zwei_hexen | Write every day! - August 2025

ysilme

Let us know if we missed you or if you didn't check in for a while, so we can add you. Of course joining the fun is possible at any point.

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ysilme here: alibi sentence. We've been out today and rather busy, like yesterday. Hopefully I'll add a few more words once I post this. But I had a lot of time to think about a plot issue on the drive, and was able to brainstorm with my husband. The issue isn't revolved, but something else fell into place, so there is that.

sylvanwitch here: We also had a busy day, so just now I added 101 words to the story I started yesterday as an alibi sentence.

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From:

trobadora

Checking in for the 23rd.

From:

sylvanwitch

Thanks, you!

From:

ysilme

It's so nice to see you checking in so regularly! ♥ *hugs*

From:

badly_knitted

Yay for brainstorming!

Aug 23rd - Busy day here too, I was out most of the morning, but... 742 words, an expanded ficathon fill and a quadruple drabble.

From:

sylvanwitch

It must be something with Saturdays! That is an outstanding word count in any case, but it’s especially great for a busy day!

Edited Date: 2025-08-24 12:17 am (UTC)

From:

badly_knitted

Yes, I was pleased to get so many words down. Glad I went out, because I got to see the roving classical guitarist busker who plays occasionally in my town. Always good to have a chat with him and listen to him play.

From:

ysilme

Yay, so many lovely words even while being busy, go you! :o)

From:

badly_knitted

Thank you! It's been an unusually busy couple of weeks, with a lot of appointments.

From:

sanguinity

Aug 23. Two! More! Paragraphs! of translation, wey-hey!

From:

sylvanwitch

Good work! Slow and steady wins the race (to the end of the work you are translating :-).

From:

luzula

Oh, to/from what language? *curious*

From:

sanguinity

From English to chinuk wawa, which is an indigenous creole that is a heritage language of the Grand Ronde Confederated Tribes here in Oregon.

You might be familiar with its predecessor, Chinook Jargon, which was a widely spoken trade language here in the Pacific Northwest, all through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. But in the 1820s and 1830s or so, there was a generation of kids around Fort Vancouver (the one here on the Columbia near Portland) who grew up speaking it as their first language, and that's when it creolized. Because of the way Grand Ronde was populated, it was also a first language for many people on Grand Ronde up through the early twentieth century.

Grand Ronde has been doing a lot of language preservation/revitalization work with it lately, and I learned it with the Native student group at the local university when I was finishing my masters degree.

I let it lapse a bit after I graduated, but I have a mutual on tumblr who posts exclusively in chinuk wawa, so I've been rebuilding my skills again, posting in chinuk a bit. Anyway, a friend who's also indigenous and grew up in the Pacific Northwest, posted a introductory essay they wrote up on PNW indigenous canoes and dared me to translate it into chinuk wawa. And... *cracks knuckles* ...here we are.

(I'm very proud of my translation of "commercial logging"!)

From:

sylvanwitch

This sounds fascinating and FABULOUS!

When I was searching for a dissertation subject, I did a tiny little bit of work around how religious ideas in Piscataway culture were "translated" by a Jesuit priest, Fr. Andrew White, who was working on a Catholic "primer" for converting the Piscataway people. He didn't finish the primer, but I was privileged to see the extant handwritten pages in the Georgetown special collections and work from photographic copies of the documents.

I ultimately chose a different direction for my dissertation, but I did enjoy diving into Piscataway culture and illuminating White's struggles with "translating" certain concepts of RC faith (i.e. sin) into language the Piscataway would more readily understand and accept. (To be clear, in case it isn't from my geeking out, I was as objective as I could be, but I was absolutely viewing White as a colonizer, not a great white savior or anything of that odious nature.)

My favorite example was a line from the Our Father. In the traditional version White was trying to teach, the line is "forgive us our trespasses," but since the Piscataway did not have a philosophical or dogmatic idea of sin (betrayal of community via stealing, for instance, they had, but they didn't have the same idea of original sin, etc.--I'm sure I'm totally preaching to the choir here, pun intended), he wrote a line of Piscataway and then translated that into "forgive me naughty man" in the margin, since "naughty" was the closest he could come in English to the Piscataway word.

Tl;Dr, I think what you're working on is amazing and wonderful!

From:

sanguinity

Language and culture and people are all inextricably intertwined with each other, and studying the language gives such insights into culture and worldview. And history, too! Local nineteenth-century history is very much embedded in this lexicon. And because this is an English-French-indigenous-languages creole, you can see these different cultures rubbing up against each other, points of contention and cooperation.

Given your own research, you'll be interested to know that there are a lot of Christian terms in this lexicon, because yes, missionaries were big early users of the jargon -- I think a decent number of our oldest jargon documents are translations of religious texts. Here's one for you: "chaku-ɬush", literally "become good", means to get better or get well (from a sickness), but also is the term for conversion/being saved.

