#sumerian grammar
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Hi there! Could you help with a translation for "I will face god and walk backwards into hell"? I've always wondered if there was a way to write it in Sumerian. Thanks very much!! (Your blog is AMAZING by the way, I really appreciate reading your posts!)
Hello, and thanks for the kind words! My twitch community helped me out with this meme translation, for which we settled on Ngae dingirshe igi ngaren agabi ganzershe in'gadun.
Igi ngar 𒅆𒃻 is a phrasal verb meaning " to appear before, look at, face" when it has a regular direct object. But putting the direct object (here dingir 𒀭 "deity") in the terminative case intensifies the meaning (Halloran 2006 says "adds intensity to the gaze"), making Ngae dingirshe igi ngaren "I face (intensely) the deity".
"Backwards" required some research, down a rabbit hole of spatial vocabulary and Mesopotamian conceptions of time-space relationships. We settled on simply agabi 𒀀𒂵𒁉, from aga "back" with the -bi adverbial ending.
For "hell", rather than use the generic (and somewhat euphemistic) kur "underworld", I chose ganzer 𒅆𒆳𒍝 "hell, flame, netherworld", here also in the terminative case as ganzershe 𒅆𒆳𒍝𒂠 "into hell".
"To go, walk" is ngen, an extremely irregular verb in Sumerian, in this case in the first-person present-future form (i)dun 𒁺𒌦. The prefix in'ga- is the way to connect two verbs with the same subject, basically meaning "and, and also", attached to the second (or third, etc.) verb in the sequence, so in'gadun 𒅔𒂵𒁺𒌦 "and I walk".
Putting it all together, we get Ngae dingirshe igi ngaren agabi ganzershe in'gadun "I face the deity intensely and walk backwards into hell," written 𒂷𒂊 𒀭𒂠 𒅆𒃻𒂗 𒀀𒂵𒁉 𒅆𒆳𒍝𒂠 𒅔𒂵𒁺𒌦 in cuneiform.
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castiel’s favorite fruit is dates btw. if you even care
#they were one of the first foods offered to him. in a previous vessel#by a young sumerian girl#whom he had healed of a lifelong injury#and sure#he had healed people before. been thanked before#but it was different to be thanked with something humans considered life-sustaining#and yes it still tastes like molecules#and yes it was just a small gesture#but he thinks perhaps without those dates thousands of years ago he wouldn’t be where he is now#he may have never seen humans as anything other than ungrateful#he would have remained an obedient tool for a greater cause forever. he would have never fell in love with dean.#so yeah dates mean a lot to him#i think i made a few grammar mistakes but im not going back and retyping all that
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Bharani : the birth of Venus.
Part 1
Let's talk about ancient godesses of love and Bharani nakshatra.
I will base my research on the legend of the dead and resurrected god present in many religious myths coming from the middle east (ps : i'm sorry in advance for the grammar, syntax or spelling mistakes that you may find in this post, english is not my first language)
Bharani, situated in the heart of the rashi of aries is governed by Shukr: Venus but also by Yami and Yama in vedic mythology who are twins and gods respectfully of life and death.
Yama, the main deity of Bharani is said to be one of "8 celestial gatekeepers, who guards eight directional doorways or exits through which souls travel from an earthly plane to other planes of existence" making him the lord of Dharma since at one's death, he decides basing on his actions in what plane should one reincarnate.
Since Yama is responsible for directing the flow of life on Earth the association between bharani and the yoni becomes evident: the female reproducting system serves as a portal for souls to take on a physical form. So bharani as Claire Nakti perfectly described it relates to the feminine ability to receive, hold, nurture and ultimately transform through the womb.
Because Bharani aligns itself with all the feminine qualities by excellence it makes sense as to why Venus is it's ruler.
Venus is the roman name for the goddess Aphrodite: in greek mythology. She is said to be the goddess of love and beauty at large but also the goddess of war and sexuality. First because the ancient greeks saw the duality that links love to war and how they seem to come together through sex.
Also, Aphrodite is said to be born from the sperm of Ouranos when his testicules got cut by his son Saturn as he was always feconding Gaia, the Earth and causing her distress: he was acting cruel regarding their children. The sperm of Ouranus got mixed up with the foam of the Ocean creating Aphrodite which means "risen from the foam". So it was interesting to see that as Shukr also means sperm in sanskrit and it shows the origin of Venus as a fertility goddess too.
This conception of Aphrodite directly links her to ancient goddesses of love such as Ishtar or Inana in Mesopotamian/summerian mythology or Isis in egyptian mythology. Most of the time, these goddesses are the female counterpart of a god that was once mortal, got cursed, died and then came back to life for them to form an immortal couple.
In the case of Ishtar, her consort is Dumuzi or Tammuz and Osiris is the consort of Isis.
In Mesopotamian mythology :
Ishtar or Inana in sumerian is the goddess of love and sexuality, beauty, fertility as well as war because of her status as a " bloody goddess" mostly refering to her character in plenty of myths.
For example: in one story, she became infatuated with the king Gilgamesh, but the latter knowing her fierce reputation, refused her advances. As a result she got furious and unleashed the celestial Bull on Earth which resulted in 7 years of plagues. This celestial bull was later defeated by Gilgamesh and Endiku, and its corpse was throwed in front of Inana. Blinded by rage, she decided that as a punition Enkidu must die and sad at the death of his bestfriend Gilgamesh began his journey to find a cure to Death.
Bharani is a fierce or Ugra nakshatra meaning that its nature is agressive, bold and assertive in pursuing their goals. They are ruthless in the process of accompling what they desire the most and are inclined to extreme mood swings that can result in them to be "blinded" by their extreme emotions perfectly expressing the passionate character of Venus and her other equivalents in differents pantheons of antiquity.
Inana/ Ishtar's story with Dumuzi/Tammur begins as she was convinced to chose him by her brother Utu. Then she got married with the shepphard Dumuzi instead of whom she prefered in first the farmer: Enkinmdou. During the courtship, Inana prefered the fine textile of the farmer and his beer rather than the thick wool and milk of Dumuzi. The preference for the shepphard illustrates that at the time the Mesopotamian civilisation was known for their proliferent agriculture with the egyptians in the region, so this myth encapsulate the opposition between nomads and sendatary people at this specifific time period.
By the way, another symbol of Bharani is the cave and traditionnaly, the cave was used as a storage room for food. Also Bharani's purpose is Artha so these individuals are motivated to accumalate resources and provide safety and security, so Bharani can be linked to the exploitation of natural ressources like the soil illustrating the preference of Ishtar for the farmer. This is reinforced also by its Earth element.
So coming back to the myth, in a mesopotamian text called Inana's Descent to the Underworld, the goddess goes to Kur (hell) with the intent of conquering it, and her sister Ereshkigal who rules the Underworld, kills her. She learns that she can escape if she finds a sacrifice to replace her, in her search, she encounters servants who were mourning her death however she finds Dumuzi relaxing on a throne being entertained by enslaved girls. Enraged by his disloyalty she selects him as a sacrifice and he is dragged to the Underworld by demons.
He is eventually resurrected by Inana and they become an "immortal couple" as he may only come back to life for half of the year, being replaced by his son (?) who is also his reincarnation for the other half of the same years, so describing the cycle of regeneration of life.
Other mythologycal stories of goddesses in the near east describe a similar patterns:
The goddess Asherah is described as being the mother and the lover of her son Adonis.
The goddess Cybele in the phrygian pantheon takes the form of an old woman as she described as the mother of everything and of all. And at the same time she is the consort of Attis who his her own son (wtf ?)
Also, Yama and Yami are implicated in a incestuous entanglement where his sister Yama wanted to lay with him however he refused establishing himself as a god with an infaillible moral campus.
All of these representations illustrate the relation between the masculine and the feminine, life and regenration which are all topics related to Bharani nakshatra. Women by their capacity to give life are seen as the source of life and therefore are eternal as they are able to regenarate themselves through daughters which are identical to them whereas man who is unable to reproduce by himself, is therefore mortal feels the need to associate with her to resurrect through a son who is identical to him. Bharani exiting as the embodiment of the link between "the father and the offspring" which is the feminine vessel.
So this is certainly part 1, I think that these ancient myths are where Claire Nakti found her inspiration for her series on Bharani.
#vedic astrology#cinema#coquette#astrology#vintage movies#aesthetic#coquette dollete#fashion#vintage#movies#greek mythology#roman mythology#ancient egypt#bharani#chitra nakshatra#purva bhadrapada#purva phalguni#cowboy carter#venus#adonis
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Hold! Let me cook!
