SHE IS RIGHT AND SHE SOULD SAY IT!!!

YES!

What is it with guys saying “You had me until [insert the very first thing you said, which also happens to be the grand thesis of your argument]”?

Oh, I like her. And, Jarrod can fudge right off.

my problem with the ‘harry becomes lord of 2/¾/5 ancient noble houses’ trope is so unbelievably petty because its that fic writers don’t take it to the potential extreme. like, okay, you wanna make harry the bossest of bitches i get that, i understand, i have that urge too from time to time, but c’mon, be a little more creative about it please

so how about a fic where harry goes to gringotts after the fighting is all over to try to make peace with the goblin nation because this boy does not need more problems and after much hostility and some groveling and promises of future payments for damages caused a plucky goblin lass comes and shuffles harry into her tiny cube office to discuss the nature of his financial situation

(this is a grave insult among goblins. getting handled by a female, first of all, because they are supposedly less capable bankers, hello misogyny among other species, and because they consider anyone who needs help with his money to be lower than cave scum. harry doesn’t know about his. and if he did, he wouldn’t care because he does, desperately, need help)

and plucky goblin lass (who we will call PGL for short) brings out this MASSIVE tome of parchment and slams it down on her desk. a cloud of dust rises. harry sneezes and gets a terrible feeling. some of the parchment is mildewing. the stack is taller than his hand is wide. this can only end badly

PGL tells him that he’ll need to read the entire book to fully comprehend the new scope of his property and harry kind of weakly says “what??”

and it turns out that heyo, when the death eaters swore to follow voldemort with all their lives and souls and magic in their little racist hearts they actually swore a modified liege lord oath which also has the coincidental side effect of ceding all titles (and property connected to said titles) held to the lord in question too. haha how funny who knew

and that’s an ongoing thing. so voldemort was the de facto head of two dozen magical houses at the beginning of the war and he just picked up more as he gained more followers and he probably could have just voted himself and his crew into every position of the government and run the country like that if he cared to do it but voldemort was not about dat political life. he wanted change and he wanted it now. he wanted to MAKE AMERICA MAGICAL BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN. so he started a civil war and just never informed his loyal death eaters of that little fact because they didn’t need to know.

and you might think that gringotts vaults are tied into bloodlines but they’re really not. the malfoy family vault belongs to whoever is the current head of the malfoy family. normally, that’s a malfoy and his malfoy spawn becomes the next head and so it passes through the family, accumulating inherited wealth. it was a working system until voldemort got involved and exploited the ever-living hell out of it.

now this all becomes harry’s problem because it turns out that Right of Conquest is an actual thing. what was voldemort’s is now his and voldemort has has the time to accumulate A Metric Fuck Ton of stuff.

also connected to titles are votes in the wizengamot. and whoo boy, this is where harry’s problem becomes really really really problematic. because the noble families squabble over those votes like children, hoarding them and passing them down, occasionally trading them for advantageous marriages and such, but mostly jealously guarding them like the politcal gold they are. it’s such a bitterly tight-fisted market that any one family has ~maybe~ three or  four votes.

and now harry bloody potter has a hundred of the things and a completely unintentional stranglehold on the government. whoops

and then hermione would shotput harry straight into the wizengamot against his protests and things would become so hilarious i just

some jerkass attempts to increase his own salary for doing basically nothing

“how about no,” harry and his hundred votes say.

somebody attempts to tighten restrictions on where magical creatures like vampires and werewolves can work

“how about no.” harry crosses his arms. “actually, how about we repeal those bullshit laws already in place that make it almost impossible for werewolves to get a job right now, hmmmm? and how about we put something in place to catch abusive owners of house elves? and make sure they get paid? and vacation days? and healthcare? actually how about we get healthcare for EVERYBODY HOW ABOUT T H A T?”

ten generations of purebloods cry out in horror. look upon him ye mighty and despair.

the years after voldemort’s defeat don’t go down in history as The Golden Era. in fact, thanks to harry bloody potter (and some incessant nudging by hermione granger), they go down as The Decade of Frankly Astonishing Strides Toward Equality *cough* enforced by a semi-plutocracy.

