#No Context Crow No. 202 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

necropsittacus · 4 years

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fuckoff long post about my skeksis language thoughts below the cut. i ought to do more with this but it’s been sitting in my files for a couple months now and i want to Show People

-i've talked about this hc on here before, but i like it enough to repeat. the existence of names like skekmal and skekvar indicate that they have some means of producing labial consonants with a beak (presumably the skeksis can pronounce their own names. also, while i am very fond of assuming the same "this is translated from what they're actually saying" conceit tolkien uses applies to tdc, it seems unnecessary and overly complicated to assume anything of the sort about *character names,* especially ones that don't sound like real-world names to start with. i am going to assume unless told otherwise that those are their actual in-universe names and not "translated" for human benefit). my favored solution is that they have syrinxes like a parrot’s rather than humanoid vocal apparatus.

-there are separate extant skeksis and gelfling languages. (evidence for this: the skeksis were straight up originally supposed to speak their own language in the movie. "shadows of the dark crystal" has a comment about how well skekso speaks gelfling. also, "shadows of the dark crystal" does some things with speech patterns for the skeksis, which i will get into below and which, with the possible exception of chamberlain and novels!hunter, make most sense to me to treat as second language difficulties--i have a hard time seeing, say, emperor deliberately speaking ""wrongly"")

one might expect that the skeksis, being the way they are, would install their own language as the official or state language. given that "shadows of the dark crystal" specifies that skekso's accent in the Gelfling language is pretty good, in a scene taking place in the castle ("his voice sounded almost cultured, his accent in the gelfling tongue much more perfected than the stilted broken phrases of the Chamberlain" (*shadows of the dark crystal* 202)), i'm assuming that *isn't* the situation, and for whatever reason they're using Gelfling for state business. given the skeksis in general, that sure isn't out of a sense of benevolence.

one option: the skeksis treat their language as a Special In-Group Thing that they don't want to use with or maybe teach to outsiders. it's become essentially a ritual thing (which might in itself warrant an explanation as to how that came about, tbh), or they do use it for casual purposes but only among themselves, something like that.

another option: there's some specific reason the skeksis lang would be impractical as a state language--i think the most likely thing for this is that there's some aspect(s) of the skeksis lang that are just anatomically difficult or impossible for gelflings to produce, perceive, or both (my initial thought was just "they might have sounds a gelfling doesn't have the right anatomy to make," influenced by the syrinx idea, but tbh going with that same idea i think like, crows, have fairly nuanced signals that we might just hear as "caw" across the board, so a species with both that sort of vocal anatomy and their own language could conceivably have nuances of sound difference a different species wouldn't Pick Up On, either?)

and these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, either

-name vs title: (this is as much my friend skye's (@deerpunk) idea as mine, so i don't want to take full credit for it) using a skeksis's personal name vs their title is a formality distinction pretty similar to the T-V distinction, except that, due to the skeksis being How They Are, the more positive familiarity/intimacy sense has been lost in most contexts, for most skeksis, and most of what's left is the insult sense. (there are some exceptions to this: skekvar to skeksil, when he's decided he trusts him, maybe skeklach and skekok (although that strikes me as half-jokingly rude friendship, so it could be both tbh), skekmal's death--and that could be a breaking down of formality expectations because the situation is so dire.) because strength, respect, ornamentation, dignity are so important to the skeksis, using someone's title to refer to them is the default, and using a personal name is specifically marking something. this is also why we very rarely see anyone call emperor "skekso" (with the exception of, to the point i’ve gotten to in the novels at the time of writing, skeksa and skekmal--and those two seem more likely to talk back to skekso anyway tbh)--it would just be rude as hell and there might be consequences

it's also of immense interest to me that at one point in "shadows of the dark crystal," skekmal refers to emperor as "so." i have not seen this kind of shortening anywhere else. it's either a peculiarity of skekmal, which would check out, given how weird his speech patterns generally are in that book, or an additional level of informality, which presumably no one but skekmal has the guts to *use* (especially for skekso holy shit).

