Exchanges and Crafting and Recs and Whatnot

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Exchanges and Crafting and Recs and Whatnot

In exchanges news, Candy Hearts exchange had reveals- I wrote an angsty triple drabble for S.C.I.谜案集 | S.C.I. Mystery (TV):
- To Banishing Memories Summary: It wasn't a bedside vigil, it was more that Bai Yutang just couldn't make himself leave.

hurtcomfortex also announced it would not be running this year :( but will be back in 2027 :)

Since the beginning of the year I got it in my head to teach myself nalbinding (an incredibly ancient technique, while now thought of mostly as a Viking era thing it actually predates the Vikings by thousands of years, with textile fragments made using the technique found at the Nahal Hemar Cave (modern Israel) dating back to 6500BCE and from 4200BCE in Tybrind Vig (modern Denmark) but there's lots of evidence from many places more "recently" like socks from 4th C CE Egypt and hats and shawls from Peru from 300BCE to 300 CE) and post-Birthday Bash really threw myself into figuring it out. There are SO many different stitches and techniques and very little standardization and there's very, very little out there about it (i.e. NO patterns basically whatsoever). After watching approximately eleventy billion videos and trying to muddle my way though some articles and books I have sort of figured out a few different styles/stitches but who knows if I'll manage to actually make anything. It's been fun (and frustrating but whatever) to attempt though!

And, as always,

recthething recs (tumblr art for Bridgerton, Doctor Who, Merlin and Under the Skin):

Bridgerton
- Sophie at the ball (gorgeous)

Doctor Who
- Sillies (cute doodle of Ten and Thirteen interacting)

Merlin
- Happy Valentine's Day!! (adorable modern!au doodle)
- I once read a fanfic with a modern AU where Arthur is a restorer. Now I think about it all the time (I haven't read that fic - it's in Russian and incomplete - but I really like this art for it)

Under the Skin (TV)
- Cuddle (adorable Du Cheng hugging Shen Yi and settling in Shen Yi's lap)
- uno reverse of the cuddle (so gentle and sweet of the two in reversed positions)

If, like me, languages interest you, I thought these two Old English/Middle English/Modern English story telling techniques were a fascinating way to show the way English has changed through time. How far back in time can you understand English? (posted story) and From Old English to Modern American English in One Monologue (video).

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I thought these two Old English/Middle English/Modern English story telling techniques were a fascinating way to show the way English has changed through time

Oooh! I'd seen the video before, but not the blog post, and they're both so fascinating! I do struggle once we get to 1300, LOL.

Isn't it fascinating how it's all "oh this is so easy" then then *bam* "wait what?!?!"

I've been looking at nalbinding! I've seen it pop up a few times on my Insta and Tumblr feeds and thinking it looks fun. I don't need another yarn craft though, I have too many unfinished knitting and crochet projects. Tunisian crochet is something I love to do as well, like, enjoy the action of, but never do anything with because I don't really like how it looks. I just like spending the time doing it, lol. Sort of like you, like 'I'm glad I learned how to do this, but I have no idea if it will ever result in anything useful'.

The language thing is very cool! My big writing hyperfixation at the moment involves time travel, so I've been reading a lot of contemporary sources for various things and seeing a lot of old writing, plus trying to figure out how one of the characters language would evolve over the timespan (like 'when did he start saying 'don't' instead of 'do not', would he be using 'thee' occasionally now, or did that die out?). One thing about older books is that they will use 400 words when 40 would do. Reading a cake recipe might as well be an invocation to a deity. And the weird long s's are a trip to get your head around.

I poked at Tunisian as well, it is very, idk, almost meditative to do, especially the return row, but it's really something I don't think I could ever make something out of especially since it has such a tendency to curl. (And also I don't want to invest in a whole set of expensive needles for it)

Oh, I love trying to figure out the timeline of word usage, having written for some fandoms set in the Old West it through me for a loop to try to figure out what words and sayings the characters wouldn't (or would) be saying.

Meditative is definitely it! The return row is very therapeutic, but yeah, the curl is hard to work with. I got a set of interchangeable Tunisian needles from Amazon for not too bad all things considered ($60, I think) and I actually use them a lot for regular crochet with the shortest cable on them. They have sizes I don't have in regular hooks and I like the grip they have, not too sticky or too slick. But I think I've used them for actually Tunisian maybe twice, lol.

Ooh, ooh, I can help with the words! I've been using Etymology Online multiple times a day for months now, it's a life saver. It'll tell you when the word came into use, and even when certain phrases using the word came into use, and sometimes even what they used before that word was invented. Not always helpful with regards to American vs. British usage, but it's been so useful overall. 10/10 recommend.

