Quick Contents

Quick Contents

Introduction

General remarks

What’s  normal?

Reactions to injury - including emotional reactions, fainting and shock. 

Minor injuries - such as bruises, grazes and sprains

Head injuries - from  black eyes to severe concussions

Broken bones 

Dislocated joints

Cutting and Piercing - for various locations, including blood loss symptoms and figures.

Blunt trauma - getting hit, internal injuries.

Burns - including electrical burns

Hostile environments - such as extreme cold and heat, oxygen deprivation and exposure to vacuum.

References - useful websites.

Read More →

me: *plots out entire novel, mentally writes 500 pages of dialogue, and deeply develops primary and secondary characters whilst driving*

me: *opens microsoft word* wait, what?

Zodiac Signs as Beautiful Words:

ARIES:  Defenestration (n) the act of throwing someone out the window.

TAURUS: Petrichor (n) the pleasant, earthy smell of rain.

GEMINI: Ephemeral (adj) lasting for a very short time

CANCER: Hiraeth  (n) a home sickness for home you cannot return to, or that never was.

LEO: Phosphenes (n) the light and colours produced by rubbing your eyes

VIRGO:  Mellifluous (adj) a sound that is sweet and smooth, pleasing to hear.

LIBRA: Limerence (n) the state of being infatuated with another person.

SCORPIO: Sonder (n) the sudden realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own

SAGITTARIUS:  Luminescence (n) light produced by chemical, electrical, physiological means

CAPRICORN: Denouement (n) the resolution of a narrative

AQUARIUS: Syzygy (n) an alignment of celestial bodies.

PISCES:  Ethereal (adj) extremely delicate, light, not of this world.

modern magic aus aw heck

i really want us to get along and i invite you over to my apartment after i had spent hours hiding away all my strange plants and potions and fancy magical rocks and moving star charts and kick my cat familiar out for a day. Everything looks incredibly normal and non-magic and things are going great until i see u accidently touch a thing i forgot to put away THAT YOU ARE NOT TO MEANT TO TOUCH 

i get a cold and when im sick i really can’t be around non-magic people but u show up at my door and i try to shoo u away but u come in and see my apartment but tomy relief u think i’m just really into weird crap, but then my cat starts talking and u notice some of my furniture are walking around the house and u swore u saw that house plant wave at you

you’re always finding weird trinkets in your clothes such as colourful feathers, smooth rocks, glinting scales or peculiar miniature marble carvings and you don’t know where they’re coming from but they’re actually good luck charms that i slip into pockets 

whenever we touch im so nervous and i cant keep my magic in check and i slip up so whenever ur hand brushes mine for a brief moment you see spirits/ghosts or light bulb bursts or door slams open and i’m so sorry cause now you think i’m haunted or something

my kitchen’s a mess and inside a fridge is a mixture of drinks, food, potions and potion ingredients and u drink what you thought was some weird cordial and now you’re having a 24hr out of sense experience and you’re seeing and saying really delusional crap and i have to keep you here overnight so you don’t die

i’d like to see a really ineffectual malicious AI character

Language Barriers

theleadcinnabon asked:

I have a fantasy story that involves lots of groups with different languages, thus language barrier problems are commonplace for awhile. For my plot, I have one character who has a bit of a magic spell on her tongue that allows others to understand what she says, no matter the language, but she can not understand them. There are three different languages present in the group (stuck on a boat). I was hoping for some advice about how to write the overcoming of these language barriers, and how exactly to present the characters learning bits of each others language. I want it be obvious what a huge struggle it is for only the dominant group to be able to understand each other, since they have the largest amount of people on the ship and control it, while the main character is one of the individuals that is verbally isolated, but is trying to find a way home. Any tips on how to deal with these language barriers, and accurately write the process of overcoming them would be much appreciated.

*dons linguist hat*

Okay, language acquisition is a tricky beast, especially for adults, and it’s almost never portrayed accurately in fiction.  We (linguists) are still not 100% sure about how language is acquired (i.e. what structures in the brain are at work there), and how acquisition differs between a first and second language (other than, “it does”) but the key with adult second language acquisition is basically just “use it or lose it.”  Without continued maintenance of a language skill, it atrophies into a useless lump.  It’s like a muscle.

In the situation you propose, the characters will learn each other’s languages piecemeal, and due to necessity.  Certain words will become familiar, perhaps fairly quickly depending on frequency of use, and individual foreign words will become known far sooner than grammatical structure (in fact, the full grammar of a foreign language may never become ingrained in an adult the way it does in a child).  You generally acquire words based on how frequently they are used, but the absolute most frequent words used in a language tend to be thing like “the,” “of,” and “and,” which aren’t very meaningful, so look instead to the frequent contentful words.  These tend to be things like pronouns or numerals, which language acquirers are likely to learn early in the process.  Some words used depend on context, so in your plot, you might have your characters first learn each other’s words for “boat,” “sea,” “wave,” maybe “storm,” etc.  Things that are readily apparent to be talked about.  Also, if Alice and Bob speak the same language and Charlie (a foreigner) is overhearing them, he’ll start to learn their language eventually, but more slowly and randomly than if Alice or Bob were speaking directly to him and actively trying to teach him their language.

In terms of presenting the process in text, you can take a couple of approaches.  The simplest way is just to state that they slowly learned words for (for example) “boat,” “sea,” and “storm.”  Maybe a storm is on the horizon, one character points it out to another and the second character finds they recognize that word when they didn’t previously.  This isn’t very interesting, though.  More interesting is to show this rather than tell it, using dialogue and the POV character’s internal thought process as translator.  For example:

Bob stretched an arm to the horizon, finger outstretched.  "Aa rahaa hai!” he cried.  “Bara tufaan!  Tufaan aa rahaa hai!“  Storm, Charlie thought.  Tufaan means storm.

(Apparently “Bob” speaks Hindi.)

One way I find to be quite realistic, both in terms of narrative and linguistic theory, is to slowly intersperse more and more understandable (i.e. English, or whatever language you’re writing in) words into your inter-character dialogue as the viewport character slowly begins to understand their fellow travelers.  You will have to do some work to write the not understandable parts, though.  Since it’s fantasy, this may be an opportunity to do a bit of conlang development.

Even when they approach fluency in each other’s idioms, adults may never have the skill of a native speaker.  You may see characters make certain errors when trying to speak in a language not their own.  For instance, there may be irregular forms of words that they can’t remember or just don’t know, and use what they think is a regularized form instead.  You can represent this by a character saying “childs” instead of “children,” or “gived” instead of “gave.”  These are errors of the kind that a child learning their first language might make, but they can persist in the adult speech of second-language learners, and even with a “translation convention” in effect (i.e. they’re not really speaking English, but it reads as English), it becomes clear what you’re trying to emulate.

And finally, thank you for wanting to actually make an effort to portray realistic linguistics in fantasy and not just going with a “Common Speech” or something needlessly lazy.

~Mod Nikhil