So, realistically, well not even that, it's a fact - language evolves and dramatically changes over the years, compare how we talk in this age to the letters of the past for example! The way we word things, how we formulate our sentences and the meaning behind them evolves with the context of current events, as in the use of modern slang compared to let's say, 1920s slang where they called alcohol "giggle water."
Now what am I on about? Well, I thought that hey: being comatosed for almost 500 years would surely mess up your communication, your words would be dated after all.
So here's the dish: Fragile!reader wakes up after 500 years, and can't understand a single lick of what anyone is saying.
A century passing = new slang and terms
Two centuries passing = grammar would have changed, but you could still hold a conversation
Anything past that? That's a new language! (See ye olden English from the medieval period, old English doesn't sound like our English!)
Poor fragile!reader spouting a dead language (old Sumerian) and the only one that understands is Dottore—
And, since their grammar would be different, the length they would speak would be different too! A bit hard to explain so:
[Reader: *Is speaking for a good thirty seconds*
*Confused cicin mage nodding along.*
Dottore, translating: "Your hair looks nice."]
Language anon here
I just read your most recent post
I served a cold-dish, room temperature, you were already on it 😭
I'm just gonna 🚪🏃♂️
ANON PLEASE, DON'T WORRY I LOVE THIS ASK SM 💗 And I was actually very much inspired by an anon right here so if anything, I'm also serving a cold dish as well 😭 But you're so right, the language of Teyvat has definitely changed a lot! From the way it's written, to new words, to old ones being now unused, pronunciation, and all that! Fragile reader was in for a shock for sure, because they would hear the segments and Dottore speaking in complete gibberish, and then switch back to the old language just for you. To reader, perhaps it's obvious that the language would no longer be the same but... it really hits them seeing it be so different right in front of them. You'd probably freak out a bit, considering literally no one can understand you, nor can you understand them.
Besides your lover, of course. Good thing he's a genius and made sure to preserve the old language for this day, and also program it into his segments. Thankfully, they are all quite patient in the process, as switching between languages is a piece of cake for them. I imagine you try very hard to learn certain words and phrases (how does one flirt in modern Teyvat? did courtship change much in 400+ years...? 🤔) in order to surprise him. Just don't do it too quickly... he will flirt back in much more advanced language that you don't quite understand yet and he'll laugh at your frustrated face. (AND READER TRYING TO BEFRIEND HER BY COMPLIMENTING HER BUT FAILING MISERABLY... you've been trying very hard for so long until he finally took pity on you.)
I imagine sometimes the two of them get jumbled together when you're feeling strong emotions, so only a select few people can really understand you. Sometimes, you still speak to Dottore in old Sumerian, if only to recall the old days.
#smooches talks#fragile reader <3#dottore love notes <3#reader: so how do i curse in the new language? 🤨#SO SO CUTE!! im eating this before bed#but unrelated history is so interesting
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True Renaming
A lesbian witch makes a mistake and accidentally summons an incubus instead of a succubus... but decides that she can fix "him" with just a few tweaks to the demon's true name
This force-feminization story was written for my patrons, based on the results of one of the polls I regularly run on Patreon!
If you like my writing, please consider supporting me on Patreon! For less than the price of a cup of coffee each month, you can get immediate, early access to everything I write - along with exclusive stories and the ability to vote on what I write next. Your support helps me keep writing and is greatly appreciated <3
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Ardat, incubus, took a moment to stretch as the brimstone smoke cleared, savoring every little sensation that came with being incarnated in a physical body - the cool air, the sound of his own heartbeat, the little strains of exertion as he experimentally lifted his arms. It had been too long. Far too long. Ardat had existed for eons, but summonings were becoming rarer and rarer. Now, finally, he was free to roam and corrupt the Earth once more.
Well, not free. Not yet. He had been summoned into a magic circle; a ring of symbols and salt that kept him bound to the spot. But that was merely a minor inconvenience. All Ardat needed to do was convince his summoner to lower their guard a little, and he had plenty of experience with that.
He was, after all, a sex demon.
Now that the smoke had almost cleared, he could just about see them. Ardat stroked his goatee, attended to his short, tufted, black hair, and plastered a winning, charismatic smile on his perfectly formed face. He struggled to keep it there when he noticed the expression his summoner was wearing.
Overwhelming frustration and disappointment.
That was a surprise. Ardat had been greeted in many ways - with awe, lust, shock, self-righteous contempt. But who would be disappointed with a sex demon they’d bound to their will and summoned from the bowels of hell itself?
A woman, for one. A goth, for another. The look of utter, icy disdain on her face looked like it was fixed there permanently, accentuated by her jet-black lipstick and thick, immaculate eyeliner. She had long, silky, black hair - plainly dyed - with layers of deep blue visible underneath, and her clothing was all fishnets, lace, and asymmetrical, flowing folds of black cloth. Her look was - in Ardat’s opinion - a little tacky, but she undeniably carried it off well, and her figure was on the softer, rounded, better-endowed side. Aradat certainly liked that. More for him to enjoy.
“Master,” Ardat said, his voice a low purr. He offered a low, theatrical bow. “Might I have the pleasure of your name? All the better to serve you, of course. Although I must confess a slight, ulterior motive. I desire to confirm my suspicion that your name is just as lovely as you are.”
It was a good line, and one that had made many would-be witches blush throughout history. So, Ardat had been hoping for a better response than an angry, disgusted: “Tch.”
He tilted his head, confused. “Excuse me?”
“It’s Lenora,” she said, with an air of clear reluctance. “I guess.”
“Have… I done something to offend you, master?” Ardat asked cautiously.
Lenora groaned and made a gesture like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “You’re an incubus.”
“Of course.” Ardat took a moment to refresh his grin. “I am Ardat of the Second Circle. I am accomplished in pleasures far beyond the average mortal ken - and I am at your disposal, body and soul.”
Lenora simply rolled her eyes. “You don’t get it. I’m a lesbian.”
Ardat’s smile immediately faltered. “Then… if I may ask… why did you-“
“Because you were meant to be a succubus!” the witch exploded. “I wanted to get my mind blown, and I found an old grimoire talking about this ancient sex demon. ‘Ardat of Ur’. A succubus! And now I get… you.”
“Ah,” Ardat said awkwardly. “Well, gender and grammar in ancient proto-Sumerian can be a little tricky.”
Lenora glared daggers at him. “Now what am I supposed to do?”
“Master, I’m sure you know that labels are just words,” Ardat attempted, making his voice a thrilling, husky growl and arching his back to present his bare, sculpted chest to the witch. “Whatever you may consider yourself, why not try allowing me to please you? I’m sure I could find a way to change your feelings. Everyone’s a little flexible, under the right circumstances. Maybe you just haven’t found the right man.”
From the look on her face, he immediately knew he’d chosen the wrong tactic. “Gross,” Lenora spat, even more disgustedly. “Try that again, and I’ll banish you before you can blink.”
“Wait!” Ardat said hurriedly. “Don’t send me back! Not when I… when I have so much to offer you, that is.” He tried to sound simpering and pleasing; maybe she’d like that more. “I could easily help you to summon a demon a little more fitting for your tastes. Now, if you’ll just let me out of this magic circle, I’ll-“
Lenora snorted a laugh. “Nice try. But no. Part of the reason I’m so pissed is that, as you well know, I can’t attempt this ritual again until the next lunar-venusian conjunction. Which is also the reason I can’t afford to send you back to Hell.”
Hearing that gave Ardat the twinge of hope he needed. “Then, surely there must be some service I can perform for you, master,” he purred. “Simply name your heart’s desire, and I will happily provide - for the right price, of course.”
“I don’t think-“ Lenora abruptly broke off, and then started thoughtfully at Ardat. Hope swelled in his demonic chest. “Actually,” she began thoughtfully, “maybe there is something I can do with you.”
“Yes?” Ardat asked, cautiously optimistic.
“I do have you here, even if you’re not quite right,” Lenora mused, pacing across the room. “And I do still have an itch I could do with scratching.”
Ardat let out a filthy laugh. “I’d be more than happy to assist, master,” he purred. “I knew you would prove to be open-minded.”
Lenora threw him a dangerous look, but it faded from her face almost immediately, replaced by a wicked, satisfied smirk. Somehow, that worried Ardat much, much more than her anger.
