🖋️
like communicating with the ancients
a secret language hidden in plain sight
executing messages with patience
can give a sudden sense of strange delight
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you’re onto something here… there’s this interesting mixture of a relaxed texting structure melded in with elements of a profoundly knowledgeable but cool friend explaining smtg to you. unserious but also occasionally academic? idk, it ebbs & flows, but i feel that you can instinctually pick up on it the more you use the app– a new dialect of sorts
Feb 12, 2024
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
———
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.
✨
A glance, a wink, a glimmer
a place of warmth, a glow
beyond the gloom
✨
Aug 2, 2024
Texts with my dad, bizarre CAPTCHA I saw (I guess we’re identifying entities now), dictionary result from synonym search, and research on something I’m writing with nunjournal
May 31, 2024
Top Recs from @mcbean
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if rice has a million fans i’m one of them. if rice has one fan, it’s me. if rice has 0 fans, im dead.
Jan 24, 2025
i’m sorry to recommend this again but i’m not sorry. and any day i am not eating rice is a terrible day for me.
Dec 16, 2024
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i have been thinking a lot about oversized suits lately. prob via osmosis of all this talking heads hype from the last year. w/e, i love the big blazer look. very "toontown villain". something about this style is a little untrustworthy, like ur a walking optical illusion. makes me want to start carrying things around in a briefcase: open to reveal just a shitty romance novel and a box of swedish fish.
anyway, in this movie, almost every single character wears an iconic suit of this variety, and i'd say it exponentially adds to its charm.
Feb 10, 2024