indicolite

I am jealous now. I have always wanted to be able to play a guitar to sing along with. Since I spent twelve years being forced into and later courting the violin, the upper strings should not be a steep learning curve if it is tuned in fifths; trouble is, my hands are small (I am small and my hands are smaller. Though stretchy), so all of the guitars I have held twist my left hand in an awkward position I do not like. A ukulele would work, but saying I can play the ukulele is not quite the same. Is it Celtic or concert harp? A girl I went to school with started playing the Celtic harp in grade 6. Now she is in McGill University's music program (really really good) and earns ridiculous money playing at weddings, the casino, and other events. Sigh. And I at first could not tell whether you were being sarcastic or not because I could not recognise the songs. Then I realised that hey, I do know "Sweet Dreams Are Made of These" (somehow I have heard this song a lot in shoe stores, of all places) and I have heard "Everybody Knows" although I kind of prefer the Leonard Cohen version. Deep deep voice talking, basically. Edit: and of course I have heard "House of the Rising Sun."

That was a beautifully written and saddening post. What I'd like to think is that the world is getting better, actually. After all, right now violence makes headlines - at least, thank goodness, in Ottawa it does. Only a few decades ago, and it is still that way in many places in the world, if someone got killed, people would just shrug: kids got killed every day. Only a few decades ago, people dying of flu, plague, smallpox, polio, take your pick, were the norm, and people who lived to 50 were the exception. Now someone dying of a heart attack or cancer at fifty gets mourned and buried and people have walks and campaigns for heart disease; only a century ago it would probably have been viewed as dying of "deserved old age." If we are sensitive enough to notice something and be shocked by it, that means it is not the expected thing; that means it occurs rarely. I can imagine, though I don't want to, a world where the shooting you saw would only get press if it was a white man getting shot: the deaths of blacks, Asians, women would be beneath notice. I can imagine, though I do not want to, a world where you would not even rush to the window when you hear a gunshot, and simply say "Oh, those (insert epithet which is now, thank god, unprintable) are at it again," and get back to your work, and the very idea that this situation is wrong, that those (insert same epithet) are people with dreams who do not want to die, would not cross your mind. It does in this place and at this time. We have built a world where people do care about those less well off than them, and have enough energy left from scrabbling after their own survival to be indignant at the plight of the less fortunate and to take action about it. There are places where this is still not the case, and it is a sign that we have done well that we can actually see that this is wrong, and those places are growing fewer with each passing year. We may not have seen that we still have a long way to go. And I do not want to imagine that.

In phonetics class they told us that listening to music with lyrics in it while studying or doing something that involves language is not a good idea, since your brain gets distracted analysing the lyrics. But then, if you have enough musical training, if you listen to any music, your brain gets distracted analysing the music! (raises hand ) So I guess if it works for you, go for it. I can't live without a soundtrack, as my coffeeshop coworkers knew - I make my own if I don't have one, and I bet they thank their lucky stars that I do have a somewhat okay voice and pitch. I abused iTunes relentlessly while making a Keynote slideshow (and I had ulterior motives in wondering if my friend who owns the iMac would freak out at the weird music I like. He didn't, the resistant creature) listening mostly to Russian and Italian stuff that I now firmly associate with that setting. Edited 'cause me can't talk English

I hear ya. I tell people who are ranting about Lost or Desperate Housewives or whatever that I do not watch TV. If they look at me strangely, I tell them that my TV gets exactly TWO channels, and one of them is in French, and to get any kind of picture quality (as I wanted for the Winter Olympics, because I am an Olympics nut) the bunny ears are festooned with enough foil for a cross between a monochromtic Christmas tree and a kinetic sculpture of an octopus and it still doesn't work. The nice TV is for the DVD player, so I can wait until some dear friend of mine burns me a DVD of whatever show season I may want. This weekend, though, staying in a hotel, I watched TV for hours: my annual overcompensation. And discovered I don't like Seinfeld that much. I have read about people feeling like they had ADD until they covered the moving headline strip on CNN, and I agree. I hate that strip, trying to give you hockey scores while the main part talks about terrorism and a little bit in the corner gives stock indices. Hate it hate it hate it. "TV will never replace the newspaper. You can't swat a fly with a rolled-up television." Or line rabbit cages with it, either. Or cover the windows. And - bliss! - you can flip through the paper, and read the articles that catch your eye. Again and again. Without any network telling you what and in what order you should learn about the world.