“Open-minded? No,” Lenora said. “I’m just going to fix you.”
“F-fix?” Ardat’s worry was growing.
“Fix,” Lenora confirmed, grinning. “Succubus, incubus, how different can they really be? Anyway, that whole thing is way too binary to be real. I’m sure it can’t be so hard to turn one into the other.”
“Turn into-“ Ardat let out a nervous, incredulous laugh. “Very funny, master.”
“Oh, I’m not joking.” Lenora’s grin was steadily taking on a crooked, malevolent quality. “I’m a witch. A damn good one. You wouldn’t believe what I can turn people into.”
“That’s not the problem,” Ardat explained, sighing. “Demons aren’t like people. Who we are - our bodies, our personalities, our genders - aren’t, for want of a better word, malleable. They are unchanging; ontologically fixed to specific lingua-symbolic entities - better known by your kind as our ‘true names’.”
It was a little surprising that a witch capable of summoning a demon didn’t know that much, but Ardat wanted to make sure to nip this absurd notion in the bud. He needed to guide Lenora towards something he could truly tempt her with.
“Your true names, huh?” Lenora laughed and reached for an old, leather-bound book resting on a nearby table. “Like, for example… this?”
She flipped it open to a bookmarked page and held it up for Ardat to see. It sent a cold shiver down his spine. His true name was written in the pages.
Most people wouldn’t have recognized it as such, or as a name at all. It wasn’t in words - English words least of all. Instead, it was a complex, intricately-interwoven symbol, expanding to fill an entire page of a huge grimoire with headache-inducing artistic and geometric figures. And yet, it was his name. ‘Ardat’ was the corresponding vocalization, although, from a demon’s perspective, it was crude to the point of ugliness in how little information it truly conveyed. The symbol on the page in Lenora’s book told and defined everything about the incubus, from beginning to end.
Which was very, very bad.
Knowledge was power, both figuratively and literally. It didn’t mean Lenora could pull off the kind of insane transformation she seemed to be set on, but knowing Ardat’s true name meant there was plenty she was capable of. He was going to have to tread extremely carefully.
“Where did you get that?” Ardat hissed.
“It’s from ancient Sumeria,” Lenora answered, throwing him a smug, nasty look. “You see, my ancient proto-Sumerian is actually fucking great. I just misinterpreted one little part of your true name. Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. I had to pay a pretty penny for this grimoire, though. Time to see if it’ll all be worth it.”
“That…” Ardat sighed, exasperated. “You still can’t turn me into… well, into anything! That isn’t how this works. True names might be written in ink, but I can assure you, they’re metaphorically set in stone. There are only a handful of artifacts in existence with the power to change them.”
“C’mon.” Lenora started giggling. “You can’t just set me up like that twice in a row.”
Ardat’s heart sank. “S-surely you don’t-“
This time, she reached for a small, wood-carved box and opened it. Inside was a candle that looked ordinary at first, but when Lenora lit it with a well-used lighter, the wax started to glow with an unnatural, purple phosphorescence.
“An ur-candle,” Ardat whispered reverently.
Fuck.
“Let’s take it for a spin, shall we?” Lenora said. She set the grimoire bearing Ardat’s true name down on the table and lifted the ur-candle menacingly towards it.
“Wait!” Ardat called out in alarm. He’d only heard whispers about what was about to happen, but those alone were enough to terrify him. But he fell silent once Lenora tipped the candle, and allowed a little of its wax to drip onto his true name.
Ardat froze. He could feel something; an unnameable sensation that held him in its grip and made his head feel like it was going to split open. It was as if something was touching his very soul, especially when Lenora picked up an iron stylus and used it like a pen to move the molten wax around on the page. Disconcertingly, the ink underneath it, dried for thousands of years, started to bubble up and move with it. And just like that, his reality was rewritten.
It only took hold slowly, with the first changes beginning after the wax on the grimoire’s pages had already set, but its pace quickened rapidly after Lenora held up the book for Ardat to inspect. His true name, the sigil that was the incubus’s very being, was different now. The changes were slight and subtle, and to most people they would have meant nothing. But to Ardat, it was everything.
Only, that was no longer his name. The sigil now sounded out as something different. It would be-
“Aridat,” Lenora pronounced, in a strong, clear, commanding voice. “Your name is Aridat.”
Aridat’s head sheared, and they shook their head in futile denial. “N-no.”
“Your name is Aridat,” Lenora insisted.
“My name,” Aridat grunted through gritted teeth, straining to hold on to at least this, to at least the word, “is Ard… Ar… Ari…”
“Your name,” Lenora repeated patiently, “is Aridat.”
“My name is Ari… dat,” Aridat found themself agreeing, a pained look on their face. “No, it’s… my name is Aridat… Ard… Aridat.”
The new sound was such a small thing, like a breath, and that made it so poisonously easy for it to slip in between the consonants, making its presence felt only in how much softer their name suddenly sounded as it left the incubus’s lips.
“Aridat,” Lenora nodded. The grin on her face was now one of lurid, sadistic fascination. “Good.”
“My name is… Aridat?” Aridat was losing their conviction. It was hard to remain defiant when reality itself had turned against them. They could feel an immense pull toward acceptance like a lead weight on their shoulders.
“Aridat,” Lenora repeated again. The witch tilted her head, amused. “You’re even starting to look like an Aridat.”
Her comment drew attention to something Aridat had been trying to convince themself wasn’t real: the way their body suddenly seemed just as molten and pliable as the wax of the ur-candle, ready to be changed, reshaped, remolded. The sensation was almost imperciptible, though. So subtle it was almost like nothing was changing at all. Aridat had to force themself to truly notice what was happening to them. Their face was softening and rounding out, and their goatee fell from their face in wisps as it disintegrated into nothing. Aridat’s hair had grown inches in seconds, and their body lost its overbearingly masculine silhouette as their shoulders narrowed and their hips widened. They even became shorter.
Ardat had been manly. Strong. A straight woman’s fantasy brought to life. Aridat, it turned out, was androgynous. Even elfin.
It just went with the name, somehow.
“My name… is Aridat,” they said slowly. This time, Aridat’s voice was heavy with acceptance. It felt good to embrace it, just like it felt good to breathe after forcing yourself to stay underwater.
Their name was Aridat. It just was. And they were a them, apparently.
“Fuck,” Lenora breathed. “That was so hot.”
Aridat, still recovering from having their identity rewritten on a spiritual level, was shaking with rage. Reality had changed but, crucially, history hadn’t. They still remembered what they’d lost. They’d been Ardat. They’d been manly and strong. Now, just looking down at their body was accompanied by a hot lick of bitter humiliation. And it was all because of this accursed witch. If not for the magic circle marked on the ground, Aridat would have had their hands around her throat.
“Aridat,” Lenora said, “how do you feel?”
The worst part, the very worst, was the way their new name being called felt. It made their ears prick up and instinctively caught their attention. Aridat was their name now, and like it or not, they answered to it.
“I… feel…” Aridat replied slowly. How did they feel? It was impossible to say. Their head was a swirling mass of contradictions. Memories that didn’t match reality. Old instincts that didn’t match their new personality, which seemed somehow more passive. More pliant. “I… don’t know.”
“That makes sense.” Lenora nodded thoughtfully. “It looked wild. I’m sure feeling it is even crazier, even though I was trying not to scramble you too badly. Although…” She looked Aridat up and down pointedly. “Maybe I wasn’t ambitious enough.”
Hearing that made Aridat’s blood run cold. “W-what?”
“Don’t get me wrong!” Lenora held up her hands in mock sincerity. “You look great, really. Normally I wouldn’t be so picky. I can roll with androgynous. But tonight I was really looking for something more on the ‘succubus’ end of the spectrum.”
“Fuck you,” Aridat hissed.
“I’m sorry!” Lenora’s grin was already breaking through her face. “This isn’t an exact science, you know. But now that I’ve tested it out, I think it’s safe to say that we can push this just a little bit further.”
“Wait!” Aridat begged as she lifted up the ur-candle again. They couldn’t let her change them any further. This was bad enough, but at least their old identity, their old name, was still within sight. “Stop, you can’t-“
Lenora ignored them, and tipped more enchanted wax onto their true name.
Aridat immediately felt it again; that terrifying sense of displacement as their true name began to flow like fresh ink. It was ice-cold and shockingly intimate, and made them uncomfortable aware of all the ways they were being changed. It made them feel thin; so thin that they’d fold like paper under their own weight.
