#the only exception is for a loanword or a word that needs to be English cause there’s no equivalent or whatever
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Welcome to the best non-english word tournament!
What is this?
This is another bracket tournament, in which we will decide the best word. However, this tournament is also dedicated to linguistic diversity and promoting languages that aren't English, since they are less visible on the internet at large. This means that words in English are banned from competing to make room for the other 6500-7500 known languages (depending on how you count). To avoid other large languages taking over the poll (both counting native speakers and languages the average tumblr user is likelier to know) there will be a limit of four words from every language. Join me and learn new cool words in many different languages as well as vote for your favourite!
Who are you?
I'm a linguistics student and language nerd from Sweden who took lots of inspiration from @ultimate-word-tournament but wanted to focus on language diversity in words. I'll also sneak in some posts about the language situation in the world because it's a fascinating topic. My native language isn't English, so please be kind if my posts are worded weirdly sometimes
What makes a word good?
There are many ways that a word can be good, but here are some examples: it sounds good/feels good to say, the script looks nice, it denotes an interesting concept, it denotes a concept you like, it does something interesting grammarwise or soundwise, it's funny, it's an interesting/fun compound, it has an interesting/fun etymology, it just has good vibes... The possibilities are endless and a judgement probably consists of some combinations of these or others
Rules:
There will be 64 words and a maximum of four words per language
No words in English, but loanwords from English are allowed with good motivation
No conlangs (I love them but the focus is on natural language)
Words from signed languages are allowed and encouraged as long as you can provide an explanatory picture or film for the sign
Words from pidgins are allowed
Words from extinct languages are allowed
No made up words (if it isn't/wasn't used in the language it doesn't belong, neither does words only your family/friend group uses, but slang words are allowed)
Every submitter is allowed to submit a maximum of two words from the same language based on the honor system
Submissions:
Submissions were open until the bracket was filled and are now closed
I will need to do some selection if I recieve more than four submissions from a language and this selection will mostly be based on who submitted first, with exceptions for good motivations or difficulty finding information on a word (like IPA transcription). I will try my best to research all words and languages, but since I'm hoping for small languages it might be difficult to find. There might also be some selection based on including more languages and areal diversity if I get some really good ones between the 64th submission and closing the form, but we'll see.
Some guidelines:
If you're able, please provide an IPA transcription for your word (the International Phonetic Alphabet has a sign for each sound used in any language, which makes transcription of exact pronounciation possible)
Please provide a short motivation on what makes your word good
You will need to provide a translation/explanation of the word in English since that is the language this tournament is conducted in for ease of communication and reach. If the exact translation of a word is part of what makes the word good, please provide that too
Have fun! I can't wait to see your words. If you just want to vote, go ahead and follow me in the meantime
I will tag some other tournaments to hopefully make this reach people who know interesting languages and good words in them. Please consider doing the same if you want this tournament to be as good as possible.
@ultimate-word-tournament @ultimate-sentence-tournament @words-for-cat-bracket @ultimate-poll-tournament @titlesbracket @tournamentdirectory @eurovision-song-bracket @the-shape-showdown @fuckingstupidbracket
#best non-english word tournament#tournament poll#info and logistics#i am a fan of words and language and this was just inevitable#help
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I'm not sure if this would garner a full request of headcanons? But here we go How would Kiryu, Majima, and Ichiban react to a foreign darling? Like she knows Japanese (mostly) but isn't from Japan? I'm totally not projecting here 👀
Kiryu canonically doesn't know ANY other language besides Japanese, so I think he would fall for a Darling that has a similar spirit. Like...someone who shows strength, either by fighting or by showing quiet strength like Haruka's mother (I don't remember her name and it doesn't matter because she's a walking plot device)
He would try to learn some basic words in their first language even if they know Japanese, just as a sign of respect to them. It's only fair since they learned Japanese. I think he might ask Gary Buster Holmes for some basic English if Darling speaks it since he's also a foreigner.
He would be protective of them, even if they can't fight. He wouldn't restrict their freedom or kidnap them or anything, but I think he'd simultaneously watch over them a lot but also distance himself from them like he did his adopted family so they aren't targeted. But eventually he would realize that trying to do that has never kept his loved ones safe in the end. Hell, Haruka went through so much while he was in prison. So he would do his best to watch over Darling and likely not confess because he knows it likely wouldn't work even without the language barrier.
Majima knows more English than you'd think, but isn't that fluent. So he would stick to Japanese most of the time except for a few words here and there. Though it'd be difficult sometimes to understand since he speaks in the Osaka dialect, and foreign!Darling might not understand everything he says at first.
He would give them a lot of freedom by yandere standards, and just have some of his guys watch them sometimes. Consider that he's the Mad Dog of fucking Shimano, and that if someone was going to try anything untoward against HIS partner, they forfeit all right to live the moment they do it. Like. You only bother Majima's Darling if you feel like dying or getting the shit beaten out of you. While the Mad Dog thing is largely an act, Majima will do anything for his loved ones; unlike Saejima, you can't easily defend yourself, so he's gonna do it for you.
The urge to leave you for your own good gets to him sometimes. Being with a Japanese person would be difficult as it is, and he would feel like he's betraying Makoto in a sense. He never contacted her again because he wanted her to be safe and far from his life of danger in the Yakuza, so why does he think it's okay to be with Darling then? I think he would come to terms with it and accept that he doesn't NEED to cut ties with someone he loves. He is allowed to love someone and take the risks that comes with that.
Ichiban's English consists of any and all loanwords from the Dragon Quest series. Like he canonically doesn't know any English and just panics when a gaijin asked him a simple question. He is very confused but he has the spirit! So he's kind of relieved that Darling knows Japanese. It was hard enough memorizing kanji and taking Japanese as a class when he was a kid, and he was born and raised here! He thinks his Darling is so cool for being able to understand two languages.
He wants to know all about your home country. What food do they have? What video games are popular? What movies are from there? If you're American he would constantly ask you about the celebrities he keeps seeing on ads and shit all over Japan.
He's protective of you (he IS a Hero, after all) and in his fantasy daydreams, you're a character from a mystical faraway empire that joined his party and who the Hero fell in love with. He's the most protective of the three if you aren't a capable fighter, and he has a habit now of texting you every morning when he wakes up just to say hi and to make sure you're ok. If you don't respond he doesn't immediately worry but he feels uneasy until you do respond.
#.like a dragon#.yakuza#.ichiban#.majima#.kiryu#yandere like a dragon#yandere yakuza#yandere ichiban#yandere majima#yandere kiryu#.myshit
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Hi conlang person (unsure what to call you)
How long do you think it will take to design the language? There are so many words, or rather things that need to have words. Do you anticipate this being a project that lasts months or years, or do you have a secret cheat code I haven't thought of?
Also, will the conlang feature loan words from other languages? How about exceptions to grammar rules? Will we be creating a new alphabet?
If you can't already tell I'm very excited about this project and appreciate the effort you put into setting it up!
Hello!! 🤝
I haven't actually posted a name on here haha 😂 I guess you guys can call me Blue, cause that's my favorite color 💙
❝How long do you think it will take to design the language? There are so many words, or rather things that need to have words.❝
Being a bit nitpicky here, I'm the one who thinks of the polls and writes them out. So of course it can't be helped that some things can't be voted on. 🧠
Other than that, some words I will choose to be in the language, but for the majority you guys have control over the project. We post, you vote.
I do have a plan for creating word posts/polls (sort of?). I'll let you guys know pretty soon when we get there. A lot of the plans I have are very open to change, depending on the results of the polls.
❝Do you anticipate this being a project that lasts months or years, or do you have a secret cheat code I haven't thought of?❝
No, I don't have cheat code. 😆 Being a bit new to conlanging, I actually don't know how long this will take. With 1-2 polls every day, this might take about 6 months to a year to make a usable conlang (this is a guesstimate!). Maybe even shorter?
From there, it can be further expounded upon by the community. If enough people are interested, I might use other services like Reddit, Youtube/Rumble videos, Memrise, etc to continue this project later on.
If people from different/foreign language backgrounds like this idea, we could make a pictures-only Memrise course and a Discord to communicate with each other? Just throwing things out there. 🤔
Language evolves over time, and I want to emulate that with these styles of posting.
❝will the conlang feature loan words from other languages?❝
❝How about exceptions to grammar rules?❝
Grammar rules will be decided upon by polls later on. 📜🖊️
❝Will we be creating a new alphabet?❝
Not necessarily an alphabet, but yes. The choice of "using an existing system" vs "creating our own system" will not be voted upon. I prefer we have our own writing system-- in my opinion it makes it feel more like its our own thing, yknow?
However, that doesn't disallow it from looking similar to existing writing systems. For typing on computer, alphabets can be done with a custom downloadable font file. Or if it is an abugida, logographic, featural etc., we can use English letters while typing to Anglicize the writing, and then use our own writing system in drawings/pictures. It sounds complicated right now, but that's because lots is open to change while this project is just starting.
I hope I've answered all of your questions!! It's awesome to see feedback and excitement about this too, makes me so happy! 🥰
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Furigana (振（ふ）り仮名（がな）, Japanese pronunciation: [ɸɯɾigaꜜna] or [ɸɯɾigana]) is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller kana (syllabic characters) printed either above or next to kanji (logographic characters) or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also known as yomigana (読み仮名) and rubi (ルビ, [ɾɯꜜbi]) in Japanese. In modern Japanese, it is usually used to gloss rare kanji, to clarify rare, nonstandard or ambiguous kanji readings, or in children's or learners' materials. Before the post-World War II script reforms, it was more widespread.[1]
Furigana may be added by character, in which case the furigana character(s) that correspond to a kanji are centered over that kanji; or by word or phrase, in which case the entire furigana text is centered over several kanji characters, even if the kanji do not represent equal shares of the kana needed to write them. The latter method is more common, especially since some words in Japanese have unique pronunciations (jukujikun) that are not related to readings of any of the characters the word is written with.
Furigana fonts are generally sized so that two kana characters fit naturally over one kanji; when more kana are required, this is resolved either by adjusting the furigana by using a condensed font (narrowing the kana), or by adjusting the kanji by intercharacter spacing (adding spaces around the kanji). In case an isolated kanji character has a long reading—for example 〜に携わる (where 携 reads たずさ, tazusa)—the furigana may instead spill over into the space next to the neighboring kana characters, without condensing or changing spacing. Three-kana readings are not uncommon, particularly due to yōon with a long vowel, such as ryō (りょう); five kana are required for kokorozashi (志、こころざし) and six for uketamawaru (承る、うけたまわる), the longest of any character in the Joyo kanji. Very long readings also occur for certain kanji or symbols which have a gairaigo (loan word) reading; the word "centimeter" is generally written as "cm" (with two half-width characters, so occupying one space) and has the seven-kana reading センチメートル (senchimētoru) (it can also be written as the kanji 糎, though this is very rare); another common example is "%" (the percent sign), which has the five kana reading パーセント (pāsento). These cause severe spacing problems due to length and these words being used as units (hence closely associated with the preceding figure).
