damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (linguist)
Outside of the Davis Center on the UVM campus, there are three flagpoles. The first flagpole always has the American flag; the second flagpole always has the Vermont flag. But the third flagpole changes all the time: on Earth Day (and also just randomly) there is a flag with a picture of the earth on it; around Diwali, they put up the Indian national flag; near Chinese New Year, it's a Chinese flag. Today, it was the rainbow flag, which gets put up for national events (like Coming Out Week, for example) and for smaller, UVM-only things - this time, it's an all-day multiple-speaker event, "Faithful Narratives", which I'm fairly certain was organized by UVM's LGBTQA Services office.

Sometimes, I really, really love this school.

Ahem. Anyway: Babel passage! \o/ It is going to be so nice to have a place like this to store this stuff, especially one that's so taggable. Sometimes I drift off into daydreams where my music is taggable, and I can listen to it by picking whichever tag I feel like hearing, instead of having to construct different playlists for everything. trufax.

Babel passage. Not important to anybody but me! )

Cut for grammatical and phonetic chatter, also not important to anybody but me. )

And so on. Glossing is so much fun, but, man, what an enormous time sink. ^^ I always forget just how much of one it is until I'm doing it.

So, a check mark for that. I think I'll hold off on Psalm 23 until I've finished the other one, too. Now I just need to shower and get some writing done, and today will actually have been good for something. :D

(I feel so sad tagging this as Conlang A. I really need to give this a proper, in-language name.)
damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
It's kind of astonishing, and perhaps a little pathetic, just how much the music I'm listening to affects my mood. A couple rounds of "Down to Earth" the other day, and I got so chest-squeezy I may have actually mildly strained a muscle in my back. ^^ I also fell down on the stairs today, which was very special; I expect to have two rather impressive bruises on my knees tomorrow.

I'm also a little alarmed by the frequency with which I'm finding myself composing posts in my head when things happen to me. o.O

B and her boyfriend have had their first true argument, by which I mean there was crying and yelling involved, albeit over Skype. I managed to escape upstairs, and helped AT with her Spanish homework, despite the fact that pretty much everything I know about Spanish, I learned from French. After that, I got to sit by and read Br's book on Proto-Indo-European, which I heart like mad. Linguistics is the discipline of my heart.

Which reminds me: having gotten my Lit books, and having a moment to spare, I want to put up a couple of the Egyptian poems, mostly for my own future reference, because they are awesome.

My love is one and only, without peer ... )

My favorite bits of that one are mostly pieces of phrases - "bright in the forehead of a lucky year", "blueshadowed sidefall of hair", "heart would run captive to such slim arms". And, of course, the delightful euphemism of "god's plenty below". :D

I was simply off to see Nefrus my friend ... )

This is one of the funny ones, although it also has a couple phrases I find particularly touching (particularly the "oh, look at you, feet" part). I find myself liking how the speaker reminds herself to be realistic in the last stanza, but can't stop herself from one last, wistful oh, Mehy.

And a shorter funny one - I think I'll go home and lie very still ... )

The last line actually made me laugh out loud a little, the first time I read it. ^^

And the last one: Love of you is mixed deep in my vitals ... )

I like the second half of this one better than the first; the last few images stuck with me the best (particularly "the hearth of familiar arms").

All of this, plus the PIE stuff, reminds me that I am, at long last, very nearly finished with the Babel passage, and, as a bonus, Psalms 23 and 137. However, I need to run through them one more time to make a few last corrections to the grammar. I also have been struck by a new conlang bug - this time, I'm thinking something with cases, and maybe combinations of glottal stops and syllabic ms and ns (possibly even ls and rs, although I do want to be sure I can pronounce the end product). I kind of half-finished a conlang that used a relatively simple sort of click, once, and I'd like to try that again, too. I need to expand my phonetic horizons!

