Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 81

A modest spell-system

Magic spells have always bothered me. If you point a wand and say “blah!” what happens? What happens if you say “yrplaq!”? Maybe there’s a way to systematize this.

Here are the 100 most common concepts in languages (tell me if you know a better list)

And here are the most common phonemes in world languages (again, tell me if you disagree)

i=to, e=from, ɛ=in, iː=of, ə=out

a=of, ɔ=not, aː=up

o=and, u=or, uː=if

 

p=be, b=do, m=present, f=person, v=then

t=have, d=get, s=take, z=other, r=now, ɾ=maybe, l=here, n=see, n̪=very ʃ=use, ʒ=work, t̪=way, d̪=give

k=come, g=go, w=like, j=know, ŋ=will, ɲ=good,

ʔ(glottal stop)=say, h=new, x=want

 

˦=question

˨=past

 

So for example, take out your wand (carved from human bone, of course), point at yourself, and say “pɔn!” (be+not+see). You’re invisible. Point it at your opponent and say “ɔn!” and they’re now blind. Point at yourself and say “gi[place name]” and teleport. Say “[Something]kil” and summon that thing. Use tones correctly and you can re-write the past or foresee the future. Easy!

There are more sounds, mapping to more unusual concepts. Thaumaturges either have to train themselves to pronounce weirder phonemes or cludge together complex concepts from simpler building blocks.

 

Works cited:

http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/...

https://jacobsonb.wordpress.com/2011/...

http://phoible.org/parameters

The Death of Ydain, interview with Sommer Nectarhoff

I had an interesting email conversation with Sommer Nectarhoff, English major and author of The Book of Lokk. We’re talking about his Death of Ydain, a fantasy epic modeled on Le Morte d’Artur and written in Middle English.

Me: In what ways is the Death of Ydain like the Arthurian legends?

Sommer: Part of what makes the old Knights of the Round Table stories so awesome is just how strangely they foreign they are to us now. While we tend only to think of dragons and knights when we think of magic back then, there were all sorts of other things going on. For instance, one of my favorite Arthurian legends involves a knight traveling through the forest and coming across a fountain, but when he drinks from it a terrible storm comes and destroys the entire forest. Of course, it happens to be a magical fountain, and soon a king comes along whose lands were destroyed, and it is his duty to challenge whoever drinks from his fountain. In the Death of Ydain there is all sorts of strange, unexplained magic—the type of things that get dreamed up when tales are told and twisted for hundreds of years.

Me: How did you go about translating the book into Middle English?

Sommer: I didn’t translate the book into Middle English—I wrote it in Middle English! However, it’s not quite like Chaucer or Syr Mallory’s original “le Morte d’Arthur”. While the grammar and vocabulary I’ve used are based on the written language of the late 1400s (near the beginning of early Modern Shakespeare), I’ve used modernized spelling.

Me: What are some things you did in the Death of Ydain that you couldn’t do in Modern English?

I wouldn’t say that there are things I couldn’t do in the Death of Ydain because of the language itself, but rather because of the way language was spoken and written at the time I was trying to emulate. People were still experimenting with English prose, and writers like Mallory relied more on exposition than dialogue. And while there was certainly plenty of brutality in their writing, it was taken much more nonchalantly, and there was certainly very little graphic sex. But because of this I couldn’t remain true to the source materials while also going for the “grim-dark” tone we see today in a lot of contemporary fantasy. For this reason, while still being pretty complicated, mature, and high-brow, the Death of Ydain is in general a lot more of a fun book than a dark one.

Me: Will it be difficult for Modern English speakers to understand?

Sommer: Not at all! I wrote the Death of Ydain because after extensively reading old Arthurian legends in a non-academic setting I absolutely loved them. The way language was used back then—while maybe not meant to be this way at the time—is so fun in itself to read as a modern fantasy-lover. There are definitely quirks to the grammar and word usage, but for any archaisms I’ve included a glossary in the back, so that if a knight calls someone a “doted varlet” you’ll know he means “idiot servant,” or if a giant sings in “dulcet” tones you’ll know he has a particularly sweet voice.

Tyrannosaur Blog-splosion!

…has begun

Josh Vogt’s Never Have Never Will interview with me

I would not want to meet Trals Scarback. I wrote him to be a believable Conan-the-Barbarian-type genius/murder-machine, which means he’s pretty much got to be a sociopath.

