Let's Have a Bou-Brat

It's everything you've been waiting for, the Let's Have a Bouba Tumblr! There's nothing here? Surprise! Brat girl summer under way.

[feldfrog]

If a fantasy world has an ancient tree of wisdom, that means it must also have young trees that are dumb as shit. Just giving terrible advice like, "the evil wizard is kinda hot"'

[itmeansalot]

[wormsermonizer]

🐎

[levunalangs]

word of the day: hlabu

Today’s Valya word is hlabu /ɬa.bu/, meaning “gay” or “non-binary!”

The exact meaning of the word is a bit hard to pin down with respect to modern real-world identities and terms. Suffice it to say that there is something of a third category of gender identity on the island Dzu, which is increasingly recognized as being internally diverse as well. There are in fact four different third-person singular pronouns for people in Valya: dyu is “she,” vi is “he,” nga is a singular “they” used in generalizations and when a person’s gender isn’t relevant, and gwi is a specifically non-binary pronoun. How this set of pronouns came about is a story for another post.

The etymology of hlabu is obscure. Though some have tried to tie it to hla “woman,” this is almost certainly incorrect. For one thing, there’s no obvious source for the second part of the presumed compound. As two words, hla bu would mean “a fourth woman,” but there’s no explanation for why that noun phrase would get this meaning. There’s also the spellings to deal with: hla “woman” is spelled as a ligature of si and la, while the first syllable of hlabu is a ligature of li and ha. There are in fact six different ways to write the syllable hla in Valya, and spellings can change: though mba “sun” is spelled with a ligature of the glyphs for mi and ba, it was once ŋuba. But the earliest written evidence shows hla as sila and hlabu as lihabu, which lines up with the modern spellings.

Anyway, that’s all to say: happy International Non-Binary People’s day from the island of Dzu, and check out the live conlanging stream Let’s Have a Bouba (aka LHAB or /ɬab/) every Tuesday!

[fruitsoftheweb]

Damage prediction on pears during transportation.

[hollowtones]

bad and naughty children get put in The Pear Wiggler to atone for their crimes

[hellsitegenetics]

String identified: aag ct a g tatat. a a agt c gt t T a gg t at t c

Closest match: Patella caerulea genome assembly, chromosome: 3 Common name: Mediterranean Limpet

(image source)

[dedalvs]

July 2025 – Fiat Lingua

Jessie Peterson very first foray into conlanging as a young child involved scrambling up English words into different words. She called her “language” Ishglen. Decades later she decided to explore what it might mean to redo the original experiment as an actual conlang, and she’s written up the results for Fiat Lingua.

[cundtcake]

translation: “My sheep! [bah! bah!] You are my life. [bah! bah!] Walk behind me…[bah! bah!] Sing (after me).”

[boomerang-always-comes-back]

This is too adorable

[foulserpent]

*goes to slovenia* *strolls around lake bled* *theres skateboarders* hmm this makes me think of elephants that use giant oiled seed pods as a means of locomotion

[sailermoon]

huge shout out to this little kid for writing my favorite poem

[the-haiku-bot]

huge shout out to this

little kid for writing my

favorite poem

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[yuk-tepat]

The wise ask

Chit xik kûy hyat Literally “Wise ask, foolish answer” (Read top to bottom and left to right)

This belongs to a specific genre of highly terse, compressed Tepatic sayings consisting of typically only four glyphs. It can be considered a truncated form of the longer, grammatical sentence:

Yaq chit ti xik lon, yaq kûy ti hyat lon

Which may be translated “A wise person has many questions, a fool has many answers.”

In other words: Shut up.

[letshaveabouba]

Makes me think of a Korean term a friend taught me the other day: 우문현답 umunhyeondap

Basically it means 'silly question, wise answer'

In this case it was the following:

-- What makes a cake excellent?

-- You must eat more to find out.

[oamul]

[tepat-side]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Austronesian_language

[godkillerbrigade]

[audarcy]

Found several packs' worth of pokemon cards strewn across a target parking lot and took a pic to show my friends without realizing how much my outfit elevated the scene to "aftermath of a wizard duel"

[lesbianshepard]

at the company holiday party and a buddy proposed "suicide via throwing yourself into the alligator moat at the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid, irrevocably changing the lives of dozens of horrified onlookers" as the coolest way to die which was the most inspired thing i've heard in a while

[lesbianshepard]

also, when you make it to the afterlife, i feel like conveying that your death was "alligators, pyramid, memphis" will be real conversation starter with quite a few ancient egyptians

[numberlover1729]

sorry for being pedantic, but the egyptians dealt with crocodiles, not gators

[lesbianshepard]

yeah, but they're similar enough that the ancient egyptians would underestand

[letshaveabouba]

We're going to end our Bratcember Lexember with another full translation, but we couldn't have got here without all of you who have joined us at Let's Have a Bouba this year. We have produced something which depended on the contributions of so many people. First and foremost - Jonathan @mindutme! We depended on you a lot and the amazing font work you did get us through this Lexember far more easily than last year. Also thank you to our Patrons who mean that we aren't worrying about being able to pay for the software we use to stream. Your support means the world to us.

So, for a final final word, thank you! (or as Miles would say, yinz). Gnátannyo refers to leaning to one side due to the burden of favour owed to the person being thanked, in the way obrigado/a in Portuguese refers to the thanker rather than the thankee. We owe all of you a lot, so come with us as we continue with N'asibómmó next year.

[letshaveabouba]

Let's start (if you are reading this in sentence order rather than post order) with the conlanging bit of the translation.

When we were trying to come up with a word for 'confusing' the idea of 'saljejǐ' first came up. To negatively or involuntarily keep thinking about something. Lexember falls at a time when for many queer folk, and as such for many conlangers, tensions can get quite high. Lexember is a real push, but it also shows us that we are part of this wider conlanging family.

You'll notice a lot of 'kpa' and this is by design. In going through which sounds had come up and which hadn't (particular when showing off Sutan, our script) we realised kp hadn't featured yet. Its root *kwa means day, and deriving a word for 'time' from this gave us a lot of kpa in a short text.

kpaɡî - day.COLL - all the time

mil'ón'akún kpammon - running out of time - here kpa is in the genitive case. The system of nominalisation to work in place of subordinate clauses has been interesting and marked a subtle change from the Yaatláw system.

kpashá - this is a modal adverb indicating a possible negative event in the future. It probably needs defining better, but in its original sense it refers to a future storm, ready to wreak havoc when it comes.

Running out of time - of course it's not the same getting to the end of Lexember as having a baby but we feel you Charli! We almost didn't have time to squeeze in this last song from brat, but Jake couldn't let this one pass. It's no club classic, but it speaks to getting older and realizing that there are some experiences the people around us are having that we simply can't know without experiencing them ourselves.

At LHAB '[we're] exactly the same but [we're] different now' - we've been in Conlang Conflict, the YouTube relay (so many views!) and we have Patrons who keep us accountable in our conlanging and content creation. LHAB is recently employed, booked and busy, but excited to go into 2025 with a new relay, big plans for Bouba Babble and who knows what else.