I just finally bought myself a 'good' set of regular hooks (as opposed to the $10 set of aluminum hooks I bought mumble mumble decades ago) last year so I can't really justify picking up ones specifically for Tunisian, although maybe I will keep my eyes out for a decent sale on them if I ever think I'll really play around with it again.

I love Etymology Online! And if you are interested in idioms and their histories and listen to podcasts, I have really been enjoying Bunny Trails (you can find their podcast on their website, any podcast app, or (for the last year or two of episodes) youtube), the hosts are very personable, there are no ads other then the patreon plug, and they do lots of research and quote their sources.

I'm lucky enough to have inherited the set of crochet hooks I learned on, so I could justify it. Also it was during lockdown, and my mum had the philosophy of 'you need things to keep you entertained and we are saving money by not being able to do x thing', so there was a little indulgence involved. I feel like knitting and crochet is like no matter what you have, you never have the exact thing you need. The needle, the hook, the yarn, whatever. It's like 'I'm surrounded by wool and none of it is right!'

I'll definitely check that out! Languages are one of my favourite things. I'm always nattering to Mum about something or other related to it, and she patiently listens while admitting she doesn't care at all, lol.

I feel like knitting and crochet is like no matter what you have, you never have the exact thing you need.

lol, that is SO true! Sighhhhhhhh

Hope you like Bunny Trails! I've been listening to them for years. And if you ever want to babble to someone about languages/linguist things, make a post or just hop on to any one of my posts and leave a comment, I love babbling about that sort of thing :)

Aww, thank you! That's so sweet!

I'll share some channels I like.

FlamSparks does a bunch of videos about song translations in movies (mostly Disney), and I love hearing all the different performers around the world and how they've translated the songs. Highly recommend Danish Frozen, that Elsa is phenomenal.

The Miracle Aligner translates pop songs into Latin and Medieval/Old English and other languages.

Twisted Translations isn't active anymore, but is full of great videos I revisit all the time. She put songs and other things through Google Translate over and over again until it turned into nonsense. Not exactly educational, but I think my love of language is why the absurdity of it is so entertaining to me.

World Friends has videos of people comparing languages to one another, seeing if languages in certain groups can understand one another or how similar different varieties of French are, stuff like that.

I'm not super into music but World Friends sounds fascinating, I'll give it a try when I have some time, thanks!

If you like World Friends, there's also Ecolinguist which is a similar theme. They were really active during lockdown but tapered off for a while and I stopped following. Looks like they're back in action, though. There's usually one person giving sentences in one language, and seeing if people who speak languages in that group can understand it. There was one in Latin which was cool, romance language speakers trying to guess, and one with Old Norse, which Scandinavian speakers tried to guess, and I think one that had some version of the Irish/Scottish/Welsh language groups, too.

Oh neat! I've put a few in my youtube watch-later list. They look interesting :)

Cool! Sometimes the Ecolinguist ones will be all in one language, but if you put the CC on, there's an English translation in there.

oh, good to know, thanks!

I just watched the world friends metropolitan vs quebec french comparison, it reminds me of some of the conversations I had with UK folks when we'd write for each other countries' fandoms (either more seriously in a Britpicking/Ameripicking beta-ing way or just randomly as a "would you say...") Very neat! Thanks for the rec

Yeah, that's actually a thing Mum and I have with each other when we're speaking French. She grew up in Quebec with a French-speaking mother, and I learned in school in Ontario from non-native speakers and (mostly) from listening to European French musicals. So, our vocabulary is different. I'll sometimes see French on products here and go 'wait is that the word for x thing?' and Mum will say 'yeah?', and I'll look it up and find out that I have a different word for blueberry than her or something. The accent is different, too, like I thought the Europeans were using a whole different word for frog (grenouille) until I realized that we just say the last syllable of it really fast, lol. The Europeans say 'gron-wee' (more or less) and we say 'gron-oy' (more or less), but if you say 'wee' fast it actually becomes 'oy'. There was a Quebecer on Instagram talking about that, that 'en tout cas' (anyway) basically gets reduced to 'k' in Quebecoic dialect. It's very hard to understand a Quebecer. Kind of like thinking you've mastered English and then trying to speak to very rural Scotsman.

A language not being exactly the same everywhere is so interesting, especially when considering the line between what makes something a dialect vs accent vs actual other language and when there's mutual intelligibility between languages. It's all so NEAT.

Oh, yeah, for sure! Like, I think the general definition of a dialect is 'regional variant within a language' while accent is 'what it sounds like when a non-native speaker speaks this language', but then you have something like Scots which is English but also not English, like a Robert Burns poem, so is that an accent or a dialect or another language?

