Brian BìnhIn an attempt to break up the constant doom scrolling, I'm going to post random little snippets of information I've picked up over the years. Stuff that is not at all topical because I need a little break from the present horrors.
If you buy a bottle of 3 year old Scotch and put it in your cupboard for twenty years until you bring it out for a special occasion, you don't have a bottle of 23 year old Scotch. You have a twenty year old bottle of 3 year old Scotch. Liquor ages in the barrel and picks up flavor from the wood. It doesn't pick up anything from the inert and nonporous glass bottle.
Wine ages in the bottle because it isn't distilled. It is more than just alcohol. It has sugars, tannins, & other stuff that continue to react chemically to change the flavor profile. This change isn't always for the better. Depending on a huge variety of factors (temperature, light, type of grapes, etc.) wine quality generally follows a bell curve: it improves, peaks, then degrades. Most wine peaks between 6 months & 5 years old. Very old wine is bad but costly because people think it's linear.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae & S. pastorianus are the two species of yeast used to make beer. S. pastorianus makes lager. S. cerevisiae makes ale, but also wine, liquor, mead, & bread. "Winemaking yeast", "champagne yeast", "baker's yeast", and "distiller's yeast" are all breeds of the same species: S. cerevisiae. S. pastorianus is a hybrid species that appeared when S. cerevisiae crossbred with another species of wild yeast in a brewery in Munich in the 1600s. There was no lager in the Middle Ages!
Speaking of the Middle Ages, you've probably heard that "ye" was actually "the" and was never pronounced with a Y sound because they used the Y to represent the letter thorn, Þ. You may wonder why they picked Y as a substitute for a letter that looked more like a b superimposed on a p. It's because in a lot of handwriting, it looked like a Y. The runic form was a stick with a triangle on the side. Later forms were rounder. Some miniscule forms were much curvier like a fancy Y.
Serifs were not extra bits added to letters as decoration. They were a natural consequence of writing with a quill. The tip of a quill has a little split through which ink flows by capillary action. When you press the quill to a page, the end spreads open on contact then narrows as you ease up on the pressure when you draw it across the page. That initial spread meant each stroke started with a serif "flare" (and sometimes ended with one if you pressed hard at the end, like in capital legs).
You've heard how "uppercase" & "lowercase" letters are called that because typesetters literally stored them in cases with the majuscules on top. Did you know that majuscule & miniscule letters are two different versions of the Latin alphabet? The ancients wrote in majuscule letters. That's right. THE ROMANS WROTE IN ALL CAPS LIKE AN ANGRY INTERNET COMMENT (when they weren't using Greek to look fancy and dignified). Miniscule letters came much later around the start of the Middle Ages.
When scribes started using miniscule, they only used miniscule. it was its own alphabet.they wrote completely in lowercase letters.they also didn't space out their sentences much.parchment was expensive so they didn't want to waste space.
It wasn't until Charlemagne's time that scribes invented "mixed case": using capital letters to start paragraphs and mark proper nouns while using miniscule for everything else. Capital letters helped break up the wall of text so it was easier to read.
Upper and lowercase letters were two different alphabets stuck together to give us capitalization. If they had chosen a different majuscule alphabet, we could have had sentences like this:
"Тhe Лord of the Рings" was a sequel to "Тhe Хobbit", both of which were written by Д'.Р.Р. Тolkien. Иt tells the story of the Оne Рing after Бilbo gives it to his nephew Фrodo and Гandalf tells him to destroy it.
Michael J. Fox's real middle name is Andrew, but he didn't like "Michael A. Fox" as a stage name. By SAG rules, he had to use a name other than "Michael Fox" because there was already an actor with that name, so he just stuck a J in the middle.
In his hit movie "Back to the Future", his character's father, George, says he has to get home so he doesn't miss his favorite TV program, "Science Fiction Theatre". "Science Fiction Theatre" had only 8 episodes. Four starred the original Michael Fox!
The Vietnamese language has *many* pronouns for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person. I can think of dozens off the top of my head and I suspect it's actually hundreds. They vary based on both relative and absolute age, social standing, incredibly complex family trees, profession, politeness, marital status, and more. Vietnamese people tend to ask a lot of personal questions when first meeting someone, which foreigners think is kind of rude, but they need that information to know how to refer to you.
Because of the complexity of its pronouns, the Vietnamese translation adds an extra layer of depth to the otherwise shallow dialogue of the Star Wars original trilogy, which I watched on TV in Vietnam.