When it is necessary to distinguish between native Japanese kun'yomi pronunciations and Chinese-derived on'yomi pronunciations, for example in kanji dictionaries, the kun'yomi pronunciations are written in hiragana, and the on'yomi pronunciations are written in katakana. However, this distinction is really only important in dictionaries and other reference works. In ordinary prose, the script chosen will usually be hiragana. The one general exception to this is modern Chinese place names, personal names, and (occasionally) food names—these will often be written with kanji, and katakana used for the furigana; in more casual writing these are simply written in katakana, as borrowed words. Occasionally this style is also used for loanwords from other languages (especially English). For example, the kanji 一角獣 (literally "one horn beast") might be glossed with katakana ユニコーン, yunikōn, to show the pronunciation of the loanword "unicorn", which is unrelated to the normal reading of the kanji. Generally, though, such loanwords are just written in straight katakana.
The distinction between regular kana and the smaller character forms (yōon and sokuon), which are used in regular orthography to mark such things as gemination and palatalization, is often not made in furigana: for example, the usual hiragana spelling of the word 却下 (kyakka) is きゃっか, but in furigana it might be written きやつか. This was especially common in old-fashioned movable type printing when smaller fonts were not available. Nowadays, with computer-based printing systems, this occurs less frequently.
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more in my Silmaril Saga of Scholomance
The first problem is the people on horses pointing swords at them.
The second problem is that the language they speak is totally unfamiliar.
And the soldier-cosplayers don't speak English. Or Swahili, or Spanish, or any other language Elrond speaks.
(The third problem is that Elros has now picked up how to say "I'm sorry, we're very lost. Do you have a phone to call our parents?" in half a dozen languages. He hopes the Scholomance doesn't give him spells in all of them - though at least Elrond will be there to help him out.)
It's still very clear that the people with swords are suspicious of Elros and Elrond.
They initially gesture for the twins to dump their bags right there on the muddy path.
Elros mimes losing things in the grass, and then gestures at the castle. He gestures dumping the bags.
There's a bit of conversation among the people with swords, but they eventually nod, and agree that the twins can empty the bags at the castle.
It's not as good as getting to actually keep their possessions, but it gives them a chance of recovering the things they'll desperately need to survive.
(Although Elrond has never heard of an induction happening late. They might not get the Scholomance at all, just living with the Feanorians for four more years, hoping that they aren't such alluring bait for mals that Caranthir refuses to let them share a house with his son.)
(And it won't even help if their mother sends the Silmaril, in a house that's very well warded but far from the Void. They'll have the mana they earn, and as much protection as the Feanorians wish to give them. No more.)
Elrond and Elros continue up the hill, surrounded by strangers on horses pointing swords at them.
Elrond tries to be polite, and introduce himself. Even Amras had looked at Elrond less as dead weight when he started calling him by name, rather than just "one of Elwing's brats".
"Elrond." He taps his chest.
The nearest soldier laughs, but the leader looks tense.
Elrond hopes his name just sounds like a swear word in this language, not a threat or insult. He tries again. "Elrond, my name is Elrond. My brother's name is Elros." He taps Elros's chest, then points at the one who laughed - though he keeps his finger very firmly in his own personal space, far from the sword at the man's hip. "What's your name?"
"Cirmacin." And then the man shook his head and said a long sentence containing Elrond and Elros's names, and a sideways gesture that Elrond couldn't interpret but was unsettlingly near to the height of his neck.
If introducing himself was already leading to death threats, Elrond ought to keep quiet.
That just gave him more time to worry though. He tried sending messages to Elros through their rings, but then he stumbled and lost track of the dots and dashes.
Besides, there was no real way to plan, not until they knew why these people were so offended by them.
Elros's message of "Amish but older and swords" was one guess as to what was happening, but incomplete. Elrond had just replied "ears", as the idea of a cult eschewing all modern technology except plastic surgery was even stranger.
The walk to the castle was only a mile, but it took far too long. Especially as neither twin had eaten breakfast or drank water that morning.
Elrond tried etymologies to pass the time. Cirmacin didn't speak Latin, but maybe his name was in it? Or Greek?
He nearly fell over when he realized it. This man with a sword was named in the conlang that Feanor invented - named "sharp edge", even!
Had the Feanorians been teaching everyone except the twins their father's secret language? Including a band of historical reenactors with bad tempers? It made no sense!
Still, Elrond wanted his twin to know. "Name is Feanor's conlang."
Both Elrond and Elros spoke it, but Elros had studiously avoided the habit of guessing a word's root language. The number of loanwords in English made it too great a risk.
Elrond was not expecting his brother to act on the information, they just tried not to keep secrets, and two heads were better than one to figure out what was going on.
Elrond was certainly not expecting Elros to immediately ask, "I still intend to go to the castle, but can anyone understand me?" in the language the two of them had been told for years was as great a secret as the Silmaril itself.
Nor was he expecting the leader of the soldiers to draw his sword and command a halt in the same language.
"How long were you planning to keep the naive act up, little spies?"
#silm#silmaril saga of scholomance#kidnap dads#my fic#my writing#silmarillion#spoiler: the gesture at Elrond's neck height is not a threat the behead him#it's a reference to the height of the Elrond that Cirmacin knows already
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Ok, I have The Itch™ to create some English Words That Never Existed Despite Sounding English for my campaign, and I've had Tumblr eat this post three times, so we are speedrunning it.
First, you'll need equipment:
A Linguistic History of English, Volume I: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic by Don Ringe.
A Linguistic History of English, Volume II: The Development of Old English by Don Ringe and Ann Taylor.
A Source of Proto-Indo-European roots or words. I use Wiktionary bc I'm a scrub.
If you don't have the money or library access to get either, both volumes of Don Ringe's Linguistic History of English are available on LibGen.
Great. Now we need to cover: What the fuck is Proto-Indo-European?, What the fuck is Indo-European ablaut?, What the fuck are these damn numbered 'h's?, how the fuck do you pronounce a 'ǵ'?
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed protolanguage from which a shit load of languages spoken all across Eurasia (before Colonialism proper) and was likely spoken six-thousand years ago on the steppe north of the Caucasaus, between modern Ukraine and Kazakhstan. It spread so far so fast that we have loanwords from Tocharian in Old Chinese.
How many languages? here's an incomplete cladogram:
How far, how fast?
That far, that fast.
Next: Indo-European Ablaut. PIE had a system of vowel gradation that it would use to decline nouns into other cases, throw verbs into other tense or mood. The fundamental vowel of PIE is short "e", which can ablaut to nothing or to "o". It can also be lengthened.
The typical ablaut for PIE is e-Ø-o. However, we often find 'a', 'ā', 'o' ans 'ṓ'. where we don't expect.
That's where Laryngeal Theory comes in! because of the screwy vowels, certain vowels popping in and out of existence, and miscellaneous unexpected consonant changes, linguists created a model that posits three laryngeal phonemes in PIE: h₁, h₂, and h₃. Their exact pronunciation is impossible to reconstruct, but we do know that they existed and the broad place of articulation due to vowel coloring effects. The first of the laryngeals is h₁, which appeared to be neutral, causing no vowel shifts when in contact with /e/, and only lengthens the vowel when following him; this one was very likely to just be "plain" ol' /h/. The next laryngeal, h₂, is decidedly not neutral and colors every /e/ to /a/ and /ē/ to /ā/; the pronunciation for this one could be the uvular fricative /χ/, or the pharyngeal fricatives /ħ/ or /ʕ/. Because of it's o-coloring effects, h₃ is often assumed to be labial; good candidates for the pronunciation on the ground , likely voiced labialized velar fricative [ɣʷ], with a syllabic allophone [ɵ], i.e. a close-mid central rounded vowel.Kümmel instead suggests [ʁ]. In cases where the exact nature of the phoneme cannot be determined, 'H' is used to denote the presence of an indeterminant laryngeal (seen a lot between "o"s, IIRC the PIE genitive plural ending is *-oHom, because we have two valid reconstructions from different lines, one as *-oh₁om, the other as *-oh₃om; since h₁ doesn't affect vowel quality and h₃ is o-coloring and is between two "o"s, either have the same effect in this position).
Laryngeals are cool and PIE's daughters do cool things with them!
The last thing we need to cover to get caught up enough to jump into just doin' some wordin' is explaining what the fuck is up with PIE's consonants.
See, PIE has three series of obstruent consonants (sometimes called "plosive" or "stop" consonants---all three names refer to the manner of articulation: the tongue or lips completely occlude the oral cavity, preventing air from the lungs from escaping, allowing pressure to build before release), termed voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated. And that seems really straight forward! You have your [ p, t, k ], your [ b, d, g ] and your [ bʰ, dʰ, gʰ ] which is the same as the prior set but with a little puff of air after/during articulation!
Except.
That's wrong.
In two big ways.
The first way is that that's not all the obstruents!
PIE has a series of three "dorsal" consonants, of uncertain place of articulation. Traditionally, the dorsals consist of palatal, velar, and labiovelar consonants in each of the three consonant series: [ ḱ́, k, kʷ ], [ ǵ, g, ǵʷ ], and [ ǵʰ, gʰ, ǵʷʰ]. It's worse than that, though! See, we posited the existence of the palatal series because of the Centum-Satem Isogloss, where having these three sorts of "dorsal" consonants explained this split: "centum" languages merged the "palatal" and "plain" series, leaving the labiovelars distinct, whereas the "satem" languages merged the "plain" and labiovelar series together, leaving the "palatals" distinct, which were then assibilated (made into sibilant fricatives like /s/ or /ʃ/ or sibilant affricates like /ts/ or /tʃ/). We figured the palatal series had to be, well, palatal---because we already have a lot of living languages that take velar consonants to sibilant fricatives/affricates when palatized (Like English and nearly every Romance language).
But it's wrong!
Like, much ink has been spilled over their actual realizations, but the consensus is that the palatal series weren't palatal. Not even palatized.
What they were pronounced as isn't settled. One that I particularly like is that the "palatal" series were plain velar stops, the "plain" velars were actually uvular, and the labiovelars could have been either, giving us the dorsal series: [ k, q, kʷ/qʷ ], [ g, G, gʷ/Gʷ ], [ gʰ, Gʰ, gʷʰ/Gʷʰ]. This isn't agreed upon, but if h₃ is the labialized uvular fricative /χʷ/, then it would be weird to not have any uvulars anywhere else.
But this isn't widely accepted, and since all my sources stick to the traditional orthography, so shall I.
The second way the PIE consonant series is wrong is that there's good evidence that the voiceless, voiced, voiced aspirate labels are wildly incorrect. One big thing is that while /bʰ/ is common, /b/ is vanishingly rare. Which is weird! usually if you lose a labial, it's /p/, and if you lose a voiced obstruent in general, it's /g/. Others get into more technical reasons that I don't quite get.