I go around explaining the Great Language Change Clock to everyone I meet: Greek Orthodox seminarians, math geeks... Someone hold me in before I become a wandering preacher. "Languages change, ye sinners! Repent ere you lose your V-to-I movement*!" Ooh, I love phonetics, how would that work, how would that work, how would that work? PM me if you don't want to post your original ideas for everyone to see; I swear upon my imp of Dragon's Heart (few bigger things worth swearing by have arrived) that I do not steal people's ideas. Now taking them and running away with them and rolling them over and over until they are unrecognisable is different...everyone does that, but I will still put an acknowledgement in my first novel to my algebra professors who, not knowing it, gave me a nefarious idea to break a mathematical law. But stealing ideas requires acknowledging that I cannot do better, which is beyond the capacities of my ego. I toyed with an element-based magic back when I was 13 and my world looked badly like Robert Jordan's, but the intervening years have transformed the Wild Magic into Bloodmagic, respectively, which works on very different underlying principles. If I ever do an elements-based fantasy motif, I would toss metal and stone in like the Chinese; more because I can't accept life without jewelry than anything else...you are giving me ideas...how do you want to be called in the acknowledgements section? *The construction that makes "Go you to the movies?" a grammatical question, rather than "Are you going to the movies?"

I got enough language change crammed into my head last semester that a lot of it was almost reflex. Basically, languages are divided into (1) those that change their words a lot to change their meaning, such as using cases, a lot of verb conjugations, etc. e.g. Russian, Latin; (2) those that change their sentences a lot and their words little i.e English, Chinese; (3) those that string together bits to a word to change it (without changing the inside word) e.g Turkish, Hungarian; (4) those that string together bits of word to make one big word that has the meaning of an entire sentence, e.g. Inuktitut. No. 1, 2, 3 change into each other, in that order. First people keep on saying "he walked"; then they get bored, the 'ed" gets absorbed and vanishes (see African American English dialect for example), but to keep on conveying the meaning of 'past' they have to put more stuff in the sentence: "he walk yesterday". Then they keep on saying "he walk yesterday" for a few centuries, and gradually the word that meant "yesterday" shrinks down and becomes this bit you stick on the ends of verbs to make them past. And then, under a few more changes, "stand+yesterday" > "stand+past" > "stood" > "standed" (all the other verbs have -ed, why not this one?) > "stand yesterday" again. Type 4 is pretty rare, by the way, and was not accounted for on the "clock cycle." My elves speak Type 4; don't know why, but I know they do. Tolkien's elves speak Type 1 - 2-ish, if I recall (goes to dig out Silmarillion...) Of course, this is supersimplified, but those are the things that drive language change - English used to be (1) and is now heading for (2) at breakneck speed. Languages that arise as linguafrancas or pidgins (mixing together two languages to make different peoples understand each other somehow) usually start out in (2). One fact that may be useful is that Type 2 languages would tend to have longer sentences, in writing, than Type 1 or 3. According to my prof, the only language for which the entire cycle has been observed is Ancient Egypt's. But the different child languages of the same parent could go through the cycle at different rates: English, Swedish, German and Icelandic all started out in Type 1, and a thousand years later Icelandic is pretty much what it used to be, snug in Type 1, Swedish is farther along, so is German, and English is, of course... One funky thing you may like, that I touched on earlier, is that sometimes words that originally had their own meanings end up as grammatical parts: see "yesterday" becoming the past tense. The French recent-past tense literally means "I'm just coming from doing x", and I am sure a lot of plural markers began life as the word "many." I found myself almost instinctively changing my tone and voice with changes in viewpoint character. Had an argument with one of my editors over the phrase "whatever the ancient Greeks used as shoelaces": "You know perfectly well what they used for shoelaces, put it in!" "I know. She (the character who is on camera now) doesn't." Don't be. I do not recommend insomnia to anyone, even when cute worlds come out. I couldn't get to sleep anyway, so I found myself thinking about my intuitions concerning the different languages, and decided I better write those intuitions down. I get my best ideas when trying to get to sleep, but my 8:30 a.m school, 9:00 a.m work, etc. have no sympathy whatsoever. *I avoided technical terms, but Type 1 (change words) is "inflectional languages"; Type 2 (change sentences) = "isolating / analytic"; Type 3 (pile together bits of word) = "agglutinative"; inflectional and agglutinative are both referred to as "synthetic"; and Type 4 of the mega-long words is "polysynthetic."

