Fate's Complaining Corner

"Re"-domestication of cheetahs?

With reference to This Post In ancient Egypt, Cheetahs were sometimes used as hunting animals like greyhounds, and kept as housepets by the royal family and later, many wealthy households.

Now, there's an argument about how "domesticated" these cheetahs were- the majority of them were captured from the wild as adults and tamed/trained to tolerate humans and obey hunting commands, mostly because back then and still today, cheetahs are extremely hard to breed in captivity. Some were bred and raised from cubs, and there was not a shortage of cheetahs living in and around human habitation for them to replace stock with.

Even today, cheetahs are... weirdly comfortable around humans, if those humans know how to mind their manners. Game wardens in Kruger National Park sometimes sleep next to young cheetahs they are re-introducing into the wild, or have had female cheetahs who are familiar with them drop their cubs off on their feet to 'babysit' while she goes hunting.

Here's a pair of San hunters from the Naankuse Wildlife Reserve in Namibia bow-hunting while a wild local male cheetah hangs out with them (the angle makes him look much bigger and closer to the men than he is, but he's still VERY close). The male's name is Aiko, and is well-known to these men- they're not worried about his presence because they know how to respect his space and he knows not to go after game they've downed. Game they miss is free for him to run down, and game he flushes from the bushes are much easier to shoot- a mutually beneficial partnership. It's extremely similar to how the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea hunt with their dogs, some of the most recently domesticated and most similar to ancient 'proto-dogs' alive today.

So, cheetahs aren't domesticated the way dogs and housecats are- they haven't been selectively bred for generations, they're not dependent on humans, and they can and will attack people that bother them.

But like Coyotes, the remaining cheetahs we have are VERY habituated to humans, arguably even moreso than coyotes are, and we've made a lot of progress in getting them to breed in captivity- Ironically by pairing them up with highly domesticated dogs, who teach them domesticated animal behaviors like "not worrying about everything".

With Coyotes, the obstacle to domestication are mostly practical matters like "getting a coyote farm funded, zoned, built and insured.", whereas with cheetahs the problem is "there are almost no cheetahs left to practice domestication on and the ones we do have are already inbred". There IS a lot of commercial interest in domesticated cheetahs, so I think a good way to get the funding for species conservation and genetic re-diversification of cheetahs would be to frame it as a prerequisite to "Re-Domestication" and pet cheetahs.

He’s her best friend, and she doesn’t even know it. They’re so close, that in the book, people think they’re sleeping together, and poor Grace is so confused because he thought that was his platonic work wife, wdym people think we’re sleeping together, that’s my person that I crack jokes with and then she glares at me because they’re not funny.

She’s softer with him than anybody else and is only ever vulnerable around him. We see in the movie, he’s the only one who ever gets her to smile, and sometimes even laugh, and then she serenades all of them, but mainly him, and he stares at her with those big, shiny eyes so lovingly, and she points at him when she sings, “everything’s gonna be alright”, and then she gives him those eyes, so loving.

And then she’s trying to stop herself from crying when she’s sending him away because, against her will, he’s become her person, and somewhere along the way, she’s become his, and they will have forever ended this relationship on bad terms, and nothing can fix that.

It’s a platonic tragedy. It’s a platonic love story. This is something we don’t get often, or, like, ever, and it’s deep and it’s tragic and it’s sad.

But even after, Eva’s still taking care of him. Packing clothes she knew would bring him comfort. Programming the ship to know how he likes his coffee. And Grace is still watching out for her, speaking to her directly in his video logs, with that same lopsided smile he used to throw her way.

He uses Rocky’s sign for goodbye, and she uses it back, and how did this book and movie give us such a deep platonic friendship because, guys, this NEVER HAPPENS.

Grace: Hey, uh, Rocky…

Rocky: You have a question, Grace my best friend Grace?

Grace: yeah. um. Why does everyone else wear clothes and you. Don’t.

Rocky: oh. That’s because they’re mostly from 🎵🎵🎵 and people are weird about clothes there.

Grace: what

Rocky: in 🎵🎵🎵 they think it’s wrong to have your carapace uncovered in public. Which is stupid. It’s a CARAPACE who cares if your carapace is out. We all have one. My country understands this. I can’t help it if the space program was primarily organized by the 🎵🎵🎵 government because they’re the ones with power and resources so everyone who works at the space elevator thinks they need to wear clothes even when they don’t actually have to.

Grace: Rocky are you a nudist

Rocky: don’t know word. I’m 🎶🎵🎶 and also the Savior of Erid so the 🎵🎵🎵 guys can’t tell me I have to wear a shirt anymore. SUCK IT

reason 1 million why i love zukka: how extra insane it makes hakoda's family tree

He’s red and he’s white and he’s green and he’s grey / My bonny young dragon, come hither away...

The mirror replied "To whom?"

"The miller who made the flour for my bread," the queen would say, or "Whoever spun the thread my shawl was made of".

The second time, she says "To the King," and she is pleased to see herself once more.

The third time, she says "To the Royal Advisor," and is once more satisfied to see herself.