The NA vs Europe thing is interesting, too, because I think NA English (and French) preserves something of the original dialects of the colonists when they came over. They were so isolated, they didn't pick up on the newer ways of saying things. Europe probably was influenced by various foreign royals being married into families and their variations filtering down through the courts to the lower classes, but NA settlers didn't know about it. Like, 'we've all decided not to pronounce 'Rs' anymore', guess you didn't get the memo. I heard someone perform Shakespeare in the original dialect and it was like an exaggerated Newfoundland dialect. And then you have the mingling of cultures on the NA side, like how much of Quebecois French is just English repurposed ('biftech' for steakhouse, 'flo' [from 'fellow'] for a little kid, 'chum' for boyfriend). Plus the influence of the Indigenous population. I think a lot of the Quebecois French words for animals are just some French guy pointing at something and saying 'what you do call that thing?' and the Native person he was talking to saying some sounds the French guy wrote down phonetically and that's now the word they use.

Edited (coding error) 2026-02-25 10:53 (UTC)

I've read (and listened to) various things about original dialect Shakespeare before, it's so interesting! Although, not surprising, American articles mention it as similar to the (eastern) Southern US accent instead of Newfoundland dialect :)

It's fascinating to think of what Scots might have become if James never also became James I of England. Apparently there was a lot more differences between the two languages then and were diverging quickly.

I wonder how much technology and the ability to record the spoken word and have it be heard around the globe has shifted language drift/changes due to isolation. Especially radio and then TV and movies. I'm sure it lead to a lot of places influenced by American and UK accents, especially RP (or the slightly less highbrow version the BBC leans to now) and the mid-Atlantic/various US accents being beamed everywhere.

And I think you're right about a lot of words resulting from an explorer going "what's that" and the other guy answering (while possibly not understanding the question) and the first guy nodding and naming that thing their approximation of the answer.

There's a super interesting dialect of Scots, Shetlandic, that's a mixture of English, Scots, and Scandavian languages because the islands are so isolated, they hung out longer than other parts of the country. I listen to a lot of Scottish folk music, and half the time I can't understand what they're saying, but I still love hearing it. And I always wonder in historical romance books why Scottish dialect is written out phonetically but I do think the language is so different, it's justified, and could be argued it's just writing an actual language and not an accent.

Shakespeare sounds so natural in the original dialect. It sounds like someone talking normally instead of performing it, probably because the meter is right when you say the words as Shakespeare would have said them ('ak-ti-on' instead of 'ack-shun' for 'action', for example). I'm a huge nerd for Shakespeare, I will watch any production of the comedies I can get my hands on (I don't like tragedy in general) and I love how different inflections of such well known words can change the interpretation so much, or different acting choices soften or harden the characters. I wish they taught it more that way in school, because I always loved it but people think it's so dry. Mum included, she'll sit politely while I'm watching something, but never really knows what's happening in the plot.

Technology definitely makes a difference. There's a website called IDEA, that purposefully set out to capture different regional dialects and accents of English to archive it before they're gone. Different ages and genders reading the same texts to show the differences. And I did some research a while ago for a story and found out in the early 1800s, all the German states were basically unintelligible to one another. German was standardized based on Luther's translation of the bible (which I think was to his own, northern dialect of German), but it was a written language, not really a spoken one, and you could walk over to the next province and not understand anything being said. The German Confederation used French at their assembly meetings because the heads of state couldn't understand each other otherwise. Now Hochdeutsch is standard for news and television, but regional dialects are still very much alive and people just know both. Same with French and Italian, too, I think.

Chinese is similar to that - there are dozens (upon dozens) of dialects that really should be considered separate languages since while they share a writing system so can communicate that way, they are not mutually understandable when spoken (Cantonese, for example, has 6 tones while Mandarin has only 4) I can't find it now, but sometimes tumblr reposts this (I believe) weibo channel that has a group of women all from different regions of China who sit in a circle and all say how they pronounce a word and usually end up laughing over how different they all are. Languages are neat

I was trying to find the Chinese word for 'maternal grandmother' literally yesterday and I realized I was going to need to know what region the grandmother was from and how close the relationship was before I could figure that out, combined with most people responding in characters I couldn't read, I ultimately decided to just cut the line, lol.

Languages are indeed neat! It's fun to chat with you! Like I said, my mum is patient, but she doesn't care at all, so it's nice to talk to someone who's interested. Poor Mum has 44 years of being a parent to two neurodivergent children hyperfixating at her about things she doesn't care about. She deserves an award.

I have been studying Chinese for years and while I'm still very beginner level, if you come across issues like that again it's possible I can help or at least know where to look stuff up. No guarantees or anything but feel free to pick my brain if you need to.

Your mom sounds awesome :)

I'll definitely ask you! You can ask about French, I can do my best with that.

She is a very cool lady.

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Exchanges and Crafting and Recs and Whatnot

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