old plans, part 3 · 10:58am Aug 24th, 2017
And then Celestia gets an idea. The elements of harmony worked once, so why not again? The elements can do anything. If anything can turn Inca into a peaceful and orderly society, it's the elements. She's had this on her mind for a while, and she's been grooming people she thinks highly of for this purpose, people such as Mag, Bittermann, Valerie (as a fixer-upper, admittedly), and a few other possible candidates.
And now it's time to talk about that book Celestia found in the Sculptor's world. Nayra has the thing. The Eldest gave it to her a few days ago, and she's been learning strange and wonderful tricks with the Nightmare's help. Celestia confiscates it early on, naturally, and reads it for the purpose of countering it.
The basic premise of the book is that you can do anything if you're willing to pay for it. It turns out "This is what I want, and I'll accept any consequences" is a potent incantation if you say it under just the right circumstances. Celestia reassures Mag that she hasn't gone entirely insane, so she isn't going to try this with all of Equestria, but she's willing to try and pull the elements of harmony back into the world. Luna comments that this is obviously going to end badly, but it's not as if they have anything left to lose. Celestia admits that, yes, that's part of her reasoning as well.
A clay jug full of Celestia blood makes for one Hell of a spell reagent. She retrieves the elements, all right, but they're wrong now, and act as a profane force according to rules no one is familiar with. The elements match themselves with Celestia, Bittermann, Jeff, Valerie, Nayra and the Nightmare, and they do nothing positive. They don't come with the expected powers, and obviously they're not going to work on the Nightmare because she's one of them now. The elements still do the thing where your life sometimes revolves around that element for a few hours to a day (like Rarity learning a special lesson on the nature of generosity, that kind of thing), but these situations no longer seem to lead to happy endings anymore. This also happens to be around the time Mag manages to talk Bittermann into something like a relationship, and it's not pretty.
Man, I never realized what a bummer this story can be when you take out the jokes. Just picture everyone being witty while this is all happening, and the villains are acting ultimately kind and compassionate in a twisted way, and Mag gets regular dream sequences where shit isn't necessarily blowing up.
A breather moment I would insert somewhere: in an argument between Mag and Nayra about Mag's usefulness to Antisuyu, Nayra tells Mag she hasn't said anything productive, hasn't fired a bullet, hasn't so much as planted food for the cause, and so Mag really ought to shut up. Mag tells Nayra to fuck off, grabs an avocado pit off the table, and announces that she's going to grow an avocado bush, feed everyone the fruit, and seriously, fuck you, I do what I like. Nayra contemptuously say that if Mag can grow an avocado bush then she'll definitely have to reconsider Mag's impact on the world. Mag marches off and plants the avocado pit in a sunlit part of the dirt alley behind the capitol building.
It grows into what is identifiably a small avocado bush. This is strange because avocados don't grow on bushes, they grow on trees. Nayra laughs, explains this to Mag, and promises to be more polite about how useless Mag is. Mag doesn't let her have any avocados. It later turns out that they taste weird because, again, avocados aren't supposed to grow on bushes.
Writing these feels like pulling my own teeth out. I'll keep going with this later, possibly tomorrow.
Are they still the same but corrupted elements (i.e. corrupted kindness) or are they different elements altogether?
Dude don't strain yourself, all of these are a lot to go through already.
4646420
I had new ones in mind, but I kept waffling over the details because this is the one plan I had doubts about the wisdom of introducing the elements like this in any way. Most probable elements: magic, hatred, despair, regret, love and peace. The Nightmare is love and Nayra is peace. Jeff gets despair because after you've done the kinds of things he has, it takes a special level of smiling emptiness to get out of bed in the morning. Bittermann gets regret because war fucked her up. Valerie gets hate, but manages to learn from it. Celestia gets magic.
4646432 Fair point! I've been trying to rip the band-aid off so I can get on with something else, but I've got things to do anyway.
These are amazing to read, but please don't force yourself to do them. I can live not knowing how the story ends without feeling like i'm pulling teeth. Promise.
I won't deny I love these blogs, but I hate the idea that you're hurting yourself to get them out. Maybe just do one last blog with a quick and dirty rundown of how it all wraps up? If you're up for it.
4646447 extremely interesting choices. Don't regret the possibility of including them, I believe you'd be more than capable of pulling it off.
I loathe to admit that I wish to see all that remains in as much detail as you're posting now. But I can't in good consciousness ask for you to keep putting yourself through emotional pain. So it possible, just a fast and dirty resume would be enough. We are fans of your work but marking you suffer for us to see the end is plainly wrong.
