Author: AB

Calques and Loanwords

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I am an amateur conlanger – I enjoy creating my own language(s). It is one of those hobbies I keep coming back to, and one that has served me well for 1) knowing far too much about linguistics, 2) being slightly quicker to pick up the grammar of new languages when learning them, and 3) a third thing. Let’s talk about a linguistics topic because we can: calques and loanwords.

A loanword is more or less what it sounds like – when a language just steals a word from another one and goes ‘this is mine now’. It’s common for foods, for fairly obvious reasons – pizza, sushi, crêpe – but languages do this all the time. Take a word or an idea that another language has, change the sounds if necessary, and hey presto, you have a new word.

Calques are a touch more complicated: take a word or phrase in another language, then translate each component into your language so that you have a new thing yourself. Take the Dutch word lijfgarde, translate each little bit, and you’ve got a lifeguard. We’ll be nice – we’ll give them football, and then they can play some voetbal. Simple enough, right?

(Side note: loanword comes from the German word Lehnvort, whereas the word calque we just stole directly from the French. Which, of course, would make loanword a calque and calque a loanword. I love language!)

So let’s have some fun and translate a word into Goja, my constructed language: first as a loanword and then as a calque. Let’s say we wanted to translate the word zeitgeist, which itself is a loanword from German.

Zeitgeist as a loanword is easy enough, though we may have to mangle the pronunciation a little. Goja doesn’t have diphthongs (two vowel sounds merged together: think how the word ray starts with an ‘a’ sound and ends with an ‘ee’ sound). It also doesn’t have final consonant clusters, so that ‘st’ at the end is going to pose a challenge. In the end, zayitgayista felt like the best way to do things, which yeah sure, good enough.

But calques, calques are way more fun, and there are bad ways to do it and good ways to do it. We’ll start with the bad way – zeit means time and geist means ghost, so let’s translate: juk means time in Goja and mikel is ghost, so awesome: jukmikel. All done, right?

Wrong. No. You did the bad translate. Firstly, let’s make a point: in English (and in German), for a lot of compound words, the last part of the word is the main part, and the first part gives some more information about it. Think about the difference between, say, a firetruck and a truckfire. Goja doesn’t work this way – the first part of the word would be the main part. Jukmikel would mean something more like ‘ghost-time’: in other words, asking ‘hey, when does Casper usually get here again?’ or possibly, ‘dammit, I hate visiting the spirit dimension: what timezone are they on again?’. Hard to say, really, but either way, not what we’re looking for.

But mikeljuk wouldn’t be great either, for reasons we’ll get to… now, I guess. Let’s break down what zeitgeist means properly: the spirit of the age, the defining characteristics of some period of history. You can see how ‘spirit of the age’ gets translated as ‘time ghost’, but that means we do have to be careful about exact translations. ‘Period of time’ is probably a better way of thinking about zeit in this context, which in Goja is dejak (can you see the family resemblance to juk? Etymology is important).

But what about geist?

In this case, geist is plausibly better rendered as ‘soul’ or ‘essence’ or something. There is a word in Goja which translates as ‘character, nature, definition, the set of qualities that define or distinguish a person or thing’: najitik. But let’s go a little further, and keep the metaphor of ‘ghost’ as close as we can get it. There is a word that means roughly ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ – but first, a tangent.

There is a concept in linguistics called ‘conceptual metaphor’. Here’s an example: in English, the future is in front of us, whereas the past is behind us – this isn’t literally true, of course, but it’s a way we think about things. In Vietnamese, it’s the other way around – you know what happens in the past, so that’s in front of you; but the future is a mystery, so that’s behind you. In Mandarin, the past is up and the future is down. In Yupno, a language from Papua New Guinea, the past is downhill and the future is uphill, whereas in Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal language, the past is east and the future is west – which, when you think of the Sun, makes a lot of sense. Here’s another time one: in English, you spend time, or you could save it, borrow it, or invest it. In any case, you should definitely budget it properly. I’m writing this in my free time. When making Goja, thinking about conceptual metaphor helped me make a language that felt natural.

For the Goja people, speech and song are big conceptual metaphors. The word for murder, zlig, comes from the words zled and gus – etymologically, to murder someone is to steal their words. To be selfish – bulabul – means to be deaf (lapul) to other people’s suffering. When you’re talking about everybody, you’re talking about the choir (dojaj), and if you match with someone and work together perfectly, then you harmonise with them – you givil them. A song is a yalos, but society is yilyos – break the law, and you’re breaking the song, that’s a crime: a yosakhap. Going all the way back to najitik from earlier, that comes from yitik, or ‘trait’, which itself comes from the word yitu, or ‘tone’. Geist translating to ‘ghost’ might work for some cultures and languages, but to a Goja person, their soul or their spirit is their voice: their migli. I would personally translate zeitgeist as miglidejak.