The fourth time, she says "To the scribe who takes the King's letters." She is shown the man's wife. And she seethes, but quiets herself, for it is only right that a man loves his wife.

The fifth time, she says "To the Court Wizard," and is shown the man's departed mother as he remembers her from his youth, radiant and smiling and warm and larger than life.

The tenth time, she says "To the Stable Master," and is shown the fastest horse in the stable, majestic and free as the wind even in captivity

"To the baker," she is shown the man's daughter, young and adorable and full of joy and laughter.

"To the artist who did my portrait," she is shown a painting of a woman done by the man's teacher, who he still looks up to now that he is well established himself.

"To the Royal Knight," she is surprised but not displeased to see the castle's entire guard force in the middle of doing drills.

The one hundredth time she asks the mirror, and it asks her "to whom?" she once again says, "To me." And she does the same the one hundred and second, and again and again and again.

But then the speakers of Gallo-Romanic dialects went even further and they got rid of the "k" sound entirely and started just saying the l and the vowel, which eventually got us to the Old French "leu".

Now the thing is, right, that in the old languages the spelling is very much a sort of consensus thing. It's not perfectly phonetic, because it can't be: all of the languages in question had phonemes that weren't exactly the same as the Latin that existed when and where the Latin alphabet was formalized, right? So as people wrote down the Old French vernacular, they basically took the letters they were taught and they used them to represent the sounds they were making.

This happens with all the languages; there's a really neat thing where if you look at Visigothic manuscripts, writing in the area that would become Spain and the vernacular form that would eventually be Spanish, you can see the difference between the sound of "v" and the sound of "b" disappearing, so that there are manuscripts where "Ave Maria" is written "Abe Maria", because to the people reading it, b and v made the same sound.

This is relevant to the question because of a fun little fact about mediaeval orthography! Which is that the characters that we now feel are absolutely separate, different letters - that is u and v - were both used for both sounds. It's not that "u" and "v" were the same letter exactly - they weren't - but that the character you used was the same and which you used depended more (properly) on where in the word the letter came, than which one it was.

So the word "hut" would indeed be written with "u", but the word "university" might well be written "vniuersity".

But it gets worse from here, because the sound of the letter we now call "v" and the letter we call "f" were also often used interchangeably. So it might actually be written "vnifersity".

If your eyes are crossing, remember that we still randomly stick "qu" in places to be "kw" and there's quite complicated rules about when the character "c" says a hard back of throat sound the same as the letter "k" and when it says a soft sibilant like "s" and also sometimes when it does something completely different.

Now as it happens the point of writing is to be able to take words from your head, put them on paper (or parchment, in this case), and then send them much farther away in both time and space to someone who absolutely cannot hear you say these words, and then put those thoughts in their head.

Which meant that you have this sort of weird liminal thing where "leu" could be spelled "lev", because u and v were interchangeable, and then also this thing where v and f were interchangeable, and both were being sent around to various places and read to others who may, or may not, do a lot of reading as opposed to a little, or may be reading in a different dialect than they speak (because remember, we're talking about mediaeval France, which means we're actually talking about a country with two major language divisions - Langue D'oc and Langue D'oïl - which then inside of them have a reasonable fuckload of languages that are mostly mutually intelligible most of the time), and so on, which means that the noise for u and the noise for f meet in the middle and may both be represented by "v" and while we're at it they may all just be pronouncing the word differently, and as you saw in the whole move from "locus" to "leu" in the first place, that can involve ending up in quite a different place through a totally logical means.

We don't know for absolute certain if this is why the word "leu", ported over to English with the Normans and added to our language, changed its pronunciation and spelling to "lief" or "liev". You will note that along the way both to Middle English and to Middle French, it grew an "i" in before the "e" sound, because words do that.

We do have some records of Old French that are spelled "leuf" or "lef"; we also got our Frenchishness from the Norman Conquest, which is to say the brand of French very specifically spoken by a bunch of Francicized Scandinavians who spoke a very specific one of those Langues D'oïl. So we do know that the idea that this word ended in the sound we might associate with the letter "f" had already took up in a bunch of different places.

The original idea of "lieutenant" is quite literally a "placeholder" - it was someone you left in your place. So if you were your overlord's "lieutenant" you were the person who gave other people orders in his place, the person he delegated to. Much like "captain", when these words were first used they did not designate a specific rank in a highly developed system with rigid relationships, but rather were the names for roles that people occupied in relationship to the enterprise/activity/whatever.

This is why in the books, the Witch King of Angmar is referred to frequently as Sauron's "lieutenant" - Tolkien knew this shit preeeeetty well and liked using words in those contexts.

So in French, they moved along the path of saying "lieu" as the word is said in French today, with no consonant at the end. Their "lieutenant", their "placeholder", maintained that pronunciation. Americans then actively wanted to distance themselves from the British and were at the time buddy-buddy with the French, so they took that pronunciation on.

Meanwhile at some point Middle English - arising from Old English and Norman French - had shifted to the "liev", the one that had a fricative on the end, which was one of the pronunciations attested in the spelling shift to "leuf".