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galacticlamps · 3 years

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Tagged by @the--highlanders ! Thanks!

How many works do you have on AO3?

What’s your total AO3 word count?

76,200

(oh what a nice even number - I should try to mess that up as soon as possible, shouldn’t I?)

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Aw man is this intentionally worded to be really hard to answer? I get that it says ‘written’ and not ‘posted’ but then what constitutes a ‘fandom?’ I definitely wrote fics for stuff I was interested in long before I even knew the word ‘fic’ - I did it throughout my childhood, and then in high school, and while I didn’t do it as much in college, it still happened from time to time. So a lot of the books/movies/tv shows/plays/musicals I wrote things for aren’t really fandoms, and frankly, I had to check my old folder just now to even remember some of them existed. I’ll just list the ones that I know for sure had fandoms, since that’s more fun (and embarrassing), right?

Obviously Doctor Who, classic and modern, Torchwood, Sherlock Holmes (ironically more of these seem to be about the books, but yes, I will admit, some for that tv show too), Les Mis, a couple different Marvel comics & movies, Good Omens, hell, I even found a Night Vale fic in there just now.

And I know there are other older things not even in that folder, some of which never made it to a computer at all, so if I had to ballpark a number I’d probably say around 25ish but really, who knows?

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Across the Gap

On the Spot

Expectations

Shards of Memories & Fragments of Glass

Itemized

(this was fun, I’d never noticed Ao3 even had a stats page until now lol)

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I try to! Sometimes I take a long time to do so but for the most part, I usually get around to it. The rare exception would be if I first saw the comment when I was super busy/distracted and then felt like way too much time passed before I noticed it again, that it might be awkward if I said something at that point.

I do genuinely enjoy hearing what people think, but I’m also weirdly terrified of making anyone feel like they have to reply to my comments. I know that’s probably a little strange, but it’s actually a large part of why I made this Ao3 account in the first place - my original one, from high school, is followed by some long-time friends of mine who aren’t interested in this fandom, some of whom are involved in art & writing professionally. The thought of anyone like that reading something I wrote out of friendliness or even just curiosity and potentially having to pretend they liked it for the same reasons stressed me tf out, so I like having this virtually anonymous one because I can relax knowing that anyone who reads or interacts with something I wrote has probably done so only because they wanted to, rather than feeling obligated, and there’s no pressure on them to be nice to me about it if anything I write or post annoys them - so I really hope nobody who does just know me as an anonymous blog has ever worried about offending me by not replying to something, trust me, I’m perfectly happy with it!

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

I don’t think I’ve really written any angsty endings? I guess the answer would have to be Reckless just because it involves the characters arguing about sad/weighty things and there isn’t really any solution to those issues - but even then I think I ended it with a kind of acceptance that stops it from really qualifying as angst? I also set it in the the same universe as other fics, so maybe that doesn’t even count as an ending? Am I that bad at ending things on angst? Lol

Do you write crossovers? If so what’s the craziest one you’ve written?

Obviously none of the fics I’ve posted are crossovers but I’m trying to think now if any of my WIP’s are - I’ve definitely poached setting/premise ideas from other media, but in terms of actual crossovers . . . I’ve got a few cross-era or cross-Doctor, a few involving Torchwood, but that’s already the same universe, so the only thing that’d qualify as a true crossover would be some vague pieces of a fic where Jamie, Zoe, and Two end up on the Enterprise, since I think the 60s series of Star Trek and Dr Who feel kind of compatible, don’t they? In fact, aren’t there like officially licensed crossover comics or something? Or did I make that up? Idk, and the ideas are very loose, so it’s not much of a WIP either

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Nope, never

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I’ve never written smut, but I’m wondering if it’s possible that could change soon. There’s a longish multi-chapter fic I’ve been working on for a frankly embarrassing amount of time, and the plot does call for a sex scene at one point towards the end, but I can’t seem to make up my mind on how - uh, I guess the word is explicit? - it should get. I know I could easily do a fade to black/implication thing, but it’s kind of a source of contention and anxiety for the characters, so to skip over writing the actual scene and just revisit them afterwards rings of “and they slept together and now everything’s fine!” which feels kinda cheap to me - in this context, anyway - and not the right payoff for a long fic that’s otherwise more of an interpersonal drama/slightly a period piece, if I had to place it in a genre. I feel like my aversion to actually writing the scene might just be prudishness I should get over, or maybe just self-doubt, because I know I’d rather have a well-written, funny, character-development-supporting sex scene than nothing at all, but since I’ve never had any interest in writing a scene like that before, I don’t know if I can do it well, and I also don’t want to ruin a fic I’m otherwise proud of by doing it badly... ugh I have to figure this out

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I seriously doubt it

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope

What’s your all time favorite ship?

I mean, it’s gotta be Two & Jamie. I’ve shipped things before with varying levels of investment, but I’ve never been able to use the term ‘otp’ in a literal sense until I came across them, and now it’s already basically gone out of fashion, go figure!

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I’m not sure if I have one? My WIP doc is huge, but I don’t actually intend to get around to finishing everything in it, so I’d like to think that anything I’ve currently singled out to complete can actually get done.

That said, I do have a few AU’s that I don’t really plan to finish, but it might be cool if I could. Two of them are for all the main + some supporting characters of the Second Doctor’s era - one’s a modern day school teachers AU, and the other is a typical fantasy/fairy tale AU. Another is just Two/Jamie, based on Doctor Faustus (specifically the Marlowe play version) but right now there are two different versions of the ending coexisting in my head. I’ve written parts of scenes & some gen. backstory for all of those ideas, but I don’t know if I’ll ever try to finish them, or what form a finished product would even take - a series of one-shots set in the same universe? one long multi-chapter fic with some kind of overarching plot? And the amount of context/worldbuilding a big AU like these would require might not make them very appealing fics for people to read, so maybe it is better if I just keep them to myself, since in my head I already know what’s going on in those worlds lol.

What are your writing strengths?

I honestly don’t know. I haven’t had a creative writing class since middle school, and since then I’ve only ever shown creative writing to others in a fandom context, so it’s been a while since I’ve discussed it or gotten critical feedback. I suppose when I work in other arts or even academic writing contexts, people usually say I’m kind of insightful or at least detail oriented, which might just be another way of saying I overthink things, but I like to imagine I’m decent at finding little points of interest to expand upon.

What are your writing weaknesses?

If you’ve read this far I feel like you must know what I’m about to say: I do not know how to be concise.

Usually when I’m writing a fic, I put down the dialogue first on its own, leaving out the action of the scene and whatever plot/context led there, even if I’ve already figured all of that out. But then when I go to add those things in, they’re always longer than I wanted them to be. I don’t mind writing something long, but I don’t want my fics to be a slog to get through either, and there can be a point at which the stuff I’ve added for context overwhelms the stuff that I wanted the fic to be about in the first place, so it becomes a structural/proportion issue too. I haven’t completely given up on any fics because of this yet, but there’s one I’ve been struggling with for a couple months now - probably because I’m even second-guessing myself on which scenes need to be written out and which can just be referenced like a recap. Hopefully I figure that one out soon.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

((this is karma isn’t it? i posted a fic last week with two words of gaelic in it and was worried about that and now this is karma))

In general, I don’t want to do it. I feel like you’ve gotta have a really good grasp of a language to write dialogue & speech patterns for someone who’s a native speaker, and since I’m far from fluent in any language the characters I write for are, I wouldn’t feel confident writing any significant amount of dialogue in, say, Gaelic.

As a sidenote, though, I kinda love it when other people do it, particularly for Jamie. Irish (Gaeilge) and Scottish (Gàidhlig) are both languages I’ve wanted to learn for a long time, because my family’s fresh out of living speakers of either & I think that’s a shame, but I started with Irish and at the moment I’m still very much learning it. As different as they are, it still helps me understand parts of lyrics or texts that I come across in Gàidhlig fairly frequently, so when it comes up in a fic I get to feel like I’m being responsible and practicing, and it’s great when I can actually understand what’s being said.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

I’m gonna go with Harry Potter even though that’s probably not a perfectly accurate answer - it’s almost certainly the first thing that has a fandom that I ever wrote for, but it was in a notebook when I was a kid and never something that I even typed on a computer, much less posted online or shared with other members of a fandom. But even then, I’m sure it wasn’t the first pre-existing fictional universe I ever set an original story in, because I did that a lot when I was a kid, it’s just hard to remember those clearly or on any kind of timeline.

What’s your favorite fic that you’ve written?

I’m very partial to Across the Gap, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that ranked first on the kudos thing above - but I’ve also got a soft spot for So Merrily We’ll Sing. It’s so self-indulgent it feels silly saying ‘it was so easy to write!’ but I guess having a fic that’s already just 100% headcaonons and fluff tied together by a song you really love does prevent it from being much of a labor (I also managed to refrain from making that one unnecessarily long, so that’s another win there)

tagging @terryfphanatics and anyone else who wants to do it - sorry I’m bad at remembering whose tumblr goes with whose Ao3 account, but I really would be interested to read this if anyone else feels like answering them!

#oh boy that was long #sorry #also sorry if the 13 is really big for some reason #i dont know how it got that way so i dont know how to change it #it doesnt look like that when i edit the post only when i save it #not fic but fic talk

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aceofthyme · 3 years

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Cadmium orange, titans and emerald green for the watercolor asks!

Cadmium Orange: What do you like to do on your days off? It's rare that I get a day off, alas, but when I get the chance I like to grab a friend and go to a museum! I also enjoy going to farms to pick berries or do some work. Beyond that, I like going through old records (surprise surprise!). Usually, if I get a day off, I'll use that to go through any of the non-English records I come across because it takes me longer to work through those (most recently, I've been working through some Latin and Dutch things). I'll also work on my novel, or perhaps bake something!

Titans: Do you prefer slow mornings or relaxing evenings? Probably the latter at the moment! I'll make some tea (or, if it's cooler out and I have all my spices, glühwein) and curl up with a book or my writing drafts. It's always nice to take a bit of time to relax and all before bed.

Emerald Green: Do you speak any languages besides English? Are there any additional languages you want to learn? Gotta say I love this question, I actually have a whole list of languages I want to learn! I'm sorry in advance for the essay, though, this is...going to be long.

At the moment, I speak English and fluent Hebrew. I have personally questioned my being labeled fluent, as I'm never quite certain what defines fluency, but I can read and write and speak and I've been studying it for thirteen years so take that as you will. I am also learning Scottish Gaelic at the moment, and I intend to start Gaeilge (Irish) lessons again once I have the time. In addition, I am re-studying Latin, learning Yiddish, and working on my German and French at the moment.

I have a personal goal to learn all the languages I can confirm my ancestors spoke, which is...admittedly a rather long list. I'm starting with the more recent ones, so to speak, which would be Yiddish and Flemish + Dutch. They were lost in the sense that they were never passed down, which makes me rather sad, and I would like to be able to not only speak them but learn to read them so I can properly go through old family letters—of which there are many! My maternal great-grandfather (who came from Belgium) was apparently well-versed in several languages, as he used to travel a bit around Europe as a child (his grandparents were involved in the selling of livestock) and was by all accounts a rather brilliant person, and according to family lore it was in part his knowledge of languages that let him get into the States; when he went before the board of inspectors—who intended to send him back, partially because of his age and the fact that nobody was there to pick him up and confirm he had a place to go—, they noted that he seemed educated and he promptly thanked each man in their own native tongue. There are quite a few stories in that vein about him, and I personally think this one is quite cool—the sort of linguistics thing I could only dream about doing, hah!

Anyway, aside from what's mentioned above, my short list of languages to learn includes relearning Russian (I used to speak a bit, but lost it all) and learning the following: Danish, Welsh, Romanian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Spanish. I'm also interested in Ge'ez, although I don't know what all resources are available, and Ladino. I've covered a bit of both in my Hebrew classes, but I would be interested in learning more!

#this is so long and it took me forever to answer i'm so sorry #but there we go! long answers haha #asked and answered #dartharaiz #watercolor ask game #alyssa speaks #thank you so much for the ask!!

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moxy-fruitbat · 5 years

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Destined for Great Things - (Reposted)

Now it’s actually functional to read because I’m not posting from mobile! I’m so sorry about it being 10 miles long before. The actual story is under the cut!

This is my apprentice Laurene’s backstory of how she came to Vesuvia and met Marcel, the other half of the Sibling Apprentices. Laurene is Fantasy!Irish, and her culture is based on a mix of different Gaelic peoples, including the Gaels (more broadly), the Picts (more specifically), druidry, and my own experience as a pagan.

It also is heavily based on Irish mythology. If you don’t know the myths, it’s perfectly fine and you’ll still be able to understand the story.

Rating: T for depictions of trauma, but there’s no gore or explicit violence. Content Warning: Fire, claustrophobia, family death Length: 3,200 words.

Yeah, you read that right, it’s basically a full-length novella. I got carried away a bit, but I’m really proud of it. (And also always open to constructive criticism!)

Irish/Scottish Pronunciation Guide (written by an American with the internet, so it's not good):

- Labhraín: LAW-reen - Muirne: MIR-ne - Bandruí: BAHN-droo - Tlachtga: TLAC-da - Uncail: UN-cuhl - Tadg: TAH-dg - Cumhall: COOL - Áillen: AH-lehn - M'iníon: M'een (Irish translation: My daughter)

Labhraín woke up on a chilly autumn morning, curled up with her cousin Muirne to stave away the cold. Careful not to wake her, Labhraín slowly crawled out of bed and dressed near the central hearth. How Muirne could sleep through everyone bustling about in the house was beyond her - there were fifteen people in here, almost entirely women and children, and half the building was dedicated to the sheep and goats, past the partition. It was always so loud.

Labhraín had just finished braiding her long hair when Muirne came and joined her.

"Morning cousin" Muirne smirked, a smile partially hidden behind her mess of dark blonde hair. "Are you ready for the day? We have a lot of work to do."

That they did. Tomorrow was New Year, one of two days where the veil between realms was at its thinnest, and the day to honor the dead and do readings for the coming year. There was still a lot to do to prepare for the feast of the ancestors and the bonfire atop Almu Hill, and Labhraín and Muirne were the two oldest cousins and eighteen and nineteen, so it was their job to do a lot of that work. Labhraín's mother, Bandruí Tlachtga, always said it was a blessing that there were so many girls. Her father chose some other words to describe it.

Muirne leaned in and whispered, so only Labhraín could hear her. "Hurry up and meet me in the hazel wood, I have something important to tell you!"

---

"What's so important that we had to rush out here?" Labhraín questioned as she focused her concentration to make a gust of wind appear from her hands and into the branches of the sacred trees, rattling the hazelnuts loose.

"I have to tell you a secret. And you promise you can't tell anyone. Especially not my Da. Promise?"

"I promise, what is it?" Not even Uncail Tadg? He was the chief magician - not telling him must mean it's something bad. And knowing her cousin, that should be expected anyway. She was usually getting into some kind of nonsense.

"I'm leaving. Tomorrow." A smile spread gleefully across Muirne's face as she picked up hazelnuts off the mossy forest floor

"Leaving?! What do you mean, leaving?" She hissed.

"I met man, a few weeks ago. Oh, Labhraín, I love him. He's getting me out of here and we're going to get married. My Da wants to keep me here until I'm an old crone, and I can't do it! I know I'm destined for great things!"

Labhraín just sighed and looked at her cousin. Muirne was in love and there was nothing she could do to change her mind. Once Uncail Tadg found out she was missing, he would send out a manhunt. In the past he had said something about an omen, that Muirne could never get married. She wasn't sure exactly what kind of omen that meant, but the soothsayers never lie.

"His name is Cumhall, oh Labhraín, you'd love him. He's the leader of a different tribe, I know he'll take care of me. We're leaving tomorrow night, right after the feast. With all the festivities, no one will notice I'm gone!"

Labhraín thought it was a terrible idea, and even if he was a king she still wouldn't like him because he was taking her dearest friend away. But how could she pull her from what she believed to be her destiny? Was it even her place to say?

Instead, she just sighed, clutching her apron full of hazelnuts and headed back to the blackhouse with her cousin. "I'm happy for you, Muirne. I wish you the best."

They spent the rest of the day preparing for the holiday - rehydrating the woad pigment, baking dried fruit bread, gathering eggs for divination and herbs for the fire, and washing turnips to carve the next day. Labhraín went off on her own for a bit, to practice her music one last time before the bonfire with the other musicians in the family. She bumped shoulders with her cousin, Áillen. He made her laugh and for a brief moment she forgot how unhappy she was.

Silent tears ran down Labhraín's face as she tried to sleep that night, surrounded by her other cousins but holding Muirne close. The words she said kept playing in Labhraín's head: I'm destined for great things. I'm destined for great things. I'm destined for great things.

I'm destined for great things.

Labhraín hoped to the spirits of the forest and the ancestors that it was true. And she hoped the same for herself.

---

The next day, after they had the feast of the ancestors in silence with the rest of the family, she tearfully waved her cousin off into the dusky forest.

"M'iníon, what is wrong?" Her mother asked, catching Labhraín by surprise. "Why are you crying? Is something upsetting you?"

"Oh...nothing. Thinking about grandfather is just making me sad." She lied, quickly wiping the tears from her eyes.