Hopefully this has given you a brief insight into the absolute rabbit-hole that is linguistics and conlanging. To cap it all off, let’s make two new words together: in German, it’s a Lehnvort; in English, a loanword; but in Goja, that can only be a guszefed. And you may not have a calque, but you may just have a galka.

Thanks for reading.

Life After Depression

AB Tags: 1 Comment

Here in my tiny little corner of the internet, I once wrote about what it was like living with depression (bad, in case you’re curious). Now I have emerged from the other side, so I would like to tempt fate by talking about what life is like after depression.

What was depression like?

Depression is one of those things that I understood on an intellectual level beforehand – all the happiness gone from the world, nothing matters anymore. I’d read Hyperbole and a Half’s comics about depression, I had an absolute obsession with Harry Potter as a child and read about the description of Dementors, part of my job involved helping people with depression, to the extent that I self-diagnosed initially with material I’d gotten at a conference designed to help people with mental illness. There’s this philosophical idea called Mary’s Room, where Mary is a scientist who knows everything there is to know about colour, even though she’s lived her entire life in a black-and-white room. Then at one point, the door opens and she’s allowed to go see the rest of the world. Did she learn anything? My personal answer to this is that if she does learn something, then she clearly didn’t know everything about colour beforehand. And hoo boy, did I learn something when I opened the depression door.

Depression was fucking terrible. I try to make it a point in these posts not to resort to profanity – I’m trying to be somewhat formal here – but I don’t think I can really emphasise how bad it was without a bit of a linguistic slap in the face. It was really fucking bad.

Let’s start by talking physically, because yes, depression can have physical symptoms, and they’re often easier to see. ‘Low energy’ is one, but those are just words. To me, low energy was having a bath instead of laying in bed because at least I moved. Low energy was not cooking in months because why bother. Low energy was being tired every single day, but not wanting to sleep because that involved closing my eyes and being alone with my thoughts. Low energy was being in the process of buying a cane just to feel better about being able to walk around my house.

And every thought was bad. Part of it was going ‘maybe I don’t actually have depression, maybe I’m just faking it so people will care about me’, even though if you’re buying a cane just for being alone in your house, maybe something is actually wrong. Rationally, I knew things were bad. But you can’t logic yourself out of a position you didn’t logic yourself into, and I wasn’t depressed because I wanted more attention (side note: there is a weird push-pull in depression of ‘I want people to care about me and help me, but also I don’t deserve it, but also I need it, but also I don’t want them to see me like this’. Depression is fractally horrible.).

Depression is when your whole being turns against you. Depression is when everything that kept you going ceases to be worth it. Depression is when every thought is about how bad life is, and also, how nothing matters anymore. Depression is when every positive thought is something logical that you have to figure out rather than feel. It feels like a design flaw in the human experience – suddenly the full power of your brain is now redirected in order to make you feel like life isn’t worth living anymore. Why should this even be possible? It’s like you designed a lightbulb that just occasionally removed all light from the surroundings instead.

I can’t give you a metaphor to explain depression because depression is void of meaning – it lives in the hole where metaphors die. If you haven’t lived through depression, I can’t explain it sufficiently to you, and if you have, you probably know far too well what it’s like.

What kept you going?

Momentum, pretty much. I still had a job with responsibilities. I still needed to eat. I still had a routine I could keep going with. The grooves of my life were worn sufficiently enough for me to keep following them.

I had support – family and friends and colleagues. People who could take me alienating them and messing with our relationship and go ‘he’s not himself, he needs help’.

Work helped. My boss had had experience with mental health issues before and managed to walk the line between ‘you need to do this’ and ‘I know this is all you can do right now’. If someone pushes you, you might as well move (and I mean this in the best way possible – I didn’t really have the mental energy to push myself).

I’d made a commitment years prior that if I was ever depressed, I wouldn’t self-harm or commit suicide. So when I was depressed, I never did either one of those (pretty obviously for the latter, or it would be very impressive to have written this). I understood it though, as kind of a ‘oh now I get it’. My way of feeling something was putting on comedy shows – depression killed my happiness but it didn’t kill my sense of humour, which felt very strange.

What started your depression? And what ended it?

