#esperanto culture | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spacelazarwolf · 5 months

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in honor of that anon who said jews have done nothing for the world, here’s a non exhaustive list of things we’ve done for the world:

arts, fashion, and lifestyle:

jeans - levi strauss

modern bras - ida rosenthal

sewing machines - isaac merritt singer

modern film industry - carl laemmle (universal pictures), adolph zukor (paramount pictures), william fox (fox film forporation), louis b. mayer (mgm - metro-goldwyn-mayer), harry, sam, albert, and jack warners (warner bros.), steven spielberg, mel brooks, marx brothers

operetta - jacques offenbach

comic books - stan lee

graphic novels - will eisner

teddy bears - morris and rose michtom

influential musicians - irving berlin, stephen sondheim, benny goodman, george gershwin, paul simon, itzhak perlman, leonard bernstein, bob dylan, leonard cohen

artists - mark rothko

actors - elizabeth taylor, jerry lewis, barbara streisand

comedians - lenny bruce, joan rivers, jerry seinfeld

authors - judy blume, tony kushner, allen ginsberg, walter mosley

culture:

esperanto - ludwik lazar zamenhof

feminism - betty friedan, gloria steinem, ruth bader ginsberg

queer and trans rights - larry kramer, harvey milk, leslie feinberg, abby stein, kate bornstein, frank kameny, judith butler

international women's day - clara zetkin

principles of journalizm, statue of liberty, and pulitzer prize - joseph pulitzer

"the new colossus" - emma lazarus

universal declaration of human rights - rene samuel cassin

holocaust remembrance and human rights activism - elie wiesel

workers rights - louis brandeis, rose schneiderman

public health care, women's rights, and children's rights - lillian wald

racial equity - rabbi abraham joshua heschel, julius rosenwald, andrew goodman, michael schwerner

political theory - hannah arendt

disability rights - judith heumann

black lives matter slogan and movement - alicia garza

#metoo movement - jodi kantor

institute of sexology - magnus hirschfeld

technology:

word processing computers - evelyn berezin

facebook - mark zuckerberg

console video game system - ralph henry baer

cell phones - amos edward joel jr., martin cooper

3d - leonard lipton

telephone - philipp reis

fax machines - arthur korn

microphone - emile berliner

gramophone - emile berliner

television - boris rosing

barcodes - norman joseph woodland and bernard silver

secret communication system, which is the foundation of the technology used for wifi - hedy lamarr

three laws of robotics - isaac asimov

cybernetics - norbert wiener

helicopters - emile berliner

BASIC (programming language) - john george kemeny

google - sergey mikhaylovich brin and larry page

VCR - jerome lemelson

fax machine - jerome lemelson

telegraph - samuel finley breese morse

morse code - samuel finley breese morse

bulletproof glass - edouard benedictus

electric motor and electroplating - boris semyonovich jacobi

nuclear powered submarine - hyman george rickover

the internet - paul baran

icq instant messenger - arik vardi, yair goldfinger,, sefi vigiser, amnon amir

color photography - leopold godowsky and leopold mannes

world's first computer - herman goldstine

modern computer architecture - john von neumann

bittorrent - bram cohen

voip internet telephony - alon cohen

data archiving - phil katz, eugene roshal, abraham lempel, jacob ziv

nemeth code - abraham nemeth

holography - dennis gabor

laser - theodor maiman

instant photo sharing online - philippe kahn

first automobile - siegfried samuel marcus

electrical maglev road - boris petrovich weinberg

drip irrigation - simcha blass

ballpoint pen and automatic gearbox - laszlo biro

photo booth - anatol marco josepho

medicine:

pacemakers and defibrillators - louise robinovitch

defibrillators - bernard lown

anti-plague and anti-cholera vaccines - vladimir aronovich khavkin

polio vaccine - jonas salk

test for diagnosis of syphilis - august paul von wasserman

test for typhoid fever - ferdinand widal

penicillin - ernst boris chain

pregnancy test - barnhard zondek

antiretroviral drug to treat aids and fight rejection in organ transplants - gertrude elion

discovery of hepatitis c virus - harvey alter

chemotherapy - paul ehrlich

discovery of prions - stanley prusiner

psychoanalysis - sigmund freud

rubber condoms - julius fromm

birth control pill - gregory goodwin pincus

asorbic acid (vitamin c) - tadeusz reichstein

blood groups and rh blood factor - karl landsteiner

acyclovir (treatment for infections caused by herpes virus) - gertrude elion

vitamins - caismir funk

technique for measuring blood insulin levils - rosalyn sussman yalow

antigen for hepatitus - baruch samuel blumberg

a bone fusion technique - gavriil abramovich ilizarov

homeopathy - christian friedrich samuel hahnemann

aspirin - arthur ernst eichengrun

science:

theory of relativity - albert einstein

theory of the electromagnetic field - james maxwell

quantum mechanics - max born, gustav ludwig hertz

quantum theory of gravity - matvei bronstein

microbiology - ferdinand julius cohn

neuropsychology - alexander romanovich luria

counters for x-rays and gamma rays - robert hofstadter

genetic engineering - paul berg

discovery of the antiproton - emilio gino segre

discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation - arno allan penzias

discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe - adam riess and saul merlmutter

discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity - roger penrose

discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of the milky way - andrea ghez

modern cosmology and the big bang theory - alexander alexandrovich friedmann

stainless steel - hans goldschmidt

gas powered vehicles

interferometer - albert abraham michelson

discovery of the source of energy production in stars - hans albrecht bethe

proved poincare conjecture - grigori yakovlevich perelman

biochemistry - otto fritz meyerhof

electron-positron collider - bruno touschek

#jewish #jumblr #am yisrael fucking chai

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becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys · 1 year

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I would really like to know how and why some of my fellow Brits have absorbed the whole "if none of us were any different (language/culture/identity) we would all understand each other better and it would be great" like my bro has said before that he thinks it would be better if only one language exists (I don't think he cares which one) I'm just ?????????? But we can try to understand each other without being the same?????