-"shadow of the dark crystal" gives several skeksis specific fucky speech patterns (presumably in the gelfling language), *besides* what's going on with chamberlain, which i think can mostly be attributed to like. Chamberlain. chamberlain has multiple scenes in AOR where there are only other skeksis present (so i think it’s a fair guess that they’d be using the Skeksis language), and his speech patterns are just as weird, in the same ways, as when he’s talking to gelfling.

so what i'm saying about this is mostly discounting chamberlain, although i will say that the “using the same weird speech patterns in sentences that are in-universe presumably in skeksis and gelfling” thing, to me, suggests maybe that he actually has a different kind of fucked up speech pattern across languages, and it’s being “translated” as the same for the benefit of the viewers (i would guess the skeksis and gelfling languages don’t have exactly the same grammar; i would also guess that chamberlain talking kind of weird is, as iirc the wiki suggests, a deliberate choice meant to project a certain image). it’s also interesting that from the very little information i have just from “shadows of the dark crystal,” chamberlain does not make the same errors as emperor (possibly he actually speaks gelfling fairly well and is playing up “oh look at poor harmless chamberlain, i don’t speak your language too good, be nice to me :)” ?)

i'm going to talk about *shadows of the dark crystal*!skekmal separately, since his speech patterns, as mentioned above, are kind of wild and have some commonalities with both chamberlain and the other skeksis in the book. i feel it necessary to distinguish novels skekmal from aor skekmal, who talks normally if a bit melodramatically. (also i'm getting the impression they have slightly different personalities, from what i've seen so far, but that's not relevant to this monstrosity of a post)

i am going to list the weird sentences individually in a bit here. the most notable oddities (discounting chamberlain and hunter) are copula omission, verb number agreement (possibly person, too, but english has so little verb agreement that that's hard to judge); "gelfling" being pluralized as "gelfling," which i think is common enough in tdc but in combination with the previous point made me wonder about pluralization errors? the omission of definite articles, and some odd word order stuff that could also be taken as sheer pretentiousness

copula omission:

"gelfling the ones that do the fixing" (202)

"gelfling causing problems for us, lord skeksis (202) ("lord skeksis" there also feels odd to me; i think i would have expected a definite article, and maybe a different word order)

"all gelfling traitors" (211)

verb agreement:

"we love gelfling, we do, we loves them" (203)

"after all skeksis does for you! gelfling came here just to tell such lies!" (211)

misc:

“daughter-soldier” (202) is not egregious but a bit odd

“yes?” to end a wh-question (202)

"silverling is sounding like a traitor herself" (212)

"see the crystal herself" (214) is not terrible but feels a Little weird

“we care not”

hunter: (not sure whether to even count this for Skeksis Speech Oddities because his speech patterns are SO wild)

"skeksis tower"

also drops first person subject pronoun (222)

"end this now, skekMal will do" (222) -- third person for himself, weird word order

omission of third person subject pronoun also

consistent omission of articles, except "skekTek the Scientist"

"not if skekMal make and take it for *himself*" - verbal agreement error

"what we does with Gelfling" - verbal agreement error

more subject pronoun omission and verb agreement errors- "silverling wanted to know what we does with gelfling. wanted to see for itself...got what it deserves" (222)

"hard to fight while carrying stone" (225) - this is okay but feels kind of weird (at least personally i’d probably say “it’s hard to fight…” in this context)

skektek also omits subject pronouns (238)--"gets to see the crystal *now*"

we don't see skektek omit first person, which is interesting; i’m taking that as essentially a characterization thing--it makes sense to have skektek in particular emphasizing his own presence and relevance

"skeksis taking care of it, taking care of gelfling" - past progressive expressed as simple progressive with no copula (243)

"how's skeksis to protect little gelfling when crystal cracked?" - agreement error, article omission (243)

"when growing old? growing weak?" (243) - omission of both subject pronoun and copula

negative concord--"not one with nothing"--(245)

"where the one with wings" (248) - copula omission

"skekmal smells 'em" (248)--is this the first place we get a potentially animate pronoun used for a gelfling by a skeksis? and it's plural?

