Ten Thousand Item Post

Random thoughts. A ten thousand item shop (i.e. countless items) is what they call a dollar store in China (also sometimes Japan, though "100 yen shop" is more typical nowadays).

• Remember how I once said (here) that elves' usual depiction as markedly less sexually dimorphic than humans—e.g. an average female elf in D&D 3E stands 5' and weighs 84 lbs, while a male stands the same and weighs 89—doesn't go with their depiction as free-loving hippies? Yes well I crunched the numbers on, e.g., chimps and bonobos. A male chimp averages 109 lbs, while a female averages 86 lbs; a male bonobo averages 103 lbs, while a female averages 66.
  
  Now, because elves have human proportions and chimpanzees have ape ones, we're just going to go by the cube-root of the mass ratio to get the new heights; we can just leave the mass ratios alone. And plugging in the male elf's 5'/89 lbs to chimpanzees' female-to-male ratios (79% the weight, thus 92% the height) should give us elf females who stand 4'7" and weigh 70 lbs. Plugging them into the bonobo ratio (64% the weight, thus 86% the height) should give us elf females who stand 4'4" and weigh 57 lbs.
  
  No, the canonical elf's ratios (males 106% as heavy as females) are, as I said, precisely those of jackals.
• The Maya, as previously mentioned, didn't have fractions. Oddly enough, though, the Aztecs did, sort of. They were at least groping toward the rudiments of the concept when people who had algebra showed up and rendered it moot; their conception of fractions was somewhat like what seems to be in play in Babylonian math. It's odd, in part because the Maya had genuine writing, and the Aztecs didn't, they were still at the rebus/mnemonic "you've got to already know the gist of it to understand it" proto-writing stage. Then again the Hindus invented roughly a third of our math, and their language wasn't written until sometime after the founding of Rome.
  
  Incidentally, the reason we know the Aztecs were beginning to come up with the concept of fractions, is we've got some of their land-surveying records (remember, the Spanish mostly only destroyed ritual manuals—and remember the rituals in question if you want to know why). They were top-notch geometers; the great Postclassic Mayan center, Chichen Itzá, seems to have mostly been built by artisans who weren't Mayan, but Nahuatl (Toltecs, presumably, given the time-frame). Being an artisan was fundamental to the Nahuatl civilization's self-concept, to the point where "toltecatl" means "artisanry" (as contrasted with "chichimecatl", literally "being a northern savage" and idiomatically "squalor"). It's no wonder those guys got good at surveying.
  
  Of course, since they used to have dealings with the Maya, you do wonder why they didn't say, "Wait, you're writing down, like, the actual sounds you say? Let's adapt that for our language, rather than having to play Pictionary whenever we have to read something!"
• I'm changing the orthography of the word "khàngaì" to "khângây". I'm redoing their language (or rather the one of their languages that shows up), so that instead of using tone to distinguish lexemes, it distinguishes inflections—instead of being a tonal language, the pitch of a word marks things like noun case or verb mood and tense. And I thought, since the folks in question are basically wolves crossed with songbirds, that I'd have the morphology be not merely tone, but actual music.
  
  I haven't ground the kinks out yet, but I think I'm going with a sentence being in a minor key makes it declarative, and major key interrogative. Also think I'm gonna have adjectives be on the same note as their referents, and probably have verbs harmonize in some way with their subjects (maybe different harmonies for active and passive verbs?).
  
  I also know I'm gonna have one of them say that the reason that language is the one they use for interstellar trade has less to do with the nation that speaks it being somewhat dominant, than with it using pure notes rather than chords, which their vocal anatomy makes pronounceable, like birds' does (and yours doesn't, that's why so much vocal music involves group harmonies). I think one of their other languages has the verbs be chords of the notes their subjects and objects are in. The Bantu languages and a lot of Mesoamerican ones (and South Athabascan ones, which might be due to Uto-Aztecan influence, I don't know enough Tlingit or Carrier to tell) use constructions that basically work like "The boy the girl he-loves-her".
• I'm honestly the type of person who worries over whether aliens have the right anatomy for the sounds I gave their language—for instance, most things other than mammals don't have hard palates (crocodiles do, because otherwise their prey would kick them in the brain on the way down their throats). I wonder how talking birds pronounce palatalized sounds—do they maybe do vowel-glides instead? Most things other than baboons and the apes don't have uvulas (and I may actually mention that the structure in zled mouths that makes their "uvular" consonants doesn't quite look like a uvula, although it sounds close enough for our purposes).
  
