#history nerdery
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The disrespect toward indigenous peoples is what popped put at me today in one of your posts. I wonder how long the English have been looking down on the Welsh. We're the Saxons like that or is it the Normans who really thought they were better than everyone else. Cause it seems like it goes back a long way.
Oh, both, just in different ways. The Normals were imperialist, the Saxons were more theft and landgrab.
Something that makes me want to start hurling knives is the INCREDIBLY COMMON English myth that the Anglo-Saxons were a sweet innocent indigenous British people who were conquered and bullied by those mean nasty Normans (and Vikings), and because the Normans came over via France, that means everything was actually THEIR fault, and the true English i.e. the Anglo-Saxons, were victims too :(
When I say it's incredibly common, by the way, I really mean it. Enormous numbers of modern day English people believe this. I've seen BBC programs about the Viking invasions that claimed without a trace of irony that the Vikings would take slaves from "the native Anglo-Saxons". I've literally had English people comment this shit on posts of mine about Celtophobia and Welsh history. Like I'm there describing how the last Prince of Wales was locked in a wooden cage in Bristol Castle at the age of eight and lived out the remainder of his life there until his fifties so the Welsh would know their place, and some snivelling English cunt will straight up write a message going "Teehee really it was the Normans not the English though and they conquered the poor Anglo-Saxons too, poor England uwu"
Anyway in the dying days of the Roman empire in Britain one of the leading reasons for Rome abandoning Britannia was the constant waves of Anglo-Saxon invaders. There were so many the east coast of Britain became known as the Saxon Shore. There were so many the Romans built a line of forts that were and are literally called Saxon Shore Forts. There were so many that an official, historically documented, paid governmental position in Roman Britain was the Count of the Saxon Shore, i.e. the guy responsible for keeping the bastards out.
Rome had banned native military, of course, so when they then withdrew and took the armies with them, the people left had no defences against the incoming waves of Angles, Saxons and Jutes. England fell pretty quickly, Angles in the north, Saxons in the south, Jutes primarily in the east, I believe. What stopped their westward expansion was the Brythonic Celtic nations living in modern day Wales. And this is the origin of the Welsh dragon - those separate kingdoms needed a banner that united them, and represented Not Saxon. An anti-Saxon force. They chose a red dragon.
This is also the origin of King Arthur. An anti-Saxon king of the Brythons, who would repel these Germanic invaders. (It was several centuries later that England realised they should probably steal the term 'British', because otherwise they were marking themselves as 'not native'.)
Anyway the saving grace of the Anglo-Saxons in the end was actually that they were whiny little bitches who gave up trying to fight in Wales with its difficult mountains and fought each other instead. The whole sorry tale of the Heptarchy is the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fighting like cats in a bag, while Saxon king Offa built a dyke along the Welsh border and went "WELL YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED OVER HERE" and every Welsh king went "...we literally didn't want to conquer you anyway, you spectacularly sad and stupid man"
Oh, and of course, there's the name 'Wales'. Given to us specifically by the Anglo-Saxons. And translated by centuries of English scholars, mostly very smugly, as 'foreigners'. A fun bit of early propaganda, look - foreigners in our own country that they tried and failed to steal.
All of which is a circuitous way of saying - yeah, it goes way back.
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So I in the year 2024 managed to overcome my various social difficulties in order to visit a local pub and watch the 6 nations also and ordered food whist there. However, when said food came I was provided with a spoon and a steak knife rather than the expected knife and fork.
Forgive me for not realising I was a time traveller who'd obviously landed in the pre-renaissance era. Please excuse me whilst I freak out the rest of the patronage by using a fork!
#history#history nerdery#rant#sorry for the rant#very british problems#british problems#the uniquely british experience of a wetherspoons#british stuff
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In the native dialect of Lesbos, Sappho's name is spelled "Psappho". I sometimes picture what it would have been like if that had been the spelling modern English had gone with. Imagine being psapphic.
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Fun history game I've been playing this morning: go back three governments.
If you went back to the beginning of the government BEFORE the one that preceded the current government, when would you be?
I've been making up the rules as I go along, but for places that get traded around or are in areas where governments split or merge, pick the classifications of 'established government' as best makes sense. Some ideas:
Governmental Name changes: if the government changes names due to the annexation of a large swath of territory (Republic of Egypt > United Arab Republic) but the head of government does not change, that's 1 government for the country that wasn't annexed.
Monarchies and Dynasties: Is a new dynasty of monarchs a new government? Maybe, maybe not; I'd think it depends on how they got power. Or maybe see how historians treat them?
Revolution: If the old government is overthrown, is that a new government? Probably, but not always; if they preserve things like a constitution, and just threw out the old leaders for corruption, maybe not.
It's fun to test yourself and guess how far back you'd get and then do a wikipedia dive to find out if you were right. Sometimes the results are bizarre.
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5/?? The pseudohistory of Prometheus
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We return to a movie I wish to send on a journey down the Kola Superdeep Borehole, Prometheus.
And my insanity truly begins in this segment. We are only 1/10th of the way through the movie so far. Content warnings for discussion of racism in pseudoscience and historical anthropology, Spider getting hung up on logistics and space nerd stuff, and pictures of Yuri Knorozov, the most sour-faced man to ever live.
The cast sits down for a briefing. This is a scene with an easily identifiable narrative function: providing exposition to the theater audience. The act of doing a briefing makes sense. It is the last thing here that will.
We are introduced to a hologram of Peter Weyland, the financier of the expedition. The name means all sorts of Lore to the series, but what’s intensely distracting is that we seem to have caught Weyland halfway through applying his zombie makeup.
Weyland is played by Guy Pierce. As of the filming of this movie, he was somewhere around 45 years old. Yes, they smothered this Australian in old man drag so that he could play this character. This is a baffling decision, that only gets slightly less baffling if you know the production history of the movie, which I did not at the time.
