together....

Er. It was a lot longer than I thought.

So. What I’ve read in the past or currently related to this includes....

Ancient Inventions, by Peter James. Ranges across the world and history up to the Middle Ages, never a lot of details but plenty of pics, and there’s bits on acupuncture, how old sewing is, and why before steam engines you wanted a waterwheel near a mine, if you could.

Several books by Conrad Totman: Early Modern Japan. Japan: An Environmental History. The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan. These books aim for an environmental slant, but they also end up covering a lot of daily life and political maneuvers because, guess what, what people do that way affects the environment! Also he is an excellent writer, with good flow.

The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto, by Mary Elizabeth Berry. Warning, this one can be a bit dark, a lot of people died in the Warring States Era, and the attitude of survivors of a whole century-plus of constant war was sometimes not healthy.

Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan, by Giles Milton. Focuses on our sailor, but gets into Japanese politics versus the rest of the world, and how that worked out for the English, Portuguese, and Dutch who wanted to trade. (The Dutch won for a lot of reasons, but mainly because they were smart enough to bring wanted products instead of broadcloth, and kept religion out of it.)

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann. Have read from local libraries, sometime want to get a reference copy. Covers the ecological consequences of Columbus and everyone sailing after him, with consequences that rocked around the world as new plants, animals, and diseases spread.

A book on a Japanese diving village which I cannot find the name for, darn it. For all I know it was a very small press thing; it was in an EPA library, of all places. It was black-and-white photography of the people, what they did, and how they lived. Maybe 60-odd pages? If you ever read my fanfic “Shadows in Starlight” and wondered where I got the fishing village that saved Obi-Wan and Kenshin out of a scrape, it’s from this book, as well as the next one.

Fishing Villages in Tokugawa Japan, by Arne Kalland. Unfortunately, this one appears to be out of print. I hope my copy made it through the move. A lot of dry anthropological detail, but it covers how plain old ordinary fisherfolk lived in those times, including their farming and salt-making.

Everyday Life in Joseon Korea. Got this a couple months ago; it’s a translated collection of essays by Korean historians, and is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. It’s got a whole farming calendar, things people ate, how they traded, how they made salt, why you wanted to be a translator if you could, and a bunch of political shenanigans to boot.  

Ginseng and Borderland, by Seonmin Kim. Also a recent acquisition. Mostly about the Joseon Dynasty’s interactions with the Qing Empire, and how they leveraged being a dependent kingdom in a kind of political judo to keep Chinese armies off their border. So a little later than I’m aiming, but it does bring up “what the situation was in Ming before things got messy”. And it’s about ginseng, and the lengths people go to get it, and that is just plain interesting.

Side note here: If you study biogeography at all, there is an interesting biological hiccup in what species are where that no one’s quite pinned down the reason for yet. In short: there are a lot of species in Eastern Asia (including Japan) that have related species in the Southeastern U.S. For example, while crocodiles are across the globe, there are only two species of alligators: American and Chinese. There are three species of wisteria; Chinese, Japanese, and American. And depending who you ask, there are only two or three species of ginseng. Native to - have you guessed yet? - East Asia, historically Manchuria/Northern Korea... and the one in the Appalachians (also in Wisconsin). So if you’ve spent time in the Southeast, there’s... how to put it... a baseline familiarity about the environment over there.

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker. This one I’ve got now, and am making my way through.

Kindle samples I’ve read, and I want the whole book of, include:

Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets, by Sunglim Kim. From the way the book’s presented on Amazon you’d think it was a dry academic analysis of art styles. For all I know what’s past the sample might have some of that, but the start, at least, has tons of bits of info on who was making art, why, where they lived, and what businesses and people could be found where in Hanseong (modern-day Seoul). So it’s potentially a treasure trove of details. Interesting.

A Global History of Ginseng: Imperialism, Modernity and Orientalism, by Heasim Sul. Again, ginseng and history.

Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea by Don Baker and Franklin Rausch. So far an interesting look on the Confucian mindset, and what problems there were with it; some of which led to conversions to Catholicism in Joseon Korea. Only Confucianism was considered the basis of the state, and things got very messy.

The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History, by Tonio Andrade. Covers gunpowder, how it developed, and why there was eventually a split between Europe and China in tech. The author thinks the main problem may have been the Qing Empire had too few enemies, until it suddenly had too many enemies. And thus lost the institutional military skills and know-how needed to keep militaries innovating.

Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan, by Jakobina K. Arch. Where Conrad Totman covered “The Green Archipelago” of Early Modern Japan, and how it kept pressing against its ecological limits, this book wants to cover the “Aquamarine Archipelago” and explore how Japan exploited marine resources through the Tokugawa age on.

The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush, William Haboush, and Jisoo Kim. Covers the Imjin War, the surprising amount of ordinary people rising in militias, and how that got people of the Joseon Dynasty to start thinking of themselves as a nation instead of just a kingdom.

And there’s at least a half-dozen more samples on Ming, Qing, and Joseon Korea I haven’t gotten to quite yet....

*Stares at list.*

...You know that face you make when you realize you could drop a thousand on Amazon, easy, and barely make a Wishlist dent? Yeah, I’m making that face.

(Especially if I got some of the DVDs I want for story research. Dr. Jin and Live Up To Your Name, to list two. Timetravel isekai! With doctors!)

So! Hope this might come in handy; either for direct research, or for people trying to get a handle on “what do I look for to research history beyond politics?”

#creative writing #writing reference #little ice age #korean history #chinese history #american history #environmental history #isekai

[howelljenkins]

As a muslim Iraqi American with a significant tumblr following, I feel as though I should let it be known exactly where I stand when it comes to Riordan’s statement about Samirah. I have copied and pasted it down below and my reaction to it will be written down below. This will be the first time I have read it. If you want to engage with me or tell me that I’m wrong, I expect you to be a muslim, hijabi, Iraqi American, and from Baghdad. If you are not, I suggest you sit down and keep quiet because you are not the authority on the way I should be represented.

Like many of my characters, Samirah was inspired by former students of mine. Over the course of my middle school teaching career, I worked with dozens of Muslim students and their families, representing the expanse of the Muslim world and both Shia and Sunni traditions. One of my most poignant memories about the September 11, 2001, attack of the World Trade Center was when a Muslima student burst into tears when she heard the news – not just because it was horrific, but also because she knew what it meant for her, her family, her faith. She had unwillingly become an ambassador to everyone she knew who, would have questions about how this attack happened and why the perpetrators called themselves “Muslim.” Her life had just become exponentially more difficult because of factors completely beyond her control. It was not right. It was not fair. And I wasn’t sure how to comfort or support her.

Starting off your statement with one of the most traumatic events in history for muslim Americans is already one of the most predictably bad moves he could pull. By starting off this way, you are acknowledging the fact that a) this t*rrorist attack is still the first thing you think of when you think of muslims and b) that those muslim students who you had prior to 9/11 occupied so little space in your mind that it took a national disaster for you to start to even try to empathize with them.

During the following years, I tried to be especially attuned to the needs of my Muslim students. I dealt with 9/11 the same way I deal with most things: by reading and learning more. When I taught world religions in social studies, I would talk to my Muslim students about Islam to make sure I was representing their experience correctly. They taught me quite a bit, which eventually contributed to my depiction of Samirah al-Abbas. As always, though, where I have made mistakes in my understanding, those mistakes are wholly on me.

As always, you have chosen to use “I based this character off my students” in order to justify the way they are written. News flash: you taught middle school children. Children who are already scrutinized and alienated and desperate to fit in. Of course their words shouldn’t be enough for you to decide you are representing them correctly, because they are still coming to terms with their identities and they are doing this in an environment where they are desperate to find the approval of white Americans. I know that as a child I would often tweak the way I explained my culture and religion to my teachers in order to gain their approval and avoid ruffling any feathers. They told you what they thought you’d want to hear because you are their teacher and hold a position of power over them and they both want your approval and want to avoid saying the wrong thing and having that hang over their heads every time they enter your classroom.

What did I read for research? I have read five different English interpretations of the Qur’an. (I understand the message is inseparable from the original Arabic, so it cannot be considered ‘translated’). I have read the entirety of the Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim hadith collections. I’ve read three biographies of Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) and well over a dozen books about the history of Islam and modern Islam. I took a six-week course in Arabic. (I was not very good at it, but I found it fascinating). I fasted the month of Ramadan in solidarity with my students. I even memorized some of the surahs in Arabic because I found the poetry beautiful. (They’re a little rusty now, I’ll admit, but I can still recite al-Fātihah from memory.) I also read some anti-Islamic screeds written in the aftermath of 9/11 so I would understand what those commenters were saying about the religion, and indirectly, about my students. I get mad when people attack my students.

And yet here you are actively avoiding the criticism from those of us who could very well have been the children sitting in your classroom. 

The Quran is so deep and complex that its meanings are still being discovered to this day. Yes, reading these old scripts is a must for writing muslim characters, but you cannot claim to understand them without also holding active discussions with current scholars on how the Quran’s teachings apply today.

When preparing to write Samirah’s background, I drew on all of this, but also read many stories on Iraqi traditions and customs in particular and the experiences of immigrant families who came to the U.S. I figured out how Samirah’s history would intertwine with the Norse world through the medieval writer Ahmad ibn Fadhlan, her distant ancestor and one of the first outsiders to describe the Vikings in writing.  I knew Samirah would be a ferocious brave fighter who always stood for what was right. She would be an excellent student who had dreams of being an aviator. She would have a complicated personal situation to wrestle with, in that she’s a practicing Muslim who finds out Valhalla is a real place. Odin and Thor and Loki are still around. How do you reconcile that with your faith? Not only that, but her mom had a romance with Loki, who is her dad. Yikes.

First of all, writing this paragraph in the same tone you use to emulate a 12 year old is already disrespectful. “Yikes” is correct. You have committed serious transgressions and can’t even commit to acting serious and writing like the almost 60 year old man that you are. Tone tells the reader a lot, and your tone is telling me that you are explaining your mistakes the same way you tell your little stories: childishly and jokingly. 

Stories are not enough. They are not and never will be. Stories cannot even begin to pierce the rich culture and history and customs of Iraq. Iraq itself is not even homogenous enough for you to rely on these “Iraqi” stories. Someone’s story from Najaf is completely unique from someone from Baghdad or Nasriyyah or Basrah or Mosul. Add that to the fact that these stories are written with a certain audience in mind and you realize that there’s no way they can tell the whole story because at their core they are catering to a specific audience.

Yes, those are good, but they are meaningless without you consulting an actual Baghdadi and asking specific questions. You made conclusions and assumptions based on these stories when the obvious way to go was to consult someone from Baghdad every step of the writing process. Instead, you chose to trust the conclusions that you (a white man) drew from a handful of stories. Who are you to convey a muslim’s internal struggle when you did not even do the bare minimum and have an actual muslim read over your words?

Thankfully, the feedback from Muslim readers over the years to Samirah al-Abbas has been overwhelmingly positive. I have gotten so many letters and messages online from young fans, talking about how much it meant to them to see a hijabi character portrayed in a positive light in a ‘mainstream’ novel.

Yeah. Because we’re desperate, and half of them are children still developing their sense of self and critical reading skills. A starving man will thank you for moldy bread but that does not negate the mold. 

Some readers had questions, sure! The big mistake I will totally own, and which I have apologized for many times, was my statement that during the fasting hours of Ramadan, bathing (i.e. total immersion in water) was to be avoided. This was advice I had read on a Shia website when I myself was preparing to fast Ramadan. It is advice I followed for the entire month. Whoops! The intent behind that advice, as I understood it, was that if you totally immersed yourself during daylight hours, you might inadvertently get some water between your lips and invalidate your fast. But, as I have since learned, that was simply one teacher’s personal opinion, not a widespread practice. We have corrected this detail (which involved the deletion of one line) in future editions, but as I mentioned in my last post, you will still find it in copies since the vast majority of books are from the first printing.

This is actually really embarrassing for you and speaks to your lack of research and reading comprehension. It is true that for shia, immersion breaks one’s fast. If you had bothered to actually ask questions and use common sense, you would realize that this is referring to actions like swimming, where one’s whole body is underwater, rather than bathing. Did you not question the fact that the same religion that encourages the cleansing of oneself five times a day banned bathing during the holiest month? Yes, it was one teacher’s opinion, but you literally did not even take the time to fully understand that opinion before chucking it into your book.

Another question was about Samirah’s wearing of the hijab. To some readers, she seemed cavalier about when she would take it off and how she would wear it. It’s not my place to be prescriptive about proper hijab-wearing. As any Muslim knows, the custom and practice varies greatly from one country to another, and from one individual to another. I can, however, describe what I have seen in the U.S., and Samirah’s wearing of the hijab reflects the practice of some of my own students, so it seemed to be within the realm of reason for a third-generation Iraqi-American Muslima. Samirah would wear hijab most of the time — in public, at school, at mosque. She would probably but not always wear it in Valhalla, as she views this as her home, and the fallen warriors as her own kin. This is described in the Magnus Chase books. I also admit I just loved the idea of a Muslima whose hijab is a magic item that can camouflage her in times of need.

Before I get into this paragraph, Samirah is second generation. Her grandparents immigrated from Iraq. Her mother was first gen.

Once again, you turn to what you have seen from your students, who are literal children. They are in middle school while Samirah is in high school, so they are very obviously at different stages of development, both emotional and religious. If you had bothered to talk to adults who had gone through these stages, you would understand that often times young girls have stages where they “practice” hijab or wear it “part time”, very often in middle school. However, both her age and the way in which you described Samirah lead the reader to believe that she is a “full timer,” so you playing willy nilly with her scarf as a white man is gross.

