taina

After the last person who spoke Ngeswte, there was the last person who wrote it.

You didn't learn to write Ngeswte from your grandmother, who never wrote it herself (but, as you would later discover, neither did anyone else). You started when you were small, recording the mysterious words of the songs your grandmother sang to you, in the letters you learned at school. They were the letters of the country your parents and grandmother had fled to, not those of the country in which the lands of the Ngeswte people lie.

When your grandmother died, you wanted to record as much Ngeswte as you remembered. The everyday letters of school no longer seemed right. Too ordinary, too thin, too hollow. You wanted to record your grandmother, who she was, the feeling of the songs.
So you created new letters. And when those turned out too ornate to be practical, you invented new ones again. And when those seemed too blocky, new ones again. And so on.

When you were fifteen, you had a satisfying set of characters, enough to write the half-remembered Ngeswte words, and some more letters for good measure.
You never spoke it, of course, and these extra letters reflected your language; the language of the country where your parents raised you. These were letters you couldn’t imagine doing without.

You didn’t know enough Ngeswte to write more than those few words.
But you liked the look of your own writing system, the new Ngeswte script, so you used it for your own language too. Secret messages to yourself.
This was enough to content you for some time.

Eventually you wanted to choose a new name, a gender-neutral one. You tried looking into traditional Ngeswte names, to see how they were gendered, if there were ungendered Ngeswte names.
In the process, you learned that Ngeswte had never been written, so you were the first to write it, you created the first Ngeswte script.

There was that linguist who studied minoritised languages of the region and recorded some samples. But that’s transcription, it doesn’t really count as writing.
You didn't know any of the linguist's sample words, but you wrote all of them in your script anyway. Ngeswte words in Ngeswte script. All the grammar examples, even the numbers 1-10 got calligraphed.

Your research yielded nothing on Ngeswte names.

The Ngeswte left few words behind for you to record. They left you no name.

Every extant piece of Ngeswte writing is unsigned. No more recent writings are known. The future of the Ngeswte script is uncertain.

ik weet dat amerikanen alles een "small town" noemen, zelfs als de populatie kleiner is dan die van mijn middelbare school – als de inwoners wit zijn is het geen "village". maar ik vind het wel apart dat het dan in nederlandse vertaling een "stad" blijft en niet "dorp", hoewel het duidelijk een dorp is.

my newest pet peeve is when i'm like "no idea" and then immediately produce a guess, estimate, or hypothesis. ("no idea what time it is. hm... half past seven-ish?") manifestly i do have some idea. the phrase "no idea" has just become semantically bleached to be very close in meaning to "don't know".

it's kinda fucked up that "employee" is werknemer (lit. "work taker") and "employer" is werkgever ("work giver") in Dutch. i guess that's in the sense of employers "providing" employment and employees "accepting" employment, but that erases the violence of capitalism. i think it would be way more accurate if the terms were reversed. employees provide labour and employers just take take take.

i'm writing the Work in English, but as it's situated in a French context, i tend to think about French a lot when writing it, and worry that i accidentally switch to writing in French instead. that hasn't happened yet though.

but now i'm writing the abstract (i hate everything lol) — i did the English one first, and then a French version, basically just for fun. and oh my goodness it feels good to write academic French again, it's so much fun! it's the first time in two years that i've had the occasion to let loose all the fancy words and constructions i want and i love it

(why didn't i write my thesis in French, come to think of it? it's not required by my MA programme (contrary to my BA), so the default is English, but i don't think there is any rule stopping me from picking any of the languages of the faculty's Department of European Languages and Cultures. i mean, my supervisor's French is maybe not quite good enough to grade an Entire Thesis in French, but i could have... chosen a different supervisor? but i did pick a supervisor first, and then, with his help, a topic.)

i recently reread Patrick Marcel's French translation of Provenance by Ann Leckie. i don't have the time and energy to do an in-depth critique of the Translation like i've done for Défaillances systèmes and Het recht van de Radch (see the translation tag for those), but i want to make a few notes all the same. first and foremost being that Patrick Marcel's translation is excellent, just like his translation of the Imperial Radch trilogy.

