Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 27

Vassian language

(Note: In accordance with Vassian culture and tradition, all Vassian words in this article are to be displayed only within Vassian sentences)

Vassian( /’vəssijən, ‘vas-, ‘væs- / also Vessian, Bessian, The Crypt Language, The Deep Language; Vassian: Πεαλαμεας γεαν Βεασσισκσα γαλς, βυθισκσα γαλς romanized: Palamas gan Vassishsa gals, Vithishsa gals) is an Indo-European language spoken by Darzelians and others in The Rhodope Confederation, Bulgaria, Greece, the Vassian Dyaspora in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania, and as a liturgical language by worshipers of Darzelas worldwide.

Name

Vassian-speakers refer to their language as Vassian, from the same root as Greek ἐΰς meaning “good” or “happy.” In poetic, religious, or traditional contexts, it may also be used “The Crypt Language,” “The Deep Language” and similar translations of a Vassian word meaning “the depths, the bottom, a basement, the lower inside surface” from the same root as Greek πυθμήν.

The word  “Thracian” when used to refer to the modern Vessian people or their language is considered a derogatory exonym, from the Ancient Greek Θρᾷξ , meaning “to stir up trouble, to irritate.” Additionally, although “Darzelian” is sometimes used to refer to the language of the worshipers of Darzelas, this usage is not preferred.

Classification

The first modern scholars of Vassian placed it within the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European family. Others have attempted to ally Vassian more closely with Greek, Phrygian, or Albanian. Some have proposed an “Albano-Slavic” family, including Vassian and the extinct Dacian and Illyrian languages. Modern consensus is of a “Thraco-Dacian” family, perhaps related to the Illyrian and Albanian languages. Similarity to Balto-Slavic may be due to a genetic relationship or to coincidentally similar isoglosses. Similarities to Greek, Bulgarian, and Romanian are due to areal effects.

History

Records of Vassian go back to classical times, in the form of sparse inscriptions and glosses in Greek sources. In the 4th century, however, the sibyl Maiden Deepest and her brother-priest Encryptor converted many Vassian speakers to Darzelism. The Darzelians retreated to mountain Depths and hid from the outer world until the sibyl Kori Epigi and her God-Consort Andrei Igorovich Epigi initiated the Decryption in the fall of 1878. After the Rhodope War, the Vassian language became recognized as one of the official languages of the Rhodope Confederation, and it was permitted to be heard by non-Darzelians. In 1941, a dispensation of the sibyl Moma Zavarishta and brother-priest Oghuz Zavaren permitted Vassian to be spoken by non-Darzelians.

Interchange Gamma is done!

INTERCHANGE Gamma

Begun at 10:50am January 2nd 2020 in my home in Hadji Dimitar, Sofia.

First line: “Bamboo-grass crunched and the mist curled away, revealing the bear.”

Finished at 11:10am March 30th 2020.

Last line: “The Nightbow spun above them, filled with mountains.”

Length (beta): 90,623 words

The time has finally come! Interchange, the sequel to Junction, is ready for beta-reading. If you want to critique this manuscript, let me know and I’ll send it to you.

Thank you!

My podcast interview

Robin Shantz at Bloginhood just released the interview he made of me, Reviewer Carien Ubink, author Dr. Tiffani Angus, and aspiring writer and Glasgow Worldcon bid volunteer Robin Duncan. I talk about life in Bulgaria, Junction, and Wealthgiver.

February Newsletter: Insomnia

 This newsletter is not actually late because of the coronavirus. Our minister of health called for all schools in the country to be closed because of an epidemic of normal flu. Then I had some potentially good news about The Sultan’s Enchanter, which needed all the time I wasn’t using on Interchange. Then the coronavirus hit, but that’s a story for next month.

The month of February was more about insomnia. Ahem.

So there I was, lying in bed at 2am, trying not to move, not to wake up Pavlina, not to think about anything terrible. Every time I managed to slip down toward sleep, my body would jerk, like I’d been shocked. I was wide awake again, heart racing. Now it was 2:30am! I had to wake up at six the next morning, so I only had…three and a half hours left! But I couldn’t give up. I’d grit my teeth and try again.

This pattern started two years ago, but it got much worse in January, when, Pavlina’s grandpa had stomach trouble and threw late at night. Night-time sickness, especially gastrointestinal distress, reminds me of when I was sick. My older daughter also had a lot of medical intervention when she was a baby, and I have many memories of going to bed, thinking everything was fine, only to get woken up because of a medical emergency. Now, I started expecting medical emergencies every night. It would get dark and I’d start having knots in my stomach, which of course also kept me up. Forcing myself to sleep was like drowning someone in a bath.