Here's one I was working on yesterday: I was trying to translate "commercial logging", which appeared in a sentence about how commercial logging has destroyed old growth forests and thus made it no longer possible to build the largest canoes anymore. And "commercial" was a problem, because that is just not in the lexicon. But there is a term, "tiki-dala" which literally means "wanting or needing dollars" which works well -- after all, commercial logging is all about logging trees so you can get dollars instead! But it works even BETTER when you know that "tiki-dala" is slang for "greedy". Because in context I'm trying to translate, that's exactly what we're talking about: being so greedy for dollars that you destroy things for everyone else. And I find it fascinating that this conversation about the cash economy and its ills is already built into the language. Right there, text.

Anyway, yes: language and culture and worldview and history all tangled up together, inextricably intertwined with each other!

From:

sylvanwitch

I love how passionate you are about this language and how awesome it is that you are helping to keep it a living language in the world!

From:

luzula

Oh cool, thanks for explaining! \o/

You might be familiar with its predecessor, Chinook Jargon
Heh, you are overestimating my knowledge here. I may have lived in the PNW, but I was a child, and if I came across that piece of knowledge, I did not retain it. I do remember being impressed with indigenous art, though.

From:

sanguinity

Eh. Some elementary school curricula mention it, especially if you ever learned about Lewis and Clark, and a lot of local place names are based on it. Alki Beach in Seattle is a chinook jargon place name. So is the city of Tukwilla. Several of the Bellevue middle schools. A good number of the ferries. Odds are better than decent that at some point you encountered a chinook jargon word and an interpretive sign explaining it -- just as it is perfectly reasonable that even if you had, you had no particular reason to retain it! :-)

Anyway, here's a very nice Seattle-based article about chinuk wawa and its intersection with Seattle history.

And here's an interactive map of chinuk wawa place names in Washington and Oregon. (Not comprehensive -- I know of several more not on that map!)

From:

ysilme

That's super interesting, and totally awesome that you're doing this! Thanks for sharing. ♥

From:

ysilme

Great job, go you! :o)

From:

goddess47

Day 22: Fnished that Teen Wolf fic! Now working on a ficlet for another weekly prompt... already have 200 words and maybe it'll go to 400 words before it's done!

From:

ysilme

Yay, that's awesome! Congrats on finishing your fic, and starting already with the next! *\O/*

Edit to ask: this is meant for day 23, right? You'd already checked in for day 22.

Edited Date: 2025-08-24 11:07 am (UTC)

From:

goddess47

Ooppp.... yes for day 23! Thanks for being aware!

From:

sylvanwitch

Woooo-hooooo! *does the happy finished fic dance for you* And good luck with the next prompt, too!

From:

glinda

I was super tired on day 22 but managed to get a few sentences in before bed to sketch out an idea for a scene that I didnt' want to lose. And day 23 has been much better with around 700 words to report for a different but much more fleshed out scene.

From:

ysilme

Kudos to you for taking those notes already in bed and while so tired! And yay for such an excellent word count on day 23!

From:

sylvanwitch

I hope you were able to rest and restore yourself. Go, you, for getting sentences down when you were so tired! And YIPPEE! for that lovely wordcount yesterday! Woooo-hoooo! *\o/*

From:

cornerofmadness

i figured it would be an alibi sentence since I was out all day but came home and had no power to do anything else so me and my laptop battery went to work. 2K for today

From:

ysilme

That's indeed ONE HECK of an alibi sentence! LOL Great job! ♥

From:

cornerofmadness

world's longest alibi sentence

From:

sylvanwitch

I'm sorry for the cause of it, but go you for getting all those words written! I hope you've gotten your power back now.

From:

cornerofmadness

Yes it came back thankfuly

From:

luzula

Day 23: It worked! I was determined to write 200 words, and I wrote 300! \o/

My goal for today is also 200.

Edited Date: 2025-08-24 06:26 am (UTC)

From:

ysilme

Oooh, great to hear, congrats! ♥

From:

sylvanwitch

Oooooo! EXTRA words! Woooo-hooo! Go, you! Go, go, go! :-)

From:

china_shop

23rd: dreamwidth post.
24th: little more work on the kink fic. :-)

But I had a lot of time to think about a plot issue on the drive, and was able to brainstorm with my husband. The issue isn't revolved, but something else fell into place, so there is that.

ysilme: That's awesome! It's always a relief when you start to see a way forward, isn't it?

sylvanwitch: Yay! *pompoms* :D

From:

ysilme

Yay for writing happening you for both days! :o) And thank you! ♥ Indeed it is!

From:

sylvanwitch

YAY back at you, my friend! Go, you! And thank you! *shakes pompoms with you*

From:

ysilme

Go you for creating words even so! It seems the busy days are rather common at WED currently. ;op I hope your days are lessening up a bit soon. *hugs*

From:

sylvanwitch

Thank you so much, my friend! *hugs*

We have our first full-day faculty meeting tomorrow, another day of meetings the next, and then two half-days working orientations for the incoming ninth graders and then the rest of the kids. After that, it's back to the full-time teaching workload, and, as usual, I'm trying to dam some of the flood by getting what I can done in advance. *sighs*

I hope you, too, get a break soon! *hugs more*

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