ForeverCurious @upcomingsynthesis - Tumblr Blog

Posts

1000 posts!

#1000 posts #tumblr milestone

«Celui qui cherche dans une drogue un paradis factice fabrique son enfer.»

#charles baudelaire #les paradis artificiels

Those degenerate days, a thousand years ago.

Though, to be honest, Genji is a pervert.

#Genji #the tale of genji #murasaki shikibu #Degenerate days

threeamserif

instagram | photos are my own, reblogs fine, do not repost/reuse

Umanpuru wajtanakushanku

Quechwan idiom.

Literal translation:

Umanpuru. Uma- root word for head. -n third person singular genitive suffix. -puru Spanish loan from puro, meaning only. (Dices puras mentiras, you say only lies.)

Wajtanakushanku. Wajta- Root word for hit + -na Nominalizer suffix -> Wajtana = A hit + -ku reflex -> Wajtanaku = A self-hit. -shan progressive verbalizer + -ku third person plural reflex. So, They are getting hits from each other. They're not fighting, that's the root maka-.

In all, They are just bumping their heads into each other.

This idiom is used to refer to the situation where you have a confused and disorganized group rushing to and fro in a restricted place and bumping into each other. They're not necessarily frantic, but they aren't getting anything done or generally ineffective. They could be idle regarding an expected activity. It conveys the image of people butting heads sideways, not confrontationally but comically.

Umanpuru is not used by itself, outside of this idiom. Wajtanakushanku by itself is grammatical but odd.

Quechwan is an agglutinative language sub-family spoken mostly in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, with a few speakers in Argentina and Chile. This idiom was collected from the Southern variety, in Bolivia.

#agglutinative #quechwan

#alexis de tocqueville #democracia en América

petitworld

Iford Manor Gardens, Iford, England by Stacy Cartledge

mactiir

obsessed with mass market paperbacks. their pleasing rectangular proportions. how they fit badly in a hoodie pocket so you can drag them around everywhere with you like a temporary little buddy. the way they fit in your hand because they're MADE for human hands and not as bookshelf decoration. the way the pages feel when you riffle them gently with your thumb. How pristine and crisp they look when you get them and how creased and folded they look when you're done, even if you try to be nice to them. how that wear is okay, how that's correct actually, because they're made with the philosophy that books aren't meant to be PRETTY, they're meant to be read. that little ripple new ones get on the left side from where you hold them when you're reading, the way the ripple only goes as far as you've read, because u change stories by reading as they are changing you. how you can find thousands of these creased and folded and loved little dudes in every thrift store and used book shop and neighborhood library and you can instantly see the ones that someone carried around in a backpack for weeks or read to pieces or gave up on halfway through because they wear being read like fresh snow wears footprints. I love these poorly made, subpar little rectangles so much. truly the people's books.

alter-koker

something ive noticed while reading dantes inferno is that there seems to be a lot of italians in hell

philosophybits

“There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.”

— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

theancientwayoflife

~ Plaque of conjuration against the Lamashtu, called "plaque of the underworld" or Hell Plate.

Period: Neo-Assyrian (1st half of the millennium)

Place of origin: Assyria

Medium: Bronze

artthatgivesmefeelings

Rafael Romero Barros (Spanish, 1832-1895) Still life with oranges, 1863

amygdalae

From the US but i spell grey with an e because e just feels like a much greyer letter than a

teaboot

grey with an E is dusty neutral but gray with an A is bluish and darker

ruinconstellation

it really is, huh

vmohlere

Omg I’ve found my people

helloelicia

It's because GRAY is a West Saxon word for the quality of light, while GREY is an Anglian word for everyday objects. And everyday objects are typically earthy, warmer, or more neutral.

To explain: West Saxon and Anglian are both dialects of Old English. West Saxon was the politically dominant dialect, but Anglian was the more popular spoken dialect. So a lot of Old English texts are written in West Saxon, but what we know as Middle English and Modern English descended more from Anglian because it was spoken by more people.

So grey (the Anglian word) shows up when authors are describing everyday stuff. Like in this sentence describing a grey beard from Holy Boke Gratia Dei: "The hed of Petir is a brood face with mech her on his berd and that is of grey colour be twix whit and blak."

Any Middle English text you read, you'll find Anglian grey is the word the author prefers to describe everyday things. Grey wool, grey feathers, grey stones, grey horses.

By contrast, gray (the West Saxon word) shows up when authors are describing the qualities of light.

A gleaming gray sword, a deep gray lake, a misty gray morning, cold gray marble, sad gray eyes. Like in this sentence from The Siege of Jerusalem: "They glowes of graie steel that were with gold hemmyd." More often than not, gray describes an impermanent or glimmering quality of light.