"Yes, we did lose a good man this year..." She placed a hand on her daughter's cheek, wiping away a stray tear. "But don't you worry, he's watching over us, especially tonight. The fire is starting soon, would you like me to help you with your facepaint so you can join the other musicians?"

A small smile came upon Labhraín's face and she nodded. She was a grown woman, but her mam always knew how to make her feel better when she was vulnerable.

"I'd like that a lot."

As her mother brushed patterns over her face in the traditional blue pigment, Labhraín kept telling herself the bonfire will make her feel better. Without fail, it always does.

---

At the top of Almu hill, she readied herself behind her dulcimer, her aunts, uncles, and cousins beside her on other instruments. This is where she felt most at home. One at the hand drum, one at the flute, one on the pipes, with Áillen on the harp. He was the best musician of them all, his warm smile always lighting up the room as he played.

But this time, no, she had to be imagining it? Áillen looked different than usual - like a man half dead, his eyes like burning coals. He caught her looking at him, and the smirk he gave her made her stomach turn.

Something was wrong.

The bonfire was never actually lit. Everything happened so fast... They were playing the music, but as Áillen started to sing, all the men began to move slower and slower until they fell unconscious. Her uncle dropped the pipes. And then the destruction began.

Fire. So much fire. It began with Áillen? And the roof of the blackhouse, below them. What was happening? Where was her mam? It was chaos. The sound of screaming filled her ears. Her mother yelled for her.

"Mam!" Where was she? Everything was a blur of smoke.. Her heart raced. Her eyes prickled.

Through the flames she saw her.

"M'iníon! Labhraín! Run!"

It was all she could do. She snatched up her dulcimer and ran down the hill and into the forest, leaving everything behind her.

---

She ran until she couldn't feel her legs anymore, collapsing onto the forest floor. The hammers to her dulcimer were long gone, and she honestly didn't even know why she grabbed it in the first place. She knew she needed to pick herself up and keep moving, to get farther away from Áillen's destruction, but all she could do in the moment was sob into the dark earth.

She wanted her mam. She wanted Muirne. She wanted the hammers to her dulcimer. She wanted to be back in the blackhouse, waking up the next morning and none of this ever happening.

Something large crunched the dead leaves in front of her, and she almost didn't even look up. Whatever danger she was about to face, maybe it would actually kill her. Being dead was better off than her current situation, right?

But she slowly craned her head up, and her eyes grew wide as she looked directly into a pair of bright yellow ones. In front of her sat the biggest mountain lion she had ever seen.

Granted, she had never seen one before. She must have run farther than she thought, since these cats weren't usually found where her tribe lived. Maybe this one was lost like she was.

It cocked its head at her, whiskers twitching, and she heard it speak to her in her mind.

"Lost?"

"Ye-yes..." Her voice trembled. "I...there was a fire and..."

"Fire?"

"Yes... Everything is gone, my mother, she...she told me to run, but now...."

"Safe?"

"Me? No, I...I don't know..." It was the dead of night by now, in a part of the forest she wasn't familiar with. She could usually sense where the spirits of the forest wanted her to go, letting them guide her, but in her current state she wasn't sure she could muster up the strength.

As her voice trailed off, the large cat shook its head once and stood up, beginning to walk away, it's tail straight up in the air like a flag.

"Follow."

It led her to a crevice in some rocks, beneath the roots of a large tree. It was a den for rearing cubs, though she didn't see any. The cougar laid down on its side and curled up, looking up at Labhraín as if to question why she wasn't following in suit. Not knowing what else to do, she laid down beside it, the cat's tail wrapping around her. She heard one more word in her mind before exhaustion completely set in and she fell asleep.

"Safe."

-------

The cougar introduced itself as Philomena, and insisted on staying with Labhraín as she went through the forest, even though she really didn't have a place to go. She was physically and emotionally drained, her skin pale and her eyes heavy. What was the point of even going anywhere? She just wanted to lay down and sleep and never wake up.

Philomena headbutted her, urging her to keep going.

"Need to go. Safe"

She groaned, picking herself up. She gathered up her dulcimer and hugged it close to her chest, trying to pull whatever familiarity to home it had into her, as if it could fly away at any moment.

She walked out into the dewy morning, scattered sunlight filtering through the trees. She sighed - even at her worst, she couldn't deny that the forest was beautiful, and was still proud to call it her home.

Philomena nudged her again, and Labhraín closed her eyes, listening to the forest and feeling where its spirit pulled her.

"Slightly north to the setting sun." She said after a few moments of thought and gathering of her bearings. Her feet like lead and her heart still heavy, she trudged forward through the trees with the sun at her back.

They walked for days, stopping only for food or sleep, and the occasional rinse in a stream. Despite all of Philomena's pushing, Labhraín refused to eat meat, because that would mean she had to light a fire spell to cook it. She never wanted to look at fire again, or at least not any time soon. What if she accidentally lit the forest on fire? What if destruction is in her blood, like her cousin? She knew that didn't make much sense, but the fear was still there.

After five days, the deep forest she was familiar with began to thin. She went around a large mountain, and the trees changes species. Signs of other human life began to appear - she must be getting close to a village. The water from the falls was flowing down the path she was already walking. If she followed it, she would probably end up at the village, since they would be using the water. Is this where the spirits of the forest were guiding her? Her pace quickened - maybe she'll actually find a place to stay.

As she continued, she passed the largest tree out of them all, roots exposed on top of a pile of crumbling rocks. She made a note of it, that if she ended up staying in the woods it wouldn't be hard to turn those stones into walls and make a house under that tree. She would be alone besides Philomena, though, and she was eager to see another human being.

The trees finally cleared, and Labhraín came face to face with the entrance to the largest city she had ever seen. Over the walls was a large white building, with gold and spires and towers. She had never seen something so beautiful. Someone very important must live there.

Philomena nudged her back, causing Labhraín to turn around. The Mountain Lion was sitting up, a look of finality in its eyes.

"Safe." It said. This wasn't to urge her to keep moving, but a statement. This is where Labhraín was meant to be.

"Aren't you coming?"

"No. Stay out here. Home in forest."

That made sense. A large predator like Philomena wouldn't be welcome in her small village, and Labhraín couldn't imagine what a large city like this place would think.

"You're my family now, though, you know that?" She asked, scratching the cat's golden fur behind the ears before wrapping her arms around it in a hug. "I'll be back for you, I'll visit all the time. I promise."

"Familiar." Philomena purred. "With you. Always."

With that, they went their separate directions: Philomena jumped into the upper branches of the forest trees, and Labhraín made her way into the city. Her heart was heavy and she was scared, but Mierne's words echoed in her head, her mantra for her entire journey.

I am destined for great things. There was no turning back now.

---

Labhraín had never seen so many people in her entire life. This city was packed, everyone was pushing around one another and she felt trapped. She didn't really know how she got to this part of the city, the streets were twisted and confusing, but it was some kind of trade center. Everyone was buying or selling different foods, from the most delicious bread she'd ever smelled to piles of exotic fruits she had never seen before. One was dark red and leathery, and a perfect sphere - it had to be too tough to bite into. How would someone eat it? It wasn't until this moment that she realized how much she didn't know about the world. In the past hour she had seen more people of different skin tones, heard more languages spoken, and seen so many different foods than she had ever seen or heard before in her life. There were people who she couldn't tell what gender they were, or if they had a gender at all. She didn't realize that was an option. But most of all she noticed that up until now she had been relatively alone or in her small family group. She realized that all these people and all the noise made her very anxious.

There was so much going on. There were so many people…

The crowd jostled her to and fro through the streets, pushed her around. She found herself feeling smaller and smaller, her heart racing, her breath quickening. She ran to the edge of the street, her back against the stone wall of a building. She sunk to her knees and closed her eyes, hoping it would just go away.

"Are you alright?"

She heard a voice and felt a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes, another face very close to her own, purple eyes looking into hers.

"Are you alright? Do you need help?" A person with tan skin and hair the color of woad knelt down in front of her, a concerned look on their face.

"I...I don't know. I..." Labhraín's voice trailed off.

"You're new here, yeah? I don't recognize you."

Labhraín nodded. Did this person know all these people in the city? How could they know so many faces?

"Here, come with me. The back roads are a lot more quiet. I can show you, if you want." They stood up and held out their hand for her. She took it, and they led her down some side streets away from the crowds They moved quite fast, twisting and turning through the alleys, and Labhraín almost had to run to keep up with their long legs. All the while, this person never seemed to stop talking.

"My name's Marcel, what's yours?"

"Labhraín."

"Law...reen?"

She nodded.

"Laurene. Okay, I think I got it! So you look pretty lost. You've never been to Vesuvia before, have you?"

She shook her head no.

"Yeah, it's a lot if you're not used to it. So welcome to Vesuvia! Are you staying or just visiting?"

"I… I think I'm staying."

"Oh, wicked. That thing you're holding, is that an instrument? It looks like a kanun?"

"It's a dulcimer. I'm missing the hammers, though."

"You play it with hammers? That's super cool! I play the oud."

Did they not know what a dulcimer was? To be fair, she didn't know what either of the instruments they mentioned were.

Marcel kept talking, asking a lot of questions that Laurene didn't think really meant much. What her favorite flower was ("We call it Lily of the Valley where I'm from"), or her favorite food ("fiddleheads". "Fiddleheads? I've never heard of that before. I like kousa mahshi." "I've never heard of that before."). They didn't mean much, but slowly they got Laurene talking, speaking to another human again. They reminded her of Muirne, and she smiled for the first time in almost a week.

By the time they got to wherever they were going, Laurene knew more about Marcel than she did anyone else. They described themself as "nonbinary" and didn't really go by any particular gender. They were nineteen, a year older than her, and was also a magician. Their facepaint helped attune their chakras, whatever those were, and they were really interested in the clothing of other cultures.

Marcel also was uncomfortable showing skin, which explained the boots, long pants, knee-length tunic, and jacket they were wearing. They even wore a looped scarf around their neck, to cover their hair and mouth when they felt like being extra modest. ("Large crowds make me nervous, so it makes me feel better to cover my head.") Laurene didn't know how they could wear so much fabric when the city was still so hot in autumn, but she could make an assumption that it was something magical.

The two of them came out of an alley in front of a shop a ways away from the marketplace, the wooden sign emblazoned with a mortar and pestle that hung next to the doorway creaked in the autumn wind.

"This is the magic shop!" Marcel grinned as they unlocked the door. "My auntie and I, we run it, and live upstairs." They paused, halfway through the door with Laurene still standing on the street outside, unsure of what to do.

"What, aren't you coming in for tea? You're new in town, you're a guest! Come in!"

#moxy ink blot #the arcana #the arcana game #the arcana mystic romance #the arcana nix hydra #the arcana apprentice #the arcana mc #the arcana fan apprentice #the arcana fanfiction #fan apprentice #apprentice laurene #fan mc #the arcana fan mc #apprentice backstory

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mj-spooks · 4 years

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So, i just came from a thing where we were talking about all the languages in the UK (especially Gaelic) because of the upcoming pokemon game. Anyway, why was Harry Potter all written from like a London english perspective? If the school was in Scotland, shouldnt it have a lot more scottish words? Hufflepuff was Welsh, why didn't more of that become an influence? Rowena was the scottish one. Is there a relationship between Slytherin being Irish the Irish-English conflicts?

The answer is “JKR is English” as far as the lack of influences from the other regions is concerned. She’s proven time and time again that she’s not particularly good at viewing things from outside the scope of her own personal experience. The disaster that is everything in the EU proves that.

As far as the school itself goes, though, it’s based in Scotland but that was an agreement made by the founders for the sake of ease of hiding, not really an indication of the region itself. At the time the founders were alive, the SoS hadn’t been implemented yet so keeping them out of sight/out of mind from Muggles was a priority. Realistically it should have shown equal influence from all the cultures of the time, but obviously that’s not what happened because, again, JKR is English.

I suppose you could interpret it as being another example of England’s colonialist behaviors, though, since it’s not like they ever considered not invading anyone ever, esp their closest neighbors. “Hogwarts is English because the English can’t let anything ever not be about them” seems as good an answer as any. Let’s just headcanon that at some point in history, after the founders were gone but before the books take place, the English wizarding community did like their muggle counterparts and more or less Took Over Everything. It’s all English because they’re the ones who implemented policies and came up with names. Boom, mystery solved.

#anon has questions #harry potter #I love this series with all my heart #but jkr is trash lmao

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fatehbaz · 5 years

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Jolakotturinn, the child-eating “Yule cat” of Icelandic Christmas folklore

So the city of Reykjavik - capital of Iceland - purchased and installed a new piece of seasonal public art depicting Yule cat this year (December 2018). And the cost has caused a lot of controversy, especially considering the city doesn’t even technically own it and has to lease the cat from private companies each year from now-on, with annual fees. The up-front cost so-far has been 4.4 million ISK - US$36,000. People are angry.

My favorite part about the controversy (from an article in The Reykjavik Grapevine):

Socialist Party councilmember Sanna Magdelena Mortudottir criticised the city’s priorities in a Facebook post that has been liked over 400 times. She referenced the folklore of the cat, which according to legend eats children that do not get new clothes before Christmas Eve. Sanna pointed out that poverty deprives children of new clothes and, as the city is the country’s largest employer of minimum wage workers, many children could get new clothes by the city raising their parents’ salaries.

Anyway!

This encouraged me to do some catching-up on winter-themed Icelandic folklore. And it turns-out that there has actually been some interesting anthropology scholarship over the past couple of years that has clarified some of the origins of Iceland’s Yuletide/Christmas traditions related to Yule cat.

Here’s the new Yule cat art in Reykjavik, installed December 2018:

You can read the Iceland Monitor article about the installation here; second photo by Eggert Johannesson; first photo here.

So, for anyone unfamiliar, the Yule cat, or “Christmas cat,” eats children. The cat devours those who weren’t gifted new clothing during the holiday gift-giving season leading up to Christmas.

The focus on clothing in this tradition probably began as a way to highlight the urgency, among parents, of hurrying-up and finishing your sewing projects and making new clothes before the onset of mid-winter (as in, if you haven’t outfitted your children with reliable winter clothes before the Winter Solstice, your children are in trouble).

In this case, the Yule cat would be representative of the danger of having unreliable winter gear, and the impending threat that cold poses against children. Aside from reminding parents of their priorities, the lore also communicates to children that winter is dangerous without clothing. Thus, it’s the Christmas norm in Iceland to gift your children socks and warm clothing.

(Source, if you can read Icelandic, unlike me.)

Here’s a take by Erin Allen:

Here’s an illustration by BambiKhan:

Here’s Yule cat on an official Icelandic stamp!

Yule cat is the pet of Gryla - a troll, a monster analogous in appearance and personality to a classic English witch. Like Yule cat, she also eats children. Except she eats only the misbehaved kids. There’s a famous painting of Gryla eating a little baby, but I’m not going to share that here; it’s easily found on Google.

Regarding children: “Collecting them up, she cooks them in a pot and turns them into a giant stew that will sustain her until the next winter.”

The name Gryla is originally given to a troll woman in the Snorra-Edda (Prose Edda) composed in the 13th Century. So her personality has been around for quite some time.

At their cave in Dimmuborgir (rural northern Iceland), Gryla and Yule cat are joined by their 13 henchmen, the Yule-lads.

The Yule-lads are all quirky and bizarre, each defined by a distinctive gimmick, theme, or exaggerated character trait. In the 13 days leading-up to Christmas night, each of the Yule-lads is designated a night during which they play mischievous tricks on children.

Here are Gryla and the Yule-lads:

Gryla has a husband, Leppaludi, who just kind of chills; he doesn’t really condone the child-eating, but he respects his partner’s autonomy. Traditionally, most stories frame Leppaludi as a sort of stay-at-home dad.

This is a popular installation in Akureyri, northern Iceland - where the folklore says these monsters all hang-out together in a cave nearby - featuring Gryla and Leppaludi (source):

Anyway, over the past few years, there has been renewed interest in searching for the cultural origins of Gryla and her mythological entourage.

First: the possible origins of Yule-lads

Here’s a report for Iceland Monitor from November 2018: in reference to how people no longer believe in the folk tales in the Internet Age, and now have to tell their children Gryla has died.

“There’s a rumour concerning Gryla, that she’s dead and has stopped eating children. I think that’s nonsense, and that she’s living a great life in the mountains still eating her human sushi,” says professor of ethnology Terry Gunnell at the University of Iceland.

Gunnell held a lecture on Gryla this week at the National Library and spoke of her relatives in Scandinavia, Ireland, Germany, Austria and elsewhere.

He says that in older times in Iceland people used to travel around the countryside wearing costumes so they wouldn’t be recognized, that covered both face and hands. Most of these were young men begging for alcohol and food and this could somehow have sparked the folklore.

Another new line of research: Gryla as an analogue to Gaelic and Celtic goddesses and mythology

Here’s just a quick excerpt from an Iceland Monitor report on the research of Icelandic sociologist Valgerdur H. Biarnadotir:

“There are tales in Scotland and in Ireland that resemble the Icelandic tales of Gryla closely and there is no doubt that these stories and beliefs came to Iceland at the time of settlement. Some stories become firmly rooted in our culture and others change or merge with stories from other cultures. The Irish elf tales are very similar to our Icelandic ones, for example. Scottish goddess Cailleach Beur and Irish goddess Cailleach Bheara are Celtic varieties of a goddess or supernatural being which we call Gryla in Iceland.” These three beings share distinct similarities.