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Guy Pierce was hired to play a younger Peter Weyland. There’s a promo video out there of him giving a fictional TED Talk in the not-to-distant future of next Sunday AD 2023, there were various plans for him to appear in the movie proper. None of those scenes are actually in the movie. They refused to double-cast the role for some reason. While the practical effects in the movie are generally excellent and it does make the tiniest smidge of sense that a hypercapitalist asshole would be portrayed as a literal rubber-faced movie monster, this, like many things in Prometheus, made the movie a very weird sit. One where I was increasingly less open to going along with the movie’s fiction. You are telling me that this is an actual human man. I am not buying it. He looks far less human than David, the only non-human there.
Speaking of David, Weyland calls him “the closest thing to a son I will ever have”, and then immediately says David is an inhuman lesser being, who does not appreciate the specialness of his existence because he does not have a soul.
Which is funny, because I think you can see David’s soul leaving his body at this exact moment.
Weyland then tries to mash in some existential weight to the movie: they might finally get an answer for “why are we here?” and all that jazz! He also tries to explain why naming a ship Prometheus is totally not like calling it Titanic II: Don’t think about the part of the myth where Prometheus is chained to a rock and has his ever-regenerating liver eaten by an eagle every day! Think about the bit where he brought fire to mankind! We’re gonna bring back that bit!
And then the archaeologists take over the briefing, and this, THIS, is the bit where they entirely lost me. My suspension of disbelief had already been strained by multiple oddities up to this point. My skepticism about these characters in particular was already a bit elevated by their implied invocation of the ancient astronauts concept.
Turns out, only Vickers, Shaw, and Holloway know why they’re here.
Two years away from Earth. On a massively expensive expedition that intends to make first contact with an alien culture, the first alien culture that humankind has ever found evidence of. Nobody has been briefed up until this point.
This is lunacy.
Explanations have been figured out by fans since then: this is a passion project by Weyland, an annoyance to the rest of the corporate structure that nobody else believes in. The movie eventually intimates this, through Vickers.
Fans have thus speculated that Weyland was just quarantined off to do his little alien hunt, with no logistical support that would make it actually functional. He believed a crazy theory put forward by Shaw and Holloway, and everyone else wasn’t actually best-of-the-best, they were just whoever would take a big paycheck to do fuck-all for nearly five years of sleeping their way to and from their destination.
I am willing to consider that this was intentional. The movie possibly tries to confirm this with Mr. “I’m here for the money” Fifield, but none of the other characters have enough characterization to determine if this is the general trend.
How could we make a story that more clearly spells this out? Maybe Millburn the biologist could encounter more of the crew talking about the payout from taking the job, or reveal that he himself has some project he needs money for. It would also chip away at the dearth of character-building dialog for most of the cast.
As a result of those deficiencies in characterization, a lot of my discussion of plot points is going to be focused around what they do, rather than why. …Except when it is about the why, at which point the main commentary will be “WHY.”
In any case: while it makes sense, I'm still not certain the film meant for this character motivation. Prometheus is just so loudly explicit with so many of its plot points that it doesn’t seem like this is the case. The movie certainly believes in the sincerity and correctness of the archaeologists, though.
Unfortunately, it also immediately tells me that they’re a couple of wingnuts. I’m not sure if it intends to, for reasons I’ll get into after I foam at the mouth for a little while.
They present a series of artifacts to the crew: Egyptian, Mayan, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Hawaiian, and their Scottish cave painting. All of them feature “men worshiping giant beings”, who are pointing to what stargazer nerds call an asterism: a pattern of stars. Shaw and Holloway believe that these are aliens that engineered humans into their current state. Shaw literally says “it’s what I choose to believe” as the entirety of their justification for this.
Again: I knew the movie wanted me to take this as truth, within its universe. That’s the implicit deal the movie has made with the audience, this is truth. You are supposed to be contemplating the "whys" of it all. But the movie had also smacked me in the brain so many times in the past five minutes, that I, like Millburn the Biologist, was ready to call bullshit.
I appreciate him for doing so, and it shows he could have been a smart character, but sadly, he is in Prometheus.
Because he is a fictional biologist and I am an actual biologist, I will expand on his argument, as I descend into ranting for the rest of the post.
Millburn objects on the basis of evolutionary history, which the movie only partially succeeds in papering over: the implication is that evolution on Earth was directed with the deterministic outcome of creating something like humans.
This opens up a whole new can of worms that the movie doesn’t get into–when exactly did this engineering start? When great apes evolved? When mammals did? Tetrapods? Skeletons? DNA itself? After all, we know the aliens, now dubbed Engineers by the archaeologists, have DNA. Did they seed all life on Earth? How did they evolve? Our last universal common ancestor is believed to have already been using DNA 3-4 billion years ago, evolving out of a likely RNA-based genetic standard. Hominins diverged from other apes around 15-25 million years ago. What sort of culture would undertake a project that required at least 15 million years on the extreme low end?
All excellent questions! The movie is not concerned with them. I am, and that is part of why this movie still lives in a special, awful place in my head.
This isn’t actually what made me become actively hostile toward the archaeologists, though. What managed that, well! It was their archaeology. Anybody who had an Ancient Egypt Phase in their childhood should be able to articulate multiple reasons why the academic community would’ve laughed these guys out of the building.
Bigness in ancient egyptian art does not indicate literal size. It indicates importance. In fact, the artifacts the movie uses exclusively come from artistic traditions which feature hierarchical or non-literal scale. Do the Engineers turn out to actually be eight feet tall? Yes! Am I still annoyed by this? ABSOLUTELY.
You know what else is a big problem? Many of the cultures they reference here had written language! A LOT of written language! They include Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Mayan art in their evidence, all of which not only wrote a LOT of things down, but had a habit of annotating a lot of their art with labels to tell you what was going on! You can actually see some on the props they used in this scene!