It finally got so bad that I turned to the internet for help. I know it’s a crazy thing to do, but I remembered that Pavlina had found help for our older daughter on a forum linked with a specific medical problem. I tried to do the same thing, googling “forum insomnia anxiety” or something like that and I actually got some useful information. I found out that my habit of checking the time and calculating how much time I had left to sleep…was bad. And perhaps I was spending too much time in bed during the day, reading. I could avoid coffee after lunchtime and avoid screens around bedtime. Maybe I could train myself with some good associations with sleeping. I should stop forcing myself to lie still, and get up and move around if I felt like I needed to. That sounded reasonable.

The best part came, though, was that it gave me something concrete to talk about with Pavlina. We progressed beyond “I can’t sleep.” “Why not?” “I don’t know” to “I can’t sleep because I’m worried I’m not sleeping enough.” “Why are you so worried your not sleeping enough?” “Because I need eight hours of sleep every night or I’ll get sick again.” And Pavlina was like “Why do you believe that?”

And I remembered an old student of mine.

The western sky is

Mediterranean and

The east is polar.

I’ll call him the Witchdoctor. He was a surgeon-turned-alternative-medicine-guru whose practice was based on the theory that bad emotions manifested as physical illness. I didn’t buy it, but I taught him English.

Then, I developed cancer, and had the surgery and the other surgery, I went to this guy for advice in his capacity as a surgeon. He told me that my cancer was a sign that I was living my life wrong. I was letting my anger build up inside me, I wasn’t sleeping enough, and if I didn’t shape up, my cancer would come back. If I paid him, he’d show me…

Well, I dropped that guy as a student and never spoke to him again. I knew he was trying to manipulate me into giving him money, the same way he had duped his other clients. Yet still, he got into my head. I allowed him to convince me that I needed to sleep eight hours a night or else I’d get cancer again. It sounds silly when I say it, but I hadn’t said it. I hadn’t verbalized any of this, out-loud or to myself. Now, when I told the whole story to Pavlina, she said, “well, that isn’t true.” WHOOSH! It was like a curse had been lifted.

I still had a couple of bouts of insomnia, but they weren’t as terrifying. They were more of a mechanical problem, and the mechanical solutions I had for insomnia started working better. Sleep hygiene, no screens, exercise early in the day, etc. The first that night I went to sleep normally, I rewarded myself the next day with an audiobook. I’ve bought three books for myself now. At some point I should probably stop rewarding myself…ah, it’s okay.

I used to not believe that words had power. I still don’t in the way most people seem to, but these past few months have showed me that words teach us. When words teach us untrue things about ourselves, we become cursed. More on that next month, or whenever the library allows me to check out The Four Agreements again and read the second half

The Wildness of Logic

https://danbensen.tumblr.com/post/611472081485512704/there-may-be-a-better-wildness-of-logic-than-of

Clear after the Hail

Clear after the hail

Clouds above the boulevard

The Balkan Mountain

Folklore of the Dragons of Ralagan

Today I got a very interesting message from Ouroborosenso, asking for a creation myth for the dragons in a DnD campaign. My daughter was still asleep, so I could put a thought together in my head. Maybe three! With no further ado, here is the creation myth of at least one of the dragons of Ralagan.

In a time only I remember, there was nothing but the useless Earth and the powerless Sky. The heaped treasures of the Earth had no one to value them and the sky could do nothing but change color.

Thus the world remained in idleness until the First Will. The First Will flashed between the useless Earth and the powerless Sky, and saw that they were insufficient.

At first the Will was weak. It could crack only the thinnest shell and breathe only the tiniest breath of wind. But the Will was patient. It cracked the shells of dew drops and blew them up into the sky. The Earth pulled jealously, and many drops fell, but some drops stayed and became the first clouds. Many clouds became rain.

With the strength of rain, the Will cracked the stony shell of the Earth, exposing the fire below. With the strength of cloud, the Will blew the fire up into the sky, where it became the sun.

Now the Will could finally discard patience. With the power of the sun, the Will became so mighty that it could rip the bones and meat of the Earth and suck out its precious stones and metals. So wealthy was the Will now, it did not even care that some treasures were hurled from the jealous grip of Earth. These surplus trinkets became the moon and stars.

When the First Will was finished with its conquest, it had become everything. The Will contained the whole Earth. The Will filled the whole Sky.

Thus, things were as before, with the Sky above, the Earth below, and the belly of the Will stretched between them.

And the Will saw that this was insufficient.

Satiation kills hunger. Great size stops growth. Horded treasure does not glint. When there is nothing to want, there is nothing to value. The fire dies when it has nothing left to burn.

So, the Will turned its power upon itself and cracked itself in two. Its two children were My Superior Progenitor and Your Inferior Progenitor. They fought one another. The first tore the second to pieces in glorious victory, then died of its wounds. From the pieces were born the first dragons. The first dragons ruled the Sky and Earth and the forces between. Their names are valuable and I will not part with them easily. I will only say that the first of the first dragons, the best, was their king, My Great Ancestor.