The sensation doubled when Lenora took her pen to the molten wax. This time she was more daring and less careful, streaking the wax and ink across the page in huge strokes. Aridat felt each one in their soul, even as they felt that name, newly-given, already beginning to slip away.
Once she was done, Lenora looked up. She was clearly proud of her penmanship, and looked at the incubus thoughtfully.
“Your name,” she said, in that slow, deliberate way, “is Aridata.”
Aridata’s heart skipped a beat. “C-c’mon,” she whined. “It’s n-not.”
“Your name,” Lenora said again, more firmly, “is Aridata.”
As futile as it might have been, Aridata couldn’t help but try to fight it. “My name,” she struggled. “Is… Ar… Aridat.”
Even that, though, was surrender, and they both knew it. Aridata still remembered the name ‘Ardat’, but she couldn’t bring herself to claim it. Not anymore. It wouldn’t feel right. She wouldn’t sound sure enough. But hearing her insist she was ‘Aridat’ now brought a maddening smile to Lenora’s face and made the demon feel weak.
And the way it came out of her mouth was just as bad. ‘Aridat’, but with a new openness at the end; a hint, a wisp, a breath of something yet to be sounded out.
“Your name is Aridata,” Lenora insisted simply.
Her words rippled over Aridata, making her shiver with their rhythm. “My name is Ari… Aridat… a… Ari…”
She was on the brink. Both of them knew it.
“Your name is Aridata.”
“My name… my name is… A-Aridata.”
As before, it was an incredible relief to say it. Aridata. That was her name. A-ri-da-ta. It sounded so different now. So light. That treasonous little ‘a’ appended to it, a whole syllable of femininity, opened up the entire name, making the harder consonants before it a mere prelude.
Aridata. It was a girl’s name.
Aridata knew what that must mean. She reached up and touched her face, and found it different. It was her face, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t changing; an old, defunct reality was simply washing away, revealing a newer reality that might always have been there. Aridata’s face was softer now. Less angular. She had wider eyes, petite brows, and a far less pronounced jawline. But that was absolutely nothing compared to what was happening to the rest of her body. Suddenly, Aridata had wide hips and curved thighs and, most distractingly of all, the distinct swell of breasts on her chest.
“Wow,” Lenora commented, wolf-whistling. “Now that’s more like it.”
“Fuck. You!” Aridata spat, and was shocked at how girlish her voice sounded. She couldn’t manage the same level of vitriol and spite as she had earlier.
“Maybe, soon.” Lenora giggled. “You know, that outfit suits you much better now.”
Aridata looked down at herself and almost choked. She was wearing the same clothing as before - black, tight-fitting, leather pants, and nothing else - but with her appearance it felt very different. She had gone from suave seducer to something much more butch, or perhaps tomboyish. Her hair, now mid-length, fit with that too. The whole thing felt like a pointed mockery, and that should have made Aridata violently angry.
Instead, it made her blush.
It was something about her chest. Having breasts, even small ones, made being topless feel very, very different. It made Aridata feel exposed; she was suddenly conscious of the air on her skin, and even more conscious of Lenora’s gaze on her body. Everything about it was undignified. Even succubi preferred tempting, alluring, suggestive clothes to simply going topless! Instinctively, Aridata moved to cover herself and started looking around for a stray item of clothing she could use. Only the look of mirth in Lenora’s eyes stopped her.
What was she doing? Aridata wasn’t some kind of blushing maiden. She was… a man? That didn’t sound right, even in her own head. But she knew she had to try and keep hold of that version of reality.
“What’s the matter?” Lenora teased. “You weren’t shy like this before. Isn’t that interesting?”
“Hey!” Aridata huffed. “That’s not-“
She broke off. She’d huffed. Since when did she huff? That wasn’t like her at all. Except it was now. Even her mannerisms were suspect. The things Lenora could do with her candle and Aridata’s true name went far beyond the superficial. Her mannerisms, her personality, her memories - all of them could be rewritten with no more than a stroke of a pen.
“Don’t worry,” Lenora said mockingly. “I enjoy you being more ladylike.”
“I’m. Not.” Aridata had to fight to keep her voice deep and even. “I-I’m a man.”
Lenora just looked at him pityingly. They both knew how false it sounded. Aridata’s voice was too high, too light, and the inner convictions of her nature were telling her otherwise, robbing her words of their conviction.
“Uh-huh,” Lenora replied, deadpan. “And who’s gonna believe that?”
“I…” Aridata spluttered. “I…”
“Then again,” Lenora added, making no attempt to hide her mockery. “Maybe you have a point. This look is good, but it’s not really what I was after. It’s more ‘female incubus’ than ‘succubus’, if that makes any sense.”
Aridata’s blood ran cold yet again as she realized what Lenora was hinting at. “N-no, wait!”
She wasn’t expecting Lenora to tilt her head and look thoughtfully at her. “OK. I’m waiting.”
“I…”
Aridata found herself speechless. She doubted anything she might say could dissuade Lenora, but there was too much at stake not to try. However, she wasn’t going to beg. She wasn’t. Aridata - Ardat, Ardat, she reminded herself - never begged. She tempted, she offered, she bargained, but she never begged. That just wasn’t how this was supposed to go. So… what could she offer? There was only one answer, however stomach-churning and humiliating.
The former incubus did her best to strike an alluring pose that showed off all her feminine assets. It came to her worryingly naturally, and she was effortlessly able to bend forward, back arched, chest pushed out, hips swaying, and put something approaching a suggestive half-smile on her face.
“I…” Aridata said falteringly. “I could… please you. Like this.”
She just had to hope that would be enough for her lesbian captor. Perhaps it almost was. Lenora had the look of someone flipping a mental coin. Once she made her mind, though, her eyes glinted wickedly, and Aridata knew she’d lost.
“Close,” Lenora conceded. “But I think we can do better.”
Before Aridata could argue, she once again tipped the ur-candle’s wax onto Aridata’s true name.
This time, Lenora didn’t even wait for the wax to settle and congeal before she started speaking. There was eagerness in her eyes, put there by unquestionable arousal.
“Your name,” Lenora announced, “is Aridatya.”
As she spoke she made it so, using her stylus to draw the wax across the grimoire’s page in big, thick strokes, obliterating the reality Aridatya had only just been growing accustomed to and replacing it with another.
“It is not!” Aridatya tried to insist. “My name is… is Ar… Ari… um… Arida…”
It was getting harder and harder to fight it. Her head was a swirling morass of different names, all of them so similar, all of which felt right and all of which felt wrong. But a new one had just appeared, echoing like a gong, sounding more and more right with each passing moment.
“Your name is Aridatya,” Lenora repeated. She sounded so firm, so sure, whilst Aridatya wasn’t sure about anything.
“My name is… Aridatya?” it came out like a question, and so Lenora nodded in agreement.
“Your name is Aridatya.”
Aridatya found herself nodding too. “My name is A-Aridatya.”
She just couldn’t bring herself to say anything else.
“That’s right.” Lenora’s stylus was still moving across the page, etching details in ink and wax, inscribing all the details of Aridatya’s soul.
“Aridatya…” Aridatya said it slowly, testing how the name felt on her tongue. Her name had become so long, so luxurious. That little ‘y’ made it sound even more feminine, and somehow fancy. Perhaps even exotic.
And… that was her, wasn’t it? It seemed to suit her perfectly, even though she would have struggled to say why. Did that mean she was exotic? Fancy? Feminine?
No. No, of course not. Ardat had never been those things, and that should have settled the question. But it didn’t. Ardat wasn’t real. Not anymore. There was just Aridatya.
Aridatya balled her hands into fists and scolded herself. She couldn’t let herself think that way. She was an incubus. A man, as remote as that now seemed. She had to remember that. She had to remember that none of this was right. She had to.
“It’s quite a name,” Lenora remarked, finishing her handiwork with a flourish. “Aridatya. I think Aridatya is very, very confident in her femininity. Don’t you? Aridatya sounds like a real girly girl to me. The kind of succubus who really revels in it.” Her smirk turned crooked once more. “At least, that’s how it looks in my handwriting.”
“W-what?” Aridatya was stunned as she felt changes washing over her. Nothing was more unsettling than feeling her reality alter. The changes themselves kept slipping beneath her notice; rather than experiencing the transformation directly, it was like she was always noticing the way reality had always been.