"what says gelfling"

"gelfling wings comes fluttering out to save it" (248)--with "it" being gurjin, presumably, since skekMal would be unable to grab naia since he doesn't know exactly where she is. so this would be "gelfling wings comes fluttering out to save gurjin;" "gelfling wings" could be interpreted as "gelfling with wings" or "gelfling's wings" with about equal workability in this sentence--"gelfling with wings comes fluttering out to save gurjin" or "gelfling's wings come fluttering out to save gurjin"--Gurjin takes it as the second ("gelfling wings fly her to ha'rar")

"skekMal kills this one, then it kills the others" (249)--skekMal using not only third person, but inanimate third person, to refer to himself. skekMal using third person like this could be taken as meaning that referring to yourself in the third person either has a different connotation than in english (i tend to think of it as sort of childlike or cutesy, and skekMal is REALLY not that), and most likely different connotations for skekMal doing it than chamberlain doing it, or this is just a really weird take on him.

also, I’ve mostly been assuming the skeksis using “it” for gelfling is just a “they don’t see gelflings as fully sentient” thing, but that can’t really apply to skekMal; i wonder if the skeksis language doesn’t have a pronoun animacy distinction, or it doesn’t work the same way as in english, and they’re just Worse about remembering to use the right ones for gelfling, because of the “not seeing gelflings as people” problem?

you could take that farther and say the skeksis language, or maybe the urskeks? don't have third person pronouns at *all;* (at any rate, my personal headcanon has always been that they didn't originally have gendered pronouns, or really gender at all per se, and skeksa and (probably) skeklach (and by extension presumably their urru counterparts) just heard this "she" and "woman" thing from non-skeksis and went "yeah i want that")

also this could have relevance to chamberlain and novels!skekmal using third person for themselves so much

my friend skye, mentioned above, took this and suggested the skeksis lang is grammatically similar to japanese, in connection with the urskeks being super collectivist, which i like. It would also jive with the verbal agreement and pluralization errors, inconsistent use of articles, and copula omission.

this post may be updated with more novels stuff later on, because This Is What I’m Doing With My Major I Guess.

#txt #tdc #long post

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nothingman · 3 years

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Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R). | Getty Images

The debate over whether Georgia’s law really suppresses voting reveals just how imperiled American democracy is.

Georgia’s new election law SB 202, which many experts decried as an attack on the fundamental fairness of the state’s elections, was compared to Jim Crow by many leading Democrats. Now some observers are pushing back, arguing the bill falls well short of a democratic apocalyptic.

In the New York Times, Nate Cohn concluded that “the law’s voting provisions are unlikely to significantly affect turnout or Democratic chances.” Slate’s Will Saletan notes that some provisions really are troubling, but that the bill also contains good provisions and that critics have “overhyped” their concerns. Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, writes that “the idea this is an epic war on voting rights is simply absurd.”

On one level, it’s a fair topic of conversation, and the critics make some good points. Research on the effect of voter ID requirements often does find small or no effect on turnout; President Joe Biden’s description of the bill as “Jim Crow on steroids” certainly overstates the case.

But at the same time, some of the policy conversation about the Georgia bill is deeply frustrating. The close reading often takes place in a vacuum, disconnected from the context that gave rise to the law in the first place.

The fundamental truth about SB 202 is this: Its very existence is predicated on a lie. The bill’s passage was motivated by unfounded claims of fraud in the Georgia presidential elections — lies that Donald Trump spread and continues to spread, with the help of both state and national Republicans.

“President Biden, the left, and the national media are determined to destroy the sanctity and security of the ballot box,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement after the bill’s signing.

