Honey Star

Now, granted, we don’t know much about Vulcan as a planet. We don’t know a lot about their history other than it’s old and for a long time was violent. Plus, a lot of what we fans see is often called Vulcan calligraphy, so, y’know. Strange happenings.

Here’s Vulcan script and calligraphy pulled from the fandom wiki.

There's not many languages that have similar writing styles, but this vertical style is very common. Chinese is one of the oldest languages we have a lot of proof for as how it evolved. Bone and stone carving was oldest, then bamboo slips, then ink. It's often thought this top down style is adopted due to the way it has to be carved into something, usually in the absence of other easy materials such as clay or wax.

Not that I think Vulcans had bamboo or even a bamboo like plant, but I think they probably had some sort of plant they could strip. They most likely started with parchment as a writing material when they figured that out, or if they somehow had reeds they could make papyrus I guess. To those who don't know, parchment was originally just stretched animal skin. Vulcans don't strike me as a wasteful society. Moving on because I could get off topic so fast.

Vulcan is read top-bottom left-right, which I personally find fun because of the idea of old Vulcan monks trying to not get their writings smeared by their robe sleeves.

The invention of ink was probably a life changer for them as a society. Something I think we forget when talking about old Vulcan is that it wasn't some lawless Mad Max neanderthal type of world. They were a fully fledged civilization eating themselves alive. They almost wiped out their own planet due to their collective paranoia.

Anyways, I think the language would've reflected that at the time but we don't see any of that. I wonder what slang was like.

But in this, I want to talk about the evolution of the script examples between the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th centuries.

While I don't believe this was intentional and was more just an inability to keep shit straight within continuity, I got some thoughts on it.

With the examples of ancient Vulcan and 22nd century calligraphy looking similar and then the 22nd century script looking close, it makes me think of the way cursive has been done in English. Cursive was very useful to minimize wear on quills, lessen ink usage, and make writing faster. I wonder if the script we are seeing is a type of cursive, and then with technology, similar to English writing societies, it faded some. This is Enterprise era, when Vulcans were still very set in older ways.

So then we get an example of 23rd century print, which is wildly different. It only has symbols from the print we saw before. Keep in mind, this is TOS era. They've changed some. Not an awful lot, they live a long time, but we do see change. The drastic change in writing could've been done because of influence from other cultures or, like mentioned above, just straight up tech. Easier to have more distinct characters on displays.

24th century print going back some to a sort of compressed looking version of the 22nd century print really tickles me. It's TNG era now. It makes me think about some kind of revolution done between the periods to connect back to their roots, that obviously they are losing themselves to the Federation and a shift back to conversative values. Definitely something to think about.

Something to also keep in mind when we're talking about print v. calligraphy is that calligraphy is an art, print is for reading. The calligraphy is meant to look impressive and fancy.

Now, there’s also this, which I’ve been loving looking at.

This is the omniglot website with Vulcan script. Looking over the writing on this is phenomenal. I’m so very impressed by people who put this stuff together, I would love to be that kind of guy someday. On it, there’s sample texts for calligraphy, standard print, and handwriting. Literally, if you ever want to figure out how to write stuff, go here. Technically these aren’t like, canon canon but it’s an amazing resource.

We all know Vulcan blood is green. It’s been like that since TOS, and the explanation we get is that their blood is copper based instead of iron based like humans, which is partly what gives us that red. Iron is what allows us to transport oxygen throughout our body.

When copper oxidizes, it becomes a green color. That’s my guess as to why they chose such a rich green color. Here’s the fun part, though. We do actually have life forms on Earth with copper based blood.

Quite a few deep sea creatures (squid, mollusks, octopi) and some kinds of land dwelling have copper based blood! Instead of hemoglobin, they have hemocyanin. Their blood is blue, and like, a pretty solid blue, to be honest. Some mollusks actually have been beneficial in medical research due to their blood, but that’s a whole other thing.

Here’s another fun fact, hemocyanin is actually less efficient than hemoglobin. It doesn’t transport oxygen as well, but, it’s more effective at working in cold climates. That’s why these deep sea creatures have it. It’s an evolutionary thing.

Granted, that doesn’t make sense for the arid desert dwelling species of the Vulcans, but I just thought this was fun. There’s a couple species on Earth (skinks in New Guinea) with green blood, but they do have hemoglobin. They just use biliverdin (the cause of green in bruising) differently and don’t process it out of them. Biliverdin in humans gets processed into bilirubin, and then taken out of the body as both are toxic in high concentrations. High bilirubin counts are the cause for jaundice. Right now we don’t actually know why the skinks are able to keep high concentrates of biliverdin in their body.

Take Vulcans for example. Hand touches (specifically finger touches) are the equivalent of kissing. This is a KNOWN fact that has been reiterated MANY times. Then Kirk and Spock keep holding hands every time they get the chance and the writers expect us to NOT BRING UP THE IMPLICATIONS???

Also Cardassians!!! They flirt by arguing and debating!! We know this because Miles O’Brein Must Suffer (Gilora Rejal). Guess who has weekly arguments scheduled?? BASHIR AND GARAK. Again, the implications just- aren’t addressed??? And when they want Garak to seem straight they make him act super nice.

Sadly, I didn't have time to write anything today, apart from a little ask that's coming later today, but you can still check 7 a.m in the neighborhood, a story I wrote two years ago about Papyrus fighting Karens.

It's right here : https://archiveofourown.org/works/47914330/chapters/120802228

It's 7 am and Papyrus' neighbor decides it's an appropriate hour to ruin his life. Papyrus just wants to go to the grocery store.

Papyrus is starting to lose his patience.