ExtraPenguin

Did some thinking on, like, the metaphors of language. Usually words for abstract things are related to words for concrete things. I realized that for a people that really isn't keen on cuddling or casual contact, Finnish has a bunch of touchy-feely words extended to abstract concepts.

Keitä tämä koskee? (Who does this concern?) koskea means touch. In Finnish, matters do not concern or affect you, they touch you.

Pidätkö minusta? (Do you like me?) pitää means like, but also to hold. Liking = holding.

Tunnetko heidät? (Do you know them?) In Finnish, if you know someone, you feel them. tuntea means to know someone, but also to feel a touch, feel an emotion. If you use the literal word for knowing, tietää, then you don't know someone, you know of them.

(Also, a bit of amusing parallel evolution, tietää comes from tie, road. Compare Chinese 知道 – 道 = tie.)

Tumblr user callanthea has expressed intent to engsub the audio drama, three eps of which have been released. They've already subbed the theme song! I'm adding it to the fanvid recs post.

In other news, there is a Modao Zushi wiki that I'm helping to fill up.

In yet other news, this AU is now at 12k and needs only 9 more scenes plus scene-level touchup to dialogue and word choice before I can send it to the beta's. Writing about the darkness of the polar night is very appealing here in the nightless night. It also has a draft title. As planned, it is so far about language, isolation, and a potentially hot take on colonialism; it has also decided to be about grief. Let's see what more it decides to be or not be. It will definitely pass 15k but will hopefully be less than 20k.

In news unrelated to Modao Zushi (shocking, I know), I have now fully transitioned from student mode to employee mode for the summer. While I was revising for today's exam (an attempt to gain a higher grade), I came across an endearing extension of the forest and trees metaphor: the forest (or at least the arboretum) was that the things we measure are the expectation values of the weird shit that happens at the quantum level, while the trees were the mathemathical tricks etc, and we went deeper into the forest, looked at the trees of the arboretum, and gave a glance to leaves and branches. 'Twas a nice extension of the metaphor. I also came across the trees and forest metaphor in Finnish in Eino Koponen's Itämerensuomalaisten kielten meteorologisen sanaston etymologiaa ("On the etymology of the meteorological vocabulary of Baltic Finnic languages"). I plan to read it, if only because I should probably read more in Finnish, and I like linguistics. As for how I came across it, I needed to find the reason why aurorae in Finnish are called fox-fires, and Google spat this out, in addition to more immediately useful resources. (And as for why I was asking Google the origin of the term revontuli, well, see the fic mentioned in paragraph #3.)