Building off a similar post I just made, I see so many DMs fill their worlds with torment. There is a mucous of suffering that coats everything, suffocating all life. The thought, of course, is that tragedy breeds drama, leads to hard fought victories, ends in a more impactful success.
To an extent this is true, but there is another way that I implore you to try. Create a beautiful world. One where kindness reigns supreme over anything else. STOP RIGHT THERE!
Don't destroy it. Threaten it. Evil is a shadow whose depths grow darker the brighter the light. If your entire world is devoid of glee, there is no loss felt when entire kingdoms fall. If your characters have known nothing but merriment, the threat of losing even one person can spur them to action. It becomes personal. The threat is more real. They have something to protect.
When you have something to fight for, thats when you fear death.
Imagine a world where everybody from a very young age is taught the basics of phonology and syntax and encouraged to make their own personal conlang for their private thoughts,
and by the time they're teenagers it's so impenetrable and convoluted that trying to read someone else's personal notes is in the same position as the Japanese cryptographers trying to follow Navajo code-talkers,
and the most intimate thing you can possibly do with anyone is teach them your secret language
(and then people are scrambling to rewrite their conjugation tables so their exes can't read their stuff anymore)
As much debate as there is about tone tags, 90% of the issues would be solved by just typing the word. Like instead of typing /gen or /hj you can just write (genuine) or (handjob) and you'll be doing pretty much the exact same thing.
Of course I personally think it's less awkward to use some rudimentary language skills to form actual sentences and phrases. They don't even have to be complicated. Like "Genuine question, why are you doing that?" Or "I'm being serious. Stop that." Or "I'm going to jerk you off now."
i like watching jerma because he could be playing a fucked up video on stream of a 3d model human blowing up into flesh and gore but then pause twice before being like "why are his shoes white. does anyone wear white shoes? i've never seen white shoes" and then the whole chat is like "you stupid bitch everyone owns white shoes"
I think the hardest part about conlanging is that there's so MUCH. I can never sit down with the goal of "working on my conlang" and expect to make any progress. But even creating one specific part takes vast amounts of knowledge and free time that I simply do not have. And every part is so interconnected that it's extremely difficult to make minor adjustments without the whole structure falling apart. It's like mapping the brain except every day I don't conlang I explode mentally
A team of scientists, led by scholars from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has published a new version of the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS), covering lexical associations in more than 3100 languages varieties. The new version of the database offers lexical data on an unprecedented scale and provides a detailed, reproducible workflow for data aggregation, allowing scholars from all over the world to contribute to future versions.
https://clics.clld.org/
Every language has cases in which two or more concepts are expressed by the same word, such as the English word fly, which refers to both the act of flying and to the insect. By comparing patterns in these cases, which linguists call colexifications, across languages, researchers can gain insights into a wide range of issues, including human perception, language evolution, and language contact. The third installment of the CLICS database significantly increases the number of languages, concepts, and data sources available in earlier versions, allowing researchers to study colexifications on a global scale in unprecedented detail and depth.
With detailed computer-assisted workflows, CLICS facilitates the standardization of linguistic datasets and provides solutions to many of the persistent challenges in linguistic research. “While data aggregation was generally based on ad-hoc procedures in the past, our new workflows and guidelines for best practice are an important step to guarantee the reproducibility of linguistic research,” says Tiago Tresoldi.
Effectiveness of CLICS demonstrated in research applications
The ability of CLICS to provide new evidence to address cutting-edge questions in psychology and cognition has already been illustrated in a recent study published in Science, which concentrated on the world-wide coding of emotion concepts. The study compared colexification networks of words for emotion concepts from a global sample of languages, and revealed that the meanings of emotions vary greatly across language families.
“In this study, CLICS was used to study differences in the lexical coding of emotion in languages around the world, but the potential of the database is not limited to emotion concepts. Many more interesting questions can be tackled in the future,” says Johann-Mattis List.
New standards and workflows allow for the reproducible harvesting of global lexical data
Building on the new guidelines for standardized data formats in cross-linguistic research, which were first presented in 2018 (DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2018.205), the CLICS team was able to increase the amount of data from 300 language varieties and 1200 concepts in the original database to 3156 language varieties and 2906 concepts in the current installation. The new version also guarantees the reproducibility of the data aggregation process, conforming to best practices in research data management. “Thanks to the new standards and workflows we developed, our data is not only FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible), but the process of lifting linguistic data from their original forms to our cross-linguistic standards is also much more efficient than in the past,” says Robert Forkel.
The effectiveness of the workflow developed for CLICS has been tested and confirmed in various validation experiments involving a large range of scholars and students. Two different student tasks were conducted, resulting in the creation of new datasets and the progressive improvement of the existing data. Students were tasked with working through the different steps of data set creation described in the study, e.g. data extraction, data mapping (to reference catalogs), and identification of sources. “Having people from outside of the core team use and test your tools is essential and helps tremendously in fine-tuning all processes,” says Christoph Rzymski.
With CLICS and its workflow being accessible to a wider audience, scholars cannot only directly contribute to the database in the future; they can also profit from the established machinery and start their own targeted collections. “The number of linguists who actively use our standards and workflows is constantly increasing. We hope that the release of this new version of CLICS will propagate them further,” says Simon Greenhill.
dededos
romaincrisis
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
stormborns