In this case, that meant noticing that her hair was longer, and that she was now wearing something different - a long, flowing nightgown, tailored to accentuate a body that was far, far more feminine than she remembered. Those were Aridatya clothes, apparently. It meant noticing that her face was slender and lips full, and her eyes adorned with smoky, sultry makeup. But more than that, it meant noticing how she felt.
It meant noticing that she liked it.
“No!” Aridatya cried out, desperate to give voice to her disgust before it fled. “That’s not right! I hate this.”
“You do?” Lenora feigned surprise, but couldn’t hide her amusement. “But you’re so pretty now.”
The heat, the warm glow of praise that Aridatya immediately felt, was dangerous. Preening was instinctive, as was posing pleasingly and shifting her weight from side to side to accentuate her hips. It took precious seconds for Aridatya to catch herself and plaster a scowl over the thin, devilish smile that had come naturally to her face.
“S-shut up,” Aridatya snarled, torn between forced resentment and reflexive pride.
“C’mon,” Lenora wheedled. “Aren’t you everything a succubus is supposed to be?”
That was a potent compliment, poisonous and sinister in how affirming it was. A succubus was supposed to be beautiful, feminine and seductive, and Aridatya felt like all of those things. So it was undeniable, wasn’t it? She was everything a succubus was supposed to be. The only thing telling her was the faint memory of deeply-buried false reality, fading by the moment.
“I’m an incubus,” Aridatya tried to insist. “Not a succubus. An incubus!”
“Aridatya,” Lenora said pityingly, “do you think anyone seeing you now, anyone at all, would believe that?”
The succubus’s cheeks turned crimson. She looked away and cast about for anything she could use as ammunition. There was precious little left, but Aridatya’s thoughts quickly turned to what was between her legs. It had always been the very pride of her manhood.
“Oh, I see.” Lenora giggled. “You’re thinking about that, are you?”
Now, Aridatya paled. Had it been that obvious?
“I was thinking of letting you keep it, you know,” Lenora remarked, lifting the ur-candle again. “But if you’re going to be difficult about it…”
Aridatya truly turned as white as a sheet as she watched one single drop of wax fall onto the page.
Compared to before, it was nothing. Lenora was careful and subtle with her stylus, too. All in all, the change she made didn’t even amount to a single letter. It was an accent at most; a simple change in pronunciation, barely audible. Aridatya was still Aridatya. But it was enough, and after several horrid moments of anticipation, the succubus felt a new reality wash over her.
And it brought with it a cunt between her legs.
Aridatya gasped and whimpered at the sudden, aching loss which drove home just how much dignity and power she’d lost. Her name, her face - those things were precious, yes, but losing a part of her body that was so symbolic and fundamental for an incubus was even more of a violation. With her hips and thighs still shifting to accommodate her new anatomy, Aridatya squeezed her legs together, hoping to feel something solid between them. Instead, she just felt a sharp, shock of pleasure race up her spine from the unfamiliar stimulation to her new, sensitive pussy.
It was humiliating, and worse, the demon couldn’t suppress a low whine of pleasure. Lenora, of course, just laughed at her plight.
“My, my,” the witch commented. “Enjoying yourself already?”
“Shut up!” Aridatya huffed. She was incandescent with shame and rage, and she couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t hide. Couldn’t flee. Couldn’t stop what was happening to her.
“C’mon,” Lenora giggled mockingly. “Don’t you kind of like it?”
Aridatya had to look away because the truth was that, on some level, she did. Somehow, having a cunt instead of a cock just felt right. It made her feel more like herself, perversely; desirable and sexy in all the right ways for a succubus like her. Knowing that she’d been an incubus minutes ago and had a dick seconds ago didn’t help. It made her seethe with rage and burn with humiliation, yes, but it didn’t make having this body feel any less deliciously affirming.
So, instead, the contrasting emotions inside Aridatya - new and old - were forced to curdle and mix together as reality fought for a stable configuration. They became complimentary, mutually-reinforcing. Her humiliation became a pleasure all of its own, sinful and tempting, spiking her arousal even higher. Her anger, directed so singularly at Lenora, twisted and became a very different kind of craving, one that was predatory and carnal.
A succubus’s hunger.
It was a heady, dizzying cocktail of feelings to be struck with, and it made keeping Aridatya’s identity straight harder than ever. Instinct was taking over. It infested her body language, making her pose and preen and smile, directing all of her hellishly tempting appeal straight at Lenora. The witch was clearly amused and enticed in equal measure.
“Wow,” she remarked, cocking an eyebrow. “Maybe that was the magic ticket. Feeling a little more agreeable now?”
“Absolutely,” Aridatya replied, her voice a vicious purr. She was desperate. She couldn’t let this go any further. She needed Lenora to let down her guard.
“Fascinating,” Lenora breathed. For a moment, occult curiosity took over, although the color in her cheeks made it clear her interest was far more than just academic. “I suppose it is the lynchpin of the succubus/incubus distinction - in some schema, at least - so it makes sense it would have rather dramatic ripples.”
“Dramatic,” Aridatya echoed pleasingly. She bent forward, showing off her new assets. Her tits had become impressively large and pert, and it was dawning on her that she could use that. That she knew how to use that. “Hey, so how about that itch you needed scratching?”
“Yeah?” Lenora couldn’t help but stare, Aridatya noticed with pleasure. “You’re interested.”
“Oh, I just can’t wait to sink my teeth into you,” Aridatya cooed. She giggled. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”
The plan, of course, was to seduce her, and then, once she released Aridatya from the magical circle, subdue her and force her to undo all the changes she’d made. At least, that was what Aridatya was telling herself. In truth, it was rationalization as much as anything else. Beneath it all was a simple, heartbeat-drum of need and desire, driving her towards Lenora’s warmth.
"Wow,” Lenora breathed. She wasn’t so quick-witted now. Aridatya could tell she was succumbing to her own desires, now that her summoned demon was in a form far, far more agreeable to her tastes. “But… sink your teeth into me? That sounds a little…”
“C’mon.” Aridatya tried to affect a high-pitched, feminine voice. It came effortlessly, and she was as dismayed at that as she was pleased with her success. “You can trust me. I just want what you made me want.”
Lenora almost went for it. Almost. But in the end, she pulled back and shook her head. “I wish. This version of you is pretty great, if I do say so myself. But… I can tell this isn’t going to be a good idea.”
“N-no.” Aridatya’s smile faltered.
“Perhaps I’ve been going about this the wrong way,” Lenora mused. “It’s not enough to make you a succubus. Not anymore. You’ll still remember what I did, at least a little, and you’ll still want revenge. I need to address that.”
“My… memories?” Aridatya was aghast. How could she fight that?
But Lenora shook her head. “No. Something deeper: your past.” She lifted the ur-candle and toyed with it in her hand, an egomaniacal smile playing across her face. “A true name is such a potent thing. It contains everything about you. Even your very history. Change that, and there’s nothing to remember.”
“Wait!” Aridatya called out, as Lenora started to tip the candle, but she already knew that wouldn’t stop her. Her next word tasted like bitter tears. “P-please!”
She didn’t beg. For all that had changed, that remained true. But this was her limit. This was the end. And so, Aridatya begged.
It didn’t matter.
This time, the way Lenora altered her true name was anything but subtle, even if it was artful. Using her stylus, she worked wax and ink all over the grimoire’s page, inscribing a fresh pattern that seemed to make the entire sigil shift into a bold new configuration.
“And,” Lenora murmured as she worked. “Why not push a few other things a little further, too?”
The sight made the succubus’s head throb, especially when Lenora looked up at her and said:
“Your name is Arideniya.”
“My name is… is Arideniya.”
This time, Aridenya didn’t bother to fight it. She just let her new reality wash over her, and accepted whatever her new self turned out to be.
It felt good, as it turned out. Arideniya couldn’t even perceive the changes as they occurred. Each one etched itself into her memory and her past, as if things had always been that way. Aridenya was left completely, blissfully ignorant of the fact that once, maybe, for a different version of herself, things had been very, very different.
Her tits had always been this huge. Her cunt had always dripped enticing wetness down her thighs when she was turned on and hungry. She’d always been a succubus, a woman, an embodiment of female sexuality, ready to feast on any mortal who came within reach. And when they were around her, they wanted to be feasted on so very, very much.
Arideniya didn’t just feel feminine. She felt powerful, and she took to her power like it was second nature. She stood tall, practically filling the room from floor to ceiling. Her horns were a crown upon her head, and her clothing was royal robes, no less revealing and suggestive for their grandeur. As the wax dried, Arideniya looked down at Lenora like a queen looking down at someone presenting themselves as tribute.