One popular reconstruction re-labels the series, voiceless remains voiceless, but voiced aspirate is relabels as (plain) voiced, and voiced as voiced glottalized. This has the really neat (for our purposes) effect of making Grimms law make more sense, as the "plain" voiced and voiceless stops become their respective fricatives, while the glottalized consonants become voiceless stops.
Unfortunately this isn't widely accepted/used, and since all my sources will be using the traditional orthography, so will I. But keep it in mind!
And that's everything, I think? Next post we'll think of what kind of words we want to coin, what roots we want to work with, and what suffixes we will append to them before, and go through our first round of sound changes!
See you then!
#linguistics#PIE#proto indo european#conlanging#conlang#infodump#surprise cladogram#damn#prototoindoeauropeans sure got around#laryngeals are for real cool
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yuu is no daijobu :’)
looks at god. why has thou cursed me with these brainworms. is this becoming a Thing.
also known as the WORLDBUILDING of language-barrier-au I guess. oof. here we go!!!
.
english DOES exist in canon? like its clearly slapped on the dorm symbols + all names/unique mahou magics are romanized (reverse-romanized? idk).
plus all the original disney movies are in english
SO THAT MEANS
English is basically the (super) dead language of this TWST au? like latin or ancient greek basically??
yeah sounds legit lets do that, also explains the loanwords! very cool. its like uhhhhh harry potter spells.
(would lilia speak english? how old is he 😔)
crowley knows the most english but, like, in comparison to everyone else. (so he doesn’t speak english, rip yuu)
yuu is actually their last name, because they said how about we don’t butcher it today. also, it makes more sense to have an european first name if they’re an english speaker
first name pending bc im lazy.
How does Yuu survive classes? they dont lol
Grim is already in charge of all the magic classes but now he gets to do everything else too lmao rip. anything written??? goodbye
On the other hand yuu DOES manage to follow along in.... Mathematics and Alchemy! All very real-world subjects! They kind of do OK in Potions (+ Grim does not have opposable thumbs).
They really enjoy biology though because, like, new species? magic?? howmst. also still hates PE. nobody likes PE.
mostly because everyone in NRC is ABSURDLY fit???? Yuu CANNOT keep up. looks at jack. what the fuck
flying is cool though.........
If they take any electives, they’d probably do well in all of them. (except maybe poisonmaking? monkey see monkey do 😔)
anyways. yuu simply does Not See Humanities. Trein hates them, Ace wants 2 be them.
Yuu’s got a notebook with them at ALL TIMES. there’s a pictionary section and a word bank section. they’ve never been better at art
regularly asks Deuce for help with the word bank (ily deuce keep being awesome). Yuu can’t read, so they force other people to write for them. slap on the translation/pronunciation under it, and its good 2 go!!
the first word they asked Deuce to write was japanese for ‘cauldron’ :)
“ogama-san!” “stop calling me that”
‘beast taming’ abilities: i do Not Know Yet
yuu can’t give them orders like in canon, sooooo? maybe it’ll be like a support magic that pops up in combat situations? still thinking about it lol
possibility: Yuu doesn’t have internal magic BUT they can harness atmospheric magic (like secondhand smoke?? drain runoff?). But it needs to build up first, so they can’t use it whenever like everyone else. Only useable in situations like:
- Ghosts (are made of magic?)
- Overblot fights (Lots of magic, duh)
- just fights (after enough magic has been used)
- magishift (after enough magic has been used)
either way their magic could be a support-style menu?? incorporate rhythm game mechanics somewhere? who knows i’m just blabbing
If Yuu doesn’t have magic, then it could be sort of a hand-signal arrangement? Yuu signals, Grim sits on their shoulder as a megaphone (that also shoots fire?).
a combo of BOTH????? cries
misc. My Yuu facts
Yuu is dirt poor lol,, they left all their allowance back home.... would have swindled kalim if he was a jerk
Would kill a man if kalim or deuce asked them to.
shorter than riddle, but will kill the first person who points it out. its Ace
Crowley could only find uniforms that were two sizes too large. constantly shuffling up sleeves.
Crowley also gave them a phone without voice recognition. Yuu says i crave the void
Ambiguously of asian descent until i figure out specifics lol. Probably an immigrant kid?
like Floyd, enjoys fun nicknames. by fun i mean puns and bad references.
are they high, tired, or stressed?? nobody knows
still doesnt understand what magishift is. or what happened in chapter 2.
worldbuilding hard... very sad
#twst oc#twst#twst wonderland#twst headcanons#twst language barrier au#serious schnozzle#back to our regularly scheduled memes#ace trappola#brain goes brr#dire crowley#floyd leech#twst yuu#kalim#deuace#grim#disney twisted#leona#deuce spade#jack howl#twisted wonderland#riddle rosehearts#kalim al asim#heartslabyul#octavinelle
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Limits of Uniformity
The notion of a “uniform proto-language” does need some sanity checks regardless. Namely, how uniform can any language variety be even in principle? What is the actual uniformitarian fall-back point on this? (Reminder: the uniformitarian principle is a key guideline of all investigation of prehistory, which states that we can only assume “kinds of” prehistorical states whose existence is known to us today too.)
Areal uniformity is the one type that we can write in by definition, once we recognize “a proto-language” to be quite possibly just one among several areal variants (as discussed in the previous post).
Some languages, usually small ones with some hundreds of speakers in just a handful of towns or clans can be also areally uniform altogether, but this is probably not the sociological setup to assume for proto-languages that have later expanded into families of hundreds of thousands of speakers. Latin is again the one notable exception, not the rule. Maybe a few more could be assumed for families that have expanded “far but not wide”, e.g. Proto-Oceanic or some of its daughter proto-languages; Proto-Inuit perhaps.
Sociolectal uniformity is not an especially tough nut either. This can exist in languages, but does not at all have to, and only seems to come about in various hierarchically stratified societies. Latin very likely had variation of this kind, and e.g. Proto-Indo-Aryan almost certainly did, too. “Genderlectal” differences could be another axis, but this is again not at all required to assume and I’m not aware of any cases where this would be clearly reconstructible. (I would have a hypothesis to pitch on this re: the fairly odd relative terminology of Proto-Uralic, but more on that at some later time.) So this is, while perhaps an underappreciated possibility, probably not a major problem in proposing a uniform proto-language.
Phonologically uniform varieties certainly exist. Phonology is fully structural: anyone’s idiolect either has or does not have any particular phonemic contrast. Variation across a language can be also usually described by some smallish enough number of these that it’s just about mathematically guaranteed that there will be multiple people who share the exact same phonological system. E.g. 10 binary phonological isoglosses only allow for a maximum of 1024 different phonological systems (in practice variants also are not distributed entirely randomly). Hence it’s always valid to aim for reconstructing an unvariable proto-state from variable daughter systems. In practice this is the strongest method of linguistic reconstruction also due to the additional fact that regular sound changes at least exist (while no such thing does in morphology, semantics etc.)
Morphological and syntactic (”grammatical”) uniformity seems similarly existent at first, but beyond “core grammar” these actually start leaving a lot of corner cases. Irregular formations and idiomatic constructions exist, and rarer ones probably aren’t known across an entire speaker community. Worse, it’s possible for different speakers to analyze the exact same construction as either fossilized or incipiently or residually productive, or indeed productive in different ways. Are e.g. happy and hapless two separate words, or two derivatives of a common root lexeme √hap-? Is /wʊdəv/ a single word, a word with a clitic would’ve, two words would have — or even would of? We do not have single unique answers to these even today. Some reconstruction of (some sub-variety of) Modern English by future linguists would not need to be able to do so either.
So we have to allow for some grammatical variation in any language variety. All variation is only finitely old here as well, but the point where all attested grammatical variation converges to a single form could be far deeper back in history than phonological uniformity. Trying to strive for uniformity would be somewhat analogous to trying to reconstruct a last common ancestor form of hands and feet (some undifferentiated sea worm body segments, 500M+ years ago) instead of a common ancestor population of modern humans (300K years ago, with hands certainly distinct from feet). In a more explicitly linguistic example, I have in a recent paper argued that variation in modern Finnish in the morphology of the verb ‘to stand’ (two competing stems seis- versus seis-o-) is in part inherited all the way from Proto-Uralic already.
Lexical uniformity is a simple case again, but now in the other direction. This simply does not exist as soon as we look at more than one person’s idiolect. Every adult speaker knows tens of thousands of lexemes, and some of these are used so rarely that there is pretty much no chance that any two speakers end up having the exact same lexicon, let alone the exact same semantics for each word.
Some weaker sense of “core lexical uniformity” could exist, but this depends on how exactly we define “core lexicon”, and is probably not a good idea anyway. Synonymy could be again stable for thousands of years and cannot be usefully reconstructed away; while if we look at divergences only, in some small list of words, we will probably end up at a point when “a” proto-language has already split into dialects that already clearly differ in their distribution, phonology, grammar and overall lexicon. Even core lexicon innovations will happily spread between lineages. The French loanwords animal, fruit, mountain and person are now universally known across English but arrived into the language in the Middle English period, clearly into multiple dialects in parallel. (This has already been taken into account in current lexicostatistic methodology in the form of a rule that all known loanwords should be discarded from analysis, though I am afraid this is probably too weak of a corrective move.)
Lastly lexical phonology might be the most challenging issue. By this I mean what phonological form do individual words have, even if they’re identical etymologically, morphologically etc. Examples from historically recorded languages show that these follow the exact same principles as grammatical or lexical variation. Forms like aks versus ask can coexist for millennia, and hence it’s not a good idea to try to reconstruct them all away. They probably do go back to some more or less regular sound change ultimately… but the way they end up in variation is mainly due to dialect mixing or analogical levelling. If some variants like these later on separate off into different varieties (ok, ask / aks have been at least partly sociolectally separate in English all along — maybe a better example would be something like dreamed / dreamt) they might give off the impression that there has been some phonological change to reconstruct as happening after the proto-language. Really this phenomenon seems to allow taking off quite a bit of load from the bin of “irregular sound change”.
There is also one telling sign for these: these never involve variation in the makeup of the overall phonology. People who use the form ask will still call the tool an axe, while people who use the form aks will still wear a mask (or at least will not turn this into ˣmaks). But this is only a hint, and it would be still hard to really rule out other hypotheses like a Proto-English **aksk that ends up being simplified in two different ways in different dialects / sociolects. And if we were to indeed assume the existence of a variety that had an early but regular metathesis rule — how far back would we put it, how many words would we assume to be later innovations or loans from a non-metathesis variety, and for that matter, could we even work out the direction of the metathesis without English-external evidence?
(I don’t even know what the real answer is. Sure enough it’s from West Germanic *aiskōn- and so ask initially appears to be more archaic, but e.g. the similar wasp ~ waps is instead from PG *wapsō. Do we require two metatheses in different directions, or one metathesis plus some hypercorrections against it, or one metathesis followed by one back-metathesis…?)