For someone who claims to have read all of these religious texts, it’s funny that you choose to overlook the fact that “kin” is very specifically described. Muslims do not go around deciding who they consider “kin” or “family” to take off their hijab in front of. There is no excuse for including this in her character, especially since you claim to have carefully read the Quran and ahadith.

You have no place to “just love” any magical extension of the hijab until you approach it with respect. Point blank period. Especially when you have ascribed it a magical property that justifies her taking it on and off like it’s no big deal, especially when current media portrayals of hijab almost always revolve around it being removed. You are adding to the harmful portrayal and using your “fun little magic camoflauge” to excuse it.

As for her betrothal to Amir Fadhlan, only recently have I gotten any questions about this. My understanding from my readings, and from what I have been told by Muslims I know, is that arranged marriages are still quite common in many Muslim countries (not just Muslim countries, of course) and that these matches are sometimes negotiated by the families when the bride-to-be and groom-to-be are quite young. Prior to writing Magnus Chase, one of the complaints I often heard or read from Muslims is how Westerners tend to judge this custom and look down on it because it does not accord with Western ideas. Of course, arranged marriages carry the potential for abuse, especially if there is an age differential or the woman is not consulted. Child marriages are a huge problem. The arrangement of betrothals years in advance of the marriage, however, is an ancient custom in many cultures, and those people I know who were married in this way have shared with me how glad they were to have done it and how they believe the practice is unfairly villainized. My idea with Samirah was to flip the stereotype of the terrible abusive arranged match on its head, and show how it was possible that two people who actually love each other dearly might find happiness through this traditional custom when they have families that listen to their concerns and honor their wishes, and want them to be happy. Amir and Samirah are very distant cousins, yes. This, too, is hardly unusual in many cultures. They will not actually marry until they are both adults. But they have been betrothed since childhood, and respect and love each other. If that were not the case, my sense is that Samirah would only have to say something to her grandparents, and the match would be cancelled. Again, most of the comments I have received from Muslim readers have been to thank me for presenting traditional customs in a positive rather than a negative light, not judging them by Western standards. In no way do I condone child marriage, and that (to my mind) is not anywhere implied in the Magnus Chase books.

I simply can’t even begin to explain everything that is wrong with this paragraph. Here is a good post about how her getting engaged at 12 is absolutely wrong religiously and would not happen. Add that on to the fact that Samirah herself is second-generation (although Riordan calls her third generation in this post) and this practice isn’t super common even in first generation people (and for those that it DOES apply to, it is when they are old enough to be married and not literal children). 

As a white man you can’t flip the stereotype. You can’t. Even with tons of research you cannot assume the authority to “flip” a stereotype that does not affect you because you will never come close to truly understanding it inside and out. Instead of flipping a stereotype, Rick fed into it and provided more fodder to the flames and added on to it to make it even worse.

I would be uncomfortable with a white author writing about arranged marriages in brown tradition no matter the context, but for him to offhandedly include it in a children’s book where it is badly explained and barely touched on is inexcusable. Your target audience is children who will no doubt overlook your clumsy attempt at flipping stereotypes.

It does not matter what your mind thinks you are implying. Rick Riordan is not your target audience, children are. So you cannot brush this away by stating that you did not see the harm done by your writing. You are almost 60 years old. Maybe you can read in between your lines, but I guarantee your target audience largely cannot.

Finally, recently someone on Twitter decided to screenshot a passage out-of-context from Ship of the Deadwhere Magnus hears Samirah use the phrase “Allahu Akbar,” and the only context he has ever heard it in before was in news reports when some Western reporter would be talking about a terrorist attack. Here is the passage in full:

Samirah: “My dad may have power over me because he’s my dad. But he’s not the biggest power. Allahu akbar.”

I knew that term, but I’d never heard Sam use it before. I’ll admit it gave me an instinctive jolt in the gut. The news media loved to talk about how terrorists would say that right before they did something horrible and blew people up. I wasn’t going to mention that to Sam. I imagined she was painfully aware.

She couldn’t walk the streets of Boston in her hijab most days without somebody screaming at her to go home, and (if she was in a bad mood) she’d scream back, “I’m from Dorchester!”

“Yeah,” I said. “That means God is great, right?”

Sam shook her head. “That’s a slightly inaccurate translation. It means God is greater.”

“Than what?”

“Everything. The whole point of saying it is to remind yourself that God is greater than whatever you are facing—your fears, your problems, your thirst, your hunger, your anger.

337-338

To me, this is Samirah educating Magnus, and through him the readers, about what this phrase actually means and the religious significance it carries. I think the expression is beautiful and profound. However, like a lot of Americans, Magnus has grown up only hearing about it in a negative context from the news. For him to think: “I had never heard that phrase, and it carried absolutely no negative connotations!” would be silly and unrealistic. This is a teachable moment between two characters, two friends who respect each other despite how different they are. Magnus learns something beautiful and true about Samirah’s religion, and hopefully so do the readers. If that strikes you as Islamophobic in its full context, or if Samirah seems like a hurtful stereotype . . . all I can say is I strongly disagree.

I will give you some credit here in that I mostly agree with this scene. The phrase does carry negative connotations with many white people and I do not fault you for explaining it the way you did. However, don’t try to sneak in that last sentence like we won’t notice. You have no place to decide whether or not Samirah’s character as a whole is harmful and stereotypical. 

It is 2 am and that is all I have the willpower to address. This is messy and this is long and this is not well worded, but this had to be addressed. I do not speak for every muslim, both world wide and within this online community, but these were my raw reactions to his statement. I have been working on and will continue to work on a masterpost of Samirah Al-Abbas as I work through the books, but for now, let it be known that Riordan has bastardized my identity and continues to excuse himself and profit off of enforcing harmful stereotypes. Good night.

#* #og #rr crit #samirah al abbas #rick riordan

[spanishskulduggery]

Do you know of any fossil words in Spanish, words that used to be common but fell out of use and are now only preserved in idioms? I tried looking on Google but all the results were English-only examples

I'll try and think of some others but here are the ones that come to mind; and I’m not sure all of these will be what you’re looking for.

si fuere menester = "in the event of" el menester used to be fairly common especially in the Medieval period, where it was another word for "need" or "necessity". Today you only see menester in si fuere menester which is an unusual construction as it is, since fuere is the future subjunctive - which is an obsolete tense - and so it literally means "should it be necessary". This expression only now shows up in contracts and legal contexts normally as "in the event of"

donde fueres haz lo que vieres = "when in Rome... (do as the Romans do)" Again, this is future subjunctive; literally "wherever you go, do what you see".. but in a more obtuse future subjunctive way "wherever you should happen to go, do whatever you may happen to see"

la urdimbre y trama = "warp and weft" The idea of this is related to "weaving", and though this phrase is rather antiquated or particular, it occasionally shows up as something like la urdimbre y trama de la sociedad or something where that's "the fabric of society". It's not the way you say that so much now [el tejido or la tela are more common], but urdir "to warp" was related to working a loom. You still do use tramar but it's not often that you see it related to weaving anymore... tramar is "to plot" or "to hatch a scheme", but you can see how "weaving" would go into "plotting"

so pena de = "under pain of" You don't often see so used in Spanish today, since it's a more direct link to Latin and Italian. And today la pena rarely means "pain" in the physical sense, it usually means "sorrow" or "anguish"... but again in legal cases, so pena de muerte is "under pain/penalty of death"

a diestra y siniestra = "all over the place" This expression literally means "to the right and left". The word diestro/a is still "right-handed" (also means "skillful" or "dexterous"), but siniestro/a used to mean "left-handed"... the idea that the left hand was more evil and "sinister", and "under-handed". In older contexts, siniestro/a means "left-handed", but in modern contexts you say zurdo/a for "left-handed"

al tuntún = "impromptu", "improvise", "on the fly", "by ear" This expression is derived from Latin, ad vultum tuum which is literally "to your face" in Latin. You never see tuntún anymore unless something is done al tuntún but it might be more regional; it just means you're making it up as you go

dormir como un ceporro = "to sleep like a log" Most people today say dormir como un tronco which is the same idea; el ceporro is a variation but it's extremely unusual to see it. Most people will use tronco if they have to

tuerto/a = one-eyed I'm actually not sure if people use tuerto/a still, since there are other ways to say "blind in one eye" or "one-eyed". In older Spanish, tuerto could show up as a "grievance", but in the expression en el reino de ciegos el tuerto es rey is still used sometimes, literally "in the kingdom of blind people, the one-eyed man is the king"

(el) haba = bean [technically haba is feminine] Not common to see el haba used much anymore except in certain contexts, and it's the root of la habichuela "bean". In Spain, sometimes haba is "idiot" so if you see el tonto del haba it's like "the biggest idiot that ever lived"

Vuestra Merced = "Your Lordship/Ladyship" This is the original form of it, but it eventually turned into usted "you" used for polite things. The title was Vuestra Merced and it was how you addressed someone without knowing their title, so it became very polite. In older Spanish you'd abbreviate it as Vd. which eventually became Ud. as the abbreviation for usted. Keep in mind that at a certain point in time, Spanish wrote the U sound as a V, and it followed more of the Latin pronunciation where the V had a softer U/W sound at times. Outside of Spain and works set in older time periods, you're unlikely to use vuestro/a - it even became informal plural "you all" in Spain - but you rarely ever see merced used. Chances are you're only going to see it was vuestra in front of it. But just know that vos has a very different meaning today than it did in the Middle Ages

meter/sembrar cizaña = "to sow discord" You're never going to see cizaña used in any other context unless you happen upon some botanical book. The literal translation is "darnel" which is sometimes called "false wheat"; basically la cizaña looks like trigo "wheat", and it grows close to wheat but it often has a fungus that's poisonous so you need to separate it. The idea behind it is that if you're deliberately planting cizaña you're actively trying to poison someone or make things worse

la celestina = "a go-between, a mediator" This word comes directly from La Celestina a novel written in Spain's Golden Age by Fernando de Rojas. In it there's a woman named Celestina who sets up meetings between women living in convents (who weren't always nuns) and men; acting as a go-between and chaperone for love affairs basically. The term was also la alcahueta but became celestina after the character in the book. Certain characters in literature are considered celestinas like the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet; basically the girl/woman can't risk her reputation so she has her maid or chaperone working to arrange things, and they're often the catalyst for things going wrong. In other contexts, celestina or una alcahueta is a "pimp" or "madame", or sometimes "a gossip"

pardo/a = brown, brownish-gray Today you’re only really going to see pardo/a used with animals. Specifically, el oso pardo is a “grizzly bear”, and pardo/a can be used with horses as “dun”. I don’t know if “grizzly bear” counts as an expression but anyway. In older Spanish pardo/a was another word for “brown” when it came to people too. Today, if you’re describing hair color as “brown/brunette” you’re using castaño which is literally “chestnut”, either castaño claro “light brown” or castaño oscuro “dark brown”. When it comes to things that are brown, the typical word is now marrón or sometimes you see it as color café which is “coffee-colored”

ser un caco = to be a thief Not commonly used as ladrón, ladrona “thief”, but un caco literally means “a Cacus”. Basically, Cacus was a mythological figure who stole some cattle and Hercules killed him. In some places people use un caco to mean “thief” as a euphemism

la Parca = the Grim Reaper Orginally, las Parcas were the Parcae in Roman (originally Greek) mythology. They were the sisters of fate who would measure someone’s life and eventually cut the thread. Today, it’s just one Parca and it’s typically a male figure, skeletal, with a scythe as the “Grim Reaper”, rather than it being a woman with scissors. That’s because during the Plague, people thought of Death as being a skeletal figure that held a scythe, the symbol for “reaping” wheat that was ripe.

manjar de los dioses = “nectar of the gods” / a delicacy el manjar is used in some places in certain contexts but it originally came from Italian as “food” or something “to eat”. Today, manjar is usually a “snack”, or in some cases it’s dulce de leche, but most of the Spanish-speaking world doesn’t use manjar so much. It is sometimes “delicacy”, but in older contexts it was code for “ambrosia”, the thing that the Greek gods couldn’t get enough of. The world manjar still feels very antiquated to me, but when it’s used it’s some kind of good food or eating a lot of food

valer un potosí = “to be worth a fortune” un potosí is pretty antiquated, but it came from the city Potosí in Bolivia which was famous for its silver mines that the conquistadores exploited. There are still some places that will use potosí as “something of great value”, though it’s not so common anymore unless you’re talking about the actual city.

moros y cristianos = “beans and rice” Usually it’s black beans and white rice, though this is literally “Moors and Christians”. You still use cristiano/a today but typically you only use moro/a in a historical sense

Also there’s the expression más sordo/a que una tapia where it means someone is really hard of hearing; literally “as deaf as a garden wall”, but I’ve never seen people use tapia ...only a muro or a cerca as “wall” or “fence”. The idea of tapiar is related to “mortar” and “masonry”

There are also some expressions related to metal and older words for it. For example, saturnino/a is an older word for “gloomy”, though it now refers to “lead-poisoning”. Saturn was linked to “moodiness” in alchemical society, and the symbol for Saturn was the older symbol for “lead”. 

This is similar to how áureo/a is “gold” but also linked to the “sun” because the Sun and gold are linked.

Another is el azogue which is the older word for mercury so it’d be “quicksilver”. You may see azogarse in some texts where it means “to be fidgetty” and it’s related both to mercury-poisoning, and probably to the idea of Mercury/Hermes being the messenger god so always on the move. 