As for titanium (1) I want to read your book NOW; I love titanium and I love that idea (2) I would advise, if you don't have a good name already, to either name it after another mythology's giant race (which may be a little odd-sounding because why name almost the lightest practical metal after big hulkin' heavy guys? Sprite metal?) or name it after one of the titans. Rhea's iron

Dear Macha, I am now addicted to your blog. I read the language post, and smiled at the coincidence, for yesterday, from 2:30 to 3:15 a.m., I sat on my bed with my notebook, and planned out the language development in my fantasy world. Not just place names or character names (I like the Ford Ford Ford Ford, it is so true); I am a fourth-year linguistics student who loved historical linguistics more than any other kind, so I sketched out how the language of the dying empire turned into the common tongue by losing all of its case system and most of its verbs, how many tones the elven language has, and why an interspecies language would have no 'r', 'l' or 'y' sounds (the other species doesn't have the flexible tongue necessary to make those), which happened to annoy most of my main characters who have those sounds in their names. I don't just have maps; by the time I talked myself into going back to bed, I had a language family tree, with dates of separation from the proto-language. And it was fun. A very important point is how different social classes would differentiate themselves through the way they speak; for example, in areas of the U.S. omitting the 'r' in words like 'door' is a lower-class feature, while in Britain it is a mark of the higher class Queen's English. My sociolinguistics professor said that in Barbados, the Canadian accent is considered a prestige accent. This leads me to think how warriors would speak differently from traders, from priests, from courtesans. That was one thing I admire Tolkien for: you can tell at once who was speaking, the hobbits or the elves, unlike certain novels, where they all seem to have come from the same university. I better shut up now before writing an essay on "The Loss of Animate Subject Differentiation in the Subjunctive Verbal Paradigm of Pre-Cataclysm Dark Elvish"...

I read two very interesting essays by Ursula Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves" and "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie"; the former is about how she built Earthsea, the latter is about use of language in fantasy in general. I do not agree with some of her points, but I find her arguments quite salient for the most part. Earthsea, if I recall correctly, started with one island in the story "The Rule of Names" (which tells of an early adventure of the dragon Yevaud). From there came wondering about how is it a wizard becomes a wizard, which became the story of Ged. It kind of developed that it was an archipelago. She did mention that she put quite a lot of thought in her Hain cycle as well, saying that at one point she knew enough of the language of Karhide (from The Left Hand of Darkness) to write poems in it; however denying that she went into as much work with languages as Tolkien did; Tolkien was a professional linguist. However, her parents were anthropologists, so Le Guin probably absorbed anthropology with her mother's milk - useful in a fantasy writer. As for my own writing: the novel I actually finished takes place in the world my friend and I made up, but a thousand years later and changed far beyond recognition - I simply had two stories and an urge to consolidate and recycle. That one I began writing in 2000 and finished actual writing in 2002. Then came the rewrites, and then came all the people telling me all the things wrong with it, and then came more rewrites as I figured out the magic, belatedly, and then more rewrites and people telling me all the things still wrong with it and the fact that I can't talk English good. Now it has passed its ordeal, is formatted (I may be the only fnatasy writer to format manuscripts in the mathematical markup language LaTeX) and all that is keeping me from submitting it to a publisher this instant and taking the plunge is that I tell myself "One more check, one more looking over, you know this chapter is not your strongest, you've got to have learned by now what to do about it..." And the fact that I've got to buy some paper and a bunch of envelopes and stamps. Meanwhile I amuse myself writing about the stuff that happened a thousand years before, and stuff in another world entirely; I found that once I knew how their magic worked, it imposed a bunch of rules upon me which, though they saved me making stuff up and justifying it to myself, left me longing for some time in a world with a different freedom. Sorry, long story.