It's a dominant culture thing. A well-meaning, left-leaning one, but a dominant culture thing. This is a view held by people who don't feel any particular connection to their own culture or language, because it's dominant - it's 'default' and therefore universal and unremarkable.

This means they can't relate to the idea of belonging to your own cultural unit/sub-group. BUT:

It also goes hand in hand with being well-meaning, and left-leaning. They come from a dominant culture - meaning, one that gets imposed on others a lot, which they don't like. So they reject the notion of borders and nationhood and that, because to them, that's a negative, right wing, oppressive concept. It's in the name of nationalism that all the oppression happens; so nations are bad, right? Drawing divisions is bad, right? Dividing ourselves rather than all getting along is bad, right?

(Most famous example of this, by the way, is the song "Imagine". John Lennon was, for all his many and varied flaws, a well-intentioned man, who fell in love with an Asian woman and got subsequently FLOODED with racist abuse for it (as did Yoko Ono). He wrote "Imagine" partly as a response to that. No religion, no borders, no nations... no divisions to hate each other over. Just harmony and love.)

Seems nice, doesn't it?

But it ignores what everyone in a non-dominant culture knows and understands - that there's a difference between division and diversity, and that a single centralised authority ruling over all is Bad, Actually. People's needs go unnoticed. If you belong to a marginalised outgroup of some form, nationalism can have a great many positive benefits, because it's defending your culture and right to exist and giving you a voice that is otherwise lost. Why should we have a single homogenous culture? It'll never happen, regardless - that's not how humans work. Culture is literally the shared set of norms and values in a group. That will always adapt and change wherever there's a mass of people. And that is a good thing, because different perspectives are a good thing.

In fact, with regards to language, I always think a three-tier structure is what we need. I'm actually not against the concept of a lingua Franca, be it Esperanto or anything else. It would indeed be highly useful to have a global language for communication. But specifically for global communication - within a nation/cultural group/etc, you have the one(s) that's native to you and helps define you as a people, and then at a local level you have your dialect that unites you as neighbours. To me, for a healthy society, you need all three of those. (I have similar thoughts about currencies and economies but that is irrelevant here.)

Anyway, those are my personal thoughts, obvs

#asks #linguistics

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dedalvs · 28 days

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My apologies, what I meant is that most of your languages are made for fantastic, fantasy worlds, as opposed to a fictional culture on Earth. If you're creating a language for a culture set on Earth, you'd probably incorporate features that tie it to a real language, am I correct?

I think you still may be misunderstanding what the key questions are and how they factor into language creation. There are two questions:

Is this language supposed to be descended from an existing language (or set of languages) on Earth?

Is this language spoken by creatures that are identical to humans in all the ways that play a crucial role in language use, comprehensijon, and transmission?

These are the only relevant questions. Notice I didn't say anything about where the languages are spoken. That bit is irrelevant. Language has its own geography and it's the only geography that matters when it comes to a posteriori language construction.

For example, looking at Dothraki, the answer to (1) is no, and the answer to (2) is yes. For that reason, Dothraki should be a language that looks entirely ordinary, in terms of how it stacks up with languages spoken currently on Earth, but its vocabulary and grammar shouldn't be directly related to any language on the planet. How could it be, if our planet doesn't exist in that universe? But since Dothraki are completely ordinary human beings their language should be a compeltely ordinary human language.

If you look at the aliens District 9, the answers to both (1) and (2) are no, despite the fact that the movie takes place in South Africa. And, in fact, you see some very interesting linguistic phenomena in that movie, where you have two species that understand but cannot use each other's languages. Its setting, though, doesn't mean that the alien language should be influenced by Afrikaans in any important way, though. It may have "borrowings", but even those would be strange (calques, most likely), since the aliens can't actually make human sounds—the same way the humans wouldn't have "borrowings" from the alien language.

On the other hand, if you look at Trigedasleng, the answers to both (1) and (2) are yes. But the suggestion you seem to be making is that I might kind of haphazardly "borrow" features from an existing language into a language that I'm nevertheless creating from scratch. That wouldn't make sense. Trigedasleng is simply an evolved form of American English with some specific constraints (some quite unrealistic, due to the scifi setting) placed on the evolution. I didn't "incorporate" features from American English: it IS American English, through and through, evolved in a way that makes sense for the setting.

