Arts by сажа

Any W.I.T.C.H girlies still alive out there?

I do think of it from time to time, yeah

Another favorite fairy, this time my number one fav!! I had a W.I.T.C.H. obsession as a kid (books/comics only, I could never get past how meh the tv show style was in comparison so I never watched it ^^;;) and Will was always my fav girl! Taranee was a close second though ♡

them witches

ao3 turns 15 today

reblog if youre older than ao3

(there's a lot of people asking about this, but the legal age to use social media is 13, except in few countries. so yes, there are people here under 15)

Northern light cats ₊⊹✨｡⋆

Binding force⋆✦🌟₊˚⊹ …wallpaper LINK! ^o^

Binding force⋆✦🌟₊˚⊹ …wallpaper LINK! ^o^

I think it's funny that in French the word for "unicorn" is "licorne" because:

Before any anglophones get on the French people's case on this, consider for a second what y'all did when you reanalyzed the Spanish "el lagarto" ("the lizard") as "alligator."

Reanalysis is fun.

Oh yeah, everybody does this*. Another English example is "apron", which was once "napron" until we reanalyzed the initial N as part of the indefinite article (a napron -> an apron).

A fun one in Arabic is the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Quite understandably, Arabic speakers heard the initial "Al" and thought "ah yes, the ubiquitous definite article" and Alexandria became al-’Iskandariyya.

In the opposite direction, Spanish adopted hundreds of Arabic words during the Middle Ages due to Andalusian/Islamic influence, and there are very few Spanish words that start with al- that aren't of Arabic origin (and in fact, many words that start with A without being followed by an L, as in about half of cases in Arabic the L in "al-" is elided).

Reanalysis occurs in many other places besides article-noun combos, of course, but it's an extremely common case.

*citation needed, but reanalysis is extremely common

Oh, this actually explains something I'd just attributed to a quirk of sequence constraints or something; why Alexander is realized as Iskander/Iskandar in Arabic! It makes sense to analyze it as al-Iskander in Arabic!

Same thing happened with the word alchemy! Started out as the Arab term "al-kimiya", and when it was transported to Europe, it became "alchemy". This is actually really interesting, because as the term evolved more, it became "chemistry", effectively un-reanalyzing the word!

Oh actually there's another layer of fun there: the Arabic "al-kimiya" is actually a loan of the Ancient Greek χῠμείᾱ (khumeíā), which was used to refer to the art of alloying metals. Arabic borrowed a lot of Greek terminology owing to Arabic translations of Greek classics (many of which were actually lost in Europe until they were retranslated from Arabic). So, yeah, the Greek khumeíā made a round trip through Arabic, then into medieval Latin as "alchemia," and from there we eventually do get chemistry!

Not quite the same thing, but this reminded me of one of the funniest phenomena in the German language.

So, you may or may not know that x-rays were discovered by a guy called Röntgen (or Roentgen, though the ö is the proper spelling). Because of that, they're called "Röntgen rays" in German. Now, the thing is that in the German, the infinitive of a verb is always formed with an -en at the, so, for example, "to run" is "rennen" or "to sleep" is "schlafen." And because of that, it just so happened that the verb for performing x-rays became... "röntgen."

ich röntge, du röntgst, er/sie/es röntgt, wir röntgen, ihr röntgt, sie röntgen

In the X-rayed lab, straight röntgin it

Which is why the Japanese word for X-ray is レントゲン (rentogen)! When Meiji Japan sent "learning missions" overseas to gather wisdom and knowledge from the rest of the world, it was Germany that they chose for medicine! To this day, a lot of Japanese medical terminology comes from German, to the great confusion of English speakers in Japanese medical environments and Japanese speakers abroad.

You’re all gonna love this one

This f***er just out there quilting chocolate

“I don’t know how to reconcile that my favorite piece of media was made by someone awful.” Because they’re a shitty person who made something good. It’s not that rare of a phenomenon. Shitty people make good things everyday. A piece of art being made by a terrible person does not make its effect null and void and making good art does not redeem a terrible person. People who are irredeemably nasty can say something true and honest on occasion. To reevaluate a work after finding out more about the artist’s horrendous biases and actions and still find things that are honest and true even when consuming it through a critical lens, that is a beautiful thing. If the artist’s actions and words completely destroy it for you and distort the meaning you once found, it’s okay to feel a sense of mourning and loss at that.

This is not to say that you should continue to lavish social and financial capital on the artist because you enjoy their art but to say that enjoying art made by horrible people does not mean you are in some way unclean.

For the last goddamn time...

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.

Good grief....

Also, you don't have to like, delete it from existence. Keep a second document full of the Darlings. You never know when you'll need it later.

The Ancient Greek word for ship was ναῦς. The word is borderline obsolete in Modern Greek, except the majority of seafaring terms actually derive from it.

For example,

The common Modern Greek terms for ship are πλοίο (plío) and καράβι (karávi).

Πλοίο comes from the verb πλέω (pléo) which means “float and sail” and it is also etymologically Greek.

I mostly make this post for καράβι which I was convinced to this day that it was a loanword, perhaps from Turkish or Latin.

Today I learned that καράβι too is etymologically Greek, from Koine Greek καράβιον (karávion), from Ancient Greek κάραβος (kárabhos) which meant “prawn”.

A little stupid of me because even the modern Greek word for prawn is καραβίς (karavís) or more commonly now καραβίδα (karavíða) but somehow I never made the connection.

So once again Greeks had the exact word for ship but at some point in time they went nah fook that from now on we gonna call ships

✨Prawn-ions✨

Send me something to think about

baby elephants

(source)