Welcome to Tsyllaes

what kind of english is that? let's look at some famous examples of each.

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, / þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, / hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. <- this is old english. note that it is unintelligible to a modern english speaker. (excerpt from beowulf)

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth / Inspired hath in every holt and heeth / Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne / Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne … <- this is middle english. it is more intelligible, but it’s still very different from what we speak now. (excerpt from the canterbury tales)

Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. / Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight? <- this is early modern english. this is so intelligible that we trust teenagers to read it in school. (excerpt from macbeth)

the english you are using to give a post a medieval or renaissance/shakespearean vibe is early modern english, not old english. (it's fine that you're using early modern english for a medieval vibe; no one expects you to learn middle english for a silly post about knights.)

how do you use pronouns?

'thou' is the informal second-person singular pronoun.

thou/thee/thy/thine

thou is the nominative form. you can use it for the subject of a sentence -> thou knowest me.

thee is the oblique form. you can use it for the object of a sentence -> i know thee.

thy and thine are the genitive forms. you can use them as possessive adjectives for nouns starting with consonants and vowels respectively. -> thy leg is broken. thine arm is broken too.

thine is also the possessive form. think about it like the word 'mine'*. -> my heart was once thine.

*'mine' is also used like thine as a possessive adjective in early modern english; you would say 'mine art' instead of 'my art'

ye and you

originally, 'ye' was the formal or plural nominitive second-person pronoun, and 'you' was the oblique form. so, it would be 'ye know me' and 'i know you'. 'ye' fell out of use and was replaced by 'you'. at that point it was already used as singular. but it was still much more formal than 'thou'.

the 'ye' you see in 'ye olde shoppe' stuff is not this pronoun. it is the way that printers who no longer had a thorn (þ) wrote the word 'the' (previously 'þe'). the 'y' in certain typefaces looked like a thorn, so we got 'ye' for 'the'.

how do you conjugate a verb?

you can't just slap a -th or -st onto the end of any verb. those are for specific conjugations. phrases like "i hath noticed" or "he thinkest that" are not grammatically sound. it's like saying "i has noticed" or "he think that".

the -st or -est ending is for (most) present and past tense verbs conjugated with 'thou'

some examples: thou canst, thou couldst, thou sayest, thou goest, thou wentest, thou hast, thou hadst, thou dost (or doest).

'thou' also has a few irregulars. some examples: thou wilt, thou art and thou wast (for 'to be'), thou shalt.

the -th or -eth ending is for (most) present and past tense conjugated with 'he', 'she', or 'it'

some examples: he hath, she sayeth, it doth, he goeth, she thinketh, it moveth

there are, of course, irregulars. the most important one is 'to be', which conjugates the same for this set as it does in modern english.

note: not every verb conjugates this way. for example, past tense verbs might use auxiliary verbs. so, not 'she cookedeth', but 'she did cook'.

by and large, the 'i', 'we', 'you' (or 'ye'), and 'they' conjugations were the same as they are today.

there were also some verbs that were used differently than we use them today, though (some of these fell out of use over the early modern period):

to be -> sometimes this verb is used instead of 'to have' as the auxiliary verb. 'i am arrived' means 'i have arrived', and 'she is come to see thee' means 'she has come to see you'.

to do -> sometimes this is used for the present progressive (i think that's the right name for it). 'he does speak' means 'he is speaking', and 'i do write' means 'i am writing'.

would -> this can be used to express a desire. 'i would i were a bird' means 'i wish i were a bird'

must -> this can be used without 'go' to mean 'must go'. 'i must to england' means 'i must go to england'

will -> this can be used without 'have' to mean 'will have'. 'you'll none of that' means 'you will have none of that'

there are a million other things i'm not covering, like different sentence structures for questions ('thinkest thou...?' as a valid alternative to 'dost thou think...?'), and different contractions ('she'll not' rather than 'she won't') but this post is long as fuck and i have things to do! enjoy! linguists, feel free to correct me on what name of tenses or declensions or whatever i have mixed up.

'wherefore' = 'why', not 'where'. think about it pairing with 'therefore'. an example of the two in use:

'my love, wherefore didst thou pretend to see me not?' [babe, why did you pretend not to see me?]

'thy father, from whom we do keep our love hidden, did at that moment walk nearby. therefore i turned from thee that he might not espy us together' [we're keeping our relationship secret from your dad and he was walking by. i did it so he wouldn't see us together.]

'hither' = 'to here', not 'here'. there's a whole set of these, actually. 'whither' = 'to where' and 'thither' = 'to there'. these pair with 'hence' ('from here'), 'whence' ('from where'), and 'thence' ('from there'). an example of some of these in use:

'whence came you?' [where did you come from?]

(pointing to the left) 'thence came i hither.' [i came here from there.]