There is also hidalgo/a which doesn’t have quite the same meaning it did originally. Today, hidalgo/a is sort of like “having noble blood”. It literally means “son of something/someone”, where originally in Spain hidalgos were the children of nobles - specifically, it tended to refer to the children of nobles who weren’t the firstborn male. Firstborn sons often got about 2/3 of the money and were expected to run the estates. The second or third or fourth children were usually on their own. It became a running joke that the firstborn became the lord, and the others would either join the army or the clergy. In Cervantes’s time, hidalgos could be among the poorest of society, even poorer than slaves in some cases. They were still “noble” in terms of blood though, and hidalgos couldn’t be tortured by the Inquisition because of it. So they were afforded certain rights, but usually tended to be poor or lower than you’d expect a noble to be. Today it just means “of nobility”, but in Cervantes’s time a hidalgo was the symbol of Spain under the Holy Roman Empire - wealthy and noble and glorious in theory, much poorer in reality.

I'd also add the phrases levar ancla "to raise anchor" or "anchors aweigh/away", where levar is rarely used today aside from nautical terms. Similarly, izar la bandera is "to hoist the flag"... not a lot of chances to use izar if it's not related to "flags" or la vela "a sail"

I also would say errar is less common today in Spanish. It's still used, but you normally say cometer un error "to make a mistake". Still, errar es humano, perdonar es divino "to err is human, to forgive divine". Also errar is weirdly irregular at times, it turns into yerro as present tense yo

And I’m also going to include when la manzana means a “city block”. Today manzana is not rare, it means “apple”. But manzana as a “city block” was originally mansana where it meant a “collection of manses/houses arranged in a block on a grid”. So there’s that. If you ever see manzana used for blocks in a city, it’s technically a separate word

Also depending on context el mar “sea” will be la mar with the feminine article. That’s usually more particular, usually meaning “open water” or deeper waters like alta mar “high seas”. The more poetic or open the water is, the more likely it is to be feminine, and so la mar isn’t quite so antiquated but it’s a little special

#Spanish #language #langblr #langauges

[lacrimosathedark]

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.)

#Resident Evil #Resident Evil 7 #Resident Evil 8 #Resident Evil VII #Resident Evil VIII #Resident Evil Biohazard #Resident Evil Village #Ethan Winters #Mia Winters #E-001 Eveline #Jack Baker #Margueritte Baker #Lucas Baker #Zoe Baker #Joe Baker #Rosemary Winters #Rose Winters #Mother Miranda #The Duke #Alcina Dimitrescu #Bela Dimitrascu #Cassandra Dimitrscu #Daniela Dimitrescu #Donna Beneviento #Angie Beneviento #Claudia Beneviento #Salvatore Moreau #Karl Heisenberg

[bean-na-farraige-agus-foraoise]

Do you have any particular resources for “Eostre” being Bede’s own creation? I know there’s no other attestation and that there are debates among scholars as to this hypothetical goddess’s existence, but if you have the time/energy, I’d love to see more resources on it being definitively a joke / fake from Bede, rather than just a possible goddess we know very little about.

It’s more the use of basic logic, so I’m just going to spell out my argument. I only have one direct quote so one citation, because again, my argument is based on logic and the way one ought to approach medieval sources that then get picked up by 19th century scholars. (I also discussed this at length with an old professor of mine who focuses on medieval theology so much of this is from my notes rather than like textbooks).

I first look at the author, Bede himself. He, like most historians of his day, is not exactly known for being accurate- his other most famous history, the  Ecclesiastical History of the English People is just chock full of propaganda, omissions, and his own personal agendas- he literally avoids talking to native Britons as he’s heavily biased against them. Bede has also been described as having “often used figures of speech and rhetorical forms which cannot easily be reproduced in translation, depending as they often do on the connotations of the Latin words (1)"- which in companion with the propaganda and his own personal agendas makes it very likely that someone unfamiliar with Bede’s writing style like... perhaps a certain German, possibly one by the name of Grimm, would take what he said at face value without taking into account any of the historical and ecclesiastical influences on Bede’s writing. 

The work that Eostre originates in is known as The Reckoning of Time, and focuses on one of Bede’s favorite topics... calendars. And I don’t want y’all to say that I’m making Bede out to be an idiot, because he isn’t, what I’m saying that the man is significantly more reliable as a scientist and a linguist than as a historian. The Reckoning of Time, written in 725, discusses things that a lot of modern day people think that those in the middle ages couldn’t possibly know such as an explanation of how the spherical Earth influenced the changing length of daylight, of how the seasonal motion of the Sun and Moon influenced the changing appearance of the new moon at evening twilight, and a quantitative relation between the changes of the tides at a given place and the daily motion of the Moon.

But the thing with Eostre is that the arguments made by proponents of Eostre’s reality don’t seem to add up. They argue that Eostre is a survival of the goddess  h₂éwsōs, who has a set mythology and role, she is the bringer of dawn, an opener of the doors of heaven, and a goddess of light- and while I have no linguistic scruples with the possibility that linguistically Eostre evolved from h₂éwsōs I do think that there are some issues with this argument. Eostre has no such role and indeed, according to proponents of her existence, like Grimm, has an entirely different role as a goddess of spring, of rebirth, a theme that by the first century AD was associated with Easter (aka several hundred years before we see Eostre being attested, and over a thousand years separated from Grimm’s claims). The associations with Easter and rebirth are what brings the rabbit and the egg into the picture. Furthermore when constructing an image of Eostre, Grimm and Holtzmann the individuals most responsible for the modern view of Eostre, just kinda..... pull aspects of goddesses from other cultures- they pull a little bit from Aphrodite, snag an aspect or two from Freyja. And in fact one of the most popular myths surrounding Eostre, that she turned a bird into a rabbit and that’s why the Easter rabbit lays eggs, was once described as “one of the oldest myths in the world” despite it being a recent fabrication as of 1900. 

Several older texts that mention Ostara such as the Althochdeutsches Schlummerlied announced in 1859 by Georg Zappert is considered a forgery. Grimm, Zappert, and Holtzmann were looking were a common thread of Germanic connection on which to build a German national mythology. Germany would not be a unified state until 1871 and was instead a region of disparate and often un-unified small states that were frequently invaded by larger nations, such as France. A German national mythology and a German national history came to be key points in the unification of Germany, and later became a focal point of German fascism. 

Furthermore much of the arguments in favor of Eostre seem to rely on what appear to me, to be flimsy linguistic claims that were only thought up in relation to Bede’s posited goddess Eostre and Grimm’s claims of Eostre’s importance in Germany despite his.... making up the things about her..... but I digress- many of the things that are held up as “proof” of Eostre’s existence seem to come from hypothetical linguistics, it’s very much an attempt to connect certain sounds and popular German names to a figure who’s existence was not mentioned prior to Bede’s work, who was popularized by a German nationalist, and then whose holiday was taken and used in what was asserted to be a survival of ancient religion (Wicca- as published in Gardner’s Witchcraft Today) just four years prior to the discovery of the artifacts that are shown as proof of Eostre’s existence in 1958. And while many of these inscriptions have been attributed to Eostre, many of the inscriptions are also incomplete, and several of them have been attributed to a social group rather than a deity. Claiming that a deity exists because you see what is believed to be a linguistic connection to their name (which again was not attested to until the 8th century) is just.... it’s like the Danu situation for Gaelpol all over again. Basing linguistic studies off of hypothetical goddesses with highly debatable origins just doesn’t feel like proof to me. 

But back to Bede, Eostre is not the only deity he just creates while writing The Reckoning of Time. And Eostre is not the only deity that Grimm grabs up as being a real Germanic figure who is otherwise unattested- Rheda is also just brought into existence and shoved into a similar situation as Eostre- made into a fertility goddess because of which month Bede ascribed them to and preconceived notions of what would be celebrated at that time of year based on over a thousand years of Christian influence and associations already held with the Easter holiday. Also, Grimm does the same thing to Rheda that he does to Eostre, in that, because nothing is given of her, he pulls aspects from other deities to flesh out her character- giving her similarities to the Roman Mars. 

And even beyond Bede’s writing- some arguments have posited that the age in which Bede was raised (shortly after the conversion was completed) would have allowed him to talk to people about aspects of religion that would have not have fully died out. Which is fair, but one must also keep in mind that Bede was sent to live in a monastery when he was 7 years old, and that he and the Abbot who raised him were among the only survivors of a plague that struck when Bede was 14. This was not a life that allowed for much other than ecclesiastical education- and Bede cites local pagan authors in his his other writing, but none of them discuss Eostre or Rheda. It seems to me as though when writing The Reckoning of Time, that Bede, who was also discussing Greek and Roman cosmology and mythology might have seen the space for a goddess of spring in Anglo-Saxon mythology and just filled in the gaps utilizing the Germanic word for Easter as his base (remember, Bede was a linguist). 

But beyond this, it’s important to me that people remember that medieval monks were human. They were political beings, they were capable of having a sense of humor, they had agendas- Bede’s agenda was calendars, but it was an agenda nonetheless. And historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, they all have agendas, they have opinions, things that influence their arguments- don’t just take what they say at face value but examine why. 

But I raise the bar to you now- why do you believe in a hypothetical goddess, what evidence do you have that says she’s real? 

Ultimately my only dog in this fight is historical literacy and accuracy because I don’t follow the Germanic gods, I’m a Gaelic polytheist. It doesn’t matter to me what gods people follow even if I think they don’t exist, that’s not my fight- but seeing people claim that a holiday was stolen from a hypothetical deity really grinds my gears- particularly when those arguments are coming from people who couldn’t give me a single academic argument for their stance that hasn’t been disproven a thousand times over. 

1. Colgrave, Bertram; Mynors, R.A.B. "Introduction". Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

[your-disobedient-servant]

Voltaire’s Paméla Letters Translated: Intro and Letter #1

The letters that Voltaire rewrote in the vein of Richardson’s Paméla after his falling out with Frederick the Great have intrigued me ever since I first heard of them in November or December. Only discovered to have been a rewrite and not originals in the late 20th century, it’s hard to say how much of it is authentic and how much exaggerated or made up, but for me, the fact that they have been altered only adds to the fascination.

Six months into learning French, I’m still not sure I’m quite ready to use this as translation exercises, but I’m impatient, I found the book for very cheap, and besides, I feel that to translate Voltaire you must channel some of the hubris, so bring it on. Poetry (to my surprise, it turns out I actually enjoy translating poetry in some masochistic way) and all. In the end, I am proud of the result.

This is not a very juicy letter, but I’m sure one will come along soon enough. I’m not sure how many will I be able to complete because there’s about fifty of them altogether, but I hope I manage at least a few.

Big thanks to everyone who helped me out with the draft. The rest under the cut for brevity, English followed by original French.

FIRST LETTER

In Clèves, July 1750

It is to you, please, niece of mine, to you, woman of a wit superb, philosopher of the selfsame kind, to you who, like me, of Permesse, knows the many paths diverse; it is to you I now address this disarray of prose and verse, recount my long odyssey's story; recount unlike I back then did when, in my splendid age's glory, I still kept to Apollo's writ; when I dared, perhaps courting disaster, for counsel strike for Paris forth, notwithstanding our minds' worth, the god of Taste, my foremost master!

This journey is only too true, and puts too much distance between you and me. Do not imagine that I want to rival Chapelle, who has made, I do not know how, such a reputation for himself for having been from Paris to Monpellier and to papal land, and for having reported to a gourmand.

It was not, perhaps, difficult when one wished to mock monsieur d'Assoucy. We need another style, we need another pen, to portray this Plato, this Solon, this Achilles who writes his verses at Sans-Souci. I could tell you of that charming retreat, portray this hero philosopher and warrior, so terrible to Austria, so trivial for me; however, that could bore you.

Besides, I am not yet at his court and you should not anticipate anything: I want order even in my letters. Therefore know that I left Compiègne on July 25th, taking my road to Flanders, and as a good historiographer and a good citizen, I went to see the fields of Fontenoy, of Rocoux and of Lawfeld on my way. There was no trace of it left: all of it was covered with the finest wheat in the world. The Flemish men and women were dancing, as if nothing had happened.

Go on, innocent eyes of this bad-mannered populace; reign, lovely Ceres, where Bellona once flourished; countryside fertilised with blood of our warriors, I like better your harvests than all of the laurels: provided by chance and by vanity nourished Oh! that grand projects were prevented by doom! Oh! fruitless victories! Oh! the blood spilled in vain! French, English, German so tranquil today did we have to slit throats for friendship to bloom!

I went to Clèves hoping to find there the stage stations that all the bailiwicks provide, at the order of the king of Prussia, to those who to go to philosophise to Sans-Souci with the Solomon of the North and on whom the king bestows the favour of travelling at his expense: but the order of the king of Prussia had stayed in Wesel in the hands of a man who received it as the Spanish receive the papal bulls, with the deepest respect, and without putting them to any use. So I spent a few days in the castle of this princess that madame de La Fayette made so famous.

But this heroine and the duc of Nemours, we ignore in these places the gallant adventure; for  it is not here, I vow, the land of novels, nor the one of love.

It is a shame, for the country seems made for the princesses of Clèves: it is the most beautiful place of nature and art has further added to its position. It is a view superior to that of Meudon; it is a land covered in vegetation like the Champs-Élysées and the forests of Boulogne; it is a hill covered in gently sloping avenues of trees: a large pool collects  the waters of this hill; in the middle of the pool stands a statue of Minerva. The water of this first pool is received by a second, which returns it to the third; and at the foot of the hill ends in a waterfall pouring into a vast, semi-circular grotto. The waterfall lets the waters spill into a canal, which goes on to water a vast meadow and joins a branch of the Rhine. Mademoiselle de Scudéri and La Calprenède would have filled a volume of their novels with this description; but I, historiographer, I will only tell you that a certain prince Maurice de Nassau, the governor, during his lifetime, of this lovely solitude devised nearly all of these wonders there. He lies buried in the middle of the forest, in a great devil of an iron tomb, surrounded by all the ugliest bas-reliefs of the time of the Roman empire's decadence, and some gothic monuments that are worse still. But all of it would be something very respectable for those deep minds who fall into ecstasy at the sight of poorly cut stone, as long as it is two thousand years old.