Beyond that, they had very prescribed formal styles, where you can follow the action entirely through gestures, held objects, attendant symbols, and clothing! If all these cultures, as implied, had actual, direct contact with aliens, recorded in the art presented here, we would know what they were told.
Skipping ahead of the movie for a minute: the Engineers were apparently not telling humans “we’re here in these stars, come find us”, they were telling humans “settle the fuck down or this is where the hurt’s going to come from”.
Here's the thing. Ancient peoples weren't stupid. They wouldn't just not talk about this. If giant aliens came down from the sky and gave them a stern talking-to that contradicted their religion, that would be a big deal. And these characters specifically say the Engineers are being "worshiped" in these images! They're apparently taking onboard what's being said!
It is certainly possible for information to be lost. Over long time scales, that's unfortunately the rule, rather than the exception. But again: half the artifacts have writing on them!
I chose to believe that Shaw and Holloway simply did not attempt to read any available translations of attendant texts, and they were thus cursed for their foolishness by the ghosts of Mayan Studies pioneer Yuri Knorozov and EgyptologistJean-François Champollion, and the still-extant spirit of Assyriologist Irving Finkel.
Knorozov knows your sins against Mayan Studies. Knorozov is a vengeful god. Chapollion and Finkel are likewise very cross.
Two last things stood out to me in the theater. One of them was extremely petty but tied into some very serious issues with pseudoscience, and the other one was not.
Pettiness first: the asterism shown in the artifacts is a pattern of six stars. The movie wants you to believe that it is very spooky that the only asterism that precisely matches this pattern are six stars that are too faint to see with the naked eye. This is laughable, both because the asterism is so generic-looking that I can think of several very visible asterisms that are good matches for the pattern, but it also recapitulates a bunch of really fucking annoying shit from pseudoscientific bullshit.
First: Pseudoscience and pseudohistory likes to make a big deal out of the fact that every culture has stories about the stars. Why?
The sky is very important to every culture’s mythology, because every culture can see the sky. Like, that’s literally it. People can see the sky. They tell stories about it. There’s not much to do at night except look at the sky, when even keeping a fire lit can be an expensive prospect. It is not even the least bit weird when multiple cultures–all of them in the northern hemisphere in this case!–have stories about the same stars.
Second: Cultures vary in their ability to faithfully reproduce celestial landmarks in art and align their architecture is variable, and not as exact as modern techniques can manage. Pseudoscience will claim that they are exact, when it fits their pre-existing theory, or fudge the difference if they want something to fit their claims.
(This is a photoshopped image, by the way.)
Were the stone age temples of Malta secretly aligned with a particular star that foretold the doom of Atlantis, precisely tracking its location through the sky over thousands of years of Earth’s axial wobbling? No! They were roughly aligned with the sun. Sunlight is important when you don’t have electric lights. Were the Great Pyramids of Giza laid out ten thousand years ago to match the layout of the stars in Orion’s Belt, according to the designs of a legendary lost race of highly advanced non-African people? Were they tapping into the Earth’s magnetic field to generate energy? No! They were aligned with the cardinal directions, and they got them a bit wrong!
Hell, if we want to play at that game, I found a decent match for the asterism in Stellarium's Egyptian constellation set. Just flip this 90 degrees clockwise and you'll see I'm totally right. Aliens confirmed.
I know the movie is trying to tell me that all the asterisms in the art are precise matches for each other and are thus impossible to explain without intercultural contact (or aliens!!), but it is also showing me that they are not that precise. So, it’s just showing me stars. At least in some of them. Their little charcoal lad from the Isle of Skye may be throwing fruit at his audience.
In fact, there's a further, probably unintentional link to pseudohistorical claims in the artifacts presented: the Maya artifact shown does not actually depict a "giant figure" being worshiped, in fact, it shows one instantly recognizable, known figure in Classical Maya history: It is an altered version of the ornately carved coffin lid of Kʼinich Janaab Pakal I (24 March 603 - 29 August 683), with the top quarter of the carving replaced with a star pattern that looks nothing like the ones on the other artifacts.
The carving shows Pakal in the pose of an infant, entering into death and being reborn. It is packed full of so many symbolic elements that can be easily recognized by those more familiar with the Classical Maya than I am.
Conspiracy theorist Erich von Däniken thought that it showed Pakal rocketing away on a spaceship. Däniken proposed this because he didn't understand the cultural symbolism, but he had seen pictures of astronauts before.
And on that note, 2,400 words into this rant, we get to the actually bad shit. Unfortunately, it ties into the issue I had with the premise to begin with: the real-world context of pseudoscientific claims of ancient alien contact. Specifically, the racism.
We’re going to unspool this more near the end of the movie, because there was further behind the scenes I was not aware of when I first saw Prometheus, and it just compounds this stuff.
So, when I went on my first tangent on how unpleasant ancient alien theories are, one thing I highlighted is that the further from Western Civilization you get, the more these theories presuppose that fellow humans are incapable of building great works or imagining interesting things. No, they had to be guided, and explicitly shown things that they copied down to the best of their limited capability.
The only european example of alien contact they show is from the Upper Paleolithic, 37,000 years ago. All the examples around the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia range from 5,500-3,700 years ago. The examples from the Classical Maya and Hawaiʻi are from 620 and 680 CE.
During this period, Tang Dynasty merchants were creating the first paper money as the famous female emperor Wu Zetian was on her way to the throne. The Prophet Muhammad went to al-Aqsa mosque, and we’re only eight years before the birth of Charlemagne’s grandfather. We’re no longer talking ancient, it’s just old.
I want to emphasize that the movie is presenting these not as depictions of myths that have been passed down–though there are more problems with that I’ll get into shortly–these are implied to be contemporary depictions of events witnessed by the artists, who were quite possibly instructed by the Engineers to record a precise pattern of stars. An equivalency is being drawn between stone age Europe, bronze age Africa and the Middle East, and a couple of startlingly recent Mesoamerican and Polynesian cultures.
