melannen | Happy deathday, Howard, and may Shoggoths ever ooze upon your bones!

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Happy deathday, Howard, and may Shoggoths ever ooze upon your bones!

The current kerfuffle in webcomicsdom inspired me to log into my Keenspot boards account for the first time in over a year. Joined: May 16, 2000. O_o That's... wow. I've been in online media fandom almost six years then, considering I was reading for nearly a year before I got a Keenspot account. I'm, like, a Great Old One. Or a Lesser Old One, anyway. I might qualify for upper-echelon minionhood, at least. It depresses me that at least 75% of the current big names in webcomics are people who weren't even *around* back in the day, when I still had hopes of someday reading every good webcomic out there. Eesh.

In other news, you guys *suck*. Except the three of you who actually wrote me double-dactyls. Plus, NO HELP AT ALL in telling me what DVDs to buy. q-:

Have some more double-dactyls, in punishment.

Firiel Miriel
Arwen Undomiel
Carried a torch for the
Dúnadan heir;
Sewed him a banner that's
Cryptobotanically
Blazoned with Nimloth's own
Daughter so fair.

Dombilly Bomdilly
My Lady Goldberry
Daughter of spring rains and
Withywind's wend:
She is too vivid for
Laurelindorinan;
Mallorn is golden, but
Willow's a friend.

Hoyoto Toyoho
Eowyn Shieldmaiden
Ended the reign of the
Wraith-rider king;
Still did she pine for her
Octogenarian
Heartthrob, till Faramir
Gave her a ring.

Quenya is a *very* iambic language; never noticed that before. Also, nobody gave me any advice on how to scan Goa'uld. Nobody on the show pronounces it consistently, and if you're going by the *spelling*, it should be either go-ah-'-uld or go-'-uld, and I have no *idea* how a glottal stop scans, although I guess uh-oh is usually just a trochee... go-ah-uld would be a dactyl, I guess, if you do it that way ...

Also, I can't for the life of me figure out whether it should be Dúnedain or Dúnadan up there, and I'm afraid to go looking, or I'll get A Elbereth Gilthoniel silivren penna miriel o menel aglar elenath! Gilthoniel! O Elbereth! stuck in my head again ... oops, too late.

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Ooh, quite lovely, especially the middle one. In the third I think I'd change "Shieldmaiden" to "Shieldmaid", though.

Sources are conflicting as to whether double dactyls must have antepenultimate hexasyllabity or whether it simply must have a hexasyllable somewhere in the second stanza. All yours do have it antepenultimate, but do you admit the nonantepenultimate variety as true double dactyls?

Really I just like saying "antepenultimate hexasyllabity"..

I think I just used the only hexasyllabical word in the Quenya corpus, there. Hmm. It has to be shieldmaiden to be a proper double-dactyl name, though.

Sources conflict-- one of the more authoritative sounding ones said either on the fifth or sixth line, I think. But really, I just like saying antepenultimate hexasyllabity, too. :) And mine always seem to work out that way anyway ... there seem to be a lot of them that use *two* hexasyllabicals in the second stanza in various patterns, too...

I heard of Higgledy Piggledys from The Game of Words, which notes that the hexasyllabic should be the fifth line, although sufficiently clever exceptions are allowed.

One example they gave, with (irritatingly) three hexasyllabics:

Higgledy Piggledy
Yale University
Gave up misogyny
Opened its doors.

Coeducational
Extracurricular
Heterosexual
Fun is in store.

SIXTH line. Not fifth. Second line of the second half.

Time to go to sleep.

Hmm. All the ones I've found by Hecht and Pascal, the founders of the form, put the hexasyllabic on either the sixth or seventh line, so it seems really odd to *require* it on the fifth.

I dunno, I'd say anything goes, as long as you have one somewhere in that stanza.

I meant sixth. I really need to stop doing anything after eight p.m. for which coherency is required.

Are you claiming that Eowyn Shieldmaid isn't a proper name or that it's not a double-dactyl? For me, saying "shield" as one syllable is awkward and makes the syllable too long and breaks the flow; "l" can carry a syllable by itself just fine, thank you, so [e' o wın ʃi' ld meıd]..

Which is why English verse scans on stress rather than length. q:

When I try to make shield carry two syllables, it sounds *way* too stretched-out-- 'shield' as two syllables is as bizarre to me as 'fire' as one. It also wants to be DUM-da-DUM (amphimacer?) instead of dactyl, when I try. Shieldmaiden works well, although I end up pronouncing "Shield" close to the same way I pronounce "Scyld", except with a slightly longer vowel...

It's much easier for me to allow "fire" to be one syllable than "shield", though I end up pronouncing it more like "far", like I'm from the south or something, if I want it to be one syllable. But yes, "shield" does work better if you pronounce it more like "scyld", with a shorter vowel. Which is probably fine, since they're the same word anyway.

