AnnemaReads

Hi! So, I've been working on revamping this short story that I originally wrote about 2 years ago in which some of it takes place in Mesopotamia, and I've just realised that the language I used is probably either made up or from the wrong time period.

What I used before was ana libbu, which I thought would mean "my love/my heart", but I'm realising that doesn't even work with the possessive not being -ngu...

Do you know how someone would say "my love" in Sumerian? Or maybe some other terms of endearment, both for a romantic partner and friends or family members? Did they have an equivalent of "darling" or "sweetheart"?

Hope you can help :)

Hello!

First, I did some digging on “ana libbu”, which seems to be a small part of a set phrase shag ana libbu, meaning something like “into its heart” or “into its interior” - shag “heart”, ana “its/that one” and libbu “interior, inner organs”. I can’t find an association with romance or love, so not sure what your source was on that. If you wanted a literal translation of “my heart” it would be shagngu or shangu (as the g of shag often drops out before a consonant), written 𒊮𒈬 in cuneiform.

The term I have seen most often for “my love”, for a romantic partner, is kiang 𒆠𒉘 or kianga 𒆠𒉘𒀀, meaning “beloved”. It’s derived from the verb phrase ki ang “to love”. There’s no vocab distinction between romantic v nonromantic love in Sumerian, but they wrote much more often of romantic love, so I’d definitely use kiang in a romantic context.

For a nonromantic context, I’ve found the Sumerians often used what would be the “regular” term as a term of endearment. In the well-known Sumerian lullaby, the child is addressed simply as “child”, dumu. So for a spouse, you could say dam(ngu) “(my) spouse”, or for a sister, nin “sister” would suffice. A lot of Sumerian literature can read to modern eyes as surprisingly distant or abrasive, because they were a pretty direct people, and didn’t use separate terms in this way, but calling your relative by their relevant term could hold just as much endearment as “sweetheart” would to us.

I’ve been working on this post on and off for the last few months. I always intended to post it during Pride Month, and hey, here we are. I’ve got a lot going on in my life right now, so this might be the last book rec post for quite a while.

When possible, I’m linking to the Queer SFF Book Database since it has information on trigger warnings and links to reviews by queer readers. When not in the database of 6/15/20, I’ll be linking to Goodreads. Links are all below the cut.

Do not recommend cis authors on this post. This post is for centering trans and nonbinary authors. Please note that trans people write all sorts of stories and protagonists, and these books don’t automatically have trans or queer protagonists. 

My master list of book rec posts is here, if you want to find more.

If you’re looking for a starting place on trans SFF, I strongly suggest the Transcendent anthology series as an overview. It’ll introduce you to a wide array of incredible stories from trans and nonbinary authors. 

This list does not cover all of the amazing trans and nonbinary authors writing science fiction and fantasy! There are many more, and please feel free to suggest them here.

california wildfires surrounding coronavirus protocols sign. 2020 in an image.

In the olden days, if footage was not used in a film, it was either destroyed or erased so they could reuse the reel, because it was cheaper than storing unused film.

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

Read your work out loud, even if it’s just to yourself. This will give you a better sense of the dialogue and whether or not it is something that people would actually say out loud.

Beware of “talking heads”. If you have a section where it’s purely dialogue, make sure to break it up with some action. Are they gesturing with their hands? Moving around? Maybe there’s a change in their tone of voice?

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

I’m not joking, exaggerating, or engaging in an ad hominem. One of the foundational elements of radical feminism is the notion that violence and abuse are masculine traits, and that women, freed of patriarchal influence, are naturally nurturing, loving, and positive. It proposes that abuse in any form is almost always perpetrated by men, and when a woman commits abuse it is only because she has been poisoned by the patriarchy into believing that abusive acts are okay. 

Incidentally, radical feminism is also the source of political lesbianism, which promotes the idea that regardless of their actual orientation, it is more feminist to commit romantically to other women as a means of avoiding male domination.