They are all connected to winter and the dwindling sunlight, to the mountains and the wilderness, according to Bjornodottir. They all have a walking stick which freezes the earth beneath it and a husband who is much weaker than they are. In some stories they have dozens of children.”

There’s access to more of Bjarnadottir’s thoughts at the link.

–

Yule cat really didn’t show-up in any written Icelandic material until the 1800s. But the figure was immortalized for a generation of children as the subject of a famous 20th Century poem by popular Icelandic poet (and parliament member) Johannes ur Kotlum.

I’ll leave you with the poem in the reblogs, though you’d probably be able to Google it.

Anyway, the 2018 controversy over Yule cat is interesting to watch. I really have to hand it to Reykjavik Socialist Party councilmember Sanna Magdelena Mortudottir using the moral of traditional folk-tale to criticize the city government.

Could the story of Yule cat - gift your children new, warm winter-appropriate clothing for Christmas, or else they’ll be eaten alive” – be related to the American Christmas tradition of gifting socks? Probably.

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atlantic-riona · 6 years

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All of the asks for the Raven!!!!! Because I love him!!!

I’m so happy you love him, because I do too! and this was a lot of fun to write, especially because talking about Bran inevitably leads to me poking fun at him XD

Their age? Bran is 19

Their sexuality/sexual preference? straight

Any siblings/Only child? MANY SIBLINGS--there’s his twin sister, Cait, and then there’s Gwydion, Alasdair, Art, and finally Conor (going from oldest to youngest)

Their favorite season? he's never been able to decide, so it varies from season to season

Who were/are their parents/guardians? THIS IS SPOILERS TERRITORY but I can tell you that his mother was named Ailbhe and his father was named Ler; Ailbhe was a soldier in the Imperial army like Cait and Ler was a sailor

Their gender? male

Their date of birth? goodness, I don’t know...*consults timeline* gonna have to say probably sometime in early spring, and for specifics...let’s say March 11

What clothing style? clothes (jk he usually wears loose tunics and loose ankle-length breeches. sometimes he wears a vest with it but he always leaves it open because he hates feeling constricted. he honestly Does Not Care what he looks like; which his brothers hate because he usually ends up Looking Good anyway)

What is their favorite food after a break-up? apple pie

Their favorite thing to do after a break-up? brood in the corner and convince himself that it was his fault

What happens in the ‘honeymoon phase’ for this character? he would probably spend a lot of time teasing her and generally be overjoyed to be around her

How many serious relationships have they been in? one so far, with Marian

What is their nationality? Falian

What languages do they speak? he speaks Falian, Vala (the language of the Valavir), and a few others (that I haven’t figured out the names for yet)

What is their profession/Education? he is a former mercenary and wants to become a healer. he’s completely self-taught in everything, but is just as educated as anyone who’s gone to university

Their favorite comfort food? apple pie

What’s a food they hate? vegetables in general, but he can never admit it, because then all his younger siblings would have an excuse to not eat their vegetables

Their music taste? it would probably range between traditional Irish and Scottish music and the more modern Gaelic-inspired music (am I saying that Bran would listen to Celtic rock? ABSOLUTELY)

Is there a story behind their name/meaning? ehehe...yes. a long one. because I put a ton of time into finding the right names for any of my characters, and this involves a lot of research, so apologies for the info dump in advance! the name Bran has mythological connotations--there are characters in both Welsh and Irish mythology with the name (Bran the Blessed and Bran mac Febail). also I knew my Bran’s father was a seafarer so I wanted a first or last name that referenced the sea or sailing in some way. In Welsh mythology, Bran the Blessed is brother to Manawydan fab Llŷr, and in Irish mythology, Bran mac Febail goes on a long sea voyage and meets Manannán mac Lir, an Irish god of the sea. Both Manannán mac Lirand Manawydan fab Llŷrare thought to be connected (possibly descended from an earlier, shared god), and in fact, both their last names mean “son of the sea” or “son of Llŷr/Ler.” in Irish mythology, Ler is hypothesized to be an earlier god of the sea who Manannán eventually replaced (it’s not exactly the same for Manawydan fab Llŷr). so Bran’s (my character, not the mythological versions) father got named Ler to reference the sea, and also because I thought it was a cool name. in addition, the name Bran means “raven” (which isn’t why he got named “the Raven,” that came later) and the raven in Celtic tradition represented war, death, and prophetic knowledge/omens (usually of death). it could also be used for someone who had raven-dark hair. so basically, since my character was someone with dark hair like a raven, spent much of his time on a battlefield, and had connections to the sea in the form of his father, it fit perfectly. (later, when I was looking for a sort of folklore sounding title/epithet, “the Raven” seemed to fit because of the connotations mentioned previously, and it was only after I started using it that I remembered his real name already meant “raven.” so his name is either “raven” or Raven XD)

Something they do that seems childish to others? sometimes he sulks up in a tree or in another high place. which, in his mind, is considered “serious contemplation,” but the rest of his siblings just call it “pouting”

What is their all-time favorite TV show? he would probably enjoy shows that were about families and had a sense of humor, maybe like Republic of Doyle (alternatively, he’d enjoy cartoons like Batman: the Animated Series)

What is their all-time favorite movie? Bran would probably enjoy Lord of the Rings a lot, now that I think about it

How big is their family? just the six siblings (for now...)

Are they close to anyone specific in the family? he shares everything with Cait, because they’re the oldest siblings and he trusts her more than anyone, but he’s also very close to Alasdair, because they have shared interests and temperaments

Have they got any allergies? yes, to people who are named Ferhon or Lucan

Are they an emotional person? he tends to put everybody else’s needs before his, so he bottles up any emotions that are not helpful for the people around him (which doesn’t always work out well for him)

Do they get angry/lose their temper quickly? no, any anger usually builds up really slowly and then BOOM one day he loses his temper and that’s that

What are some of their guilty pleasures? reading, apple pie, lying/sitting down doing nothing

Do they have pets? Do they want pets? he has a pet! (sort of) Marian gave Alasdair a puppy, who has since become the family dog

Do they like kids? Do they want kids/have kids? he loves kids and wants to have lots of them someday

Who’s cuddle buddy are they? there is no specific cuddle buddy really--all the sibs sort of pile up on top of each other if they’re relaxing or something

Do they have any tattoos? no

Do they have any piercings? nope

What is their hair colour? Is it their natural colour? wavy black, and it is naturally so

Do they like musicals? would probably not really mind them, as long as he isn’t forced to sit through one

Do they like marmite? I’m not sure, because I’ve never had it myself :)

Do they like glitter? probably not

Do they believe in the supernatural? yes (he IS the supernatural, to be fair)

Have they ever seen a dead body? TOO MANY

Have they ever had a near-death experience? ALSO TOO MANY

Have they ever broken a bone? you know what, yes. going to make it canon now.

What are they like when they’re drunk/what kind of drunk are they? it’s a 50/50 chance if he’ll be mopey or ready to start a fight

Have they ever drunk underage? there is no drinking age, so no

What is the first thing they do when they wake up? make breakfast for everybody

Do they consider themselves popular? that would require having more than a few friends (also he’s CERTAINLY not popular with the Empire at the moment)

How do they like their tea/coffee? I have to confess something: most of my characters drink tea, but I Do Not like tea and so have no idea of the Nuances of it. so...I don’t know

What do they smell like? woodsmoke and pine, also various herbs if he’s been working

Are they a virgin? yes

Do they wear glasses/contacts? no; he has excellent eyesight anyway

Are they good at remembering significant dates? Anniversaries, birthdays etc? once in a blue moon (and by that I mean he totally asked Art to remind him if something really important comes up since Art’s the only one in the family who bothers to keep track of the dates)

thanks! :)

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turtlesoupstories · 7 years

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retrouvailles (pt 1/4)

as promised, here is our new project in honor of the blog hitting 500 followers! this is going to be a four part installment that all of us have collaborated on. we are really excited about this and hope you guys will enjoy it!

the piece is called retrouvailles and each of the four parts will be written by one of us: i have written the first, marlo will be writing the second, kaitlyn the third, and our lovely shannon will be bringing it to a close! here is part one!

love always, mikayla (@cagedbirdsong)

“Yes, just the coffee please. Thank you, keep the change--yes, you too!” Claire offered a smile to the spritely young barista behind the counter, exchanged a handful of cash she still didn’t quite know how to count for the coffee, and turned only to crash directly into the stranger standing behind her.

She hadn’t realized how close he had been standing, and apparently he hadn’t been paying much attention either, his gaze fixated on a poster pinned to the glass display case of the quaint corner bakery; she watched the crease between his brows disappear as his eyes went wide and he jumped back, half of the scalding liquid soaking into the front of his shirt and the other half sloshing onto both of their feet. Claire jumped back a step as well, the offending cup held away from her body, and met his eyes with a face of horror.

“Ohmygod, I am sosorry, I didn’t seeyouthereand - ohmygod!” The words came blundering out of her in a rush and she immediately lunged for the napkins on the counter, pressing a fistful to the stain on his shirt without a second thought.

It must have hurt - she could feel the heat of it on her own skin where it had spilled onto her hands - but despite it all, the bloody man smiled, a wide, bright kind of smile that should certainly be illegal. “Och, dinna fash yerself on my account,” he was saying, though she was barely paying attention, her cheeks flaming on several accounts as she rapidly took a step back, his hand coming up to grab the sodden heap of napkins she had assaulted him with. “It’s you that’s lost a perfectly good cup of coffee.”

“I--me!? You’ve just had boiling coffee poured down your shirt! Jesus H Christ, are you alright?” A few of the other patrons had turned to watch the commotion, and one of the employees had appeared out of nowhere with a mop and bucket, ushering the messy duo out of the way.

The Scot, for Scottish he was if she were to judge by the accent, just laughed a little, one hand peeling the sticky material of his shirt away from his skin. “Ah, it’s no’ the worst I’ve had. Second time it’s happened, actually.” His blue eyes flashed as he smirked up at her, dropping his attention back to dabbing at the stain. “Though, the first woman wasna quite as beautiful.”

If all of the blood hadn’t already rushed to Claire’s face, it certainly did now. “Oh, I- that’s very kind of you to- thank you.” She felt heat creep down her neck and dropped the now empty cup in the trash can, wringing her hands in front of her. “I’m really terribly sorry, are you sure you’re alright?”

He smiled again and shook his head, waving one hand in dismissal. “It’s really no’ an issue, lass.” Despite her embarrassment, Claire found herself relaxing at his reassurance, something about him oddly calming, familiar almost.

“Your shirt, though; I feel horrible, it’s ruined now.” She gestured lamely to his outfit with a grimace, and wiped her palms on her jeans.

“Ach, it looks better now, anyway,” the Scot chuckled, wiping his hands with the napkins before dropping them into the trash as well. “I wasna o’er fond of it much, but I think I’ll keep it now.” He blinked at her, slowly, like some sort of odd red owl, and Claire found herself laughing a little, skin prickling.

“Well I’m glad I just happened to dump my coffee on the nicest bloody sod in the whole of Paris,” she blew out, rocking on her heels. And the cutest, her brain chimed, which only made her blush more.

He grinned one of those maddening, dazzling smiles again, and bowed his head. “At your service…” he trailed off, arching one ruddy eyebrow.

“Claire,” she blurted, sticking her hand out awkwardly in front of her. “Claire Beauchamp.” Jesus, Beauchamp. What are you doing? Get it together.

He reached out, still half smiling at her, and took her hand in one of his. It was large and warm and calloused, and nearly swallowed Claire’s whole. Her legs momentarily quivered.

“James Fraser, but ye can call me Jamie.” He released her hand, and her skin immediately felt the absence of it. “A pleasure, Claire,” Jamie laughed, glanced down at his shirt, and shrugged. “Even if ye did ruin my new shirt.” There was laughter in his voice and she knew he was joking, but she groaned nonetheless, bringing her hands up to cover her face briefly.

“I am so sorry! Is there anything I can do to make it up to you? Anything at all?”

Jamie rocked forward on his feet, lip caught between his teeth. “Weeeeel, ye could let me buy ye another coffee, seeing as how I made ye lose yours.” His smile turned suddenly shy, his neck flushing ever so slightly, and Claire’s heart skittered in her chest.

She reached up to tuck a wayward curl behind her ear and laughed a little, smiling coyly back at him. “I feel like I should say no, but I would love that.”

Jamie grinned again, found them a table on the sidewalk, and returned a few minutes later with a cup in each hand. “Vanilla soy latte for the bonnie lass.” He placed it in front of her as he sat, leaning his elbows on the table.

“Thank you again, Jamie, really. Most people don’t buy a girl coffee after she spills it all over their clean white shirt.” Her eyes smiled at him over the rim of her cup and he shrugged as if his clothes were too tight across his shoulders, playing with the stirring stick in his own drink.

“Like I said, Claire, it’s my pleasure.” He raised his cup, murmured something under his breath in what she assumed to be Gaelic, and took a drink.

“Your accent,” Claire broached the silence after a moment. “Scottish? Or Irish?”

Jamie set his drink down, ran his tongue over his lips (she shuddered), and leaned back in his chair. “A Scot, through and through, I’m afraid,” he purred, annunciating the r’s. “Were ye hopin’ for the luck o’ the Irish then?”

Claire laughed, raising one hand to push some hair out of her face as a stray breeze dashed by, and shook her head. “I wasn’t hoping for much of anything really… but I suppose a Scot will have to do.”

If it were possible, Jamie’s grin seemed to grow even wider, his eyebrows shooting up to nearly his hairline. “Claire Beauchamp, are ye flirting with me?”

Another sip of coffee, another smirk over the rim. “I might be, James Fraser.”

Something in his eyes shifted, darkening them for a fraction of a second, but he cleared his throat and crossed his legs, the fingers of his right hand tapping on his knee. “Ye’re no’ from France, I take it,” he chuckled, peering at her from the corner of his eye. “What brings ye to Paris then? Sightseeing? Meeting an estranged lover?” She snorted and shook her head.

“No to the last bit. Just a vacation - sightseeing included.” She winked at him and he smirked back, reaching out to clink his cup with hers.

“Aye, I’ll drink to that.” A few moments of comfortable silence passed between them, both sitting and soaking in the cool morning sunlight and the hustle and bustle of downtown Paris.

Claire covertly watched him from the other side of the table, the way his lip twitched when he watched something, the way his eyes seemed to move fluidly, tracking one thing while most people’s just flitted around, their attention caught by whatever happened to enter their field of view. She noticed the shadow of stubble on the corner of his jaw where he must have missed a spot shaving, the bob of his Adam’s apple as he took a drink. She only jerked back to reality once she had begun to notice how his shoulders and chest looked beneath his shirt, and that his pants were just a hair too tight across his thighs, so she could see the ripple of his muscles when he moved. She coughed once, cheeks flaming. “And how come you’re in Paris, Jamie?”

He glanced at her, eyes cool and sparkling, but if he picked up on her train of thought he didn’t react to it. He merely shrugged again, ran a hand through his hair, and smiled. “Much the same as you, I’m afraid. Nothing special. I do a wee bit o’ photography in my free time, and what better place than Paris for it, hmm?” For the first time, Claire noticed the leather strap hanging on his chair: a camera. One of the small details she had failed to notice in the rush of their first encounter.

Interest piqued, she leaned forward a bit. “I’ve always loved photography. Have you been doing it very long?”

“Mm, about two years now, maybe three. It started wi’ a trip I took back home, in Scotland. More of a hobby then, but I’ve a wee studio here in the city. My cousin Jared lives no’ far from here, and gave me run o’ the place so I could try and maybe make a business of it. There’s no verra much exposure in Scotland, I’m afraid.” He paused, then grinned, shrugging. “Save the sheep.”

Claire giggled - Jesus, Beauchamp. Like a schoolgirl. - and folded her arms, leaning on the table. “I’d love to see some of them, sometime. The photos. Not the sheep.” He laughed, eyes crinkling, and her chest swelled.

“I can show ye some, if ye like. There’s a wee… thing going on at a restaurant down the road from the studio, something to support local artists and whatnot. I’ve a few pieces up for display. If ye feel like going, that is. It’s nothing fancy, a cocktail party of sorts, verra casual…” He trailed off almost hopefully, and Claire blushed.

“I would love to. Thank you, Jamie.”

He dipped his head, blushing furiously, and grinned shyly up at her. “Oh, aye. I’d be glad ta have ye.” He glanced at his watch, sighed, and his smile turned apologetic. “Ye’ll hate me, but I should be going. I’ve a few things left ta finalize for tonight.”

Claire nodded, sparing a glance at her own watch, and smiled. “Of course,” she said, though she would be lying if she said she wasn’t a touch disappointed. He stood to leave, picking up his camera bag, but then paused.

“Claire?”

She looked up at him, eyebrows arched.

“I’ve thought of one more wee favor I might ask of ye, if ye dinna mind.” His voice was shy, odd in comparison to the natural ease that seemed to go with everything he did.

“Money for a new shirt?” She teased, smiling.

It got the desired reaction: he laughed, but then shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. Would ye mind if I took a picture of you? It’s just, the sun’s just right, and the scenery’s perfect. Not to mention ye look right bonnie as of now.”

Claire flushed again, heat pooling in her stomach, and shook her head, curls bouncing. “No, I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t mind at all.”