(all thanks to a third tier plot never really explored by a would-be dictator YOU’RE ALL WELCOME)

Omg this is beautiful.

Harry as an accidental Lord Vetinari, oh my god.

Harry dealing with that all these pureblood families outright hate him. They were loyal to the Dark Lord, loyal to blood supremacy, loyal to their own enrichment and empowerment via the casting down of others, and now here’s Harry Potter, who opposes all of these things, who killed the Dark Lord and vanquished their dreams: their new Lord and Master.

And they can’t do anything about it because not only is it a binding magical contract but it’s their tradition, their law, their way of doing things, and they can’t attack Harry without shattering their own foundations in the process; they can’t even really convey their dislike of Harry because it would be disloyal to their own House.

So, all these pureblood wizards from old families who both hate Harry Potter and everything he stands for but also as a point of honor are perversely proud of him. He’s a wizard; he’s a half-blood, but he’s also the scion of a House of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, and he’s a powerful and talented wizard who vanquished the greatest Dark Lord history has ever seen. And he’s the Head of a dozen great and ancient wizarding Houses, he’s their Head of House so to speak, and they tie themselves in knots trying to figure out how to feel about him.

And the ones who don’t have a noble House, but only have their votes in the Wizengamot that Harry Potter owns, and you just don’t throw tradition out and start casting votes on your own inclination, well, they aren’t honor-bound and pride-bound to claim and embrace him, but they make their social standing from copying the greater Houses, and when their betters are quietly and gracefully saying “he’s a chaos-minded tyrant, but he’s our chaos-minded tyrant,” well, they buck up and agree.

Harry Potter, unlike Voldemort, isn’t lashing out at random or threatening to kill their children, so it’s sort of an improvement in many ways, even as they want to scream and throw things over all his reforms.

And after all, the old Houses value power. And Harry, above all, has power.

He goes down in pure-blood history as the Tyrant. The most powerful Lord their family lines have ever known. The man who reshaped their world. Elderly wizards tell their great-grandchildren long after his death that “I knew the Tyrant.” “I beheld him when my father took me to the Wizengamot, and he spoke to me.” “When I went to Hogwarts, he gave a guest lecture.” This far removed, at the end of their lives, the details of his rule are forgotten, the overturnings of tradition lost to history, and he is remembered with pride, even with adoration.

Their Tyrant. Their Lord. Harry Potter, the Greatest Wizard that Ever Lived.

(There are pictures of Harry at Hogwarts, at the Ministry, at St. Mungo’s, outside the Auror Office and in front of the Minister’s Office and in the entrance hall to the Wizengamot and in both the entrance hall and the Headmaster’s office at Hogwarts, and in every House he ruled. He wears stately robes and an impressive hat, gold jewelry, a beard (dark in some pictures, silver-shot in others, pure snowy white in still more, for he lived to be an old man himself, older than Dumbledore, older than Griselda Marchbanks, who lived to dance at his wedding), his glasses accentuating his brilliant green eyes, his scar more prominent in the pictures than it ever had been in life, surrounded with such trappings as the Sword of Gryffindor and the Elder Wand and a skull that purports to be that of Lord Voldemort.

Also at Hogwarts, in a back corridor next to a set of of dancing trolls and an overzealously combative knight, is a portrait commissioned by the executor of Harry Potter’s estate, in response to directions left in his will. This portrait depicts an eleven-year-old boy in brand-new wizard’s robes, with broken glasses and untidy hair that happens to cover his forehead. The portraits of his older selves go wrapped in the lofty dignity of the position he attained later in life; this child, filled with the untarnished wonder of the magical world, goes freely among the portraits with an anonymity Harry Potter never found in life, and loves it.)

GIVE ME THESE BOOKS.