There are certainly a posteriori conlangs where the creator approaches the creation of the language by saying, "I took the initial consonant mutation of Irish and combined it with the triconsonantal root system of Arabic and added the Turkish plural suffix (with vowel harmony) and added the accusative from Esperanto", and the like. This is one of the hallmarks of an amateur conlanger. Not even a creole language in the real world does this. Creole languages draw influences from many different languages, but the resulting system can't be divided up neatly into different linguistic sources. Furthermore, the result is a coherent system that doesn't look like any of the sources. Tok Pisin gets a lot of its vocabulary and grammar from English, but also gets vocabulary from German and other languages that were native to the region. When listening to the language, though, it's not like it sounds like English, then it suddenly sounds like German for a word, then it sounds like a Papuan language, then back to English: the whole thing sounds like Tok Pisin. It's a seamless, coherent system—just like any language, since all languages on Earth have borrowings and features from other languages.

Also, minor nitpick: "real" language doesn't make sense. We say natural language vs. constructed languages. Both are equally real, in that neither has any kind of material existence. A constructed language is a real language with a fake history.

Does this make sense?

#conlang #language #tok pisin

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atthebell-moved · 1 year

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QSMP Language Stats on AO3 (as of June 6th 2023)

Hey hi hello. I just spent 3-4 hours working on this and I'm a little bleary-eyed so forgive the text of this if it makes little sense.

So, I decided to look into the statistics and percentages for QSMP works on AO3 and what languages they're tagged with, to see how multilingual the fandom on that platform is, as AO3 is far easier to do stats on than elsewhere.

Some fun tidbits from the start/tldr;:

QSMP has 1433 works as of today (well, as of checking this while writing it, it's actually jumped up to 1438, but for the data I collected earlier, let's stick with 1433).

English is the most commonly tagged language, at 80.04%, which is a smaller percentage than the percentage of all English works to all works on AO3 (more details for all of this below).

Though the top three languages are spoken on the server, French has no works on AO3 currently.

There's a decent amount of works that are translated into several languages, which is very rad! Doing stats on that would be an entirely different post, with a bit more work involved, but I want to give a big kudos on this as translation is very difficult and is often a passion project in fandom that goes underappreciated.

I got a lot of these numbers just by going through the QSMP tag and filtering by language and then checking manually, but for the larger AO3 numbers I got those on the Languages page, which shoes all languages supported by the Archive.

Now onto the numbers! Everything is below a cut because trust me, this post is long. Viewers beware, you're in for a stats dump.

Numbers, Stats, Percentages, all that fun stuff

QSMP works

[Image Description: A table with three columns; the first lists languages, the second the number of works, and the third the percentage of total works. For the languages column, each language is listed first in that language and then in English in parentheses, and English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French are all color-coded to indicate that they are spoken on the server. End ID.]

The most commonly tagged language, like I said above, is English, with 1147 works or 80.04% of total works in the QSMP fandom tag.

The second most commonly tagged language is Spanish, with 254 works and 17.73% of the fandom.

Next is Brazilian Portuguese at 27 works and 1.88%.

And the next four are all much lower: Mandarin at 2 works and 0.14%, Russian at 1 work and 0.07%, Latin with 1 work at 0.07%, Esperanto at 1 work with 0.07%, and French with 0 works and 0%.

I included French because it is the only spoken language on the server without any works, which I find interesting and will talk about further in my notes/analysis later on.

Some interesting trends to note! First thing: English, as one would expect, is the most used language, with 80.04%. I am also unsurprised that English and Spanish are at the top, as I know there's sizable MCYT fandoms for both languages. I think there's a few reasons why these numbers shake out the way that they do, which I'll get into later, but for now I think most would agree that these are what one would expect, aside from perhaps the languages that do have works but are not spoken on the server.

With these, I'm actually not surprised either. After English, Mandarin and Russian are the next two top languages in terms of works on AO3 (numbers below), and for Latin and Esperanto, creating works in those is something that happens often enough in fandom that I don't find it surprising, although with how small QSMP is (in terms of works on AO3 at the moment) it is interesting regardless. I talk a bit more about Esperanto in my notes at the end, but for Latin, as a language people often take in school but rarely use and a language with a lot of cultural hype surrounding it, people who took Latin in high school or even studied it in college with sometimes write or translate fic into it.

Across All Fandoms

Okay, with those numbers at the ready, let's compare to total numbers across all fandoms on AO3. I did this comparison using the same languages as above, but I will also add another table showing the percentages for the top 15 languages on the site, as I find that kind of stuff interesting and I think it's somewhat relevant.

I don't have a confirmed number on the total number of works on AO3 as of when I did these numbers, but according to the AO3 welcome page, they're at approximately 11,220,000 works right now. I'm going with this number, as I know its an updated one probably at least as of June 1, and complete accuracy is not necessarily possible in this instance.

[Image Description: The same table as above, this time with numbers for all fandoms across AO3. End ID.]

The most commonly tagged language is English at 10,021,982 works and 89.32% of all works on AO3.

Spanish has 130,024 works and 1.16%

Brazilian Portuguese has 30,549 works and 0.27%

Mandarin has 621,505 works and 5.54%

Russian has 238,699 works and 2.13%

Latin has 149 works and 0.0013%

Esperanto has 99 works and 0.00088%

French has 52,904 works and 0.47%

Okay! Lots of numbers this time, and some similarities and differences. First thing I want to note is that the total number of works on AO3 being over 10 million means these stats are far more meaningful and show more significant trends than those for QSMP. QSMP also only has 1433 fics, which is MINUSCULE compared to the total number of works across fandoms on AO3. You also have to consider that the number of people who write fic for a fandom versus the number of people who speak it is very different, and you also have to consider platform differences between different fandoms. There are other fanfiction websites in various languages, and that might impact these numbers to some extent.