But let’s be generous. Maybe these aren’t supposed to be contemporary accounts in these two outlier cases: the movie’s script will certainly indicate later that they have no idea what they’ve implied here. Perhaps these are story traditions that were handed down from the Olmecs and Melanesian precursors of the first to sail to Hawaiʻi.
Unfortunately, this just recapitulates a different racist trope: that European and more “developed” civilizations invented so much cool and comfortable material culture and philosophy that they forgot the Mystical Religious Truths of the old ways, which were preserved only in Primitive Lands and among Uneducated Peoples, where they never found anything better to do with their time. Oh, if only we had heeded the warnings from those spiritually attuned non-white people!
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(Look, I only remember Devil (2010), which has 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, because M Night Shyamalan wrote and produced it, and this was two years after The Happening came out, so I watched it out of morbid curiosity. It's not as unbelievably bad as The Happening, but as shown in the clip above, the spiritually attuned latino security guard Ramirez attributes toast landing jelly side down to Satan. That is an actual thing that happens in the movie. He is proven right.)
But let's be even more generous: someone probably realized that they'd focused near-exclusively on Middle Eastern cultures, and wanted to throw in a couple from elsewhere. Sitting here, having seen the movie in full, this is the most likely option: their inclusion creates a contradiction with a later scene, and was thus probably not checked for consistency. These cultures were thrown in as a bit of background flavor. I list this last, because in the theater, there was no way to know this at the time.
That answer's still not great. Still leaves us in the same position, where Europeans are pretty much given their own agency, while other cultures need to be led.
Oh, and to anyone else who’s made it this far and knows the production history of Prometheus: don’t worry! I know what Ridley Scott told that one interviewer, about a contact between a less-ancient European power and the Engineers. I’m saving that one. I like to save that one, because strategic deployment of that quote made some of my IRL friends scream.
Next time: the Prometheus descends to an alien world, and I descend further into madness. I am going to drag you all down with me.
(Pictured: Yuri Knorozov, and my present mood.)
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Citations for alt text ramblings:
https://www.almendron.com/artehistoria/arte/culturas/egyptian-art-in-age-of-the-pyramids/catalogue-fourth-dynasty/
#Prometheus (2012)#prometheus 2012#The last time I watched this movie with a scientific colleague and friend#this scene took us twenty minutes to get through#because we were both biologists#plus me with the archaeology and a dash of space nerdery#and they knew mesopotamian history#so by the time we were done with this scene we were ginned up and ready to fight the movie
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DID YOU KNOW, Cardiff has had a Somali community since the 1880s, centred mainly around the docks?
Get this and many other supplemental facts in the annotations of my graphic adaptation of The Worst Journey in the World, out Nov. 24th!
#the worst journey in the world#twjitw#cardiff#somali diaspora#history#terra nova expedition#terra nova#dockside#illustration#drawing#history comics#nerdery#scott expedition#graphic novel
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Hi! I asked a few months back about Muzan's speech and grammatical forms etc and as a big language nerd I've come back to ask if you could explain Kokushibo's? He has a very unique way of talking—I'm so curious about those ellipsises lol—and I've read a few times that his dialect is a very old one and I'm so interested about this. I always try to understand the character's voice as best as I can as a fanfiction writer and it'd help so much to understand his.
I also want to say I have so much respect for you, oh my Goddd. I live and die for nerds. Nerds are the best. They keep the planet going. I love your enthusiasm and your passion and it genuinely makes me smile. People like you are the coolest.
After such exceeding praise, I... am humbled to admit... my nerdery... has limits......... and I may not have super insightful things to say about this speech pattern apart from... yes... He... takes his time.
While he might use uncommon words, his speech is... at least to my knowledge and this isn't my area of expertise... written in a modern grammatical style, so there was no Sengoku-accurate classical Japanese thrown in which would throw off the typical Shounen Jump reader--nor does it feel slightly dated and unusually straightforward like Rengoku's speech patterns, which says more about Rengoku's traditional values and straightforward outlook as opposed to his time period, I think. Likewise, in the flashbacks to Michikatsu's life, their speech is in modern Japanese, just with old family terms and a smack of distanced formality which would be common in samurai households. (Since I brought up Rengoku here, I want to be clear that Rengoku's ancestor was only ever called a "swordsman" and the Tsugikuni brothers were "samurai," there is a big difference). What's of more interest is that Michikatsu didn't speak with such dramatic pauses as Kokushibo.
Kokushibo is very direct with his wording--he uses a lot of plain statements, stating realities and rules without beating around any bushes. He's practical, and uses terms appropriately filled with respect for one who outranks him when speaking of or to Muzan. When addressing anyone of lower rank, demon or not, he doesn't use impolite language, just basic.
Another interesting point is that he has some pretty long statements with no use of ellipses. He's got his whole thought planned out before he says it, and a full breath for it too.
Hmm. Breath??? No, he never gave up his ability to use Breath Technique, I don't think it's for lack of lung power.
But... brain farts?
No, seriously! Besides Tamayo and Muzan, he is the oldest demon we know, if anyone has a right to being senile, it's him! I know, I know, demon bodies don't degrade like human bodies too. But you know what has been shown to suffer? Speaking ability!
Nezuko is an extreme case, having almost entirely neglected regaining the powers of speech in favor of physical developments like faster healing speeds and mastery of the sun. While many demons do fall on the verbose side, we've also seen some demons (especially less powerful demons) with very simplistic speech or slurred voices, like Daddy Spider (who was only powerful having powered Rui's powers). What if Kokushibo, by pouring so much effort into his Breath technique and sword and eyes, has to redirect that focus from his speech?
That's the best... I've got.......