The problem with discussing Georgia’s law solely in the narrow terms of what this or that provision does is that it implicitly concedes that the law is a reasonable enterprise to begin with: that the rationale for its passage is legitimate rather than an effort to further a fraudulent and dangerous narrative.

“The conversation is something like the mid-2000s debate over whether torture works. It basically doesn’t, but to even have that debate is to have surrendered something,” writes Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver.

The Georgia bill is not merely the sum of its provisions in a country where 60 percent of Republicans believe the 2020 presidential election “was stolen” from Trump through voter fraud — it validates a lie that is corroding American democracy. It also extends and deepens a much older Republican campaign to rig the system in their favor.

The debate over the bill’s provisions, briefly explained

Let’s start by getting clear on what Georgia’s new law actually does.

SB 202 is a big piece of legislation, containing a number of provisions touching on different aspects of election law. In his analysis, Cohn divides these provisions into four buckets: new regulations on absentee voting, new in-person voting rules, changes to runoff elections, and expansions of the state legislature’s power over election administration.

Many critics of Georgia’s law, myself included, have argued that this last set of provisions is the most troubling one. It gives Georgia’s Republican-controlled General Assembly effective control over the State Board of Elections and empowers the state board to take over local county boards — functionally allowing Republicans to handpick the people in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning places like Atlanta.

Saletan argues that there are sufficient safeguards in the bill to prevent abuse of these powers, but this is a minority view. Voting rights advocates, experts I’ve spoken to, and even Cohn all think there’s a serious potential for abuse here. “This represents an obvious threat to American democracy,” he concludes after an in-depth analysis of the new provisions.

The more serious arguments that Georgia’s law isn’t so dangerous focus on Cohn’s other three buckets, which include regulations that:

Extend voter ID requirements to absentee ballots

Sharply limit the use of ballot drop boxes

Expand weekend voting during the early voting period

Require large precincts to take steps to limit crowd length

Criminalize giving voters with food and water while they wait in line (with an exception for poll workers)

Shorten the time between Election Day and any subsequent runoff elections from nine weeks to four, sharply contracting the early voting period for runoffs

These provisions will clearly make it somewhat harder to vote by mail; the impact on in-person voting is harder to discern but could plausibly make it harder to vote in Democratic-leaning precincts and easier in Republican ones.

But here’s the surprising thing: There’s some decent political science research that making voting marginally easier or harder, through policies like voter ID laws or expanding the use of drop boxes, doesn’t really affect turnout all that much.

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

An early voting line in Atlanta in December, during the Senate runoff.

“In the contemporary United States, with such wide and ready access to the ballot, changes around the edges don’t disenfranchise people,” Rich Lowry writes in National Review. ”It’s hard to believe that one real voter is going to be kept from voting by the new [Georgia] rules.”

Lowry is overstating the case. Experts like Charlotte Hill, a PhD candidate at UC-Berkeley who studies elections, cited research suggesting that so-called “convenience” reforms making voting easier really do matter for turnout.

The likely effect of Georgia’s ballot access provisions is the sort of thing that reasonable people can disagree about. The evidence on their effects is genuinely mixed; it’s fair, even important, to try to pinpoint exactly what effects certain provisions of the bill are likely to have.

But it’s not the most helpful way to think, and frame the conversation, about the Georgia bill.

The Georgia bill validates Trump’s big lie

Policies are enacted to solve problems. In the case of SB 202, the alleged “problem” is simple: that voters have had a crisis of confidence in the results of the 2020 vote and the integrity of Georgia’s elections.

“The way we begin to restore confidence in our voting system is by passing this bill,” Georgia Rep. Barry Fleming, the bill’s sponsor, said during a floor debate on his proposal.

But this is a problem entirely of Republicans’ own making. From Trump on down, key party leaders and operatives have worked to sow doubt in the validity of the 2020 results. By passing SB 202, Georgia’s Republicans are merely ratifying their own lie.

