The Desert Mermaid

Every so often I check just to see if it's shown up yet.

It has.



As far as I can tell, it's using this version, though I think it scans better than she sings it--she seems to rush it a little bit.

One of these days I'll get me some good recording equipment and blast out my sprite version, because I am both an unrepentant Frozen fan and an unrepentant nerd. But for now, you can enjoy it in Classical Latin or Esperanto if you're so inclined. No Klingon yet, but I'm gonna keep watching. You never know.

Is it bad that I guessed every single entry on this list, and in fact my only problem was that I also had ten more guesses and had to decide which ones they'd leave off?

It's kinda fun to have your hobby be the subject of a Cracked "WTF is WITH these people?" article once in a while.

... Which reminds me. I never posed the Sprite version of "Let It Go", did I? Hmmmm ...

Aw, yea, have acquired the Frozen DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack. I will now watch Frozen and "Get A Horse" nonstop for roughly the next couple of years.

And why, yes, I am translating Frozen's "Let It Go" into my own conlangs. To, uh, test them out. Yeah, that's it.

Okay, actually, this isn't really new--I've been doing Disney dubs and writing my own lyrics to songs since I was in junior high. And because I am totally fascinated by multilingual Disney songs. I can get lost for hours watching one song in multiple languages,* and I want in on that action! But this is a first for a couple of my newer languages, and I'm having a blast. Can't decide if I prefer the crazy polysynthetic Sprite Language Mark II version or the Modern OGYAFEse fossilized triconsonantal roots** with their esoteric rhymes, but they're both terribly fun to mess with.

Yeah, I know, I'm a nerd. But hey, we nerds know what we like, and there's nothing wrong with that!


*It is an eternal bummer to me that there are no official Swahili dubs. There's a Zulu dub of The Lion King, but that's as close as we get.

**Well, not quite triconsonantal roots, but rather overdone semantic derivations with the same sort of consonant radicals and ... yeah, you stopped caring, didn't you? Having a phenomenally boring hobby is a terrible burden.

I have finally read through the entire Silmarillion.

Good GOD, that was boring.

It shouldn't be. There was a goddamn fistfight between the Dark Lord and a giant light-eating darkness-spinning spider, which ended when the Dark Lord tag-teamed 75 Balrogs with their flaming whips and swords to drive the monster off. That should be interesting to read. But Tolkien's need to be all high saga narrative style whenever he's writing about Elves makes it mind-numbing.*

Also, his total Mary-Sueing of the entire species of Elves still bugs me. He keeps insisting that they're the fairest and wisest and noblest of races and they could totally beat you at everything and they're the best times infinity, and yet the entire Silmarillion consists of them bashing each other with swords because they have FEELINGS. And they seem to be rather forgetful. Rather than improving their skills, they made all the nicest stuff right at the beginning of time, and then it all got destroyed and they forgot how they did it and so they just sat around making less-awesome things and stabbing each other with complexly-named swords. Tolkien's contention that The Old Ways Are The Best Ways leaves his world unnervingly stagnant.

I do like to entertain myself, though, with the idea that Elves (or at least some of them) are color-blind. This is my explanation for their obsession with white and grey and silver. It's a stupid thing to complain about, but I really do get bugged with the lack of color in their world, so it's fun to think that all the soft grey EVERYTHING is actually riotously colorful. And yes, I know I am full of shit, but dammit I had to do something to get through this thing.

It makes me wonder why the hell The Hobbit is one of my favorite books, when The Silmarillion bores the hell out of me and LotR annoys me with its terrible dialogue, incessant musical numbers, and long bookends of hobbit fuck-aroundery. Maybe Tolkien's just a better writer when he gives up trying to sound magnificent. Or maybe the visions in his head are far cooler than the words he can put to them. But they are impressive visions, so even after all my ranting, I gotta give it to him--the guy's imagination had STYLE.


*Makes me want to reread David Eddings' books, because of his contrasts between the High Fancy Narrative Style and What Our Heroes Really Said--the latter of which is a lot less forsoothy and a lot more grumbly.

Have spent the evening trying to work out how to incorporate a particular feature of Twitter hashtags into a spoken conlang. I'm not even ON Twitter, and yet the unofficial use of hashtags as self-commentary, editorializing, metadata, references, and stupid jokes FASCINATES me. Makes me almost want to go to grad school just so's I could do a thesis on it, but barring that, it's an interesting conlang exercise. Yes, it's very much a product of its medium--text-based and part of hyperlinks--but it does present some interesting ideas.