'and whither go you now?' [and where are you going now?]

(pointing to the right) 'my lord calls me thither.' [my boss is calling me over there]

'very well. get you hence.' [alright, get away from here.]

'whom' ≠ fancy 'who' and this one is just also true today.

'whom' works for the object of a sentence. 'who' is for the subject. in other words, 'whom' receives the action and 'who' does the action.

'whom wrote that letter to you?' -> incorrect! this should be 'who wrote that letter to you?' because 'who' is doing the action.

'whom did you write that letter to?' (or even better, 'to whom did you write that letter?') -> correct! 'whom' here is receiving the action.

oh.

would you look at that.

England’s King Charles II took medication made from human skulls after suffering a seizure, and, until 1909, physicians commonly used human skulls to treat neurological conditions.

huh.

Noble’s new book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, and another by Richard Sugg of England’s University of Durham, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy. There were few vocal opponents of the practice, even though cannibalism in the newly explored Americas was reviled as a mark of savagery. Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts.

Same source:

the poor, who couldn’t always afford the processed compounds sold in apothecaries, could gain the benefits of cannibal medicine by standing by at executions, paying a small amount for a cup of the still-warm blood of the condemned. “The executioner was considered a big healer in Germanic countries,” says Sugg. “He was a social leper with almost magical powers.” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade.

Yeah, I think a lot of people tend to look down on Aboriginal art because they think it's a form of abstract art that is just lines and shapes but almost all of them tell a story. Sometimes it's a very obvious story, such as the emu dreaming where the waterhole flooded, and sometimes it's more symbolic.

the circle in the middle is a waterhole/dam or billabong. The squiggly lines coming out of it are small rivers. the dots represent the earth but because they are in neat lines, it almost feels as if they have been flattened by the flooded water, especially as the vector lines draw out from the waterhole in the middle. the emu tracks are heading toward the waterhole, and the three lines in the middle are marks left by their tail, implying that they are wading through the mud to get there.

It's a birdseye view of a moment just after the waterhole floods and afterwards the emus go looking for food.

It's Interesting, because the original artist D. J. Ross was from Yuendumu which is in central australia, so this would have been a rare time that there was enough rain to flood the waterhole.

Dreaming stories, kinship links, sacred rites, keeping track of biodiversity and songlines are some other topics covered by Aboriginal art.

In the same way monet painted the middle class and the local landscape in the late 1800's/early 1900's Aboriginal people also paint the average lifestyle of our people. It just looks different.

For example, this picture shows a LOT of activity. The men at the top left of the picture are doing a cultural burn near and around a sacred site, the women at the bottom left are digging for food. across the river, on the right the people are preparing food and in the center, two people (presumably elders) are preparing for a ceremony.

I wouldn't say these all happened at the same time, more that this was a common undertaking over a set of time.

it takes time to understand and not all symbols are the same in all areas, but once you do understand them it becomes easier to see the story being told.

Deserts, but like, positive. Deserts portrayed as beautiful places full of life and wonder. Desert as homeland, desert as a place of beauty and intrinsic value.

Mountains. Andean-style settings where the world is mountainous and the land is organized into altitude zones, where uphill/downhill are more meaningful than east/west

Island archipelagos. We’ve gotten a few in fantasy recently but 1) I want More 2) I want someone to do a Fantasy Kula Ring

Something inspired by Tiwanaku or Chavín de Huántar

Independent city-states. They all are unified by basically the same culture but they are all also politically independent variously at war, making alliances, happily trading, in a trade war, conquered and subordinate to other city-states, founding new city-states, travelling to the central temples of other city-states’ patron gods, etc.

The Chihuahuan Desert looks like this:

The Mojave Desert looks like this:

A desert can be and often is a vibrant place of life and abundance, and these deserts are home to plants, animals, and yes, people, and have been for thousands of years.

The partially excavated and restored Pueblo Bonito, the largest Great House of dozens in Chaco Canyon, the center of a social/cultural regional network that spanned hundreds of miles in the 900s-1100s.

The ruins of Paquimé, a cultural center full of royalty and ritual with settlements that radiated out around it for kilometers in the 1100s-1400s.

The remains of Casa Grande and its outlying adobe buildings, the largest remaining Hohokam platform mound great house, occupied in the 1300s-1400s.

I pull these out in particular because they were all at their height at roughly the same time as the European Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance, which a lot of popular fantasy settings take their inspiration from. It's not only possible to live in the desert with Fantasy Kingdom levels of technology, it's possible to have complex societies with politics and intrigue there.