Jamie grinned, his face momentarily childlike, beaming and bright, and pulled his chair back, opening up his camera and quickly attaching a lens. He nodded at her, and Claire raised her cup and took a drink, her eyes smiling over the rim, hair caught in a small breeze and the busy streets of Paris behind her.

The camera flashed with a click.

#AHHH #HERE WE GO #we are super excited for this fic!#we hope you guys enjoy it!!#retrouvailles #tss #outlander fanfiction #outlander fanfic #tss collab series #tss retrouvailles #turtlesoupstories #mikayla

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everlarkbirthdaydrabbles · 7 years

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My birthday is May 16. I would love a fic that features Age!Gap Everlark with Katniss 5 - 10 years older than Peeta. M or E rating. Thanks for running this fabulous web site.

Wishing you the happiest of birthdays, @ldyglfr62! Your gift - the penultimate offering from everlarkbirthdaydrabbles, was written just for you by @xerxia31. We hope you enjoy!

When Irish Eyes are Smiling

rated M, for language and adult situations.

It’s not completely unexpected, but it’s still a shock to see it. Thick, expensive card stock, pale pink with roses and their names embossed in gold.

Madge Undersee and Gale Hawthorne, along with their families, request the honour of your presence at their wedding…

I’m happy for them, I truly am. I’m just still kind of shocked that after nine years together, it took Gale less than three months to marry my replacement.

It’s not like I thought Gale and I would ever marry each other, even if our friends all expected it. And our breakup was completely mutual. But that he moved on so fast is kind of a slap.

“You should go on vacation,” Prim says when I phone to tell her the news. “That way, you can skip the wedding without looking like a jerk.” Trust Prim to cut right to it. Because she’s right; even though Gale is my oldest friend, I’d rather rip out my intestines with a fork than watch him marry the woman of his dreams while all of our mutual friends look at me with pity.

“I can’t go sit on a beach somewhere by myself,” I groan. “That’s even more loser-ish than going to my ex’s wedding stag.” But the wheels are turning. I do need to get away, and not just from the wedding. I could use a break from my entire pathetic life. “Maybe I could go see Effie?” I mumble. My late mother grew up in Ireland, she moved to America before I was born to marry my father. Her sister still lives near Dublin, and is always asking me to come see her. It’s been a long time since my last visit.

A fabulous deal on the flight seals it. Since I’m a freelancer, there’s no one to arrange vacation time with. I can work from anywhere that there’s an internet connection. My neighbour agrees to check my mailbox periodically, and my friends all understand.

o-o-o

I arrange to stay six weeks with Effie. The first week passes in a haze of jetlag, lumpy pillows, and daily afternoon tea on her garden-gnome-and-flower-strewn patio. It’s calm, quiet.

Since I’ll be gone over my birthday, Prim insists on paying for a week-long bus tour of the Scottish Highlands for me, both as a birthday gift, and as a break from my aunt. “Better not be one of those singles tours,” I grumble as she details everything over Skype while I sit in Effie’s formal living room, surrounded by creepy porcelain dolls, a pair of lace doilies protecting her mahogany table from my computer. Prim’s in med school in Seattle, I haven’t seen her since Christmas, and I think she feels guilty about not having been there for me - in person - when Gale and I broke up, no matter how many times I tell her that I’m fine about it. But since Effie is already driving me crazy, I don’t put up much of a fight.

“Do those exist?” she asks, and on my shitty laptop screen she looks pensive. I can tell she’s wishing she’d thought of looking for one. “Wild and Sexy Tours. Huh. I wonder if I can change it…” She starts clicking away on her keyboard and I balk.

“No, geez Prim, this is fine, great really.” The website she’s linked me to shows small tour buses, catering mostly to elderly vacationers. Just my speed.

“Have you met anyone over there yet?”

“Sure, Effie’s friend with the strange beard came by for cocktails yesterday.” Prim’s face screws up.

“That’s not what I mean, Katniss. Have you been out to the pubs at all? Or gone to a rugby match?” At my shrug, she groans. “Dammit, you’re too young to be spending your time holed up with Effie’s antiques. You need to get out there, meet people, date.”

“I’m not really ready for that,” I tell her, and I can see by the way her expression changes to pity that she thinks I’m still hung up on Gale. I don’t bother correcting her. Gale and I should never have been more than friends, we both knew it, but being together was easy, like a comfortable pair of jeans. I’m not in love with him, I really never was. But I’m not anxious to put myself out there just yet. Or maybe ever. Because Gale’s the only guy I’ve ever been with. At not-quite twenty-seven, I have no experience dating at all.

“Just promise me you’ll talk to some of your tour mates at least,” she says sadly. And I promise, because I can never tell my sweet sister no.

o-o-o

Edinburgh is a confusing mess of streets and hills and hilly streets and more freaking hills, and by the time I find my way to Waterloo Place, where I’m supposed to catch the bus tour, I’m late and in a panic. When I see the little red bus still at the stop, I’m almost weak-kneed with relief.

“‘Bout time you showed up, Sweetheart,” the driver grumbles, grabbing my backpack and tossing it unceremoniously into the back. I climb on board, and my heart sinks. I’m too late to have gotten one of the single seats, and am now going to be stuck sharing. There are only two empty seats, one on the bench in the very back, between a young woman with spiky hair and a serious case of bitch face and a man who might be a professional football player; the other right behind the driver, next to a startlingly handsome man, who glances up at me through a mop of ashy blond waves, and smiles shyly.

I hope Blondie isn’t a talker.

o-o-o

Blondie is a talker.

His name is Peeta Mellark, and he fills the first hour of our drive north with mostly one-sided conversation. But I find I don’t mind all that much. He’s Irish, from a village on the Irish sea, and his gently lilting accent is much nicer to listen to than the rough Scottish burr that our driver barks as he points out one thing or another along the route.

“You know a lot about Scotland,” I finally say.

Peeta smiles wistfully. “My da used to bring me here, when I was small. We’d walk the hills and sleep in the heather.”

“How long has he been gone?” Peeta lifts an eyebrow, but I know I’m right. I recognize the look in his eyes. It’s the same expression I wear when I think about my own father, whose death when I was just a kid marked the beginning of the end of my idyllic childhood.

“I was seventeen when he passed,” he says quietly.

“You miss him.” It’s not a question, I can see in Peeta’s eyes. He nods. But any further discussion is cut off by our first stop on the tour.

Though it’s a bus tour, it turns out to be a fairly active one. We make multiple stops all along the route to the Highlands, exploring an ancient cathedral, touring a distillery, even visiting a heritage village. And as what appears to be the only two people travelling alone on the tour, Peeta and I end up spending most of the day together.

It’s… nice. He’s sweet and interesting, and it’s refreshing to talk with someone my own age.

When we arrive at Inverness, our stop for the night, I realize that Peeta and I have been assigned to the same bed and breakfast, along with the linebacker, whose name is Thresh, his girlfriend Rue, and our driver, Haymitch. That’s going to make keeping to myself that much more difficult, I realize. Then Haymitch arranges for the whole group to eat together at a pub on the river. I want to say no, that I’m too tired or some other excuse, but somehow I get sucked along anyway.

I hate being forced into group situations, but Peeta, seeming to sense my unease, sits beside me and acts as a bit of a buffer between me and the throng, not speaking for me, but deflecting attention when I get overwhelmed.

And it’s compelling to watch him interact with the others. He’s so friendly and well-spoken, so intelligent and insightful, easily moving between discussing the differences between American football and Gaelic rugby with Thresh, and the impact of Brexit on tourism in the Republic with the South African lawyer seated at the next table.

And though I promised myself that I wouldn’t think about Gale, it’s impossible not to compare him with Peeta. Gale has always been sort of closed minded; conversation with Gale is only possible on the narrow range of topics he cares about, and generally involves either a recitation of his opinions with no room for dissent, or a re-living of his glory days. But Peeta is so thoughtful, I watch him absorb and consider everyone’s viewpoints, watch his reflect back intelligent discourse in a way that feels engaging and exciting, not like a firestorm. I can’t help thinking that maybe Prim is right. Maybe I do need to spend time with people my own age instead of feeling like I’m still stuck in highschool with Gale.

o-o-o

The sun rises ridiculously early in Inverness, and the curtains in my room are barely translucent. By five-thirty, I’ve given up on sleep entirely, and decide to sneak down to the common lounge, where the wifi signal is better.

I’m surprised to find I’m not alone. Peeta is already there, dressed for the day and facing the large plate glass window, beyond which the sky is streaked in pink and amber. He doesn’t hear me at first, and I can see in the reflection that his usual easy expression has been replaced by something more intense and removed that suggests an entire world locked away inside him. I decide to steal away, to leave him to his musings, but he catches the motion and turns, the faraway expression resolving into a smile that seems so genuinely sweet with just the right touch of shyness that unexpected warmth rushes through me. “Good morning, Katniss,” he says.

“What are you doing up so early?” I ask. There’s an empty teacup on the windowsill, he’s clearly been here awhile.

“I’m a baker,” he laughs. “I’m used to the pre-dawn wake-ups.” I grin, I heard him mentioning his business over dinner, and I’m curious about it.

He makes me a cup of tea, and another for himself, and as we sit together in the early morning hush he tells me about the bakery he owns in the tiny coastal village where his family has lived for generations. The picture he paints of his bucolic life there makes me ache, my own empty, tetherless existence in sharp contrast to his certainty. It makes me realize how stunted my growth has been, having wasted all of that time with Gale. Playing things safe instead of living.

I’m ready to live.

o-o-o

Our tour guide, Haymitch, is gruff and grouchy, but he seems to know all of the hidden gems of Scotland. As we head to the Isle of Skye, he makes frequent stops to walk nature trails with stunning waterfalls, to show us multiple off-the-beaten-path lookout points, and we even spend a glorious hour searching for shells on a Carribean-blue beach. But in the mid afternoon, the bus starts to make a strange noise. And as we pull into our next stop on the itinerary - the enchanted-sounding Fairy Glen - it comes to a shuddering halt.

“Ah shit,” Haymitch grumbles.

“Well,” Peeta murmurs in my ear. “There are worse places to get stuck.”

He’s right, this place is utter magic. As a group, we explore the strange rolling hills and mini lochs of the glen, walking the concentric rings and pressing coins into cracks in cave walls. Peeta is half mountain goat, I swear, practically jogging up the steep hills, gently teasing me as I lag behind. My laughter, unfamiliar but free, echoes all around.

And eventually, Peeta and I end up in a little meadow-like depression at the bottom of one of the hills. I haven’t felt so free since I was a kid. I’d love nothing more than to lie in the grass and watch the clouds float by; when I say so, Peeta pulls off his sweater and spreads it on the ground, tugging me down to lie beside him, my head pillowed on his arm.

I must drift off because the next thing I know, the patchy blue sky has clouded over completely, and Peeta is sitting beside me.

“Peeta, you should have woken me,” I say, rubbing the sleep crud out of my eyes.

“For what? Nothing’s going on here,” he says. “Besides, I like watching you sleep. You don’t scowl. Improves your looks a lot.” This, of course, brings on a scowl that makes him grin. “I’m kidding,” he laughs. “You’re beautiful, scowling or not.”

Something flutters in my chest, but I push it away. I don’t have room for that in my life. Instead, I nod towards the notepad in his hands. “What’s that?”

He tilts the paper towards me. It’s not writing, like I’d assumed, but a drawing. A sketch of a sleeping girl. My breath catches at the image on the paper. It’s me, clearly, and the talent in the pencil lines is mind-blowing. But it’s more than that. The girl in the picture looks softer, calmer, like all of her worries have been cast away. Peaceful. No, not peaceful… content. I haven’t been that girl in a long time. “This is incredible, Peeta,” I whisper.

“I have an eye for beauty,” he says, and it should sound cocky, like a come-on line. But from him, with those earnest blue eyes smiling, it just doesn’t.

Haymitch comes stomping into the clearing, greasy handprints marring his kilt. “Bus is fixed, git your arses on it,” he grunts.

Peeta gathers his sweater and notepad, and we trudge back to the bus. The tour continues in near silence, but it’s a good quiet. A comfortable quiet. Peeta wraps his arm around my shoulder and I find myself leaning into him as he strokes my hair. It’s uncomplicated and intimate. And though I’ve never been a cuddly person, I love it.

Our last stop is a trail that winds around a glassy Loch. The whole group is subdued, introspective maybe. Or maybe just hungry. Peeta and I lag behind though, enjoying the calm.

We emerge from the cover of the trees into a patch of yellow flowers, glowing in the sunlight. “Gorse,” Peeta answers my unasked question. “It’s everywhere at home too.”

“They smell fantastic,” I sigh. “Coconutty. Like the beach.” He chuckles, but when I reach for the golden flowers, he grabs my hand. I scowl.

“Thorns,” he says, delicately moving the blooms aside to show me that what I thought were flat leaves or needles are actually sharp spines. “Beautiful on the outside, but nasty underneath.”

“Just like me,” I say absently, but his brow wrinkles.

“No, Katniss,” he says. “You’re not like the gorse. You’re a bluebell.” I roll my eyes, but he continues, so earnestly. “Bluebells are shy, unassuming. Most people hardly notice them.” He leads me with a gentle hand on my lower back to the shady part of the hill. Only when he points them out do I realize the bluebells are in full bloom here. “But they’re strong and resilient, stubborn even. And once you see them, you can’t tear your eyes away from their beauty.” I turn to face him, but his hand doesn’t fall away, shifting instead to trace circles on my hipbone.

I want to scoff, to dismiss his words as the polished pick up lines of a player. But I can’t. As I stare at him, utterly speechless, he reaches up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I lean into his touch, and he smiles, just the barest lift of his lips. Sweet and hopeful. Before I can even consider what a terrible idea it is, I lift up on my toes and kiss him.

It’s a gentle kiss, but the desire that flares in my gut from that brief touch is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I haven’t kissed a lot of guys in my life, a handful back in highschool, only Gale after that. But no kiss has ever before felt so electric. I need more.

It’s clear he agrees, because almost as soon as I press my lips to his again, he takes control, one huge hand cupping my cheek, tilting my head to deepen the kiss. Exploring me thoroughly. I can’t hold back the little noises that escape me, and he groans softly in response.

I lose all sense of time and place, gripping his shirt, kissing him with a passion I wasn’t certain I was even capable of. It’s only when I hear the rest of the group heading down the path towards us that I pull away, reluctantly.

Peeta’s eyes flutter open, heavy-lidded, pupils fat. “I have wanted to do that since the first moment I saw you,” he whispers.

We don’t talk about the kiss, but for the rest of the day Peeta holds my hand. Even through dinner at a quiet little restaurant right on the harbour, he plays with my fingers, looking at me with something like adoration.

When we get back to our B&B I’m not ready for the evening to end. But there are other guests in the common lounge, playing a raucous game of cards. “Would you like to come to my room?” I ask, then immediately feel heat climbing up my cheeks. “Just, uh, just to talk a while longer.” I can’t meet his eyes. I’m incapable of flirting, or of communicating at all, really. Yet he follows me unquestioningly.

We sit side by side on my bed, talking. But there’s a tension between us that wasn’t there before, a crackling awareness. I don’t even know who makes the first move, but one minute we’re talking, the next I’m sucking on his tongue and his arms are pressing me tightly to him.

Kissing Peeta here in my quiet room is even better than on the nature trail. Free from distractions, I can let my hands wander, trace the firm musculature of his shoulders and arms, feel the pull and flex of his back. He unravels my braid and runs his fingers through the locks. “Beautiful,” he whispers against my lips.

We kiss and caress, hands becoming more bold. It’s when he lays me back on my bed, the hard length of his body cradled by my own, that I begin to panic. “Peeta,” I start. “I really like you.”

He pulls back just enough to look at my face. Then he smiles fondly. “But you’re not ready,” he says, and I’m shocked that he anticipated my words. “I know,” he says, and there’s no anger, he doesn’t even look disappointed. “We won’t do anything that you don’t want to,” he promises.

“Could we keep kissing?” I sound all of thirteen, pathetic and immature. But he doesn’t laugh at me.

“I’d like that,” he says.

We kiss and touch, chastely, fingers on napes and cheeks, tangled in hair. Making out like teenagers. Like the teenager I never really was. And eventually we fall asleep wrapped around each other.

o-o-o

I expect the morning to be awkward, but it isn’t. It isn’t at all. When I wake up, he’s still there, lying beside me, awake and smiling contentedly. He kisses me, just lightly, before retreating to his own room to get ready for the day.

We tour two different castle ruins, climb down (and back up) a gorge, and check out dinosaur fossils. He’s gently affectionate through it all, holding my hand, kissing my cheek, but never demanding anything else.

But I tug him into my room and my bed again that evening. And again he kisses me to sleep.

o-o-o

Gale’s wedding day falls on the fourth day of the tour. I’m cranky, and Peeta notices. He asks me what’s wrong but I brush him off. But even in the face of my moodiness, my pique and my - as Haymitch says - ‘slug-like charm’, Peeta is patient with me. Willing to take whatever little bits of myself I offer. And it’s that acceptance that prompts me to open up to him. In fits and starts over the course of the day as we walk and tour and explore, I tell Peeta about Gale, about the wasted years, about the holding pattern I’ve been in since we split.