Not sure it'll work out, but it'll be fun to try. Perhaps I will call it Hipsterese.

The problem with having a phenomenally boring hobby is that you can't really explain how darn much fun you're having to anyone. "Dude! I just changed a language from the OGYAFE into two daughter languages with the power of SOUND CHANGE! Now I'm going to work on semantic shift!" Yeah, nobody cares.

So, uh, just take my word for it: I am having a pretty good time conlanging over here. That's all you need to know.

So not too long ago I sent off an application for grad school because why the hell not, and among my linguistics credentials I explained about my conlanging hobby and that I've learned a lot.

Only today does it occur to me that I should've SENT them an outline of one of my conlangs.

Oh, well. Maybe next time.

My first conlang has prepostrophes. They're meant to indicate a mark from the language's own writing system, which is used to add inflections to some words. I have considered getting rid of them, but honestly I like them.

It doesn't take much to justify a prepostrophe to me. But then, the same is true of diacritics. It's all in whether they're functional.

I tellya, it's been a weird week--especially with this chestburster* acting up. Since the Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board Scan results came back "fuck if we know," I am indeed going to a gastroenterologist next to see if they have a better idea. Till then, Waldo continues to restlessly chew on my liver.

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OGYAFEland is my latest conlang project. And for once, I'm trying to make a language family by starting with the prototype language--which is way easier than starting with the modern language and going backwards. (Though I did manage to fake it pretty well with Rredŕa--I gave them a good earthy start, for aliens, and the Spacefuture Terms are often derivatives, compounds, or straight-up borrowings--you know, like languages do.) I've had a particular idea for a new language for some time now, and I'm excited to see if it works out.

Also, the morphophonemic system I'm working on means I can play with a really simple and completely superfluous method of word derivation using polyhedral dice. I could always sit down and just come up with words, but I've noticed that when I do that my synesthesia comes up with the same letters for specific meanings in each conlang, so that I usually wind up with some combination of p, n, r, and e for a word meaning "leaves" because those are the green letters, or the red/orange f, d, g, and o for fire words.** Randomizing it with the dice makes it easier to avoid that, and at this point, for this project, a word generator would not work.

Not to mention, I can finally justify buying polyhedral dice when I have never been a tabletop gamer. What? They're fun!

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So one day in September I decided the hell with it, I should go to grad school, so I took the GRE.*** Somehow a bunch of grad schools found out about this, and dammit my inbox is flooded with academic spam invitations to various schools. At this point it's so obnoxious I am starting to seriously consider midwifery school again.

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I was supposed to work yesterday. Unfortunately, somewhere between my house and the freeway, my front right tire went, and I quote, "splort." I am not car savvy, so I was in the turn lane for the freeway ramp trying to figure out why my car felt weird when a lady began honking wildly from a couple lanes over.

"Your tire is completely flat!" she yelled. "DON'T GET ON THE FREEWAY."

"That explains a lot," I said. "Thank you, good citizen!"

So instead of getting onto the ramp and therefore winding up with Car Problems On The Freeway, I pulled a U-turn and wound up with Car Problems In The High School Parking Lot--a much better option. I hung out there till Dad and a tiny AAA lady came to my rescue. Could've been a lot worse--although I am not looking forward to finding out how much new tires are going to cost.

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The latest in Having A Body Is Weird: Did you know you can get charley horses in your eardrum? This time it was Mom who got to learn the hard way. Dude, having a body. It's weird.


*I named it Waldo. Although when I talk to it (who doesn't talk to their chestburster?), I generally address it as "you bastard."

**And don't get me started on how this this is related more to the letter than to the sound--that is a great source of irritation. On the other hand, synesthesia has its own ideas about what an onomatopoeia is, too--not just the colors, but the idea of what, say, a bottle sounds like in essence. It's not just similarly-colored things that wind up with false cognates across my disparate conlangs.

***My party trick is standardized tests. I have never needed to study for them and still have trouble remembering that other people do. This seems to really annoy people, but to be honest, for all their pomp and circumstance, standardized tests measure some very specific useless skills. I just happen to use the gravitas people assign them to my advantage.

Hey, guys, another interview meme! Meant to jump start me back into life and writing and stuff!

You can comment and I might give you questions, although given my track record with that it may be a while or never before I actually do. Uh, sorry about that. I am trying …

Anyway! beccastareyes asked me some questions!