This should primarily serve as a warning against going into too small details when reconstructing the general scaffolding of historical phonology. My own rule of thumb remains that one example is no example, two examples are a pattern, three examples are required to call something an actual sound law.
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In any case we can see there will be still quite a bit of variation that should be allowed to perhaps have occurred in a “uniform proto-language”. The target is some realistic amount of grammatical and lexical coherence plus a uniform phonological system; and it may not even be too much of a problem if we still end up with multiple variant forms of some individual words. Hypotheses for explaining any remaining variation are always worth exploring, but we don’t need to nail all of them down in one specific way.
#historical linguistics#linguistic reconstruction#uniformitarian principle#variation#linguistics#methodology
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not a request, just a question! im not native english so in the pronouns sets, whens the right time to use the third and fourth ones? sometimes theyre the same word but sometimes theyre different and it confuses me a bit ;;; thank you!
good question, anon!! i would also like to know
the "third and fourth ones" are called the possessive determiner and the possessive pronoun!!
in a standard set,those would be:
they/them/their/theirs/themself
she/her/her/hers/herself
he/him/his/his/himself
let's look at possessive determiners first. these would be their, her and his.
the purpose of possessive determiners is to show who owns something!!
you use these when you want to say:
♡that's their hat.
♡her hair is cool.
♡his jacket has a lot of badges.
here are some examples of how to use the possessive determiners in some common neopronoun sets!!
♡that's xer hat. (xe/xem/xer/xers/xemself)
♡faer hair is cool. (fae/fae/faer/faers/faerself)
♡zir jacket has a lot of badges. (ze/zim/zir/zirs/zimself)
now let's look at possessive pronouns. these also show who owns something!! the difference is that possessive determiners come before a noun, and possessive pronouns replace a noun.
you use possessive pronouns when you want to say:
♡that plant is theirs. (or just "that's theirs")
♡this dog is hers. (or just "this is hers")
♡is that sandwich his? (or just "is that his?")
here are some examples of how to use the possessive pronouns in some common neopronoun sets!!
♡that plant is xers
♡that dog is faers
♡is that sandwich zirs?
that's the necessary basics!!
you may be wondering why we need both possessive determiners and possessive pronouns if they basically have the same job. as far as i know, the answer is “because english is hard and evil”.*
here's what happens when we replace the possessive pronouns in these sentences with possessive determiners:
♡that plant is their. (grammatically incorrect)
♡that dog is her. (changes the entire meaning of the sentence)
♡is that sandwich his? (exactly the same)
this is because in the pronoun set they/them/their/theirs/themself, none of the pronouns repeat. that's why the sentence becomes incorrect.
for she/her/her/hers/herself, the object pronoun and the possessive determiner are the same. that's why the meaning of the sentence changes. the sentence is grammatically correct, but not saying that you want it to say.
for he/him/his/his/himself, the possessive pronoun and the possessive determiner are the same, so you don't have to worry about mixing them up!!!!! yay!!!!!!
not all neopronoun sets are exactly the same.
some neopronoun sets are like they/them/their/theirs/themself where none of the pronouns repeat. an example would be thou/thee/thy/thyself.**
some neopronoun sets are more like she/her/her/hers/herself, where the object pronoun and the possessive determiner are the same. an example of this would be pi/pika/pika/pikas/piself.
some neopronoun sets are like he/him/his/his/himself, where the possessive pronoun and the possessive determiner are the same. an example of this would be puppy/puppy/pups/pups/pupself.
*learn mandarin instead!! the grammar is way easier!! people get put off by the tones and having to memorise characters, but it’s a lot easier to learn than it seems!! especially since we live in the digital age so learning how to handwrite isn’t as important anymore!! you can just type in the pinyin and select the correct option!! the hardest part about mandarin in my opinion is the lack of similarity to english. for example, i can get the basic meaning of many dutch sentences just based on how the words sound similar to english ones. with mandarin you’re pretty much on your own because a) you can’t read and b) there just aren’t that many english loanwords in mandarin.
**except they/them is plural n most neopronouns are singular. but some neopronouns are plural???????? the moral of the story is asking “how do i use this one specific neopronoun set” is a looooooooot easier for us to answer than if you ask “how do i use neopronouns”. please. if you only take one thing away from this post, let it be that. /nm
if this post is entirely wrong i take full responsibility!!!!!!!!!!!! mod nya owns the only braincell on this blog.
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[SONG TRANSLATION]
G4L by Giga
KANJI
あれが正解なんて
誰の成れの果て？(なんだっての悶々々)
答えも欲しいのも一個てこれだけ
悩んだってしょうがないじゃんね
あれは夢だったって思うことにしたって（つらw）
でも全然思えないんだけど
助けてよフォロワー！
抗うだけ
若さに負け
Next,Next LuckyLucky & Lucky!
アーリーオー 割り切れたらさ
オーリーオー 楽なのにとか
aah… Hmm…
もうヤダ！
なんという新世界か！
あなた以外は
あなた以外はいらない
はらないでよバリア
あるはずなの何か
あったならばHappy! jumpin' YEAH!
あなたのその手とあたしのこの手を
つないだらもう二度と離さないわ
あなたのその手があたしのこの手を
掴んだら……以後お見知りおきを！MyLove♡
これで終わりなんて
アガれないままなんて（鳴いちゃってポンポンポン）
どうにかなっちゃえって願って願って
ねえ、朝帰りしたりしちゃわん？どう？
なあもう我慢できん！pain×2 痛いってばeveryday
ま、ゆーていけるけどなブルベ夏なんで関係ないな^_^
誰よりもネコ 節操ない！も結構
あーしはあーしだ 見といてよready
もう今日で終わらせたいなって
リスタートできたらって
でも無理よ もう〜！
What's on your mind?
アーリーオー 割り切れたらさ
オーリーオー 楽なのにとか
aah… Hmm…
もうヤダ！
なんという新世界か！
あなた以外は
あなた以外はいらない
はらないでよバリア
あるはずなの何か
あったならばHappy! jumpin' YEAH!
あなたのその手とあたしのこの手を
つないだらもう二度と離さないわ
あなたのその手があたしのこの手を
掴んだら……以後お見知りおきを！MyLove♡
ROMAJI
are ga seikai nante
dare no nare no hate? (nandatte no mon-mon-mon)
kotae mo hoshii no mo ikko-te kore dake
nayandatte shou ga nai jan ne
are wa yume dattatte omou koto ni shitatte (tsura)
demo zenzen omoenain dakedo
tasukete yo FOLLOWER
aragau dake
wakasa ni make
NEXT NEXT LUCKY LUCKY LUCKY
aariioo wari-kiretara sa
ooriioo raku na no ni to ka
aah… Hmm…
mou yada!
nan to iu shin sekai ka
anata igai wa
anata igai wa iranai
haranaide yo BARRIER
aru hazu na no nani ka
atta naraba HAPPY JUMPIN YEAH
anata no sono te to atashi no kono te wo
tsunaidara mou nido to hanasanai wa
anata no sono te ga atashi no kono te wo
tsukandara igo o-mishirioki wo MY LOVE
kore de owari nante
agarenai mama nante (naichatte pon-pon-pon)
dou ni ka nacchaette negatte negatte
nee asa-gaeri shitari shicha wan? dou?
naa mou gaman dekin PAIN PAIN itaitteba EVERYDAY
ma yuuteikeru kedo na burube natsu nante kankei nai na
dare yori mo neko sessou nai mo kekkou
aashi wa aashi da mitoite yo READY
mou kyou de owarasetai natte
RESTART dekitaratte
demo muri yo mou
WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND
aariioo wari-kiretara sa
ooriioo raku na no ni to ka
aah… Hmm…
mou yada!
nan to iu shin sekai ka
anata igai wa
anata igai wa iranai
haranaide yo BARRIER
aru hazu na no nani ka
atta naraba HAPPY JUMPIN YEAH
anata no sono te to atashi no kono te wo
tsunaidara mou nido to hanasanai wa
anata no sono te ga atashi no kono te wo
tsukandara igo o-mishirioki wo MY LOVE
ENGLISH
notes:
> "blue-summer type" is one of four personality/aesthetic types popular among "gyarus", or fashion-forward young girls and women who you might often see dressed in bright colors on the streets of harajuku. the title of the song, g4l, can be read as "gal", the root english word of the japanese loanword "gyaru". gyarus stereotypically have a distinctive, cheery, emphatic pattern of speech that is used throughout this song.
> by "f, lol" i meant "press f to pay respects, lol". i thought the best way to convey the general tone in this song might be to use online slang. i was going to go the extra mile and use "u" "ur" etc, but that seemed sloppy, so i didn't
You’re telling me that’s supposed to be right?
And who exactly decided that? (whining ‘why, why, why’)
I want answers, but I only get this tiny little bit-
C’mon, you can’t blame me for complaining
I’ve decided to brush all that off as a dream (F, lol)
But I can’t get myself to forget it?
Save me, followers!
Everything I do is just to be contrary,
losing myself in the rush of youth
Next, next, lucky lucky & lucky!
(Oh whoa) “If I just settled for what I have
(Oh whoa) it would have been easier,” or shit like that-
Aah. . . hmm. . .
I’m sick of it!
What even is this new world!
I don’t need anything or anyone
I don’t need anything or anyone, except you
Don’t block my way-
If the thing that’s supposed to be there is there,
then I’ll be happy! Jumpin’ yeah!
If we can just reach out to each other,
I won’t ever let you go again
now that I’m holding your hand,
I’ll be in your care from now on, my love
You’re saying it just ends like this?
But it hasn’t even gotten exciting yet! (whining and flailing like a kid)
Wishing and hoping for it all to please, pleeeease work out!
Hey, why don’t we stay out drinking all night? Whaddya say?
Ugh, i can’t take it anymore! The pain, pain damn hurts every day
-well, I’ll say what I say, but it’s totally not just because I’m a blue-summer type girl, okay? ^_^
Yeah, I’m a huge hypocrite- “You have no shame!” you say? Then fine!
I‘m jus’ me, so mark my words, ready?
I say “Mm, I wanna finish this by today”
or “I wish I could restart it all”
But that’s impossible, c’mon!
What’s on your mind?
(Oh whoa) “If I just settled for what I have
(Oh whoa) it would have been easier,” or shit like that-
Aah. . . hmm. . .
I’m sick of it!
What even is this new world!
I don’t need anything or anyone
I don’t need anything or anyone, except you
Don’t block my way-
If the thing that’s supposed to be there is there,
then I’ll be happy! Jumpin’ yeah!
If we can just reach out to each other,
I won’t ever let you go again
now that I’m holding your hand,
I’ll be in your care from now on, my love
#g4l#giga#gigap#ギガｐ#ギガ#jpop#jrock#artiswitch#アーティスウィッチ#song translation#translation#english translation#japanese translation
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How the Straw Hats Talk
I got a request from anonymous asker about the differences in dialogue styles in Japanese between the Strawhats, which is something I’ve been thinking about for awhile, so I decided to make it its own big post!
