Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
This is also true with filmmakers. Western filmmakers pan their cameras mostly left to right and Iranian filmmakers do right to left.
Time seems such a universal concept and then I find out the different ways people perceive everything and remember “it’s all appearances to consciousness”
Linguistic and Cultural Implications in Star Trek - Turkish & Kurdish
Ok I am here to vent about weird appearences of Turkish/Kurdish language and culture in Star Trek, especially DS9. Why? Because I don’t have anything better to do :,)
I’ll keep adding if i can find more. Enjoy!
Case 1: Tarsus 4
As you might know, Tarsus 4 is a planet mentioned in the TOS (The Conscience of the King, s1 e13). However, Tarsus is a real and well known town in Turkey and honestly first time I heard this name, I had to replay the scene.
Arjin is the name of a Trill we encounter in Deep Space 9 (Playing God, s2 e17). However, Arjin is also a very common Kurdish/Turkish name that is usually given to boys, meaning “the fire of life”.
Case 3: Major/Minor Cardassian Characters
Damar
Damar is a Cardassian that we encounter especially in the season 7 of Deep Space Nine. His name basically means “vein” in Turkish, which is easier to ignore compared to other usages of Turkish.
Parmak: Kelas Parmak is a Cardassian character from the DS9 novels. His name, Parmak, basically means “finger” in Turkish.
Makbar
Here, another Cardassian who appeared in “Tribunal, s2 e25” of DS9. She was a Chief Archon. It is also an Arabic word (used in Turkish too) that means “tomb, grave”. Which is quite funny considering that Makbar kept announcing O’brien’s execution in that episode.
Case 4: Bajor
Bajorians are compared to the Kurds by Berman himself but when my father told me that “bajar” in Kurdish literally meant “the city”, I was, again, very surprised. This is not only parallel between Bajorans and Kurds. Bajorans have spring festivals (The Gratitude Festival) that is quite similar to Kurds’ Newroz.
Honestly, whoever named these characters seemed to have a field day.
Hazar
General Hazar was a flag officer in the Bajoran Militia. Hazar is a proper noun that has several meanings in Turkish: a semi-nomadic Turkic people that in the late 6th-century, Caspian Sea, a rift lake in the Taurus Mountains and a feminine proper noun.
Kalem: Kalem Apren was the Bajoran First Minister. Kalem means “pencil" in Turkish.
Nane: Nane was a Bajoran Vedek and art instructor who helped Ziyal. Nane means “mint” in Turkish.
Pelin: Pelin was a Bajoran who lived on Terok Nor during the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor. Pelin is a very common name given to girls in Turkish.
Pinar
Pinar was a deputy in the Bajoran Militia assigned to Deep Space 9. Pinar is also a very common name given to girls in Turkish, even though the character is a guy.
Think about things you know. Think about the things that live in your head, that got encoded into your memory without being learned.
My parents will get on YouTube and look at compilations of Top 80’s Songs and sing verses of every last one. They quote SNL skits that aired 20 years ago.
People in my generation quote Vines the same way. We know jingles from infomercials we haven’t seen in over a decade. It’s been months and I still find the words humming in my head, Turtleneck and blazer, on point like a laser…
I can sing songs I never intentionally listened to. It’s going down, I’m yelling Timber tumbles through my head without me knowing where it’s from. As an adult, I looked up “apologize” on youtube because of a vivid memory of being in the dentist’s chair as a child and hearing, It’s too late to apologize, it’s too late… I have always instinctively known that Boots with the fur follows Apple bottom jeans.
I can’t hear “What do you want” without the overwhelming urge to say “I want to sing and dance!” because of a Ray Stevens song. I can’t hear “What does the fox say?” without feeling something. I dare not say “Dumb ways to die” in front of my siblings.
Did you ever sit down and intentionally memorize the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody? Were you ever a fan of Owl City or do you just know that “You would not believe your eyes” is followed by “If ten million fireflies?”
Why do mnemonics work on us? How often do you say to yourself, “Thirty days hath September” or sing the ABC’s to yourself quietly? My dad told me, “If red touches black, he’s a friend of Jack, but if red touches yellow, he can kill a fellow” and I remember it. I can count by threes without thinking about it because of a video I had in elementary school. I can sing the alphabet in Greek and in Spanish because I listened to alphabet songs for them. I still know Be, am, is, are, was, being, have, has, had, could, would, should, may, might, must, shall, can, will, do, did, does, having are almost all English “helping verbs” because of a video I watched in high school. The only reason I know anacondas are found in Ecuador is because of a CollegeHumor parody of Nicki Minaj’s song Anaconda.
Study advice tells you to make up rhymes to memorize information. Commercials have jingles and slogans and rhythmic phrases because we automatically memorize them. It’s batshit that “make a mnemonic” is standard advice for students. How is that not harder than just remembering?
