#linguistics
Well worth reading for linguists and movie historians alike:
my naim is wug
and wen you’r yung
and sussing owt
yur nativ tung
and wen ther’s tu
of mee arownd
you pluralyze
you pik the sowndHey,@animatedamerican.@2ells2tees put this where I could see it.
i love it :D
anemotionallyunstablecreature:
*raises hand* Hi. So - the use of a keysmash is emotive. You use it to indicate that you’re so overwhelmed with emotion that you can’t even type, you’re just flailing at the keyboard.a6:
u kno when u keysmash but the jumble of letters dont convery the right Feeling so u gotta backspace and re-keysmash to turn ur HKELSXPXA to a JKFSDKAS
Vaguely wondering how future anthropologists will explain this…
So why is there a difference between a “hkelsxpxa” and a “jkfsdkas” or an “asdfs”?
Because language evolves! It’s actually really exciting to think about, but there’s a reason why slang is continually changing and why Old People are usually characterized by not knowing the slang variants that are being used by The Youth - it’s because the way we use words changes over time, especially in response to technological or environmental changes.
And text-based communication - texting someone on your phone, or chatting with friends on Skype or Discord - is actually really new, this is something which started in my lifetime. And grammatical rules have been evolving and settling into place around that form of communication.
For instance, linguistic researchers have noticed that anyone who’s grown up with texting being a normal thing will usually not end their texts or IMs with a period unless they’re angry or annoyed. This is because it’s a lot harder to do a run-on sentence in those mediums; you can just hit ‘enter’ and go to a new line. A period, then, becomes an indicator of emphasis, instead of an indicator of “there is nothing missing from this sentence” - and it’s an indicator of negative emphasis (rather than the positive emphasis that an exclaimation mark can give).
So, the keysmash has its own grammatical rule. And it’s one that makes sense, considering that it’s entirely possible for a keysmash to be caused accidentally - by something falling onto the keyboard, or a cat walking across it. The rule, then, is that a deliberate keysmash and an accidental one need to be distinguishable.
So a deliberate keysmash will nearly always use keys only in the home row, and usually in a particular order that isn’t likely to have happened purely accidentally.
So, future anthropologists will likely explain it as a marker of language evolving to work with a text-based medium where expressions and body language are difficult-to-impossible to convey. Much like emojis, crytyping, and whether or not you put punctuation at the end of a sentence (and in what context you do so), keysmashing is used to convey how you feel - in a way that body language and facial expressions would usually be expected to fill in the gap.
I did a survey once of people who use keysmash and over half of people reported that they’d adjust a few letters or delete and re-smash when it didn’t look “right” (except for the poor Dvorak users, who had kind of given up on keysmash entirely because their vowely home row made theirs emotionally illegible to other people).
“Morpheme is the Smallest Meaningful Unit in a Language“
is the linguistic equivalent of
“Mitochondria is the Powerhouse of the Cell”
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed that’s common to tumblr and non-tumblr classicists, it’s hatred for Aeneas, from benign condescension to flat out antagonism. Admittedly, for many years scholarship advertised Aeneas as nothing more than ‘the founder of the Roman race’, which doesn’t really sell these days. Scholars swept under the carpet the qualities that make Aeneas such a gift of a character - his compassion for others, his pain, his humanity - because it’s not fashionable for a manly hero to have those qualities, right?!
I cannot take it any longer. I must tell you how we have all been cheated, and why Aeneas is one of the literary figures I most admire.
Nowadays most people study Latin first, and then Greek, and the Aeneidis one of the first things everyone studies. But Vergil’s Roman readers will have already read the Iliadfirst. So Vergil’s Aeneas is Vergil’s take on a familiar character, and Vergil takes it for granted that we know all about him. What is Aeneas like in the Iliad?
- Aeneas is honoured by the Trojans as much as Hector is (5.467).
- Aeneas and Hector are rebuked for letting the allies fight in their place, and it is Aeneas who is addressed first (5.77).
- Priam does not appear to share his people’s favour for Aeneas (13.461). While Aeneas is brooding over this, he is sought out by Deiphobus: ‘Aeneas, counsellor of the Teucrians, you need to help the army’ (13.463-4).
- Glaucus appeals to Hector andAeneas to save the body of Sarpedon, unaware that Zeus has already done this (16.536-47).
- Hectorlistens to Aeneas’ advice. Are we going to argue with Hector? Everyone loves Hector, and Hector loves Aeneas. When Apollo rebukes Aeneas because he, Hector and others aren’t fighting (17.327-32), Aeneas recognises the god and tells Hector that it is shameful to retreat into Troy (17.335-41). Hector listens to him, although he doesn’t usually listen to the good advice of Polydamas, but threatens him instead (12.230-50, 18.296).
- Aeneas is a renowned warrior (8.108). But that doesn’t make him arrogant – Aeneas is sensibly reluctant to try to fight Achilles when he knows that Achilles is stronger (20.89-99), but he is goaded into it by Apollo, who protests that Aeneas too is the son of a goddess (20.104-9).
- The gods (20.115-31) and the poet (20.158-60) suggest that Aeneas is at least nearly equal to Achilles in valour.
- Aeneas’ reply to Achilles’ taunts is measured (20.200-58).
- Even though Achilles is the best warrior, it is by no means easyfor him to defeat Aeneas (20.288-90).