Another ancient monument, the remains of a great stone road, built by the Romans, which led to Frankfurt, to Vienna, and to Constantinople. The Holy Empire devolved into Germany has fallen a little bit from its magnificence. One gets stuck in the mud in the summer nowadays, in the august Germania. Of all the modern nations, France and the little country of Belgium are the only ones who have roads worthy of Antiquity. We could above all boast of surpassing the ancient Romans in cabaret; and there are still certain points on which we equal them: but in the end, when it comes to durable, useful, magnificent monuments, which people can come close to them? which monarch does in his kingdom what a procosul did in Nîmes and in Arles?

Perfect in the trivial, in trifles sublime great inventors of nothing, envy we excite. Let our minds to the supreme heights strive of the children of Romulus so proud: they did a hundred times more for the vanquished crowd than we solely for ourselves contrive.

In the end, notwithstanding the beauty of the location of Clèves, notwithstanding the Roman road, in spite of a tower believed to have been built by Julius Caesar, or at least by Germanicus; in spite of the inscriptions of the twenty-sixth legion that quartered here for the winter; in spite of the lovely tree-lined roads planted by prince Maurice, and his grand iron tomb; in spite of, lastly, the mineral waters recently discovered here, there are hardly any crowds in Clèves. The waters there are, however, just as good as those of Spa or of Forges; and one cannot swallow the little atoms of iron in a more beautiful place. But it does not suffice, as you know, to have merits to be fashionable: usefulness and pleasantness are here; but this delicious retreat is frequented only by a few Dutchmen, who are attracted by the proximity and the low prices of living and houses there, and who come to admire and to drink.

I found there, to my great satisfaction, a well-known Dutch poet, who gave us the honour of elegantly, and even verse for verse, translating our tragedies, good or bad, to Dutch. Perhaps one day we will be reduced to translating the tragedies of Amsterdam: every nation gets their turn.

The Roman ladies, who leered at their lovers at the theatre of Pompeii, did not suspect that one day, in the middle of Gaul, in a little town called Lutèce, we would produce better plays than Rome.

The order of the king regarding the stage stations has finally reached me; so my delight at the princess of Clèves' place is over, and I am leaving for Berlin.

***

LETTRE PREMIÈRE

À Clèves, juillet 1750

C'est à vous, s'il vous plaît, ma nièce, vous, femme d'esprit sans travers, philosophe de mon espèce, vous qui, comme moi, du Permesse connaisez les sentiers divers ; c'est à vous qu'en courant j'adresse ce fatras de prose et de vers, ce récit de mon long voyage ; non tel que j'en fis autrefois quand, dans la fleur de mon bel âge, d'Apollon je suivais les lois ; quand j'osai, trop hardi peut-être, aller consulter à Paris, en dépit de nos beaux esprits, le dieu du Goût mon premier maître !

Ce voyage-ci n'est que trop vrai, et ne m'éloigne que trop du vous. N'allez pas vous imaginer que je veulle égaler Chapelle, qui s'est fait, je ne sais comment, tant de réputation, pour avoir été de Paris à Montpellier et en terre papale, et en avoir rendu compte à un gourmand.

Ce n'était pas peut-être un emploi difficile de railler monsieur d'Assoucy. Il faut une autre plume, il faut une autre style, pour peindre ce Platon, ce Solon, cet Achille qui fait des vers à Sans-Souci. Je pourrais vous parler de ce charmant asile, vous peindre ce héros philosophe et guerrier, si terrible à l'Autriche, et pour moi si facile ; mais je pourrais vous ennuyer.

D'ailleurs je ne suis pas encore à sa cour, et il ne faut rien anticiper : je veux de l'ordre jusque dans mes lettres. Sachez donc que je partis de Compiègne le 25 de juillet, prenant ma route par la Flandre, et qu'en bon historiographe et en bon citoyen, j'allai voir en passant les champs de Fontenoy, de Rocoux et de Lawfeld. Il n'y paraissait pas : tout cela était couvert des plus beaux blés du monde. Les Flamands et les Flamandes dansaient, comme si de rien n'eût été.

Durez, yeux innocents de ces peuples grossiers ; régnez, belle Cérès, où triompha Bellone ; campagnes qu'engraissa le sang de nos guerriers, j'aime mieux vos moissons que celles des lauriers : la vanité les cueille et le hasard les donne. Ô que de grands projets par le sort démentis ! Ô victoires sans fruits ! Ô meurtres inutiles ! Français, Anglais, Germains, aujourd'hui si tranquilles fallait-il s'égorger pour être bons amis !

J'ai été à Clèves comptant y trouver des relais que tous les bailliages fournissent, moyennant un ordre du roi de Prusse, à ceux qui vont philosopher à Sans-Souci auprès du Salomon du Nord et à qui le roi accorde la faveur de voyager à ses dépens : mais l'ordre du roi de Prusse était resté à Vesel entre les mains d'un homme qui l'a reçu comme les Espagnols reçoivent les bulles des papes, avec le plus profond respect, et sans en faire aucun usage. Je me suis donc quelques jours dans le château de cette princesse que madame de La Fayette a rendu si fameux.

Mais de cette heroïne, et du duc de Nemours, on ignore en ces lieux la galante aventure : ce n'est pas ici, je vous jure, le pays des romans, ni celui des amours.

C'est dommage, car le pays semble fait pour des princesses de Clèves : c'est le plus beau lieu de nature et l'art a encore ajouté à sa situation. C'est une vue supérieure à celle de Meudon ; c'est un terrain planté comme les Champs-Élysées et le bois de Boulogne ; c'est une colline couverte d'allées d'arbres en pente douce : un grand bassin reçoit les eaux de cette colline ; au milieu du bassin s'élève une statue de Minerve. L'eau de ce premier bassin est reçue dans un second, qui la renvoie à un troisième ; et le bas de la colline est terminé par une cascade ménagée dans une vaste grotte en demi-cercle. La cascade laisse tomber les eaux dans un canal qui va arroser une vaste prairie et se joindre à un bras du Rhin. Mademoiselle de Scudéri et La Calprenède auraient rempli de cette description un tome de leurs romans ; mais moi, historiographe, je vous dirai seulement qu'un certain prince Maurice de Nassau, gouverneur, de son vivant, de cette belle solitude, y fit presque toutes ces merveilles. Il s'est fait enterrer au milieu des bois, dans un grand diable de tombeau de fer, environné de tous les plus vilains bas-reliefs du temps de la décadence de l'empire romain, et de quelques monuments gothiques plus grossiers encore. Mais le tout serait quelque chose de fort respectable pour ces esprits profonds qui tombent en extase à la vue d'une pierre mal taillée, pour peu qu'elle ait deux mille ans d'antiquité.

Un autre monument antique, c'est le reste d'un grand chemin pavé, construit par les Romains, qui allait à Francfort, à Vienne et à Constantinople. Le Saint-Empire dévolu à l'Allemagne est un peu déchu de sa magnificence. On s'embourbe aujourd'hui en été, dans l'auguste Germanie. De toutes les nations modernes, la France et la petit pays des Belges sont les seules qui aient des chemins dignes de l'Antiquité. Nous pouvons surtout nous vanter de passer les anciens Romains en cabarets ; et il y a encore certains points sur lesquels nous les valons bien : mais enfin, pour les monuments durables, utiles, magnifiques, quel peuple approche d'eux ? quel monarque fait dans son royaume ce qu'un proconsul faisait dans Nîmes et dans Arles ?

Parfait dans le petit, sublimes en bijoux, grands inventeurs de riens, nous faisons des jaloux. Elevons nos esprits à la hauteur suprême des fiers enfants de Romulus : ils faisaient plus cent fois pour des peuples vaincus que nous ne faisons pour nous-mêmes.

Enfin, malgré la beauté de la situation de Clèves, malgré le chemin des Romains, en dépit d'une tour qu'on croit bâtie par Jules César, ou au moins par Germanicus ; en dépit des inscriptions d'une vingt-sixième légion qui était ici en quartier d'hiver ; en dépit des belles allées plantées par le prince Maurice, et de son grand tombeau de fer ; en dépit enfin des eaux minérales découvertes ici depuis peu, il n'y a guère d'affluence à Clèves. Les eaux y sont cependant aussi bonnes que celles de Spa et de Forges ; et on ne peut avaler de petits atomes de fer dans un plus beau lieu. Mais il ne suffit pas, comme vous savez, d'avoir du mérite pour avoir la vogue : l'utile et l'agréable sont ici ; mais ce séjour délicieux n'est fréquenté que par quelques Hollandais que le voisinage et le bas prix des vivres et de maisons y attirent, et qui viennent admirer et boire.

J'y ai retrouvé, avec une très grande satisfaction, un célèbre poète hollandais, qui nous a fait l'honneur de traduire élégamment en batave, et même vers pour vers, nos tragédies bonnes ou mauvaises. Peut-être un jour viendra que nous serons réduits à traduire les tragédies d'Amsterdam : chaque peuple a son tour.

Les dames romaines, qui allaient lorgner leurs amants au théâtre de Pompée, ne se doutaient pas qu'un jour au milieu des Gaules, dans un petit bourg nommé Lutèce, on ferait de meilleurs pièces de théâtre qu'à Rome.

L'ordre du roi pour les relais vient enfin de me parvenir ; voilà mon enchantement chez la princesse de Clèves fini, et je pars pour Berlin.

#this nearly murdered me #i mean swearing at Voltaire is nothing new for me but #i open the book as soon as i get it and the first letter containd FIVE POEMS #dramatic little bitch (semi-affectionate) #anyway onto no. 2 #Paméla letters #my translation #Voltaire #Frederick the Great #Mme Denis

[amenomiko]

Thank you for the interesting request @crossmix ❤❤❤❤❤

MC Brought Gadgets from the Future

(Minus Sasuke because he is from the future dowh :B. Please assume that MC brought it to all of them with Sasuke's help. Why? Because it will be interesting. Let's make the impossible, possible. MWAHAHAHAHAH)

Nobunaga - Mobile Phone

Oh.

Hooooh.

Hm. Intriguing.

"So you can connect with people no matter how far they are?"

*Sends death threat to kasugayama castle right away*

+kaomoji and devil emoji at the end of his messages

Secretly message Mitsuhide to buy his konpeito so Hideyoshi wouldn't know about it.

Takes a selfie before a war. Or maybe when he stab someone.

Watches drama with it, and complains it has small screen.

Also, secretly takes a video when MC's not looking. Or maybe during their-- hm. Hmhmhmhm.

Hideyoshi - Tablet

Aaah~~ this is very convenient.

He can write his daily plan of the day..!

But wait-

The screen is big but why his daily plans doesn't fit one notepad?? It needs at least 10 to fill one. Sigh.

I'm so busy to take care of everyone dot com.

"*Groans* The keypad is too small!"

"How does this thing work again??"

"No, don't touch there Mitsuhide I can do it on my own! Who knows if you break it intentionally??"

"Of course I trust you (half of me) but MC will be furious if this thing is broken!"

Masamune - Polaroid

You can take pictures with this and it printed out in instant? Amazing!

*Binge shopping all the films, especially those with decorated frames*

20% of it is a picture of him and his vassals, his fellow lords, especially Hideyoshi's face when he is angry.

Not to mention his huge nostrils when he is angry.

HAHAH.

+Ieyasu's butt before and after it was smacked.

+His expression before and after it was smacked.

MC wonders how he could take it quickly despite not using a phone.

And then another 80% is his Kitten a.k.a MC.

Her smile, her cute moments, her shy expressions, her blushing face, her moments of changing into her lingerie, and most importantly her boob--

*Polaroid is confiscated the next day*

Mitsuhide - Airpods

Hmmmmmm.

Nice ( ͡^ ͜ʖ ͡^).

Hooh? It's like something that you can cover your ears from all the noise but it gives you music.

This is perfect.

Ah speaking of the devil.

"Mitsuhide this is where you are!!"

"Wait, wait, dear friend. Just a moment."

*Puts airpods on*

He likes it. So much.

Such an hour of bliss he gets for the day of nothing but music with Hideyoshi's nagging-- mute version.

"Ehem. Uhuh."

He nods and nods, to the music. But NOT to the latter in front of him who is wheezing from his own lectures.

"..I... Need to drink water."

"Oh? Has it ended? I don't mind you lecture me for another hour 😏."

Ieyasu - Laptop + Internet

"It's not that I'm interested but this internet thing assist me with medicines. And herbs. And.. *small voice* shopping for Wasabi's dresses."

And also to set MC's picture as wallpaper with 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Hngh.

Anyway-

Back to medicines.

As if.

He googles on "How to Kick Someone Off the Stairs without Being Caught" and "How to Make Someone Eat Carrot without Being Caught" and "How to Decrease my Contrary Side" and "How to Survive from A Sugar Rush Dragon, Satan Snake, Cabbages, and Satan of 6th Whatever Hell."

Also, "Why Is My Girlfriend so Cute and I Can't Hold it Back".

Mitsunari - Electric Hand Fan

"Waaaaaaaaaaaa OAO~~~~~"

"Mitsunari! Again?? Stop playing with the fan and sleep! It's in the middle of the night! SHEESH!!"

"Hehehehe I'm sorry Hideyoshi-sama! Ever since MC taught me how to play it like this, I can't seem to stop (❁´◡`❁)!"