Luffy: All casual all the time. This boy has never used a polite form in his fucking life without being actively coerced. He also has a strong tendency towards informal honorifics for people he doesn’t know- I’ve mentioned ossan for ‘mister’ or ‘old guy’ before, but like he also calls Kureha obaachan (grandma). He also tosses a whole lot of casual nicknames around, but I’m sure that’s something that comes through in English as well.
Zoro: Basically the same as Luffy in terms of formality (by which I mean: none) but more aggressive (he has a lot more of a tendency to use words like teme and kisama, for instance, and more of a tendency to use masculine sentence-enders) and he often uses more complicated words than Luffy does. Also, less a speech pattern thing, but almost all of his attack names are food puns and that’s wonderful.
Nami: Speaks very casually, and uses pretty neutral speech in terms of gendering- she uses 私/watashi for ‘I’, which is a very standard pronoun, as opposed to the more feminine あたし/atashi, which is what Nojiko, for example, uses. She also swears a lot. The only honorific she uses is for a crewmate is for Sanji- she calls him Sanji-kun, but only when she’s trying to get him to do something.
Usopp: Speaks similarly to Luffy, but goes a little more over the top with it sometimes in terms of, like, how he refers to himself- he sometimes refers to himself as おれ様/ore-sama, which is like ‘the great and wonderful me,’ particularly when he’s trying to feel brave or hype himself up for something, and often tacks the masculine/emphatic particle ぞ/zo onto his sentences (some of the other guys do this too but it’s most noticeable with him). He also does the same thing Nami does where he calls Sanji ‘Sanji-kun’ when he needs something from him. I want to believe he’s seen her success and is trying, to absolutely no avail, to replicate it.
Sanji: Oh boy. To start with, Sanji’s speech patterns are very different depending on whether he’s talking to women or men, and he especially tends towards overly formal language if he’s trying to make a good first impression on a girl (the best example of this is when he first meets Nami at the Baratie). He’s also one of the only members of the crew who uses honorifics, but he only uses them for women (-san for Nami, -chan for Robin and Vivi). Sometimes he goes really over the top with them- for example when he first meets Nojiko and learns she’s Nami’s sister, he calls her お姉様/onee-sama which is ‘older sister’ but with a very excessively reverent honorific attached. When he’s talking to guys, though, he drops all of that and is extremely casual and rude. He’s also probably the Strawhat who swears the most, with particular fondness for くそ/kuso (shit/shitty).
Chopper: He uses a very similar speech style to the rest of the male Strawhats (generally casual + masculine with ore for ‘I’ and omae for ‘you’) but it comes off as somewhat incongruous due to how baby he is- it would be more expected for him to use ぼく/boku instead, so his speech style comes off as kinda trying to make himself seem older and scarier than he is. Which is very cute.
Robin: Speaks more formally than the rest of the Strawhats, comparatively. She’s the only one who consistently uses あなた/anata to refer to other people, and thus is the only one who has a default ‘respectful’ way of speaking. Also the only member of the crew (besides Vivi) to consistently use honorifics for everyone- I’m pretty sure this translates directly into English, so I’m sure you guys know this one already, but she calls everyone by their jobs+san, so for example Zoro is 剣士さん/kenshi-san, ‘swordsman-san.’ I’m also pretty sure she’s the only permanent crew member who never swears (at least, thus far. I’m almost at Enies Lobby, so we’ll see).
+Vivi: Vivi speaks casually, but doesn’t swear. She also horrifically overuses loanwords while in her Miss Wednesday persona, to come off as even more showy and over the top. She uses honorifics for the whole crew, probably because she’s both younger than all of them and not a full member of the crew. She calls everyone with (first name)-san with two exceptions: she calls Chopper ‘Tony-kun’, because he’s younger than her and technically joins after she does so they’re on more even footing, and she calls Zoro ‘Mister Bushido’ (yes, ‘Mister’ is actually sounded out in the Japanese), which is a holdover from her Baroque Works speech pattern.
#one piece#op#opmeta#japanese#long post#straw hat pirates#straw hat crew#luffy#zoro#nami#sanji#usopp#chopper#robin#vivi
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how would you say a plural amount of letters? like in english you would say “two K’s” (kays) or “three S’s” (esses), how would you write it in spanish and how would you pronounce it?
Just a warning this kind of goes all over the place because of a lot of grammatical minutiae, but the simple answer:
la K / la ka = the letter K(las) dos kas = the two K’s
la S / la ese = the letter S(las) tres eses = the three S’s
You sometimes see it a letter written by itself or as its pronunciation (la K or la ka in singular), but in plural it’s usually its pronunciation (las kas)
So like…
Hay dos kas en “jackknife”. = There are two K’s in “jackknife”.
“Necessity” tiene dos eses. = “Necessity” has two S’s.
Most of the letters will have a kind of -s sound tacked onto their pronounciation and that will get you the plural of that sound.
There are exceptions… the vowels + X
La a [the letter A] => Las aes [the A’s]
La e [the letter E] => Las es / Las ees [the E’s]
La o [the letter O] => Las oes [the O’s]
La u [the letter U] => Las úes [U’s]
La i (latina) [the letter I] => Las íes (latinas) [I’s]La i (griega) [the letter Y] => Las íes (griegas) [Y’s]
La equis [the letter X] => Las equis [X’s]
With U and I, it’s because you’re preserving the U and I sound so they take on an accent mark to fully pronounce it…. basically because when U+E and I+E are put together, they blend, so the accent mark adds a hiatus. With A+E and O+E, the hiatus is already there so you don’t mix the sound.
It’s really just to keep you from saying something like “the oohs” and “the ees” which could be confusing.
Saying “aes” is kind of like “a-es”, and “oes” is like “o-es” because of the hiatus.
And with E you get two options “es” and “ees”… typically I hear las es with a long EH sound for multiple E’s or people putting la letra E just to be very clear.
And X [equis] already ends in S, so you don’t have to add an additional thing and make it “equises” or something. If you see something like “XXX” it’s commonly pronounced as (las) tres equis
Additional note: Q is frequently written as either la q, or la qu or la cu. In plural I think I’ve only seen las qus and las cus.
———————————————————————–
Onto the confusing part - and I can’t stress enough how regional this all can be, so please let me know if I make any mistakes here, native speakers.
This might be a little difficult to explain completely well because I’m not using IPA here. I’ll try and be as clear as possible but just know that I’m using the Spanish pronunciations of things and how they’d write or approximate it.
First, all letters in the alphabet are feminine probably because la letra “letter” is feminine, so there’s that rule first.
Second this is generally how the letters are pronounced or said in Spanish and I need to point out some things because there’s a lot actually here that won’t make sense if I don’t:
A - (a)*
B - (be / be grande)****
C - (ce)CH - (che)**
D - (de)
E - (e)*
F - (efe)
G - (ge)
H - (hache) [although I did learn it as la ache]
I - (i / i latina)*
J - (jota)
K - (ka)
L - (ele)
LL - (elle)
M - (eme)
N - (ene)
Ñ - (eñe)
O - (o)*
P - (pe)
Q - (cu)
R - (ere / erre)***
RR - (erre / erre doble, doble erre)***
S - (ese)
T - (te)
U - (u)*
V - (uve / V corta / V chica)****
W - (doble u / doble uve / uve doble)
X - (equis)
Y - (i / i griega)*
Z - (zeta)
So now the little bits of explanations begin:
* The vowels - All of the vowels [A / E / I / O / U, and Y] are usually written with their pronunciations like I did above. In Spanish, most Spanish speakers know how “A” is pronounced but for the sake of non-native speakers:
A is pronounced like “ah”
E is pronounced like “eh”
I is pronounced like “ee”
O is pronounced like “oh”
U is pronounced like “ooh”
Y is pronounced like “ee”
With i and y it’s common to differentiate them as i latina [I] and i/y griega [Y]… The letter [I] is i latina being “Latin I” because it comes from the Latin alphabet, and because the letter [Y] comes from Greek it’s griega. They are pronounced the same “ee” like a long E song in English.
So say you were spelling out a word like yanqui “yankee / someone from the US” you would spell it Y-A-N-Q-U-I [i griega - a - ene - cu - u - i latina] in a way that tells you that Y and I are different letters.
** - CH. The letter “CH” which is pronounced like che or “chay” in English is not technically a letter in Spanish anymore, but it might show up in some dictionaries as its own section.
*** - R and RR. I’ve seen R written as ere and erre before. And while RR is not its own letter (anymore, but in some places it is considered its own), I’ve seen it as erre or erre doble [double R]. I was taught ere [R] and erre [RR] but I understand why that’s not totally great for everyone depending on your own pronunciation; I personally recommend saying erre [R] and doble erre [RR] if you mean RR because it makes it very clear you’re talking about a double letter.
If you were saying multiple RR’s, you’d most commonly see erres dobles.
**** This one is really its own issue but B and V have similar pronunciations in a lot of things. Just suffice it to say it’s its own issue.
For our purposes, it’s normally pronounced be [”bay”] and uve [”oo-vay”]. Otherwise, you’ll see B as B grande or B larga which mean “big/long B”… and you might see V as V corta or V chica which is “short/small V”
Another common way to differentiate it is to say B de burro “B as in burro [donkey]”, and V de vaca “V as in vaca [cow]”…….. that’s kind of like the equivalent of “B as in boy” and “V as in Victor” in English.
Side Note: It should go without saying but ele is pronounced “el-ay”, and elle is pronounced “ey-yay”… because LL has a strong Y sound.
Side Note 2: Similarly ge is pronounced like “hay”, and jota for “J” is pronounced “ho-ta”
Side Note 3: Ñ or eñe is pronounced “en-yay”
So moving on, just note that the letters are feminine, and normally you’re going to say la and then las for plural.
When doing plural, you usually have to add a -S sound to it. That’s mostly easy for the consonants, minus X so you don’t really have to worry too much.
I typically see the letters sort of spelled out so for example: hacer eses which is literally “to make S’s” is another expression for “to spin around” or “to spin out” is typically written as eses
You might see something like la m but then you might see las emes for “M’s”… I think that might just be for the sake of convenience. But you might also see la ache instead of la h… or la jota instead of la j.
It’s more acceptable when it seems to be a whole different word, kind of like la equis vs la x which I think both make sense.
I typically capitalize it if I’m going to write it as a singular letter because I think that is a little easier to understand when reading, but that is probably just me.
Additional Note: There are some abbreviations where Spanish pronounces them a bit differently; they’re normally treated as loanwords.