You know what follows “Hey diddle diddle,” but why? You can probably name most, if not all, of Santa’s reindeer. You know what Superman can leap in a single bound whether or not you’ve ever given a shit about Superman. You know “Ring around the rosie” is followed by “Pocket full of posies.”
I posted about this a while back, but you know that song about murdering Barney that you or your siblings used to sing? That song has been sung for over 30 years. Across multiple continents. There’s a tree of variants based on the same basic theme, There’s even multiple versions in Spanish based on the Spanish Barney theme song.
Where I can’t remember poems, there are little indents in my memory where their syllables should be. But I have multiple poems memorized that I never memorized on purpose.
You have definitely heard about how The Iliad is an epic poem. Before writing, everything was passed down orally. Everything. “How on earth did they do it?” people wonder, and bitch about how technology has ruined our memories, which is hilarious, because how they did it is obvious.
We are WIRED to memorize. If something rhymes or is rhythmic, our brains are terrifyingly good at making that shit last FOREVER. We can’t make it stop. “Damn it, I can’t get this song out of my head!” we will say. I have had this happen to me after hearing a song literally once.
Rhythm, rhyme, meter, the basic components of poetic structure, are VERY fundamental to how our memory works. Somehow. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” is in trochaic meter. If it was “Teenage Mutant Samurai Turtles” it wouldn’t stick around the way it did. But if you sing it, it sticks around.
Why does this work?
Do you know anyone that never gets songs stuck in their head, that can’t remember jingles and poems and theme songs? Is there anyone you can think of that just…doesn’t have that lightbulb light up when you sing half of something they should remember? Dyslexia, aphantasia, prosopagnosia, disabilities where faculties we think of as “things brains do” are missing are pretty common, but are there humans that can’t do this?
It would be noticeably disabling. Imagine trying to memorize your ABC’s if you can’t sing them, even in your head.
if we one day get to hear the cardassian language and they dont start fucking hissing or something ill be so pissed
where was that line from where it was like i think garak talking to bashir andhe said julian couldnt even speak the language if he tried because of the way the langauge is spoeken or something with their anatomy differences i think that was from the nexus anyway if its just some made up bullshit language like every other star trek alien langauge ill fucking throw up and die i need them to start screaming like tholians right now
Julian: uh oh, I think the translators broken. Garak?
“In the West, you find the idea that only humans have language. I never believed that. We know bacteria sing to each other, that even subatomic particles are self-aware and communicate and tangle with one another. So, for me, the universe is itself language; everything is speaking to everything else, in particular chemical, sonic, and territorial languages. There are sorts we can’t even imagine, yet together they form part of what we as humans can sense and perceive. We can talk about things as if we know what we are talking about. That’s the most fascinating thing in the world because in truth we don’t know much at all. What we don’t know composes 99.9 percent of the real. That possibility of sensing what we cannot name makes language what it is—a reaching for what cannot be said.”
if anyone needs me i’ll be frothing at the mouth thinking about the origin of language and interspecies communication. happy wednesday.
how did we learn this? who taught us this? is it coincidental? is it observational? is it that something in the source of these sixteen languages stems from the same animal instinct that causes each of these species to call out to their own kind? I Am Going To Lose It.
Patricia McConnell talks about her research into this in her book “The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs” which also addresses a ton of other interspecies communication things and not just about dogs! Highly recommend reading it
“A collection of common glyphs of the poorly understood Memeorite civilization of the Second Silicon Age. Memeorite glyphs possess multiple conflicting interpretations and a complexity of meaning impossible to capture in a few short words. These are rough translations only.”
i think that trill has like. pronouns in the past tense. to distinguish between the current and past hosts. and standard does not have these. so like jadzia’s talking to sisko and he mentions curzon and jadzia hears it as “you (present tense).” which leads to one day ezri is talking to weyoun and realizes that dominionese has a similar grammatical structure because cloning also has elements of Past Selves. and then they’re friends <3
so weird how in english some words are really just used in expressions and not otherwise… like has anyone said “havoc” when not using it in the phrase “wreaking havoc”? same goes for “wreaking” actually…
old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
“Ha… right.”
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’
the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever
We had a running joke about how many times our grad PI’s emails scared us because they were uncharacteristically terse. (You’d get like “We need to talk about your paper.” and then the actual talk would be “It’s great!”)
And he heard us talking one day and started adding smiley emojis to his emails, and honestly it really helped
Can we also have a support group for all of the people who’ve had to do the “Please do not send me a text that says ‘call me.’ unless someone is dead. If no one is dead, you need to delete the period and add a lighthearted emoji” workshop with their boomer parents? Because I know about 10 people who’ve had that exact conversation.
Texts from my mom look like this now:
Call me! 👻
call me 🥑 🥭
Call me. (No one’s dead I just want to talk.)
CALL ME! 🎏🐹🌴💅🏼🎷🌺👒
Book rec if you are interested in this kind of language stuff: Gretchen McCullough’s book BECAUSE INTERNET. It goes into these topics in detail along with a bunch of others and is really fascinating.