"You- that-- UGH!"

"Now, now, lad. Isn't that much better than him reading a book until the next morning?" Masamune followed after Hideyoshi to rest for the night, leaving Mitsunari with his fan.

Of course, it is much better. He even brought it to the battlefield, using it even when they are discussing for the battle tactics;...

Until the maps were blown when he accidentally pressed the highest power.

+Nagged by Hideyoshi and Ieyasu too.

And there's one time when he entered Ieyasu's medicine room,

He made all the mixed herbs blown all over before Ieyasu could arrange it into its bottles--

Which earned him super 'cow-lick' hair all over his head that night, as Ieyasu use the fan to mess with his hair.

Kenshin - Language Translator Device

He stared to the small thing in his palm.

This?

Can translate a language?

Hmh. As if he deals with those barbarians.

"But sometimes you can't understand Sasuke's language, right?" - MC

That hit him.

Oh.

Yes.

More reason to stab.

"Let's try it, shall we? I heard this word from one of the Chinese women foreigners few days back..!" Shingen clears his throat before pressing the button and says "Wo Ai Ni".

Translated : I love you (Japanese)

Kenshin:

Shingen:

Kenshin:

Shingen: Uhhh- *stabbed* Ow.

*later*

Sasuke, who happens to be walking down the hallway, braced himself when he saw his Lord. "Ah, Kenshin-sama."

"..Sasuke. Get ready so I can kill you."

"(English) GOD DAMN."

Translated: GOD DAMN (Japanese)

Sasuke: Oh. I forgotten MC brought that here (´。＿。｀).

*Scene of chasing begins*

Shingen - Drone

Ooooooh.

It can fly?

And you can view things from the camera attached to it?

Hm. Hm.

*Instantly use it to view the town as a whole, taking notes of the dessert shops for him to stop by later*

*Move it to fly when Yukimura was taking his bath + gets a girlish scream when it takes picture of his *beep**

Shingen: Ah, my Yuki has grown up uwu. But he can't won mine. Heh.

Also Shingen: *Sends the drone to fly all the way to Azuchi and attach a note on it for Nobunaga with*

"You Suck Too."

+With bear emoji at the end of the message.

Yukimura - Webcam

W h a t.

This is like your eyes that can view things no matter how far you were? And you can view it no matter how small it is, and no matter where you put it??

That's-

Some kind of a creepy stalker.

Modern days scares him. For the love of--

Wait what? You can pair it with a microphone so you can talk to the person?

.....

*BING*

Meanwhile, Shingen who has just gone back from the town:

"Heh. It's really hard to get this limited snack from foreigners. Now I shall hide it here~~~"

But before he could put his beloved snack in his secret drawer...

"AHAH! SO THAT'S WHERE YOU PUT IT OAO!"

Poor Shingen nearly fainted with a foam in his mouth.

#ikemen sengoku #ikemen sengoku imagines #ikemen sengoku mc #ikemen sengoku masamune #ikemen sengoku hideyoshi #ikemen sengoku mitsuhide #ikemen sengoku nobunaga #ikemen sengoku mitsunari #ikemen sengoku kenshin #ikemen sengoku shingen #ikemen sengoku sasuke #ikemen sengoku ieyasu #ikemen sengoku yukimura

[margridarnauds]

a@fallenidol-453 and @any59

YOU ASKED FOR IT. 

So, first off: Let’s start off with a story. I’m in my flat in Ireland, doing....Celtic Studies things. Namely, looking at Quinn’s workbook, flipping between it and Strachan’s paradigms, crying. Okay, not really crying, more “knitting my brows and scribbling furiously, because WHY is this language like this?” 

My housemate comes in with a friend of hers. We have the usual smalltalk, you know “What do you do here?”  “Oh, Celtic Studies.”  “Celtic Studies!” *I tense as I prepare for the inevitable “So, do you have any family.........” question* “Well, we just so happen to be fluent in Irish!”

Now, this is much rarer than a lot of people would think in Ireland, because the Irish education system is.........shit when it comes to teaching Irish. I literally never had someone in Ireland tell me, “Oh, I LOVED studying Irish! It was my favorite class!” And the more someone loves the Irish language, the more that they generally hate how it’s taught. So, I’m like “Oh, cool! Here’s what it looked like a thousand years ago!” and I show off my paradigms, going to the first page, which is the section on definite articles. 

There’s this moment of silence as she looks at it, HER eyebrows knitting just like mine were a few minutes ago. “Is that....Latin? It looks like Latin.” 

Now, there are two options with this story: One is that she was lying through her teeth about knowing Irish fluently in order to impress the naive American. Problem with that is that, of course, you risk being called on it. BUT the second is what I’m going with, namely that the language has changed a lot more than people generally think it has. (There’s about the same period of time between Old Irish and Modern Irish as there is between the creation of Beowulf and the present day. Imagine trying to read Beowulf without knowing ANY Old English and you’ll see the problem straight away.) This is actually a problem, because a lot of the time, people will see foreign-born Celticists writing in Old Irish/Middle Welsh/etc. and instead of thinking of us as professional scholars who are taking advantage of a dead language in order to send what are essentially very niche memes (not necessarily even “meme” in the sense of joke), they think “Oh! The dumb foreigner’s mangling the language! So funny!” 

...and yes. This has happened to multiple people I know, including myself. It’s annoying. 

So, how much has the language changed? There are essentially five stages of the language that we are able to trace: Primitive Irish, Old Irish, Middle Irish, Early Modern Irish, and Gaeilge/Modern Irish + Proto-Celtic which is the sort of shared ancestor between all the Celtic languages and the reason why some of these words are confusingly familiar and my brain needs about twenty minutes to reboot when I’m going in-between Middle Welsh and Old Irish. 

Going back to our friend, the definite article: In the modern language, there are two forms of the definite article, as you’ll learn in your very first lesson on Duolingo: An (singular) and Na (plural). You can see this reflected all over the place, probably most obviously in the names for instutions like “An Post” (the post office) and An Garda Síochána (The Guard of the Peace, the police force). 

In Old Irish? There were multiple forms of the definite article, and they had to agree with the gender, person, and case. In the Middle Irish period, those distinctions gradually fall away, becoming even pronouned in the Early Modern Irish period, leading to the language as we have it in the modern day. 

Some other changes: 

- Loss of deponents. Old Irish used to have a system that was like the deponent verbs of Latin, where you had words that LOOKED passive, but were active in meaning. As time went on, they totally dropped those, taking different approaches to how to deal with the old deponent verbs. (Sometimes they’d use, say, the verbal noun form AS the verb, sometimes they’d apply deponent endings to verbs that hadn’t been deponents before.....it’s a mess.)

-Loss of the neuter gender. Gone entirely, save for a few fossilized examples, though with some efforts to bring it back in some form in the interest of non-binary people. In the time of Old Irish, however, there was a full neuter gender, complete with a neuter article. 

- The loss of declensions. “BUT,” you might say, if you’ve studied Modern Irish, “Modern Irish HAS declensions!” And you’d be right! It does! Five, in fact.  .......Old Irish had thirteen. 

What happens over time is that people look at all those declensions and are like “That is an ASSLOAD of declensions, let’s simplify!” And so they start treating some declensions like they’re another declension, so the number of declensions goes down over time as the others all get sorted into new categories. 

Also, the categorization is different. In the modern language, you just hear that the declensions are decided by the endings, which.....is probably one of the reasons why so many people hate learning Irish, because it seems arbitrary, when, in reality, it isn’t. In Old Irish, we actually go back even FURTHER in time, to Primitive Irish (which ended around the 7th century) and, even further back in time, Proto-Celtic, because that is where the declensions actually come from. Irish used to look quite like Gaulish or Latin, with similar endings - “Fer” was “viros”, which became “viras”, “ingen” was “enigenā”, which became “inigena”, “rígain” was “rígainí” in the Proto-Celtic, “athair” was “ɸatīr” in the PC, “túath” was “toutā”, “Día” was “Dewos”........etc.

That’s why “fer” and “Día” are both o-stems, despite looking almost nothing alike, it’s why they behave the same way - They shared the same endings back in the day. That’s why we call them o-stems in the first place, it isn’t because of what’s IN them, it’s what used to be in them. 

“Ingen” is an a-stem for the same reason. 

“Rígain” is an i-stem. 

“Athair” is a r-stem. 

There’s METHOD to the madness, I promise. 

- There’s a loss of distinction of sounds - Old Irish was very strict on “This is spelled with an A and THIS is spelled with an O and those are TWO DIFFERENT SOUNDS.” Middle Irish was like “Eh? Let’s make it a general “schwa” sound.” So the spellings vary a lot starting in that period, Early Modern Irish only adds to the confusion (a favorite Celticist Hobby is pointing out the sometimes flat-out *weird* Early Modern Irish spellings of Old Irish names because *oh, boy*), and by the time you get to the modern language, a lot of things are spelled quite differently from what you’d think. Some consonants also soften in their sounds - the preposition “Co”, for example, becomes “Go”, “ocus” becomes “agus”, etc. 

- Univerbation. Essentially, Old Irish had a LOT of compound verbs like do-beir, do-gni, at-tá, ad-cí, ro-cluineathar etc. And, in the modern language, “do-beir” becomes “tabhair”, “do´gní” becomes -“á dhéanamh”, etc. Essentially, they took what’s known as the protonic form of the verb, which is the version we would use following a conjunct particle like “ní”, which expresses a negative form of an action, and they made that the regular form of the verb. They were like “Nope, don’t want to handle it, not today, Satan.” And sometimes, those forms would evolve as well, so I could be looking at a verb in Early Modern Irish, go “that looks vaguely familiar” and then realize that it’s a VERY mutated form of an Old Irish word. 

- The ~copula~. So, the copula is....an alternative to the substantive verb used in certain circumstances, indicating a state of being. Which seems really....grammar-y, but all that really means is that it translates out to “is, am, are” in English. If you ever read any medieval Irish texts, you’ll notice a lot of syntax that’s like “Cold is the wind from Norway”, “It is not a good thing you have done”, etc. The reason is because, in the actual Irish, all this would have begun with a form of the copula. It was a VERY popular way of starting off a sentence, instead of the usual Verb-Subject-Object form. In the Old Irish period, the copula was inflected, meaning that, like the definite article, it changed depending on certain factors, namely person, number, and tense. “Am” would be “I am” (”Am rí” - “I am a king”) “At” would be you (sing.) are (“At gataige” - “You are a thief), “Is” would be “he/she/it is” (”Is lóech” - “He/She/It is a warrior”), “ammi” would be “we are” (”Ammi druíd” - “We are druids/magicians”).....etc. Now, once again, starting in the Middle Irish period, you have people going “............that is an ass-load of work, let’s just use the third singular and call it a day.” This is why, in Duolingo, you have to say “Is cailín mé” a thousand times. In the Old Irish period, you would just say “Am ingen”, but, with that loss of distinction of the copula, pronouns become increasingly important to the Irish language. Some of this was already present in Old Irish, with the 3rd sing. copula being used for the sake of emphasis, “It is I who takes Bres to the trash fire, where he belongs”, sometimes with an emphasizing pronoun for added drama, but it eventually gets to the point where the others are consumed entirely. 

- Independent pronouns also come into their own, being uniformly used after the copula, with the infixed pronouns that had been uniform going away. So, for example, if I wanted to say “I kill him” in Modern Irish, I would say “Maráim é” - if I wanted to say it in Old Irish, I would say “Nan-Marbu”, with the no being what’s known as a meaningless conjunct particle (it’s there to say “LOOK! AN INFIXED PARTICLE!”).

- A lot of the verb forms, like the nouns, get smushed together - There were at least three different forms of the preterite (in Modern Irish, known as the “Simple Past”) in Old Irish, in Middle Irish, the S-preterite gradually grows to dominate, to the point where now, there is only the simple past, with endings varying depending on if you’re talking first or second conjugation verbs. Likewise, the future tense goes from having five different categories of future tenses to being divided into first or second conjugation verbs in the present day. 

Overall, there’s more, there’s a lot more, but I think that you can get the gist. When I see primitive Irish, I’m like “Okay, it’s Old Irish - The Latin edition”. It looks WEIRD, but it looks OLD and, for the most part, fairly recognizable. We don’t see it that often, outside of an ogham stone, that’s why we make such a big deal when we do. Old Irish, I’m like “FRIEND....who sometimes scares me”, Middle Irish, I’m like “Okay, this is a bit weird, but I can understand most of it, especially if I’m reading an edition where the editor explains things”, Early Modern Irish looks, to me, like everything’s been tossed into a blender. I KNOW that some of the words look familiar, but it’s HARD and it kind of hurts my brain to stare at it for too long. Modern Irish actually looks better, because it’s streamlined, the spellings are consistent, etc., but it still looks......almost eerie, actually. It also shows in how these things are taught - If you’re in an Old Irish program, you’re taught Old Irish and Middle Irish; if you’re in a Modern Irish program, you’re taught Early Modern Irish and Gaeilge (or you’re expected to know Gaeilge off the bat.) And what should probably be mentioned is that, actually, there was likely only ever a brief period where “Old Irish” was actually spoken or written - Kim McCone pointed out in an article that, actually, in some of our oldest, most sanctified sources for Old Irish, the Wurtzburg Gospels, we’re already seeing traces of Middle Irishicisms. It’s likely that, among the general populace, they were already simplifying their speech, but that the scribes who wrote this stuff down, that literary elite, took a conservative approach to the language, essentially a medieval Irish Academie Francaise, and they tried to preserve the “pure” form, only to lose the battle as time went on and even they started using these forms of the language. It’s also why we put SUCH a massive emphasis on dating....(besides the fact that it’s the closest thing we can come to dating anything, *badum tss*): Scribes, along with copying old texts, would actually sometimes put older forms of the words in newer texts in the hopes of it looking older or more authoritative. There are some bardic poems in the 16th century that are actually EERILY good. Likewise, you have some scribes looking at an older text and being like “Oh, that doesn’t look how it should! I should fix it!”, only to drop a Middle Irishicism on an Old Irish verb. And sometimes a scribe will try to correct the correction and makes it even worse. We have to analyze the whole text, weighing all of it together to see when a text might have actually been composed. 