All it takes is a bunch of bad habits chained together and then kickstarted. It’s kind of like the Chernobyl disaster – it was designed terribly and then everything went wrong. To stop being depressed, I needed to find those habits, fix those habits, and reverse whatever weird chemical brouhaha was happening inside me. So here’s the process, or at least my process:

1. Realise you’re depressed. This may be harder than it looks. I recommend knowing as much about being depressed as possible beforehand, so you can tentatively self-diagnose (THIS IS NOT THE ONLY STEP). Alternatively, have a trusted person let you know, and then since you trust them, believe them.

2. Go and get therapy. If you knew all your bad habits and how to fix them, you probably wouldn’t be in this situation, so go find a professional to help. This is one of those ‘if you have time/money’ steps, unfortunately, but if you have some spare, now is an excellent time to use them. You may need to go through many professionals for help – the second psychologist I spoke to was excellent for me. This is despite, or possibly because, their process involved weird pseudoscientific spiritual mysticism stuff. I am very much not into that, but quite frankly, my rational side was not helping, and I could use some different metaphors. It also helped that my psych was extremely perceptive and picked up on multiple bad habits of mine within 10 minutes of me being there. What I’m saying is, go in with an open mind.

3. If this does not work, and it may not be sufficient, and you end up crying at 1am on a Sunday night/Monday morning to a friend, maybe it’s worth going to a doctor and going “I can’t make any more happy chemicals at home, is storebought fine?”

4. Keep doing 2 and 3, and slowly, eventually, your depression starts to fade away as you’ve successfully built yourself a ladder to climb out of the pit you’ve found yourself in. Also notice that you can’t use depression to get yourself out of depression – you can’t dig up, stupid. In order for things to change, things have to change.

This is my personal experience, n of 1 here. But if you’re reading this, I want to tell you how my depression ended too. And I was very lucky, I had a very ‘basic bitch’ depression – went to therapy, took the right pills, turned that frown upside-down. But that’s the depression you want (presuming you want depression), you don’t want a doctor to go, “huh, I have no idea what’s going on with you”. Some people have treatment-resistant depression, which are three (two-and-a-half?) horrifying words. I think if you’re depressed, it’s very easy to assume the worst. But if you’re reading this while depressed, you may have the basic bitch variety – and either way, get help. Your brain is fighting you – you need to fight back, and you will want backup.

Final thoughts?

Depression: really bad. Also: solvable. I’m coming off my anti-depressants after a year and change, close to eighteen months. Some people stay on them forever. Others don’t. I don’t know what side I’ll eventually end up on. What I do know is that I am no longer depressed. I have a partner, a cat, and a future. If you’re depressed and reading this: there’s a way out.

Also, yes, here is a picture of my cat:

    Building Bridges

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    (Prelude: I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Poverty, by America recently, as well as having talks with friends about anarchism and living standards. The point I’m making here has almost certainly been made before, but I felt like doing some thinking and writing.)

    Imagine a time long before today. This is a time before technology: when an Apple meant a fruit, or possibly original sin; when government was either non-existent or feudal/medieval, depending on whatever was convenient for the following narrative; and when grandpappy would hold little child on bouncing knee and tell him tale after tale of Simplified Economic Fables.

    Imagine a carpenter, out in the wild green yonder. He has a long family tradition of carpentry: his father was a carpenter, and his father was a carpenter, and his father was a carpenter, and his father invented trees. His mother knew the ways of the forest – from her mother, she learned to listen to larches and speak with spruces. Every sapling has a story, or so she would say, and every elder would sing about the good old days when roots were roots and bark was bark, and that wizened old man from many generations ago would keep on claiming that he invented trees, and would not shut up about it.

    He is a carpenter of some repute: they say he could stare at a pile of timber, and that it would shape itself into furniture to avoid his gimlet eye. They say he could knock in two nails with one hammer, or three if he should miss. Where tale turned into truth and truth tale it is never possible to say, but certainly he was the finest carpenter in all the land, and old farmers and deer would travel from many a mile just to gaze upon a beautiful bedframe or sturdy stool. His wood-turning skills were so great even, that he could turn a story from third-person to first-person right in the middle with no care at all for narrative structure.

    One day, while out inspecting my burgeoning sandpaper crop I happen to gaze upon the local river – a terrifying turbulent river that all who hear tell of its ragged rocks or vicious vortices quake in terror before. Yea, it is said that to cross upon this river with canoe or catamaran alike is to risk one’s very soul within its gluttonous maw, and even the birds that fly over dare not glance below. I eye the deep waters with careful consideration, a blood-soaked body moving past me as if to illustrate a point, and decide that Today is the Day to Act. Capital letters in tow, I return with idea to my woodshed.

