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csevet replied to your post “subversivegrrl replied to your post: …”
YOU DO
i DO. I tried to borrow it from the library and they didn’t have it. It was going to be the next thing I bought but then T. Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War was partly on sale and I couldn’t resist. (It was so good! but doesn’t really lend itself to fanfic. It wasn’t worldbuilding-y so much as a real good character study.) So I have to come down from the ridiculous reading binge that caused, and get myself to a point where I’m Ready to Read another book, which sounds crazy but I seriously get Altered if I really read books too much. It’s. It’s silly.
(if I read it this week I’d be at the farm anyway so it’s not like i’d be missing out on writing time by binge-reading. hmmmmmmm.) (OH RHINEBECK IS THIS WEEKEND by the way! I assume it is too far for you and you are not going so I will pet a sheep for you but if you ARE going then let me know! My sisters and mom and the Farmkid are going on the Sunday so I don’t know how that’s going to be.)
walburgablack reblogged your post and added:
Right, yes, so.[shey] in Bengali is essentially he/she, except it doesn’t denote gender, so “she ate an apple” would be “shey apple/apel khelo” which is also perfectly accurately translatable as “he ate an apple”. It isn’t “they”, which is [tara]. Sanskrit-derived languages don’t really *have* gendered pronouns, but several of the others have gendered verbs, so that balances out. Bengali… doesn’t.
I am desperate to write a queer novel in Bengali but alas my grasp of my own mother-tongue is not that strong. I blame the education-system, but mostly myself..
So the gendered verbs… are conjugated in a way that makes the gender of the person doing them explicit? So like, there’d be a verb conjugation that specifically means “she ran” vs “he ran”? I guess I get that.
I know Turkish doesn’t have gendered pronouns because of Google Translate’s horrible revelations about how its AI translates them automatically in really sexist ways into English. Machine learning, bruh, laying all your shit bare… So I guess i just hadn’t thought about it except in that one specifically awful context.
When I was in high school I desperately wanted to learn every language. I was going to, I had so many dreams of it. And it turns out my memory is fucking awful, so I took three whole years of Japanese and had forgotten until this moment that I don’t even think that language has pronouns the way English does, let alone gendered ones– the nouns don’t have genders either, and degrees of formality are encoded within the verb conjugations, which sounds really complicated but is genuinely so simple and easy to hear, very intuitive. And a number of the verb conjugations are just– only men can use them, women would never be so coarse. It’s not even quite… that cut and dried, but it is, and I don’t remember it well enough to speak intelligently about it at all, because I don’t really have a brain cut out for mastery of any subject at all… Everything about Japanese was so easy to learn and so sensible, except the goddamn writing system– they have two perfectly easy-to-use phonetic writing systems that they barely use, and then Chinese characters my tiny mind is too tiny to memorize in any useful quantity.
Anyway. I love the idea of a queer novel in Bengali, and I am so heartbroken at the idea of not being fluent enough in one’s mother-tongue to write it– understand I’m coming from a place of only having the one language that I know well enough to do anything, and I felt so stupid while traveling, I was the only monolingual person I met. But one of the people I met traveling was Nepali, and he said, sort of wryly, that his only language of complete fluency was English. He’d attended English schools from such a young age that he had never fully learned his own native tongue, and while he could have a conversation in it, he couldn’t conduct complicated affairs. He now lived in Germany, with a German fiancée, and conducted most of his daily business in German, but if it was a really important conversation, he had to ask her to speak English, because his German isn’t totally fluent either (and when she got emotional she’d speak too fast for him to understand, and he wouldn’t be able to answer).
(Your picture was not posted)
csevet replied to your post “subversivegrrl replied to your post: …”
YOU DO
i DO. I tried to borrow it from the library and they didn’t have it. It was going to be the next thing I bought but then T. Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War was partly on sale and I couldn’t resist. (It was so good! but doesn’t really lend itself to fanfic. It wasn’t worldbuilding-y so much as a real good character study.) So I have to come down from the ridiculous reading binge that caused, and get myself to a point where I’m Ready to Read another book, which sounds crazy but I seriously get Altered if I really read books too much. It’s. It’s silly.
(if I read it this week I’d be at the farm anyway so it’s not like i’d be missing out on writing time by binge-reading. hmmmmmmm.) (OH RHINEBECK IS THIS WEEKEND by the way! I assume it is too far for you and you are not going so I will pet a sheep for you but if you ARE going then let me know! My sisters and mom and the Farmkid are going on the Sunday so I don’t know how that’s going to be.)
walburgablack reblogged your post and added:
Right, yes, so.[shey] in Bengali is essentially he/she, except it doesn’t denote gender, so “she ate an apple” would be “shey apple/apel khelo” which is also perfectly accurately translatable as “he ate an apple”. It isn’t “they”, which is [tara]. Sanskrit-derived languages don’t really *have* gendered pronouns, but several of the others have gendered verbs, so that balances out. Bengali… doesn’t.
I am desperate to write a queer novel in Bengali but alas my grasp of my own mother-tongue is not that strong. I blame the education-system, but mostly myself..
So the gendered verbs… are conjugated in a way that makes the gender of the person doing them explicit? So like, there’d be a verb conjugation that specifically means “she ran” vs “he ran”? I guess I get that.
I know Turkish doesn’t have gendered pronouns because of Google Translate’s horrible revelations about how its AI translates them automatically in really sexist ways into English. Machine learning, bruh, laying all your shit bare… So I guess i just hadn’t thought about it except in that one specifically awful context.
When I was in high school I desperately wanted to learn every language. I was going to, I had so many dreams of it. And it turns out my memory is fucking awful, so I took three whole years of Japanese and had forgotten until this moment that I don’t even think that language has pronouns the way English does, let alone gendered ones– the nouns don’t have genders either, and degrees of formality are encoded within the verb conjugations, which sounds really complicated but is genuinely so simple and easy to hear, very intuitive. And a number of the verb conjugations are just– only men can use them, women would never be so coarse. It’s not even quite… that cut and dried, but it is, and I don’t remember it well enough to speak intelligently about it at all, because I don’t really have a brain cut out for mastery of any subject at all… Everything about Japanese was so easy to learn and so sensible, except the goddamn writing system– they have two perfectly easy-to-use phonetic writing systems that they barely use, and then Chinese characters my tiny mind is too tiny to memorize in any useful quantity.
Anyway. I love the idea of a queer novel in Bengali, and I am so heartbroken at the idea of not being fluent enough in one’s mother-tongue to write it– understand I’m coming from a place of only having the one language that I know well enough to do anything, and I felt so stupid while traveling, I was the only monolingual person I met. But one of the people I met traveling was Nepali, and he said, sort of wryly, that his only language of complete fluency was English. He’d attended English schools from such a young age that he had never fully learned his own native tongue, and while he could have a conversation in it, he couldn’t conduct complicated affairs. He now lived in Germany, with a German fiancée, and conducted most of his daily business in German, but if it was a really important conversation, he had to ask her to speak English, because his German isn’t totally fluent either (and when she got emotional she’d speak too fast for him to understand, and he wouldn’t be able to answer).
(Your picture was not posted)