#kokushibo#kny fandom theories and meta#kny nerdery#but not nerdery enough as I only ever took one credit of classical Japanese#and it was with a professor whose passion was Heian literature and he was always sick of teaching beginners it seemed#I was advanced when I met him but not advanced enough to have any understanding of what he put me through#but I will never forget when he introduced classical Japanese by saying#We take you to the deep end of the pool and say See that shark down there?#It's name is Kakarimusubi#go make friends#so to be honest I have never even studied Sengoku era Japanese#but even books from around the Taisho era were slightly different enough that I had trouble with them when I encountered them#though this was forever ago and maybe I wouldn't have as much trouble now? having more exposure just does that#CLASSICAL CHINESE THOUGH#that is like totally opposite from Classical Japanese and I used to be able to understand that stuff well#but now? Well. Lack of exposure will do that too.#tldr I'm sorry that my nerdery has failed when it comes to Sengoku era Japanese#I do my studies in modern vernacular#this post used to be about KnY and now it is about my own ancient history
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Y'know...
I've recently had this burning inclination to grow through every piece of writing I've ever made, find every instance I've ever used the word 'destroyer', and change it to... something I'll have to come up with. For consistency's sake. Or something. Holy crap that would be stupid. I'm not doing it. Absolutely not---
#The actual reason is that there's some important historical background behind the word 'Destroyer" in the naval context#which very specifically is not one for one with what happens in the 12 Worlds#[If anyone wants to know what that background is please hit me up I'm dying to release this nerdery]#So#Like my use of the term 'armtrack' instead of 'tank'#In theory I should come up with a substitute with its own background and history rooted in the 'lore' of the 12 Worlds#I shall save this for another time hopefully having forgotten this debate with myself ever took place
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Hi, I'm Amy AKA The Simline.
From the first time I saw Singin' in the Rain as a kid I've been costume obsessed, and The Sims helps me channel that nerdery into CC curation and lookbooks influenced by history, television, movies, current events and all manner of creative inspiration. Because I cover such a broad range of styles I thought I'd gather everything into a pinned master post for ease of navigation.
I'm really happy to have you here and I hope you enjoy your stay!
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So I’m interested in the thing you taught about Anglo-Saxons pushing the celts out of land- do you know how far north they pushed?
I’m Scots, and I have an interest in our history, but to be honest almost all of my knowledge of it comes from post-1000, with the exception of a few local myths about Viking raiders being scared off by a mother wolf.
So I’d love to ask what you know- and I’ll just say that, because you talk about the welsh language a lot, I would be interested in what you think of the work to revive Gaelic as a primary language of this country- my Nans all for it, but most other people think it’s not working the way it has in wales because Gaelic was never spoken across the country Welsh was- my mums family is from old Norse speaking ancestry/cities and the local area was more likely to speak French than Gaelic (my dads English with a clan surname so some Highland Clearance stuff definitely happened and also for about 50 years round about bonnie prince Charlie that name was banned/got you shot so some *shit* presumably happened)
In terms of how far they pushed, this is the map of the Heptarchy, i.e. their furthest extent:
So a bit of the Scottish south east. You see Strathclyde on there? That was the Brythonic part! This is why Glasgow is a Welsh name in origin. Cousins!
In terms of Gàidhlig revival (I'm not correcting you with the spelling, I just have friends who speak it and that's their preference lol), it's certainly a lot more complicated than it is in Wales, for numerous reasons. One is admittedly that Scotland has always been inherently multicultural - even before the Anglo-Saxons, the north was Pictish, the west was Goidelic (Dal Riada spanned west Scotland and modern northern Ireland), the south was Brythonic, and the islands have long been a spirited mix of Norse and Other. Each of those spoke their own language. Then came the Heptarchy, which birthed Scots, and then the Vikings in earnest... By contrast, Wales just spoke Welsh. Different dialects, sure, and infusions from elsewhere, but country-wide, we just had the one thing.
And then there's the sheer weight of numbers. The current percentage of the population that speaks Gàidhlig is, to my knowledge, less than two percent, which is an incredibly challenging position to be in. By contrast, the lowest Welsh ever slid to was seventeen percent, back in the Eighties, and today it's about thirty. That's much easier to pull off.
I should clarify here, of course, that I am not about to speak on behalf of Scottish people. Whether Gàidhlig is representative, whether it SHOULD be revived, those are ultimately debates for Scots to have, I'm nobody. But since you asked directly I can share my very Welsh-influenced perspective.
Firstly, any country-wide bilingualism is unilaterally a good thing. Without exception. Every country in the world should be aiming for it with *something*, regardless of what it is. There is no harm from raising a bilingual child. It's literally good for the brain.
Secondly, any language at all is a beautiful, unique thing that acts as a memory crystal for the culture and philosophy attached to it. If you lose one, you lose something important that can't be replaced. Here's an example! Translating between Korean and English pronouns is often a challenge, because Korean doesn't have the gender markers that English needs, but English doesn't have the age/social status markers that Korean needs. That tells you something fascinating about both of those cultures, and the philosophy and worldview they hold. Gàidhlig is not yet dead. There is time to save it. It is unique; it's a repository for so much of an older Scottish culture that otherwise might be lost. Why not save it?
Thirdly, why place the pressure on it to be a language spoken by all of Scotland? Does it need to be? Because there wasn't a pan-Scottish language, not until English, and that one was spread through imperialism. You won't find an alternative that was spoken by everyone. Does that mean you shouldn't bother with any of them? Well; see point one. But also...
If the issue is a lack of 'identity' - this was not spoken in my area, so I don't identify with it - it was still nonetheless a Scottish language. It's still unique and endemic to the country you now identify with. It's therefore still yours. And what's preventing someone learning something appropriately local as well? Fuck it, if you're from the south, learn Welsh. Pictish was lost - it can't be saved anymore. But it looks like it was Brythonic, so again, there's always Welsh as the closest analogue. But Gàidhlig is still Scottish, unique to the country, whereas Welsh is more pan-British.