These are different from Spanish abbreviations:
FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]In Spanish el FBI is pronounced like el Efe-Be-I sort of how you’d expect
CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]In Spanish this is la CIA which is pronounced la Si-A, rather than pronouncing each letter individually
KO / K.O. [knockout]In Spanish this is normally el KO which is pronounced el ka-o the way you’d pronounce K + O. In some places you’ll hear el knockout with voz inglesa but in some places they use estar KO to mean either “to be unconscious” or “to be dead tired”
OK / okayIn Spanish estar OK or OK/okay sounds just like English “o-kay”, and it’s pretty directly adapted from English
OVNI [el objeto volador no identificado] In Spanish el OVNI or el ovni is the direct translation of “UFO” or “Unidentified Flying Object”. You pronounce it “ov-ni”, rather than pronouncing every single letter
There are other expressions like this. The one I mentioned above “XXX” in English is “triple X” or “X-X-X” but in Spanish it’s tres equis and is a synonym for “pornographic” in some contexts
There’s some variations with Spanish abbreviations.
Some are like when you might see Los EEUU / Los EE.UU in writing, but you’d hear it as Los Estados Unidos “the United States” rather than hearing it all pronounced.
So it really depends on the actual word/abbreviation in question.
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Is Japanese internet slang full of fish? - My washed-up linguistic theory.
A couple of weeks ago I was looking at a glossary of Final Fantasy 14 Japanese internet slang a friend had sent me, and I was struck by an idea: Japanese has a really wide lexicon of fish and fishing related words. Does Japanese internet slang also have more fish related words than English internet slang does? The idea made me laugh, and that was enough to want to try to pursue it.
The Japanese lexicon does, in fact, have a very extensive vocabulary related to fish and fishing. Masayoshi Shibatani (1990) wrote, ‘The vocabulary of a language reflects the cultural and socio-economic concerns of its speakers, and the Japanese lexicon is no exception to this truism.’ He explains that fishing was one of the primary socio-economic activities in traditional Japanese society, and therefore the native Japanese vocabulary has a great number of words and expressions relating to fish. Of course, we have a fairly wide fishing vocabulary in English as well, but Japanese goes into further detail. Shibatani gives examples of 9 different Japanese words for a fish that we would refer to simply as ‘yellowtail’ in all cases in English - in Japanese there are different words for it depending on its size.
Another wonderful piece of evidence of the abundance of fish words in Japanese is a 1940s ‘Glossary of Japanese Fisheries Terms’ that I found on the American National Marine Fisheries Service Scientific Publications Office website. In March 1947, J. A. Krug, Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior and Albert M. Day, Director of the Fish and Wildlife service, published a leaflet titled, ‘Glossary of Japanese Fisheries Terms.’ It is a dictionary of fishing terms and names of fish, including both Japanese to English and English to Japanese translations.
The introduction reads, ‘Fish and fishing play such an important role in Japanese life that an extensive and complicated fisheries vocabulary has evolved. Each of the hundreds of kinds of fish, shellfish, and seaweed has several vernacular names, the wide assortment of prepared seafood adds many more words; and the variety of fishing gear has a large specialized nomenclature.’ Clearly, the vocabulary related to fishing in Japan was so specific that it didn’t do well enough simply to translate it to the closest English word - a specialised glossary was needed so that American fishermen could understand precisely what the Japanese fishermen were referring to. (If you, like me, are quite enamoured by historical, niche glossaries or dictionaries, you can read the Glossary of Japanese Fisheries Terms here.)
With this evidence that Japanese does have more words to do with fish and fishing than English does, I wondered if perhaps the extensive fish-related lexicon in Japanese affected the creation of slang terms, particularly internet slang terms. While there is no definitive corpus or complete dictionary of Japanese internet slang, several fish-related phrases came to mind. For example, 雑魚 zako, literally meaning ‘small fish’ is a commonly used phrase in casual Japanese which means ‘a wimp’ or an ‘unimportant person.’ This is also used in MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, e.g. Final Fantasy 14) lingo to mean ‘low-level NPC (Non Player Character) enemies.’ Of course, we have the word ‘small fry’ in English which has essentially the same meaning of ‘unimportant person’, but we do not use it in the same context in online gaming. (I have been informed that in English we might call these weak enemies ‘trash mob’ or ‘slimes’ - a reference to the slime blob enemies in the game Dragon Quest.) I also recalled that 鯖 saba - ‘mackerel’ is slang for the word ‘server’ - a lovely wordplay on the loanword sābā.
I then asked on twitter if anyone could help me to come up with some more Japanese fish-related internet words. I had a few interesting replies, suggesting 釣り tsuri (fishing) which means ‘trolling’, accompanied with 釣り師 tsurishi (angler) for ‘troll’, and エサ esa (bait) and 釣り針 tsuribari (fishhook) , which both refer to the content used by a troll to entice other users into replying angrily. Although we might also call this practice ‘baiting’ in English, and we of course have the famous term ‘clickbait’ for baiting people into clicking a link, the metaphor is further expanded upon in Japanese internet language. When a troll gets the responses they were hoping for, other net users may say something like ‘大漁だな’ tairyou da na - ‘That’s a big haul.’
I was also told about ウェブ魚拓 webu gyotaku (web fish printing), which is a method of preserving the content of a website in a snapshot, like the service Wayback Machine. Gyotaku is the traditional Japanese practice of dipping a fish in ink to create a print, which could record a fisherman's catch they are particularly proud of, or simply make a nice picture of a fish. (Incidentally, the web address for the website where one can access webu gyotaku is ‘megalodon.jp.')
This is not an incredibly extensive list, but I was pleasantly surprised with the number of responses I received. I also tried to come up with a list of fish-related English internet terms, but all I could think of was ‘phishing’, ‘clickbait’, and ‘catfish.’ None of these are slang as such, but created terms for phenomena that only happen online. (They respectively mean, ‘sending scam emails’, ‘using sensationalised or misleading content to entice users to click on something’, and ‘pretending to be someone else on online dating sites.’) I suppose at a stretch I could actually include ‘the net’ into my list of fishing-related internet vocabulary.
I don’t, however, think that this is enough evidence to suggest that Japanese internet slang does indeed have a larger proportion of fish or fishing-related terms than internet slang in other languages. Furthermore, even if it did, it does not necessarily prove that it is because of the wide fish lexicon that Japanese has in general.
I think my next step would have to be to explore whether other aspects of the Japanese lexicon are reflected in the creation of internet slang terms. Shibatani also mentions that Japanese has an abundance of words to do with nature, but not many body part words. (Even a novice Japanese learner will have noticed that ‘foot’ and ‘leg’ are both expressed with one word, 足 ashi, and that both ‘smile’ and ‘laugh’ are expressed with the verb 笑う warau.)
The problem is, it is fairly difficult to linguistically analyse ‘Japanese internet slang’ as a concept, and to compare it to ‘English internet slang.’ There is no official online corpus of internet slang in English or Japanese, and it changes every day as new slang terms are created and older terms fall out of practice. The only way I can see to continue this research is to compile my own lists, either from spotting slang terms ‘in the wild’ online, or asking strangers on twitter to come up with any terms they can think of.
Even if I could prove that the tendencies of the Japanese vocabulary are reflected in its internet slang, what would this actually demonstrate? That, somehow, the balance of this lexicon is engrained in Japanese minds and so it affects the creation of new slang terms and wordplay? Or just that there are a lot of fish words so people create fish-related associations?
What kind of words are there more of in English than in other languages? Have we English-speakers developed a tendency to create internet slang based on… growing wheat… or… brewing… or whatever is that was traditionally engrained into English society, and therefore probably English vocabulary? Somehow, I don’t think so.
So, I was unable to come to a satisfying conclusion about my theory of fish-heavy Japanese internet slang. But I don’t think it was a complete waste of my time. It was my first foray into researching something just because I was curious and felt like it, and even though it didn’t lead me to any groundbreaking discoveries about the creation of new slang terms in Japanese, I had a lot of fun. It sparked some interesting conversations with friends and twitter strangers, and I got to read a 1940s fish dictionary. Some pretty good mental stimulation for a Wednesday afternoon in lockdown.
#japanese#linguistics#internet slang#internet linguistics#research#fish#fishing#misshanake#essay#japanese linguistics#japanese studies#slang#final fantasy#ffxiv#dragon quest
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also wrt to saporian, canon gave me two words to work with: zarothay (banana) and zarotho (suffer an eternity of doom)
now i could have just directly imported the two words into my vulgarlang file and called it a day, but (a) that’s no fun, and (b) zarothay poses a difficulty because it breaks the rules of saporian vowel harmony:
zarothay /zaɾɔˈθeɪ̯/ n. banana
a and o are broad vowels, but ay is slender. how do we deal with this?
one option is to change the invalid phoneme into the valid phoneme that is its nearest approximation: ē. [“ay” as in day → ʏ, which is the ü in standard german, or similar to the “i” in “sit,” but a little further back in the mouth]:
zarothē /zaɾɔˈθʏ/ n. banana
this is a serviceable fix, but i don’t like it because it breaks the established rules of how vowels are shifted from slender to broad: those rules rely less on phonological similarity, and eɪ̯ becomes ɔ (o) [“o” as in “not”] which would in turn become oʊ̯ (o) [“o” as in “no”] because it is at the end of the word.
so scratch that.
a further consideration here is that bananas are not a native plant in saporia. bananas are tropical, and saporia is temperate. so, bananas are imported, and the word for banana must be too. (the origin of the english “banana” as well; it is believed to ultimately borrowed from the wolof word banaana and entered the english lexicon via spanish or portugese.)
so that’s our second option. zarothay is a loanword.
i like this much better, because it (a) doesn’t break a different rule to accomplish the fix, and (b) tells me something important about saporian: when loanwords are introduced into the vocabulary, the spelling is nativized but the pronunciation is kept. this makes loanwords identifiable by dint of their breaking the vowel harmony rule.
and this also incidentally deepens the canon translation joke: to feldspar, fluent as he is in saporian, zarothay would look “wrong,” so he absentmindedly “fixed” it by shifting ay to o in accordance with the standard rules for vowel-shifting. the mistranslation happens not because the words are similar-looking, but because he erroneously applied a rule to a word that is an exception to the rule.
and this brings us to zarotho. in canon, feldspar translates this word as “suffer an eternity of doom.” that is a lot of meaning to pack into a single word, so it makes sense to me to assume that “zarotho” is not a root word but rather a word that has been modified to encode additional meaning. the challenge here is to extrapolate the root word from the very minimal context we are given.
first, we can break down the english translation into parts:
[suffer] [an eternity of] [doom]
[verb] [temporal clause] [complement]
which tells us that the root word here is probably a verb, to suffer.
because there are only three syllables in zarotho, i decided that the root was probably just one syllable: zar. and, because this is a regular verb with a broad vowel, that means it takes the broad infinitive ending, making it:
zárīgh /ˈzaɾɪʝ/ v. to suffer
next, the temporal clause. i decided that in saporian, an affix can be used to modify a verb to give it permanence; sort of the equivalent of inserting “always” or “forever” in front of a verb in english. this affix is -oth /-ɔθ/ [broad] or -aedh /-eɪ̯ð/ [slender], and it is inserted before the infinitive ending of a verb, so:
zárothīgh /ˈzaɾɔθɪʝ/ v. to suffer eternally
getting closer. now we need to figure out the complement: doom. this part is interesting, because while doom has negative denotations, it can also just mean “fate” or “destiny.” and one of the first things i decided about saporian culture in bitter snow is that they don’t really have a concept of fate. ultimately this is a result of the influence zhan tiri and her cult had on the development of saporian culture, because zhan tiri is all about choice and the carving of one’s own path, by force if necessary.