Here’s how I’d end it: The sudden accumulation of power to Lord Potter means that the long delayed proposals to reform the Wizengamot into a fully elected body suddenly become very popular. Strange bedfellows are made between muggleborn reformers whove been campaigning for decades and pureblood plutocrats. Suddenly press elements ike the daily prophet discover a long held belief in representative democracy. And a popular movement rapidly forms. Lord Potter is a reform minded fellow himself, so is naturally onboard with such proposals, not having wanted to be in charge of anything anyway, so the laborious process of drafting the legislation begins. The question of franchise is a bit difficult, as noone had ever bothered to make a proper census of the wizarding population. But a compromise is reached that any individual who can perform an act of magic on rquest is allowed to vote. The purebloods are quite happy with this arrangment. They’re quite happy to surender their symblic status for a system where, as the richest, best connected and most politically experienced segment of the population they expect to be able to exercise more actual power. With great fanfare and ceremony the last session of the old Wizengamot is closed. And they wait for hte results delivered via floo and apparation from across the land. Harry Potter wins by a landslide. He seems just as surprised as everyone else by this development. Though later historians will debate whether he really was. His victory is attributed to his personal celebrity and popular among the younger and muggle born voters. Also the, seemingly overlooked minor detail, that “individuals able to demonstrate magic” does not specify those individuals have to be human. House elves do not forget their friends.

Okay, but @akaltyn is basically describing how the English parliament passed the Reform Act 1832 which was the first major expansion of voting rights in England. All it’s missing is the king threatening to create a hundred more Whig-leaning peers to get the bill out of the House of Lords.

@deadcatwithaflamethrower HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!! This is pure gold!

It got better.

English is weird

John McWhorter, The Week, December 20, 2015

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do nonspeakers saddled with learning it. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a spelling bee. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.

Even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. Our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels “normal” only until you get a sense of what normal really is.

There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian. If you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find Frisian more like German, which it is.

We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s we who are odd: Almost all European languages belong to one family–Indo-European–and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders.

More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third-person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talks–why? The present-tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult?

Why is our language so eccentric? Just what is this thing we’re speaking, and what happened to make it this way?

English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Old English is so unlike the modern version that it’s a stretch to think of them as the same language. Hwæt, we gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon–does that really mean “So, we Spear-Danes have heard of the tribe-kings’ glory in days of yore”? Icelanders can still read similar stories written in the Old Norse ancestor of their language 1,000 years ago, and yet, to the untrained English-speaker’s eye, Beowulf might as well be in Turkish.

The first thing that got us from there to here was the fact that when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (and also Frisians) brought Germanic speech to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke Celtic languages–today represented by Welsh and Irish, and Breton across the Channel in France. The Celts were subjugated but survived, and since there were only about 250,000 Germanic invaders, very quickly most of the people speaking Old English were Celts.

Crucially, their own Celtic was quite unlike English. For one thing, the verb came first (came first the verb). Also, they had an odd construction with the verb do: They used it to form a question, to make a sentence negative, and even just as a kind of seasoning before any verb. Do you walk? I do not walk. I do walk. That looks familiar now because the Celts started doing it in their rendition of English. But before that, such sentences would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker–as they would today in just about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones.

At this date there is no documented language on Earth beyond Celtic and English that uses do in just this way. Thus English’s weirdness began with its transformation in the mouths of people more at home with vastly different tongues. We’re still talking like them, and in ways we’d never think of. When saying “eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” have you ever felt like you were kind of counting? Well, you are–in Celtic numbers, chewed up over time but recognizably descended from the ones rural Britishers used when counting animals and playing games. “Hickory, dickory, dock”–what in the world do those words mean? Well, here’s a clue: hovera, dovera, dick were eight, nine, and ten in that same Celtic counting list.

The second thing that happened was that yet more Germanic-speakers came across the sea meaning business. This wave began in the 9th century, and this time the invaders were speaking another Germanic offshoot, Old Norse. But they didn’t impose their language. Instead, they married local women and switched to English. However, they were adults and, as a rule, adults don’t pick up new languages easily, especially not in oral societies. There was no such thing as school, and no media. Learning a new language meant listening hard and trying your best.

