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miam in french
ñam in spanish
mums in swedish
nyam-nyam in russian
mjam in german
oishi in japanese
onomatopoeia can be so universal and i think that’s beautiful
Feb 1, 2024
Feb 28, 2025
After seeing this post (by daphne) about vulvic imagery in medieval Christian texts, I decided (due to a combination of puzzle-solving curiosity and ADHD) to try to translate the text. I’ll let you fill in the very apropos linguist joke on your own 🤭
Anyway, I won’t bury the lead, so here are my translations. Scroll down for more detail on the process!
Transcription:
Nous monstre tres dous dier me tresguint largesce
Quant vousistes pour nous souffrir tant de destresce
Literal translation (attempt!):
(It [this image]/God) shows us (this) very soft/sweet door, (which) signals generosity to me
When you (God) wanted us to suffer so much distress
Freeish translation:
To present us such a pleasant portal is, to me, a grand gesture of generosity
When you’ve willed us so much woe
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Ok so here’s what I did. I speak French decently, and at first glance it looked like Old/Middle French.
After eyeballing it a little, I needed to look up medieval script to see if I was reading the letters properly. As I was doing this I was cross-checking words in O/M French to see if things were lining up. For the most part it went well but I ran into a couple of real head-scratchers. First, dier. I thought this was probably related to French dire (to say/tell) but I wasn’t getting any hits. So then I thought, since I’d confirmed we’re in OF, could this be from eastern France / modern-day Belgium/Luxembourg/The Netherlands and be a dialect (like Walloon or Luxembourgish) that included some Germanic words? That led me to the Luxembourgish dier, meaning door, which made sense given the imagery. Then I ran into tresguint, which was extremely mysterious. It took me quite a while digging, and what I landed on is that it’s a combo of tres (very) and guint, a conjugation of the OF verb guignier (cognate with English wink), meaning to signal. So, that’s my best effort based on semi-educated guesses and instinct. If you’re still here, you get my final version of translation, the freest one. I guess it’s a poem.
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A glance, a wink, a glimmer
a place of warmth, a glow
beyond the gloom
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Aug 2, 2024
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"typing this out", instead of "this," essentially. every grammar lesson that's ever been taught since modern english came around will tell you that the latter is the only proper way to be technically "correct" in your writing, but it's always peeved me how whenever i put a series of words into quotation marks, i always want them to act as their own standalone statement with sentiment that starts and ends with said quotation marks, and imo the insertion of a comma that stands as a part of the sentence around that in between that serves to just completely disrupt whatever meaning i intend behind it. maybe if everyone starts doing this, the whole paradigm would be shifted!!!
also, long run-on sentences are pretty chill too
Jan 22, 2024