There's even an instance where a Middle English author uses both, and you can see how one spelling is more about the quality of light while the other is more about the color of the animal: "The cerkyl or the roundel off the eye ys sumtyme graye lyke the ey off a catte, sumtyme blak grey lyke the eyn off doggys."

("The circle or round of the eye is sometimes gray like the eye of a cat, sometimes black-grey like the eyes of dogs.")

The reason Americans use gray and not grey is because Noah Webster hated the English. :)

zenosanalytic

@helloelicia's bit here is not accurate. Idk if this is some common folk etymology(I doubt it given it's based on some supposed difference in Proto-english) or what, and Im not accusing them of ill-intent or anything, but from what I know and what sources I can find, that's not where the spelling difference comes from.

To begin with: consistent spelling is more of a modern(in the Historical sense meaning, like, post-1600s) thing; before that ppl pretty much just spelled and read phonetically, and spelling generally isn't a primary aspect of languages anyway since, obvsl, languages aren't created on the page in writing theyre created in speech(to put it another way: spelling is an abstraction of language which expresses how ppl say words). So like: the idea that the difference in meaning btwn two homonyms would be expressed in spelling from their origin is just... not how languages work because speech PRECEDES spelling(why would two words, so similar and complementary, exist in two separate, if closely related, languages? Wouldn't each word just be that language's word for the same idea?? Languages don't fill in each other's gaps in this way cuz they exist for themselves; not to compliment another). If these were two different ideas, then their difference would be expressed with a difference in the words expressing them, not in something as subtle and technical as the vowel used to write them on the page(which: Migration era peoples would mostly never read in the first place cuz most Saxons, Angles, and Frisians[everyone forgets the frisians! >:(] of that era weren't literate).

OK with that out of the way: why the difference in spelling? Well, according to EtymologyOnline the regional spelling's diverged during the 20th century but it unfortunately doesn't give a source for that(tho it does include a google ngram of grey showing up in writing going back to 1800). Merriam Webster notes the difference and includes some interesting trivia about how persistent it is across words compounding with grey, while Wikipedia notes the difference and gives a brief etymological gloss. Interestingly Wikitionary, under Gray: Alternate Forms; Usage Notes, includes a short gloss on an early 20th century effort to try and enforce a difference in meaning btwn the two spellings similar to what @helloelicia describes, so maybe they got the argument from a text of that persuasion.

In all likelihood I'd imagine this separation wasn't so much bcuz USians and Commonwealthers spelled it the same before that, but rather because spelling in general was less consistent before the 20th century, and when these two sub-communities of english-speakers started standardizing, they standardized in different ways. As to why the different choices on grey I haven't the foggiest but a second important point to make about this is that it was NEVER that hard-and-fast a rule in the first place. Both spellings remained common in both regions(among and amoung is another like this) and both were considered perfectly acceptable as late as the 90s. Honestly I only started noticing spellchecks giving me(a Texan) grief for spelling it grey maybe a decade ago?

nathanielthecurious

Thank you for writing up this explanation of why the previous comment doesn't make sense!

The Oxford English Dictionary has some excellent discussion of this word's history. It explains that in the Old English word grǣg, the West Saxon form had -ǣ- and the Anglian form had -ē-. So helloelicia is correct on that. However, this has nothing to do with any variation in Middle English and beyond, because both of those vowels would regularly become -ei- in early Middle English in that phonological environment. (It also doesn't correspond to any difference in meaning in OE as far as I can tell.)

So why was there variation in Middle English? Well, in Early Middle English 2 different sounds existed, one spelled ei or ey (that's the one from OE ǣ/ē, remember) and one spelled ai or ay. A sound change caused these two sounds to merge, and so (because spelling was not yet standardized) people began to use the e and a spellings interchangeably, regardless of what vowel a particular word had originally had.

As spelling became more standard, it was pretty arbitrary whether the -ey or -ay spelling would stick for a particular word. Clay, for example, eventually went one way, and whey the other way. Somehow, for gray/grey both spellings stuck around.

I would guess that the continuation of variant spellings is actually partly because a word describing a color lends itself to the type of aesthetic judgment/orthographic symbolism (the "gray just feels different from grey" idea) that we see above on this post. The OED gives many examples of people distinguishing the meanings of gray and grey, going back at least 200 years, which suggest that the distinctions have never been very consistent. Different people have described how they imagine the distinction in totally different ways (some people saying grey is lighter or more delicate, some saying gray is warmer or more brown, some saying one is more blue and the other more green, some saying they are the same thing). Art criticism has historically used the two as distinct technical terms: grey being an admixture of purely black and white, and gray including other cool colors very faintly.