Well, the book I first learned all this from made a big issue about "fire" only being one syllable, which made no sense to me, until I belatedly realized the writer was British, so he didn't know beans about proper English pronunciation anyway. q: That's odd-- I'll have to pay attention next time, whether our accents are really that different, or we just *think* differently.

The only time I usually say "scyld" in in the proper name usage, as in "Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum m&ae;gþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas," which is just as awful an earworm as "elbereth gilthoniel". Arrghhh.

I think we just think differently - by all rights our accents should be virtually identical, considering we grew up within 15 miles of each other..

Well, we did grow up near each other, but I do occasionally detect a fair bit of daown the aocean hidden in my speech, and even some Miami Valley, so, who knows?

Higgledy Piggledy
Replying in metered verse
Causes confusion
As I write back:

Is it the rule to have
Antepenultimate
Hexasyllabity?
Am I on crack?

See, I considered answering comments that way ... but I decided *I* wasn't on sufficient crack. Props to you though. q:

I didn't answer because this post went *way* over my head. I don't care for poetry, don't know what you mean by "Scan," and have no idea what a "dactyl" is. Sorry. :(

Goa'uld usually seems to come out "go-uh-oold," at least, that's how most of the Goa'uld and Tok'ra say it. I think the Stargate TPTB just like thro'wing ran'dom apo'strophes in'to wo'rds. (Believe it or not, my license plate says "Goa'uld!")

I'm just showing off my poetry geekery-- don't mind me. Scan refers to the rhythm of the words-- a dactyl is just a pattern of rhythm that goes DUM-da-da-DUM-da-da. Scansion takes a bit of effort to learn to see, and it's a pretty much useless skill to have.

Yes, the a'pos'troph'e sydrome is pretty common in sci-fi, sadly. But Goa'uld really does sort of have a glottal stop there if you pronounce it that way, which seems to be the consensus. Teal'c has no excuse, though.

That is the best linsence plate *ever*.

==hums== (http://www.livejournal.com/users/stellar_dust/174636.html)

And from what little I've seen, I'd say it's GOOaOOLD. Emphasis on both first and last syllables, no matter where you put the glottal, so not quite a dactyl unless you fudge it. Or they're related to flying dinosaurians, which is not outside the realm of possibility. But whatever.

Flying dinosaurians?

Yeah, there is something of an accent on the last syllable, but I think it's a secondary accent and the primary accent is on Goo-- or, I dunno. Yeah, whatever seems to be about right.

'Dactyls! Sheesh.

Oh, and yes, the LOTR poems are yummy.

oh. Right! You know, these days I see dactyl, I just automatically translate it into "digit". I might as well just give in and finish teaching myself Latin...

It should be "dunadan" -- "dunedain" is plural. I'm sure you've figured that out by now, but I had to have my little geek moment.

I did know that much, but I wasn't sure which you would use in that sort of adjectival use, sort of speaking of the Dúdedain as a nation; but, yeah, I think it's finally right now. Maybe.

Hey, this whole *post* was an extended moment of geekery.

I wonder if it couldn't be either. Because he is the heir of the Dunedain, but he personally is Dunadan-- it's sort of ambiguous as to part of speech.

Mel, I adore these. I especially like the last 4 lines of the 3rd, especially the use of "octogenarian," which is just perfectly satisfying. And these should be witty, IMO.

And yes, how do you pronounce "shield" as two syllables? Do you count every single dipthong as two syllables? Say, "count"?

And I've usually seen 6th or 7th line, but I'm not a connoisseur.

One should never let an opportunity to make fun of Aragorn's age pass by. ;)

He doesn't look a day over 86! ;)

It has to do with approximants, not vowels. For me, both the alveolar approximant [ɹ] (as in the "r" in "fire", as pronounced by those with rhotic dialects such as

melannen and I have) and the velarized alveolar lateral approximant [ɫ] (the l in "shield") can form the nucleus of the syllable. I may actually pronounce shield more like [ʃi:j ɫd] and the [j] (if it's really there) might have something to do with it. So maybe it's just that I am weird and allow [ɫ] as well as [l] (like in "bottle") to be a nucleus. But words like "milk" (where I'm using [ɫ]) definitely don't have two syllables. I'm not a real linguist, I have no clue what's going on. I don't actually know anything about phonetics, just what sounds good to me. But I try as best I can to explain it with the resources I have.

I was thinking about it some more today and I realized that I *do* scan "child" and "wild" and such with two syllables. But I don't with wield or sheer; so for me it must have to do with way the length of the vowel interacts with the approximant, not the approximant itself.

(although "while" is only one syllable. arg.)

Also, after reading all those links I have realized again why I prefer phonemes to phonetics. Poor &schwa;.

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Happy deathday, Howard, and may Shoggoths ever ooze upon your bones!

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