“Master,” the succubus purred, her tone anything but submissive. “Allow me to show you true pleasure.”
Lenora started to sweat from sheer temptation. Her magic circle offered scant protection against the raw, mind-bending power of Arideniya’s presence. She was overwhelming in every sense. She was any mortal’s fantasy given form, and Lenora was far from immune.
“W-what,” the witch struggled to say. She was drooling, but her mouth sounded painfully dry. “This isn’t… I didn’t mean to…”
“Oh, yes, you did,” Arideniya countered. “This is exactly what you wanted. Exactly what you summoned. I’m all your handiwork, Master. It’s time to enjoy me. Time to take down this silly little circle.”
Lenora twitched abruptly, like she was struggling not to obey. Temptation was overriding her reason. Arideniya’s wicked grin widened. She had no particular animosity towards this mortal - but she needed to feed, and she liked to drink deep.
“I don’t u-understand how…” Lenora stuttered, flustered. She took a single step towards Arideniya, taking her perilously close to the magical circle’s boundary, before something seemed to click in her head. “Oh. Oh! I know what I did wrong.”
She stepped back, and hefted the objects in her hand - a leather-bound grimoire and a strange-looking candle. Arideniya’s eyes flew wide as she noticed it. The object seemed to trigger a memory from another life.
“Is that a-“ was all she managed to say before Lenora once again tipped the candle wax all over the grimoire.
This time, Lenora wasn’t artful or sparing. She poured as much wax as she could, obliterating almost all of the succubus’s true name in a single gesture. The succubus was rooted to the spot as a strange, unearthly sensation swept through her, making her mind flash white and robbing her of all sense of self and purpose. The sensation only grew stronger when Lenora started writing with her stylus in wax and ink, replacing some of what had been blotted out and altering what remained.
“It was obvious, really,” Lenora murmured as she worked. “I was too focused on what I wanted to change. Lost sight of the big picture. I was adding, each and every time. More letters, more sounds, more changes stacked on top of changes. I made a name that was impressive. Magnificent. Powerful.” She grinned. “But I think this will do the job just fine instead.”
The succubus standing before her just stared, dumbfounded, struggling to comprehend the meaning of her words.
“Your name,” Lenora told her, slowly and deliberately, “is Aria.”
“My name…” Aria echoed, “is… Aria!”
She brightened as she said it. It felt so right, and the rightness of it made her giggle a pretty, air-headed giggle. Aria licked her lips and arched her back, and reached up to jiggle her own, massive tits experimentally. Doing that made her giggle even harder.
“Maaaaster,” she drawled, pouting. “Don’t you wanna, like, fuck me?”
Lenora laughed. “No need to worry about hidden agendas now, I think,” she said. “So - time to make a contract?”
“A contract?” Aria snorted. “That stuff is soooo boring. Um… let’s see… I’ll give you whatever you want if you’ll, like, make me feel good?”
“Deal,” Lenora announced. She stepped forwards and used the tip of her shoe to erase the boundary of the magical circle on the ground. As soon as it was broken, Aria bounced on her, kissing and squeezing and groping with overeager lust.
Lenora laughed, and her laughter soon turned to moans. It was time to get that itch scratched.
---
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So I just recently got caught up on WD!Steven and that little rant that Pearl went on about humans speaking sumerian and using animate/inanimate gender classes to refer to gems (EE Bomb: Friday) and I was wondering if you had resources where I could read more about that? It seems super interesting.
Hey! So I'm assuming you mean this comic.
In terms of resources, I'm afraid all I've got for you is basic work-ups on Sumerian as a language. I believe at this point it's pretty much agreed that Sumerian had two grammatical genders - human and other. (source 1)
I extrapolated a lot, for the sake of the comic because I am admittedly not well versed in ancient Sumerian grammar, but it felt fun to me to consider the idea that ancient humans initially saw gems as something so OTHER that they did not even place them in the same category as human-classified nouns.
It should be noted, of course, that simplifying Sumerian nouns into simply animate and in-animate is not altogether accurate, as per this paragraph from Daniel A. Foxvog's “Introduction to Sumerian Grammar” (Source 2)
Sumerian features a kind of grammatical gender which has nothing to do with the natural gender categories masculine vs. feminine. Instead, nouns are viewed as either personal, referring to individual human beings, whether singular or plural, or impersonal, usually referring to persons viewed as a group (collectives), animals, places, or things. Some grammars use the linguistic terminology "animate" vs. "inanimate," which can be misleading, since the impersonal category is used not only for lifeless objects, but also for animals, groups of persons, and "objectified" individual persons referred to scornfully or dismissively such as slaves – all of which are certainly animate, living things. (*emphasis mine)
My initial thought was admittedly just based on the gems' inhumanity, but another interpretation could be made that the gems, which function as a mass unit and often come in near-identical groups of the same gem, were thus interpreted by the Sumerians as a collective rather than another individual.
Aside from that, the rest is just me speculating. If you're asking for sources from the canon text (original SU) then I'm afraid I've got nothing - that whole comic was just speculative! I made it all up.
As for genders in grammar - if you're asking this as a general curiosity, I do want to mention that Sumerian isn't particularly WEIRD for this. Grammatical gender is not the same thing as cultural and social gender, and is a whole other beast of its own. Many non-Western-European languages classify what we call 'genders' in grammar by things that have very little to do with masculine and feminine traits. You can read about it more on the Grammatical Gender wikipedia page!
Cheers!
Sources Sited:
http://www.eltereader.hu/en/kiadvanyok/english-gabor-zolyomi-an-introduction-to-the-grammar-of-sumerian (Lesson 1, Page 15, page 167)
2. https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/articles/cdlp/2.0.pdf (Page 22)
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When you want to write a longpost about some interesting aspect of your conworld, like the Hhotakotí revolution, wherein a charismatic young military leader united the Hhotabain for the first time, abolishing the clan system and replacing the traditional positions of clan representatives on local councils with guild representatives, creating an industrial-oligarchic state which would rapidly become a major regional power. But you can't write a longpost about that yet because in order to do that you need to have a good picture of the rhetoric and the writings of the movement, and for that you need to have the details of the traditional clan system and the pitfalls pointed to by its discontents worked out. And the clan system grew naturally as the Hhotakotí spread across the archipelago so you need to have all the early population movements mapped out (for which you need your map, but we'll get to that) and in order to do that you need to decide on a branching for the different dialects of Hhotakotí. Now obviously if you're going to be making decisions about dialect branching you need the basic structure of the grammar down, and the grammar of the protolanguage. But a major part of the grammar that you've been using for years evidently runs up against putative syntactic universal FOFC, which places limits on mixed head-direction structures related to center embedding. And now you've found a possible counterexample in Sumerian, so you want to base your structure on this example, and there's various strange embedding depth constraints you have to account for as a result, but also you have no idea about the diachronics of the Sumerian case obviously. So you have to look into the grammar of some other proposed counterexamples, which mostly come from Australia. Now this is promising because case stacking is an areal feature in both Australia and the Caucasus region, which is probably why these weird center embedding phenomena show up in Sumerian, so you hope that the relevant syntactic structures might be similar enough to be useful. But combing through grammars like this is a lot of work and you have homework all the time so you can't do it right now. And also to place the protolanguage geographically you need your fucking map, which has been lost for 8 years now even though you KNOW it's in a box in your parents' basement somewhere. So you can't write the longpost yet. Anyone else have experience with this?
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further ghosts + linguistics headcanons:
julian makes multiple puns about cunning linguists
the captain and mary bond over weird sounds and unusual phonemes
thomas is initially reluctant but after a bit of persuading he gets into orthography and now he wants to revive the letter thorn
robin keeps going down internet rabbit holes for the grammar of minor languages
also he wants to learn sanskrit, ancient greek, and sumerian. after that it'll be akkadian. he's fascinated by ancient languages
and he loves names. he starts renaming his old friends in other languages. that's guillermo... that's elixabete... and that's. well. godric
humphrey does not understand a fucking thing, poor guy. it's all just words that go straight over his head. he especially hates cases
on the other hand if someone could explain what the hell is going on with french he wouldn't mind that
kitty gets really invested in reviving different minority languages
yes, all of them
julian's second-favourite hobby is looking up the etymology of vulgar words. he gets pretty into it after a bit. it's almost sweet
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THE OLDEST LANGUAGES ARE THE MORE COMPLICATED IN GRAMMAR THAN TODAYS LANGUAGES! THERE IS NO EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE AND WRITING, AND MAN DID NOT EVOLVE!