People speak to droids with the pronouns used to speak to pets or farm animals. Droids address people as professional superiors.
Droids speak to each other like they are siblings.
Vader speaks to everyone (except the emperor and Tarkin) as an arrogant superior addressing an underling.
Everyone addresses Vader as if he were a high ranking imperial mandarin, which he kind of is.
Leia is addressed as a princess. Han constantly butchers it and mixes up her rank constantly until the Carbonite/"I know" scene when they start addressing each other as lovers.
Vader speaks formally to Luke as an arrogant superior addressing an unknown young man. When he says "I am your father", he suddenly switches to the pronouns used by a father to his child. He continues addressing Luke as father to child until he dies. Luke continues speaking as a humble peasant addressing a mandarin until the next film when he finally tells Leia "he's my father". Then he speaks to Vader as a child to his father.
When I say Vietnamese has a lot of pronouns, I'm not exaggerating. There are pronouns for almost every specific family relationship. Not just "aunt" or "uncle" but "the aunt who is my father's younger brother's wife". For some reason "parent's older sibling" is just one term though. Also "cousin" isn't really a thing: they're just "surname siblings" that are addressed like siblings.
Vietnamese has pronouns that are only used in fiction, because they describe relationships that don't exist in the real world. Some are for feudal relationships that no longer exist in the modern world, but are still used in historical settings. Some are relationships that only exist in fiction.
There's a 2nd person ("you") pronoun for addressing talking animals in folktales or cartoons. This is different than the word used to talk to pets and farm animals that aren't expected to talk back.
elilla&, autostopowiczka@BrianBinh oh this is cool, Japanese has that too, I didn't know any other language that does that!
it has a fair amount of pronouns only used in fiction, though I think not in the hundreds, more like a few dozen. but also specific grammar inflections, verb endings, particle and whatnot that make you sound like, say, a wizened old grampa, a megalomaniac monarch, a cosmic deity, a spoiled young lady, a ninja, or a rough blue-collar worker—but not how any of these people would talk in real life, more as sort of, trope talk. like in the novel I'm currently reading, there's a scene in which a little girl answers to a question with "sayō de gozaru" where normal people would say "sō desu", and immediately the main character goes, "oh Naomi-chan, you like ninjas then?"—because these are the same words meaning the same thing, but inflected in a "ninja from TV shows" kind of way.
in jp this is called yakuwari-go, or "role speech" http://skinsui.cocolog-nifty.com/sklab/index.html . I have an entire role speech dictionary and it's one of my favourite dictionaries ever.
Owlor 🦋@elilla @BrianBinh I've definitely been tripped up in anime where they've been playing with this in a way that's really hard to translate, like when the badass talking weapon randomly switches between sounding like a cool entity and sounding like a little girl as a bit.
@Owlor @BrianBinh yeah I did manga scanlation for a few years and the hardest part for me was to convey character colour, which is expressed grammatically by trope conventions, in English where the same thing would be expressed purely by intonation, body language and vocabulary choice, and only one of those are represented in writing.
@elilla @BrianBinh The only real example of "grammar that's only ever really used in fiction to convey a sense of character" I can think of in English is mangled ren-faire speak, which might be why it shows up a lot in translations 🤔
@Owlor @BrianBinh I actually experimented with that myself when translating Vinland Saga, but I wasn't very good at it, and my success varied. it's hard not to make it corny; look at how the first Dragon Quest or the original Thor comics went heavy on the thou art's, but the modern versions just gave up trying.
I know one author who does this really well: Sarah Monette in "The Goblin Emperor". she uses "you" for formal and "thou" for informal in a court setting and magically makes it sound natural somehow—the first time a character thous another you actually do feel like suddenly intimacy has been raised, finally a friendly chat between friends, which is amazing given that "thou" sounds like exactly the opposite to modern ears—along with a few other uses of archaic grammar that aren't so common in the average fantasyspeak, with a stylistic masterfulness I struggle to convey in one toot. probably has to do with her being both an English PhD and already established as a fantasy author by that point.
did I mention Goblin Emperor has a #conlang? Ethuverazin is very underrated as a conlang! it sounds really pretty while being much simpler and more approachable than Sindarin. when I first read the novel I had to carry a little notepad with the book everywhere because I kept being distracted by spotting a suffix here or recognising a morpheme in a court title over there. my only complaint about Ethuveraz is that we only get tantalising hints of the orc dialects and by the time we reach the second novel the author's enthusiasm for her own language seems to have waned, but I still enjoyed the heck out of it.