gender agreement for nemen and the gender trinary

French has only two grammatical genders while Hwae and Tyr have three social genders. Marcel solves this by creating spellings with æ. now there are proposed neutral gender systems for modern French by Alpheratz (2018) and Florence Ashley (2019) which use æ for certain gendered endings, but Marcel takes it much further, using it in every case. the general rule for neminine ending formation seems to be to take a feminine form and replace the final e with æ. some words (especially kinship terms) require slightly different approaches:

• e/em > iæl/læ
• neman > næmme
• nuncle > noncle
• Mx. > Mæ or Mænæmme

for mixed agreement, Marcel applies the prescriptive rule of using the masculine plural (even for groups without men). singular they is rendered as ils, of which i'm not really a fan.

t/v

Ingray addresses her mother Netano with vous and gets tu in return, which makes sense given the dynamics in the Aughskold household.
Ingray and Taucris use tu for each other.
Ingray and Garal use vous for each other throughout the book, which also feels appropriate.

"This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.
–A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

...which i am aware is not strictly applicable to me. Dutch/European culture, to which i belong, is rather on the devouring than the devoured side. still, i can't help but think of the way i can't help but switch to English every other sentence when talking with a friend who prefers to speak Dutch. and i think of queer communities and experiences, which i have only ever gotten to know in English, which i hardly know how to talk about in other languages (except, amusingly enough, French; i assume because of the easy use of cognates in queer lexical domains). i think of how strange Dutch feels in my mouth these days, even though i have stopped trying to distance myself from it and unlearn it; how i feel like i'm pretending when i speak Dutch.

and i can relate to alternating between trying to fit in as well as possible and exaggerating my foreignness, depending on the point i'm trying to make. i speak six languages, but i don't sound the way a native speaker is expected to sound like in any of them. the one i am most comfortable using is not one i identify as a native language. i suppose with six languages, i can always pretend more or less convincingly to be from somewhere else.

for as long as i've been in university, i've heard debate and controversy about English-taught courses in Dutch universities. right now, as the parliamentary elections are rolling along, there is talk of requiring universities to offer a certain amount of Dutch-taught programmes. the arguments i've heard in favour of this are generally along the lines of protecting the status of Dutch against the encroach of English.

here is my own opinion on the matter:

i don't care about Dutch-taught programmes. admittedly this is coming from someone who personally hasn't taken any Dutch-taught courses and, if given the choice, would prefer English over Dutch any time (i just feel more comfortable with English). however, the "protection" argument doesn't convince me either. i don't think there is any need for concern over the status or vitality of standard Dutch: there are over 20 million Dutch speakers, and standard Dutch enjoys full institutional support in the Netherlands as well as Flanders, Brussels, and Suriname. the language is being transmitted to children as a first language, and those children continue to use Dutch all their lives. there does not seem to be any reason to believe the chain of transmission is at risk of being broken, or the number of native speakers significantly decreased.

if one must be concerned with the status and vitality of languages in the Netherlands, i think there are plenty of languages more in need of attention than Dutch. West Frisian is the first that comes to mind, of course, and what about Romani, Sranan Tongo, Uyghur, Berber...? or Moroccan Arabic and Polish, for that matter.

i have also heard the argument that not all Dutch people are good at English, stereotypes notwithstanding. this sounds more like an access-to-education issue, which i am more sympathetic to. if the solution to this lies in the availability if Dutch-taught programmes, i feel like this path leads to forcing universities to offer every degree programme in Dutch, which i'm not sure is ideal either. also, why not improve quality of high school education? there's plenty of improvement needed there.

as a final note, i care very much about the preservation of English-taught degree programmes in the Netherlands because i wish non-Dutch speakers to have access to our education system too. Dutch language courses offered by my university's language centre have long waiting lists and are not at all sufficient for gaining a sufficient level of proficiency to follow higher education.

i love the expression "i'm gay for X". i really, really like what it does with agency/POV (i'm not sure how to describe it exactly). like rather than saying, "X is [attractive/hot/insert adjective]" as a property of X, i am instead talking about a state or feeling that i am experiencing. plus it's nicely vague about what i think is attractive about X/why i think X is attractive/in what way i am attracted to X.

my biggest prescriptive pet peeve is when people talk about false cognates when what they're referring to are really false friends (and, in many cases, very real cognates).

i did just find out that false cognates are also a thing that exists, but still, very different from false friends. almost the opposite, really.