  Zledo can't pronounce F or V (they render those elements in human languages as ɸ and β), and the only glottal sound they have is the stop (their H is actually a velar—IPA x—just like the J in Spanish). One can imagine that an alien race might pronounce F with the upper lip on the bottom teeth—is that a lateral labiodental?—which I'm gonna call an "underbite F". I think I might give the khângây that pronunciation. A species with a wolf-like tongue might have trouble with some of the alveolar sounds, since the tip of its tongue would be floppy; it might pronounce T as Th and D as Dh (but presumably still as stops, i.e. they'd basically have a Mexican accent in that regard).
• My whole family (well, with one exception) are getting obsessed with Death Note. And I realized what I don't like about it, something I did actually touch on in my thing about it, the 12th post on the whole blog. Namely, I'm a science fiction writer. Death Note completely ignores the implications of the existence of Kira. Not just the cosmology is unexplored—usually shinigami serve an ecological function in the cosmos, these ones are basically just cow-tipping rednecks—but even worse, the sociology.
  
  Basically Death Note suffers from the same problem as In Time, which has a world where immortality is the medium of exchange and, instead of exploring how people change when death is no longer a certainty, they chuck hoary class-war chestnuts at us. Death Note ignores the implications of its setting in favor of police procedural and highly stylized intrigue. How does some brat setting up as a knockoff of the Spectre, and everyone knowing he did it, affect everyone? Yeah, they talk a bit about crime rates dropping, but Kira doesn't only kill criminals later on, he kills anyone who crosses him, and tries to take over the world's political system. And at that point, we discover Death Note is every bit the "all conflicts are resolved with a children's card game" setting that Yu-Gi-Oh! is, it's just that the children's card game is "the civilian police system". Probably the moment Kira killed someone overseas, definitely the moment he went after an official of another country, he ceased to be a criminal, and became a national security threat.
  
  Most of the things Light uses to hide hinge on the police system—he has sufficient plausible deniability RE: being Kira that they can't get probable cause to search him. Now, leaving to one side that Japanese cops aren't actually sticklers about that kind of thing, "probable cause" don't mean jack to people whose job is more likely to involve the phrase "extraordinary rendition", let alone the people who don't have to bother to outsource that. It would realistically take less than a week from the first time Kira made foreign officials fear for their national sovereignty to the moment when Light finds the barrel of a black-ops pistol shoved in his mouth.
• Oddly enough, Canadian English has more branches than American, even though Canada has about 11% the people. But there are four big divisions of Canadian English: Western and Central, Maritimes, Newfoundland, and Northern. Meanwhile, there are only three divisions of American: Midwest, Northeast, and everything else is Southern.
  
  Incidentally, most Canadians probably speak Western and Central, which I believe is also what TV and radio are mostly in, but there are three other divisions of Canadian English even if one of them is the dominant one. In America, our TV is in Midwestern, albeit a very deracinated variety that shades towards the western end of Southern. It's also somewhat interesting why everything that isn't Midwest or Northeast is Southern, namely that most of our western settlement was by ex-Confederates, either trying to start over after the war or trying to escape Reconstruction (postwar occupations suck to live under).
• While I stand by my assertion that the concept of shinigami existed in Japan prior to the Meiji era, because it's mentioned in an 18th century play, I do think we have to acknowledge they're not much of a god in a cultic sense. No, instead, they're basically a jinx—as are the binbôgami (poverty gods) and the ekibyôgami (pestilence gods). All three, in turn, are probably just subclasses of magatsuhi no kami, the "gods of days that bear calamity".
  
  They probably functioned something like Sapientia and Fortuna and so on, in Roman literature—most of them aren't so much actual gods as they are rhetorical personifications. If the Romans were doing a litany of all the gods (as the Japanese occasionally list the eight hundred myriad), they might list such personifications, but they didn't really have any cult except sometimes as the handmaids of gods who aren't just named after the thing they're the god of (as the magatsuhi no kami serve Izanami no Mikoto).
  
  I think a lot of the time the terms are just applied to people, rhetorically, i.e. "With the extra repairs, that klutz is our god of poverty."/"Thanks for giving me your cold, plague-god!"/"Why is every TV detective a god of death?"