The first fact which conflicts with the evolutionary view is that there is no such thing as a 'primitive' language. If language had evolved from animal noises, or the primitive grunts of 'ape-men', we would expect to find that the oldest languages were the most simple; the opposite is true! Evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson admitted: 'The oldest language that can reasonably be reconstructed is already modern, sophisticated, complete from an evolutionary point of view. The most ancient languages for which we have written texts, such as Sumerian and Sanskrit, often have far more intricate and grammatical forms that many modern languages. In Sanskrit still spoken in parts of India each verb has about 500 parts (most English verbs have only 5 parts, e.g. do, does, did, done, doing). In fact, Sanskrit is considered one of the most perfect systems of writing ever devised.
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Silim! I was wondering what some of the basic verbs would be in Sumerian, e.g: 'to be', 'to have', 'to do', etc.
Hello! This is a more complicated answer than you may have expected. As with many languages, the most common & frequently-used verbs are also the most irregular - think of how irregular "be/is/are/were/been", "do/does/did/done", and "go/went/gone" are in English.
Of these core verbs, the simplest in Sumerian is tuku "to have, hold, possess, get", which only has two roots - tuku in the past and tukutuku in the present. Example: Ngae dub ibtukutukun "I have a tablet."
There is no perfect match for "to do" in Sumerian, but the verb aka "to act, take action" covers a lot of the same semantic space. It's used in a lot of phrasal verbs, like kurum aka "to inspect" (i.e. "to do an inspection"), or sagaz aka "to do a robbery, to commit a murder". It's basically regular, appearing as ak or aka in all tenses, but in certain participles appears as just k- (as in kede "for the purpose of taking action.") Example: Zae ana ibakan? "What are you doing? What action are you taking?"
The verb "to say, speak" is also both common and irregular in Sumerian, with three different roots: dug is the dictionary entry, but is only used in the past-tense singular; in the plural or present tense it's e, and in all non-finite forms (like participles) it's di. (Aka and dug are the only verbs in Sumerian with a dedicated participle root.) Example: Ngae iben "I'm saying it", Ngae dug "I said it", Dide "for saying".
The verb for "to go" takes this one step further, in having four separate roots, the only verb in Sumerian with this many. In singular past it's ngen, plural past is ere, singular present is du and plural present is sub. So: Ngenen "I went", Erenden "we went", Dun "I go", Subenden "we go".
And finally there's "to be", which barely operates as a verb at all. Instead, it acts like a set of suffixes at the end of a sentence - so -men "I am", -(a)m "it is", etc. It also works only in linking two nouns/pronouns, as in Ngae lugalmen "I am the king", Lugal is'habam "The king is a villain." In English we often use "to be" to connect a noun to an adjective, as in "The king is beautiful", but in Sumerian such a construction would use a dedicated verb like sag "(to be) beautiful". Lugal sage is literally, "The king beautifuls".
I hope that's helpful! If you'd like any more example sentences translated using one or more of these verbs, let me know.
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Sumerian grammar distinguishes two nominal gender categories:
(1) humans and deities and (2) animals and things. This categorization is in contradistinction to that of Semitic Akkadian and Indo-European English which distinguish the gender classes: masculine and feminine. It has been established that grammatical gender influences our ways of thinking and seeing the world around us. Consequently, it follows that the division masculine : feminine was not a fundamental aspect of Sumerian thought and that the male : female division of human : animal world was not necessarily projected onto the cosmic plane. This peculiarity has been given various interpretations. It has even been suggested that deities originally had no gender and were only engendered in the period when they were anthropomorphized. It has also been claimed that, since the unmarked gender in many languages is male, Sumerian religion was male-dominated and the female element was only added secondarily. On the other hand, it has been noted that there is a lack of maleness even in the word lu2 ‘man’, which is perhaps better understood as signifying ‘animate being’. There is even a ‘mother goddess’ with the name dLu2-gu-la meaning ‘great man’. In contrast, the Semitic Akkadian language of Mesopotamia does distinguish masculine and feminine forms for deity: ilu ‘god’ and iltu or more commonly, ištaru ‘goddess’. However, even in Akkadian in the Old Akkadian, Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian periods, the lexeme ilum was understood as ‘divinity’ and could refer to a goddess as well as a god.
– Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources
Asher-Greve, Julia M; Westenholz, Joan Goodnick
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So! Let's talk about Ikanan!
In images for this fic, I use Twilight Princess Hylian.
But due to the limitations of fonts on AO3, I use Akkadian in the direct text. (I'm learning about workskins now thanks to Juruna-Yudja 🙏🏾, but it's a process!)
Both represent the same language in-universe, but since I had no reference for the phonetics of Hylian to transliterate, I used Akkadian (with occasional naming done in Sumerian) instead of creating a full conlang. I also wanted the direct text to be translatable.
Again, none of the easter eggs I put in are necessary to understand the story - basic engagement is enough, but I like to put in more for those who enjoy additional interactivity! Shout out again to Siletrea, who went through and translated some of the dialogue that has already appeared in Ch13 and 14!
Below the cut, I have provided the translations for those entries thus far. If you'd like to jump in on your own instead and learn a little about one of humanity's oldest languages (seriously!! It's so cool that historians have reconstructed it! Bro and I'm out here using it for fanfiction lmao) here is the link to the dictionary I used. Pay attention to the syntax rules when searching and you'll be a-ok!
Note that I haven't done much conjugating or gendering. That would make this all too complicated (I say, as though it isn't already), so please bear with me, linguists. Meanwhile, I've hacked grammar together in the way that I learned Hebrew since this is a Semitic language, so I'm using possessive pronouns after their noun and postpositives (?) Blah blah blah, here are the translations
Muhhu-ikku basu nidutu rapsu
"Your mind is (a) vast wasteland"
Allu, kuzbanu-atta, issurri [a real leash] lu [fun]
"Though, you (are) attractive, perhaps [a real leash] ought to (be) [fun]..."
Allu adannis [cute], anaku [enjoy that]
"Though very [cute], I [enjoy that]."
[Heroic warrior?] Lillutu! Ardananu?
"[Heroic warrior?] Nonsense! A ghost?"
[Grandmother], edu-atta sasu?
"[Grandmother], (do) you know him?"
And finally this, which is in aforementioned Hylian and is a Sumerian name.
Ursang... ...Ursang... ...Ursang
"Heroic warrior... ...Heroic warrior... ...Heroic warrior"
That's all for now! Hope you enjoyed this rambling!
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Šɯk, Sumerian, and marking phrases instead of words
So, I was reading through the new(ish, I'm late, sue me) grammar for Šɯk from Mark Rosenfelder's Almea project and came across what at the time seemed like a really bizarre detail. To quote from the very first line of the nouns section,
Nouns do not inflect, but NPs [noun phrases] do.
Needless to say, this seemed like a less than naturalistic choice - very out of step with the usual tone that the languages in Almea have (besides, possibly, the lack of pronouns in Munkhâshi, but I wouldn't be too surprised if a language did this in real life as well).
So, I searched the bulletin board for a post about the grammar, and in the very top of one, someone asked about the system... and then compared it to Sumerian.
Yeah, it's a natural feature, and with a real-life example. And I've got some thoughts.
How Šɯk and Sumerian handle noun inflection
These are very similar and both really easy to understand, so I'll group them together here. When a clitic is applied to a noun, it is added to a "stack" at the end of the noun phrase in a certain order and duplicated as needed, as in these samples:
Šɯk:
meʇ ɯsak ʘily-at-at-nye
son healer queen-gen-gen-pl
the sons of the queen’s healer
Sumerian (From the Wikipedia article on Sumerian, so take with grain of salt):
dig̃ir gal-gal-g̃u-ne-ra
god great~ints-3poss-plr-dat
for all my great gods
And in cases where it would lead to three or more doubled segments, the third is left ambiguous. Simple enough. But what does this mean for someone like me who wants to put their own spin on it in their own conlang?
Implications
In my opinion, the big takeaway here is that phrases can carry segments, even including ones we generally think of as "belonging" to a specific word in a phrase. On the surface level, of course, this means verb phrases could of course do the same as the NPs above. For example, you could have a system where TAM gets marked on the earliest element of a verb phrase - normally probably a verb or auxiliary, but... adverbs? Nonfinite verbs?
