I remember when I first started playing MMPORGs I was very careful about my typing. I used complete sentences. I puncutated. I capitalized. I used emoticons, but as mood-shading, not in place of actual text. And I was very prejudiced against people who didn't type properly, unless they were currently being attacked by a pack of hyenas and had been reduced to "gaaaaa334222" in a keyboard fumbled attempt to stay alive.

Several years later, I've gone from "Greetings, folks, how are things? :)" to "hey everyone" and I don't have any misgivings about it. Part of that involved something I never internalized until fairly recently: typing is a physical effort. People with any kind of pain in their wrists, hands or fingers tend to type minimally because it hurts. Typing is also a skill: people who never learned to type quickly often default to shorthand. The person who types 'ok gtg' will sometimes be an articulate, thoughtful person on voice chat... or a foreigner struggling with English. It never pays to assume.

That's part of what intrigued me: how the method of communication filtered personality. You see only shards of it when someone is constrained, and it makes them seem a particular way until you begin to recognize patterns in how they react and learn to "read" them.

I'm not entirely sure when I decided to stop typing like a writer in games. But I could begin to guess a few reasons why.

The first was because lately when I'm playing games, very little of me is actually present. I'm there to do something enjoyable for fifteen or twenty minutes, and I'm often emotionally used up from the day. The more completely I type, the more I find that people can read my mood. Which is great if I'm cheerful, but not so great when I'm droopy. If all your sentences look about the same ("yeah i can do that give me 10m") then it's harder to rain on other people's parades.

But then another interesting thing started happening: the more sloppily I typed, the more people paid attention when I bothered to type properly. It's like cursing: if you curse all the time, people stop taking you seriously. But if you never curse and one day you do, everyone stops and rushes over because they're sure you're about to explode. There's something to be said for being able to make people pause and say, "Wow, she must feel strongly about that because she bothered to punctuate."

Finally, it really is true: gamerspeak saves time and wear on your hands. As long as people can understand what I'm saying, puncutation, capitalization, all those things are niceties. If the purpose of language is to communicate and all I want to communicate is that I'm busy, then "am afk" works just as well as "Not right now, I'm about to idle."

But none of this trumped the most fascinating observation... something I noticed only a week ago when I saw a couple of my lines in succession, all without punctuation or capitalization... and I realized that while I wasn't bothering with those things, what I was bothering with was rhythm. In my head, I was treating it like free verse... like a gamer e e cummings. After that, the entire paradigm shifted. I was fascinated by the fact that rhythm mattered so much while I was framing these sentences in my head. The lack of punctuation was a feature, not a bug: you were intended to drift off into a long pause, not come to a short halt. Uncertainty was integral. It made sense of the "not wanting to communicate everything" aspect of filtering yourself, and yet it did communicate... but to the part of me that reads poetry, not prose.

I'm not sure where we're going, text-wise. We communicate in dozens of mediums involving keyboards, abbreviated or full: text messages, IM, games, email, Mucks, forums, web pages. But I no longer think of the truncated versions of language we sometimes lapse into as "bad English" that needs to be corrected. There's too much going on: a desire to save time, the limitations of the input device, the expectations and uses of the medium. It's not so much that the language is evolving as much as we are learning to use different, more abbreviated versions of it for different purposes.

Inevitably these days I still run into the people prejudiced against people who don't type perfectly. They use my old arguments on me: "First impressions are important." Now I think they're the ones who are missing things. There is more nuance there than they realize. It's just not on the surface, where they're used to looking.


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Tags: culture, gaming, language, linguistics
Current Mood: curious

There's no Admonishment today; as I mentioned on the weekend I'm not ready to post it... so instead, your dose of Kherishdar today comes in the form of a couple of vocabulary words:

ishte [ YSH teh ], (adjective) — the universe's quality of being morally neutral. In basic, expresses that the world, fate, life neither leans toward evil and sorrow, nor toward happiness and good, but that the universe is a moral blank awaiting the influence of the Ai-Naidar.

aivnar [ EYEV naar ], (noun) — an individual's moral duty to influence the universe toward good.

This one was hard for me, because I honestly believe in a benevolent universe. Nature is harsh and Entropy is at work, but neither of them are out to get us, and in total we exist here and it has wondrous meaning.

