Aftermath

My campaign against the vegetative refugee from Sleeping Beauty in my garden continues. There is now much less rose, though probably at least as much as I've already taken out, and I have been stabbed in the ball of the left thumb, which I do not expect to be a mortal wound.

There is also this story.

The brambles had died when the prince had awoken the sleeping princess with a kiss. That’s what Gerhardt had been told and he had no reason to disbelieve it. However, Gerhardt was a gardener and his job was to clean up dead brambles.

As opposed to thinning out the palace orchard or finding the ways through the yew and box forest that had once been the formal garden. The head gardener himself was leading a team that was trying to clear out and replant the kitchen gardens, and reportedly finding surprising pockets of vegetable vigour. Gerhardt didn’t know what the royal family was eating, but his meals were featuring a lot of parsley.

Before they’d slept for a century, more or less, the surrounding farms and towns had delivered fresh produce to the kitchen door every day. Part of Gerhardt’s job was to clear a path so those deliveries could resume. Assuming the local farmers knew to resume deliveries. A messenger had been sent out, but Gerhardt hadn’t seen him return.

Even so, the only way in and out of the castle was still path that the prince and his helpers had hacked in, and Gerhardt was working to widening extend it, but there was still a century’s worth of oversized rose debris as well as the newly dead roses to be removed. Gerhardt hadn’t believed the tale that the prince’s groom had told of the quick-branched, carnivorous and vampiric roses that had confronted them on their arrival but, aside from cutting roses up for kindling and small logs, Gerhardt and the two boys helping him had been finding bones. They had provided Father Johan with more work than any of them had expected.

And there were the mosquitoes. Gerhardt had seen the moat, the bit you could see through the dead brambles from the drawbridge over it, and he really didn’t want to know what was going on in there. He feared he was going to find out.

Languary 3

Finally, my third Languary post. I realised that I was tying myself up in knots trying to write every thing out, so here we are:

We now move to people who aren’t us with the second person.

The creators of ‘Allspeak’ divided the people to whom one might be speaking directly into the familiar, the unfamiliar, and those with whom it is impossible to became familiar. The first category contains friends, family, and (often) ones’ deity of choice. The second category is people outside the first category and is thus the form used for strangers and in formal and/or professional circumstances. The third category contains animals, things, and metaphorical concepts.

The singular second person pronouns are:

Subjective     Objective                  Possessive adjective          Reflexive

Familiar        tay /teɪ/        tayer /teɪɜ/               taym /teɪm/                      tayertay /teɪɜteɪ/

Unfamiliar    tuy /taɪ/        tuyer /taɪɜ/               tuym /taɪm/                      tuyertuy /taɪɜtaɪ/

Impossible    toy /tɔɪ/        toyer /tɔɪɜ/               toym /tɔɪm/                      toyertoy /tɔɪɜtɔɪ/

This makes the plural second person pronouns:

Subjective     Objective                  Possessive adjective      Reflexive

Familiar        tayk /teɪk/     tayker /teɪkɜ/           taykm /teɪkm/               taykertayk /teɪkɜteɪk/

Unfamiliar    tuyk /taɪk/     tuyker /taɪkɜ/           tuykm /taɪkm/              tuykertuyk /taɪkɜtaɪk/

Impossible    toyk /tɔɪk/     toyker /tɔɪkɜ/           toykm /tɔɪkm/               toyertoy /tɔɪɜtɔɪ/

That, in turn, leads us to second person verbs. ‘Allspeak’ does this by adding the vowel of the subjective pronoun to the basic verb form as a suffix before any tense suffixes are added. Thus you have:

                                    Singular                                                                 Plural

                 Familiar        Unfamiliar      Impossible              Familiar        Unfamiliar      Impossible

you stop      tarkay           tarkuy             tarkoy                     tarkayk         tarkuyk            tarkoyk

you are stopping      tarkaya         takuya             tarkoya                  tarkayak       takuyak           tarkoyak

you will stop        tarkay’yu      tarkuy’yu         tarkoy’yu               tarkay’yuk     tarkuy’yuk       tarkoy’yuk

you will be stopping      tarkayayu     tarkuyayu        tarkoyayu               tarkayayuk    tarkuyayuk      tarkoyayuk

you plan to stop        yutarkay       yutarkuy          yutarkoy                 yutarkayk      yutarkuyk        yutarkoyk

And so on.