Personal Blog maintained for archive purposes. This is still my main because I can't switch it to become a sideblog. Go to @riversidewings for my current Tumblr presence, please.
In an AU cyberpunk Seattle, River Eginian is a burned out Armenian-American veteran trying to find a new direction for her life. Her wife Isawa Kasu is a fiercely independent Japanese cyberneticist and wayward heir to a complicated legacy. Both are trying to build home and belonging together. After the 2011 tsunami brings them back to Japan, will they still find what they seek?
I’ve got character bios, a pitch deck, a synopsis, a treatment, and I’m now 5000 words into writing a screenplay for a short film called A Sword Beside Her, based on my 2022 novel Confluence: A Person-Shaped Story. We know River and Kasu as the blade doll and Wielder– but how did they begin?
In the wake of the events of Confluence: A Person-Shaped Story, River faced an uphill battle in recovering her health and strength, and had to find new ways of wholeness, even as life went on.
An affirming bit of body art, and a trip across the bay to Sendai, changes things unexpectedly. And meanwhile, at Keyaki Solutions, Zee and Akiko know things.
Folks, this is Nyri. It’s been a hard day today in Shinto in the anglosphere. Zoe and I recorded an announcement to discuss our views on what’s happening. Please give it a listen.
Patrons’ update for the tail end of April is up! Book progress, podcast progress, new reviews, and more. Follow the link to read on: https://www.patreon.com/posts/82317745
I learned to speak Chinese with a Dongbei accent because I used to live not far from the OP (which definitely gets me weird looks as a white lady originally from Kansas.) Native Mandarin speakers are often SO confused by my accent. But yes…Taiwanese speakers do sound really melodic and beautiful. And I sound like I’m angry shouting all the time.
In Germany and Austria, the Swiss are well-known for speaking Scweizerdeutsch. For reasons unknown, they use diminutive forms of a ton of nouns. The result is that Swiss people speaking German sound like if you found a city in Appalachia where it was 100% normal to baby-talk to everyone, all the time.
On the flip side, no one can understand a goddamn thing coming out of a Viennese person’s mouth.
The dialect variance within the German language is insane at times
This is not exactly a new thing tho - here have a video from 1973 about it:
Beautiful addition, thank you so much!!
Tags from thetimetravelinglady
[id #linguistics, #I’ll never forgive Quebec for what they did to French #also Louisiana end id]
Descendants of the original French settlers, Acadians hold their own dialect, traditions and cultural identity. At one point, British forces expelled them from Eastern Canada (including killing, separating families and burning their homes) and so there was a diaspora - even after the expulsion was officially over, many Acadians had trouble finding a place they felt welcome, and many settled in Louisiana. Cajun is heavily influenced by the Acadian roots!
Even today Acadians face discrimination because of their dialect a,d because of the Anglephone majority in Atlantic Canada. Even though New Burnswick (current home to a majority of Acadians) is officially bilingual, outside of select communities, it is difficult to function without at least conversational English. There have even been political parties running on platforms that included lowering accessibility to services in French.
There’s thing about Japanese television that people don’t realize: everything is subtitled. Why? Because there are some very, very difficult to understand dialects in Japan. Dialects that are so difficult to understand that most people in Japan outside of that region can’t understand them.
For instance there is Tohoku-ben, from the Tohoku region. I actually lived there for a while and acquired some of it. Which is a pain in the ass because now I tend to sound like a rural, backwater Scottish sheep farmer to normal Japanese people if they can understand me at all. And I now live in Shikoku, which has a fairly odd dialect as well, although it’s sometimes called ‘princess dialect’ because it sounds old fashioned and a bit odd, like some out of time princess of yore.
Tokyo dialect is what’s taught to foreigners, because it’s the standardized dialect. But it’s why all of Japanese tv is hard subbed most of the time; the damn country can’t understand itself if someone travels for 50 km half the time, let alone the other side of the tiny nation.
And yes, this has caused issues with my husband thinking I don’t understand Japanese at times. The issue is that trying to speak is a lot more difficult that understanding, so I get what’s he’s saying, but I have to mentally take time to make sure I respond in a way he understands, because just switching my brain to ‘Japanese’ doesn’t work because of some of the Japanese I’ve learned that he doesn’t understand. And it doesn’t help that I’ve been acquiring a lot of Japanese from old women who speak a dying form of Japanese that is becoming difficult for people to understand these days.
I mean, this is why I made a point of writing a deuteragonist in Confluence who speaks Tohoku-ben (specifically, the Ishinomaki “flavor” of Miyagi-ben) out of spite, because the Tohoku dialects aren’t just rural, because of politics dating back to the Boshin War of 1868, they’ve actively been getting coded in pop culture for decades as “that backwards language that idiot traitor hicks speak.” My Unseen Japan colleague Noah Oskow wrote a really good treatment of the topic here: https://unseenjapan.com/zuzu-ben-japan-northern-dialects/
In Confluence: A Person-Shaped Story, Isawa Kasu is a daughter of privilege and power in the Tohoku region. She’s a fictional daughter of a real and very old warrior family that once ruled Tohoku in the Kamakura era after the defeat of the Northern Fujiwara. She’s a cybernetics engineer, a CEO, and a trans lesbian. She lived in the US for many years, and speaks excellent English, as well as some Western Armenian which she learned from her wife. And because she was raised by her father to be his heir apparent– and was sent away for her education, first to Tokyo and then to Nagoya, in order (in his words) to be “civilized”– she clung that much more stubbornly to her mother’s Miyagi dialect. She can speak Standard Japanese just fine, but when we see her at home with her wife River, she speaks Miyagi-ben most of the time that she’s not speaking English.
I am trying to consciously go against the grain, in writing someone who’s the antithesis of a very rampant stereotype in Japanese pop culture.
…and I have to say, in writing her, I am enjoying the range of flexing my muscles in Miyagi-ben, from ohayou degansu, omesan (G'mornin’, darlin’.) to Areyaa, okatsuee. Azugu wa kuree pijon shageji seddee deneenoga (Well that’s mighty strange. Ain’t that a clay pigeon setup over yonder?)
