I actually like cinnamon in some meats. Never tried it with pork, but why not?
And the sugar probably caramelises once you fry the bacon, so it's probably not as sweet as it might look like.
Che schifo.
Sorry for the gratuitous usage of Italian, but I don't think there's any English word or expression that accurately describes what I feel about it.
We had some pretty chilly nights the last weeks, in the 0~5°C range, so Siegfrieda is often asking to be covered. And by "asking" I mean: she stares me, scratching her blanket, and sometimes meowing, until I grab her blanket and cover her. It's a mix of cute and annoying, because she sometimes gets too hot so she leaves her blanket, only to ask again five minutes later.
And sometimes she finds smart ways to control her own temperature, like this:
She's also visibly happy when I go sleep - it's like she got a huge self-heating pillow (my body). I don't mind cuddling, so it's a win-win.
In the meantime, Kika (who gives no fucks about weather) reacted to the winter in a different way: she still hates cuddling, but she's clearly more needy. Her "mrrown-own?" = "pet me! pet me!" has become more frequent. I even left a chair near my desk, just for her - within my arm's reach.
The analogy is perfect IMO. And it goes deeper:
Typically when you're missing some micronutrient you tend to eat more, since your body assumes you'll eventually get enough of that micronutrient this way. But if you keep eating junk food all the time, no matter how much you eat, that nutrient won't be there; so you end overweight and malnourished at the same time.
I believe the same applies to information. The "information" we need is actually multiple things: we need cathartic things, thought-provoking things, info on the state of people we care about, useful info that directly improves our lives, info about the dangers and opportunities out there... we need all those things, and a lot more.
However our brains won't crave for all of them equally. For example, cathartic content - that makes you release strong, bottled up emotions - is as addictive as fat. It's that cute cat pic that makes you "aww", it's someone getting wrecked for Schadenfreude, it's the "main character of the day" to direct your hate towards. And, sure, you do need catharsis - much like you need fat - but you don't need that much of it, and specially not as much as social media shoves down your throat, at the detriment of almost everything else.
[Speaking as a mod] Thank you for sharing this. Seriously. It's such an amazing resource I'm listing it in the sidebar, to increase visibility - starting now.
Peer reviewed by my neighbour's dog. She'd probably add "even if you see no threat, and even if you don't give a fuck about humans, it's better to bark anyway just to be safe". Except in posh paper speech.
She's cute until you remember her true vampire form. :D
I see two ways to do so:
- Have multiple agent noun affixes, each for a type of agent. For example I feel like Spanish -dor is more often used for someone who's repeatedly doing something, while -nte is someone doing it now.
- Apply the affix not to the base form of the verb, but to a conjugated form, in a way that preserves tense/aspect/mood information.
So, as an example of #2. Let's say your conlang has the verb "lug" (to do), and here's part of its conjugation:
- indicative perfect past - lugene (they did)
- indicative imperfect past - lugavo (they were doing)
- indicative habitual present - lugien (they often do, they typically do)
- indicative progressive present - lug (they're currently doing)
- [etc.]
And your agent suffix is, dunno, -bor. Most languages would apply it into the base form and call it a day, so you'd get "lugbor"; you could instead do something like
- lugenebor - the one who did
- lugavobor - the one who used to do
- lugienbor - the one who often does; like Spanish "hablador" (one who talks often = talkative)
- lugbor - the one actively doing it; like Spanish "hablante" (one who's talking now = speaker)
- etc.
I feel this would go well with an agglutinative language. Just make sure the distinction between adjective and noun is clear, otherwise your conspeakers will conflate the nominalising and adjectivising suffixes.
Romance languages are really messy in this aspect, and there are multiple competing suffixes:
- -dor; see amar→amador, hablar→hablador(a). The OG agentive nominaliser, in Latin it was -tor/-tōrem. Eventually it got a feminine version, as Spanish -dora.
- -triz; the original feminine of the above, from Latin -trix/-trīcem. I think it isn't productive any more.
- -nte; see amar→amante, hablar→hablante. From Latin present active participles, like -āns/-antem. Originally it was a way to handle the verb as an agent adjective, and more conservative grammars still describe it only like this, but neither Latin nor the Romance languages care too much about the distinction between noun and adjective, so... so yeah.
- -ero/-era, the one you listed. From Latin -ārius/-ārium, -āria/-āriam, -ārium/-ārium. Originally it formed nouns from adjectives, and rarely from other nouns (X-arium = "where you keep X"). People started spamming it in other parts of speech.
I listed them as in Spanish but in the others it's the same deal. And the confusing part is that there's always some subtle semantic distinction; for example an hablador is someone who's talkative, but an hablante is whoever is speaking.
The process is called "agentive nominalisation", and the resulting noun an "agent noun".
From what I've seen most languages with the concept of agent noun do it like English does: start with the verb, remove any potential verb-exclusive affix, add a specific affix for agent nouns. That seems to hold true even for non-IE languages; see Old Tupi and Cebuano. However there are plenty twists you can add to that, for the sake of conlanging:
- It doesn't need to be after the root. A prefix, infix, or circumfix is fine too.
- You could have multiple affixes instead, either for different semantic purposes or different phonetic environments. (I think Irish does the later.)
- As typical for affixes they can also interact with the root; for example Old Tupi does this, if you plop that -sar (agent noun former) into the verb aûsub "to love", the result is not *aûsubsar as you'd expect, but aûsupara (I think /bs/→/p/?)
- Something akin to Arabic vowel alternations seems realistic IMO. Or even consonant mutations.
- Instead of an affix, a separated word. It would be like saying "drive doer" in English, instead of "driver".
Not only hieroglyphs can be used for the meaning and the sounds of a word, they often use both at the same time: the rebus principle, or "represent something by what it sounds like". That's a lot like writing English "I see you" as "👁️ C U".
Coptic, mentioned in the video, is a descendant of Egyptian. That's why Champollion's strategy worked: even if the Coptic translations of the Greek words won't give you the exact sounds Egyptian used, at least it allows you to see consistent patterns, that you can contrast with Egyptian loanwords in other languages.
For reference on dates, Ptolemy V reigned from 204 to 180 BCE. He's the grand-grand-grandfather of "that" famous Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator).
I'd argue Demotic isn't quite a different language from the Egyptian written in hieroglyphs; both are more like different registers of the same language, written with different writing systems. So it's less like 2025 English vs. Old English and more like "colloquial 2025 English" vs. "a really posh 2025 English", with one being written with Latin letters and another in Saxon runes.
Albedo would say otherwise.