4646457 4646473 Not doing this would suck more, and it helps to know people are enjoying them. I'm already annoyed that I can't spend the time it would take to really sell people on Nayra, who is one of my favorite characters and yet won't ever see the light of day in her current form. I had a ball researching the ways a learner of the English language might get confused about English grammar, looking into the differences between Aymaran and English and everything. "Close the lights." "Where is her?" "Can you explain me this?"
I gotta say, the Aymaran language is FASCINATING. It's a language isolate, kinda like Babylonian is, meaning it's radically and inexplicably different from any nearby languages and in fact any language in the world, but also has structural similarities with Japanese (subject-object-verb sentence structure) German (agglutinative words, or mashing of words together with their stems and suchlike still intact for really looooong words made up of littler ones) and other gonzo things I don't even remember. I found an Aymaran dictionary online and everything, it's awesome.
I love the research stage of creative writing. Creative writers should never underestimate the power of a deep and accurate mise-en-scene. If your creative writing project doesn't require research, you're doing something wrong.
One hopes everyone involved has the wit to keep secret the fact that the big pretty talking horse is full of wish-and-it-happens juice.
I'm being a smartass, of course. But seriously, if MY blood were a uniquely potent magical reagent, I wouldn't tell anyone. It seems like a way to get a great deal of interest from people you'd very much rather not have interested in you.
4646493 i'd love to see a blog post about the language research you've done for this fic.
Poor Sunbutt. Making such a silly decision thanks to said book. I mean, of course it would go wrong, but if she's busy trying to play Goddess on a planet she should not be - well, it makes sense why.
4646493
Kudos to you for putting in the effort to make a character with intermediate English knowledge sound believable. I've been looking for something like that for a while.
Most stories I've seen, where humans learn Equestrian for example or a "not entirely perfect" translation spell is used, will just leave out a few articles or pronouns to make the English sound "broken". I consider this a cheap tactic, since most languages have a concept of those word types and even if they didn't, I'd imagine it wouldn't be a hard thing to pick up on (though my native language does have articles, so I'm not speaking from experience). There's other easy targets like verb conjugation, which is much harder to get right all the time.
Having said that, I don't think I could easily write up believable intermediate level speaker myself, which is kind of funny considering English is not my native language. I guess it's just been too long ago, that I struggled with all the fundamental grammar and stuff.
Just checked my feed and found these. I'm sad you aren't going to finish, but I completely understand your reasons. I do hope you'll post more writings in the future, either horsewords here or even just a blog link to anything else you might produce, because I really love your style.
4651064
I've got so much respect for English learners. This language is silly. It's silly in interesting ways, though, and I like the idea of writing dialogue for someone who's still learning about the various inconsistencies of English. The copula alone is absurd. How long did it take you to work that one out? Is/was/will be/were/going to be/are/flibbity-fuck, what on earth is going on here.
I failed a Spanish class last semester, so I'm also familiar in the ways a person can have trouble learning a language. The professor was very confused as to why a failing student knew obscure facts about Bolivia and Peru, and she had to stay confused, because I'm not going to come out and say "I had to research it because Bolivian history is relevant to my My Little Pony fanfic." It'd only invite more questions.
4669687
Okay, first things first, I want to apologize.
I initially just wanted to type out a quick reply, but I just kept thinking of more stuff and didn't want
to cut anything, so it kinda turned into this three page essay.
Only the first two parts about grammar and spelling are really relevant to your question, but if you want to hear more details about small grammar problems, my view on the spelling bee and the role of English in the German school systems, you could consider the other three parts to be bonus chapters ;)
Now, for the actual answer:
Well, I'm from Germany and like most European countries (countries in general?), we've got a lot of English all throughout school.
I'm just telling you this, to emphasize the point, that most of my major struggles with English lie way back. Still, here's a summary of what I can think of:
Troubles with English grammar
Pertaining to your question:
Actually, the German copula is irregular in a pretty similar way, so I think it wasn't that troublesome.
Also, while in English, verbs (apart from the copula) are only conjugated by tense, in German every verb is conjugated not only by tense but also by personal pronoun.
In that way, English is actually easier to learn than French for example, which also has this feature (though you might as well call it a bug).
In general, in terms of grammar I think English is one of the more gentle languages and apart from a list of irregular verbs, it's actually quite regular. (So far I only have German, Japanese and French to compare it to though and I'm pretty horrendous at the last two.)
I especially love, that the nouns don't have any gender, where as in German we've got three (masculine, feminine, neuter). This just makes articles a hell for foreigners, because there is generally no indication, what gender a word has and you just have to memorize that shit.
In English, it's just plain old “the”.