Think about this from the point of view of someone who believes the Trump story of the 2020 election: that mail-in ballots were fraudulent, that in-person votes are the only reliable ones, that local election officials in heavily Democratic areas like Atlanta cheated, and that feckless state-level Republicans like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused to intervene to stop them out of cowardice.

Getty Images

Trump supporters rallying in Washington, DC, on January 6.

This is all a ludicrous fantasy, of course. But if you really believed it and wanted to prevent it in the future, then you would have designed a bill like SB 202: one that makes mail-in voting harder and takes power away from voting officials who failed to “stop the steal” in 2020.

And that, in fact, appears to have been what was on state legislators’ minds when they wrote the bill. Stephen Fowler, a Georgia reporter who covers elections, writes that “the vast majority of Georgia’s rank and file Republican elected officials jumped on board a series of hare-brained lawsuits and schemes to try and overthrow the state’s elections.” In December, Georgia House Republicans held a series of hearings in which speakers like Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani were invited to spout theories about how the election was stolen from Trump.

“Democrats are relying on the always-suspect absentee balloting process to inch ahead in Georgia and other close states,” Fleming wrote in December. “If elections were like coastal cities, absentee balloting would be the shady part of town down near the docks you do not want to wander into because the chance of being shanghaied is significant.”

Josh McLaurin, a Democrat in Georgia’s House, told me that the state GOP is “a party whose election policy is driven by Trump’s ‘big lie’” — reverse-engineering SB 202 to solve the wholly fictitious problems invented by Trump and his allies.

The new rules aren’t just premised on a lie. Their enactment also validates that lie.

The successes and failures of the GOP’s anti-democratic agenda

Here’s another piece of context the debate over SB 202’s provisions is missing: The GOP has been working to fix state election rules across the country in its favor for years now, a campaign that’s accelerating in the wake of Trump’s claims of a stolen election.

According to the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan institute that studies voting rights, there are currently 361 bills in 47 statehouses around the country that would restrict the franchise — most of which attempt to put limits on absentee votes. These bills, according to Brennan, are “a backlash to 2020’s historic voter turnout” being pushed “under the pretense of responding to baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities.”

So far, these bills have only passed in Republican-controlled state governments like Georgia’s — and recent history suggests they’re only likely to pass in such governments. A new working paper by the University of Washington’s Jake Grumbach attempted to measure the health of democracy in all 50 states between 2000 and 2018. The findings were unambiguous: Republican control over state government was correlated with large and measurable declines in the health of a state’s democracy.

It’s fair to say, at this point, that the Republican Party is engaged in a long-running, at times systematic attempt to change the rules in their favor. Not every tactic they’ve used in the fight has been equally effective; gerrymandering, at both the state and national level, has a much clearer partisan effect than voter ID laws.

But the fact that some of these laws don’t end up being effective at suppressing turnout isn’t a defense of the GOP. Attempted murder is still a crime. And focusing too heavily on the details of any one bill not only misses this overall context, but also serves to normalize the GOP’s anti-democratic project.

Getty Images

Trump at CPAC 2021.

Of course Democrats shouldn’t lie, or even exaggerate, about Georgia’s law. But they’re right that the bill contains several extremely dangerous new provisions, and they’re also right that the broader context suggests the stakes of our current fight over voting really are existential.

“We’re so obsessed with estimating causal effects of suppression efforts we have ceded important normative ground,” writes Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford. “The right to vote is sacred. Access to the ballot should be expanded, not burdened.”

There’s only one party in modern history whose presidential candidate refused to concede when they lost a national election. It’s the party whose candidate is still insisting that he won the 2020 election, whose partisans violently attacked the US Capitol on January 6 in a last-ditch effort to keep their man in power. Now, that party is using its fantasies of fraud to justify legislation like what passed in Georgia.

And we can expect more attacks on election integrity in the coming months from GOP-controlled statehouses — because the Republican Party, as an institution, seems perfectly willing to use Trump’s big lie as a pretext to seize more power.

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