As long as the invaders got their meaning across, that was fine. But you can do that with a highly approximate rendition of a language–the legibility of the Frisian sentence you just read proves as much. So the Scandinavians did more or less what we would expect: They spoke bad Old English. Their kids heard as much of that as they did real Old English. Life went on, and pretty soon their bad Old English was real English, and here we are today: The Norse made English easier.

I should make a qualification here. In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language easier than another one. But some languages plainly jangle with more bells and whistles than others. If someone were told he had a year to get as good at either Russian or Hebrew as possible, and would lose a fingernail for every mistake he made during a three-minute test of his competence, only the masochist would choose Russian–unless he already happened to speak a language related to it. In that sense, English is “easier” than other Germanic languages, and it’s because of those Vikings.

Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language–but the Scandinavians didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once lovely conjugation system: Hence the lonely third-person singular -s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff.

They also left their mark on English grammar. Blissfully, it is becoming rare to be taught that it is wrong to say Which town do you come from?–ending with the preposition instead of laboriously squeezing it before the wh-word to make From which town do you come? In English, sentences with “dangling prepositions” are perfectly natural and clear and harm no one. Yet there is a wet-fish issue with them, too: Normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way. Every now and then a language allows it: an indigenous one in Mexico, another in Liberia. But that’s it. Overall, it’s an oddity. Yet, wouldn’t you know, it’s a construction that Old Norse also happened to permit (and that modern Danish retains).

We can display all these bizarre Norse influences in a single sentence. Say That’s the man you walk in with, and it’s odd because (1) the has no specifically masculine form to match man, (2) there’s no ending on walk, and (3) you don’t say in with whom you walk. All that strangeness is because of what Scandinavian Vikings did to good old English back in the day.

Finally, as if all this weren’t enough, English got hit by a fire-hose spray of words from yet more languages. After the Norse came the French. The Normans–descended from the same Vikings, as it happens–conquered England and ruled for several centuries, and before long, English had picked up 10,000 new words. Then, starting in the 16th century, educated Anglophones began to develop English as a vehicle for sophisticated writing, and it became fashionable to cherry-pick words from Latin to lend the language a more elevated tone.

It was thanks to this influx from French and Latin (it’s often hard to tell which was the original source of a given word) that English acquired the likes of crucified, fundamental, definition, and conclusion. These words feel sufficiently English to us today, but when they were new, many persons of letters in the 1500s (and beyond) considered them irritatingly pretentious and intrusive, as indeed they would have found the phrase “irritatingly pretentious and intrusive.” There were even writerly sorts who proposed native English replacements for those lofty Latinates, and it’s hard not to yearn for some of these: In place of crucified, fundamental, definition, and conclusion, how about crossed, groundwrought, saywhat, and endsay?

But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin–note how one imagines posture improving with each level: Kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.

Then there are doublets, less dramatic than triplets but fun nevertheless, such as the English/French pairs begin/commence and want/desire. Especially noteworthy here are the culinary transformations: We kill a cow or a pig (English) to yield beef or pork (French). Why? Well, generally in Norman England, English-speaking laborers did the slaughtering for moneyed French speakers at the table. The different ways of referring to meat depended on one’s place in the scheme of things, and those class distinctions have carried down to us in discreet form today.

The multiple influxes of foreign vocabulary partly explain the striking fact that English words can trace to so many different sources–often several within the same sentence. The very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great many languages are much duller. The typical word comes from, well, an earlier version of that same word and there it is. The study of etymology holds little interest for, say, Arabic speakers.

To be fair, mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon worldwide, but English’s hybridity is high on the scale compared with most European languages. The previous sentence, for example, is a riot of words from Old English, Old Norse, French, and Latin. Greek is another element: In an alternate universe, we would call photographs “lightwriting.”

Because of this fire-hose spray, we English speakers also have to contend with two different ways of accenting words. Clip on a suffix to the word wonder, and you get wonderful. But–clip an ending to the word modern and the ending pulls the accent along with it: MO-dern, but mo-DERN-ity, not MO-dern-ity. That doesn’t happen with WON-der and WON-der-ful, or CHEER-y and CHEER-i-ly. But it does happen with PER-sonal, person-AL-ity.