1. I don't remember if I've asked this before, but why did you go to Africa?

Short answer: because I was studying Swahili.

Longer answer: lots of reasons. I have always been an anthropology nerd, and so I really wanted to take a look at any place that was not familiar to me—I wanted to get some perspective on human culture, mine and others’. Plus, it would be an adventure.*

I could really have gone anywhere, but I had picked up a book on Kiswahili a few years earlier, and in doing so I learned a bit about the history and culture of the Swahili people. It was fascinating enough that it seemed like a cool place to start.

2. Favorite conlang or conculture project. Or just rambling on whether you can separate the two, or if conlanging is an aspect of conculturing.

I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED. HOW LONG DO YOU HAVE?

I’ve got a few right now:

( Unicorn Riders! )

( Big Fluffy Aliens! )

Third, I’m working on the OGYAFEland cultures. On the one side you get the humans of the kingdom Polara, whose society I hope is believable and unique from any cultures here in our world (not to mention the annals of fantasy). On the other you get the sprites, who are shamelessly utopian, because god dammit I don’t care if it’s not fashionable, I am the writer and I get to make a world where things went right.

Highlights from the human side of things are a sense of style like the bastard child of French Renaissance and Streamline Moderne, verb phrase place names (“Roses Climbing”; “Sparks Fall on the Mountain”; “Lion’s Roar Drowning”), a casual animistic belief system with cultural heroes but no gods, a lunisolar calendar, interjections like “Skulls and Shrooms!”, a complex gender spectrum based on beliefs about blood, magic as a high-education trade like medicine or law, and patchwork pants. On the sprite side, you get energy efficience, love of the arts, large cities twined with woodland and meadows, no school, and, naturally, socialism.

3. Is Tamora Pierce worth reading as a grown-up? I read three of the Alanna books as a kid, but it was near the end of my 'sneak into the kids books to grab things' phase. Now, of course, there's Amazon and used books.

YES. (As mentioned on her blog, neither of us is ashamed of the kids’ section—I never was, and she got over it. I truly believe that some of the best writing can be found in juvie and YA sections.)

4. What's the best thing about living in Utah? Given I've spent all of a couple of hours there, enlighten me.

That you can forget about your laundry and leave it in the washing machine overnight and it won’t grow mildew.

Okay, real answer: How orange it is! In Salt Lake you theoretically get all four seasons, which means a lovely bit of variety, but I especially like the aspens and scrubby oaks turning colors in the fall. They make a lovely swishy noise when the wind blows through them, and the air smells GREAT, all crisp and dry and a little bit like leaf and dirt.

Dig:


And in the south, there’s the orange of red rock, in strange and wonderful buttes and arches and basins. It also smells great there—a soporific combination of sun, iron, and sage.


You can almost smell it now!



Oh, and there were dinosaurs.

5. Your LJ says to ask you about your mermaid collection, so a fellow ocean fan is asking.

I’ll be damned! Somebody found the “Things to ask me about” bit!

I’ve always loved mermaids, ever since I was three years old and saw Disney’s The Little Mermaid and loved it.*** I like the variations on merfolk in history and the aesthetic, and—you should know me by now—working out how they could actually live underwater has always appealed to me. (I have worked out several “species” of merfolk; one of my favorites is a fully mammalian species that stole quite a bit from the adaptations of dolphins. Merfolk with blubber!)

So I sort of wound up collecting various mermaid figures and pictures, just because I thought they were interesting. (It started, once again, with Disney: the first mermaid in my collection was a Happy Meal toy Ariel I got soon after seeing the movie.) I’ve built up a sizeable pile of mermaids!



Sadly, this is the best picture I have of them right now; they’re in storage pending my getting a house with some room to display them. But once it comes out, I’ll even have a few more to add to the mix, including that one crazy clay sculpture of a skelemermaid I got for Xmas one year. So yeah, it’s still growing!


*There was also a little bit of defiance there; people all worried about the whole chronic-depression-dependent-on-pills thing, and I wanted to prove that it wouldn’t hold me back.

**I have books like these for many concultures. I call them my hitchhiker’s guides.

***Not so much love for the original Hans Christian Andersen story. Have you read it? It is LOONY. It’s some kind of codependent psychodrama and has a whole lot of weird theology about whether or not mermaids can acquire an immortal soul. Kind of like an early version of Teen Supernatural Romance.