Matt Sheean’s How Dinosaurs can fix your Addiction to Power

Riding a tyrannosaurus sure sounds cool, but I wouldn’t want to actually do it.

 I will be adding to the list as it grows

The Contsansa Rus’

Europe on the eve of the Mongol conquest

In 1223, the Mongols invaded the lands of the Kievan Rus. In our timeline, they migrated north, eventually founding the Grand Duchy of Moscow. But what if they’d gone south?

Eastern Slavs (speaking a language ancestral to modern Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian) would have found the Balkans inhabited by southern-Slavic-speaking Bulgarians and Serbians, both autonomous after the conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the Fourth Crusade, and both adhering to the same brand of Eastern Orthodox Christianity as the Kievan refugees. By the time the Greek-speaking Byzantines kicked out the Latins, they would find a larger, more powerful state to the north, pushing up against Hungary to the west and the Mongol successors like the Nogai to the east.

Whether the Southern/Eastern Slavs would have remained united is another question. If not, and perhaps even if so, their states would have fallen to the Ottoman Empire. We might at most end up with a Slavic- rather than Romance-speaking country north of the Danube.

The biggest changes would occur in the North, where no Grand Duchy of Muscovy forms. Instead, Northern Slavs speaking a language related to Polish, German-speakers, Baltic-speakers, and Finno-Ugric speakers would compete with Turkic-speakers like the Kipchaks. We’d probably get lots of little principalities, perhaps coalescing in the 1500s into something like Great Lithuania in the west and a federation of Christianized Kipchaks or Tatars in the East. In the 16oos, these people would be well placed to begin eastward empire-building.

The Never Have, Never Will Interview with author Daniel Bensen

The Tyrannosaur Queen blog-splosion begins now!

Head on over to Josh Vogt‘s blog, where he has up a “Never Have, Never Will” interview with me.

I’m pleased to have author Daniel Bensen on the blog today, giving his answers to the Never Have, Never will interview! Daniel talks about capes, sociopaths, dinosaurs, and his avoidance of damp places.

Let’s jump on in:

Is there a story you’ve written that will never see the light of day? Why would you deprive us of this genius?

Actually I think everything I’ve written is out there somewhere, all the way back to the pre-internet event horizon when I was in middle school.

What’s a story you’ve never written, but always wanted to?

I’ve never written a space opera. I just can’t figure out how to get the capes to billow properly in a vacuum.

And it only goes downhill from there.

Read on

Live and Let Live

“There,” Taiwo points into the northern sky and my vision zooms and enhances until I can see the two black specks circling like vultures.

Drones.

“Which one is ours?” I ask.

“Who knows?” Taiwo says. “Does it matter?”

Of course it matters. We’re the rightful government of Nigeria, and the people who programmed the other drone are a bunch of apocalypse-cultists. They haven’t made any advances into our territory for months, but then again, we haven’t won back any land from them in just as long. I’m here to figure out why.

A flash in my enhanced vision. A seconds later, the sound of gun-fire reaches my ears. “They’re engaging,” says Taiwo.

“Good,” I say, “maybe we will actually see some progress in this war.”

The drones swoop and dive around each other like mating falcons, firing their weapons wildly…and doing no damage to each other whatsoever.

“What are they doing?” I say. “Taiwo, aren’t they programmed to conserve ammunition?What purpose does this display serve?”

“Display exactly, sir. The drones are showing each other how strong they are. How they can afford to—”

“To waste bullets?” I turn to face Taiwo, face growing hot. “Damn it, man, this is war, not a damn aerial choreography! Tell our drone to attack.”

“I have, sir,” says Taiwo, “but its tactical programming obviously judges the situation to be too risky for full assault. It’s easier to manufacture new bullets than new drones, after all. A more sustainable behavior than attack is peaceful display and standoff. The enemy drone has obviously reached the same conclusion.”

I sift through the jargon. “You’re telling me that our drones and theirs are colluding with each other?”

“They can’t talk to each other,” says Taiwo. “They’ve just…fallen into equilibrium with each other. And that equilibrium is peace? Isn’t it wonderful?”

“No,” I say. “We don’t want peace if it means an endless standoff against the Cultists while both sides waste millions on keeping a bunch of pacifist drones in the air.”

“Don’t think of it as a waste,” says Taiwo. “Think of it as taxes. You’re paying for someone to keep the peace.”

“What?” I splutter. “Paying who?”

I should have kept my eyes on the drones. By the time I hear their rotors, it’s too late. They’ve already taken up their positions, flanking Taiwo, guns pointed at me. “Well,” says the programmer, “you can start by paying me.”