He listens attentively, neither judging nor offering platitudes. But his quiet support means the world to me. “Do you still love him?” he asks as we sit on the dock in a quiet harbour town, watching the seabirds circle and dive.

“I never did,” I confess. “But after so long, I don’t know how to move on.”

When we return to the B&B, I again tug Peeta into my room. But this time I know something has shifted between us. Our sweet, chaste kisses rapidly escalate. And though Peeta tries to slow us down, tries to be a gentleman, I want more. And after a few attempts, he gives up on the idea of reining us in, surrendering to my demands and my searching fingers.

Our clothes fall away, until I’m down to my bra and underwear, and he’s only in shorts. He stares at me in awe, as if I’m something exotic instead of plain Katniss Everdeen, far too bony and wearing threadbare panties. And though I’ve only ever been naked in front of one man before now, I don’t hesitate to reach behind me to unhook my bra. But Peeta stills my hands. “Are you sure?” he asks. “We don’t have to…”

“I want to,” I tell him.

When the cotton falls away, he shudders. “So beautiful,” he murmurs, licking his lips. “You have no idea, the effect you have.”

“Show me,” I whisper. And he does. In his arms, I get what might be my first taste of real, raw passion. Sex with Gale was fine, good sometimes. But never like this. As I shatter, and shatter, and shatter again, everything I think I know about myself is turned inside out, and I am changed forever.

It’s fucking terrifying.

o-o-o

The last day of our tour is quiet, too quiet. The weather is unsettled, the group members tired. Even Haymitch has lost his sarcastic edge. Leaves me too much time to think about Peeta, sitting next to me. Playing with my fingers and humming in contentment. Too much time to panic.

How can I say goodbye to this man? This man who has opened my eyes and my heart, who has shown me the barest hint of a life I never even knew I was missing out on.

What choice do I have?

It’s pouring rain when we pull into the stop at Waterloo Place, and in the soggy pandemonium of luggage unloading, it’s easy for me to grab my small backpack and slip away unnoticed. I get into the first available cab and am whizzing up the Royal Mile within moments.

I don’t look back.

o-o-o

I love Effie, I do, but sometimes I just need to get away. There’s a coffee shop near the rail station that’s a perfect escape, it’s outside of the touristy area and the patio is a great place to people watch.

A swarm of men in sharp black suits rounds the corner, heading straight towards me en route to the train. Slim-fit wool trousers cling appealingly to athletic bodies before spilling downward in perfectly pressed lines to where polished black shoes click on the cobbles. It takes a moment to realize that, no, the swarm of outrageously attractive men sauntering in the spring sunshine are not, in fact, men at all, but boys. Irish schoolboys - fifth and sixth years by the looks of them - splendid in their crisp white shirts, perfectly tied windsor knots and shiny shoes. I shake my head at myself. Leering at a bunch of teenagers? I’m too old for that. In my defense, they’re much better dressed than any of the men I know. I mean, I assume Gale wore a suit to his wedding, but it would have been the first time. Even when he dragged me to his senior prom, he wore a dress shirt open at the collar and a leather jacket.

I bet Peeta wears crisp suits like these, though.

And just like that, my mood falls again. I miss him. I miss him so much. I’ve spent the past five days lying to myself, trying to make myself believe that the week we spent together was no big deal, a little fun, a lot of great sex, nothing more. But my heart, the frail, foolish thing, is singing another song. I miss him. I feel his loss acutely, despite only having known him a few days. I know I made the right choice, leaving him on that rainy Edinburgh street. His life is here, and mine, what’s left of it, is in Philadelphia, I guess. There’s no chance of a future for us. And no sense mooning over impossibilities. But it doesn’t mean I haven’t fantasized about hiring a car and driving to the coast, just to see him one last time.

It’s the melancholy that’s making me see things. In the middle of the group, a golden head stands out. For a split second, I’m sure the broad shoulders and narrow waist attached to them belong to Peeta. But it’s impossible, these are school children, Peeta is back in his hometown, living his life. But the crowd shifts, and I can see his face clearly, blue eyes shaded by lush golden lashes, the smattering of faint freckles that kiss his sunburned cheeks.

And I drop my teacup.

The clatter catches his attention, his head swivels until he meets my eyes. I’m helpless to look away from the myriad of emotions that play across his handsome face. Surprise, relief, joy and anger. But I’m sure my own face reflects only a single sentiment.

Horror.

He says something I don’t catch to the people he’s with, then changes course to walk purposely to where I sit, frozen and mute, heart pounding so hard that I feel light-headed. He covers the few yards in long strides. The sun catches his hair, crowns him in gold as he stands above me, a wide smile curling those sensual lips. “Katniss,” he says, in that molten sex voice that I hear in my head every time I touch myself. The soundtrack to my every recent fantasy. The lament of my regrets. “I didn’t know you were in Dublin! I thought you’d gone back to America! I’m so bloody happy to see you! You were gone so fast after the tour, I didn’t get your number, and you’re not on Facebook.” He’s reaching for me, and my body instinctively reacts, warmth pooling low in my gut. Which is what snaps me out of my stupor. I jump from my chair, angling myself so that the narrow café table is between us.

“Katniss?” His brows furrow in confusion, his hands dropping to slide into his pockets. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re in school?” It’s barely a whisper.

“For another week, yes,” he says, still looking puzzled. As if it isn’t a big deal. A big fucking deal. He’s a child!

“You didn’t tell me you were so young.” I’m not certain I say it out loud until Peeta’s face twists, like he’s tasted something unpleasant.

“I’m eighteen,” he says. “I’ll be nineteen next month.” Eighteen! As if seeing him in that school uniform wasn’t bad enough, the confirmation that he’s a just a kid, that he’s almost nine fucking years younger than me makes my stomach lurch. “Is that a problem? For the record, you never asked.”

“You’re a child!” I say, much more loudly this time, and his frown deepens. “I’m… shit, I’m a pedophile!” Peeta’s jaw tightens, and an angry flush streaks up his neck. He grabs my arm, not hard but not leaving me much recourse, and walks the two of us away from the patio and around the corner of the building, into a quiet alley.

“Knock it off,” he hisses, and for a moment I feel like a naughty child being chastised. Which just serves to piss me off, I’m the grown-up here! I wrench my arm away from him, and back up, crossing my arms in front of me. But the alleyway is narrow and I’ve only moved a step before my back hits the wall. He steps forward, close enough to feel the heat of his body, to feel the tension that radiates from him in waves. “I’m an adult, Katniss,” he says lowly, his words skating across my lips as he leans in. “Old enough to drink, to vote.” His next words brush against the shell of my ear. “Old enough to fuck you senseless.”

A full-body shudder rips through me, equal parts arousal and revulsion. He’s a child! I took advantage of a child! I push against his chest and he takes a single step back, still in my personal space, but giving me enough room to clear my head a little. “I’m, fuck!” I gasp. “I’m twenty-seven. I’m nine fucking years older than you are!”

“Eight,” he says, “and so what? Doesn’t change how I feel about you, or what we have together.”

“It’s wrong-” I start, but he’s having none of it.

“Bullshit! We’re both adults.”

“You lied to me!”

“I did no such thing,” he snaps, but I’m pissed now.

“You told me you owned a bakery on the coast!”

“I do!”

“You’re a child!” His jaw tightens again, I can see the anger in his stormy eyes. Anger and hurt.

His hand reaches for me and instinctively I draw back, but he simply slips my phone out of my pocket. “What the fuck?” I sputter, but he’s already unlocked it and apparently messaged himself.

“Where are you staying, Katniss?” he asks, handing my phone back. I want to tell him it’s none of his business, but I just can’t. The pain in his eyes compels me to tell him.

“My aunt has a house in Clontarf,” I grumble. Peeta nods.

“Come with me tomorrow,” he says.

“What? No, that’s not a good idea Peeta.”

“Please, just do this one thing for me. Then I’ll leave you in peace.” The pain in his eyes is shocking. Guilt eats away at me. It was cruel, I know, sneaking away like a thief in the night. I can see how much I’ve hurt him. He takes my silence as acceptance. “Meet me here tomorrow morning,” he says. “Half eight. Wear a jacket.” Then he spins on his heel and strides out of the alley.

o-o-o

I fight with myself half the night and all morning. I’m not going to show up. He’s not going to show up. I owe him a chance to explain. He’s a fucking child! By the time I make it to the café, I’m an absolute mess.

But an absolute mess wearing mascara and a cute top. I’m a hypocrite, on top of everything else.

Removed from the cold horror of discovering I’d been cavorting with a schoolboy, I have to admit to myself that seeing him again ripped down the walls I tried so hard to construct around my feelings for him. Damn him! Damn him for being gorgeous and sweet and Irish and a toddler!

He pulls up only moments after I arrive, riding a smallish motorcycle, blond curls sticking out from under a black helmet. In jeans and a leather jacket, golden stubble glinting in the thin morning light, he’s even more impossibly handsome. But it’s clear he hasn’t slept well, his wary gaze is ringed with faint purple. “I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” he says softly, pulling off his helmet. I don’t bother to tell him that until I got off the bus, I wasn’t sure either. I simply shrug. He dismounts; I pretend I’m not checking out his ass in those snug-fit jeans. But he merely pulls a second helmet from his saddlebag, handing it to me without quite meeting my eyes.

“What’s going on?” I ask, but he shakes his head.

“Put on the helmet, Katniss, then get on the bike.”

“Don’t you have a car?” I’ve never ridden on a motorcycle before, and Irish streets with their too-narrow lanes, cobbles, and the whole driving-on-the-wrong-side issue are scary enough in a vehicle with four wheels. His lips twist.

“No. Let’s go, we have a long ride ahead of us.”

It’s madness, but I do as he asks.

I sit stiffly behind him, trying to put some distance between us, but as soon as the bike is in motion, I have no choice but to wrap my arms around him and hold on tight. And having him again cradled between my thighs provokes the most confusing rush of emotions. This is such a bad idea. Such a fucking bad idea.

We don’t talk as he pilots us out of the city, we simply can’t. The rush of wind makes that impossible. But from time to time as we pass through the suburbs, then out into the countryside, he’ll squeeze my knee to catch my attention, pointing out an old tower or a ruin, or just the way the sun catches the gorse on the mountainside, making the world glow in sunny yellow. In spite of what I’ve learned, he seems like Peeta, like the man I met in Scotland. He feels like comfort, and like home. When he points of a patch of bluebells clinging to the side of a hill, my heart hurts. I stop fighting with myself and lean into him, my helmet-encased head resting against his broad back, his warmth soothing me. He squeezes my hand where it wraps around his ribs. Acceptance.

About forty-five minutes later, we drive into one of those quintessential Irish postcard villages, narrow medieval buildings crowded along the street - though here they’re painted in lush pastels - colourful bunting zig-zagging across the road and cars parked haphazardly everywhere. He circles a statue of what appears to be a young fisherman, then heads down an impossibly narrow alleyway, parking the bike in a tiny courtyard.

When he offers me his hand to help me off the bike, I take it gratefully. My legs are like jelly, and not just from the ride. He holds my fingers just a little too long, smiling wistfully. Then we rid ourselves of the helmets, and he leads me out of the alley, to stand in front of a building. It’s tall and narrow, like most of the buildings here are, but unlike most, it has an enormous plate glass window facing the street. The building itself is painted turquoise, and Mellark’s is spelled across the front in swoopy gold letters. “Welcome to my bakery,” he says softly, and with a hand on my back he ushers me inside.

The interior is even more charming than the exterior, and for a moment I can only gawk. Polished wood floors, pristine glass cases displaying a decadent array of goodies, and paintings on every wall that feel familiar. But none of that really means anything, does it? He’s in school, it’s clear that this isn’t really his bakery. It probably belongs to his family, and he works here on school breaks.

I turn my attention to the people working behind the counter, three of them. They smile warmly at me, but right away their expressions change as they catch sight of Peeta. They seem to stand a little taller, attempt to look a little busier. “Peeta,” one of them calls out. “We weren’t expecting you.” Well of course they weren’t, it’s Thursday, he’s supposed to be in school.

In school. Ugh. What am I even doing here?

“Just popping in for a bit,” he says with an easy smile. “Have a little business I need to attend to.” He heads towards a swinging door that separates front shop from back, but pauses with his hand on the frame. “Coming, Katniss?” Three heads snap to me in surprise, and I can feel my cheeks burning as I follow Peeta into a small, but modern industrial kitchen.

Here too, the workers stop and straighten, as if they’re trying to impress Peeta. It’s subtle, but I notice it. He greets each warmly by name. And I quickly realise that it’s not fear that makes them all snap to attention. It’s respect. Inexplicably, all of these people seem to respect him.

But it’s not really that inexplicable, is it? He carries himself with a confidence that goes beyond boyish ego. I can’t reconcile the businessman in front of me with the eighteen year old schoolboy I saw yesterday.

Peeta leads me to a small, windowless office at the rear of the building, and gestures for me to sit. Before I’ve even gotten comfortable, one of the women from the front shop has appeared with a pot of tea and a pair of cups. “Thanks, Dell,” Peeta says genuinely. The woman beams at him, then backs out of the office. I open my mouth to speak, but he shakes his head. “Hang on,” he says. “She’ll be back again.”

He’s right, she reappears a few moments later with a plate of food. I haven’t been able to eat since I saw Peeta yesterday in Dublin, and my stomach clenches painfully at the yeasty, cheesy scent wafting from the treats. “You call me if you want anything else,” she says, and Peeta promises he will. With one last wink in my direction, she leaves and this time Peeta closes the door behind her.

“What was that all about?” I ask, trying not to be obvious in my coveting of the buns. He notices anyway, and pushes the plate in front of me.

“Irish hospitality,” he says absently as he pulls the bags out of the teapot. He knows, even without me ever having said anything, that I prefer my tea weak.

I know all about Irish hospitality, know that Delly would continue bringing us more food and more tea and just generally fussing if Peeta hasn’t shut the office door. But this is different. “Not that. The weird way she was looking at me. She… she winked!” He glances up, and a flicker of amusement crosses his face before the sadness creeps back.

“I’ve never brought a woman here before,” he says. I wrinkle my nose at the implication of that, I can’t decide whether it’s because I’m somehow special or because, as a freaking child himself, I’m the first ‘woman’ he’s been with.

“Why have you now?”

“Because I want you to see me. To see that I am exactly who I said I am. Now eat your bun,” he says, nudging the plate again, “while I tell you about my father.”

My heart breaks again and again as Peeta paints a picture of his life. The only child of a single father, he had a typical childhood right up until his father got sick. Terminal cancer. The man spent all of his remaining time preparing his young son to take over the bakery that had been in the Mellark family for generations. At only fifteen, Peeta traded rugby for accounting, friends for responsibility. He even spent his transition year working full time at the bakery, learning the ordering system, studying food safety compliance.

By the time his father died not quite two years ago, Peeta was running the bakery himself.

He has an uncle who deals with the day to day while Peeta finishes school, something he’s doing because he promised his dad he would. But Peeta is the owner, and the one in charge.

It goes a long way to explain his maturity. He hasn’t been a child in a long time. On the face of it, the story sounds unbelievable. But I know what my eyes are telling me. What my heart is telling me. He may be younger, chronologically. But he’s the one with his life together. While I haven’t really grown since high school, his life has leapt light years ahead.

I sit in silence, picking at the cheese bun - which is incredible but which I can’t really enjoy - feeling like a pile of shit. The office door opens. An older man strides in, clapping Peeta hard on the shoulder. “Peet,” he says. “Wasn’t expecting you today! Glad you’re here though, I have those contracts for you to sign.”

“That’s great, Dalton,” he says, taking the proffered papers, his lips moving as he skims the words. But then he frowns. “The wage is wrong,” he says, pointing.

“They’re students,” Dalton says dismissively, and Peeta’s jaw tightens. It’s fascinating to watch, even if I don’t fully understand.

“That’s not how we do things here. I pay everyone a living wage.” Peeta stands, moving around the desk to take my hand, pulling me out of my chair. “When you’ve redone the contracts, leave them on my desk. I’ll pop in later to sign them before I head back to Dublin.” And with that, we walk out, leaving the older man behind.

We walk down the narrow cobbled street towards the waterfront, weaving among the tourists, past the harbour before finally stopping at an overlook right at the edge of the village. Peeta sits heavily on one of the empty benches, and drops his head in his hands. I lower myself beside him.

“You’re a good boss,” I say softly, breaking the silence that hangs between us. He doesn’t look at me.

“The bakery is more than just a job,” he says. “It’s my father’s legacy and my future. I have eight employees who directly depend on me, not to mention the suppliers and lorry drivers and pubs who benefit from my business too.” He lifts his head to look out over the water, and the weariness I see in his face speaks to a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Yet he’s uncomplaining.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him.

“I’ve never lied to you, Katniss. I might be younger than you thought, but I am exactly the man I said I was, exactly what you saw in Scotland.” Wary blue eyes meet my own. “Can you say the same?” My breath catches. It’s a valid question.

Katniss Everdeen is quiet and closed-off, reserved to the point of unfriendly. Difficult to get to know. Resistant to change. That’s not the woman who spent a week adventuring through the Scottish highlands. That woman smiled more, laughed more. That woman tried new things. That woman opened her heart, if only just a little. I shake my head, and his drops again to stare at his lap. The real Katniss Everdeen is the one who left this kind, gentle man standing on an Edinburgh street in the rain, without a backward glance.

