48lexr
they/themConlanging, Historical Linguistics, Worldbuilding, Writing, and Music stuffENG/ESP/CMN aka English/Español/中文（普通话）
231 posts
Latest Posts by 48lexr
What do you listen to while writing?
Feel free to drop your playlists or favorite tracks!!!
Y'know, it's weird how the Egbert house doesn't have a garage or a carport or anything. Surely a paragon of fatherly responsibility like Mr Egbert would know better than to simply leave his car exposed to the elements at all times.
dudes watch brokeback mountain
EVERYONE(!) I’m blazing this post because at this pace we might barely hit 1,000,000 signatures—or just fall short. PLEASE reblog this post, no matter where you are from, so we can reach as many EU citizens as possible and end this horrible practice!
I am half tempted to make a Ćol'kotusan (conlang) master post and try to actually publically post all the grammar rules and stuff for it
Would anybody be interested?
RoSEMARY (originally posted on 11/10/24 on Bsky)
this is earthbound to me
hmm another cool Tagalog thing that isn't in modern English (to the extent of my knowledge, that is) - and which can be found in other languages too! - are gender neutral pronouns and words for people. this wasn't something I noticed until I started reading more and more English books, because I realized that a lot of these words have no direct equivalent in English.
the word siya, meaning he/she, singular. I wouldn't say it's an equivalent to the English gender neutral "them" as it is purely used as a singular pronoun.
anak, meaning son/daughter. For me the English translation "child" is not 100% accurate, since child could also mean a random kid that isn't your son and daughter, while anak quite literally means child as in offspring.
a few more familial terms like pamangkin (nephew/niece), bienan (parent-in-law), manugang (child-in-law).
and then there are ones like kapatid, sibling, and asawa, spouse, but I think these are more often used in casual conversation compared to their English equivalents.
and then we have the aspects of the language that were directly influenced by Spanish, so we have some gendered words in usage, hence the terms Filipino/Filipina. however, in these instances, people generally aren't very strict on using the "correct" gendered word when talking casually. really threw me for a loop when I started learning romance languages that had gendered nouns, lol. thank you for listening to my random rambling~
one of the funniest things I see people say about "standard english" btw is californians who are like "yeah basically all american english speakers speak the same way so it makes sense to call that 'standard american english'" because you know they only perceive it that way because californian english has like every single vowel merger simultaneously so they can't tell the difference between other american english varieties. they're fish who don't know they're wet
i hope im not just a mutual to you but also a really annoying stranger who is somehow always going through something
THE DAY OF LANGUAGES!!!
This 7th of May, 2025, we use our own language again!
If your language, native or not, is something other than English, on May 7th you can speak that language all day!
You’ll blog in your chosen language(s) all day: text posts, replies, tags (except triggers and organisational tags).
Regardless of what language people choose to speak to you, you can answer in your own.
Non-verbal, non-written languages (like sign language and dialects) are more than welcome! See my FAQ for tips
English native speakers can participate in any other language they're studying/have studied/know.
The tag is gonna be #Speak Your Language Day or #spyld for short.
Please submit me some language facts for me to share on this day <3
Pinned post and FAQ
Kshafa Morphosyntax
For Kshafa I want to have a more complicated morphosyntactic alignment than what I had for Ngįout, which was marked nominative, but otherwise just plain vanilla nominative accusative. What I had come up with was inspired mainy by what I'd read about alignment in Majang, which is a complicated variant of tripartite fluid-S, in which the subject is nominative if it's "topical/expected", and ergative if not.
This whole split based on pragmatics is a bit too complicated for me, so I decided that for Kshafa the split is going to be based on the definiteness of the subject. If the subject is definite it is nominative, and if it is indefinite it is ergative in transitive clauses and absolutive in indefinite clauses.
The diachronic explenation I have for this to make it make sense in my mind is that originally it was an ergative fluid S language that is based on definiteness - transitive clauses are ergative, intransitive clauses are fluid. Then, a kind of focal definite demonstrative article thing stuck to a definite ergative argument and the nominative case was made.
In addition, another part of the system (that was also inspired form Majang) is that the verb agrees with the definiteness of the subject, and because Kshafa has can be pro-drop, it can distinguish between intransitive clauses and transitive clauses with a dropped agent. Some examples:
A dog runs - run.3SG dog.ABS
The dog runs - run.3SG.DEF dog.NOM
A boy is being bitten - bite.3SG boy.ABS
The (known thing) bites the boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS
smth bites the dog - bite.3SG.DEF dog.ABS
A dog bites a boy - bite.3SG boy.ABS dog.ERG
The dog bites a boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS dog. NOM
Final thing is that nominative arguments can be freely fronted, so:
The dog bites a boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS dog. NOM => dog.NOM bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS
I'm pretty happy with that, it makes sense to me. The only thing is that I need to figure out what to do when non-subject arguments are definite, because I don't want to have a morphological definiteness destinction in the other cases, and having a definite article just for non-subject cases feels weird. Maybe I can just say that just like how turkish only marks definiteness on accusative arguments, Kshafa only marks definiteness on subjects.
I have to wonder (in a non-conspiratorial way) if not teaching phonics is also part of an effort to dismantle public schools and keep people dumb.
Because literacy was historically used as a tool to reinforce class divides. It still remains that way in many places.