Going to get into analysis now, as I think discussing how the data compares will get into that pretty quickly anyway.

Analysis:

Disclaimer! Much of this is just my personal opinion, or stuff I've noticed but don't really have numbers on or too much info on myself. I would love to hear from folks in the Spanish, Brazilian, and French communities (as well as any others!) about what they're like, especially as regards MCYT. I am lightly familiar with Spanish fandom because of Karmaland and now QSMP, but it's still not wildly familiar to me, and otherwise my fandom experiences are pretty English-centric.

The biggest thing to note here, in comparing the data between QSMP specifically and AO3 broadly, is that the percentage of Spanish fics is far smaller-- it's gone from the near-20% in QSMP to around 1% for all works. This makes sense, considering how many QSMP members speak Spanish, how much Spanish MCYT fandom has grown in the last several years, and the fact that the server is themed around multilingualism and cross-cultural expression, meaning fans who speak multiple languages are more likely to write in not just English and also generally incorporate more of the various languages into their writing.

The difference here is also in terms of audience, like I said. This fandom is far more likely to attract Spanish speakers than Mandarin or Russian Speakers, at least at the moment, so it makes sense that Spanish would have far more works. In comparison to French, also, Spanish has more than double the amount of speakers than French and from my knowledge Spanish MCYT fandom is far bigger.

For Portuguese, I'm not familiar with the fandom, but there does seem to be a decent MCYT fandom going on and I'm impressed with the number of works in Portuguese. I know it seems small, but again, the total number of works really is not that many.

The biggest reason so far that I think English, Spanish, and Portuguese are at the top, aside from just that the first two were on for much longer and the latter for at least a month longer than the French (and aside from the fact that English is so present on AO3) is that those streamers have made themselves much more central to the narrative and to lore than any of the French speakers have, at least so far. The Brazilians showed up and immediately became so involved and so beloved, and while fans obviously like the French speakers, they're not doing quite as much RP nor are they as involved in the Federation lore that much.

I also think one thing I haven't really seen people acknowledge is that Cellbit is very attractive, which of course begets fan attention. His lore is incredible and I think he's a very talented RPer, obviously, but he is also really hot, which means people are more likely to create fanworks about him. For Spanish and English speakers, obviously there are also creators who people are very into (I'm not even going to name any because it's quite a long list and you're all well aware). For the French, not so much. This is not me calling any of them ugly, I'm just saying that I have not seen really any thirsting over any of them aside from a few people talking about Baghera. I'm not going to get into the logistics of fan attention and attractiveness of creators, I just wanted to acknowledge that that is definitely doing Cellbit some favors and is likely making interest in Portuguese and Portuguese fanworks more popular.

Okay I've reached the point of writing this post where I think I've been working on all of this for at least 3-4 hours and I need to stop thinking about it so. That's everything I have for the moment, but I would be happy to hear what other folks think about this. If i said i would talk about something but forgot please just shoot me an ask or something and i'll add on.

Here's some extra notes:

There are a few (not many, but enough to acknowledge) fics that are written in Spanish but are tagged as being in English. I'm not sure if the same is true of Brazilian Portuguese.

Due to the nature of the server, there is also a huge number of works that contain elements of multiple languages, ranging from a few works to a decent chunk of the dialogue swapping between languages. This is not completely unheard of in fandoms, of course, as there are many fandoms which provide the opportunity for multilingualism, but this is fun to note because it's so present in the canon itself. I would argue there's a decent number of fics that are themselves bilingual/trilingual/multilingual, and I wish AO3 had a way of tagging as such. I'm not sure if there are any freeforms along those lines, but I have seen some folks noting in their tags that there's some amount of Spanish/Portuguese in them as well as English, and the same goes for the Spanish fics I've looked at.

Similarly, there's a decent amount of translations! Which is super cool! Translations are usually only done as passion projects by really dedicated fans, so it's really cool to see a (relatively) small fandom (for AO3) with a decent amount of them. I want to stress that translation is very tough work so major kudos to folks doing translations, either of their own work or other's.

The one Esperanto fic is a translation of an English work! Also, if you're unfamiliar, Esperanto is a conlang (constructed language) created in 1887 as an international language meant for anyone from any background to be able to learn. It never picked up much global steam, as lingua francas are far more common and it's still fairly Euro-centric in the language systems it pulled from, but it is likely the most spoken international auxiliary constructed language, and translating into it is often done as a nod to the importance of translation and cross-cultural communication. I think it's very fun that someone translated a work into it for QSMP :]

Also!!! here are the top 15 languages used on ao3 and their number of works. They're not in a spreadsheet bc i got really really tired sorry

english: 10,022,162 mandarin: 621,520 russian: 238,700 spanish: 130,692 french: 52,904 italian: 33,962 brazilian portuguese: 30,549 indonesian: 29,030 german: 22,755 polish: 17,215 ukrainian: 11,041 cantonese: 8,878 filipino: 8,664 vietnamese: 6,565 czech: 5,168

#bell.txt #qsmp #ao3 stats #long post #qsmp stats

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do-you-speak-this-language · 6 months

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hello and welcome to do-you-speak-this-language!