thus, it feels wrong for saporian to have a direct translation for “doom,” or “fate,” or “destiny.” instead, i think this part of the word zarotho should have implications of pain, destruction, and death without linking those to the concept of fate. i decided to start with a verb here also:
oīgh /ˈɔɪʝ/ v. to harm, to torment, to torture.
i chose this because the full phrase feldspar translates is “all who claim the treasure shall be made to suffer an eternity of doom.” this phrasing implies an active infliction of harm, rather than passive suffering.
so we have all the pieces now; how do we put them together?
first, because oīgh is going to function as an affix, we need to turn it into a noun by dropping the infinitive ending:
o /oʊ̯/ n. the act of torture, torment, or causing harm
next, we affix o to zárothīgh according to the standard rule, i.e. the affix goes before the infinitive ending:
zárothoīgh /ˈzaɾɔθɔɪʝ/, “to suffer torture/torment eternally”
as a second to last step, we need to conjugate this compound verb into the conditional future tense. in saporian, conditionals are constructed using the irregular modal verb thaegh /θeɪ̯ʝ/; the tense [present/past/future] is encoded in the modal verb, while the main verb loses its infinitive ending:
thaegheídh zárotho /θeɪ̯ʝɛˈið zaɾɔθoʊ̯/
(*presently, irregular verbs like thaegh take the regular verb endings when conjugated, but figuring out something better to do with them is next on my saporian priority list. so this part is subject to change.)
and finally, we need the rest of the phrase in order to make the conditional statement make sense:
ā chádīm nēzhīch sholamóla, thaegheídh zárotho zhīch.
/ɑ ˈχadɪm nʏ ʒīch ˌʃɔlaˈmɔla θeɪ̯ʝɛˈið zaɾɔθoʊ̯ ʒīch/
which translates roughly to “desecrators of the barrow will suffer eternal torment;” the direct word-to-word english translation, preserving the saporian syntax, is: [if] [desecrate] [they] [(the) barrow], [will] [suffer eternal torment] [they]. isn’t grammar fun
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A Sketch for a Modern Gothic Alphabet
Inspired by all the AOE2 I’ve been playing today, and the unfortunate lack of Gothic-language unit responses in said game, I sat down and started sketching out a Modern Gothic conlang: basically, what would happen if you gave the language of the Goths the Hebrew treatment, and tried to cobble together a functional language out of the attested bits we have.
Now, I don’t think this would be nearly as big a project as it might seem; even though the Gothic-language literature isn’t nearly as extensive as other ancient Germanic literatures, our goal is not some intangible lexicographic “purity.” Anything we do not have words for, and can’t plausibly calque, we’re going to borrow--but the existing vocabulary may prove surprisingly effective, e.g., a word like thius, thiwos, “servant” > “employee.” Bandi, bandjos means “band” as in “group of people,” but why can’t it also mean “band” as in “rock band”? If it works for English, it will work for Gothic, I say.
But I think the alphabet is an opportunity to get really creative. The Goths wrote in an alphabet adapted for their own language, which I’ve heard described as “basically Uncial Greek;” but it also seems to borrow liberally from the Latin alphabet and from Germanic runes in a couple of places, and it’s interesting and different enough on its own that I think simply squeezing the language into a Latin or Greek transcription wouldn’t do it justice aesthetically. Now, the attested Gothic alphabet did not make case distinctions; “majuscule” and “miniscule” script in the Early Middle Ages weren’t used to convey information as we use capitalization, they were simply stylistic variants. Some of the Gothic letters resemble capitals, and some resemble miniscules; and when a letter is the same in both Greek and Latin majuscule, whether we choose the Greek or Latin miniscule is going to be important. We have to make sure each letter is visually distinct in both forms, after all.
So this is how I would design a modern version of the Gothic alphabet.
Αα - ans. [a] or [a:], transliterated <a>. Pronounced as in father. Most of the letter names are the reconstructed reflex of the Proto-Germanic name for the corresponding rune; ans is no exception. Old--that is to say, real--Gothic has both long and short [a], and does not in writing distinguish the two. For our purposes, we will write long [a] doubled: <aa>
Ββ - bairkna. [b] or [v], but always transliterated [b]. [v] is the allophone of [b] immediately after a vowel, or between two vowels; as the sound doesn’t otherwise occur in Gothic, there’s no ambiguity here, and we don’t need to mark it. Loanwords with [v] in them will probably get borrowed as [b] or [v] depending on the environment the sound occurs in.
Γγ - giba. [g] or [ɣ], transliterated <g>. [ɣ] is a fricative, pronounced in the exact same spot as [g]; like [v], it’s just an allophone of <g>.
Δδ - dagz. [d] or [ð], as in English then. Transliterated <d>.
Εε - aihws. Represents [e:], which is similar to the first part of the diphthong in English “day,” or the Spanish e. Although the names of the Germanic rune-letters were originally acrostic (starting, or at least containing, the sound they represented), sound change in Gothic means that the <ai> in aihws is actually pronounced like the e in English let.
Uυ - qairna. [kʷ], transliterated <q>. This sound is a labialized [k], very close to the qu in English quern or quiz. Up until now, we have been rather slavishly following the Greek alphabet, in both order and names of our letters; however, in qairna, we have no Greek equivalent. At least, not in the age of the Bishop Wulfilas, who was responsible for first writing down the Gothic language--there is the archaic Greek letter qoppa, source of the Latin q; why Wulfilas did not use the Latin letter, I don’t know, and I don’t know why he chose a letter which was bound to cause confusion among Greek-speakers, resembling as it does a miniscule upsilon (had Greek miniscules even been developed by the 4th century?). But, much like the Turks turning dotted and dotless i into two different letters with distinct capitals, we’re going to split the difference and divide upsilon in two. The lowercase quairna is a u-shaped crescent, without the right-hand stem. The uppercase is a larger version of the same. Using U and its small capital variant would be an excellent typographical approximation.
Ζζ - aizo. [z], transliterated <z>. Identical to modern English. Gothic did not rhotacize [z] in the same way that the other Germanic languages did, retaining a clear distinction with [s]. There is no satisfactory rune-name for this letter; the name chosen is arbitrary, on the pattern of English phonetic names, with some consideration given to the fact that [z] did not occur at the beginning of words in Gothic.
Ηh - hagal. [h] or [χ], transliterated [h]. Attic Greek had no letter H, but the Latin letter H was based on a version of that alphabet where eta retained its original value, [h]. As the old Gothic <h> strongly resembles a miniscule Latin [h], we will simply borrow that letter. Alone or at the beginning of a word, <h> sounds as in English; in a consonant cluster, or in the final position, it is a fricative with the value of German or Scottish <ch>.
Ψψ - thaurnus. [θ], transliterated <th>. The question of why a literate churchman, whose best reference for the written word was Greek, would not simply use theta for the dental fricative continues to vex me; perhaps he thought psi was more like the runic thorn, whose name this letter shares.
Ιι - eis. [ɪ], transliterated <i>. Identical to iota, a dotless i. By the time the Goths encountered the Greek-speaking world, the spelling conventions of the tongue were centuries out of date. The diphthong originally represented by <ei> was now pronounced as a long [i] (the sound in “deep” or “scream”), and so that digraph was chosen for the long [i] sound. Its short equivalent--pronounced as in English “hit” or “bill”--got iota.
Κκ - konja. [k], transliterated <k>. Identical to Greek kappa.
Λλ - lagus. [l], transliterated <l>, in both cases as in “lake” (which is what lagus means). Identical to lambda.
Μμ - manna. [m], transliterated <m>. Although the small form of the Greek mu, with the compressed peaks and the left-hand stem is often confused by people familiar with only the Latin alphabet for “u” or a letter like it, and lowercase manna would seem already to be similar to two other letters (one of which we have not yet encountered), I have chosen to retain this form because it is the miniscule corresponding to the Greek letter. And I like descenders.
Nν - nauths. [n], transliterated <n>. Since there is no [v] in this alphabet, there’s no worry we’ll confuse the small form of nu with that letter.
Gg - jer. [j], transliterated <j>. Here we have our first real problem. You see, this isn’t a G. If you look at the letter as written in Gothic manuscripts, it looks a lot like a Latin G, but the hook is a right-hand descender only. It doesn’t go inside the body of the letter, as far as I can tell. What this really is is a C with a descending right stem or hook, like the IPA letter for the velar nasal... but that letter doesn’t exist in any font I’m aware of, and would look almost identical to a capital G. So here I’m approximating it with G, and approximating its miniscule form with a lowercase (but note, single-storey) g, because I expect the desired lowercase form (a small c with a slightly elongated descending right hook) would look very much like a g where the body of the letter was open.
Ƞn - uurus. [u] or [u:], transliterated <u>. As with <a>, a doubled <u> signifies a long vowel, not originally distinguished in written Gothic. The original letter looks like a small and large version of Latin miniscule n (where the capital does not descend below the line).
Ππ - pairtha. [p], transliterated <p>. Equivalent to pi. Not a very common sound in Gothic, due to Grimm’s Law, but found in lots of Greek loanwords like pascha, “Easter.”
ɥ - hjo. [dʒ], transliterated <hj>. Now we are really far off the beaten track. You see, the Gothic alphabet had two letters with no sound-values at all. The Greek alphabet gave numeric values to each letter; when set off with dots or an overline, it was intended that you should read them as a number, and not a word. Gothic retained that convention, and used similar values for each letter in the Gothic alphabet; but it had two more numerals than it had need of for letters, including one that looks like <h>, rotated 180 degrees. Rather than strike these letters from the alphabet, I’ve elected to keep them, and to arbitrarily reassign them to values I think will be useful for modern Gothic loanwords. To distinguish the affricate value of <j> from the (more common outside English) liquid version, I have prepended an arbitrary <h> in the transcription. This is also a handy ex-post-facto justification for why the name of my pseudo-Gothic kingdom on my minecraft server is spelled the same way, since originally it was spelled as “Hjairsil” only becaused that looked amusingly like Gothic. Unfortunately, I have no font on my computer that can render the rare capital form of this letter! As one of those IPA symbols that occasionally gets dragooned into service as a real honest-to-god letter, it does have a capital, at codepoint U+A79D--but my computer cannot render it, and I don’t know if yours can either. The name of this letter is arbitrary, chosen phonetically.
Ρρ - raida. [r], transliterated <r>. The old Gothic alphabet actually uses a symbol that looks like a Latin capital R, with a right-hand descender. If one desired to use a version of this letter more like that one, I would use Rʀ, as the open lowercase r feels rather out of place.