We talk a lot about how Irish has survived over the years in spite of everything, and that’s IMPORTANT, but I feel like it’s also important to say that it’s changed, it’s reinvented itself. It isn’t static and it’s never really BEEN static, and I think, my ongoing confusion aside, that that’s really important. I can’t translate an 18th century Irish text, at least not EASILY (even though I want to do my PhD on an Early Modern text so RIP me), but someone who got their PhD in 19th century Gaelic Literature also can’t translate Old Irish (and yes.....it has happened where people act like studying Irish literature = being able to “explain” Old Irish materials to me. Because, again, Dumb Foreigners Can’t Know What We’re Talking About) We’ve got to work together to get the fullest possible picture. The language had a past, it has a future. 

#long post #celtic studies #also why we DO need to study modern Irish as well #because we can only get so much from the older materials and it's important to remember there's more outside the medieval world #my new program is Very Big on me learning modern Celtic languages along with older languages and honestly I'm thrilled #because I view it as a matter of respect as much as anything else

[fireflyhwufanficwriter]

My thoughts on Dr. Stone’s S02E03 (“Call from the Dead”)

My thoughts after watching Season Two, Episode Three:

01. Taiju and Yuzuriha have different types of shoes – that’s a nice detail 😊

02. Leave it to Yuzuriha the arts and crafts club member to notice a detail like the dirt around the grave being different!

03. Day after day… I wasn’t expecting them to visit the grave THAT often. I like that they used the same phrase (“mainichi mainichi”) as last time – in Season One, Senku used it to describe Kohaku’s dedication to her sister, and now in Season Two, Nikki used it to describe Taiju and Yuzuriha’s dedication to their friend 😊

04. I liked Kohaku and Ginro’s excitement at hearing Taiju’s voice. This is the first time they’ve heard an outsider who they knew right away wasn’t an enemy! (Well, second time for Kohaku, since Senku saved her the day they met.)

05. The next time I’m on the phone with somebody, I’m going to imagine the same huge arc of electricity that Kaseki did 😁

06. Senku was so emotional – eyes shining with tears, smiling as he listened to Taiju – and then it all went away because he had to remind his friend that HE was Senku 😆

07. Just like how Gen is the stand in for the audience (modern timers, but generally clueless compared to Senku), Kokuyou and Ruri are the stand-ins for how incredible the phone must seem to Ishigami Village 😁 Come to think of it, Kokuyou’s had that role since last season – he’s far away enough from the main cast that he doesn’t know all of their adventures (and that distance makes him like the “normal” villagers), but close enough that he gets to share his thoughts and theories. It was through his eyes that we saw the big impacts that bottling and furnaces had on Ishigami Village 😊

08. I know it was short, but I like how Senku greeted Yuzuriha separately. They haven’t had that much screentime together since the anime began, but I like how Senku and Yuzuriha have their own friendship, instead of Taiju being their go-between or something like that.

09. “He’s been screaming all day.” All day? Have they been there longer than just the few minutes we’ve seen?

10. Kohaku noticed the defensive reason for why they had to speed things up! 😊 And I liked her observation about Senku and Taiju 😊

11. It’s could be easy to just write Taiju off as a loud blockhead, but it’s scenes like his allowing Tsukasa to hit him in Season One and his question about bloodshed in Season Two that really show you the kind of admirable, pacifistic guy he is 😊

12. “Gen will be back tomorrow or so.” Okay, so we have an estimate of how far the two kingdoms/empires are from each other. I’m glad they mentioned this!

13. Magma and Chrome’s loud conversation really shows how much anime can improve upon manga. When you’re just reading, you do know characters are talking and being loud, but when you’re watching anime, it drives home the fact that they’re being SO LOUD and that they need to SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP! Poor Gen… 😆

14. Thank you for finally saying Ukyo’s name, Gen 😆 Anime only folks get important information, and manga readers can sigh in relief that another character’s name has been revealed 😁

15. I’m with Magma. Chrome’s so selfish, worrying about his own life like that! 😡 Not like Magma, who’s strong and noble and self-sacrificing and only thinks of others and their safety 😁

16. You have to feel sorry for Gen… he’s trying to get the two of them to just SHUT UP 😆

17. I doubt Magma was seriously thinking that Chrome would go along with that plan, so he must have been joking… and the fact that we have Magma JOKING around with main characters after being the main antagonist in the middle part of Season One… they’re really pals now, aren’t they? 😲😊

18. Chrome’s battery has 15V… how much is that compared to an AAA battery for a remote control? I'll look it up later 😁

19. I’m a modern era person and it would have never occurred to me to use a wire to connect two ends of a battery and throw it into the grass to start a fire. Either Senku told him that battery stuff fairly recently and it was stuck Chrome’s mind because he was in charge of the heating team, or he’s just that much of a genius that nobody explained that to him but he intuited it anyway… or I’m just that stupid 😆

20. It’s expected that Chrome would sacrifice himself, but Magma… very impressive character development 😁 (I mean, I’m a manga reader, so I knew this was going to happen, but still 😁)

21. Gen’s eyes are blue? I never noticed until this episode.

22. Poor Gen… first, in Season One, he had to run like the wind from the shed of science to the Cave of Miracles while he was SEVERELY injured, and he had to do it as fast as possible to help Senku stay safe, and he was the only one who could do it… and now, he has to run like the wind while dealing with the knowledge and guilt that two of his comrades sacrificed himself for him, and he has to do it as fast as possible to be able to start his extremely important deception mission, and he’s the only one who can do it.

23. Gen really needs to get Kaseki to build him some kind of cable car system or a limousine so that he can travel in style between the two kingdoms/empires instead of exhausting himself all the time running back and forth 😲 Or at least a bicycle!

24. Since it’ll take Gen at least one day, possibly longer, to reach the shed of science, that means that Taiju and Yuzuriha must have talked to Nikki one or more days after they spoke with Senku. Anime helps with some things (like sound), but it can sure confuse people about the passage of time…

25. Copper swirly! 😊 I like Kaseki’s name for it better than Senku’s name for it 😆

26. Kohaku’s eyes! She’s SO fascinated by how the copper swirly is being used 😁

27. Nikki’s SO hostile 😲 I get that she’s a guard and everything, but she doesn’t really have a reason to be this hostile to Taiju and Yuzuriha, does she? It’s weird O.o Unless maybe she wanted to do something else (hunting/training/etc.) but she was forced to be their guard specifically because she’s a woman and can stick to Taiju AND Yuzuriha like glue? (Like Brienne from Game of Thrones.)

28. Why are her eyebrows a darker shade than her hair? This is sort of like Kokuyou’s weird hair colors, but to a lesser extent.

29. The punches are… she’s really hostile. Maybe it’s just to emphasize how much she changes later on and the episode, but it’s still so weird.

30. Didn’t Senku “die” on a cliff, out in the open? Kohaku was able to see him from (presumably) far away, and all that stuff with the gunpowder and the huge rock… am I remembering it wrong? Was it NOT a cliff after all? Because the rocks around this grave make it look like some kind of natural, concealed fortress!

31. Senku’s Sebastian voice sounds so silly 😆

32. I wish they had done Lilian’s voice differently. Gen’s fake Lilian doesn’t sound like a native English speaker while speaking English. Maybe they’re counting on the people they’re talking to not knowing the difference between foreign language accents… but still, this could have been done better. Maybe the studio just didn’t want to hire a new person to speak just a few lines. Or maybe they did this on purpose so that Nikki could notice something was off with her voice?

33. Yuzuriha being quick on the uptake again! 😁

34. This has to be the most stressful, rushed, and mathematical estimating of CD sales and body measurements ever 😆

35. The video game music was used in such a fun, light way last season (choosing the third mining team member) that hearing it in this scene for this situation sounds so weird 😲

36. That crouching backwards, pointing straight ahead Lilian pose seemed really out of place when the music is this really soft, gentle song 😲

37. I wonder if the stadium they showed us is based on a real stadium in Japan?

38. “Lilian doesn’t exist in this world anymore. Am I right?” Oh, Nikki… 😭

39. Senku’s eyes were shining when he replied to Nikki… I wonder if talking about Lilian reminded him of Byakuya… somebody who was in space with Lilian and also doesn’t exist in this world anymore… 😭

40. I love how Senku doesn’t lose anything or inconvenience himself at ALL by making that promise, since he’s going to protect the glass recording anyway because of Byakuya 😆

41. Okay, after Nikki committed to the plan (welcome, Nikki!), they zoomed out and the grave is seriously surrounded by all those vertical rocks. There is NO WAY this grave is in the same place Senku and Tsukasa last talked. No WAY.

42. I was SO surprised when the episode ended there 😲 That was NOT what I was expecting. This episode felt so short!

43. I still love this ending theme! 😁

44. About the ending theme (“Koe” / “Voice” by Hatena), songs mean a lot more to me when I understand what the lyrics mean, so I went to YouTube hoping to find an English cover or English subtitles or something. I found this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scv09Dtby-8) by a YouTube channel called AniComet Music, and from 0:12 to 0:34, the lyrics are, “I keep struggling and suffering, but still / I’ll gain strength from the feelings I’ve had for you / It’s a story that will never change / Even though I knew I’d never be a match for him.”

45. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel the song is from Senku’s point-of-view, and both the second and fourth lines could be about Byakuya (especially the fourth line) – in a father/son context, of course – of how he gets strength and inspiration from Byakuya and how he feels his father will always be beyond him and more than him 😭

46. With that said, even though my interpretation is really meaningful to me, it doesn’t really make sense, since “you” and “him” are obviously different people, and when you read more of the lyrics, “you” can’t really be referring to Byakuya. Maybe my interpretation will change when I listen to the song more and read more translations, but this is the first English translation of the ending song that I’ve read, and it really speaks to me 😊

https://firefly-hwufanficwriterrrrr.tumblr.com/MyDrStoneEpisodeMangaThoughts

#dr stone #ishigami senku #dr. stone #oki taiju #ogawa yuzuriha #asagiri gen #hanada nikki #lillian weinberg #ishigami byakuya

[dawnrider]

Since most of the votes were for the Modern AU, I bring to you, the spicy part so far of a college AU I’ve been writing off and on for a long time. I promise there’s more plot and emotional development before this... but I’m guessing y’all don’t care about that right now. XD Had to split it into 2 parts since it was long.

1 | 2 |

Spitfire:

I'm not sure what woke me, exactly, but I was suddenly wide awake.  Judging by the darkness, it was the middle of the night.  My hands shifted restlessly under my pillow for a moment before I realized that I could feel someone watching me.  Not the best feeling to wake up to in the middle of the night in your apartment alone...  A soft noise, maybe a rustle of clothing, drew my attention and I nearly screamed.  Standing near the window, the moon not quite reaching him, was Yash.

I had never seen him look so intimidating before.  While nothing about him was outwardly antagonistic or aggressive, he loomed over me in a way he'd never done.  “Yash?” I whispered.  “What are you doing here?”  I pulled the blanket in my hands closer, somehow feeling like it was protecting me from him.  Despite the fact that he was hanging back in the shadows, I could easily see that it was him.  No one else filled a room the way he did. No one made me fight a constant quiver in my knees the way he did.  I wasn't even standing and I could feel my patellas twitching.  He still hadn't responded to my question and it was making me even more nervous than I was already.  How the hell had he gotten into my apartment?  "Yash?" I tried again.

"I... had to see you," he murmured.  There was a growling tone to his voice I was unfamiliar with.  Was he sick?  He stepped into the light from the window and I felt my head tilt in confusion of its own volition.  He looked different somehow.  The phrase “animal attraction” quickly came to mind and I found myself lowering the blanket and slipping from the bed.  The wood floor was chilly under my toes, sending a shiver up through the soles of my feet.  But as he drew closer, I realized the chill wasn't causing the shiver at all.

His eyes, usually a pale brown, absolutely glowed golden in the moonlight.  His hair, which I had always considered blond was clearly a platinum silver.  Most startling was the way his eye teeth seemed longer than was normal... or even slightly abnormal for a human being.  I mean, mine were a little lengthy. I had repeatedly discovered this the hard way when I used to bite the inside of my lip in the same place consistently.  Yash's were nearly deadly looking.  He seemed to be breathing through his mouth deliberately and I couldn't tell why until he took a deep breath through his nose and winced.  "Geez, do I smell bad?" I half-joked in a weak whisper.  He barely reacted at first, closing his eyes.  I didn't have time to react myself when he suddenly grabbed my arms, pulling me against his chest.  "Are you alright?" I questioned him, when I really felt the question should have been going the other direction.

"I have never smelled something so delicious in my entire life."  I froze at his words.  Was he serious?  Was he seriously playing some kind of prank on me?  The whole sneaking into my apartment in the dead of night thing, the looming in the darkness and barely speaking, looking at me like he wanted to devour me...  Was this supposed to be some sort of Halloween, vampire, scare the crap out of Kagome thing?  If it was, it wasn't funny anymore.

"That's sweet, I suppose.  You still haven't told me what you're doing here... in my room... in the middle of the night.

