Signal Boost: Just Another Holiday · 4:18am Dec 27th, 2020
Do y’all like kirin?
Then you might want to read Freglz Jinglemas gift to me!
After all, we all know that there’s nothing more in the holiday spirit than to bring something into your house that can burn it down, and then draping lights on said thing.
Source
(seriously, though, make sure your tree’s watered and your lights are safe)
Getting back on topic, we’ve got a cute kirin (all kirin are cute; that’s an actual fact) and a human and nice holiday snuggles. Why, one of the best things about being an adult for Christmas is that you don’t have to get up first thing and tear open presents in a frenzy . . . you can really slow down and enjoy the other aspects of the holiday. Like staying in bed or Nerf battles or watching what is legit the best Christmas movie ever.
And let’s not forget about the beauty of a tree.
It’s also got a (minor spoiler) mute kirin using hoof language which isn’t how I personally tend to think it’s done, but it is a very valid headcanon.
If all that weren’t enough reason to give it a read, it’s also got pancakes!
Thanks, Freglz! 
*bringing
You mean Die Hard, or some other film?
Also, Freglz's short story earned a spot in the featured box:
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That comic about mute ponies & sign-language looks cool. Recently, I saw two other stories about mute ponies or ponies that know sign-language; is there something inspiring authors in that genre now?
- MLP: FiM
- Romance
- Sad
- Slice of Life
Calamus might have lost his hearing, but while learning Pegasus Sign Language, he finds that others hear him better than before.- MLP: FiM
- Slice of Life
It's hard to say something in a world that counts you out. But just because you can't speak doesn't mean you don't have a voice.I'm glad you enjoyed, and I'm surprised you deemed it worthy of a signal boost. But I'm also curious as to how you think mute kirins do communicate if not through hoof language, considering we have seen some form of it in the show.
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Oops . . . I actually meant to write ‘to bring,’ although of course your correction would also be correct. I don’t proofread blog posts as much as I should
Die Hard, of course.
I saw that!
I don’t know how new it is. Vinyl is canon mute, and Octavia was fanon mute back in the day, so I’d imagine that some authors back then dealt with it . . . I first came across ear-language in this:
[Unpublished stories cannot be embedded]
And it might have gained some resurgence with the Kirin, since if they’re being written while silent, they have to have had a way to communicate, even if it was mostly pantomime. Or horn pictures might be a possibility; unicorns can do that.
It’s also possible that there’s some other fandom that people are being inspired by; I generally don’t keep up on most pop culture, so I wouldn’t know if there was.
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I couldn’t not signal-boost it, I wanted to share with everyone.
It’s indisputable in the episode that they did lots of pantomiming, which is an effective form of communication from someone who’s mute—I have in fact helped a customer at a shop where I used to work who pantomimed out all of what he needed, and I’ll be honest, he was very good at it. Necessity and all that. And I also work with non-verbal clients who have other methods of communicating; one guy will take off your coat if he wants you to stay, for example.
I interpreted in the story that you were going with something similar to Meadowmood’s ‘tap language’ (as referenced in the link in the blog post), which may have been a misunderstanding.
My own personal preference is for ear language, where ear position spells words, since that can be done with all four hooves on the ground, and since IRL horses do a lot of communicating with their ears.
Having said that, even assuming that equines have ear language as their version of sign language, and assuming that Pumpkin Smoke knows it, she probably doesn’t, so they’d come up with some kind of intermediate communication system that works for them . . . some of the non-verbal clients I work with know some ASL, although they don’t always do the signs right or in the right place, so it’s a matter of knowing what each individual client does.
And I should say, since I didn’t make it clear in the blog post, that their communication is absolutely believable. Two people that need or want to communicate will find a way to do so, whatever it is.
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Yeah, I considered going through an assortment of nonverbal communication strategies, like figuring out which might be best for certain situations, but I did most of this in literally two days, rushing to finish before the deadline. I could only think of cute scenes, not cute and informative.
I did take inspiration from Meadow's blog, and thought about demonstrating ear language, but figured the movements would be far too precise and the differences so minute for a run-of-the-mill human to grasp. Not without dedicated training. Thus Pumpkin and his unnamed girlfriend make do with another method: stomping for short, simple sentences, questions and answers, and tactile signing for longer conversation. That way he can pantomime to clarify if need be, or maybe just pick up a pen and write.
Maybe I should've had him carry a small whiteboard around.
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Heh, I know that feel; I had a brilliant idea about how to frame my own story after it was essentially done and I didn’t have time to start over.
I think for a longer piece, there might be merit in really fleshing out how they learned to communicate, but that’s not really the focus in this story. And I think it’s interesting that she knows Horse Code, but doesn’t speak in it, and he recognizes English but doesn’t write it on a tablet, let’s say. Even though either of them could presumably do those things, maybe it’s faster that way, maybe it works better for them.
When I was at my bother’s wedding, his in-laws are Indian, and depending on the generation they speak English some or fluently (and Hindi [I think] some or fluently) . . . I was sitting at a table with some of the older ones, and in conversation they’d change languages mid-sentence if there was a word in the other language that expressed what they wanted to say better, or that they were more fluent with, so to my mind a blending of techniques that works for both conversation partners is very realistic.
Yeah, I’ve never really gotten in the weeds on ear language other than ‘it probably works like semaphore,’ and mentioning that a pony uses it or knows it. I leave the nuts and bolts up to the reader.
Any kind of sign language would probably have shortcuts for the most important words, IMHO. Like, obviously you can nod or shake your head for ‘yes’ or ‘no’ rather than sign it out. I do know that some of the signs we use for commands are basically pantomimes (i.e., ‘eat’ is holding your hand like you have something in it, and bringing it to your mouth). Writing something out even with magic would be slower, but might be the only way to get a complex idea across, especially since they also natively speak different languages.
There’s really a lot of depth to explore, honestly.
I figure in the apartment, that wouldn’t really be necessary (there are likely pads of paper around or a whiteboard if he needs it).
As for carrying things around in public . . . for non-unicorns, at least, I tend to think that it’s difficult, at least to the extent that they wouldn’t want to carry around a bunch of stuff ‘just in case.’ No pockets in their coats, y’know. Like, the pony equivalent of a whiteboard might be some dirt and a found stick, to mouthwrite (or hornwrite) the message as needed.
In fact, in a longer-version form of this story, it could be an interesting bit of worldbuilding to see how Pumpkin Smoke reacts to the idea of the unnamed female protagonist carrying a purse full of stuff she rarely uses on any given outing.