All I Survey II

Random thoughts. Of course, it's only random thought because, while I'm still riding a giant linguistics high, I still might wanna talk about other things. Your quaint notion of "on topic" is very droll.

• I realized, using the reflexive causative for honorific speech, in Zbin-Ãld, might just be part of a bigger thing where they use auxiliaries mostly for social-signaling speech (apart, pretty much, from the use of the pure causative). One can also say "[subject] dares that they do X", for instance, in an equivalent to the -teiyagaru construction in Japanese, and their version of "please" has always been "request that [subject] does X". And yes, "does X", all but their most informal requests are in the third person, e.g. "I request that the citizen wait here."
  
  The reflexive-causative honorific, of course, is mainly used by citizens when speaking to (sometimes about) nobles, but, because of a political reform a few centuries ago, is now also used by nobles when speaking about the citizenry in any official capacity. Remember, the current zled political theory has the nobility holding power in feudal gift from the populace, not from each other.
• If it ever strikes you as odd that Irish and Bengali are in the same language group despite being separated by nearly 7000 miles, how about the fact Madagascar and Easter Island speak languages that aren't only in the same group, but the same branch of the group? They're 9000 miles apart, after all, and yet both speak Malayo-Polynesian languages—imagine if the Irish spoke Farsi, for the level of weird that's getting into.
• Easter Island reminds me, why do people try to make Ancient Aliens or Atlantis arguments based on it? The big statues were reared between 1250 and 1500. And the ruling class of the island were exiled aristocrats from Peru, whether Moche or Inca I forget: back home, they could do things significantly more impressive than a few moai.
  
  Given the way nationalism works in much of Asia (*cough*Ahnenerbe*cough*), I'm really quite surprised nobody in, say, Indonesia has seized on the probably-superficial resemblance of some Indus Valley signs to those of Rongorongo (pronounced "wrong-o, wrong-o"). You could make a better case for that script representing an Austronesian language than for it representing Sanskrit, I'll tell you that for free. Come to think of it, have any of those trigger-happy Russian linguists looked into a relation between Austronesian and Dravidian (which is probably the language of the Indus Valley culture)?
• Actually a lot of the things we talk about as ever so ancient really aren't. Chinese writing that the average Chinese person can read only dates to the same period as the Second Punic War (and we can read Roman writing from that era, too). Chinese writing that is demonstrably set up like Chinese writing, though obscured from the layman by using different calligraphic principles, is only as old as the various Canaanite scripts—in a well-defined form only as old as Greek.
  
  Before that, China wrote in the same scratched in proto-writing conventional symbols you see in stuff like the Vinca Script. Meanwhile, cuneiform was already a full-fledged scribal writing system starting in 2600 BC, and Egyptian hieroglyphs from somewhere between 3200 and 2400 BC. Also? China's first emperor post-dates the Roman Republic by 263 years.
  
  China is popularly listed along with Egypt and Sumer as one of the world's great original civilizations. But it's not. Chinese civilization is only as old as Greek or Hindu, both of which are recognizable starting around 1300 BC. Dim proto-Chinese gropings are recognizable in the era of the Hittites, who have treaties with the Indic-speaking Mitanni aristocracy.
• On the flipside of that, however, is the other silly canard, that China is ever so stable compared to the west. Only, the history of every Western country can pretty much be summed up as "Roman, tribal, High Medieval, decadent medieval, Renaissance, modern". China in the same period has gone through Han, Three Kingdoms, Jin, Northern and Southern Dynasties, and Sui—just to bring us up to the middle of Europe's "Dark Ages" or tribal period—then the Tang (part of which is the Second Zhou in some regions), then the 5 Dynasties and 10 Kingdoms (which is Liao in some places), then the Song Dynasty takes us almost to the end of the High Medieval. Much of the stuff in between Han and Tang, and between Tang and Song, would count as an interregnum or "Dark Age" in Europe.
  