REQUESTS ARE CLOSED ❌ they will open back up again soon i promise!!

if you haven't seen the description already, i started this project to examine this userbase's linguistic diversity, generally speaking. as of now i am the sole moderator of this blog. :-)

you can call me c! my pronouns are she/her and i am under 18. i have a strong interest in linguistics and language learning and have made varying amounts of progress on more than 40+ languages, but am currently focusing on esperanto, spanish, japanese, and russian.

this blog was inspired by blogs such as @haveyouheardthisband , @haveyouseenthismovie-poll , @haveyoureadthisbook-poll , @haveyoueatenthis , and more!

click "keep reading" for more information about language requests and the general rules of this blog.

REGARDING REQUESTS AND ORGANIZATION: when indicated so, you are very very welcome to submit your own requests for languages you'd like to be seen in a poll. i will accept requests for any widely-recognized language, including conlangs (constructed languages) and other minority and endangered languages. i do my best to research every language i make a poll on, but if somehow i cannot find any written information on a language i have received, i will NOT make a post for it and will do my best to inform you of this.

once i have received enough languages to make polls for, i will create an online spreadsheet that you can access to see what languages have already been done and submitted. right now it doesn't exist. however, when it does, please read and check the spreadsheet for the language you wish to request before actually sending me an ask about it!

languages will be tagged by the most commonly written English version of their name (ex: Spanish will be primarily referred to as Spanish, Japanese as Japanese), but i will also mention names of languages as expressed in their native languages, both in the body of the post and in the tags (ex. Spanish will also be referred to as español, Japanese as 日本語).

REGARDING BLOG RULES & BOUNDARIES: for the sake of maintaining a large sample size for each poll i post, anyone who encounters this blog is allowed to participate and reblog my posts if they so wish.

if you make the decision to comment on a certain language on any post, PLEASE be respectful of the language and culture you are talking about, as well as any other people that may have contributed their own view/experience with the language. nothing like "[x language] is so ugly-looking/sounding" or "[x language] sucks because etc etc etc" or "people from [x country] are so rude/weird/annoying/etc" or anything similar. such comments will be immediately removed and, in more severe cases, the user will be blocked from interacting with further posts.

also, do not start arguments or discourse about any language. this could also have you end up blocked.

lastly, please be patient with me and my posting schedule. i am currently preparing for community college and i usually have a lot on my plate offline. i promise i will get to your request or respond to any questions you may have eventually!

#📌#linguistics #language learning #langblr

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highlyentropicmind · 25 days

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The results of these polls will be like a base, or guide. No language is 100% any of these things, they all have bits from the other categories

#conlang #conlanging #linguistics #language #tumblr culture #language evolution #tolkien #quenya #sindarin #esperanto #dothraki #constructed language #lojban #ithkuil

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revemaknabino · 1 year

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Jutuba kanalo en Esperanto, kiu alŝutas bonegajn rakontojn 😯

Mi rekomendas! 💚

Plue, ĝi havas subtitolojn. Por mi, kiu ofte miskomprenas kion oni parolas esperante, estis tre utilaj.

#esperanto #EO #esperanto language #esperantolanguage #learn languages #language #learn more #learning #study motivation #Culture EO #Kolekto de Herkso #KolektoDeHerkso #youtube #Stories #creepypasta #Creepypasta in Esperanto #Esperanto Channel

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olive-garden-hoe · 2 months

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Tmnt 2012 hc:

I think that if the turtles were humanized they would all be black and/or blasian since they’re siblings and would have to have the same genetic tree (in 2012 I’m pretty sure they’re biologically related). However I love idea that they have slight differences between them since they hang out in different areas in nyc (a diverse city with a bunch of different cultures that I think would really interest them).

So anyways I hc that Splinter brought them all up to be bilingual, however Raph and Donnie aren’t as good at Japanese anymore since I think they aren’t as good with languages and they would consume a lot of English content growing up + Leo probably started translating Splinter for them and they kinda stopped needing to use it, so it faded a bit. I think Raph stopped speaking Japanese but can still understand it and could speak it (with some grammar and pronunciation errors) in a pinch. Donnie rarely speaks Japanese but he speaks it from time to time with Splinter, Leo, or Mikey. Leo is probably fluent in Japanese and English and I think her (Leo is transfem in my books) and Mikey can read Japanese while Raph and Donnie can’t. However, I think that Leo code switches and sometimes makes tiny grammar/pronunciation errors, with Mikey being the best at Japanese of all their (Mikey is aroace gender-fluid) siblings.

I don’t think Raph is a big language buff (unlabeled he/him non binary Raph supremacy), so he probably just knows English and Japanese. Meanwhile, I think Donnie knows code languages and probably taught themself (They/them for Donnie, source: me) obscure/dead/constructed languages like Esperanto or Latin. Leo probably can understand/read Spanish to some extent, though she’s barely conversational speaking it. She might also know certain phrases in a bunch of different languages since I hc that she wants to travel. Mikey, in my opinion, will be the best at picking up languages, probably fluent in Latin American Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese, conversational in Italian and Korean, and has begun to pick up some Haitian Creole (though her pronunciation isn’t good because she probably sounds either very American or has WAY to heavy of an accent). They also codeswitch and mesh together languages pretty often, so his siblings have begun to pick up a bit of their languages, especially Leo (how she learned Latin American Spanish)

I think they speak primarily English among themselves and Japanese/English with Splinter, who is plays a little game with himself when he hears music to guess the language it’s in

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catgirlforeskin · 2 months

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I think that when it comes to first worlders the best political parties are those that lead to deaths of as much first worlders as possible, not just minorities.

