#dariocantu

[ask-ironbeak]

Hi? I follow the Nahuatl tag and your post appeared? Are you making something Nahuatl related?

Only marginally related, unfortunately, since my knowledge of Nahuatl is seriously limited.

I’m writing a story (which you can read here if you want) based in the universe of Starbound, a video game about space travel, which has some bird people whose dress and culture bear a superficial resemblance to the Aztec Empire. The game itself uses kind of a dog-Latin version of Nahuatl for a lot of its names (at least to my knowledge–I’m not sure how many of the words I see are actually words in Nahuatl, if any).

My recent post was an answer to why the naming conventions in my story are different from those in the game. Basically: I’m not a huge fan of using Nahuatl-ish non-words, but I don’t know enough Nahuatl to insert a lot of it into the story, nor do I think it would be terribly appropriate or necessary to do so when the entire thing is supposedly being translated into English from an alien birdpeople language anyway.

I’m trying to stay reasonably true to the lore of the game without straying into “other cultures but IN SPACE” tropes that often plague science fiction writing. Unfortunately it’s sometimes a difficult balancing act between referencing Mesoamerican culture/history carefully and pushing certain aspects of the story away from the history, because it’s actually about fictional people in space.

If anyone in the Nahuatl tag wants to share any thoughts on this I’d be interested to know, but I’m really just writing fanfiction for a video game and trying to maybe do better by Nahuatl than my source material did.

[fuckyeahlinguisticmisconceptions]

You can't say that you speak a language because you don't know every word in said language

Oh man this really gets my goat

[malteseboy]

Linguask 13 😉😂

13. choose a Slavic (eastern European) language you’d like to learn

too many 😂 I’ll pick Serbian

[malteseboy]

Would Maltese be considered a Creole language? (Love Maltese, 10/10)

I read more about it and apparently Maltese is listed under “Arabic-based Creole languages” on Wikipedia but I don’t know how accurate it is.

I don’t understand much about this topic or Creole languages in general so I can’t give you an answer on what I think. But it’s definitely interesting and if anyone would like to tell me what they think, I’m more than happy to listen!

[pycckuu]

Two questions: 1.- Is there any way to know what syllable has the accent in Russian 2.- How intelligible is Ukrainian to Russian and vice versa. P.S. I love your blog even though I barely know any russian))

thanks!✨ sorry to say, there are no real rules for syllable stress in Russian – you will have to learn the stress with every word, either by looking it up in a dictionary or using vocabulary lists that include marked stress (bolded, underlined, or accent-marked vowels indicate stressed syllables), OR just by doing a ton of listening and learning stress patterns ‘through osmosis.’ as for Ukrainian and Russian, from what I know they’re mutually intelligible to a pretty good degree. A lot of vocabulary looks and sounds rather similar, though the two languages use a few different letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. but as someone who has only studied Russian and has not had much exposure to Ukrainian, or done much research on the similarities between the two, I don’t really have much more detail to give you :)PS– you can paste words/passages into russiangram.com and it will mark the stress FOR you, as long as everything is spelled correctly ;)

[despazito]

Could you name the species on your caniforms and feliforms post? Pls?

they should be captioned if you click the images!

[prototumblinguist]

2 please?

I think French is super overrated, especially because people often deride people for learning/speaking German and say “French is so much prettier” which is like ugh it’s so influenced by anti-German sentiment accrued in the World Wars and French has SUCH A SIMILAR PHONETIC INVENTORY. It’s also got an academy which automatically makes it lesser to me because people use that as evidence of it being a more proper and fancy language. blech

I’ve got nothing against French intrinsically, just our societal attitudes towards it. I love all languages equally (okay, I do have a few special spots for some languages but it’s not hard to earn that kind of spot. Every language has so much uniqueness and it’s amazing and I love it)