In my experience, it is interesting when the world itself gives you ideas on what is going to happen. I built a world in collaboration with my best friend in eighth grade - astonishingly enough, some pieces of it are still salvageable! - and we had some ideas of different governments we wanted to kick around with. Once she drew the map, suddenly I knew a lot more about what was going on in those countries: "Ok, whoever held that fertile valley was sitting pretty, so those two countries had fought wars over this land...and still don't like each other: problem when hero from country A meets heroine from country B; cool! And I see why this mountain range would keep this culture isolated...and self-sifficient...and xenophobic..." I love world-making - that is, taking a concept and going with it, and discovering stuff along the way. Although I had to rewrite a great of my novel once I figured out HOW magic worked (mine takes one mathematical law, violates it, and sees what happens). But there is a thrilling feeling when everything fits together and makes sense instead of being slapped together because you thought it would look cool. When you know that, yes, it goes that way because it has to. Wishing you all the best in your writing.

As for the individual Qliphoth - I would treat all the 'a's like 'father', all the 'e's like 'bet', all the 'i's like 'ee', and the 'iel' endings just like in the name 'Daniel' ('iel' means 'of God'), and q like k, since, as we said before, passing for a fluent Ancient Hebrew speaker is beyond the scope of this forum.* What puzzles me is the difference between 'gh' and 'g' in the names: they are both gimmel, so there must be a difference that escapes me, but 'gh' seems to occur word-initially, and 'g' everywhere else, so I would guess they are allophones (sound different, but are actually the same sound in different contexts) and I personally would pronounce them both 'g' in 'get'. Since I am a linguist, not a Kabbalist, I may be wrong, but on the other hand, if I mispronounce the names of evil powers, it may not attract their attention. So I would stop my aid there, Galen. Hope it helped some, and wiser people can take it up where I left off. *Sorry for the tone of that - proofreading too many syntax papers today, and their language creeps into mine :-).

One of the Hebrew speakers would be wiser, but I will do my best on Qliphoth: Q is, I believe, a pharyngeal, but if you are a native speaker of English, pharyngeals will probably be hard (they are at the very back, deep in the throat, near the pharynx) So I think if you pronounce the Q as a 'k', no one would be yelling at you. The Hebrew letter given in the review thread have q corresponding to the letter known as 'kuf' - the one that looks like the logo for Mac OS 10 PowerPoint. In all my years of Hebrew study (and I took first grade completely in Hebrew), I have never been able to hear the difference between that and a k. I could not find a Hebrew spelling of Qliphoth in the Review threads, so I would guess that the 'ph' could be either a 'f' (as in 'telephone') or an aspirated 'p' - the 'p' at the beginnings of words like 'pot' (hold your hand against your lips and say 'pot' and then 'spot'; you will feel a breath of air on 'pot' because that 'p' is 'aspirated' while the 'p' in 'spot' is not). As for the 'oth' bit - that is the Hebrew feminine plural marker, unless I am mistaken (one Qlipha, two Qliphoth? I know phonetics, not Kabbalah, and if I am wrong here, someone who knows better please point this out), and in modern Hebrew, it usually shounds pretty much like 'ot' - like in 'not', not 'moth'. Now Hebrew pronunciation, like that of every other language, changes with time and dialect. But in summary, I think that if you say "My next order includes some Klee-fot," you would not have murderous spirits chasing after you for murdering their names - I hope.