I used to be mad about "whole language" reading approaches in theory but now I work with school-age kids and I am mad about it in practice.
one of the funniest things I see people say about "standard english" btw is californians who are like "yeah basically all american english speakers speak the same way so it makes sense to call that 'standard american english'" because you know they only perceive it that way because californian english has like every single vowel merger simultaneously so they can't tell the difference between other american english varieties. they're fish who don't know they're wet
EMERGENCY COMMISIONS
EDITING SERVICES
Hello! Barlowe here; I've run into a really rough place in my life and desperately need money. So, as a writer of over ten years who's been editing my own writing for most of it, I'm offering up editing paid editing services for anyone!
Only $1 USD per 100 words (aka 1¢ per word), for basic editing, and $3 USD per 100 words (3¢/word) for in-depth line-editing which I will actively converse with you on the story's contents to expand upon the writing and make it much, much better!
(Prices for line editing can be negotiated lower for things that require less edits!)
(examples below "read more")
Before and After Examples:
Here's a sneak peek of "Iridensia: the Aspect War" by @falco-underscore-77!
Basic editing ($1 / 100 words):
(original to the left, edited to the right)
Line editing ($3 / 100 words):
and the kind of notes I might leave as I work with you on the editing:
Personal Writing Examples:
Narrative/Basic:
Action/Emotional:
reblogs are appreciated for visibility!
fancy silver divider by @saradika
Reorder the alphabet song to match with keyboards and other honestly shit ways to improve public education
Apparently boomer Democrats are having meltdowns over a gen-z progressive who is primarying an 80 year old Democrat because she "went on trans podcasts" and wore a Charizard kigurumi
Love my grandparents.... on the phone just now my papa was dead serious like “i just think it’s so terrible to kick your child out for being gay . This is a union family and the ONLY thing i’d ever kick any of you out for is crossing a picket line.” okay working class hero!
things that happened to me when i was a woman in STEM:
an advisor humiliated me in front of an entire lab group because of a call I made in his place when he wouldn't reply to my e-mails for months
he later delegated part of my master's thesis work to a 19-year old male undergrad without my approval
a male scientist at a NASA conference looked me up and down and asked when i was graduating and if i was open to a job at his company. right before inquiring what my ethnicity was because i "looked exotic"
a random male member of the public began talking over me and my female advisor, an oceanographer with a pHD and decades of experience, saying he knew more about oceanography than us
things that have happened to me since becoming a man in STEM:
being asked consistently for advice on projects despite being completely new to a position
male colleagues approaching me to drop candid information regarding our partners / higher ups that I was not privy to before
lenience toward my work in a way I haven't experienced before. incredible understanding when I need to take time off to care for my family.
conference rooms go silent when I start talking. no side chatter. I get a baseline level of attention and focus from people that's very unfamiliar and genuinely difficult for me to wrap my head around.
like. yes some PI's will still be assholes regardless of the gender of their subordinates but, I've lived this transition. misogyny in STEM is killing women's careers, and trans men can and do experience male privilege.
Gang, I might make a YouTube video about Javanese (from the perspective of an American conlanger) because you can't make this shit up.
(Tl;dr: Javanese register is very complicated and very fascinating. Also, what's up with slack-voiced consonants?)
The findings are in! Thanks to the 105 people who voted.
The results are pretty expected, I think. The prestige American and British pronunciations are in roughly equal distributions. I figured mine ([ˈɑɹnd͡ʒ]) would be pretty low down, and it was, lol.
Shoutout to:
That one British person in the replies, for whom "orange" rhymes with "Stonehenge." I assume it's a true rhyme, which is cool!
Also, shoutout the the one person in the tags from Singapore who gave the pronunciation [o.ɹeɪntʃ] (something akin to "oh-wrench"). I'm in a languages of Southeast Asia course right now, and we glanced at Singapore English and Singlish, so this was another cool glimpse.
Y'all, I just got curious at one point, and I hope this isn't a repeat of a previous post. So, if you don't mind:
Wiktionary has a couple of recordings if you're curious about the difference/don't know linguistics and can't read IPA.
Follow-up question:
What words/phrases (if any) rhyme with orange?
This is a hotly-debated topic in the English language. I sincerely believe that in my dialect, no single word is a true-rhyme with orange that isn't also either a portmanteau or explicitly related to the word "orange." (E.g. blornge does not count for me, even though it does rhyme, because it is a portmanteau of blonde and orange.)
Reblogs are appreciated!
Please Reblog is Your Blog is Safe for Non-Binary People.
If my mutuals can’t rb this then we can’t be mutuals
A while (I'm talking coming up on a decade or so) ago, I wanted to write a space western inspired by Alfred Reed's El Camino Real (beautiful piece, it's well worth listening to.)
space western is such a sexy trope but there are literally like 2 popular media from the genre
i fucking love writing a healthy best friendship between a man and a woman without making it weird or having them fall in love
There's something about Wen Ning kneeling to apologize for everything that went wrong, and Wei Wuxian kneeling down with him as if to say nothing is your fault that isn't also my fault. Either we'll stand together or we'll kneel together.
They are the secret third thing.
Finally got my main characters in the same spot, but one's unconscious and the other one doesn't want a potentially dead body on her ship.
Like come on I'm trying to write a story here I don't have time for you to become sentient, just bring him on board and slowly fall in love already
why is france called the hexagon when its abundantly clear that it’s a pentagon