And I don't exclude myself from this. Or more like, I exclude smart and beautiful me, but not my people. In fact, this ask was inspired by interacting with some of them. Total destruction of all European cultures, even "oppressed" ones, and replacement of it with unified ersatz with Esperanto as first language is the only way to safe the world. Five centuries of Imperialism, Capitalism and Nationalism left nothing worthwhile in any of them.

Unlimited JPON on Catgirlforeskin’s inbox

#asks

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smhalltheurlsaretaken · 1 year

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Hey, how about I give you an easy ask to take the bad taste out of your mouth? Do you think the Jedi have their own Language? I mean the Mandalorians have Mando’a, Jewish people have Hebrew and Yiddish, Catholics have Latin, and Muslims Arabic. We know all Force wielders can communicate telepathically bc of Grogu and Nubarron. But do you think there is an ancestral or classical language either written or verbal for the 25,000 years of Jedi?

Ooof that's an old ask 😅 I only vaguely remember what the drama was that time around.

Hehhhhhhhh... I know there’s a Legends-inspired fanon conlang called Dai Bendu but I’m not super into tbh, and those examples you listed are interesting because as far as I can tell they wouldn’t actually apply to the Jedi.

I won't try to give history lessons on languages I'm only superficially familiar with, but as for the one I do know the full history of... Mando’a isn't even the unifying language it's made to be. It’s spoken all of twice in canon afaik (by Sabine in Rebels when asking to land on Krownest, and a dialect by Satine and a dying Death Watch terrorist in TCW), and even ultra traditionalists like the Children of the Watch don’t speak it onscreen among themselves. (Obviously because conlangs are a pain to get right. Not everybody can be LotR Elvish or Jason Momoa's Dothraki.) So it's only a big deal in Legends, really. Which is not to say it's not interesting, but that means I can't compare the way the Jedi Order works in Lucas' canon with the way the Mandos work in Legends.

Now for the irl languages:

Not all Jewish people speak Hebrew, or Yiddish (Yiddish is Ahskenazi, not Sephardic, for one thing) - and that Hebrew is even a living, thriving language again was a huge and conscious effort born out of extreme necessity. It's so unique that I can't compare it to anything.

Most Catholics don't know Latin (and it's a dead language anyway) and though the use of the language in liturgy started because the early churches were living under the Roman Empire and Latin was quickly replacing Greek as a 'universal' language, it carried on as a religious tool specifically to prevent expression and to further class divide. Having all holy or political texts written in a language even the small literate portion of your lower class wouldn't know was a device for control.

There are many, many Arabic dialects and not all Muslims speak them, and just like Latin, and English (and French, and Spanish, etc) the reason why so many people speak it is a tangled mess of religion, commerce, colonialism, convenience, etc.

But yes, those languages have a huge historical/religious/traditional/cultural and spiritual importance to them - but all for very different reasons, as their histories are all pretty unique. Again, I don't know nearly enough to try to say any more about them. But.

The political, religious and cultural incentives to have their own common language wouldn't exist for the Order as far as I can tell.

For one thing, because the Galaxy has its own common language. (I don't know if there's anything in Legends that gives an indication of how long Basic has been around for, but I'm assuming it's at the very least as old the Republic.) Just like the early Church didn't randomly pick Latin and Greek even though all but one of the writers of the New Testament weren't (there's good evidence that at least two of the Gospels were originally written in Aramaic of Hebrew) but used those languages because they were conveniently what everybody else could understand, the Jedi would have had every reason to use Basic as soon as it was available to them and they started to grow into an actual Order. And unlike Catholicism, the Order never grew so much that it took over the government it developed under, so Basic had no reason to become just theirs.

Would they have a language created (or resurrected) piecemeal, like Esperanto, as a way to foster unity and communication? As I said, they had Basic already - just like Esperanto was more or less a failure on account of English and a few other languages already filling the role of universal language.

And as a way to keep their more arcane/dangerous lore from falling into the wrong hands... Well, they have holocrons, and most people don't have the Force. The Order had no real reason to develop a way to keep their writings and teachings safe from outsiders - by the very nature of their connection to the Force, outsiders can't use Jedi lore. You can use holocrons to preserve your history and your culture, in a way that's much more effective than any language you could ever develop.

(Remember, Sith struggle to open Jedi holocrons and vice-versa. It's as perfect of a safeguard as you're ever going to get.)

Plus, the Jedi aren't really that concerned with being a closed group. Rather, their entire job description is opening themselves up to the Galaxy around them. They are originally diplomats, ambassadors. They have more reasons to learn the native languages of the people they help - the people they all come from - rather than to have one of their own.

What's more, in regards to the languages you cited: their cultural importance developed over centuries of shared history. Languages are transmitted through the generations, to your children and grandchildren - that's how accents and dialects come about in the first place. The Jedi are unique in that every single one of them is adopted. And so 'ancestral' just can't have the same meaning for the Order as for, say, an actual ethnic group. They start with a clean slate with every generation, so to speak - or rather, they're constantly flooding their own culture with contributions from all over the Galaxy, constantly mixing rather than being a closed circuit. Just take the iconic Jedi tunics - not only are there plenty of Jedi who don't wear them, but there are plenty of non-Jedi who have a very similar dress style (see the average Tatooine farmboy).