The Ai-Naidar don't believe that. But what they do believe seems consistent with all the rest of their beliefs: that if the universe is good, it's because people make it good... and therefore, people must.


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Tags: ai-naidar, culture, language, linguistics
Current Mood: tired

You know, the next time I have to describe someone as being incredibly quick to learn things, like genius-level quick, I think I'll use the analogy that they learn as fast as a baby. O_O

But anyway, I digress. I was writing a letter.

Dear Wigglet:

When you howled "MA MA" at me at around nine months, I figured you had no idea what you were saying, because I was under the impression that a baby's first word was somehow more obvious. But I was puzzled because I was pretty sure you didn't know that I was "ma ma" though we'd been trying to teach you that.

I also figured that you weren't quite sure that "da da" was Daddy when you came up with that one a few days later.

Somehow, though, between now and then you've figured out how to say—badly—a whole host of tiny words. You say "kih teh" when we point at the stuffed cats. You ask for a "ba ba" which is as good as "bottle" seems to get at this point. You know both "Ma ma" and "Da da" and in fact, while staring at a book with a baby resting in her mother's arms, you said, very carefully while placing your hand on it, "beh bee," even though I know "ee" is a hard sound for you to make.

I find myself astonished that you figure out these things at all: that you know to go get the "hat" when I ask for it. I can't imagine what a difficult task it is, when you're holding the tiny blue racquetball in one hand and the yellow spiny rubber ball in the other, to learn that "yellow" refers to the color of the ball and not its texture or size.

But anyway. What I mean to say is... at some point you started using language. Poorly, but definitively. And because I am a poorly educated mother who was waiting for some great epiphanic moment where you held your arms aloft and declaimed something triumphantly while staring me in the eye, I really, honestly don't know what your first word was. The one that you knew was a word and not a sound, I mean.

Or maybe I just overthink things. But that's because your mom is a pocket linguist, and like most people nowadays, she thinks too much.

Anyway, in thirty years, I hope you're not telling your friends, "My mom didn't even remember my first word," while rolling your eyes. Honestly, no one issued me a manual when you showed up. You'll see one day.

Love and Bewilderment,
Mom Jaguar

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Tags: humor, language, linguistics, mom in spots
Current Mood: O_O

I was discussing poetry with asakiyume when an interesting challenge came up: what do you do with foreign words (real or imaginary) in fiction, text or poetry? Do you translate them into English? Add a foot-note? Put something in parenthesis but leave the foreign word in the text?

None of these are new solutions, of course. But publishing online gives us access to HTML and all its associated widgets. One of the things I've been toying in my own work is using Javascript to put a pop-up with a definition when you float your cursor over the word. You get the initial mystery of seeing the foreign term and if you want to try using context to extrapolate the meaning you can... but if you absolutely must know what it means (right now, without having to look down at the bottom of the page), you can point at it and get the translation.

What's interesting about this is that you can use it to play with people's perception of their familiarity with the language. A footnote requires a significant break in attention, one that evokes a new language student stopping to consult a dictionary. But the Javascript pop-up is more akin to how you do things when you're acceptably multilingual and run across an unexpected word from one of your known languages—that moment of context-switching as your brain shifts gears, calls up the right word, and keeps going. (Note that the truly adept are past this also, but simulating that level of knowledge probably isn't going to work when the reader knows they don't know the language).

So it's been something I've been toying with as I'm preparing some of my alien stories for web publication: how do I want to present foreign words to the reader? Do I want them to feel alienated from them, but give them the feeling of completely new discovery? Do I want it to function more as if they sort of know the language already? And how does that affect the emotional impact of the story?

New technology is often annoying. But on occasion, it comes up with fun stuff like this. :)

And yes, to forestall the inevitable tangent, you would have to code the page to gracefully break if people don't have Javascript enabled. But as with most things, they'd be missing out. Javascript isn't exactly brand-new, untried technology anymore. -_-


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Tags: language, linguistics, technology, writing
Current Mood: sleepy

I am sitting across the restaurant table, rooting around in my purse for I know-not-what, while my mother holds the baby on her lap. The two are entertaining one another, eating, grabbing for things, etc. I am half-listening as my mom asks Wigglet what she wants....