  Then China gets conquered by Mongols, and there's the Yuan Dynasty, which lasts till the middle of the decadent medieval in the West (Marco Polo visited the Yuan). Then there's the Ming, which basically actually was what the Renaissance was trying to be (like the Renaissance, it was still much worse for the farming masses than High Medieval Europe). In 1644 you get the Qing Dynasty (conquest by Manchurians), which was what the Renaissance and Enlightenment actually were in Europe (i.e. oppressive government by racist savages), and then in 1911 you get the fall of the dynasty, the takeover of the warlords, Japanese Imperialism, and first the Republic and then the People's Republic, neither of which could give Vlad the Impaler any serious competition in the "good governance" races.
• To switch to a different tidbit of global history, you know the Medieval Warm Period? Since so much of our politics is based on the importance of climate, and denying medieval achievements, the Warm Period is generally credited with the High Medieval prosperity (medieval breakthroughs in agricultural technology, occasioned by the fact that—unlike Muslims or Byzantines—they had no slaves, actually deserve more of the credit).
  
  But the same Warm Period didn't just happen in Europe. It also happened in the New World. Only there, it caused a drought that probably destroyed Anasazi civilization (that's when you start seeing cannibalism, drastic increases in fortifications, and whole settlements made up of nothing but temples), and another one that probably destroyed the Classic Maya. What benefits one man may harm another; what the world gives with the left hand was taken away with the right. Nice place, this cosmos.
• What do conlangers have against the letter C? Also X and Q. Now, aside from the fact that K^w is an independent phoneme in many Indo-European languages, not least Proto-Indo-European—it's called a labialized velar—what if you're deliberately trying to evoke some other language? Elvish is spelled the way it is because Tolkien was deliberately trying to evoke Latin. If I'm trying to evoke Chinese, I might spell a language's aspirated voiceless alveopalatal affricate as "q", or its voiceless alveolar one as "z"; if Arabic, "q" will be a voiceless uvular stop.
  
  Also, though, any fictional language's orthography should be designed to be pronounced by the people who are reading the book. I, for instance, use the sequence ⟨kh⟩-⟨gh⟩-⟨hh⟩ in Zbin-Ãld, for sounds pronounced [q], [ɢ], and [χ] (the voiceless and voiced uvular stops, and the voiceless uvular fricative, respectively). I write [ʧ] and [ʤ] as ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨j⟩, and [j] as ⟨y⟩. Because my book is written in English, and while ⟨kh⟩ is likely to be said as a fricative ([x], which is actually what the H in Zbin-Ãld is), or just an aspirated [k], what, pray, does the average person pronounce ⟨q⟩ as? Most people know by now that Mandarin romanization uses a q for a ch sound and an x for an s, but I can hardly rely on such common knowledge for languages I made up, now can I?
• I am, however, a firm believer that fictional cultures' names are not required to conform to the expectations of a provincial audience. I say this because I once had an English teacher complain about all the weird names in my literary analysis of one of the Chanur books by C. J. Cherryh. Because one so often meets people named Zhuge Liang or Agamemnon, right?
  
  I realize that names like those of the zledo—e.g. Hhãzma, pronounced [χazma], with the first syllable trilled—may be hard to pronounce. Technically even I can't pronounce them, I don't have the right vocal anatomy to trill the tilde-ed vowels (most humans, in the book, make a gurgling noise; I think I'm gonna have a gal what speaks Chinese give 'em that r-coloring from Mandarin). They're hard for humans in the book to pronounce, too. The fact Zbin-Ãld marks the sex of names by which syllables are trilled (odd male, even female) is probably counterintuitive, too—Õzdyithõ and Yehõ are male and female respectively, despite ending in the same sound—but they have to trill vowels in human names in order to mark them as nouns, so the difficulty is reciprocal.
• You want further proof that manga-ka are a bunch of nerds? How about this, the Volume 8 cover of The World God Only Knows.
  
  
  Not only are they reading books called Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, but the top Keima is Plato, the middle Keima is Aristotle, and the bottom one is Heraclitus. How do you know? It's based on "The School of Athens" by Raphael, that's how.