Right now, I don’t like the real Katniss Everdeen very much.

He sighs. “My age isn’t really a problem, is it Katniss? It’s just a convenient excuse. You took off before you knew.” He’s right. When I really search my heart I know that the age gap between us is just a number. In many ways, in most ways really, Peeta is the more mature of us. The one with his priorities straight, with his shit together. Our ages don’t matter at all.

After what feels like an interminable silence, he asks, “Why? Why did you leave without a word? I thought there was something between us. Something real.”

“There is,” I whisper, startling myself with my honesty. He glances up at me, confusion in his expression, but also a heartbreaking flicker of hope. “You’re right,” I tell him. “I was a different person in Scotland. And… and I think I like that person better.” I swallow hard. “I like who I am when I’m with you.

“Then what’s the problem, Katniss?” The hint of frustration in his voice threatens to put me on the defensive.

“Your life is here, Peeta! And I live three thousand miles away!”

“You’re here now,” he says.

“For four more weeks,” I say, and sadness creeps in as I realize that I don’t want to leave him again, that even pissed off and hurt and, yeah, young as he is, just his presence makes me feel alive. “And then what?”

“Why do we have to figure that out now,” he asks. “Why can’t we just take it day by day, see where things go. Live without a plan, without a safety net.” He reaches for me, cradling my face in his hands, and my eyes slip closed. “Live, Katniss. Be the woman you want to be.”

What’s left of my defenses melt away as he kisses me so softly it’s like a dream. My hands wrap around his wrists, holding him in place. Keeping him with me, at least for the moment.

I know the only thing really standing between us is my fear.

“Okay,” I whisper, the words hanging, fragile and afraid, in the space between our lips.

“Yeah?” he smiles. And at my nod, he kisses me again.

I’ve wasted so much time living in complacency, afraid of change. But this feels like a second chance. An opportunity to grow and mature, instead of staying safely stuck in the past. And the part of me that is not so brave as I could wish is glad that it’s Peeta beside me as I step into the unknown.

—–

#Everlark birthday drabbles #ldyglfr62 #xerxia31

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ohnohetaliasues · 7 years

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• Info

Okay, first off, let me say, she is gorgeous!!!!! I’m in love with her appearance. You’ve nailed the stereotypical Irish appearance, and that has made me insanely happy as a Hetalia OC reviewer, and as a girl of Irish decent. I have that texture of hair, and the eyes are definitely a good color. I actually have green eyes myself. Not that green, kind of dull green, but you get what I’m saying. Her hair is very nice, and I’m okay with the color, as it’s stereotypical, and it’s also a natural hair color, and is something I’ve seen before in nature. The freckles are a good touch, too. I especially like the Celtic symbol on her dress in the first picture. Anyway, onto the info.

Name: Janet O’Connor / Seana Ó Conchobhair. (Janet and Seana have the same meaning, “gift from God”, but Janet is the anglicized version of “Seana” ) She has freckles, red curly hair and pale skin, with big emerald eyes. Her body is kinda curvy: she has wide hips, big thighs and butt, but a pretty narrow waist and a small bust. She has a scar behind her right shoulder from a shot of the 1916 Easter Rising. She’s kinda strong, and has a lot of strenght in her legs (due to step dancing and her love for cycling).

Very very good representation there. Irish people are stereotyped to be very robust and muscular. I like the work you put into this a lot. I especially like how her name was Anglicized, since the British had control over the Irish for a very long time.

I set her birthday on the 17th of March, Saint Patrick’s Day. I think she might look around 25.

Good. Good age too, considering Ireland is over 3,000 years old. While her birthday is fine, I’d suggest January 21 as an option as well, as that’s Ireland’s independence day from the English.

I started drawing her in this green “celtic/country-like” dress to make her look stereotypical, but of course she doesn’t really dress like this. She likes long and comfy skirts, overalls, blouses and off the shoulders shirts. She would wear any kind of boots. She’s pretty sensitive to cold so she starts wearing sweaters pretty early after the summer.

It gets cold in Ireland fairly early, so good addition.

She is just Ireland, both Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The country was never “split” before 1921 so I thought that she decided to let England control the North together with her after the referendum. I draw her with the flag of the Republic of Ireland because it’s the country she totally takes care of.

Good choice.

• Personality:

She’s stubborn and extremely patriotic, she says what she thinks and hates being told what to do, but she can be really friendly with people who show respect for her and her culture.

Describes the Irish in a nutshell. Good job. You obviously did a lot of research.

Also, she’s kinda protective and caring towards the ones she loves, and really welcoming with people who visit her country. She’s very hospitable, and wants her guests to feel great. She’s a daydreamer and has a strong sixth sense, being able to perceive other’s emotions from one look, making her very sensitive and compassionate. She’s loud and energetic, and really proud of irish traditions. In her opinion, anything made in Ireland is the best, and Ireland is like heaven on Earth. She’s really sarcastic, and loves making fun of someone she doesn’t like by making witty comments (she usually swears using gaelic words and phrases). She has always been a rebel, and sometimes she can be moody and really short-tempered. She tends to hold grudges (forgive but not forget) and when she feels blue she often isolates herself from the rest of the world.

• Interests:

She’s a great fan of rugby (her favourite athlete is Brian O’Driscoll), and she can play a bit of Camogie. She also likes watching boxe, and she’s a fan of Katie Taylor and Conor McGregor. She likes swimming a lot, and often goes to the beach or to the lake to spend a lot of time in the water. She loves gardening and spends a lot of time in it; her garden is full of different kind of flowers and plants. She also cultivates a large number of vegetables, potatoes above all. She likes watching cooking shows (she’s a fan of the scottish cook Gordon Ramsay) and she’s pretty good at cooking “rural/rustic” dishes. I think she was good at hunting, but I imagine that after many battles she’s now a bit tired, and prefers other hobbies, such as playing harp (her harp is a Camac Vendome, and she called it Erin). She loves music, but she’s not so good at singing, though, even if she loves attending folk rock concerts and scream the song lyrics! She’s a big fan of Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly, The Cranberries, Clannad, Enya, Sinead O’Connor and many other musicians, but now her favourite band is probably U2. She loves to dance, especially folk music, but in her life she learnt different styles of dancing such as walzer or latin. She’s crazy about DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) and the Just Dance games on Wii (I guess Alfred was the one that let her know about these games). She can obviously see magical creatures such as the Leprechauns and all the “aes sídhe”(even the dangerous ones), and she likes telling stories, legends and jokes; she gets really excited for Saint Patrick’s Day and Halloween (Samhain), which originated in her own country. She’s pretty religious and pious, but after all the things she went through in her life she’s far from being bigot or narrow-minded. Plus, she also feels a strong bond with the ancient traditions of her land. So she’s ready to go to mass every sunday but she’s also the first being excited about celtic festivals like Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasa.

I don’t have much to say cuz this is all so great!

She prefers beer over whiskey, and her favourite is Guinness, but her favourite whiskey is Jameson’s. Her favourite dishes are colcannon and Irish stew. Her favourite snacks are crisps sandwiches and beans on toast. She has three rabbits: a white one, a black one and a red/orange one. She called them Columba, Brigit and Patrick, just as the three major saints of Ireland. She’s scared of Banshees (the woman-like spirits that will cry and scream if a clan member from one of the major families in Ireland will soon die -such as the O’Connors-) and snakes, seen as evil spirits by Saint Patrick, who taught her many things when she was very young.

I’m very happy!

•Short history:

Talking about her history, christianity and Saint Patrick’s work had a great influence on her when she was young, but she didn’t forget her past and celtic origins at all. She was an energetic and extrovert child, but she became a little more suspicious towards strangers after the viking invasions in the IX century, but the warrior king Brian Boru was able to get them out of the island after a couple of centuries. Unfortunately, her island was declared as property of the English king Henry II in 1171, who became Lord of Ireland.

Good, I’m so glad you included this!

From then ’til 1542 was the period of Lordship of Ireland, and after this King Henry VIII officially became the first Irish King with the Crown of Ireland Act. The isle became part of the United Kingdom in 1800 (Acts of Union). During all this time Janet has always tried to rebel and gain freedom and independence, in one way or another, for example by joining “The Sea Queen of Connacht” Grace O’Malley during her journeys and fights against the english crown in XVI century. In the XVII century Penal Laws came from England in order to make Ireland accept the Anglican Church, and because of this there have always been many religious fights between them. She suffered the Irish Great Famine that happened in 1845, and she also travelled to the U.S. where she could work together with Alfred for a bit. She still hasn’t forgiven England for that period of mass starvation, even though her country received a little help. She’s grateful towards the other countries that helped her with donations.

Irish history is full of rebellions towards England and its laws: english government took away many rights from irish people, there was land expropriation, and many cultural things such as gaelic language and traditional dance were banned. Ireland has always tried to keep in touch with England’s enemies like France or Spain in order to get some help, but things didn’t always end up well. At the beginning of the XX century the rebellions ended up in some cruel fights between the two parts, also because of the birth of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) , a revolutionary military organization, born after the famous Easter Rising. This rebellion ended up in a disaster, but the next years were crucial: Ireland became a battlefield in which IRA and civilians fought against the english military forces. Michael Collins was a very important man in this period, and his work determined the end of the Irish War of Independence in 1921. After that, the Irish Free State was born, but the Northern region of Ireland (six counties) stayed with the United Kingdom. After this, a long civil war started between those who wanted Ireland to be unified and the ones who thought that it wasn’t necessary to take things too far and accept the situation. The fight went officially on ’til 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, a treaty that explained relations between Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and United Kingdom at best. ( still in progress, adding more things in the future! sorry if I made any mistake, I don’t speak english as first language ^^“ )

My god that was amazing. You really did your research and I’m so proud of you! I taught you well, young Padawan. Your English seemed fine to me! Anyway, on that note, please send in the updates asap, because I’d love to see more of this!

~Kat

#OC #Hetalia OC #APH Hetalia #Self insert #submission #amazing oc #mod kat #yay!#YASSSS #i'm so happy

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lingthusiasm · 7 years

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 6 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: and I'm Lauren Gawne. And today we're going to be talking about the International Phonetic Alphabet. But first -- it was International Mother Language Day in February and even though it was a couple of weeks ago now on February the 21st, I think it's still worth saying a belated 'Happy Mother Language Day' to you Gretchen!

Gretchen: Happy Mother Language Day to you! Which we are wishing in our of mother languages of English, which is kind of boring.

Lauren: Both wishing it our mother languages. Do you have any other heritage languages that you wish to acknowledge?

Gretchen: I mean, technically Scottish Gaelic is probably a long time ago a mother language for me, but my ancestors were lowland Scots so it's a really long time ago.

Lauren: Well happy Scots Gaelic day

Gretchen: Do you have any other?

Lauren: My grandmaternal language is Polish and thanks to generally typical Australian attitudes towards non-English speaking in the 1960s that wasn't passed on to any of my mother's generation at all. So yeah it's still a very recent part of our family history. I'm the only grandchild who ever learnt enough Polish to speak with my grandmother in her mother tongue

Gretchen: Oh that's cool

Lauren: Which is cool, I wish I still spoke that much

Gretchen: Well I mean it's cool that you learned it, it's not cool that no one else did

Lauren: It's probably questionable how much Polish I remember today. And yeah, I always like to think of my Nan and my lack of opportunities to learn Polish on February 21st. What have you been up to or what's coming up?

Gretchen: Well, by the time this episode goes out I will have been to South by Southwest, where I will have done a panel with Erin Mckean and Jane Solomon and Ben Zimmer

Lauren: How are you not going to like die of fangirling at people?!

Gretchen: Because I've already met all of them anyway?

Lauren: Awwww I'm so jelly

Gretchen: But they're really cool and I'm really excited to be on a panel with them! We're going to be talking about 'Word curation: Dictionaries, tech, and the future' which will happen by the time you guys get this episode so you can check out the hashtag that I'm sure will have some action on it and we'll link to that in the show notes.

Lauren: I'm really excited for that panel. I'm looking forward to it hopefully - is it going to be recorded? Am I going to be able to see it as a non South by Southwest attendee?

Gretchen: I think there's going to be an audio recording on soundcloud that South by Southwest is going to put up online because they've done that for previous years. So I can't promise that they'll do that again but they seem to like doing it in previous years, I don't know why they wouldn't do it again so we'll link to that if we have it.

Lauren: Yay, excellent!

[Music]

Gretchen: So there's a problem when you learn to spell English, which is that it's really hard to spell English.

Lauren: It's really a lifelong learning process as far as I'm concerned

Gretchen: It's a lifelong learning process. You know, some languages don't have spelling bees because their spelling systems are so consistent they don't need them - we can only wish! So, the English spelling system is especially ridiculous, it's got silent letters, it's got something around 14 vowels but only five letters to write them in.

My favorite demonstration of this is that there's a phrase that has all of the English vowels and the phrase goes - I have to have to say it in a non-rhotic accent because it only works that way - the phrase goes 'Who would know aught of art must learn, act and then take his ease'. And each of those words has a different vowel in it.

Lauren: Cool!

Gretchen: And that's one way of remembering the vowels

Lauren: That's a nifty sentence!

Gretchen: Yeah, but if you try to write that down in English it's hard

Lauren: With the English orthography that we have, or the English writing system - orthography - that we have

Gretchen: And spelling systems are also inconsistent across different languages. Even languages that are consistent in themselves are often inconsistent when you compare them with each other. So, some languages use the letter J for the /dʒ/ sound [as in Jane], some languages use it for the /ʒ/ sound like French [Jean], some languages use it for the 'y' /j/ sound like German as in 'Jan' or 'Johann Sebastian Bach', some languages use it for the /x/ sound as in Spanish like 'Juan'. There's a whole bunch of different sounds you can use the same letter for depending on your language

Lauren: There's a really great tumblr post that kind of encapsulates this variety in the ways different alphabets that are based on the same alphabet English is based on, use their orthographies in different ways which we'll link to. When I first read this I was like oh look someone's just posting in Norwegian or Danish or something, but then if you sit there and read it and you know the orthographic conventions in different languages it says something along the lines of 'I wonder if English speakers will notice that I'm writing this in English but using the spelling conventions of my language'

Gretchen: And yeah a whole bunch of people have certain different versions of it - there's a Finnish one which is pretty good, there's an Irish one which is fantastic

Lauren: It's good, because once you know what the phrase is that gives you a feel for what the conventions are in different languages. For example I found the Polish one really easy to read and then for some of the others I was just basically guessing because I knew what the sentence was, and it really nicely illustrates this problem that we have that we all learn different spelling conventions for different languages

Gretchen: And we're not the first people to have noticed this problem! In fact people have been realizing this problem for quite a long time, as long as people have been writing with different systems. And it became especially apparent as writing systems became standardised in the 1700s and 1800s, when dictionaries are becoming popular and people were starting to write in a standardised sort of way and looking at other languages and realising that their standardisations were converging on something different

Lauren: I really love that historically there was no consistent spelling conventions, and so in Old English text we actually have a good idea of the different common literate dialects of people who lived in Mercia or people who live in Cumbria and because the way that they wrote English really reflected the way their accent worked. Once spelling systems became standardized that stopped being the case

Gretchen: It also became really difficult people for who are trying to learn English because even if you learn the spelling systems, then you pronounce the words the way they look and people look at you like "that's not actually how it's pronounced" and you're like "how was I supposed to remember that?" Various people came up with various proposals for spelling reform for either just like a more phonetic way of writing English in total, or for ways of adapting English words so that it could be used for specialised purposes like people who are learning the language, or people who want to write down specific things and annotate exactly how they're said

Lauren: And some people went for massive 'let's create an entirely new alphabet', some people just wanted some small reforms. So Noah Webster is probably one of the people who had the most impressive effect on English especially on American English. It was Webster who decided to take and consistently use conventions like 'i-z-e' instead of 'i-s-e' and using words like colour without the 'u' instead of with the 'u' as part of this attempt to make English spelling more realistically reflect the language that was being spoken

Gretchen: Yeah and there were other British reformers that were trying to do this, so there was a guy named Henry Sweet who came up with an alphabet called the Romic /ɹomɪk/ alphabet or the Romic /ɹɑmɪk/ alphabet, I'm not actually sure how to pronounce the name of this alphabet, which...

Lauren: If only was written down some where in a consistently pronounceable script!

Gretchen: If only! He didn't seem to actually write the name of his own alphabet anywhere in a consistent script so that's a shame. And that was based on mostly Roman letters but with adaptations for sounds that English had and Latin hadn't. And then there was Alexander Ellis who was apparently the real-life origin of Henry Higgins from 'My Fair Lady'

Lauren: Really?!

Gretchen: I dunno, that's what Wikipedia says!