And basically all Jedi have different accents - which suggests that they hold on to their native languages. Even Piell and Aayla definitely don't sound like they're native Basic speakers, Obi-Wan has his own accent, Gungi or Byph don't speak Standard at all... Just like Jedi don't take away names, they don't seem to take away language. I don't think it's culturally Jedi to see being a Jedi as quite its own culture. More like, being a Jedi is a calling, a life commitment and a community, and the cultural aspects are what you bring over from your roots (which are not Jedi) and what you use to reach the people in the Galaxy who need you. Jedi, by design, are extremely multicultural - I just don't see them smoothing that over.

Even the super duper old 'Sacred Jedi texts' from the Sequels aren't just in one language:

Although...

In a sense, the Jedi do have kind of their own language after all, as you mentioned - empathy (telepathy seems to be more of a specific ability some Jedi have, like psychometry), which can't be codified into either words or written symbols, which I really like. It's much more unique than giving them a conlang that echoes to some distant origin of the Order (because as I said, they renew each other with each generation which is very special on its own) or mixes all the languages they bring with them (because, again, the point of those languages is to be focused outward, not inward).

Jedi can do what real people can't: they can speak to each other from the heart with no language actually required, and that's the greatest communication ability of them all!

Interestingly enough, the Sith do seem to have 'classical' languages for their occult rituals:

(Hey kinda like what happened with Latin lmao) But yeah, the Sith use secret languages to remain closed off and keep their lore to themselves, which isn't in the Jedi's nature. That's an interesting parallel.

Obviously this is all my very subjective interpretation. I've got an old post touching on whether or not the Jedi can be considered a 'minority' in SW and I'm gonna say more or less what I said then: they are comparable to plenty of real life groups and cultures (including many that do have their own languages), so if my take doesn't convince you, headcanon away! I couldn't find anything in support of it in the movies or TCW, but there was nothing that directly contradicted the idea either so it's a free for all!

Mostly I stuck to my guns because from a Doylist perspective while absolutely amazing when done right conlangs tend to be a fandom catastrophe. It typically reveals that most people using them have no idea how bilingualism works or how the conlang itself works (if you've read 2000-2010 era LotR fanfiction... you know. You just know) and it becomes absurd to the point of parody. And just look at Mando'a. Not using it is sometimes denounced as ooc despite its near complete absence in canon.

So yeah, tldr: subjectively, I wouldn't really want the Jedi to have one (because fandom), practically, I don't really see how they would have developed one + empathy/the Force kind of counts as its own method of communication, thematically, Jedi culture is much more focused outward rather than inward, but for funsies go crazy.

#ask #jeff22003 #long post #meta #my meta #jedi order #conlang #languages

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elbiotipo · 1 year

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Barebones (I am not a cunning linguist) situation of language in my space opera story:

NO UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR: that's a cheap cinematic trick to make things easy, if you want to communicate between different species or cultures you either learn their language or convene into a trade language. You could also hire a diplomat (a very in-demand profession) who is not only a translator, but also a cultural advisor. For every world and species, there are multiple languages, dialects, customs…

There's also no universal trade language; there is something like it, among Human spacers: Tandar (from "Standard") which is both spoken and visualized and is widely used, but olfactory species, species that communicate in different sound and radio frequencies, and others need their own translators and agreed trade languages.

Tandar was originally a military auxiliary language used in the Last Machine War among Human forces. It is very distantly descended from Mandarin, with a strong English vocabulary, and it also incorporates, besides its numeric system, a "protocol" used with machines, a basic programming language; it is often said that its two languages in one.

Written Tandar is logographic and strictly standarized; stylizing it is very much frowned upon, as it is supposed to be used in emergency signs, instruction manuals, and such. Tandar can also be written in all sorts of other scripts, and over time, puns and metaphors in Tandar have given way to a true Tandaric literature. It is still considered a technical trade language.

Tandar is "everybody's second language" there are, supposedly, no native Tandar speakers, and it's used for trade or technical purposes. You don't talk to your mother or spouse in Tandar.

In practice, there are indeed many communities that have creolized Tandar into local languages. There is also a corpus of jokes, puns, songs (especially spacer shanties) and other vernacular literature in Tandar. So there's a debate about its condition as a pure auxiliary language here.

There is also a mainstream "spacer culture" who speaks Tandar and is connected by similar traditions and of course technologies (it's good to have standarized spaceship parts...), but it varies from one side of the galaxy to another. So smilar, and yet with unique quirks for every trade world and even ship. Sociologists and linguists love studying spacers for this reason.

Human "colonies", now centuries old, were often settled by people from the same nations or ethnic groups. Over the centuries, they have developed their own dialects, so that half a dozen worlds settled by, for example, Thai-speaking astronauts, now have dialects barely comprehensible between each other, or even new languages. A few have developed wholly different cultures, but broadly, the main language families from Mother Earth are still spoken.

There is no faster-than-light communication, so no space radio or TV, the closest thing is a slower-moving (in days-weeks) postal service. So mass communication does not homogenize languages. Many local planetary dialects incorporate some Tandar or other trade language in their speech, but most people speaking it or other trade languages live in trade worlds.

The great generation ships that departed from Mother Earth in times past, virtually flying civilizations encased in asteroids, often have kept old dialects alive in relativist travel. Even if relativist travel has been replaced by faster-than-light aetheric travel, the close-knit nature of generation ships makes them act as cultural time capsules. This is a point of pride to them; speaking Hawaiian, Esperanto or Rioplatense often means "you're part of our family", even if you're born in another world.