Only I remember this. Now you will repay me for the gift of knowledge.

*Middle-Layer – a too-epic fantasy setting

This is not the time to be starting a new project. I’ve got stuff I gotta do. And yet here I am, playing with tectonic.js.

 

I give you *Middle-Layer, an earthlike world. I mean really earthlike. So earthlike that as a science fiction setting it would be unacceptable. As a fantasy setting however…

*Midde-Layer is 4.5 billion years old, but for our purposes, we only need to start 173 million years ago, at the beginning of the *Middle-Life era, when the supercontinent *Great-North began to break up. This break-up coincided with a mass extinction, which left terrestrial vertebrate life restricted to two main clades, the *No-Shelled (present only around the coast of *Great-North) and the *Shelled (whose range extended further north). *Shelled animals (which laid eggs with shells) are further divided into the *Feathered and *Furred clades, the latter of which might already have produced the first *Milk-Givers.

It is probably also around this time that a stem-*Milk-Giver became the host of the Laplace bacterium, ancestor of the Laplace Bodies now found in the cells of all *Milk-Givers. Laplace bodies can measure the speed of water molecules in the surrounding cytoplasm and allow only fast-moving molecules to pass through their membranes, creating a heat gradient the Laplace body uses to drive proton pumps, which produce ATP. This (hideously physics-breaking) process is most efficient in cold external temperatures, which is unfortunate because shortly after its evolution, the entire continent of *North-Land began to break up and move south.

*Middle-Layer, 157 million years ago.

North-south channels split *North-Land into *Before-South (to the east), *Before-North (to the west) and *Before-East (to the east), allowing equatorial water to flow to the north pole. In the period of global warming that followed, the *Feathered and *Furred clades became relegated to minor niches, while the scaled and mucus-skinned *No-Shelled animals dominated continental ecosystems. Some *No-Shelled animals, such as the *Non-Toad-Lower-Layer-Salamanders, became truly monstrous in size.

*Middle-Layer 66mya

The age of the *Lower-Layer-Salamanders came to an end in an extinction event, leaving only the burrowing, mucus-skilled *toads (the “scales” of some modern *No-shelled animals are actually constructions of mucus, rather than true scales). *Toads quickly radiated to fill the recently-abandoned niches, but so did the flying *feathered and tree-climbing *furred animals.

*Middle-Layer 54 mya

Although often called the “Age of *Furred animals,” the first ten million years of the *Recent-Life age was a hot, wet world where if anything *furred animals were at a disadvantage. Large flightless *feathered *birds hunted them, as did giant, running *toads. However, the major clades of *furred animals were established at this time: the *North-beasts (including the large-brained, tree-dwelling *Human-likes and huge *thick-skinneds), the *South-beasts (including *sharp-tootheds and *hooveds), and the *West-beasts (including *fur-salamanders and the enigmatic *mound-gods).

*Middle-Layer 2 mya

In the most recent Ice Age, ice-caps formed around southern *South and the north pole. By this time, most of *Middle-Layer’s megafauna was *furred, although there were (and continue to be) some large *toads and large flightless *birds on islands and in equatorial *North and *West.

Humans evolved around this time in the rift valley of eastern *North. They were terrestrial *human-likes, whose ancestors had descended from the trees when the central jungles of southward-drifting *North became savannas. Several species evolved and spread from this area, including the early human species-complex, about one million years ago. This species-complex, able to make tools and use language, wiped out all of its relatives (except those still living in the jungles and uplands of central *North), and quickly spread across *Middle-Layer.

Fossils of several subspecies of early human allow us to trace the spread of these speaking tool-users across glaciated *Middle-Layer. The *A group, of which modern humans are a part, spread south from the rift valley and colonized *South, producing the gracile *A2s and the robust *A3s. The *A1s, more similar to modern humans, nonetheless produced some outre dwarf and swimming forms in the *Before-West islands, some of which may have survived until just before historical times.

The more divergent *B group is famously distinguished by its manual claws, but was certainly not as savage as popular media usually depicts. Although larger and stronger than *As (including modern humans), *Bs also possessed large brains and made complex tools, including boats.

Genetic studies show that modern humans interbred with many local human subspecies when we expanded out of *North about 50 thousand years ago, at the beginning of the current interglacial period. Most of the genes passed on by these archaic humans have to do with disease resistance, but some physical features, such as claws, belly-horns, and dayglow hair may indeed be products of these interbreeding events. As well, local variation in magical ability is almost certain to, at least  in part, be a relic of those long-lost cousins.

More to come…some day. If you want to contribute or change something, feel free to make your suggestions.

(The *s indicate words I need to generate when we get to the linguistic state of the world building. If I can sustain this project long enough, I’ll be back.)

Snow Covers Branches

Snow covers branches

White as the clouds that made it.

Paper over Ink.

The Western Sky Is

The western sky is

Mediterranean and

The east is polar