ngansuril

By far the trickiest thing to master for imitators of a southern English accent is when to use a short, front 'a' and a long, back 'a'¹, which I will henceforth transcribe as A and Ah . A long time ago, southern English underwent a sound change called the Trap-Bath Split; the language now uses both of these vowels, and they're not in free variation; if you use the wrong vowel in a word people will think you're weird. So what's the rule here? How do we know when to say A and when to say Ah? Perhaps it has something to do with sonorance? If you listen to a speaker from London, you'll notice they'll always say  cat, bag, gap  and  dad, but never  caht ,  bahg ,  gahp  and  dahd . If we consider only monosyllabic words ending in stops, it seems that there's a rule here regarding 'softness'; a hard ending in a segment leads to a hardening of the vowel. But this all falls apart when we consider fricatives: the southern 'grass' is alway...

  I can already hear your retorts of, 'But Akira is the perfect movie! It's a classic!', but hear me out. Every medium and every genre has its classics; the works that everyone must see, or read, or perhaps smell. Akira is a classic of the cyberpunk genre and of the medium of animation. It is one of those works of visual art that is referenced in so many other works that experiencing it firsthand feels like unlocking some kind of secret code. Akira is a notable contribution not just to the visual design of the cyberpunk genre*, but arguably to the design conventions of the medium of film as a whole. * Players of Cyberpunk 2077, itself a pastiche of the genre, will recognise Kaneda's bike (Jackie's bike) and the Harukiya Bar stairwell (Afterlife entrance)  One would expect such a visually influential film to also be highly insightful. Watching this film for the first time today, I personally was expecting, at the very least, to find the plot elements quite familiar. ...

500 Hours of Mind-pumping Action  image source  It's a new year, and shortly after the Christmas period I found myself the recipient of an Amazon gift card. Since I've been trying to read more, it seemed a good idea to spend my gift card on some books. But what to buy? I thought it a fun little experiment to ask an LLM to recommend me books, based on ones I've read in the past. The LLM's recommendations were fine – even uninterestingly so. What really struck me instead was the LLM's use of language; the way the recommendations were framed. One of the books I've recently read was a fantasy novel of considerable length; the LLM took this to mean that I favour long books – books with plenty of 'content', one of those nü-web words which have drawn some mockery in recent years. In truth, I have never felt particularly drawn to long books. I am, in fact, an impatient 'consumer'. I like to engage in creative works which respect my time. There is somethi...

Children of Omelas by Asikea Ngansuril  When his existence was first described to me, he was named only as the Child. The Child was not he; the Child was it. I was one among few who had seen the Child with their own eyes. I matured a little faster than my friends, many of whom were told about the Child years after I was. Early in the morning of my eighth birthday, I was escorted by Council bureaucrats to the city plaza. There, at the heart of Omelas, stood the Mausoleum of Prosperity. It was a monument to the happiness of Omelas; the happiest city in the world, so we all said. I was led silently into the Mausoleum, through corridors and down flights of stairs, until we came to a little door somewhere in the basement of the building. Wielding a set of keys, one of the adults flung the door open, and there it was. What first stood out to me was not the smell, not the festering sores on its backside, nor its abject nakedness; it was the fact that it wasn’t much younger than m...

 Here I am I've long wanted to write things -- essays, short stories, etc. -- and put them out there, but I never really felt ready. I suppose the right time has now come. If you're reading this, you likely know me as Bouncy, or Bouncy[alliterative noun]. While I am quite fond of the name Bouncy, it is obviously a screen name -- people don't usually call me Bouncy in real life, unless we happened to meet online. I chose the pseudonym Ngansuril a few years ago now, while I was coming up with new words for Niváki (one of my constructed languages). I figured it would be nice to use a Niváki pen name, so I chose the first name Asikea (Asi for short), giving the full name: Asikea Ngansuril. Note that Niváki is a head-initial language, like French or Welsh, and so family names are usually written  after  given names. The Niváki writing system uses logographic characters, or  inisa  (秘字), which are borrowed from the Chinese writing system in a similar fashion to hanja ...