l i n g s t u f f

if you happen to know what common greek and latin roots mean you can spot someone mistranslating them, which comes in handy very often

normal sounding words are almost never coined as acronyms. if someone claims something is an acronym you should literally always fact check it

sometimes the story presented by a proposed etymology falls apart if you like. think about it. why would a hypothetical continent be named after an animal speculated to not live there? why would an idiom's original form be something that very obviously sounds like something you'd say as a comeback to the version everyone already knows?

It is *not* AI. It is not """interpreting""" Rocky's words/meaning. It only picks up literal words.

This is how it works:

Eridian words are musical notes/chords

Soundwaves are physical, and at different frequencies they make different patterns! These physical patterns, and therefore Eridian language, is formulaic and repeatable. This is easily processed by computers in a reliable way. This is also lucky for Grace!!

Grace and Rocky create a database that maps notes/chords to words

When Rocky speaks, the computer looks up the exact notes in their pre-made database and returns the associated word

It is a FORMULAIC LOOKUP, NOT AI

Rocky isn't saying "My loneliness knows no bounds, and I have forgotten my soul in the endless abyss" which the translator outputs as "Rocky in space too long"

Rocky is literally saying "... Rocky in space too long" knowing that that's the only words the translator has to draw from.

Rocky is doing the hard translation work in his head before he speaks because Grace is learning and the computer can only regurgitate words that have already been saved — in the order that Rocky says them.

Like when you have a friend who is learning your language, and you slow down and use simple words/sentence structure and fewer slang/jargon words to make it easier for them.

Because hearing is Eridians' primary sense, they have a better memory for sounds, which means Rocky picks up English quicker than Grace can pick up Eridian.

In the book, there is no text-to-speech involved, Grace records Rocky's vocab into a spreadsheet, which he uses for reference on the fly and also as a DIY duolingo for Eridian practice. The movie just adds a speech generator (which is a pre-recorded soundbank provided by a NASA journalist, played by James Ortiz, lol).

But it's doing the same thing — just out loud for the audience's benefit (and so Grace doesn't have to be running back and forth to his spreadsheet in the early days). It matches soundwaves that Rocky generates to the vocabulary spreadsheet and then pulls the corresponding English word from the soundbank.

Obviously it *should* sound very early GPS voice 🤣 because it's word-by-word without infection, but although Ortiz did try that a bit, it wasn't working well on-camera. So they turned him loose to give Rocky's voice personality. And we can suspend our disbelief for it because he's *fantastic*.

But especially when writing for Rocky in fics, we need to remember exactly what's happening, otherwise it won't sound authentic.

-eth is just an older variant of -s for third person singular. the octopus likes/liketh me. he wonders/wondereth what’s going on.

-est is only for thou. thou goest. thou takest. sometimes even in past tense for Some Reason- didst thou see that?

thou knowest. in some dialects in northern england -eth has changed to -s like everywhere else and -est has survived but also changed to -s, this is why the arctic monkeys guy yells “tha knows”. “ya know” “thou knowest”

while we’re here:

here, there, where = this place, that place, which place

hither, thither, whither = to this place, to that place, to which place

So, genuinely no hard feelings, I get where y'all are coming from, but that was actually kind of my entire point

The Rosetta Stone was and is real.

This is indisputable. You can go see the Rosetta Stone on display right now!! I'd say you could even it touch it, but there's museum glass in the way, so that the oils on human skin can't further degrade this 2,000-year-old stele, which is one of the most important surviving historical texts in the world.

The Tower of Babel is not real, and it never was.

The Tower of Babel is a millennia-old religious story about a mythological tower, which serves as a mythological explanation for the origin of different human languages. Yes, there are some religious historians who speculate that the myth was inspired by one or another physical tower, but no, that doesn't prove anything other than "this is how many people in this cultural explained or understood that sort of event."

The Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, is an object of translation that actually exists

Photo credit: By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved from Wikipedia article "Rosetta Stone." https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3153928

That picture is of a real object. It is not of a picture of a 3,000+ year old myth.

Our attempts to understand each other will not result in us being struck down by some force from on high!

And the true path to a world where we can all understand each other does not involve us all speaking the same language. That's racist bs

an over-simplified guide for people who have never studied them

from real questions I have received

as I am finally qualified enough to talk about them

WHAT?

A language family spanning (mostly northern) Eurasia. The three biggest languages by amount of speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian.

WAIT, WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE ARE MORE?

The Sámi languages might be the most famous of the "smaller" Uralic languages, but have you heard about Karelian? Udmurt? Hill Mari? Nganasan? There are 38~42 Uralic languages that we know as of today.

WHERE ARE THESE OTHER LANGUAGES?

(image description: the locations of the Uralic languages on a map. The Uralic languages span from modern-day Hungary, the northern Nordics, and northern Russia.)

(CONTINUE READING UNDER THE CUT)

Just as a note, word cognates can be tricky because especially beyond basic terminology they get borrowed fairly easily! That's why a bigger emphasis is based on grammar when determining which languages are related.

Some common Uralic grammar features:

They're agglutinative, so grammatical information is conveyed via suffixes added to word stems

Lots of grammatical cases!

The locative system in cases has a three-way split (to, in/on, from)

Possessive suffixes

Grammatical singular, dual and plural (So separate grammatical ways of showing "I do x", "We two do x" and "We (3+) do x")

No grammatical gender

The negative verb (so rather than a particle like English no, the Uralic no is conjugated as a verb)

Infinitive uses of verbs (forms of verbs used more like nouns)

Object conjugation (the conjugation of the verb depends on only the subject (who's doing) but also the object or what/who is being acted on)

French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Romanian: it has wonderful balance, so we will sensibly name it “level” - as in ⚖️, balance. It’s so rare that all of us come to such a nice consensus. Hopefully it’s not because, like, English rode in roughshod and -

English, spitting: dragonfly

French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Romanian and a whole host of others: normally you’re more with us than everyone else - did you … get that from the celts, or…?

Welsh: no. Fuckoff. snake’s servant

Irish - BIG NEEDLE

Basque, supportively - witch’s needle!

Swedish - troll’s spindle

Norwegian - eye sticker

Danish - goldsmith

Croatian - fairy’s horse

Finnish: wolf’s rod (?)

Hungarian - sieve-knitter

Turkish - little Joseph 😊

It looks like the “libellule” variants swept over a lot of older regional names, themes in which seemed to be snakes, magic, horses/riders, witches and devils, and needles. Normally it’s English words that do that, but in this case, English is going 🗣️ DRAGONFLY 🗣️ in a mild eddy of independence, and is clearly not guilty.

As far as we know today, dragons featured only in German witch trials from Thuringia, Saxony, and Bavaria, i.e. from the eastern parts of today’s Germany. [...] The belief in a connection between witchcraft and dragons seems to belong to the bedrock of witch beliefs in this area. “Dragon whore” (“Drachenhure”) was a common insult in sixteenth-century Saxony. Dragons featured in the oldest eastern German trials from the early sixteenth century, and they disappeared only in the early eighteenth century when the witch hunts themselves finally petered out.

Dillinger, Johannes. "The Dragon as a Household Spirit: Witchcraft and Economics in Early Modern and Modern Sources." Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 17 no. 2, 2022, p. 212-240. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2022.0024.

Immortal: It's called Duolingo, it's a language-learning app. I gotta maintain my streak.

Duolingo: Gefeliciteerd!

Person: Why are you teaching yourself a dead language?

so like if the username is something like "dancingwithbears" they'll refer to their husband as "Mr. Bears"