"Agua? Leche? Tete? Pulpo?"

I burst out laughing. "What??"

My mom and the baby look up. "What do you mean, what?"

"Pulpo!" I repeat, laughing. And, yes, there is an octopus toy on the table, but...

"Well, she was reaching for it," my mother says reasonably.

"I know," I say. "It was just the progression. It sounded so normal until then... Water, milk, pacifer... octopus..."

The baby gnaws on the octopus's head. The surreality of it dissipates. But only a little.

Water. Milk. Binky. Mmm, rubber calamari, rawr!


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Tags: humor, language, mom in spots
Current Mood: blearily amused

I am walking through the mall with my mother on our Wednesday "Take the Baby to the Carousel" outing when we start talking about people who don't grow up, relationships without commitment, the lack of coming-of-age rituals... basically all the things we've been talking about here on Livejournal. My mom finds this all very interesting, in a clinically detached way; now that my sister and I are both safely settled down, she no longer has any personal stake in the matter. I've noticed she's become a lot more intellectual about cultural trends. But anyway, the discussion proceeds:

"Ah," she says. "You mean the lifestyle. Like "Sex in the City." "

I nod. "Just like that."

My mother says, "You know there's a term for that kind of thing in Spanish."

"Oh?"

She leans toward me, lowering her voice. "Yes. They call it amigos con derechos."

My mental double-take is so complete I lose a couple of steps and have to lengthen my stride to catch up. "Friends with rights?"

Satisfied at my ease with translation, my mother says, "Yes. Friends with rights."

"In English we say 'friends with benefits,'" I say, startled. "Wow. That's... a big difference. Rights versus benefits... wow."

"I guess so," my mother agrees, and the conversation segues into American culture versus European culture, and the formality versus casualness of each. But when I get into the car to drive home, I find myself astonished again at the inter-relation of culture and language, and how the same concept can be rendered so differently.

A friend with rights versus a friend with benefits. Wow. That says a very great deal about both the American and the Spanish assumptions. Doesn't it?


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Tags: culture, language
Current Mood: poleaxed

"What now?" Shame asks as I stare at the lexicon, my pen still in my hand.

Wordless, I point. He looks and says, "Ah. I wondered when you would find that."

"You wondered!" I exclaim.

He nods. "Since I saw that you make... strange distinctions. "Submissive." "Dominant." "Switch." "

I look over my shoulder at him. "Exactly what were you reading to find stuff like that?"

"A culture's attitude toward sex is revealing," Shame says. At my expression, he says solemnly, mimicking the Calligrapher, "I used the tool of the Firefox."

"Lord preserve," I say, covering my eyes. "Did you...."

"Turn Safe Search off," he says. He nods toward the dictionary. "But you see, we are different."

ieqera [ ee yeh KAIR aa ], (noun) — balance between desire to lead and desire to follow. Every person's ieqera is different, leaning more towards one or the other, but every Ai-Naidari has both qualities in them.

"You perceive," he says as I stare at it, "all of us must have both. As Farren noted, "Ever is there one born below you... and one above."

"Even you?" I tease.

"Particularly me," he says.

"Even Thirukedi?"

"The Emperor answers to his people, does he not?"

"The Exception?"

He smiles without humor. "Is the Exception. That question answers itself, and you should know better, aunerai." He taps the page. "Read on."

naima [ neye MAH ], (noun) — need to lead, be in charge, take care of many others, be aggressive, make decisions (one side of the scale of ieqera).

fijza [ FEE jzah ], (noun) — need to follow, be subordinate, serve one particular person, be receptive/submissive, be given clear direction (one side of the scale of ieqera).

"Taking care of people is in both these definitions," I say, quiet.

"The more responsibility you have, the more people you are responsible for. Yes? And yet the servant serves a master." Continuing the lesson, he says, "The adjectives are manaimas, to be leaderish, and mefijzan, to be followerish. Both are necessary and honorable. It is possible to be bad at both... and very good. A good servant is as invaluable as a good leader."

"My head hurts," I say.

"Is it your head, or your heart?" Shame asks.

I eye him.

He touches my shoulder, startling me. "I didn't mean to wound you. But... this is another form of destructive independence your society practices, yes? Pretending that everyone must be a leader, and that cooperation is somehow accomplished by many leaders coming together and mysteriously deciding to help one another. It's ridiculous. It drives the truth into your bedrooms."