"Don't you feel it?"  I gave him a blank look.  "I'm drawn to you, Kagome.  I know you're drawn to me."  I couldn't deny that and he seemed to know what I wasn't saying.  "You're it," he growled.  I flinched and I heard what sounded like a whimper in response.  "Don't be afraid of me, Kagome.  I would never hurt you."

"I-I know that," I whispered uncertainly.  I did know it, but I wasn't sure why he felt like he needed to tell me that.  The reason came in the form of a rough kiss I most definitely hadn't expected.  Despite the way I had felt about him for several years, never in a million years did I think he would ever return my feelings.  But again, maybe he didn't and this was some strange prank.  The way he was kissing me certainly didn't imply that he was joking.  His lips were firm and insistent, urging me into kissing him back with equal enthusiasm.  When his kiss changed from a firm but relatively chaste one to fierce and open-mouthed, I followed right along without a thought.  His tongue traced mine carefully at first, then with more confidence when I didn't pull away.

I found myself reciprocating until I brushed one of those deadly looking incisors with my tongue and felt a sting of pain.  So not just "deadly looking," actually dangerous.  Yash flinched himself, clearly stunned by the taste of my blood in his mouth.  It took him several moments to pull away, his tongue tracing his own teeth and then his lips.  He seemed more focused than before, his eyes really taking me in.  “Kagome?  Shit, I'm sorry,” he growled, stepping back and switching on the floor lamp I had next to the armchair in the corner.  The light made him look normal again, the same Yash I had known for years.  I stood frozen, watching him, as he went to my bed, pulling the blanket I had been gripping earlier up and around my shoulders.  “I shouldn't be here,” he told me.  I started to protest but stopped when he spoke again.  “But I can't leave now.  I... I need to explain.”

“I should think so.  How the hell did you get into my apartment?” I asked again.  He looked sheepish before pointing to the window.  I raised an eyebrow.  “I live on the third floor Yash,” I said in a tone that attempted to remind him I was expecting a truthful explanation.

“It's a brick building.  These help,” he muttered, slowly presenting me with fingers clad in blunt but very tough looking nails.  Looking from his hands to his face, I frowned, taking one hand in my own to study it.  The tips were not sharp, but certainly could do damage if applied properly.  I'd always admired how strong his hands looked.  Hands that could fix things, solve problems, protect things.  The nails were real.  It took me several moments to realize that they in fact grew like any normal fingernail, just thicker and tougher.  I looked into his face again and saw the nervousness in his eyes.  Why was he afraid of me?  He was the one with the claws.  As I stared, the way I had seen him in the moonlight seemed to become clearer, the way I usually saw him fading as I distinguished the features I normally didn't notice.  The fangs were back and his eyes looked more like molten gold than light brown.  Why had it never occurred to me that his eye color wasn't really normal?  His hair, almost platinum blonde in my previous opinion, was clearly silver.  The last thing I noticed was the pair of animal ears twitching in agitation on top of his head.  I felt the stretch of shock on my face.

Yash's fingers gently curled around my wrist as my hands went numb and almost dropped from where they had been holding his.  “Yash...” I whispered, completely baffled.

“Don't be afraid, Kagome.  I won't hurt you,” he repeated.  He seemed so sure that I was going to be afraid of him, that I was going to start screaming at any moment.  Alright, maybe letting out a little scream had entered my mind for a moment, but it wasn't there now.  I felt the shock slowly wear off to be replaced with faint wonder.  “You needed to know the truth,” he murmured, stepping closer.  His steps were light and as non-threatening as he could manage.

“Shippo too?” I whispered.  A tiny smile quirked the corner of his mouth.

“Not exactly.  He's... He's a full-blood.  A fox.”  I frowned for a moment before tilting my head in confusion.  “Youkai.  The English word Demon doesn't quite fit, but it's the best translation.”  Nodding slowly, I started to sit, squeaking when Yash caught my elbows.  He steered me back a few more feet so I actually landed on the bed.  He knelt in front of me, staring up into my face plaintively.  “My mother was human, my father an inuyoukai.  A dog demon.  My given name is Inuyasha.”

I fought the quirk of a smile.  Not completely unfamiliar with my parents' native language, I guessed the translation of his name.  “Dog forest spirit?  A bit literal.”  A tiny hopeful smile twitched his lips.  “Then how is...”

“I saved Shippo from a couple of weather youkai a long time ago.  He was too young to protect himself and they had just killed his father.  Runt's been following me around ever since.”  The fact that he had taken my best friend under his protection made me smile, my heart warming even more to him.  My head was spinning a little but his warm hands on my arm and knee kept me grounded somehow.

“Why... why share this with me?” I wondered aloud.

His eyes dropped a moment before looking back at me with the quiet determination of a man with a goal in mind.  “I know you think I've never paid you much attention, that I didn't notice you.”  I froze, my eyes widening in embarrassment.  “I've always been very aware of you.  I noticed you even before you became friends with Shippo.”  Trying not to panic, I held my breath.  “Kagome, you don't have to be afraid.  Your interest has always been welcome,” he whispered, leaning closer and toying with the blanket that draped across my arm.  Was he reading my mind?  “I wanted Shippo to become friends with you to make sure you were safe and...  You seemed so alone then.”  His voice had remained a soft comforting murmur, almost hypnotic in its tone.  “Then you were all he could talk about, the best friend he could ask for.”

He was referring to when I'd first arrived at school.  I hadn't known anyone, my family lived nearly five hundred miles away and my roommate at the time was an antisocial, angry girl who eventually tried to kill an ex-boyfriend at home over a school vacation.  Needless to say I hadn't been upset she didn't come back to school after Fall Break.  Shippo had bumped into me shortly before Thanksgiving, a surprising and welcome friendly face.  He was a little younger than me, but he'd been accelerated through school since he was so brilliant.

“The letters and emails from you when you were in Brazil...  They weren't for Ship, were they?” I asked suddenly, putting things together.  There was no reason Shippo would have needed to hear from his older brother so often and certainly not for him to have read every single one to me unless they were for me to hear what was going on.  He gave a small sheepish smirk, but nodded to affirm my assumption.  “Why didn't you... approach me?”

His eyes glowed faintly in the bright light of the nearly full moon and I saw some strange emotion in them.  “I'm not a risk-taker.”  I knew he didn't mean that he wasn't a thrill seeker.  The man had bungee jumped, sky dived, base jumped, cave dived and swam with sharks.  He wasn't afraid of anything.  Except me apparently.  “Shippo never told you about my ex, did he?” he said quietly.  No he hadn't and I was a little afraid to hear it now.  I shook my head and bit my lip.  I had assumed he'd dated a lot.  He was intelligent and extremely good looking and I'd seen at least a few girls throw themselves in his path in hopes of getting his attention.  “It was a long time ago.  Long story short, we met at a time when things were really rough between humans and youkai.  There were a lot more youkai then than there are now, at least out in the open.”  Stretching up to his full height, I felt my awe of him return for a brief moment.  He was tall, broad and almost otherworldly in his appearance.  I found that my feelings for him hadn't changed at all.