Humans who have lived for generations in alien worlds have adopted their languages, customs, culture, religion, even body language... to the point that meeting one for the first time as a "mainstream spacer" human is almost the same as meeting an alien.

The reverse is true for aliens who have lived in human worlds. In fact, this is a very humanocentric perspective. Everything above applies to other species (for everyone, the others are aliens) and with the differences of biology, psychology, culture, economics, and time...

#cosas mias #campoestela

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silentwalrus1 · 2 years

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Hi, can I ask you a writing question? One of my works has a place in it that i want to worldbuild and make feel authentic, or at least like i know what i'm talking about, and the fact that youve apparently never actually finished brotherhood and yet have fleshed out Amestris and it's relations down to insane minutiae honestly stuns me. So i want to ask how you're able to do that, how do you know where to look for the information you need? is hammering all that out just a continual process of interrogating yourself on 'okay, then what?' I'd be greatly obliged if you could share some wisdom. (also caveat emptor rules and i will be devouring non's fics later)

Worldbuilding! Arguably my favorite thing to do in stories!

Let’s take a look at this from the top down.

Step one: notice stuff.

I write what I like to read, and often what’s most interesting to me is the physical worlds built in fiction, as well as the cultures and behaviors etc that arise from them and how they differ from what we have in reality; that means I’m often paying the most attention to what other authors do when it comes to building out other realities, on everything from physical laws of the universe to linguistic drift. The details I particularly like or that stick out to me as the most convincing or interesting is what I tend to incorporate.

This is also true of real life - i love cities and gardens and food, so the things i notice about cities and gardens and food are what I write about: details that add texture and individuality to where I am, what I’m doing and how. What country am I in? How is it different from my own? Do I have to wear special clothing? How are the maps different? The street paving? Are people rude here? What is rude here? What the hell is that thing being fried on a stick and what does it taste like?

Making these details feel realistic in fiction, however, often involves building logic chains more than just copying things from real life or native creativity. which brings us to:

Step Two: scream WHY?

WHY are things the way they are? Why is the teapot full of so much goddamn limescale in Paris? Why are portrayals of ghosts illegal in Chinese fiction & media? Why does Russian food suck so so bad? All of these questions have answers. (Built on limestone. Implication of afterlife undermines state doctrine. Not a lot of fresh produce grows locally and what does tends to be tubers.) So building out these If X - Then Y chains give you depth and context to the world, and in fiction make it feel realistic.

For example: Why do most countries in the world teach children English? Because an English speaking empire conquered a lot of them, leading it to become a lingua franca and the de facto language of higher education and commerce now. So if you want to have Fictional Country X, Y and Z all share a language - what’s the reason? Shared national origin, split apart later along ethnic lines? Shared colonial history? Shared trading ties so longstanding that a basic business esperanto developed?

Step Three: integrate it... NATURALLY. Act NATURAL

To people living within a world, their everyday reality is not going to be news to them. They are also very likely going to have Opinions about how the world is set up around them. Having Character A monologue about How The World Works for twenty pages at Born Yesterday Character B is... look, that shit’s not even that fun even when it IS justified in-universe, like for example this being Harry Potter’s first day at magic school learning about magic world for the first time ever, from people whose job it is to literally give lectures on the stuff.

So you want to get this stuff in there more organically. One of the best ways to integrate believable worldbuilding is to have your characters complain. Everybody gets around on flying dragons? Twenty minute rant on how the giant dragon manure cleanup crews are NEVER on top of it, and god fucking help you if you jaywalk under a major flight path and an incontinent Bluescale happens to trundle past. What’s pissing your character off at their job? What made them mad in the news this morning? What are they craving that’s out of season or too expensive or doesn’t come in the color they want?

All of these things make your characters feel like more complete people, because in real life we’ve all got big, overarching goals (become a doctor, start a family, restore our bodies from a cruel and arbitrary god) but we also have medium goals (get that promotion at work, buy a house, stop the apocalypse) and of course small goals (change your bedsheets, buy that snack you’re craving, get your busted automail fixed & not die in the process).

All of these goals arise from our surroundings and the world we live in, and are often quite interconnected (I need to go pick up my prescription -> the country in which my drugs are manufactured is currently at war with my country and under shipping embargo from three others -> i become a supervillain). If Amestris’ capital city is designed to be a circle, for example, then maybe kindergartners in Central learn basic neighborhood geography with maps that look like pies, and this makes people jokingly refer to various districts as Strawberry Rhubarb or whatever.

So yes, a lot of it is just asking yourself “okay, what then” and extrapolating logically: you introduce X phenomenon, what effect will that have on everything else? If your story is on an island, you’re likely to have a lot of fishing industry, cuisine, culture. If your story is in a space station, people are going to move in ways that account for zero G. If your story is in a dictatorship, people are going to be less trusting, less socially mobile, less informed. (This is actually one of my main cinamasins ding sounds for FMA - where is the culture of repression and cultural control and fear endemic to authoritarian regimes!!!)

So overall, my advice here boils down to get outside, read a lot (fiction and nonfiction) and just notice stuff, including all the ways how you receive new information - gossip? Memes? Church? News headline? History textbook? Racist joke? - which then gives you a big grab-bag of things to pull on and put together. Have fun!

#writing #yap yap #thank you! I’m glad you’re enjoying my work!

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