    Over the next several weeks and months, any passing sparrow or spectre in the night would hear me there, sawing with saw or lathing with lathe. I beg forgiveness of old women whose orders of dining tables I fill three days late, and offer 10% off next purchase. Pines go missing in the night, and local search parties spend hours looking for shallow graves. Eventually, it is built – the grandest bridge that one ever would see. It is assembled deep at night with the help of passing animal life, and in the morning, it stands solid and proud over the now defeated stream. Word passes from man to man as quick as the raging rapids run, and the townsfolk gather to see the victory of carpenter over river.

    There is a parade in my honour, and the tributaries of road and water both are clogged with confetti. Though the building of bridge has made me tired and poor, soon I grow rich – I set up a toll on either end to pay for the timber I have taken and the excess hours I spent in my study. Some travelers grumble, as travelers are wont to do, but no man or beast begrudges the tax, for I spend the rest of my days improving the lives of those who walk across this weary wooden way – replacing aging board, widening what needs widening, fending off bridge trolls who try to set up camp to accost passers-by with riddles three, and setting up small souvenir shops for tourists. And in my lifetime, I am made legend – I am greeted so often by newcomers who know of me only because they can now pass safely that my name becomes now and forever not Art Carpenter (for my name was Arthur this whole time), but instead, Art Bridgeman.

    —

    In 1840, the French economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared that “Property is theft!”, meaning that those who own private property, unearned by their tools or hands, steal from those who work it (An actual economist would probably say I’ve completely misunderstood what Proudhon was saying, and I haven’t done pretty much any deep reading on this but I’m sort of trying to gesture at a nebulous concept here so just go with me on this one.). Proudhon is often considered the founder of anarchism, the idea that a society would be better without a state to control it. There are multiple strains of anarchism, but one is anarchist communism, where private property is abolished in favour of property owned by the community. Personal property, like the stuff you own in your house, still exists here – personal property is not the same as private property, which are more like factories or businesses.

    In the 1960s and 70s, the term “rent-seeking” was popularised – effectively, it means that those who own land or natural resources can extract wealth above and beyond what is needed to keep it going. Rent, in economic terms, is payment to someone for that person not actually doing anything – this doesn’t just extend to housing but is an excellent example of it. Let’s say I buy a house, do nothing with it and get money from it by renting it out. From my point of view this is excellent – I’m getting money basically for free. Later down the road I could use that money to buy more houses, and get even more rent, and so on and so on. I can live out my life in luxury while doing exactly nothing. From a renter’s point of view though, this is basically unfair – they’re paying me money for the privilege of having a roof over their head. From a broader economic standpoint, it would be better if I gave all my houses to those that are renting from me. I would have to make money by actually going and working and contributing to the economy, and the renters can stop giving me money and instead use that to improve their lives in some other, more tangible way.

    In 1993, writer Terry Pratchett came up with the idea of the “Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness” in his book Men at Arms. In his book, Pratchett’s character Sam Vimes talks about how the rich can stay rich by talking about buying boots – the rich can buy one set of expensive boots that will last a long while, while the poor, who can’t afford to save for good boots, have to keep buying cheap boots that quickly wear out, spending money over and over again until paradoxically, they have spent more money over time than the rich have, while still being worse off.

    In 2024, Steamboat Willie finally entered the public domain after its release in 1928. United States copyright law has gone through multiple revisions – in 1790, the length of copyright was 14 years, with an option to renew it once for another 14. By 1998, however, this time limit had been extended numerous times, and now sits at either 95 years after publication (120 after creation if unpublished), or the life of the creator plus 70 years, whichever happens to end earlier. Copyright law is a complicated beast, but the goal of it is to give a creator rights to their work, allowing them to profit from their hard-earned intellectual endeavours. While broadly speaking, copyright is considered positive for society, since it provides the ability and incentive for creators to create, there have been multiple criticisms of it, including issues with the length of copyright, debates about what counts as an author or creator, and the ability of people to use copyright as censorship or gatekeep access to knowledge and information.

