i hate when people in movies/tv are reading ancient languages and they translate everything really smoothly and poetically, as if when people who study ancient languages aren’t consulting three different commentaries and sobbing profusely when we read
ok so like…. it says
“come you all into the deepest cavern, or maybe that’s fireplace, depends on usage, and having come may you give your…. treasures? Skin? Pants? I don’t know, something…. to the….. about-to-be-adored guy, that one who…. okay, he either causes earthquakes or sleeps a lot, I think this might be an idiom….”
“ok, sorry that took so long and i hate to disappoint but i’m still not entirely sure what it means, like, it could be something about a religious ceremony or it could be a dick joke. leaning towards dick joke, might be both. knowing the ancients, probably both. this could very well be an ancient dick temple and we should probably leave.”
Funnest part is when you get shit like this:
Why yes that is a text comprised of almost exclusively crocodile hieroglyphs.
We also can’t get a coherent translation because the grammar makes absolutely no sense. Participles and Participial statements all the way. Sobek who is Crocodile of Crocodopolis who advances the Crocodile for the Crocodiles….
The crocodile hieroglyph is also used to write sovereign and an adjective meaning power…so the text is suuuuuuuper confusing.
As someone who knows nothing of hieroglyphics, I would assume this meant “There’s a lot of crocodiles here, you should probably leave.”
This is clearly how the ancients wrote “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”
forget wanderlust, sonder, all those words for vague dreamy feelings… what I’m asking for is a concise word for the feeling you get when someone makes an assumption about you that’s 100% correct but you really don’t like that anyone was able to make that assumption. for now I’m calling it a fuckor
“he asked me ‘you main junkrat right’ and a wave of fuckor wracked my feeble body”
back in my day we didn’t call it “shitposting”, we called it “nightblogging” and blamed the australians
I’ve been on this god forsaken website for too long.
ok there is a difference between nightblogging and shitposting nightblogging is like “what if apples screamed when we bit them?” shitposting is like “a crisp one donger bill”. nightblogging has more of a focus on theoreticals, especially in stating absurd thoughts in normal ways. shit posting is more often the opposite, stating normal things in ways that make them absurd. “a crisp one dollar bill” isn’t funny or unusual, but replacing “dollar” with the absurdist internet word “donger” is what makes it funny & thus a shitpost. it’s not necessarily that one is more coherent, but that they’re differentiated both by form and by lexicon. nightblogging is surrealism, shitposting is dada
that makes so much sense, i understood all of it, completely and totally changed my views of thinking
You know what I think is really cool about language (English in this case)? It’s the way you can express “I don’t know” without opening your mouth. All you have to do is hum a low note, a high note, then another lower note. The same goes for yes and no. Does anyone know what this is called?
These are called vocables, a form of non-lexical utterance – that is, wordlike sounds that aren’t strictly words, have flexible meaning depending on context, and reflect the speakers emotional reaction to the context rather than stating something specific. They also include uh-oh! (that’s not good!), uh-huh and mm-hmm (yes), uhn-uhn (no), huh? (what?), huh… (oh, I see…), hmmn… (I wonder… / maybe…), awww! (that’s cute!), aww… (darn it…), um? (excuse me; that doesn’t seem right?), ugh and guh (expressions of alarm, disgust, or sympathy toward somebody else’s displeasure or distress), etc.
Every natural human language has at least a few vocables in it, and filler words like “um” and “erm” are also part of this overall class of utterances. Technically “vocable” itself refers to a wider category of utterances, but these types of sounds are the ones most frequently being referred to, when the word is used.
Reblog if u just hummed all of these out loud as you read them
This still doesn’t tell me how to convey this sound in writing. I notice, in fact, that even with all those other sounds written out (hmmm, awww, etc), the I don’t know sound is not written out there!
There must be a slightly more eloquent solution than “he shrugged and made an ‘I don’t know’ sound.”
@porcupine-girl well in a text, i write it iono, but when describing it, that is definitely tougher. i sorta make the sound more like mm-NM-Mm, but that looks like it sounds different than how i hear it. this is a very confusing question.
Of all the skills that futurists predicted would become valuable in the era of constant communication, I don’t think anybody saw “conversational multithreading” coming.
No, I don’t mean holding multiple conversations with different people at the same time. I mean holding two or more completely separate conversations with the same person, via the same medium, at the same time.
Like when you’re texting, and the person on the other end asks you a question, then mentally eight-tracks and asks a different, unrelated question before you’ve finished keying in your response to the first one. So you answer the first question, and a conversation based on that answer ensues; then you answer the second question, and a totally different conversation based on that answer ensues, and now you’re having two separate conversations with the same person at the same time, and have to keep track of which responses pertain to which conversation purely from context.
Sometimes I wonder what the generational cutoff for that seeming unusual is – I didn’t pick up the skill until I was like thirty, so there’s always that undercurrent of generational novelty there.
The only way this differs from my from my day to day existence is that normally my off topic ADHD question tangents are verbal instead of typed
So I used to have a Russian friend who had a pretty thick accent and like a lot of Russians tended to eschew articles. She would say things like “Get in car.” And stuff.
Well one day this asshole who had been kind of tagging along with us asks her why she talks like that because it makes her sound dumb and I still remember her response word for word.
“Me? Dumb? Maybe in America you have to say get in THE car because you are so stupid that people might just get in random car, but in Russia we don’t need to say that. We just fucking know because we are not stupid.”
Thus is why I assume the Heavy speaks the way he does. He’s not stupid.
the big mans a lad i have fuck all, he lets me have a kip in a field he showed me a pond
I think my favorite part is how the first three are totally comprehensible to a modern reader, and then the fourth one is just “Wait, what?” You can practically see where William the Conqueror came crashing into linguistic history like the Kool-Aid Man, hollering about French grammar and the letter Q.
The fact that this language is at a point where “I don’t care” and “behold the field in which I grow my fucks” mean exactly the same thing blows my mind sometimes
sparksoffandommagic 