Lauren: Okay, because I'm going to invoke the supremacy of David Crystal, if that's okay. I don't know if Crystal officially trumps Wikipedia, but in his book called 'Wordsmiths and Warriors' he says if Higgins is anyone it has to be Daniel Jones who is a phonetician who is very influential in terms of like codifying the vowel system. So what we think of is the modern International Phonetic Alphabet vowel space kind of started with Daniel Jones' cardinal vowels

Gretchen: I mean I don't know it could have been a composite or something

Lauren: I think to be honest that the most likely is that there was a genre of gentleman academic at the time who's very interested in these topics. Anyway, there was a lot of work being invested in generating some kind of writing system that accurately reflected speech

Gretchen: Yeah and so they made the International Phonetic Association in the late 1800s, which confusingly enough also has the acronym IPA, and they had some meetings and they were like, “yeah, we need to come up with a system for this”

Lauren: So the IPA is where the IPA was created

Gretchen: Yeah I hope they were all drinking IPA but I can't guarantee that

Lauren: In our reenactment that is definitely what's happening

Gretchen: Yeah, when we when we all get dressed up in historic costume (bagsies Henry Sweet), then we will all drink IPA

Lauren: I'm Daniel Jones apparently - no wait, I'm going to dress up as Cardinal Vowel, I always thought that would be a great linguist costume

Gretchen: Ah that's great! Were cardinal vowels invented yet?

Lauren: Well it was Daniel Jones who did that, I don't know when he was working

Gretchen: Oh ok good

Lauren: I mean we'll have to have a whole episode just talking about vowels and how they work, but that was kind of a thing that was figured out at the time

Gretchen: Yeah and they came up with some principles for future development of this International Phonetic Alphabet and these were: each symbol should have its own distinctive sound and the same symbol should be used for the same sound across all languages

Lauren: So instead of having the J sound sounding like /dʒ/ or /ʒ/ or /j/ or /x/ across different languages, every time that sound was used it would be used for exactly the same sound

Gretchen: Every time that *symbol* was used

Lauren: Yes sorry every time that symbol was used it would be used for the same sound

Gretchen: They also came up with some principles that influenced which symbols ended up being chosen for which sounds. So they decided to use as many ordinary Roman letters as possible and to have a very minimal number of new letters, and to use what they called quote unquote “international” usage to decide the sound for each symbol

Lauren: So they wouldn't like, take the symbol that we have for 's' and decide 'oh we're going to make that the sound for 'l' because we're crazy people'

Gretchen: Yeah, they didn't do that. But the other thing is, so if we look at the vowels, the IPA vowels look kind of weird from an English perspective. So the IPA uses the letter that we think of as 'i' to represent the 'ee' /i/ sound and uses the letter we think of as 'e' to represent the 'eh' /e/ sound and so on. And this doesn't make sense for English, but it does make sense when you look at a whole bunch of other languages like Spanish and Italian, and the way the Roman alphabet has been used for non-European languages generally falls along these principles as well. So they said, “Look, even though we're English speakers we're going to not do the English things”

Lauren: Okay, so they really did go with this kind of international general preference

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, they're still eurocentric, they're still starting with European languages and kind of working their way outwards, but they were at least not completely Anglo-centric, which is helpful here, because English does some weird stuff with its sounds

Lauren: Yeah and we only have 26 letters in the English alphabet, a few more if we kind of pull everything from across European languages, and there are so many more sounds that the world's languages can make, so once we've run out of kind of standard letters where do we go from there?

Gretchen: Where we are from there is often Greek letters or Latinised looking versions of Greek letters because those were familiar to these creators. Another thing that they did was they would rotate letters. and this was partly because the shapes are still familiar if you do that and partly because this is the 1800s and people were typing with metal bits of type. So if you just take a lowercase 'e' and turn it upside down, you can just print your new character by flipping or rotating an existing metal type bit rather than casting a new one

Lauren: I have a really nice example from Australia, so I was at a workshop the other day and a colleague was showing me a booklet of Kamilaroi, so it's a language from the New England area of New South Wales in Australia, and William Ridley was working on this language in 1856. So this is even before the IPA was codified. And these languages have a sound like an English sound but you may not notice it in English because it's a sound at the end of words like 'sing' or 'bring', that /ŋ/ sound, but that sound can occur anywhere so you can have it at the start of the word as well as at the end. This /ŋ/ sound now has a symbol in the IPA that looks like an 'n' with a little tail and it's called an 'engma'

Gretchen: Yeah kind of like an 'n' with a 'g' tail shoved on it

Lauren: Yeah, and Ridley is one of the first people who adopted this symbol for use in his describing languages work in the 1850s, which was before the 1880s when the IPA was established. But this symbol had begun to be used for this /ŋ/ and it makes sense because it's like an 'n' and a 'g' squashed together. But when he sent it to the typesetters for his booklet they didn't have a /ŋ/ and so they just turned a capital 'G' upside down which sounds a bit crazy and it looks a bit crazy it looks like it's just full of upside down 'G's, but it meant that that was a way that they could represent this /ŋ/ sound. Apparently he sent it to some other journal in Europe and they just turned it all into a 'z'

Gretchen: Wow, a 'z'!

Lauren: Yeeeah

Gretchen: Wow, that's really bad! So I guess that's why it's good that another principle the IPA had was that the look of the new letters should suggest the sound they represent, so once you've learned the kind of basic ones and if you see a couple languages and you have a sense of what's used in other languages then you can often guess fairly accurately what an IPA letter is going to be like. So it's better to have a symbol for /ŋ/'that looks like an 'n' and a 'g' shoved together because that's how it's often written in different languages, a bit like an 'n' sound, a bit like a 'g' sound.

Another one of their principles was that diacritics should be avoided where possible. So adding extra little like accent marks or other types of small bits on top of letters was something that they tried to avoid for their basic sounds. Diacritics were only was supposed to be for if there's a modified version of a sound, but not for basic sounds in general. So in the current IPA, you still get these rotated letters, which must make the IPA very difficult for people who are dyslexic; you get small capitals; you get Greek stuff like the Greek letter theta is used for the 'th' /θ/ sound, and the runic and ultimately Icelandic sound /ð/ -- so the symbol that looks like an 'o' with kind of a cross above it, that’s from Icelandic and it used to be in English before the Normans came, that got borrowed back in -- so borrowing from other established systems. Because then you could just go to Iceland and grab some of their metal type bits, I don't know, or go to Greece and get some from them

Lauren: It's something that was a problem with the original metal type but it's also been a problem for a long time with modern software. So for a long time computers didn't really have fonts that expanded beyond the kind of really basic font set of like English and French and some diacritics and some special things. If you have some older software or if you look at older digital documents you have, y’know, people using capital 'A' for particular vowel sounds, vowel characters in the IPA that are symbols in the IPA that aren't in regular type or y’know schwa would be a capital 'E' for example

Gretchen: Yeah you can even see this on some old websites, people will use a different system that only uses the basic 26, plus capitals to do the extra stuff or maybe some places use like an 'at' sign @ to indicate a schwa, because we've also had a different version of this encoding problem with technology

Lauren: So it's not just the metal type it's also modern computing

Gretchen: It's also the byte! It's the type and the byte!

Lauren: The type and the byte have been a problem, it's getting better

Gretchen: It's getting better thanks to Unicode, thanks Unicode! So yeah the first version from 1887 was designed to work for sounds in English, French, and German because that's what they were doing at the time. It's a bit weird compared to the modern IPA because we're used to seeing it as a chart and they just gave a list of symbols and keywords that stuff was found in for various languages. So they'd say something like okay this 'a' symbol is going to be like the sound in English 'father' or this symbol is going to be like the sound in German 'Bach' and they just give the keywords like sometimes you see in the front of the dictionary. And then later, so they kept on working on it in the late 1800s and then by the year they expanded, published a version that included Arabic and a few other languages’ sounds, that’s when they finally publish it as a table for the first time

Lauren: So why would it be in it table, for people who aren't familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet?

Gretchen: The cool thing about the table is -- so our English alphabet that you learn as a kid is 'ABCD' in no particular order, that's just the order it is, that's just for historical reasons -- but the table is ordered based on how the sounds are produced. So sounds get produced with constriction in various parts of the mouth and with different degrees of constriction once you're in that place

Lauren: So it's a nice feature based table of all the kind of combination of features in particular places

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. If you superimpose a mouth onto that table, it looks a bit weird but you can kind of do it and you can see where each of the sounds is produced

Lauren: I have a link somewhere to an audible IPA chart so you can click on the sounds and hear what they sound like, but the ones on the very left side are all produced with just the lips like /p/, and the very front of the mouth. And then the ones at the very right edge are all the way back at the far back of the mouth, and that's things like your velar sounds like /g/ get made with that soft bit there or your uvula like right down in the very far back in the mouth

Gretchen: Yeah, it goes from your lips, through your mouth along the roof of your mouth and back into your throat. And the weird thing about this version from 1900 is that it's a mirror image of that so it has 'p' and 'b', your labial sounds on the right instead of on the left

Lauren: Oh no, that would confuse me so much

Gretchen: You can see an image of it on Wikipedia, it's all like typewritten, we'll link to that

Lauren: Wow, awesome

Gretchen: But it looks really weird, and they also have the vowel chart and the consonant chart on the same chart

Lauren: Right, okay!

Gretchen: They just have like a really wide section where the vowels go

Lauren: How weird!

Gretchen: Yeah, which is something else that changed later

Lauren: So there's now a table for the consonants, there's a few consonants that don't even fit, and then there's a vowel chart that's a separate thing, but it's very similar principle like it starts at the front of the mouth and goes back

Gretchen: Yeah, and what's cool is that the version that we use today is actually very very similar to the version that was solidified in 1932, which was quite a while ago. There were some adjustments made in 1989 and then after that it's just like 'oh well we need to add this one symbol because we found some languages that use it' but pretty much it stays very similar for quite a long time once it's established

Lauren: Nice. So it goes from left to right all the different places in the mouth, and then from top to bottom there are different ways just looking at the consonants, the ways to pronounce different consonants so you have the very plosive sounds like /b/, /k/, /d/, /t/ - we call them stops - along one row and your nasal sounds, so your /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, sounds along another row...

Gretchen: It kind of goes in order of how much you need to drop your jaw. So if you think about the sounds in the top row, your mouth is the most closed when you're making like a 'p' or a 'b'. You have to literally close your mouth for a second, you have to close your lips to make those sounds. Whereas if you're making a sound like 'r' /ɹ/ you don't have to actually close anything you're letting the sounds kinda come through. So the 'r' /ɹ/ sounds are near the bottom, but the /p, b/ sounds are near the top

Lauren: I mean that's the thing I found super neat about it when I was studying the IPA in undergrad was just how elegantly it captures all these different parameters in one table

Gretchen: Yeah, just to realize that someone has thought this through, thinking 'ok what are all the permutations you could put your mouth in and which ones do people actually use and let's organize this'

Lauren: And English just uses one subset of it

Gretchen: Yeah, every language is going to pick some subset of the sounds in this table, or if it doesn't we have to add something. So one of the cool things that you can do with the IPA because it's based on different positions the mouth can be in is adapt it to other mouth stuff. For example, Lauren Ackerman, who has the linguistics blog 'Wug Life', has made a table of emoji with their mouth positions as if they're making sounds in the IPA. So you can look at this table and she has things like the surprised emoji, which has kind of a round mouth and so that's like an 'oo' /u/ sound because you have to round your lips for that, and the 'ee' /i/ is kind of like a smile, and it is completely ludicrous but also great

Lauren: These are the important things that linguists do with their downtime

Gretchen: Yeah and the other cool thing you can do with the IPA is because you can use it to represent mouth sounds is you can write beatboxing in IPA, because beatboxing is done with the mouth

Lauren: Oh yeah, that must look amazing!

Gretchen: It looks so cool! I have a picture of it, of a chart that some beatboxing linguist researchers made

Lauren: That is awesome

Gretchen: So we'll link to that too

Gretchen: I mean we both have a lot of love for the International Phonetic Alphabet, obviously it's something we engage with a lot in all varieties of linguistic work. I think it's worth mentioning though that like, it's not perfect for everything, it can get really annoying sometimes.

Gretchen: Yes!

Lauren: Particularly, as I mentioned in terms of the fact that font encoding on computers is still a problem, you still occasionally will get proofs back from a publisher for a journal article and all the engma, they're all mysteriously like really ugly still, we haven't quite got there with them being part of the font set for every single font

Gretchen: Yeah and it can be hard to write on a normal keyboard

Lauren: Yeah it's also really annoying to write on a normal keyboard sometimes. Also especially in the vowels, like I get a bit of like IPA anxiety when I use IPA and share it with people publicly, especially for long passages of text it's not always that easy to transcribe things

Gretchen: Yeah, and as fluent writers we've gotten used to the Byzantine nature of the English spelling system and we we also know how to talk, but thinking about how you talk in a more conscious way to say 'what sound am I saying here, what sound am I saying there' -- that’s different. So it can be hard to write extended passages in IPA. I know if I make a blog post that has an English sentence or two in IPA, I'll inevitably get some corrections from a linguist or something that says “I think you're probably producing this sound here” and I'm like “Oh yeah you're right” because there's no spellcheck for IPA

Lauren: Yeah and also even if there were a spellcheck, you and I would produce different IPA transcriptions for our own pronunciation of things

Gretchen: Yeah and we're pretty good with understanding people's different pronunciations of things when we're hearing them, because I guess humans have a lot of evolutionary practice at that, but for reading things we have a fairly standardised system. I remember when I was still a young linguist back when John Wells's phonetic blog was active. He's a well-known British linguist who's involved in some of the history of the IPA and he used to keep a blog and he would sometimes write full posts in IPA. And they were really interesting for me to read, to practice but I also found them very difficult because he would be transcribing his own accent. And he was British and so he wouldn't write all these 'r' /ɹ/ after vowels that I would, so I had to figure out where all these /ɹ/ were supposed to be. I'd end up reading his post out loud to myself and hearing the British accent being like “oh yeah this is what he's trying to say”

Lauren: You would be saying it in his accent?

Gretchen: Yeah, I'd be saying it in his accent, because you can write someone's accent, which is the cool thing but also the more challenging thing about reading IPA

Lauren: Linguists also talk about broad IPA and narrow IPA transcription - so like, you can do a kind of rough-and-ready, mostly correct transcription, or actually if you are a phonetician and you're looking really closely at how people actually articulate things, you discover all kinds of things that you need to transcribe to capture the correct and accurate transcription but which people don't hear kind of consciously or would find really weird when you've represented it to them

Gretchen: Yeah or don't notice

Lauren: And there's often like phonological processes, like when you tell people that the vowel that they use in the middle of 'handbag' is actually, for native speakers if they say it quickly, it often becomes 'hambag'

Gretchen: 'hambag', like a ham sandwich

Lauren: Yeah, like a bag-o-ham. If you write it out in IPA, people are like ‘that's incorrect,’ and you're like 'well that's what you said'

Gretchen: There's a fun story about that, so English speakers also often say 'sammich' instead of 'sandwich' because the 'm' the like the nasal sound becomes like the 'w'. Except for Anglo-Italians; so in Canada there's like Italian Torontonians and Italian Montrealers and people who grew up in those communities often have a particular accent. So in that accent they say 'sangwich' instead of sammich' because in Italian the 'w' sound is kind of more velar whereas in English it's more labial and so it like pulls the nasal along with it to be a different sound

Lauren: And when you start transcribing things in really close IPA you can see those distinctions, it's really cool

Gretchen: Yeah and we often just reduce the vowels in words that we’re saying quickly or in the small unimportant function words we often reduce the vowels all to schwa or something like that

Lauren: I still remember in in my undergraduate class learning that English vowels will often change into schwa, this is the /ə/ sound in unstressed syllables and it just made me realize that for a certain set of words, that's why I was really bad at spelling them. Because you sit there and you're like 'is it amu... amuni ammunition?'. I mean, is it ammunitiON or is it ammunitiAN? That’s not a great word to use as an example but it's the first one that came to mind. For certain vowels, because it's unstressed and it's a schwa, it’s possible that any of the vowel letters could be used to spell it. So you just have to memorize what the spelling is because your pronunciation doesn't help you. And that's why I tell people I'm bad at English spelling - it’s not my fault, it's the fault of my stress system and orthography!

Gretchen: The other thing is, is sometimes English orthography gives you useful cues to distinguish between certain words or when a suffix who's added sometimes the stress changes and you have to recover vowels that are kind of there but had turned into schwa. So if you take a word like 'electric' which becomes 'electricity' - in some senses it's weird that it's spelled with a 'c' and not with a 'k' or an 's' because 'c' is completely redundant, it always makes one of those two sounds, but it does reflect that when it's 'electric' with the 'k' sound and then when you add an '-ity' to it, the 'k' sound becomes an 's' sound because that's what happens with 'c', but it doesn't happen with 'k'. Or the vowels also change - with 'electric', 'electricity' you get different sorts of vowels. So it's kind of useful to have some of this stuff there that was historically there and has changed in its sound. But it also creates this extra layer of complication. Or you can get used to speed reading because a word always looks like the same in spelling whereas if you had to speed read a whole bunch of different accents then an unfamiliar accent might be harder to speed read, but then again it's harder to learn spelling in the first place if you have an accent that's less similar to the spelling system

Lauren: But we still love the IPA for all of the occasional detriments that occur

Gretchen: We still love it and it's still useful to have it as an option to write something very specifically even if you don’t want to do that all the tim. I find if I'm meeting somebody and they have a name I haven't heard before, then I write it in IPA and then I can pronounce it correctly when I'm talking back to them. People like it when you pronounce their names correctly.