    In the story above, Art Bridgeman, née Art Carpenter, used his hard work, knowledge, and resources to improve the lives of himself and those around him. He made money off his ideas, and travelers were safer than if they crossed the river by themselves. An argument could be made that if Art decided to give access to the bridge for free, that society as a whole would be better off. However, another argument could be made that if creators (using the term broadly) aren’t incentivised to do things like build bridges or write novels, then there would be no bridges to save people from drowning or novels to save people from boredom. In this story, as well, the river still exists, and one could always choose to cross it by boat rather than paying the toll – though it may be risky, the opportunity still exists. Art’s bridge is a net good for his society, and as said in the story, he is using the money earned from it to continue to improve it. It’s very easy to read the tale of Art Carpenter and imagine a “And they lived happily ever after” at the end of it. But in the real world, alas, stories don’t end – they simply continue…

    —

    It has been many a year since that first day, when it seemed like all the people from all the world came to gaze upon my simple bridge. Ages ago now, an old man came to my door, begging for a hot meal, a warm blanket, and a place to sit before he made his way out of my life as easily as he made his way into it. In exchange, he gave me stories, and one I will never forget said that a man dies twice: once when his body passes, and once when his name passes from living memory. His name was James, which I know because he carved it into the headboard of my guest bed. My body has since passed, but my spirit lives on as the Bridgeman name continues on. When I passed, I gave my knowledge and tools to my son and my daughter, who swore to make my name proud and leave my legacy as rich as their pockets now were. Soon they built their own bridges, learning from me and my works as I learnt from my father, and in time more and more travelers found their way to the other side of the river, and on to their merry missions.

    But this is a tale of ages past, and now one of my descendants commands control of all the crossings over the waters. The boards are starting to crumble but there is no need for him to repair them, for there is always another bridge, and another way over the river. The money flows to him as the water flows under the bridge, but the money does not flow out – I built a kingdom of wood, and he has built one of gold. Trolls sometimes take refuge from the rain and footsteps, and he no longer cares to learn their riddles. At one point, a man in formal wear appeared with a clipboard to inspect the bridges, and proclaimed in a reedy voice that access to the river’s edge is no longer permitted, citing the horrors contained within its calamitous currents and murderous maelstroms. While I cannot argue with the man about the dangers of the river, no longer are there any destitute sailors trying to find their way to better climes, or fisherman seeking salmon for their family’s supper. The poor line the blocked-off banks adjoining the bridges, begging for a coin from passing travelers to let them seek employ or companionship on the other side. The travelers affect deafness or apologise that their coins are already intended for the toll booth, and they have no more to spare. I cannot always tell if they are truthful.

    My descendant fends off the cries of condemnation as easily as the river washes downstream, declaring that if he has a life of luxury, it is only because he traces his trails all the way back to a common-born carpenter who sought only to enrich the lives of peoples everywhere. Often, in parties or palaces, he tells a tale of toil and trudgery, and announces with intoxicated pride that he hails from the honourable Art Bridgeman.

    I neglect to know his name.

    —

    Relevant links:
    Poverty, by America: A book by sociologist Matthew Desmond on how poverty persists in America, including the structural reasons behind its endemicity. (I bought the audiobook on Audible, owned by Amazon. I recognise the irony.)
    Your Book Review: Progress and Poverty: A review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, which also discusses issues with rent and land.
    Men At Arms: The book from which the Vimes theory originated. I can recommend this one generally if not yet specifically, since I’m still working my way through the Discworld series.
    What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government: Proudhon’s book from which the “Property is theft!” quote originates (though he said it originally in French, obviously). I haven’t read this one, but it’s on my list. You can feel free to castigate me for not reading two of the things I’m linking here.

    Thanks for reading.

    Appropriately enough, I have placed this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. You may share and adapt this material in any way you want, providing you give appropriate credit and distribute any adaptations under the same license.

    Living with Depression

    AB Tags: , 1 Comment

    Content warning: frank discussion of depression, overuse of metaphor, spoilers for “The Count of Monte Cristo”

    I have been living with depression for a while now – it’s hard to say exactly how long, for reasons I’ll go into, but I could believe anything from three months up to twelve, and honestly, there were probably signs before that. Now, while I haven’t been formally diagnosed with depression, at some point when you fit almost all of the signs (sans the self-harm and suicide ones, and I have no plans to change that), and your mental health professional of choice calls it depression without hesitation, and you were Googling months ago ‘signs of depression’ while simultaneously recognising that Googling it is a pretty good sign… look, you can call it ‘set of conditions incredibly reminiscent of but not formally recognised as depression’, but let’s just say that this thing is a zebra and not a horse that’s made it its lifelong goal to be a barcode.

    It’s hard trying to explain depression, because to make the words exist, I have to think them, and depression alters your way of thinking. The best way I can try to explain it is imagine you’re trying to count or solve some sort of maths problem, and there’s someone in the room with you yelling numbers at you. At some point, you’re not sure which numbers are the right ones and which ones have just been screamed at you by someone with clearly nothing better to do, so the whole process just starts to break down. And of course, even if you stop trying to count, that guy’s still there, except he’s winning.

    This is what depression does. It’s a little guy screaming negative stuff at you, and if you don’t realise he’s there, you’re just going to think that the negative thoughts are yours and therefore real.