But also, there's other phrase structures that this seems to apply to easily. What about relative clauses? Maybe a full-phrase stack like this could form its own strategy for relativization: assuming an ancestor language uses the gap strategy, non-reduction strategy, or the internally-headed relative clauses strategy, that these behave like clitics more than suffixes, and that they get placed in a consistent place within the phrase, then could these stacked roles behave like a combination of a relative pronoun as well as keeping track of the roles of the rest of the nouns in the clause?
Additionally, speaking of reanalysis, I could see a system like this degrading over time into something that encodes specific relationships. Let's say we have some accusative, instrumental, and genitive cases, and their clitics get shunted to the initial position of a phrase. Over time, these may degrade into single words that encode the meaning of both nouns involved - a particle for first-instrumental, second-genitive, a particle for first-accusative, second-zero, and such. And let's also say that our instrumental particle is used with the accusative to represent giving someone something (i.e., a "You received the book via me" approach). Eventually, if most of the clitic system falls out of use, than this previous stacked-cases word becomes a valency-increasing operation! It might even come across as a marooned part of the verb phrase. (Or it could be something else, but that was the first place my brain went).
Regardless, I think there's a lot of interesting things that could be done with the idea of inflecting phrases instead of smaller blocks. Obviously, it isn't something common, but it could add a lot of flavor to a conlang concept, which is definitely something I'll need to keep in mind for my next project.
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What do you think of Joyofsatan.org? They claim to follow the Sumerian God Enki-Satan, they’re pro-choice and they’re the largest Satanist group in the world.
Sorry in advanced for any spelling and grammar errors!
I knew alittle bit about Satanism prior to this ask but not much. I myself would probably identify as a skeptical secularist. I really tend to belive and practice the things that feel right and make me happy. I am always open to learning new things as I believe that all religions are correct in there own ways. Some I'm sure tho, more so than others.
Here is a few key points I've compiled after reading their main newcomers information page:
They claim to have converted many atheists and skeptics because there religion is "real".
"Satanism is unlike mainstream religions. Those who open their minds to Satan *will* experience him. Unfortunately, Christianity and its cohorts have given people the impression that the spirit/astral world is nothing but bunk. Little or nothing ever happens spiritually with these religions. Their anti-life doctrines are all based upon stolen material from religions that preceded them. This material was hideously corrupted, with all of the spiritual knowledge being removed from it, and twisted to conform to their agenda to spiritually enslave the world; keeping spiritual knowledge and power in the hands of a few."
They claim to be humanity's "original religion" and say that it is based on ancient texts and ideologies predating any of the abrahamic religions.
The metaphysical world is intertwined with the scientific world Instead of viewed as polar opposite and incompatible like in many mainstream beliefs.
They view Christianity and mainstream religion as a harmful tool used by people in positions of power to control the masses.
They believe in the human soul
They practice witchcraft
They believe in some conspiracy theories, mainly that the world governments keep spiritual information hidden from the public
"Satan and his Demons are VERY REAL. They are not "evil" as the Christian Church has depicted them to be. In truth, Satan does not conform to the Christian or Western concept of "evil". "Good" and "evil" are nothing more than cultural concepts; Satan transcends this."
"Satanists respect free thought and staunchly support the separation of church and state. We do not proselytize, nor do we push our religion on anyone."
A key element seems to be respect. Anyone can practice this religion and can make it far regardless of their previous education so long as they carry it out and treat the rituals and practices with the utmost respect.
Satanism is forward moving only. Once you open the door to Satanism you cannot close it.
I tend to agree with alot of the things they have said here. Especially that where Christianity and large mainstream religions are tools used by those in power to control the masses. I also belive that many "christians" are so indoctrinated by the church that they have completely missed the point and have actually closed themselves off spiritually.
They also have some interesting points that I have heard before. Mainly that Satan and demons are not "evil" and that "evil" is not "evil". These are ideas I have thought quite a bit about before. It is something I myself will have to and have worked alittle at unlearning.
Overall, I think it is very interesting and I agree with many of their points. It is definitely something I will have to look more into to see if it is worth getting into. Given that I've only read a few pages on their site I don't fully trust it. But I think I will move forward with respectful caution as there seems to be write alot I can learn from it.
I am a bit of a bubbly person (to put it lightly) and this seems to be a very serious and strict religion so I'm not sure it's exactly the right fit for me though.
Great ask!
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Into The Storm | Babalon’s Trickster Transmission & Epic of Gilgamesh Summary
Let’s see how, in the biblical tale of Noah and the epic of Gilgamesh summary, Noah constructs the ark on his own after failing to persuade humanity of the impending calamity.
Backstory — Babylonian narrative & Gilgamesh Epic:-
According to a new study, in the Babylonian narrative recorded in the epic of Gilgamesh summary, everyone helps build the gigantic boat, but only after being duped by a god with promises of delicious cakes pouring from the sky and other goodies, only to drown anyhow. According to Cambridge senior lecturer Dr. John Worthington, the god Ea’s promises to Uta-napishti recounted in the Assyrian Flood Tablet, use clever wordplay that can be read as promises of abundance if the people build the ark or predictions of a horrible death from flooding.
In other words, the world’s first pun was so awful that it could have destroyed humanity.
“Ea’s message appears to promise a rain of food, but its hidden meaning warns of the Flood,”
Worthington said in a statement: “Once the ark is completed, Uta-napishti and his family board and live among various animals. Everybody else drowns. With this early episode, set in mythological times, the manipulation of facts and language begins. It could be the earliest example of fake news.”
Into the Storm, the most interesting rise (TV series) deeply explores Babalon’s trickster transmission story.
New Readings of the Epic of Gilgamesh:-
The study is based on a fresh reading of nine lines in the story published last week by Worthington under the title “Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story.”
Accordingly, the “Epic of Gilgamesh summary” dates back 3,100 years and is regarded as the earliest extant piece of literature and the most ancient religious text after the Pyramid Texts. It became a worldwide sensation when Assyriologist George Smith recognized its importance in 1872. Worthington is an Assyriologist focusing on Babylonian, Assyrian, and Sumerian grammar, literature, and medicine. Worthington calls Ea “a master writer who can combine multiple concurrent meanings into one deceptive utterance.”
In one example, he says, “At dawn, there will be kukku-cakes/ in the evening he will rain down upon you a shower of wheat.” But it can alternatively be translated as “Through incantations/wind-demons, he will pour down upon you rain as thick as (grains of) wheat.” It’s just the difference between “ice cream” and “I scream,” Worthington explained.
The Impact of Worthington’s Discovery:-
Worthington’s research into the Babylonian flood myth has reignited interest in understanding ancient literature. This revelation emphasizes the complexities of literary works and the significance of taking into account cultural context and linguistic variations while translating them. Scholars now realize the possibility of hidden meanings and wordplay within these stories, encouraging a rethinking of previous interpretations.
This discovery also provides insight into the evolution of storytelling approaches. The use of wordplay in the Epic of Gilgamesh summary indicates a profound understanding of language and its ability to convey clarity and deception. This revelation adds the Babylonian story to the discussion of the evolution of literary devices, foreshadowing the employment of puns and double meanings in subsequent works of fiction.
Open Questions and Future Research:-
Worthington’s work opens up avenues for additional inquiry. Are there any additional examples of wordplay or hidden messages in the Storm of the Epic of Gilgamesh or other ancient Mesopotamian texts? Could similar strategies be used in flood legends from various cultures? A more in-depth knowledge of these features could shed light on the early civilizations’ belief systems and narrative traditions.
This revelation also raises questions regarding the role of tricksters in mythology. Ea’s manipulation in the flood narrative depicts him as a crafty deity who manipulates language for his benefit. Examining the depiction of trickster gods in various cultures may indicate a shared awareness of the power of language and deception in human affairs.
Concluding Opinions:-
The Babylonian narrative in the Gilgamesh Epic highlights how the god Ea used deceptive promises to motivate people to build a boat, ultimately leading to their demise in a flood.
This clever wordplay is a cautionary tale about the consequences of blind faith and manipulation.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, dating back 3,100 years, is considered the oldest surviving literary work and one of the earliest religious texts. Assyriologist George Smith’s recognition of its significance in 1872 brought it to global attention.
Assyriologist Worthington highlights EA’s skill at crafting ambiguous statements with multiple meanings.
Comparing these strategies with flood legends from different cultures may reveal common themes and connections across diverse narrative.
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