Ahem. So, barring any totally unforeseen grammatical snarls, I vow to myself to post the darned thing tomorrow. That, plus another chapter of HP AU and a few more cliché-bingo-fic wanderings - and some homework, of course - and I may actually feel like I've managed to accomplish something this week. \o/
damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
I've been sort of overdosing Harry Potter lately - first going to HBP, and then my mother got OotP on her Netflix because she couldn't remember anything about it, and we watched that, and then also I just got up the nerve to share the few chapters of the HP AU that I've actually written with M (she liked it! Although she's definitely the sort to say that, even if they were deeply terrible - though she would probably add a little concrit to the compliments, if she really didn't like it). So it's possible that I shouldn't be surprised that I had an HP-verse dream the other day. ) I very distinctly remember thinking at this juncture that I was a dreadful Mary Sue, because here I was, an original character (and a self-insert at that!), and I was beating Voldemort about the head with a jacket, and I wasn't dead. (And, of course, in a larger sense, I was fighting Voldemort, which was something Harry, or maybe some of the professors, ought to be doing.)

It was very odd, but rather a fun dream. I must add it to the list. That makes three flying dreams (one with wings, two where it was my superpower), a pirate dream (I was Elizabeth the Red, scourge of the high seas - mostly I remember the part where that was my name, and the part where I boarded a ship by swinging on a bit of rigging), and three fandom dreams (one SG-1, one J2, and this one).

I also must add to my wildlife count for the summer, with two more moles in Mary's garden, a wild turkey crossing the road on the way home, and a deer in the field across from my house, nomming very happily on some grass, and regarding my car with a very blasé kind of air as I passed it.

My thesis research is slowly but surely progressing; I have now completed three interviews, although one is probably not long enough to provide a good speech sample, and have two more scheduled for next week.

My mother is currently updating me daily on the tale of my birth, as my birthday approaches. My due date was three days ago, but my birthday's not until the third of August; I was very late indeed. (If I had been five minutes earlier, my birthday would be the second of August, but no; I felt it was best to wait until 12:04 AM of August third.) She loves to tell us these things, she does the same thing to my sister when March rolls around. I have done a little hinting around as to things I would like, and it looks like the first season of Burn Notice on DVD has a very good chance of happening. \o/!

Syntax is slowly leaching away my will to live. I appreciate the quirky beauty, the intricacy and arbitrariness, the flexibility, of English grammar, really. But I've taken, like, five classes on it. I was kind of hoping that this course would be a little more comparative - a little more about other languages, languages that are very different from English, languages with tenses and moods and particles and other things that don't exist in English. ... Sigh.

Thank god for conlanging, I guess. :D
damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
Yeah, that's not gibberish - well, okay, it is, but it's not completely meaningless. That would be the first line of the Babel passage in my most recent conlang; I haven't finished the whole thing, I still have some more glossing to do, but I wanted to post a little bit, just to feel accomplished.

Cut for nerdery. )

This is another one of those things that's kind of a waste of time by any normal definition; it's meant to be the language of a desert-dwelling minority group in a story that is never going to go anywhere, a bit of not-quite-original fic born of getting a copy of The Blue Sword for my birthday and watching the Dune miniseries a few too many times. :D Still, it's a fun thing to futz around with when I don't feel like working on anything good - it's a nice worldbuilding exercise, with bonus femslash. \o/

Anyway. Off to dinner, and then quite possibly the whole suite's going to watch Harry Potter. Good times.
damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
Note: the dance is not nerdy because the source of the yay is nerdy, or anything like that; it's nerdy just because I'm doing it. :D

My Scottish Gaelic paper is DONE OMG. \o/ It's not a great paper - it may not even be all that good of a paper - but it's FINISHED. And, frankly, I did well enough in the rest of the class that I can afford to take a minor hit on the paper grade, if it comes down to that. (Sidenote: I am so crazy used to Google Docs that I keep stopping to hit Ctrl+S every few sentences - which Chrome interprets as me trying to save the Dreamwidth journal-update page to my computer, natch. I am such a winner.)

My goal for the rest of today mostly involves more Age of Mythology, although I was also hoping to finish up the first round of word generation for my latest conlang, and maybe get started on glossing some words - enough to translate the Babel passage, at the very least. If I do manage to get the Babel passage done today, possibly I will post it here, just for future reference. I LOVE being able to tag things, I cannot even express how much, except possibly by going ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ a few dozen times. There are times when I kind of wish my computer were just sort of a sea of documents that I could tag appropriately.

Also: this is the CUTEST THING EVER.

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damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
'tis not so deep as a well

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