    The last few months of being consciously aware I’m depressed have been eye-opening, in a horrifying realisation kind of way – the mental equivalent of realising that the horror movie monster serial killer was inside your house the whole time. Because then the next thought is – which thoughts were “correct”, and which ones were just yelled at you?

    Let’s briefly put yourself in my shoes. Your relationships with many of your friends and family have been pretty much universally declining, your love life is struggling, to put it mildly, your hobbies have seemed much less engaging, and to plagiarise Taylor Swift, work might have been okay, but it hasn’t been fine at all. After about the twentieth time breaking into tears and realising seemingly everything has been going wrong but you’re not sure what’s wrong and fixing it hasn’t helped, you start to see a psychologist. The first few sessions are you realising that these cycles of behaviour aren’t normal and that you have actually been repressing emotions for months. At some point during this process you’re having a conversation with probably about the only person in the world you can be genuinely open and honest with, and that includes yourself. Your relationship with this person has been struggling, and at some point you say something to the effect of “I care about you, more than I care about anyone else besides me, and recently I’ve been feeling like I don’t care about me some of the time.” This sentence is an immediate red flag, because while you’re struggling you’re also not stupid, and you immediately Google symptoms of depression, and the answer to the question turns out to be ‘yes’.

    This is when I would like to tell you that things got better, but unfortunately recognising a problem is different to solving it. That conversation happened a few months ago, and it’s hard to say if things have gotten worse or I’ve just gotten better at noticing when things are bad. My guess is the latter, but it definitely feels like the former.

    I don’t actually know which thoughts are correct, which relationships that have been damaged are my fault or not, and I don’t have the confidence to be able to figure those out or not. Reaching out is hard when one of the first thoughts is “they probably don’t want to help me anyway” or “I have no idea how they would help me” or “maybe I should keep pretending everything is fine and telling people I’m OK is a good way to maintain social interactions that aren’t about me not being OK, which I would really like to not be reminded of”.

    I would love to end this on a high note, but really the best I can give you is probably a middle C. I’ve pretty much moved from ‘trying to fix what I have’ to ‘trying to live with that I have’, which feels either realistic or pessimistic and I haven’t figured out which is better. There is no easy fix for depression that I’m aware of, so hoping that this very loud, very persistent guy goes away because he gets bored is probably not the panacea that I’m hoping for. My goals now are to try to get on with life regardless, and try to actively seek happiness rather than passively have it like I used to have (though that’s far harder than it seems – Mr. Screamy does a fantastic job at reducing my willpower to fight him, and makes it far easier to forget that it’s even possible).

    Some quotes that have resonated:
    “You must fight them! They are a hive of monsters!” or “Yi’icekdozim! Zagim gogdaslav znazlighavev!” – something I thought of translating into my language months ago
    The entirety of Preludes by T.S. Eliot
    “The soul makes its own horizons; your soul is overcast, and that is why the sky seems stormy to you.” – from “The Count of Monte Cristo”

    It’s also probably relevant that the last sentence of that book is something to the effect of “all of human wisdom is contained in those two word – wait and hope”.

    If you stumble upon this and you have depression, then I can only offer you these comics from Hyperbole and a Half, a link to a collections of emergency contacts and websites for your specific country, and a reminder that the average length of depression symptoms is not ‘the rest of your life’, despite how much it might feel like that from the inside.

    Thanks for reading.

    Update: Life After Depression.

    An Introductory Key To Linguistics

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    For those who don’t know, I really enjoy conlanging. For those who don’t know what on earth that last word was, it means to construct a language; hence the term. I’ve not yet finished one, but I love the process of thinking hard about creating new words, about building a grammar from the ground up, about constructing a writing system, and so on and so forth. When I’m more comfortable with the progress of my conlang (constructed language), I’ll most likely put it up here, but until then, I’d like to examine a simple sentence, explore it, talk about what we can learn from it, then add more to it and see what we can learn from that. A disclaimer before I start: I’m largely self-trained, so please don’t take anything here as gospel truth. That being said, let’s get started!

    Our sentence today is the following:

    I lost my keys.

    We can say a few things immediately. Firstly, this language uses an alphabet. This means that consonants and vowels have equal weighting amongst letters (also, that this language uses letters, where are a type of graphemes, a grapheme being the smallest unit of a writing system). This means that the writing system is not an abjad, where each grapheme corresponds to a consonant, and vowels are non-existent or optional, with such examples as Arabic and Hebrew; and that the system is not an abugida, where each unmodified grapheme represents a consonant, and vowels are shown with a diacritic or by modifying the consonant, with such examples as Devanagari (used for Hindi), and the wonderful Ge’ez script, used in Ethiopia. Furthermore, this means that the writing system is not a syllabary, where each grapheme represents a syllable, such as in Japanese kana; and that it is not a logography, where each grapheme represents a whole word, such as in Chinese.