"I'm not sure that's true," I say, quiet.

"I'm not sure it's not," he says, and leaves me with the dictionary.

Ieqera... always someone above and someone below. But that would require more trust in one another than we have, wouldn't it.

I put the pen down and close the book. I'm done for the day.



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Tags: ai-naidar, language, meta-conversations, philosophy
Current Mood: sigh

"Weird," I say.

"What's that?" Shame asks from where he's reading nearby.

"Well... ashgeten sounds wrong, in the whole "adding ash- to a word makes it "person who has this quality." " It doesn't sound at all like one of your words. It doesn't even match some of the other ways you denote "person who has this quality." Is it archaic?"

"No, it's a Third World word. Or maybe Second," Shame says. "I'm not a linguist."

I turn over my shoulder to star at him. "What?"

"A word from one of the other worlds?" Shame asks. "Are you so busy thinking of us as fantasies that you forget we are a multi-world empire?"

"Uh, no," I say, though I'm guessing my face says "guilty as charged."

"Even with instantaneous transit, Kherishdar is too big for us to have a homogenous language. Or it would be, if we didn't have linguists. They go from world to world, notating the local changes and bringing them to the other worlds. They write the common dictionaries. That way a colonist can still talk to someone from the capital."

"You... correct... for linguistic drift," I say.

"I trust that wasn't a pun," he says, returning to his reading.

"No," I say, because I'm too busy squealing to myself. I want that job!!

"You might want to look up keva," he adds, absent.

So I do. And giggle.

keva [ keh VAH ], (noun)—people who are into everything, trying to figure out how it works. This applies equally to children asking "Why" all the time and busybodies who want the latest gossip and elderly relatives who want to know if you really know what you're doing. Linguists and anthropologists in particular often earn this appellation.

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Tags: ai-naidar, language, meta-conversations
Current Mood: eee!

I am still limp on top of the dictionary when the Calligrapher murmurs, "He has not told you why it irritates him so."

I look up. This ought to be good.

"Shim is often a quality associated with a story's romantic object."

"Romantic object," I say slowly.

The Calligrapher nods. "Because the process of such growth is usually mysterious to the young and callow, it is particularly attractive to them."

I can feel the laugh coming on again. "You mean--"

He shows me a picture of Orlando Bloom. "I believe the word is... heart-throb."

From the other room: "FARREN!"

The Calligrapher calls back, "You are the one who left the tool of the Firefox open!"

I die.


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Tags: ai-naidar, humor, language, meta-conversations
Current Mood: AHAHAHAHAHAHA

"No," he says quietly, "Stop that with my hair."

I look up from the art I later end up uploading and squint at him. "What?"

"The hair," he says. "It should hang straight down."

"Oh come on," I say. "I do hair that flows in invisible winds all the time. It's like my trademark." I point the end of my pencil at him. "You can correct me (heh) on vocabulary, but this is my sphere. Don't tell me how to do art."

He taps the dictionary with a blunt fingertip. "You are drawing Ai-Naidar. That means you pay attention to our visual styles."

"Yes?" I say.

"That drawing is from when I was at a point of emotional equilibirum," he says. "There should be no movement."

"No movement...?"

The dictionary drops onto my desk with a thump, open to an entry:

shim [ SHEEM ], (noun) – motion; almost always used for emotional/spiritual motion, in the sense of a person changing or growing. This is usually considered an awkward, uncomfortable or painful process, but also ultimately an joyful one. Also used to describe a visual trope, in that the character/person in an illustration with the most motion is the one that is changing the most. This is often depicted as external motion (wind in hair or clothes) even if the character is not moving, as a symbol that they can't stop growing/changing even when they seem physically still. Adjective form is shimele.

I stare at it, wide-eyed. And then say, choking up, "W-w-what?"

He glances at me.

"You... you have a word for fwoosh!" I get it all out in a rush and then burst out laughing.

"Gods save me," Shame says, exasperated. "The aunerai is mad."

I squeak in the middle of my gigglefit and keep going.


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Tags: ai-naidar, humor, language, meta-conversations
Current Mood: *giggle*