Ss or Σς - sojil. [s], transliterated <s>. The letter S is, after all, only a variant of sigma; I would not use the closed, medial form σ, due to its similarity to other letters, and the fact that the old Gothic letter resembles Latin S and final Greek ς, but not σ.
Ττ - tius. [t], transliterated <t>. Equivalent to Greek tau.
Yʏ - winja. [w] or [ɪ]; transliterated [w]. Wulfilas uses upsilon, whose majuscule is identical to English Y; the letter evidently retains its identity as upsilon specifically, because it transcribes that letter (originally pronounced [y], like German ü) in certain names when they appear in Gothic, though by that time it would have had the value of a short [i].
Ϝϝ - faihu. [f], transliterated <f>. Possibly a capital and small capital F would be better; but digamma is an authentic, though rare Greek letter, which is virtually identical.
Χχ - iggws. [k], transliterated <k>. Greek chi.
ʘ - hwair. [ʍ], transliterated [hw]. Another letter with a case problem: hwair resembles theta slightly, but also monocular o, or the IPA symbol for the bilabial click. I would prefer the distinct sizes of the monocular o, rather than theta (which looks very similar in both upper and lowercase forms) but my computer doesn’t support that character.
Ωω - othal. [o:], transliterated <o>. The Gothic letter strongly resembles both the Greek omega and the odal-rune, whose name it inherits; but it definitely denotes the long [o] sound only, the short [o] being a digraph.
Cc - tsho. [tʃ], transliterated <tsh>. Tsho replaces the final letter of the Gothic alphabet, which is either the tyr-rune, or or the Greek sampi. <c> with the affricate value pairs neatly with <g>, and will be of more use in loanwords.
The transcription scheme should ensure that Gothic spelling is unambiguously recoverable from a Latin transliteration.
Old Gothic had several digraphs, which modern Gothic will carry over intact. <gg> represented the nasal [ŋ] (ng in sing) in Greek, and does so in Gothic as well. The digraph <gw> represents [gʷ], parallel to <q>. Note that this introduces an ambiguity: the trigraph <ggw> can represent either [ŋw] or [ggʷ], an ambiguity present in the original orthography; but this is not an especially common sequence of letters. The trigraph <ddj> has an uncertain value according to historical linguistics; I have opted to abolish this uncertainty by assigning it the value of a geminate palatal stop [ɟː], in accordance with some reconstructions.
The two vowel digraphs <ai> and <au> present an irritating problem. Rather against the principle of parsimony, and the principle that ancient peoples tended to construct or adapt writing systems neither more nor less complicated than necessary for their tongues, I tend to be of the opinion that spelling should usually be considered to strongly reflect pronunciation. Yet these two digraphs appear in positions that have distinctive vowels in Proto-Germanic; and on that basis, it has usually been the custom in Gothic grammars and textbooks to distinguish three values for each. There is good reason for doing so on etymological grounds, if you wish to keep distinct the Proto-Germanic reflexes of each appearance of each digraph; but this seems improbable. Improbable, but not impossible--since there are cases where these digraphs must reflect true diphthongs, rather than the flattened values they otherwise would likely represent, especially in Greek proper nouns. By arbitrary fiat, modern Gothic will use <ai> to represent only long and short [ε]; and will use <au> to represent both long and short [ɔ], except in the aforementioned Greek names and modern loanwords.
<iu> is a falling diphthong, not two distinct vowels; double consonants are always pronounced as such (e.g., <nn> as in “unnamed”, not “unaimed”). Gothic has a stress-accent system like English, and like English does not mark stress. Punctuation follows the Greek norm, as used in modern times: guillemets or dashes set off quotations, a raised point substitutes for the semicolon (which is instead the question mark), the decimal point is the comma, and the digit separator is the full stop. Proper names, and the start of a sentence are capitalized, as is each word in a title.
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The Devanagari script and how it is used in Marathi
If you are studying Marathi online, you probably want to study its writing system first. Doing so is not necessary to speak Marathi fluently, of course—there are many illiterate Marathi speakers after all (including children too young to read and write). However, as my langblr will make extensive use of Devanagari, there will be no getting around it.
There are plenty of guides and apps already present that can teach you Devanagari.
My personal favourite is this guide by Sarvabhashin, which is used to teach Hindi. Contrary to many guides, it does not teach you the letters in the traditional order, and instead focuses on similar shapes and sounds so that you can learn much faster. There are also plenty of practice exercises in it—excellent if you like to be kept on track.
Most guides on learning the Devanagari script, including the one above, are written with Hindi in mind.
Marathi pronunciations for Devanagari letters are mostly similar to those of Hindi. However, there are several critical exceptions, which I am going to list below.
ऐ
This letter is pronounced as if it were a flowing combination of अ + इ. This is in contrast to Hindi, where it is pronounced as the ‘a’ in the English ‘dare’.
औ
This letter is pronounced as if it were a flowing combination of अ + उ. This is in contrast to Hindi, where it is pronounced as the ‘o’ in the British English ‘not’.
अं
There’s a lot to process with this one, so I’ve given it its own article.
ऋ
This letter is pronounced as ‘ru’ in Marathi, in contrast to ‘ri’ in Hindi.
अॅ
This letter is pronounced as the ‘a’ in ‘action’, or the ‘a’ in ‘ant’. In Marathi, this letter is used in loanwords from foreign languages, particularly English. It is uncommon in Hindi, and some would argue it does not exist in the Hindi alphabet.
ऑ
This letter is pronounced as the ‘o’ in ‘body’, or the ‘o’ in ‘lock’. In Marathi, this letter is used in loanwords from foreign languages, particularly English. It is uncommon in Hindi, and some would argue it does not exist in the Hindi alphabet.
क़ / ख़ / ग़ / ज़ / फ़ / ड़ / ढ़
The nukta is not used in Marathi, and so these none of these Hindi letters exist in Marathi. Most of these sounds are also not found in the Marathi language.
Two of these sounds (ज़ and फ़) are indeed found in Marathi, however, and we will have a look at them shortly.
च
This letter has two sounds in Marathi. One is the traditional Sanskrit ‘ch’ sound, as found in ‘church’, ‘chess’, or ‘check’. The other is a ‘ts’ sound, which is found in Slavic and Chinese languages. An English approximation of this sound is the ‘ts’ in ‘cats’.
It is not always obvious which sound you should use in which instance, as the difference is never marked, not even in a dictionary. The only way for you to learn this is by trial and error.
ज
This letter has two sounds in Marathi. One is the traditional Sanskrit ‘j’ sound, as found in ‘journal’, ‘jeep’, or ‘jail’. The other is a ‘dz’ sound, which is very uncommon in any language. It is pronounced very similarly to the ‘z’ as found in the English ‘zero’, ‘zen’, and ‘zest’.
It is not always obvious which sound you should use in which instance, as the difference is never marked, not even in a dictionary. The only way for you to learn this is by trial and error.
झ
This letter has three sounds in Marathi. The overwhelmingly common sound is the traditional Sanskrit ‘jh’ sound. It is somewhat similar to how you might pronounce the ‘dgeh’ in hedgehog.
Additionally, झ may be pronounced as an aspirated version of the ‘dz’ sound of ज. One example of a word using this pronunciation is झाड [zhāḍ] (tree).
The third pronunciation is in fact identical to the ‘dz’ sound of ज. झ is pronounced this way when it is used in loanwords from foreign languages, particularly from English.
This is a convention that exists because using the letter ज may cause readers to mispronounce foreign words. For example, ब्राजिल may be pronounced as ‘brājil’ instead of the intended ‘brāzil’.
This convention is not a hard-and-fast rule, so you may yet see ब्राजिल and the like.
ण
This letter uses a difficult-to-pronounce ‘hard n’, which is found in Punjabi and Dravidian languages. This is in contrast to Hindi, where it is pronounced identically to न. If you cannot pronounce it in the Marathi way, then pronouncing it as the ‘n’ in ‘den’, ‘hen’, or ‘net’ will suffice.
ष
This letter is pronounced identically to श in Marathi. That is, it is pronounced similarly to ‘sh’ in ‘short’, ‘shape’, or ‘sheep’.
फ
This letter is formally pronounced in the Sanskrit style as ‘ph’, i.e. as an aspirated ‘p’. Think the ‘p’ in ‘pig’, ‘pit’, or ‘push’.
However, most Marathi dialects use the ‘f’ sound instead, like ‘f’ in ‘fan’, ‘fit’, or ‘fall’. I recommend using the latter pronunciation for common use.
व
This letter is pronounced much the same as in Hindi, most of the time.
In some circumstances, it may be pronounced with more of a ‘w’ sound, such as in the word किंवा [kiṅvā] (or). This is a very subtle accent thing, so you don’t need to worry too much about it. Just pay attention to native speakers and speak as they speak.
An additional note is that its usage differs from Hindi when it comes to loanwords from foreign languages.
Hindi uses व as a substitute for both ‘w’ and ‘v’ as they are seen in English. That is, विलियम [William] and वनेसा [Vanessa] both use व.
However, Marathi uses व only as a substitute for ‘w’ and it uses the conjunct व्ह for ‘v’. Therefore, those names would be transliterated as विलियम [William] and व्हनेसा [Vanessa].
This is not a hard-and-fast rule, so expect to see exceptions.
ळ
This letter does not exist in the Hindi alphabet at all. In Marathi, it is used as a ‘hard l’ sound, which is very difficult to pronounce. It is found in very few languages, even in India.
If you cannot pronounce this sound, pronounce it identically to the ‘l’ in ‘love’, ‘luck’, or ‘life’.
ज्ञ
This conjunct is a rare combination of ज + ञ. In Sanskrit, it is meant to be pronounced as it is spelled, i.e. jñ. In Hindi, it is pronounced with a ‘gya’ sound.
In Marathi however, this conjunct is traditionally pronounced with the difficult ‘dnya’ sound. You start with a द sound and it flows into a न्य sound.
If you can’t pronounce this unusual combination of letters, then you can get away with using the न्य / ञ (nya) sound by itself.
र्य / र्ह
These difficult-to-type conjuncts are a unique feature of written Marathi. They are alternate combinations of र + य and र + ह, but they follow an important rule.
You see, when ‘r’ is joined with another letter in Hindi, it always goes at the end of a syllable, rather than starting a syllable itself. For eg. in कार्य [kārya], the syllables found are kahr-yuh, and not kah-ryuh.
In Marathi however, the ‘r’ can sometimes start a syllable of its own. In these cases, the conjunct is written as र्य or र्ह.
A good example of the difference between र्य and र्य can be found in the Marathi words सुर्या and सुर्या. Here, although the two words would be transliterated the same way, as suryā, they are pronounced differently.
The first word, सुर्या, has the following syllables: su-ryah.
The second word, सुर्या, has the following syllables: sur-yah.
This may be a difficult distinction for speakers of most languages, including English, but it may come more naturally to speakers of languages were syllables starting with ‘ry’ do exist, such as Japanese.
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