He looked to me for permission before sitting next to me on the bed.  I curled my legs under me, tucking the blanket more tightly around my shoulders.  “Go on.”

~~~~~~

“Holy types, priestesses and monks, tended to destroy first, ask questions later.  Which, considering the way youkai were then, was a completely fair way to handle themselves.”  Her eyes widened slightly at my easy acceptance of such brutality.  “More than once I almost got my ass fried until I learned the hard way that getting purified didn't mean I was dust like a normal youkai.”

“You become human...”  I nodded, a grim smile on my mouth, pleased that Kagome was so quick to understand.  “But your...”

“Youki.  My youkai blood...” I supplied.

“Youki then.  It comes back obviously.”  Again I nodded.  “Well that's lucky.”

My face must have displayed open shock at her easy words.  “Lucky?”  I choked out, staring for a few moments.  “I... I guess I never thought of it that way.”

Kagome let out a small laugh.  “Why not?  A full-blooded youkai would be purified and die whereas you can survive a purification attack.  That's pretty neat.”

“Neat?”  My head tilted in surprise at the word.  That definitely wouldn't have been the description I would have chosen.  What I would like to choose in that moment was to kiss Kagome again.  The soft, playful smile on her lips made me hunger to capture them with my own all over again.  Of course, I knew I wanted a lot more than just a kiss.  I wanted a lot more than just a moment too.  “Kagome,” I purred, tugging her against me and pressing my lips to hers.  She accepted my kiss without complaint, her soft mouth moving against mine in a way that left no room for doubt that she wanted me too.  It was almost more than my beast could handle, forcing me to pull away to calm myself.  I had been explaining something to her, something important.  Damn if I could remember what it was.

“You were telling me about mikos and youkai,” she reminded me gently, her voice reflecting her slightly aroused state.  It was a continuous struggle, but I managed not to go in for another kiss.

“Right.  The first time I was purified, it was a miko named Kikyo.”

“Wait, Kikyo of Shikon no Tama fame?”  I jumped.  Kagome knew of her?  Obviously the stories were written in history books but I had never anticipated that Kagome would remember those stories.  I nodded.  “Wow.  I mean... wow!  You're the half demon they talk about.  My family comes from the Sunset Shrine in Tokyo, the same Shinto shrine that was built to replace the one from the warring states period.”  She chuckled softly.  “Small world.”

Having read the stories enough times myself to know them by heart, I knew what they said about me.  What I was curious to know was what Kagome's interpretation was.  “Pretty conniving and diabolical.”

Kagome scoffed.  “I don't know which stories you've been reading, but the way my grandfather has always told it, Kikyo lost her life and the love of her life the day the jewel disappeared.”  I couldn't miss the moment her face changed as she realized more completely that the person she was talking about was right in front of her.  “I'm sorry, I...”  I shook my head.

“It was, obviously, a very long time ago.”

“More than five hundred years a long time ago.”  Her mouth twisted in a motion that told me she wanted to ask something.  “The hanyou in the story... he was pinned to a tree in the forest forever.  Obviously you disappeared and they just had to end the story.”

If only that were the truth.  “No, I was pinned for almost five hundred years.”  Kagome's mouth dropped open.  I smiled a little.  “I didn't know what woke me until a few years ago.  I was in the woods somewhere, woods surrounded by buildings that were so obviously not of my time.”

Kagome's face became sympathetic.  “That must have been very disconcerting.”

“More than a little.  I stayed in those woods as long as I could stand and then started prowling the city at night, listening to what I could, watching humans live their lives.  Eventually I knew I would have to find a way to blend in.”  I shook my head.  “An old man found me in the woods that very night.  He was obviously as surprised to find me there as I was to see him.  But not for the reason I expected.  He said he had never expected me to wake up and that his family had been guarding the land around where I was imprisoned for hundreds of years.”  I looked Kagome over.  “He told me that he knew of a miko who could help me hide my features, and brought me to her to learn the illusion you normally see.”

“He... he was never frightened of you?”

I laughed.  “No, which confused me more than anything.  I asked him why he wasn't.”  I took a deep breath.  “He told me that he knew that my life had been stolen from me by a trick and he smiled at me strangely.  'I believe your new life was born only two months ago.  Wait for her, she will find you.'  It was the oddest thing anyone had ever said to me, and I didn't understand what he meant until a few years ago.”  Nothing I could do or say would make the next part of my story less weird or creepy sounding, so I plunged on.  “He helped me get acclimated in the city before leaving me on my own in the forest.  He never told me his name, or how he knew what had happened, but I had a feeling I would see him again eventually.”

“When did you find Shippo?”

“A couple years later.  I guess it would have been... 1987?  I ventured into the woods a lot to clear my head.  I would go further out from the city to find quiet and one day I found the Thunder Brothers, as they liked to call themselves, about to kill a fox youkai kit.  He was only... three or four.”

Kagome gaped at me.  “Shippo is only a few years older than me?  When you were talking about finding him, I thought for sure he was...  Wow.  So them accelerating him through school isn't completely off.”

“He's just puny, so it's easier to explain him as younger than he really is.”  Kagome pushed my arm playfully.  “He'll hit his next growth spurt soon and then there'll be no living with him.”

Kagome mused over what I had told her so far.  “So you learned all about the modern world in a few years, put yourself through school and what?  How did you end up here?”

That's where it got creepy.   “The man who helped me told me that the city was taking my forest and making it a public park, so I couldn't live there anymore.  His family was moving, he said, across the ocean.  His son had died and his daughter-in-law had gotten a job offer in California to teach Japanese to high school kids.”

“Huh, my mom teaches Japanese at the University of...”  Kagome's face widened again in shock as she slowly turned to face me more fully.  “My grandfather helped you.  He knew that you were there the whole time.”  I could only nod.  “What year did you wake up, Inuyasha?” she whispered.  “What month?”

“September of 1985.”  

Kagome simply blinked at me for a long moment.  “That's... that's when I was born.”

“I know.”

TBC

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#Dawnrider Fanfiction #InuKag-Week #Desire #Modern AU #Spitfire #Stay Tuned

[watch-grok-brainrot]

Hi! So I saw some of your commentary on translation and decided it's worth a shot to ask. Sorry if it's a bother! What is, in your opinion, the most faithful translation of this line? "Who cares about the crowded, broad road? I'll stick to my single-log bridge until it's dark". I've seen a few variations, including "into the dark". It's a minor difference, I guess, but it's such an important line, I want to know as much as possible!

Not a bother at all! I’m so honored someone would ask my opinion of a translation! And your question is delightfully open ended. i’ve been needing an excuse to go down a rabbit hole of chinese and cql! That means if i wander and end up super off topic, it’s ok! (also, this is the first ask i’ve gotten about something not due to a tumblr game so i’m really excited!) 

Any-hoot! The line in question is:

管他熙熙攘���阳关道 我偏要一条独木桥走到黑

In short, both “into dark” and “until dark” work. But let’s talk a bit in depth about the elements of the line since you want to know as much as possible. Also, translation, IMO, is personal so you can decide what you prefer. Hopefully i’ll give you enough information to help you form an opinion. 

管他 - guan ta -  no matter, who cares. 管 has a lot of meanings: tube, pipe, valve, manage, control, care, jurisdiction, etc. 他 is him/other. In this case, together, the phrase is a VERY casual (borderline rude) way of saying who cares -- fitting of WWX’s relaxed speech pattern.

熙熙攘攘 - xi xi rang rang -  bustling/full of people. Per Baidu, this is a 成语 (1)  referring to a line from 《史记·货殖列传》: “天下熙熙，皆为利来；天下攘攘，皆为利往”. 史记 is commonly thought of as China’s first “biolographical history”. Written in the Han Dynasty, it chronicles all Pre-Han dynasties and kingdoms. It set the precedent of not discussing the current dynasty in a piece of history writing because under the circumstances one cannot be impartial (i.e you can say whatever you want about previous rulers but not those related to the current ones lest you want to risk decapitation). The passage the term is from is a section that discusses merchants. The line can be translated as “Everyone [under heaven] is happy, all arriving for profits; everyone [under heaven] is troubled, all leaving for profits.” The coming and going captured from the source is reflected by the current usage of the term as bustling/full of people. 

阳关道 - yang guan dao - character by character: sunny, pass, path/way/road. 阳关道 is a reference to a road going through a pass on the Silk Road. There were two options onto the silk road back in the Han Dynasty. The north road forces you through 玉门关 (Yu men guan). The south road forces you through 阳关. Located in modern day Gansu Province, 阳关道 is said to have been 120 meters wide (which is massive even by today’s standards!). Within this context, it indicates a well known, well traveled, busy, broad road. (2) (3)

我偏要 - wo pian yao - character by character: i, wilfully, want. So, in short, “i insist on”. Like 管他, WWX is just being casual in his speech here. The idea of willful, though, is important as a character trait for him. He will do what’s right; he will follow his path; come hell or high water. 

一条 - yi tiao - a. Seriously, the first character is one. The second is a measure word for a stick-like thing. This is a fun (aka highly frustrating for non-native speakers) part of chinese! When you refer to an object that can be counted, you need to use measure words. You use the wrong one, and the implications get odd. Sometimes I would translate measure words via “a [measure word] of [something]”. E.g. A unit of person. A head of cattle. A cup of water. BUT! If you use the wrong measure word, it seems really weird. E.g. A cup of person. A stick of water. 

独木桥 - du mu qiao - character by character: single, wood, bridge. Aka a single plank bridge. It is often paired with 阳关道 since they contrast so well. There is also a chinese saying: “你走你的阳关道，我走我的独木桥” which basically says you walk your broad path, I’ll walk my single plank bridge. It means to each their own. This is definitely part of what WWX is trying to do. He saved the Wens. He’s exiled himself from the Jiangs and the cultivation world. He says to Jiang Cheng that he just wants to be left alone to live out his life. And that sentiment is reflected in this statement about busy broad paths and single plank bridges. 

走到黑 - zou dao hei - character by character: walk, reach/until, black/dark. In this case, the color black indicates an ending. I’m thinking death or some sort of fall from grace. Usage-wise, it can just refer to the end of an alley (alleys existed even in the Tang Dynasty since cities were organized in grids). Sometimes, in a slightly longer phrasing, the wording can mean stubbornly choosing to do something without looking back. So how do we want to interpret this part of the line? Based on context of WWX, his stubbornness, and his 独木桥, I would say he is mindfully heading towards the end. For that reason, I prefer “into the dark” over “until dark”. (4)

That said, we can also be less literal with our translations! Let me offer this as an option of a fairly liberal translation that still captures the essence and the tone: “Who cares! To each their own!  I’ll walk my own path come hell or high water!”

And I’d like to leave you with the idea of LWJ saying to WWX: The feeling of “walking my own path come hell or high water” isn’t bad indeed.

Footnotes: 

成语s are idioms and are usually 4 characters long. They are super common in modern chinese. As a child, you either pick up their meanings from context or are taught the meaning. Oftentimes, the meaning derives from a story or a literary reference that are only tangentially related to the characters of the idiom. 

It’s actually a modern day tourist attraction! In my wanderings on Baidu, i saw a picture of modern day 阳关道. There was a picture of a stone memorial and the writing on the stone literally said former location of 阳关. I don’t know why i found this so funny... oh, well. 

Both  阳关 and  玉门关 are well known to Chinese children due to their presence in Tang Dynasty poetry.  For example: 送元二使安西 作者：唐 王维 (Sending Off Yuan Er Towards Xi’an by tang poet Wang Wei) 渭城朝雨浥轻尘，客舍青青柳色新。劝君更尽一杯酒，西出阳关无故人。(Morning rain in Weicheng dampens the light dust ， Making the inn verdant and freshening the willows’ color 。 I implore you to drink one more cup of wine ， Once west of Yang Guan you will have no more familiar people 。)

Full disclaimer: I might be partial to into the dark because of that Deathcab for Cutie song “I will follow you into the dark”. Also, uh… LWJ’s mood when he named LSZ (5), right?!  “Love of mine, someday you will die/But I'll be close behind and I'll follow you into the dark” FOLLOW YOU INTO THE DARK. I AM SCREAMING. What are wangxian feels?! Why are they EVERYWHERE. 

In case you don’t know, LSZ’s S and Z are 思 (si, to think/miss) and 追 (zhui, to follow/chase). LWJ explains it as 思君不可追, 念君何时归. People (i think both in chinese and english speaking fandom) explain it as “missing you but can’t go after/be near you, thinking about you and wondering when you’ll return.” I always interpreted this line very dramatically: LWJ wanted to follow WWX into death but could not because of this child. By bestowing the name on the child, he expresses his desire to chase after WWX. (also, WTF does my footnote have a footnote?!)

(I want to say I consider myself a native Chinese speaker but I grew up outside of China. I didn't go to school in China but I did manage to work my way through textbooks (aka my dad sat me down nearly every day for 10 years to teach me the language) so that I have at least a late middle school/early high school reading level. I have read the unabridged/simplified Journey to the West but none of the other famous 4 novels. From interacting with people, I believe I have good language sense. I also pick up wordings and phrases pretty easily. The language makes sense to me. However, I am not well read or well studied.) 

Welp, @ ho-heystranger let me know if you’re happy with this. If not, feel free to follow up in the notes or something. oof. this got way longer than i anticipated!

#ho-heystranger #i got an ask! #mo dao zu shi #the untamed 陈情令 #translation #管他熙熙攘攘阳关道 我偏要一条独木桥走到黑 #wei wuxian #lan wangji #lan sizhui #definite ramblings #some historical context #everything is a reference in chinese #and the more you read the more you learn your references but the more you want to bang you head against a wall #yes this is personal experience #also ngl i kinda love it #chinese is so old its references has references and other references #reference-ception? #i'm gonna stop now #my ramblings are ending up in the tags

[marcmaccoy]

”LA DIVERSIÓN EN IDIOMAS”

The title above is translated as, “The fun in languages”, something that I never really felt and had at the beginning. Ever since the quarantine started, I really did not plan to do anything nor to improve myself in any of my hobbies at all. Maybe it’s because I expected that all these crisis will be over in a week or two, which obviously and sadly, did not happen. Before, I just like to play my musical instruments, paint, and I got into Korean Dramas as well because of my friends. Sometimes, I bond with my pets and do cooking experiments too. All of these are done in order for me to avoid boredom. However, as time goes by, those things became a bit dull to me and I felt the need to discover something new.

Let me share a bit of my journey first.

As I watch Korean Dramas, I got this tendency to copy what they say and it became a habit of mine whenever I want to express something. So instead of saying, “Salamat” or “Thank you”, I often say, “감사”(gam-sa) which is an informal way of saying “Thank you” in Korean. Also, “안녕”(an-nyeong) which means “Hi”, “네”(ne) which means “Yes”, “아니”(ah-ni) which means “No” and many more. At that time, I didn’t know how to read their alphabet yet but because of my curiosity, I’ve thought of studying it. Surprisingly, I learned “한글”(han-geul) or the Korean Alphabet in just a day! Nine total hours to be exact. I was dumbfounded by how I was able to understand that in just a short manner of time. This inspired me to continue moving forward until I decided to finally learn the Korean language.

In the middle of my journey learning the said language, I began to encounter a lot of interesting facts about it. Such as it wasn’t the writing system of Korea before and how it only existed at about 578 years ago during King Sejong’s reign. It is said that “한글”(han-geul) was created in order for people with little to no education could learn how to read and write. Because before, many Koreans are illiterate due to their very complex Chinese-based writing system called Hanja (漢字) which is difficult to understand. Meaning to say, it was created by the King for the purpose of literacy. Also, the shapes of the letters in 한글 was based on the surroundings and how you say it. These are among the facts that I knew while I became deeply interested in Korea’s traditions, history, and cultures. I was so excited to be fluent that time. I even made flashcards to enhance my vocabularies, watched a lot of tutorials on YouTube, surfed many websites on the Internet, and proceeds to watch Korean series. Little did I know, I was going to unexpectedly give up studying this language. Why? Well, when I got into its grammar, I was surprised by how complicated it is. I also saw videos on YouTube about Filipino learners of the Korean Language that aren’t still fluent after years of studying. So I got a bit down and frankly, I lost my motivation.

Even so, my language learning journey did not stop there. I still want to learn a foreign language that interests me other than the ones I already know which is Filipino, my native mother-tongue and English, my second language. I tried Japanese because of Animes but it was a bit complicated too. They have three kinds of writing systems and the grammar is similar to Korean. French because I have a French uncle and a Filipino cousin and aunt which speaks fluent French but when I knew how it sounded and how the words were pronounced, I already lost hope. French pronunciation is too complicated for me. I also dig up about German because my main to-go-to country in the future is Switzerland and of course, I would want to communicate with people there. However, German is laborious too! The words, the combinations of letters, and the grammar is too confusing. Until I finally encountered the language that’s spoken by the first colonizer of my motherland and it is no other than Spanish.

I started by memorizing basic phrases such as, “Gracias”, “De nada”, “Hola”, and a lot more. I was, once again, amazed by how easy this language is spoken. It is because Spanish is a phonetic language. Meaning, the words are pronounced exactly the way they are spelled. Also since Spain colonized my country for about 333 years, we adopted a lot of words from them which are now considered as loan words. It is estimated that about 4,000+ Tagalog and 6,000 Visayan words came from Spain. Some of the examples include baso(vaso), lamesa(la mesa), tinidor(tenidor), kutsara(cuchara), bumbilya(bombilla), and banyo(baño). As well as the number system, the names of the months, days, expressions, greetings, and many more. For this reason, I was determined to continue learning it because unlike in the other languages, there is no need for me to struggle in memorizing new vocabularies.

I did the same things I did to Korean and just added some new tactics. While my school is on a term break after the first semester, I enrolled at a Spanish Beginner course online where we are taught by a Filipino teacher who is fluent in 5 languages: English, Tagalog, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. My cousin from France, who’s also fluent in Spanish, gave me books like Spanish dictionaries and grammar textbooks for writing and reading purposes. I was also able to use my Netflix binge-watching skills and started to watch a lot of Spanish series for listening purposes. And on YouTube, I began to discover facts about Spain. Their rich culture, history, and traditions, and how their language was influenced by Arabic as well. Additionally, Spanish is the 2nd most spoken language in the world, surpassing the English language, having over 460 million native speakers located in Spain and in Latin American countries. It is also the 3rd most used language on the internet. That’s a lot of people to talk to!

Furthermore, did you know that being multilingual gives your brain several remarkable advantages? Some of it can be seen such as higher density of the grey matter that contains most your brain’s neurons and synapses. It also helps our brain engage in more activities in certain regions where that language is spoken. And although not yet definitively proven, learning many languages decreases the rate of having dementia by 5 years! In addition, more businesses nowadays are seeking applicants who can navigate the modern global economy. It can be seen that in the 21st Century, knowing a second language is not only beneficial, but necessary for success in life. The continual globalization of the world’s economy is bringing diverse cultures and communities into more frequent contact with each other.

Looking back in time, I was nothing like this way before the quarantine started. Learning languages was never really included in my interests. But now, it is! In fact, I am even determined to shift my college course to something related to languages and pursue a master’s degree about linguistics. Indeed, it changed my life. It changed how I see things from a monolingual perspective and it opened a new horizon for me. Gladly, I was even able to have Spanish speaking friends! I have this one friend from Peru who speaks fluent Spanish and I happily encountered Spanish native people here in Facebook who are trying to learn a different language as well.

Overall, my experience was a blast! There are times that I became tired and almost lose my motivation because of how slow my progress is. But even so, I will not give up. I am not fluent yet and I still have a lot to know but I will keep on practicing until I become one. I believe that in the near future, it will open new opportunities that will be helpful for me too. Moreover, It has always been my dream to travel and I truly think that language learning will be an aid to that. Hoping that I’ll be able to talk to that nearing 500 million people soon!

Before I end my blog, I just want to share this quote from Charlemagne, also known as Karl and Charles the Great, a medieval emperor who ruled much of Western Europe during 768-814, “To have another language is to possess a second soul.”

Bueno. Eso es todo. Gracias por su tiempo leyendo mi blog. Espero que encuentres algo interesante. Además, a aquellos que están aprendiendo otro idioma, nunca perder la esperanza! Pronto seremos fluidos.

Truly, there is fun in languages.

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