    We’re still going with the letters, by the way. We can also tell that these words do not exhibit (and here’s a long technical term that I am about to explain) phonemic orthography. Phonemic means relating to the sounds of the language, and orthography means the rules of the writing system in the language. Phonemic orthography means that each sound perfectly corresponds to one grapheme, which of course is totally untrue in English. The letter “y” in the example sentence above corresponds to both an /aɪ/ sound, as in “my”, and is part of the /ɪ/ sound in the word “keys”. Those things in between the forward slashes correspond to parts of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which tries to codify and standardise the potential sounds across all human languages.

    Got that? Alright. Let’s go into the structure of the sentence.

    First, the basic word order of the sentence. English is primarily an SVO language, which means the sentence will have, in order: a subject, which is (roughly) the thing doing the verb; the verb, which is the action; and the object, which is the thing that the verb is acting upon. In the example sentence, “losing” is being done, “I” am the one that is losing the things, and “keys” are the things being lost. In something like a VSO language, the sentence may run, sans the word “my”, “Lost I keys.” This is the sort of thing that gets very complicated when you get into languages that don’t classify noun types in the same way as other languages (what’s referred to as morphosyntactic alignment), but we can’t stop now, so we must keep moving.

    There’s more! The word “my” is what’s referred to as a possessive pronoun, which often acts like an adjective, and it tells us that these sorts of words appear before the noun in English. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case; “I lost keys my” may sound odd in English, but plenty of other languages put their adjectives after their corresponding nouns, and they do quite well enough for themselves.

    This sentence also tells us how words inflect, which is how words change in order to represent different properties. The word “lose” has conjugated (the inflection of a verb) to represent past tense, and the word “key” has declined to represent a plural (“decline” meaning the inflection of a noun, the noun form of decline here being declension). This also tells us the extent to which words inflect in the language. Languages like Mandarin have much less inflection than English – the equivalent sentence in a language with no inflection may be literally translated as “I lose past-tense my key plural“. On the other hand, some languages (most, actually) have more inflection than English. An example sentence that corresponds to our example one may be “I-lost my keys”, or even “I-lost-my-keys”. I won’t get into this too much, but the thing to look up if you’re interested is morphological typology.

    I’m going to leave it there for our simple sentence, though there’s still more I could talk about – the fact that pronouns inflect for case but nouns generally don’t and the fact that “lose” is conjugated irregularly (i.e. it’s not “losed”) being two examples. I would like to move on, however, to talking about one concept – the idea of the perfect aspect.

    Let’s consider the following three example sentences.

    I lost my keys.
    I have lost my keys.
    I had lost my keys.

    The first sentence tells us only about what happened in the past. However, the second and third sentences tell us something interesting – they tell us the relevance of what happened in the past. Take the following two sentences: “I lost my keys, but now they’re here.”, as well as “I lost my keys, and I don’t know where they are.” Both of these sentences feel totally natural to read, because nothing about the simple sentence that we started with contradicts the last part of the sentence.

    A bit of a side note here: the word “but” functions pretty much exactly the same as “and”, but implies some sort of surprise or contrast between the two phrases it conjoins. It’s interesting!

    Alright, let’s take these two sentences: “I have lost my keys, and I don’t know where they are.”, and “I have lost my keys, but now they’re here.” The last sentence feels odd, and rightly so – the use of “have lost” is what is referred to as the present perfect, and means something that has happened in the past and still has relevance in the present.

    The last sentence is what’s called the past perfect, sometimes referred to as the pluperfect. It refers to something that has happened in the distant past, and has relevance to the more recent past; consider the sentence “I had lost my keys before I found them again.”

    Finally, there is something that is often confused with the perfect, known as the perfective aspect. In its essentials, the perfective aspect refers to an action viewed as a whole or that is completed. This is contrasted with the imperfective, which is (roughly) an action viewed as a process, or something that is not completed. A good example would be the difference between “I lost my keys” and “I was losing my keys.” The former refers to the action as a whole, and the latter refers to the process. You can even combine the perfect with the imperfective, as in “I have been losing my keys.” This last sentence here could be called present perfect imperfective (sometimes also called past perfect progressive), because it’s referring to the process, and it’s referring to something that’s happened in the past and has relevance in the present.