What’s the difference? It’s that -ful and -ly are Germanic endings, while -ity came in with French. French and Latin endings pull the accent closer–TEM-pest, tem-PEST-uous–while Germanic ones leave the accent alone. One never notices such a thing, but it’s one way this “simple” language is actually not so.

Thus English is indeed an odd language, and its spelling is only the beginning of it. What English does have on other tongues is that it is deeply peculiar in the structural sense. And it became peculiar because of the slings and arrows–as well as caprices–of outrageous history.

Celtic isn’t a language but most of this is correct. (Celtic is a language family. The only one I currently speak is Irish, which is haon, do, tre ceathair, which sounds nothing like eeny meeny miney moe. I have no idea what this essay refers to there.)

The thesis of the article would imply Common Brittonic, although that still throws weirdness on anything other than “eeny” to “oinos” (oinos, dau, tris, petwar, pempe, swex, sextan, oxta, nowan, dekan). 

I’m glad to have read it, though, because it’s the first time someone’s actually made the connections to Common Brittonic and to Old Norse as to why some of the Weirdnesses we have exist! They mostly focus on the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman. 

Wait wait I might actually have an answer

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore

Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude

But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work

This is the version we know and love today

BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore

If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found

To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit

The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior

Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies

So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written

Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah

There’s a good chance it maybe did cross his mind

@old-gods-and-chill LOOK AT THIS THAT’S SO COOL

Not only all that, but Tolkien was also working within a frame narrative that he wasn’t the real author, but a translator of older manuscripts; so, in-universe, the published The Hobbit isn’t actually Bilbo’s book, but rather Tolkien’s copy of an older copy of an older copy of an older copy of Bilbo’s book. So when errors and anachronisms came up, he would leave them there instead of fixing them, and he may have even put some in intentionally; what we’re supposed to get from the “Christmas tree” bit is that the first scribe to translate the book from Westroni to English couldn’t come up with an accurate analogue for whatever hobbits do at midwinter.

Yes. Another example of tolkien doing this is him using, for instance, Old High Gothic to represent Rohirric - not because the people of Rohan actually spoke that language, but because Old High Gothic had the same relationship with English that Rohirric had with Westron (Which is the Common Language spoken in the West of Middle-Earth). There’s tons of that stuff in the book.

Like, Merry and Pippin’s real names (In Westron) are Kalimac Brandagamba and Razanur Tûk, respectively (to pick just one example of this). Tolkien changed their names in English to names which would give us English-speakers the same kind of feeling as those names would to a Westron-speaker. Lord of the Rings is so much deeper than most readers realise.

tolkein’s entire oevre is just one epic in-joke with the oxford linguistics department imo

#i thought it was old english representing rohirric but i have read lotr one (1) time so

No that’s right! The basic point still stands and is neat but a lot of Rohirric names are translated as Old English, like Theodred and Eorl and so on. Another interesting thing is that he sometimes modernized them to modern English because, apparently, those names were intelligible to Westron speakers, either because Gondorians knew them or because the Hobbits recognized them from their dialects (they once lived near the Rohirrim and borrowed a bunch of words, including their name for themselves). Here’s a good link about it from Tolkien Gateway, it’s SUPER cool. 

Also if I correctly recall (it’s been a while so I might not) there was a draft of TTT where Tolkien intended for Theoden to greet Our Heroes in Old English. This was in The Treason of Isengard and I have a very distinct memory of reading it at about fifteen and being completely floored and baffled by the fact that he just…wrote an entire speech in Old English for Theoden to say. Like, can you even believe. I absolutely love how much flavor and care he put into the languages in LOTR.

#other than in respect of certain blind spots #the answer to ‘did tolkien even think about this’ #is almost always ‘the man spent twenty years overthinking it' #and it’s either a moving philosophical reflection or a dumb joke he put in to annoy cs lewis (via @simaethae)