Prose Poetry Code – Page 70 – The Three Written Arts

Looking forward to 2016

So, it’s a new year. The slate has been cleaned. We can put 2015 behind us, and look ahead to 2016. From a programming point of view, what does this new year hold? Let’s take a look.

Programming languages

This year should be an exciting one if you like programming languages for their own sake.

JavaScript: Most everybody is using a browser capable of most of ECMAScript 5 (ES5). By the end of the year, expect both parts of that to increase. More people are going to have modern capabilities, and the browsers themselves will cover more of the standard. Speaking of standards, I’d look to ES6 support becoming more widespread in browsers, even Microsoft’s.
C++: The next revision of the C++ standard, C++17, is still a ways away. (You’re crazy if you’re betting on it actually coming out in 2017. Remember, C++11 was codenamed C++0x for years.) However, we should start seeing parts of it becoming fixed. Ranges are a big thing right now, concepts are coming (finally!), and it looks like C++ might get some sort of compile-time reflection. Things are looking up, but we’re not there yet.
Perl: I’m serious. Perl 6 is out. (I think that leaves Star Citizen as the final harbinger of Armageddon.) In the works for a decade and a half, with a set of operators best described by a periodic table, and seemingly designed to be impossible to implement, who can’t love Perl? At the very least, it’ll be fun to write in, and the new, incompatible version will spur a new generation of Perl golfers and other code artists. But I think it might turn out a bit like Python 3. Perl 5 has history, and that’s not going away.
The rest: I can easily see Rust gaining a bigger cult following over the next year, especially at places like Github. PHP has their version 7, but the less said about PHP, the better. C# and Java are going to be simmering for another twelve months, at least, and I don’t see much new news coming out of either of them. Ruby will continue its slow slide into irrelevance, probably dragging Python with it. (I wouldn’t mind them taking Haskell along, but I digress.) Newcomers will arise, and I’d say we’re in for another round of “visual coding”. And hey, maybe this will finally be the year for Scala.

Hardware and the like

The big thing on everyone’s lips right now is Vulkan, the official successor to OpenGL. It was supposed to be out in time for Christmas, but it got pushed back. (Funnily enough, the same thing happened two years ago with Kaveri, AMD’s first processor line that could support Vulkan. But I’m not bitter.) Personally, I don’t see much out of Vulkan this year. It’ll be released, and we’ll see a few early, buggy drivers and experimental alphas of games, most of which will be glorified tech demos. I’d give it till 2018 before I start worrying about replacing OpenGL.

Tiny computers are going to get bigger this year, I think. I mean that in a figurative way, of course. The Raspberry Pi 2 is the big name in this field, but you’ve also got the BeagleBone and things like that, not to mention the good old Arduino. However you look at it, it’s a mature area. We’ve moved beyond revolution, now it’s time for evolution. These computers will get more powerful, easier to use, and more ubiquitous. Next Christmas, I can easily see a stick computer being like this year’s quadcopters.

On the other hand, as much as I hate to say it, I’m not holding out a lot of hope for 3-D printing. We’ve been hearing about it for half a decade, and there has definitely been incremental progress. But 2016, in my opinion, is not going to be the year we see inexpensive 3-D printers flying off the shelves. They’ll stay in the background. (The whole “Internet of Things”, however, will only grow, but it’s not intended to be programmable, so it doesn’t help us.)

Libraries, engines, etc.

Look for Unity and Unreal to continue their competition, with a bunch of smaller guys chomping at the bit. Godot, assuming they don’t screw themselves over by switching to Vulkan prematurely, might get a boost as the indie engine of choice. And JavaScript engines have near-infinite upside, especially for mobile coding. Game development in 2016 will be like it was in 2015, but better in every way.

I do think the Node.js fad is dying down, and not a moment too soon. That doesn’t mean Node is done, only that I see people evaluating it for what it is, rather than what it’s advertised as. It’s the same thing as Ruby a few years ago, back in the early days of Rails. Or JavaScript and Angular a couple of years ago, for that matter. Still, Node is a solid platform for a lot of things. It’s not going away, but this is the year that it fades from the spotlight.

The same can be said for the current crop of JS web frameworks. There’s no chance of the whole Internet getting behind a single framework, nor two or even ten. But this is an area where the churn is so great, what’s popular next December hasn’t even been written yet. I can tell you that it’ll be slower, more bloated, and less comprehensible than what’s out there, though.

In the end

For programming, 2016 has a lot to look forward to, and I’ve barely scratched the surface here. (I haven’t even mentioned learning to code, which will get even bigger this coming year.) Whether native or browser, desktop or mobile, it’s a good time to code.