Of course the modern Hopi, Zuni, O'odham, Navajo, Apache, Yaqui, Yavapai, Havasupai, and Pueblos live there today, as well as of course the millions of people of various ethnicities and origins who live in greater Phoenix and Tucson and Albuquerque and Las Vegas and El Paso. Parts of the surrounding landscape have been converted into grassland specifically to sustain cattle ranching, not humans; but they are also still very much deserts.

Immediately before this post on my feed was a video of a pair of mated Gambel's quail, and a bunch of their babies, running around together.

I grew up in a very rural area of Arizona's High Desert. I remember lying in bed at night and listening to the coyotes, their voices distant through the sounds of the night bugs and the calling of screech owls and poor-wills. If I held my breath, I could hear the bats; I can't tell you which species, as Arizona hosts twenty-eight of them.

In the morning, before the rest of the household was up, I would lace up my tennies and walk out to one of the areas of protected parkland, which was mainly discerned from the owned land by the lack of barb-wire fences, though I'd cross those if I had to. I'd have to be careful of snakes--I encountered diamondbacks and coral snakes on occasion, but more often they'd be yellow and black kingsnakes, harmless but I didn't want to step on them carelessly--and blue-bellied lizards would dart and skate across the sand in front of me while I walked. Grey-carapaced grasshoppers with secretly colorful wings, beetles dark and dun and jewelry-bright metallic, butterflies in shocking shades, moths that hadn't settled down for the day, the occasional scorpion. Wasps of all sorts, elegant and filigreed and interested in me every time I sat to drink from my canteen. If I spilled water on the ground, little things would fly over or run up to drink from it--lizards and insects, and once or twice a small desert mouse.

The sky was vast and full of birds. Golden eagles, turkey vultures, merlins and gray jays and cactus wrens, Gila woodpeckers and peregrine falcons, hummingbirds and cardinals and the intimidatingly-large ravens who would land in groups and turn to watch me as I walked past, occasionally croaking out calls that sounded very nearly like human speech.

If I was lucky, a grey fox might cross my path; if I was unlucky, I might have to book it to get ahead of a band of javelina, whose stink would usually announce them well before I noticed their sound.

Kangaroo rats and horned lizards were less common, in the hours that I was out, but some days I'd still get to meet them as I went.

A couple of miles overland through the desert would take me to the Verde River, which in many places would not be considered a river at all to a Northerner, but which nevertheless held brown and rainbow trout, sunfish and catfish. Usually I was more likely to be watching the tadpoles than the fish, though, and then the toads and frogs that they became, which the blue herons would come over to snap from the water. The dragonflies, as long as my hand was wide, would land in the cattails until I'd been sitting long enough to attract mosquitoes for them to eat right from the air before they could bite me.

I can't sum up the sheer incredible density of the life in that desert. I haven't even started on the plants, the low, grey little shrubs that would explode into flowers of electric brightness for a couple of weeks of the year, the deeply-scented scrub, the many sorts of cactus and succulent. If I started describing them, I would not know where to start.

Also, desert 💚 red desert, gold desert, white desert. Desert thriving with spinifex and saltbush and adorable small marsupials and big ones like striders which are just straight up kangaroos but they run instead of hopping and niras which are a kind of wombat/kangaroo hybrid thing with a helmet.

Also diprotodons. They live in the forest tho, not the desert. And makakis, which are based on macrauchenia because fuck horses. Horses suck.

Colourful paint pigments preserved in their original pots.

Waterhole-hopping through the gorges of Tjoritja (10.07.21)

Arrernte Country

You know that thing where a story is written in tight third person limited — we’re meant to be inside someone’s head, seeing the world through their thoughts — and then suddenly the narration says “the blond frowned” or “the shorter woman sighed” about a person the POV character knows really well?

That’s called antonomasia — using a descriptive label instead of a name. And it’s fine when we’re talking about strangers: “the cashier handed her the receipt,” “the tall guy blocked the door.” The POV character doesn’t know their names, and we just need a quick way to tell people apart.

But the moment it’s used for someone the POV character already knows, it breaks immersion. Because that’s not how our minds work. We don’t think “the older man smiled at me.” We think “Mark smiled.” Or maybe “my boss” if that relationship matters in the moment.

Third person limited means the narration sits inside someone’s perception. Their inner monologue is the story’s voice. So when you switch from “Mark smiled” to “the blond smiled,” you’ve pulled the camera away from their mind and turned it into an outside shot.

If you want to create distance or irritation, you can do it on purpose —

“The idiot from accounting emailed again.”

That’s character voice. That’s judgment. That works.

But otherwise?

As soon as your POV character knows someone’s name, use it. While we do tend to worry about repetitions, names rarely register as such to the readers.

If you need variety for rhythm, use relational or emotional identifiers that make sense in their head: her friend, his partner, their teacher, the person they loved.

Because inside someone’s thoughts, there are no “blonds” or “brunettes.”

Victorian Tear Catchers