So yeah, those are my very rambly thoughts that I have not actually pondered deeply at all. I shall now bow out of that particular conversation and leave it to the Scots
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On another note, and these are random ideas based on stuff I’ve seen and read. But this post brought an interesting idea about Christianity being hailed as the religion of reason, of domestication, a place of safe haven from the wild mysticism of the unknown. After all, many revered scientists, such as Gregor Mendel or Isaac Newton, were Christians who saw their work as contributing to a closer understanding of God and his creations. I had a professor who explained how many native cultures have criticized Western science and rationale as an attempt to control and limit nature, as is the effort to quantify everything.
So with that in mind, I really wonder if this was intentional in Philip’s characterization, how his journal especially sets him up as a scientific explorer with diagrams, ‘figuring out’ the New World to master it. His diary is rife with all sorts of sketches and formulas. And the documentation, the categorization of science might even be compared to Belos’ covens, and their seemingly arbitrary distinctions…
By contrast, Luz is more willing to engage with the magic of the Titan on his own terms, trusting him and what’s different and unknown. She’s communicating with nature, following the advice of Eda, who espouses how magic IS wild and that this is a good thing; She enrolls at the University of Wild Magic at the end of the show. ‘Wild’ is obviously a term meant to demonize witches as savage and barbaric, which has its connections to colonizers who dismiss nomadic cultures, people who live off the land, as more ‘primitive’.
People more knowledgeable than me on mysticism have also made posts about Luz’s relationship with magic, such as her acknowledging the power of names by saying Camila’s in the climax of Yesterday’s Lie, summoning a cube with a direct link to her. Names are a big thing in magic from what I understand, hence the creation of middle names; People couldn’t just refuse to give their name to a fae for fear of being deemed rude and punished, but giving your name gives them leverage. So have a REAL name to protect, while your first name is more of an alias.
For the record, I don’t think TOH is taking an anti-science approach or anything; Keep in mind Keeping Up A-Fear-ances, and how it calls out alternative medicine as a dangerous hoax in its A-plot. The cast is composed of unapologetic nerds who are validated for their nerdery, wanting to learn things for their own sake; Lilith’s history hyperfixation is celebrated.
Plus, Season 1A encourages Luz to critically question what she’s told, even from Eda; There’s a whole character thread where Luz feels the need to draw her own conclusions, and Eda realizes she can’t just dogmatically order Luz to trust her on authority alone, because she knows firsthand how harmful that logic is in the long run. So she allows Luz to attend Hexside and figure things out for herself, how SHE feels about them; Eda answers Luz’s questioning and admits her mistakes.
In the end, I think it’s simply about respect; Respect for different cultures and ways of thinking, which also ties into the themes of neurodivergence. People see the world in different ways, and they don’t want you to abandon your own to embrace only theirs, they just want to be allowed to exist and live in actual harmony.
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I think we should start referring to historical figures with absurdly grand titles by the most prosaically literal translations we can come up with. Like, "Charlemagne"? "Carolus Magnus"? Fuck you, your name is "Big Chuck".
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Turn Week 2023:
History Nerdery!
Hello, and Happy Fourth of July! For today's Turn Week, I wanted to talk about Benjamin's regiment in the Continental Army. We all know he's a Connecticut Dragoon, but what does that mean and what did they do, exactly? I'm going to let you know! The Continental Cavalry is my favorite unit in the army, and I actually did an Honors Research Project on them last year for my college. WARNING: this is going to be LONG. I'm sorry. Kind of.
What is the Continental Cavalry?
The cavalry is the mounted troops in a military force, meaning they fight on horseback. At the time of the Revolution, the cavalry was considered an elite and necessary force for a proper military. Combat on horseback was dangerous- you not only had to avoid cannon and gunfire, but you had to attack other mounted troops with lances and sabers of their own.
There are two types of cavalry: light cavalry and heavy cavalry. The light cavalry had three primary duties. Scouting, which was to patrol enemy forces, movements, and the terrain surrounding camps and battlefields, which also played into reconnaissance. They also served as messengers to officers on and off the battlefield. On the other hand, heavy cavalry was troops used in action. Their objective was to lead charges and weaken the enemy’s unmounted troops, like going after their flanks. They also performed raids/ambushes or small skirmishes against the enemy. Their combat was on and off the battlefield.
Due to the near constant lack of funds for the Continentals, their Dragoons performed both light and heavy cavalry roles. A dragoon/trooper is a soldier who fights either on horseback or on foot, depending on the amount of horse available. They used weapons such as: a cavalry saber, a shortgun, and a musket.
Unlike the British army, which brought over cavalry forces, at the beginning of the war, there was not an official cavalry for the Continentals. Some state and organized militias had mounted troops- such as the Philadelphia Light Horse- but professional, commissioned troops had not seen action.
After seeing the performance of the British cavalry during the New York Campaign, General George Washington realized his army needed horses of their own. Writing to Congress in late 1776, “From the Experience I have had in this Campaign… I am Convinced there is no carrying on the War without them.”
What made up the Continental Cavalry?
In 1777, the cavalry's first year in action, there were four regiments of Light Dragoons.
The 1st Regiment of Dragoons- from Virginia, also known as Bland's Light Horse. Their uniforms were originally the "classic" Continental coat: blue with red facings, but they then changed the standard to brown with green facings.
The 2nd Regiment, also known as the Connecticut Light Dragoons, Colonel Elisha Sheldon and Benjamin Tallmadge's force, mustered from Connecticut, hence the name. Their uniform was blue with buff facings.
The 3rd Regiment, aka Colonel Baylor's or Lady Washington's Light Horse, in honor of Martha Washington. Their uniform was white with blue facings (one of my favorite uniforms in the army.)
And the 4th Regiment, led by Colonel Stephen Moylan. His troops originally wore red! coats, and this lead to some incidents of friendly fire. At Washington's order, the regiment changed to green with red facings.
How does this relate to Turn: Benjamin Tallmadge and His Dragoons.
