#clair's corner

I made up a conlang for a specific story a while ago, and I've kinda gradually added to it bit by bit over the years and, for the sake of having one more complete language rather than a bunch of random half-baked collection of words in various fake languages, decided I could just reuse this one. I'm rather proud of what a fucking mess the systematic conjugation is, and if I made a second conlang I might be tempted to do that Latin thing where all the nouns get their own genders or some such nonsense, just to distinguish the two. Also, it just seemed like a fun idea to me in the same way that, like, you sometimes see people reuse the same character designs across multiple comics as part of their "cast" that act out their stories.

Anywho, I've been trying to reorganize my conlang notes for a bit now. Streamlined spelling rules and whatnot, and now I'm shifting the exact file type its stored on so it'll be easier to toggle if it's sorted by English or Conlang alphabetically, and I came across the words for dragon and dragonfly.

In the original story I started this for, the group that speaks this language has a disdain towards dragons, so the word for dragon is a compound word that directly translates as fire worm. Dragonflies, on the other hand, are seen as signs of luck, so the word for dragonfly can also be used to mean luck in certain contexts. I distinctly remember being pleased with the fact that I'd framed bits of language around cultural attitudes, and I wouldn't want to replace those words within that story. But neither of those choices logically follow in any other story I've toyed with applying this language to, since the cultural context around them wasn't applied to any other world I've built.

For the time being, I've dealt with it by making a second, similar version of dragon for use in other stories, and added a note to dragonfly about how it only gets to carry dual meanings in the one story world. So I guess I'm now seeing a bit of dialect diversion. Which miffs me a little. Now I feel like I'll be under more pressure to alter additional words for a given story.

HBO pulled a bunch of its cartoons off its platform and the shows now can’t be legally viewed anywhere. There’s no legal copies because the cartoons were only available for stream and the distributor apparently had market data showing demand for DVDs was too low to be worth production cost. Now a bunch of people are freaking out over lost media.

In any case, I’m taking the critique down because it seemed ill focused. There were plenty of much more significant writing issues that plenty of people have talked about at length, and recent comments from the showrunner have more or less confirmed my suspicions that they basically animated a pantser’s first draft, but symbolic naming is a pretty weak gripe. Especially since while I do think it’s a nice idea to do something with that heavy of a naming convention, I don’t usually expect symbolic names from a story. I guess I was just trying to pick something that hadn’t been said 50x already? Idk.

Me, reading my own story: Wow. It sure is convenient that the item your character stumbled on twelve chapters ago which functions in a specific way established in chapter one turned out to be useful in a way that makes complete sense within the rules of this setting that you've heavily foreshadowed but won't fully explain for a few more chapters.