The End of all Podcasts

So you may have noticed that I’m not doing podcasts any more.

I made the decision back in the spring, where getting up before my baby daughter to record yet another conversation with someone in North America actually made me sick. It wasn’t the guest; he was great and every understanding of my unstable mental state before the coffee kicked in. It’s just I spent the next week throwing up. Putting together the podcast was just unhealthy.

And it’s not just health. I love talking to people about science fiction,but I love actually creating science fiction more. When my schedule got tighter, I had to prioritize.

So, I worked through my queue of podcasts, the last of which, Genre with Mike Underwood, I posted two weeks ago. I don’t think I can top the conversation, so I’m going to let that one stand as my last podcast.

So now what are you going to do? Well, you can go back and listen to the over 100 podcasts in the archive. Starting with my favorites:

Speculative Philosophy with Eric Schwitzgebel
Polishing your Shmoo with Tex Thompson
Narrative Technology with Turbofanatic
Taking criticism with Melissa Walshe
Outlining with Simon Roy

Also, you might enjoy some of the things I’ll be doing with my new-found free time. Expect to see:

More art
Better-written wonderful awful ideas like the (relatively) acclaimed Fellow Tetrapod and Consider the Neanderthal
A wildly entertaining newsletter
A whole goddamn book coming out in January

So goodbye for now, and thanks again for listening.

 

The Post-Humans

So I’ve been thinking about future human evolution…

Like most people, Baram’s life began with intensive surgery.

It was not a Cesarean section. The ova and spermatozoon that would become Baran had been extracted from his parents six moths previously and brought to term in a uterine replicator. When the generic machine could no longer keep the fetus alive, he was decanted and subjected to his first personally-tailored medical procedure. He was, in other words, born.

“Happy birthday, son,” whispered Welang, Baram’s father. He clasped hands with Baram’s mother and haptic sensors conveyed impulses from the prosthetic fingers to Welang’s brain. A tiny 3D printer in that brain began to manufacture the hormones associated with love and affection.

The surgeons working on Baram also had prosthetic fingers and prosthetic training modules, prosthetic executive overrides to make sure their decisions were good, and prosthetic empathy shunts so they could simulate human conversation. They would have been most offended if told they were not human, and disagreed with as much force and eloquence as their software could manage.

Baram’s father, too, would have taken umbrage at the suggestion that he was but a weak and stupid scrap of flesh floating in a mechanical shell. That the shell had taken over so much of his basic mental and physical functions that it had somehow become him.

Ridiculous. Those were the ravings of a Luddite cultist. The sort of monster who would deny their child such necessities as eye glasses or personality optimization. So what if his biological brain was only half the size of a 21st century pre-human’s? He did not  dwell in his brain any more than that pre-human kept their soul in their mitochondria.

To be human was to be a tool-user, and humans had never had a more intimate connection with their tools. Anyway, if Weilang were to do the unthinkable and leave his son out naked in the elements, Baram would only die slightly sooner than a pre-human infant. If you wanted raw survival skill in the absence of tools, you found a cockroach.

So when the surgeons placed the infant Baram in his first shell, great joy registered upon his father’s mental state monitor. The shell lay still for a moment, forging synaptic links, initializing. calibrating. Then it opened its eyes and wailed.

Weilang could not be happier. This was because no emotion of greater intensity could be safely manufactured.

Consider the Neanderthal 2:2

(This is part 2 of the story. Click here for Part 1)

Death Head is only a child, but it is already clear she will be taller than her age-mates when she grows. Thinner, too. And, according to everyone but her father, Red Knife, Death Head will be more useless.

Death Head was born retarded from the corpse of her mother, the infant’s bulging skull plugging a narrow birth canal. Her father managed to save her with a knife of flint he knapped specially for the purpose, earning names for both himself and his hybrid daughter.

The baby was slower than the others, her hands unable to grasp, her eyes blank. Hide a piece of meat behind your back and a normal infant would peer around you, looking for it. Death Head would just gape at you, as if shocked you’d made the object vanish. Point out a bird’s nest in a tree and she wouldn’t even be able to follow your finger to find it, let alone climb the tree to retrieve the eggs.

Recently, though, Death Head had started to do something strange when she called.

All of the children squat around the fire, as well as about half the adults. Some are men fallen out of practice on the hunt, but most are the women they have stolen on raids, who do not know the calls of this camp. Teaching them is everyone’s responsibility, and who better than a man fresh from the hunt?