Although the show does not get into heavy detail about Benjamin Tallmadge's battle experience, we know what battles he was present at with his regiment.
1777 the cavalry's first years as professional troops in battle. Both had very... different outcomes, let's say. Both were also mentioned or briefly shown in season 2 of Turn, and my research focused on this.
During the Campaigns, a set of troops from each regiment of Dragoons was stationed with General Washington in Pennsylvania, led by Bland, Moylan, Baylor, Sheldon, and Tallmadge.
Benjamin Tallmadge and his soldiers were present at both the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown.
At Brandywine, Washington first used the dragoons for only scouting, not combat. But as the British went after his insecure right flank, he frantically sent units of soldiers and cavalry to prevent the British from getting to the road along and to Brandywine Creek. The cavalry also acted as messengers to officers during this battle, but insufficient preparation and speed led to delayed reports. The cavalry did lead a charge that allowed Washington to retreat, but the day was lost. Afterwards, the British marched into the Continental capital of Philadelphia.
After Brandywine, Washington needed another battle to try and take back Philadelphia. With a night march, he decided to attack the British near their camp in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a small village outside the city.
Washington had four columns, 2 made up of Continental forces and two of state militias. Just as at Brandywine, his right wing was commanded by Sullivan, and his left by Greene. The Dragoons were now under their newly commissioned commander, General Pulaski. Tallmadge stated in his memoirs that, “if every division of the army had performed its allotted part, it seems as if we must have succeeded.”
Unfortunately, this would not be the outcome at Germantown. At the beginning of the battle, the Continentals were winning. Part of the camp was captured. A heavy fog and rain set over the battlefield, and the British used this fog to their advantage. They retreated into a local country house and created a stalemate.
Benjamin Tallmadge and his dragoons were first stationed with Sullivan’s division, close upon “the scene of the action.” As the battle turned against the Continental forces and the troops became victim to enemy and friendly fire, Washington ordered him to use his 2nd Dragoons to block any further retreat, to no avail. Germantown was lost.
Germantown was the last official engagement of the Philadelphia campaign. But on June 28, 1778, the Continental Army and the Cavalry engaged the forces at the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey. Due to proper military training thanks to the Inspector General Baron von Steuben and six months of waiting at Valley Forge, the army emerged as a proper fighting force and prevailed against the British. The victory allowed the Continentals to take back their capital and keep Washington in as Commander in Chief.
Monmouth is the shown in the finale of season 2- Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot- with Benjamin leading his dragoons into the battle.
After the 1777 campaigns, Tallmadge and his dragoons would stay up north, particularly New York, to patrol and engage the enemy in raids. They also participated in the Battles of Stony Point and Fort St. George, which were shown in seasons 3 and 4 of Turn.
Sources (and further reading):
Memoir of Col. Benjamin Tallmadge : Tallmadge, Benjamin, 1754-1835 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Brandywine: A Military History of the Battle that Lost Philadelphia but Saved America, September 11, 1777 by Michael C. Harris, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com)
Germantown: A Military History of the Battle for Philadelphia, October 4, 1777 by Michael C. Harris, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com)
Cavalry of the American Revolution - Jim Piecuch - Westholme Publishing
#oh my GOD#i went insane#i went crazy#i'm so so sorry#i just really really like dragoons.#turn week 2023#turn: washington's spies#benjamin tallmadge#military history#american revolution#the Philadelphia campaign#saber & shortgun#I hope I got everything right. oh my god. I’m sorry.#long post
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sooooo @thisisallaikiss posted some star wars au art that altered my brain chemistry over on twitter and this was the result... so... i think i'm writing a star wars au now 💫
people underestimated the force (lol) of my star wars nerdery but they STILL BULLIED ME INTO THIS so please blame them if i'm slow to update my idol au now 😃 enjoy the wip!!
i'm running away now 🏃
Darkness clung to the man like a great shadow, rolling off the Force user in noxious waves that were almost stifling. He was strong — by far the strongest darksider Megumi had ever encountered. His presence alone felt like despair and the young Padawan thought he would have drowned in it, if not for the light pouring off the Jedi Master at his side.
Master Gojō was always a beacon in the Force, but he burned impossibly brighter then, cutting through the shadow that surrounded them like a warm knife through Bantha butter. When those tendrils of hopelessness brushed up against his consciousness, Megumi felt the need to meditate — to cling to the light with everything he was — but Master Gojō was seemingly impervious to the affliction that ailed his Padawan.
There were rumours of darkness in Master Gojō. There were rumours that he was sentimental in a way that was dangerous for a Force user of his stature. There were rumours that some members of the Jedi Council considered him a threat to the Order.
Looking at his Master then, Megumi thought they were simply afraid of him, because the man was ablaze with light. Not for the first time, the Padawan wondered why Gojō Satoru had chosen Megumi as his apprentice. The Jedi was simply radiant — so radiant that the dark couldn’t even get close to him; bright and brilliant like the grin on his lips.
It didn’t stop Megumi’s heart from sinking—
—because why the kriff was Master Gojō grinning?
‘Well, well, well!’ came the Jedi Master’s voice, as if in answer. ‘Would you look what the Lesser Lantillian spat out!’
The man’s shoulders tensed a little, but rather than seeming petrified by the prospect of facing down the greatest Jedi in galactic history, he simply looked pained by the pitch and volume of Master Gojō’s voice.
Against all the odds, Megumi found he could relate to the guy.
The darksider inclined his head in their direction, more a jerk than a nod, and some of the silky black hair that wasn’t secured in a knot at the crown of his head fell forward over his broad shoulders. It was somewhat mesmerising to watch, the way those onyx locks danced around his features like the shadows that danced at his back.
Glancing at the shock of stark white hair atop his Master’s head, Megumi almost laughed — would have laughed if his vocal cords weren’t seized with fear. It was just that the pair of them made for such emphatic embodiments of their respective polarities in the Force that it was actually comical. It seemed unimaginative, somehow.