I am sorry, but O did not do anything for me. I could smell the honey alternating with something medicinal; amber and musk in Haunted and Fallen are good with my skin, so it may have been the vanilla not liking me. It was not unpleasant, but..."This is what everyone is waxing rapturous about? This?" The musk scents mentioned above work way better for my sexy feeling, especially in wrist vs. wrist contrast. I swapped it away. Bye bye O, find your lover in other places.

I love this smell. Musks are good to me, but after the musk passes, I can smell the dragonfire - that must be the dragon's blood resin I could never get the currant or fig notes; they all blend together. Got this as my first frimp, and it was on the top of my next-order wishlist. I love the labbies, they read my mind. This is a scent rather similar to Fallen on first application; Fallen goes through more different smells on me, but I mistook Dragon's Heart for it in the dark the other day. Ah, smells in bed.

On me, Lightning smells like morning after the rain - exactly. I can see the dripping leaves and hear them rustle. Today I, hoping to put it on (it is a good school-and-work scent) spilled half the imp all over me. Including some in my mouth, so I CAN give a review of the taste - stinging and acrid and "must run to rinse out my mouth" and "oh man, please, Beth, don't kill me with my own stupidity" and "here lies Indicolite, she died of eating lightning". I am alive, my shirt smells divine, half of my imp is gone, and kids, don't try eating lightning at home.

One word, LOVE. This oil did for me what O promised: musk and amber and patchouli, throwing in the floral, making me joyful and sexy and sniffing my wrists again and again and again... Many people seem to not agree with vetiver; it is wonderful to me. Sandalwood was one note I never got. But who cares! EDIT: After applying it on my wrist at midnight and sniffing it again at around 3 pm the following day (another reason for me to love it) I do finally get sandalwood. On order for 5 mL, thinking it should have been 10. Want more! Can't live without it in my nights!

Musk takes advantage of my skin and shouts its name to the winds. That is fine by me, as I love musk. With Haunted, amber and musk changed places again and again - like a procession of ghosts in a dark cemetery. I can see where it got its name. Cold musky, warm amber, cold musky, warm amber. I will be placing an order for 5 mL as soon as the bank balance permits, and for now, carrying the imp everywhere with me, for when the mood striketh.

On me, cinnamon is the dominant note, but enough other smells peek out around the edges - warm friendly smiles of the ghosts of the road to guide you on your way. I knew as soon as I tried it (I ordered it as an imp as my intro to BPAL spicy scents) that this one is my first priority to get a bottle of; I am waiting for it now. There is a story about Silk Road and me: while heading to the States a couple of weeks ago, I accidentally tried Donna Karan Black Cashmere body lotion in the duty-free shop. It went horribly stinky on my hands, like bad bad pot combined with the worst incense ever, and it would not die down even after a shower and bed and being layered with Satsuma. Finally, I remembered that I had taken the imp of Silk Road with me, and whipped that out. My roommates and I are forever grateful to BPAL for saving our stink sanity! "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand..."

Japanese romaji would transcribe miyoo as mi (as in me) yo (as in "yo man whatsup?") and then make the o longer. I have no idea, though, whether Beth used romaji or a transcription. OO-tre-nya-ya with the nya as n-tilde if you can do it (try making n and then, keeping your tongue tip on your gum ridge behind your teeth, touching the tongue below it to the back of your front teeth; sounds complicated but try it) ve-CHER-nya-ya with same thing (at least if you are going standard Russian - about the first difference between Slavic languages is where they would choose to stress a common word) French u in Ulalume can be learned by going "eeeee" as in beet, then as you are making the sound, move your lips closer and rounder as if you were pronouncing "oo" or "oh." Generally, transcription of foreign languages that do not use the Latin alphabet is a lot more consistent than English - it's English that is the weird one after it had gone through the mess of the Great Vowel Shift and emerged with no vowel actually sounding like it is spelled. Hey linguists!