Bevwm starts simple, with a call that comes naturally to everyone.

“Āāy!”

Even the foreign wives look around for the hyena.

Klèy jumps out from the shadows beyond the camp-fire, skins piled over her shoulders so her back is hunched, severed yellow fangs raised in her hands, giggling eerily.

“Āāy!” calls Bevwm again, and makes the signs with his hands: coming-together-in-defense. There is a call for that sign, but at the moment it escapes Bevwm’s memory. He should really have studied before beginning the class: If menaced by hyenas, the camp should come together and defend each-other.

Bevwn repeats the lesson, this time to the accompaniment of two hunters, one atop the shoulders of another, both wrapped in dark wooly skins. The one on top holds his arms like curved tusks, while his partner stumps forward, his hands pressed together and upraised.

“Fwāām!” calls Bevwm, and everyone scatters to allow the mammoth its right of way.

Next, a pack of hunters panting in sleek gray pelts: “ààw!”

The men pick up branches and spears, while the women help the children climb trees. Death head loses her grip on her branch and falls, knocking over the two children under her. In a real wolf-attack, the three of them would be dead.

Furious, Bevwm closes on Death Head, hand lifted to punish her.

She turns, eyes flashing in the firelight, signing no, no, no. “Aa!” she says.

Bevwm stops. He doesn’t know that call.

Death Head repeats herself, mixing sign and call: No “aa-aa.” No “aa-aa” from “Bevwm. Bevwm drăăw” good. Begging. “Glááng?”

Bevwm doesn’t understand. This “aa-aa” sounds like the word for “danger from hyena,” “danger from wolves,” and “danger from mammoth,” but is none of them. It is all of them. It means, he sees, “danger.”

“Bevwm aa-aa drăăw,” says Death Head, pointing to herself. “You teach me about danger.”

Once, Death Head’s father created a new type of knife. Now his daughter is creating a new type of call.

No, he signs, kneeling by the girl. He cringes as if in death, taps her bulging forehead, and flicks his fingers out from his mouth. “Drăăw.” He says, palms up.

What he means is: “Teach me, please?”

Consider the Neanderthal 1:2

The following are some musings the origins of combinatorial language, based on as well as my experience teaching English as a second language.

Consider the Neanderthal. He is 178cm tall and 81kg in weight, stocky and powerful, with a mane of shaggy blond hair and beard covering a long, lemon-shaped skull. Compared to the mass of his body, his brain is about the same size as that of a modern human. Although rather differently optimized.

Bevwm is a man of impeccable instinct. He can track a caribou, spear it, dress the corpse, and cook the meat, all without thinking. None of the tasks of a lone hunt require much conscious consideration. But now, Bevwm is returning to camp and he is struggling to remember his calls.

He counts them out on his fingers and toes. Vwĕĕ: There is an edible herb. Tá’: There is a flock of ducks. Āāy: Beware the hyenas. His people have thousands of such calls, but while Bevwm can remember all most common ways to point out danger and opportunity out on the tundra, he is less confident about his camp.

Camp is complicated. Camp is full of people. Broad-shouldered, heavy-browed, chinless, devious people. And the first thing they do when he returns home with his meat is to make demands of him.

“Bevwm,” he calls when the dogs start barking.

“Klèy’.” Klèy’ herself melts out of the leafy shadows. “Bevwm,” she calls, more quietly this time, and gives a growled call: “drăăw.”

Bevwm squints, remembering “drăă,” the call for finding roots that could be edible after you pound them. Also there “trăăw,” the call for packing up camp quickly because raiders are coming.

“Trăăw?” he says, knuckles going white on his spear.

Klèy slashes her hands in the “no” sign and calls again. “Drăăw!” She puts down her spear so can sign as well as call, flicking fingers from her mouth to his eyes in a gesture Bevwm recognizes as teach.

“Drăăw” means giving a formal lesson, he now recalls, and the thought makes Bevwm’s shoulders droop with weariness.

Holding his palms out to her, Bevwm groans on a rising, nasal tone: “Glááng?” He wants to know if he can beg out of this chore.

Klèy pounds a fist into her hand. The response is short, nasal, definite. “Fem!” Which means, he shouldn’t do what he suggested.

There’s no getting out of the chore. Bevwm is tonight’s designated teacher. He slumps under his meat and trudges home.

Come back Monday for the rest of the story