Lauren: That's handy. The Journal of the International Phonetic Association used to accept articles written in IPA, which blows my mind. So people would write about some feature of phonetics and they would do the whole thing in the IPA. I think it very quickly became apparent that that was more labour both to produce and to consume than there was any benefit in doing that, for many of the reasons that we've already mentioned

Gretchen: Like, 'hi I'm going to write about like long vowels in Sussex' or something and that whole thing would be in IPA

Lauren: Yes, I think academics clearly had more time on their hands 50 years ago.

Gretchen: I mean, to be fair, I have played IPA Scrabble, which is like Scrabble, but you do it in IPA

Lauren: Do you just kind of argue for your own pronunciation or do you have to do it in your own dialect?

Gretchen: The way that I've done it is I combined IPA Scrabble with Descriptivist Scrabble, which is a little bit like those bluffing games, so as long as you can convince other people that it's a word then it's a word

Lauren: Ah, I like that

Gretchen: Yeah, because like, dictionaries are arbitrary authorities anyway, so with Descriptivist Scrabble you can just use whatever means you have at your disposal to convince people that it's a word. Of course choosing an obvious word like dog or something is going to be easier to convince people than saying--

Lauren: blergh?

Gretchen: Yeah, than saying “blerg is a word, honestly it means a colour kind of like grey and blue at the same time” but you can try!

Lauren: There are heaps of cool things people have done with the IPA including someone has made a set of IPA Scrabble

Gretchen: Yeah so I posted on All Things Linguistic a set of frequencies and scores that you can use for IPA Scrabble tiles, because I made it with a friend in undergrad and we had figured this out. We just cut out bits of cardboard to make them, and then some undergrads at Yale came across this post and decided to get their friend who has like a wood cutting machine to cut these out of these gorgeous wood tiles and they sent me some photos which I've also posted. You can see those on the blog, they're amazing, so yeah so someone has made a wooden IPA set that I still have not played but it’s really cool

Lauren: IPA characters also make for popular tattoos because they're quite beautiful, so I've definitely seen a schwa tattoo and I've seen a glottal stop which is a little bit like a question mark - it's our logo!

Gretchen: It is also our logo. Do people get whole words in IPA or like phrases in IPA tattooed on them?

Lauren: Mmm I haven't seen any but if anyone has we will definitely be interested in seeing it

Gretchen: If you know any IPA tattoos please send them to us

Lauren: Well I've seen a couple but not that long

Gretchen: There's also a whole version of Alice in Wonderland that's published in IPA - so this takes us back to the Journal of Phonetics - and she's like talking to the Mad Hatter and so on and it's all in IPA. The weird thing about this particular version is that this publisher decided to also have capital letters

Lauren: Huh, interesting

Gretchen: And of course they had to make capital versions for all of the IPA letters

Lauren: Wow, that's commitment

Gretchen: Because you know if you think about it capitals are redundant, they don't add any extra phonetic information to a sound, so the IPA doesn't use them. And sometimes the IPA uses small cap versions of a letter to indicate a different sound because it's an extra symbol. And so instead this person decided that no, if I'm going to write it as a book I'm going to make capitals and so yeah it's very interesting how they decided them.

Lauren: Yeah, there you go. My IPA nerd craft activity was to cross stitch the consonant chart, I did that quite a few years ago and it's a very useful adornment in the office when you just need to quickly refer to some of the symbols. I also was going to do the vowel chart but the modern vowel chart is very very complicated and messy which is why I went with Jones's much more elegant original cardinal vowels

Gretchen: Ahh so you did a simplified version

Lauren: Yep I'll put links to those in the show notes

Gretchen: And you also did a cookie cutter, right?

Lauren: Oh yeah! I made a schwa cookie cutter for Christmas last year, just what you need, and it's a 3D printable cookie cutter, so you can also download that design and print your own and make your own gingerbread schwa or shortbread schwas.

Gretchen: That's great. There's also an IPA version of the game 2048, which came out when the game 2048 was popular - so that's the one where you like slide the tiles around and you try to combine to make bigger and bigger things. And so you start with a schwa and then you combine them to make an engma, which makes no sense phonetically, and then you combine them to make an esh. Again, this won't teach you anything about phonetics

Lauren: But it goes into more and more elaborate and less frequent forms

Gretchen: Yeah it does get to more and more elaborate stuff, like you end up with like a glottalised bilabial click or something like that

Lauren: Right, it doesn't officially teach you anything about the IPA but it is a good excuse for a distraction

Gretchen: You should not do it if you're a student and you're about to write an exam on the IPA, this is not a good way to procrastinate

Lauren: Official warning!

Gretchen: Instead you should play IPA scrabble

Lauren: Much better way!

Gretchen: Which will teach you some more about the IPA

Lauren: Or read Alice in Wonderland

Gretchen: There's also a fun sketch from the sketch comedy show John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, which is a sketch where some characters encounter some skeletons and the skeletons are pirates but these skeletons cannot tell you that there are pirates because they don't have any lips, so they cannot produce the 'p', sound so they call themselves 'kirates',

Lauren: Awww

Gretchen: And the characters who encounter them are very confused, like 'what are you?' 'we're kirates, I said we're kirates!'. Anyway, I am probably not doing it justice but you should listen to it, we have a link to that as well

Lauren: Excellent

Gretchen: Although they don't make the point which I kept thinking, which was like 'Well, if the don't have any lips, they probably don't have any tongues either, so they probably can't produce any sounds because they're skeletons'

Lauren: They probably don't have any kind of pulmonic air flow ability

Gretchen: Like all they can do is clack

Lauren: Yup, Morse code?

Gretchen: Yeah! So skeletons can communicate with us in Morse code, there we go

Lauren: Yeah. I was going to say sign language just because I always seem to want to mention sign languages because they're always cool

Gretchen: Oh yeah please do

Lauren: it's worth pointing out that like obviously the IPA is for all spoken languages, if you haven't figured that out by this point in the podcast, I'll just make that abundantly clear. It’s for all oral languages. In individual sign languages people talk about like phonemes and morphemes in terms of hand shapes so there are some hand shapes that are possible in some sign languages that don't occur in others. And so you have a similar kind of basic feature sets that you can refer to in in sign languages. But because it uses a more complex modal articulation system and it isn't just limited to the mouth, then it's a bit more complicated cross-sign-linguistically, but they do have their own kind of equivalent of phonemes or phonetics

Gretchen: There's a couple different standardised sign transcription systems, I don't know if any of them have caught on at an international level in the same way to the IPA has, I mean to be fair there there are other phonetic transcription systems that aren't the IPA, it's just the IPA has caught on more than the others. But you can transcribe signs, there's a couple different ways of doing that. There's also the fact that sign languages have alphabets that they use to borrow words in from spoken languages among other functions and within that there are sign equivalents of at least some IPA characters, which I know because I've been to linguistics conferences and seen interpreters signing talks and they will sign a particular IPA symbol when the person who's giving the presentation is talking about that particular IPA symbol

Lauren: There you go

Gretchen: Yeah, I cannot recite any of them for you, but I remember noticing it and thinking 'huh, ok I guess that's what they're doing’

Lauren: Man, awesome!

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode go to Lingthusiasm dot com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow at @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo

Gretchen: And I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and my blog is All Things Linguistic dot com. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our producer is Claire and our music by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic! [Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #ipa #International Phonetic Alphabet #phonetics #phonology #lingthusiasm #episode 6 #transcript #transcripts #podcast #accessibility

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dalishious · 7 years

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I was thinking about that elf accent post, the one implying the american "southern" dalish accents are stupid and what you said about Canadian accents, specifically eastern Canada? I'm a fellow Canadian, from Quebec but now living in Ontario. My Step-dad is a Newfie, so his family (I suppose he does too? It's a bit harder to tell since I'm used to his specific accent as I live with him) all have newfoundland accents and I think maybe the reason why Maritime canadians get shit (1/2)

(2/2) I think maybe the reason why Maritime canadians get shit on for their accents is probably a historically based and left over culture element from British colonialism? Idk I've been watching a lot of outlander recently and the british characters shit on the Irish and Scottish accents of some of the other characters and that's what I feel is probably somewhat contributing and its just ingrained now so nobody reallys questions it that much I guess??

That is part of it, yeah.

And oh boys. I’m sure your step-father has heard many Newfie jokes. Tell him I send my regards.

To understand how our English came to differ from someone in say, Alberta, you have to understand the history behind our geographic area. I’m going to be specific to Nova Scotia for the sake of brevity, but it’s quite similar for all Atlantic provinces. It went something like this:

For years and years and years and years and years First Nations, predominantly the Mi’kmaq, live relatively peaceful lives in an advanced society with advanced morals

The French come along and build Acadia all over those morals

The British then take over, and mass deport the Acadiens and burn down their homes and send them either down south to Louisiana or to New Brunswick and Québec

But they’re a bunch of racist fucks even worse then the French, who don’t want the First Nations to reclaim their (now absent) land. So they flood their new land with poor Scottish and Irish people to the rural areas, while they build up their fancy cities for the fancy English people.

So now we’ve got a land with people speaking Mi'kmawi'simk, Old French, and Gaelic all being told that they have to speak English or else. And ta-da, new dialects evolve. Now speed those dialects up x2 compared to the super dragged out way the rest of the country talks. There you go.

Today, Atlantic Canada is the only area in North America where Gaelic continues to be spoken as a community language. The Acadiens are faced with just as much criticism in the French speaking world, as we are in the English. And the Mi’kmaq just try to keep our language alive, after years and years of oppression and being tortured for using it. I have a single cousin in my family, in my gen, that is fluent. It’s... really, really dispiriting.

Fun fact though, this is also evident in our place names. Like, CFAs can be real assholes about the names of our places, calling it gibberish and shit. It’s not gibberish. A lot of the “gibberish” is from the Mi’kamq language. Kejimkujik. Musquodoboit. Shubenacadie. Stewiacke... Anyway

#not da #houseofaustrich #ask

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pog-mo-bhlog · 7 years

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Tá Gaeilge agam agus tá mé sásta go raibh cainteoirí teangacha gaelacha anseo i dTumblr. I speak Irish, and I'm happy that there are speakers of Gaelic languages here in Tumblr. I've been following you awhile and just wanted to say hello. Also, why are you learning Scottish Gaelic, and do you natively speak scots?

There's a discord chat that has sections for Irish and Scottish Gaelic if you want a link? I'd try to respond in Irish but I'm terrible at it. Like I got the gist of what you were saying, but dear god, is that a t being Lenited by a d? Scary stuff. Anyway, I started learning a couple of years back. I sometimes jokingly say I learnt Gaelic to speak to my cat, because when I was little I thought the reason we couldn't communicate was because she spoke Gaelic (some confusion about Scottish wildcats on my part). I also figured that if I'm Scottish I should speak the language of Scotland, not England. I don't even know where that came from, I'm the only person in my family with any Gaelic at all. Scots is...complicated. Like, it needs more rigid spelling and grammar so it can be an accessible language for learners, or speakers who want to improve, and it also varies wildly from region to region, which is my problem because I'm a born and bread weegie but my dads from Edinburgh and my mums from Fife. Mixes things up a bit. I also only know one guy who is a 'non native learner of scots' and he's cool, but literally the only person I know who does that.

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moxy-fruitbat · 5 years

Text

Destined for Great Things

I finally finished editing Laurene's backstory! It's a tale of how she came to Vesuiva and how she met Marcel, leading up to them becoming the Sibling Apprentices. It's long as fuck and I'm not sorry. Laurene is Fantasy Irish, and the story is full of bits of Irish mythology, and I encourage you to read some of the original stories, if you want! I love them.

"Fantasy Irish" is inspired by a lot of different Gaelic peoples, including (broadly) the Gaels and (more specifically) the Picts and a more mythological version of druids. Also influenced by my own experience as a practicing pagan.

Length: 3k words (I can't believe it either)

TW/CW: family death, fire, (mild) suicidal thoughts and PTSD, claustrophobia

Rating: PG-13 for depictions of tragedy. No explicit violence, gore, or sexual content

------------------------

Irish/Scottish Pronunciation Guide (written by an American with the internet, so it's not good):

Labhraín: LAW-reen

Muirne: MIR-ne

Bandruí: BAHN-droo

Tlachtga: TLAC-da

Uncail: UN-cuhl

Tadg: TAH-dg

Cumhall: COOL

Áillen: AH-lehn

M'iníon: M'een (Irish translation: My daughter)

Labhraín had just finished braiding her long hair when Muirne came and joined her.

"Morning cousin" Muirne smirked, a smile partially hidden behind her mess of dark blonde hair. "Are you ready for the day? We have a lot of work to do."

Muirne leaned in and whispered, so only Labhraín could hear her. "Hurry up and meet me in the hazel wood, I have something important to tell you!"

---

"I have to tell you a secret. And you promise you can't tell anyone. Especially not my Da. Promise?"

"I'm leaving. Tomorrow." A smile spread gleefully across Muirne's face as she picked up hazelnuts off the mossy forest floor.

"Leaving?! What do you mean, leaving?" She hissed.

"His name is Cumhall, Labhraín, you'd love him. He's the leader of a different tribe, I know he'll take care of me. We're leaving tomorrow night, right after the feast. With all the festivities, no one will notice I'm gone!"

Instead, she just sighed, clutching her apron full of hazelnuts and headed back to the blackhouse with her cousin. "I'm happy for you, Muirne. I wish you the best."

I'm destined for great things.

Labhraín hoped to the spirits of the forest and the ancestors that it was true. And she hoped the same for herself.

---

The next day, after they had the feast of the ancestors in silence with the rest of the family, she tearfully waved her cousin off into the dusky forest.

"M'iníon, what is wrong?" Her mother asked, catching Labhraín by surprise. "Why are you crying? Is something upsetting you?"

"Oh...nothing. Thinking about grandfather is just making me sad." She lied, quickly wiping the tears from her eyes.

A small smile came upon Labhraín's face and she nodded. She was a grown woman, but her mam always knew how to make her feel better when she was vulnerable.

"I'd like that a lot."

As her mother brushed patterns over her face in the traditional blue pigment, Labhraín kept telling herself the bonfire will make her feel better. Without fail, it always does.

---

Something was wrong.

"Mam!" Where was she? Everything was a blur of smoke.. Her heart raced. Her eyes prickled.

Through the flames she saw her.

"M'iníon! Labhraín! Run!"

It was all she could do. She snatched up her dulcimer and ran down the hill and into the forest, leaving everything behind her.

---

She wanted her mam. She wanted Muirne. She wanted the hammers to her dulcimer. She wanted to be back in the blackhouse, waking up the next morning and none of this ever happening.

But she slowly craned her head up, and her eyes grew wide as she looked directly into a pair of bright yellow ones. In front of her sat the biggest mountain lion she had ever seen.

Granted, she had never seen one before. She must have run farther than she thought, since these cats weren't usually found where her tribe lived. Maybe this one was lost like she was.

It cocked its head at her, whiskers twitching, and she heard it speak to her in her mind.

"Lost?"

"Ye-yes..." Her voice trembled. "I...there was a fire and..."

"Fire?"

"Yes... Everything is gone, my mother, she...she told me to run, but now...."

"Safe?"

As her voice trailed off, the large cat shook its head once and stood up, beginning to walk away, it's tail straight up in the air like a flag.

"Follow."

"Safe."

-------

Philomena headbutted her, urging her to keep going.

"Need to go. Safe"

She groaned, picking herself up. She gathered up her dulcimer and hugged it close to her chest, trying to pull whatever familiarity to home it had into her, as if it could fly away at any moment.

Philomena nudged her again, and Labhraín closed her eyes, listening to the forest and feeling where its spirit pulled her.

Philomena nudged her back, causing Labhraín to turn around. The Mountain Lion was sitting up, a look of finality in its eyes.

"Safe." It said. This wasn't to urge her to keep moving, but a statement. This is where Labhraín was meant to be.

"Aren't you coming?"

"No. Stay out here. Home in forest."

That made sense. A large predator like Philomena wouldn't be welcome in her small village, and Labhraín couldn't imagine what a large city like this place would think.

"Familiar." Philomena purred. "With you. Always."

I am destined for great things. There was no turning back now.

---

There was so much going on. There were so many people…

"Are you alright?"

She heard a voice and felt a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes, another face very close to her own, purple eyes looking into hers.

"Are you alright? Do you need help?" A person with tan skin and hair the color of woad knelt down in front of her, a concerned look on their face.

"I...I don't know. I..." Labhraín's voice trailed off.

"You're new here, yeah? I don't recognize you."

Labhraín nodded. Did this person know all these people in the city? How could they know so many faces?

"My name's Marcel, what's yours?"

"Labhraín."

"Law...reen?"

She nodded.

"Laurene. Okay, I think I got it! So you look pretty lost. You've never been to Vesuvia before, have you?"

She shook her head no.

"Yeah, it's a lot if you're not used to it. So welcome to Vesuvia! Are you staying or just visiting?"

"I… I think I'm staying."

"Oh, wicked. That thing you're holding, is that an instrument? It looks like a kanun?"

"It's a dulcimer. I'm missing the hammers, though."

"You play it with hammers? That's super cool! I play the oud."

Did they not know what a dulcimer was? To be fair, she didn't know what either of the instruments they mentioned were.

The two of them came out of an alley in front of a shop a ways away from the marketplace, the wooden sign emblazoned with a mortar and pestle that hung next to the doorway creaked in the autumn wind.

"What, aren't you coming in for tea? You're new in town, you're a guest! Come in!"

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