- Aeneas is rescued from his battle with Achilles by Poseidon, who is a pro-Greek god. Poseidon saves Aeneas on the grounds that: he’s unaware of his fate to survive (20.296), has done nothing wrong (20.297), always gives gifts to the gods (20.299), and most importantly is fated to survive (20.300-8). Poseidon’s only rebuke is that Aeneas shouldn’t have listened to Apollo and fought with Achilles; rather, he should stick to the otherwarriors, since none of the others will be able to kill him (20.331-9). Achilles muses in bewildered disgust: ‘Well then, Aeneas truly was beloved of the immortal gods’ (20.347-8).
In other words, Aeneas is one of the few characters in the Iliadwho is rewarded by the gods for being a good person. He is also not allowed to show valour in the way he wants to, like the other heroes, because the gods have plans for him.
In the Aeneid, we learn that Aeneas does not want these plans, but he has to follow them anyway. He does not regain his agency, but the gods’ protection is removed from him by the anger of Juno. How can anyone hate a character who is introduced like this:
This is a song of war, and of the hero who was the first to come,
by fate a refugee, from the shores of Troy to Italy and Lavinian
shores, and who was furthermore tossed all over land and sea
by the violence of the gods, because of cruel Juno’s unforgiving anger;
he suffered much in war, too, so that he might found a city
and bring his gods to Latium, whence come the Latin race,
the Alban fathers, and the walls of lofty Rome.
Muse, tell me the reasons – what slight to her divinity,
what grief made the queen of the gods drive to endure
so many misfortunes, to encounter so many trials, a man famed
for his goodness? Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?
Vergil has a lot of feelings about Aeneas. You should, too.
‘But Vergil goes out of his way to make Aeneas a drip!’ NO.Vergil writes a realistic character. Vergil’s Aeneas behaves EXACTLY LIKE anyone should expect a war-torn refugee to behave. He is miserableand scared. But he accepts the responsibility put upon him, and he puts this responsibility before his own fears and his own desires.
Vergil could have written a poem about ‘the founder of the Roman race’ just marching into Italy and lording it over everyone because that was his destiny and that was his right. But Vergil stopped to think, and he thought, ‘Wait, this figure is a refugee. This is a good man who loved his home and his people and would value that quality in others. This is a man who suffered and would not want others to suffer like he did. This is a man who would forget how to want his own happiness.’
I can’t go through the whole Aeneidhere, because I could write reams about every scene, but I’ll talk a little about two of the things for which Aeneas is most criticised, which I haven’t already talked about in my previous Aeneid rants (all in my tag here, but especially this one).
Thanks for taking the time to put this together and include all the references!
“Aeneas constantly puts others first and all he gets in return is misery.“ Ouch. That is so true.
This is a fantastic post. I could write a thousand words here elaborating on it but I’d probably just be reiterating stuff from your post that I just don’t think can be emphasized enough, so I’ll keep it short. I don’t understand why Aeneas isn’t more popular either. The classics fandom is rightly wild about Hector and Patroclus because they remain good people amidst the annoying violent masculine hero culture, so why not Aeneas? He’s a devoted family man who goes through hell but remains incredibly resilient and selfless. He’s a fairly understated, easily overlooked character in the Iliad, yet, as you showed, he’s already got a lot of good qualities there, and he’s not as flashy as Achilles or Hector but that’s exactly why he’s the one who survives, why he’s the one who’s worthy of carrying the destiny of the Trojans. It is tough, seemingly endless work to be the kind of hero the Aeneid requires but he does it, and IMO he deserves ALL the respect and sympathy for it. What’s not to love? (Well, there was the time he tried to kill Helen, but it was just one time and he was very upset and under a lot of stress so I can forgive him.)
I’m gonna stop here before I spend all night ranting in praise of my small son Aeneas.
You know how articles reporting on psycholinguistic experiments often say something like ‘X number of people took part but Y number of people’s results were discounted for various reasons…didn’t understand the instructions, wasn’t paying attention, was generally incompetent…’, well now I can say I have probably just been admitted to that inevitable and illustrious group of rejected data-providers.
First, I did some example tests to get used to the computer and the instructions for the task which involved learning a made-up language. That was all well and good. Then I started the experiment proper. I was plugging away at the exercises, tapping here, tapping there as required until the researcher came in mid-way and told me, in a kindly, roundabout sort of way, that I was being too slow (it was meant to be a short-term memory test after all)!
After that, I sped up as best I could. After the first short-term memory part, I moved on to the second long-term memory one. Essentially they were testing to see what kinds of rules I had learned from part 1. After the experiment there was a quick interview-like section where the experimenter asked me to describe the rules I had learned from the exercises and what I thought this made-up language was. Now here’s the bizarre bit…I correctly spotted that the made-up language was essentially an ergative language - hooray! However, virtually all the rules that I had been using during the experiment (and consequently my answers) were completely wrong!
It turns out they are testing whether certain alignments (e.g. ergative alignment or accusative alignment or some unattested one) are equally learnable or not. I reckon their null hypothesis will be that unattested and attested systems are equally learnable with the aim of demonstrating that typologically-unattested systems are harder to learn. Evidently I find even attested systems hard to learn! I suppose (and hope, for dignity’s sake!) that in every experiment there’s always one such person!
I just find this extremely hilarious