’Master Gojō,’ the man said stiffly.
Unlike Megumi, his Master had no trouble summoning a laugh — a loud, grating thing that bounced off the temple walls. It was unbecoming on a Jedi and, though he should have been used to it, Megumi found himself wincing in synchronisation with the darksider standing before them.
‘Master Gojō now, is it?’
At the Jedi Master’s taunt, the man’s eyes flickered across to Megumi. The Padawan froze under the malevolent weight of that gaze, but he saw no violent red staining those golden irises. Not a Sith then.
Huh.
‘Well then, Lord Getō.’ Master Gojō dragged out the sounds, sarcasm dripping from every single syllable. ‘Why don’t you hand over the holocron so we can all go on our merry way?’
#jjk#jujutsu kaisen#satosugu#jjk fanfic#jujutsu kaisen fanfic#gojo satoru#geto suguru#fushiguro megumi#stsg#sugusato#sgst#star wars#wip#my writing#fushiglow
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Mando’a masterpost
Most of my Mando’a linguistic nerdery you should be able to find under the hashtags #mando’a linguistics and #ranah talks mando’a. Specific topics like phonology and etymology are tagged on newer posts but not necessarily on older. I also reblog lots of other peoples’ fantastic #mando’a stuff, which many of these posts are replies to.
I also post about #mandalorian culture, other #meta: mandalorians and #star wars meta topics, #star wars languages, #conlangs, and #linguistics. Not Star Wars content tag is #not star wars. I like to reblog well-reasoned and/or interesting takes on Star Wars and Mandalorian politics, but I am not pro or contra fictional characters or organisations, only pro good storytelling. You can use the featured tags to navigate most of these topics.
Currently working on an analysis of canon Mando’a. Updates under #mando’a project. Here are my thoughts on using my stuff (tldr: please do). My askbox is open & I’d love to hear which words, roots or other features you want to see dissected next.
#Phonology
Ven’, ’ne and ’shya—phonology of Mando’a affixes
Murmured sounds in Mando’a
Mando’a vowels
#Morphology
Mando’a demonyms: -ad or -ii?
Agent nouns in Mando’a
Reduplication in Mando’a
Verbal conjugation in Ancient Mando’a & derivations in Modern Mando’a
-nn
#Syntax
Middle Mando’a creole hypothesis— Relative tenses — Tense, aspect and mood & creole languages — Copula and zero copula in creole languages — More thoughts about Mando’a TAM particles
Mando’a has no passive
Alienable/inalienable possession — more thoughts
#Roots, words & etymology
ad ‘child’—but also many other things
adenn, ‘wrath’
akaan & naak: war & peace
an ‘all’ + a collective suffix & plural collectives
*bir-, birikad, birgaan
cetar ‘kneel’
cinyc & shiny
gai’ka, ka’gaht, la’mun
jagyc, ori’jagyc & misandry
janad
*ka-, kakovidir & cardinal directions
*maan-, manda, gai bal manda, kir’manir, ramaan & kar’am & runi: ‘soul’ & ‘spirit’
*nor- & *she- ‘back’ (+ bonus *resh-)
projor ‘next’
*sak-, sakagal ‘cross’
*sen- ‘fly’
tapul
urmankalar ‘believe’
*ver- ‘earn’
*ya-, yai, yaim (& flyby mentions of eyayah, eyaytir, gayiyla, gayiylir, aliit)
Regional English in Mando’a
#Non-canon words
Mining vocabulary
Non-canon reduplications
Many words for many Mandalorians
What’s the word for “greater mandalorian space”?
Dral’Han & derived words
besal ‘silver, steel grey’
derivhaan
hukad & hukal, ’sheath, scabbard’
*sen- ‘fly’ derivations
tarisen ‘swoop bike’
*ver- ‘earn’ derivations
#mando’a proverbs
#mando’a idioms
Pragmatics & ethnolinguistics
Middle Mando’a creole hypothesis
Kinship terms
Politeness in Mando’a: gedet’ye & ba’gedet’ye — vor entye, vor’e, n’entye — n’eparavu takisit, ni ceta
Mandalorian languages
#mandalorian sign language
Concordian dialogue retcon
Mandalorians and medicine, baar’ur, triage
Names of Mandalorian planets
A short history of the Mandalorian Empire
#Mandalorian colour theory (#mandalorians and color): cin & purity, colour associations & orange, cin, ge’tal, saviin & besal
#Mandalorian nature: Flora and fauna of Manda’yaim, woorlarii (whistler), beskaab’sen (bell-bird), beshap (iron wood), galek’tal, unnamed lizard, unnamed, oltaba (mandalorian centipede crab), galkali, skredee (saw jaw), kitat (bucket bird), karikase (star flies, or mandalorian fireflies)
starry road
Other
Mando’a timeline
What I would have done differently if I had constructed Mando’a
Mando’a handwriting guide: part 1, part 2, part 3
Free tactical medicine learning resources for medics & those who write them
FAQ
Can I use your words/headcanons in my own projects? (short answer: yes please)
What’s your stance on Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorians? (tldr: they’re fictional and I don’t have one beyond their narrative being interesting & wishing that fandom would have civil conversations about them.)
LGBTQIA?: I’m about a flag short of an entire pride parade. Oh, you meant is this blog safe for you? Yeah, I don’t stand for any shade of discrimination. If I say something insensitive, rest assured it’s because I temporarily misplaced my other brain cell, not because of malice.
Asks under #ranah answers
P.s. Let me know if the links don’t work or something else is wrong (some items don’t have links, they are articles in my draft folder/queue which I’ve listed here so they don’t get lost—sorry for the tease!). Also please tell me if you need me to tag something I haven’t so you can filter it (this blog is for readers—if I was writing just for myself, I wouldn’t bother to edit and publish—so let me know what I can do to make it work better for you). Thanks!
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