Since both are Germanic languages, English grammar mostly feels like a slimmer, more simple version of German grammar, apart from a few notable differences.
(For more detail on those, see the part at the end.)
The sentence structure for example, is mostly the same.
I'd say grammar is overall one of the points in favor of English over most languages.
However …
The real problems
The phonology of the English language is mostly pretty tame and kinda similar to German, except for this one sound, that's especially loved by the most often used words in the language:
“th”or the dental fricative which is apparently only used in 7.6 % of all languages.
Germans will often just approximate it with an “s”-sound or “f”-sound, leaving us with an accent we ourselves are embarrassed to hear. To be honest, that's probably also the fault of our teachers, who don't stress pronunciation early enough or only speak accented English as well.
Still, it's kinda douchy for the number one world language to use a phoneme so rare, that it leaves 90% of the other languages struggling.
Even considering this, I would say the area, where English really stuck its proverbial hand into the dumpster, is spelling.
Especially since it's a problem even native speakers have to deal with, once they enter elementary school.
There's just so many silent letters, weird consonant combinations and most importantly letter combinations that are exactly the same, but sound different depending on the word. Take the „ou“ in tough, bough, cough and dough for example. Speaking of which, why is there the unnecessary silent „gh“ in the 2nd and 4th and why don't you just use „f“ in the other two? And the more I think about, the more I feel like vowel letters can just sound like whatever you want them to be. The “a” in “yard” sounds different, because there's an “r” after it, than the a in “fan”, which is how it should be pronounced (according to the name of the letter in the alphabet).
This pretty much sums it up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXa8cO9mXFk
I don't know how anyone ever learned all that stuff, including me, though I guess it's just rote memorization.
For English learners, this makes it especially hard to guess the pronunciation of a new word they read or write down a word they hear.
In terms of spelling, English is definitely the worst out of the four languages I've learned about so far.
Spelling bees
We don't have these in Germany, so I first came into contact with them as a kid through a German dub of an American high school comedy. German has pretty regular spelling – except for a few notable exceptions and loan words, everything is “written like it sounds”.
(Side note: I once read a blog of a native English speaker learning German, who complained about English loan words in German, because they are messing up the regularity of spelling).
Because of this simplicity, I thought, that a spelling contest was kinda pointless, unless you used scientific jargon or the like, since in Germany, we have most of our spelling down after elementary school.
Only years later, when I really noticed the weirdness, that is English spelling, did I realize, why the spelling bee exists. Thinking about it in this context, it seems kinda ironic, that the biggest flaw of the language is paraded around like this.
Though the dumbest thing about these contest has to be, how they take in foreign loan words, that nobody ever uses, just to make it extra difficult. Like „knaidel“ a word with German roots, that even I didn't recognize, until I looked up it's meaning. Why not just make it a „Who can spell best in French, German and Latin?“-contest.
Small problems with English grammar
As you said, the devil lies in the detail, so here's some usual beginner's mistakes:
You see, "must" is equivalent to the German "müssen", which means to have to do something. The German negation of "müssen" is "nicht müssen", which just means to not have to do something, meaning it's optional. However in English the negation "mustn't" is quite the opposite, meaning you are not allowed to do something. I first I thought that was completely bougeous and the German version made much more sense, however, I guess if you see "to must not do" as "you have to not do something" it kind of makes sense.
Those are pretty much all the problems I came up with of the top of my hat.
English in the German education system
In Germany, we start English lessons in the 3rd year of elementary school with the basics of "Hello" and "Goodbye" , which than weave their way up as compulsory courses all the way to the end of high school, with about one or two 1,5 hour lessons per week depending on the school year.
In general I'd say it plays a pretty big part in our education. Here's an example:
In my state, in the last two years of high school you normally have to choose two advanced focus courses, which will also play a larger role for your final graduation mark. (In general, German education is very inflexible and you can't choose most of your courses in school). The first one has to be either German or math and the second one can be a variety of subjects, though depending on your school your choice can be rather limited.
In my case for example, you could only do history, physics and English.
Those three are pretty much the standard for most schools (some also have biology and chemistry, but very few have art or music).
I guess it just goes to show, how much our education system values English, that it's among these "top three courses". It's also very much liked by students, and usually preferred over history.
Because of this, I'd wager, that nowadays most people under 25 have a pretty good grasp on the English language.
Kudos to you, if you've made it this far. One final thing: It was continuously weird to me while writing this post, that you have to capitalize languages. That's just annoying.
PS: I probably should have just PM'd you ^^'
4671271
This is one of my favorite posts on this site.
Mag would ask if they can't just give the Elements back because they just made everything worse.