    All this from a couple of words about losing keys. We didn’t even talk about complex sentences, questions, phonotactics, correlatives, moods, and on and on and on. Language is complicated. But, of course, that’s what I find so much fun about it.

    And if you ever want to make your own language, all of these concepts are things you should be thinking about.

    I’ll probably put up some links to how to make your own conlang at some point, but I would specifically like to credit here three sources: Mark Rosenfelder’s zompist.com, and especially his Language Construction Kit, his Web Resources, and his three books, which I have all bought on Kindle; /r/conlangs, which is a great community of passionate and conlangers; and of course, the greatest website to ever exist, the source of all human knowledge and power, Wikipedia, may its reign last a thousand years. I say the last part only half in jest – I know technically it may not be considered a reputable source, but if we’re being entirely honest with ourselves, we all know it’s an amazing compendium of knowledge.

    Thanks for reading.

    Death of the Author

    AB Tags: , , Leave a comment

    I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of the death of the author, along with the broadly related concepts of prescriptivism versus descriptivism, headcanons, and to what extent authors have the right to their own work.

    So as you can probably see from the menu above, I have written some poetry. And my dilemma is this: I want to explain what I meant when I wrote the poems. I feel it is important to me that my thoughts are out there. But I also want them to stand as they are. That too is important to me. And then that got me thinking – if I state my analysis of my own poetry, to what extent does that discredit other people’s analyses? If someone else sees something in my poetry that they appreciate, and I didn’t consciously intend for it to be in there, are they somehow wrong for having found it?

    These aren’t rhetorical questions, I plan on answering them.

    I am drawn to a conversation I once had with somebody, who told me how ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was an allegory for WWII, and who had some rather convincing arguments. Later I found out that ‘The Lord of the Rings’, although its first volume was published in 1954, was to a large extent, planned and written before the end of that war. In fact, I can directly quote Tolkien’s beliefs on this matter. This passage is from his Foreword to the Second Edition, as follows:

    “As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical… The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted.”

    So the question remains: was this person wrong?

    To paraphrase the great Reverend Lovejoy, the long answer is ‘no’, with a ‘but’.

    Allow me a brief diversion. I am a very large ‘Harry Potter’ fan. I am very much not a ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ fan. By no means do I consider it canon – as far as I am concerned, Voldemort never had a daughter, and Time-Turners do not work that way. Furthermore, I am reticent about a lot of the extra details J.K. Rowling has released on Pottermore. Specifically, she mentioned how Dumbledore retrieved the Mirror of Erised from the Room of Requirement. This is contradicted in the book series, where Dumbledore implied that he was unaware of the room while talking to Igor Karkaroff. While there are ways to circumvent this contradiction, I can’t say I’m happy with any of them.

    So now a new question emerges: Am I wrong? What is my belief about the canon of Harry Potter worth in comparison to J.K. Rowling’s?

    Or how about language? I strive to be grammatically correct, because I enjoy grammar. I strive to distinguish between ‘who’ and ‘whom’, for example. But I know that most other people don’t. And I know that many people don’t believe that you should start a sentence with a conjunction, as I am so fond of doing. But I do. Here are some more examples, and you can probably see which ones I tend to side with based purely on what I’ve been doing throughout this post.

    With all this in mind, let me come back to my answers to those questions I asked earlier. Allow me to briefly quote Tolkien again, from the same Foreword:

    “I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader,and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

    I can certainly sympathise with Tolkien to an extent here – there is something to be said for writing something with the intent of allowing the reader to form their own interpretations of the work. But I also sympathise with those who intend a specific interpretation of a work; ‘Animal Farm’ is a pretty direct and intended satire of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist Soviet Union, and another interpretation of that book is almost certainly going to be in some way inferior. And to give some food for thought, Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is often interpreted as being about censorship, but Bradbury himself has stated that he intended it to be about the decline of literature with the rise of mass media. So who is right?

    Here then is my answer, and allow me to paraphrase the aforementioned ‘Animal Farm’:

    ALL ANALYSES ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANALYSES ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

    I believe that, generally, an author’s analysis is just as valid as the next person’s, but all other things being equal, the author’s analysis should be given some more credence until proven otherwise – one should probably trust an author to be an expert on their own work, after all. But, there’s room for a headcanon as well as canon, there’s room for applicability as well as allegory, there’s room to walk that pragmatic line between prescriptivism and descriptivism, and there’s room between subjectivity and objectivity for just a little ambijectivity.

    I will be placing my notes on my poetry somewhere on this site – where, I haven’t quite decided yet. They will not, however, be on the same page as the actual poetry. I will not force my interpretation of my poetry on anybody else.