More on calendars

When this post goes up, it will be the start of 2016. A new year. Time to throw out those old calendars and set up the new ones. (Well, probably not. Most people just use the calendars on their computers or phones these days.) But before you toss that record of the old year, take a look at it, because it’s actually quite interesting.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about holidays. This time around, I’m going to look at the whole calendar. Not just our own, mind you, but others throughout history and the modern world. Some of them have features that might be useful to a writer looking to make his fantasy world distinctive.

Into the west

Let’s start with our familiar western calendar. It’s the simplest, but only because we’re familiar with it; if we grew up using, say, the Islamic calendar, then we would be used to that. Now, you already know the basics, if you’re above the age of 4. The year is divided into twelve months, beginning in January and ending in December. Months have fixed numbers of days, but they aren’t the same: we’ve got four of them with 30 days, seven with 31, and then February, which can have 29 in leap years (like this one), but normally has 28.

Months can then be divided into weeks of 7 days each (though only February divides exactly). Days, of course, are 24 hours long, not counting Daylight Saving Time, and hours are subdivided into 60 minutes, which are, in turn, subdivided into 60 seconds. Going back to the other end, years are counted from the putative birth of Christ, with the only real nod to religious diversity being the “modern” names for either side of the dividing line: Christian Era (CE) and Before Christian Era (BCE) versus the traditional Anno Domini (AD) and Before Christ (BC). We can also group the years into decades, centuries, and millennia, but these are more a notational convenience than a function of the calendar.

So that’s what the Western calendar is. But why is it like that? Why are the months uneven? Why does the year start in January? Do we really need leap years?

Let’s start with the first question there. Our calendar is the result of a long chain of cause and effect reaching far back into history, but its current form was largely determined by the Romans. They were the ones that gave us our twelve months, with essentially today’s names. As usual, though, it’s not that simple.

First off, the Roman (Julian, technically; Julius Caesar’s reign saw more than its share of calendar reforms) New Year was in March, so January and February were at the end of the calendar. February 29, the leap day, would have been the last day on the list. The year starting in March basically lasted until the Gregorian reform: sometime since 1582, depending on where you live. (In America, the one time a non-specialist would encounter the Julian-to-Gregorian switchover is in genealogy. Some dates in the 18th century—when Britain and the colonies that would become the US switched—are recorded as OS or NS. These stand for Old Style and New Style, meaning what we now call the Julian and Gregorian calendars, respectively.)

Incidentally, moving the year’s starting date messed up the naming. September comes from the Latin word for “seven”, which you wouldn’t expect from the ninth month. But a few hundred years ago, it would have been linguistically accurate. The same goes for October (eight), November (nine), and December (ten).

Just about the one thing the Romans didn’t give us for our calendar is the AD/BC split. That one came a few centuries later. Before then, years were reckoned from the time of a well-known event or the coronation of a noble figure such as a king or emperor.

Written in the stars

Let’s turn to the scientific aspect of the calendar for now, since that’s where we can get more insight. We’ll get back to the history shortly, I promise.

The year, scientifically speaking, is the time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun once, while the day is how long it takes our planet to rotate on its axis. These are the only “natural” units of time measurement; weeks and months and hours are all human invention. Both the year and the day can be found by observation: the day is roughly the time between one noon and the next, and the stars (including the Sun) will return to the same position in the night sky after a year. (Technically, this isn’t entirely accurate, but the inaccuracies are far below the calendar’s resolution.)

Clever readers will note that we’ve already run into a big problem: the year is not made of a whole number of days. It’s not 365 days long, nor is it 366. In fact, it’s something like 365.2422 days. So, if our calendar only had 365, we would effectively lose a day about every four years. But if we made every fourth year a day longer, that makes up for the discrepancy. Hence, leap years.

The Julian calendar had one every four years, no matter what. By the time of the Gregorian reform, the difference between 365.2422 and 365.25 had added up, and they had to skip a few days to get things back on track. (How many days depends on when the reform took place.) To stop that from happening again, they also changed the rules to make only certain century years leap years. And that’s why 2000 was special: the next leap year ending in 00 won’t be until 2400.

The sun and the moon

There’s another way to count the days, and it can even work at night. The Western calendar is a solar calendar; it’s based around the sun. But our months are remnants of a connection to a lunar calendar. It’s right there in the name, too.

Other calendars are exclusively lunar in nature. The Islamic calendar is one example. Months start and end based on the phase of the moon, and in many Muslim countries that is a literal statement, even today. But the lunar period isn’t a whole number of days, either, so Islamic months can have either 29 or 30 days. Due to religious circumstances, the Islamic calendar has exactly twelve months, meaning that it will always be short of the solar year. The current year for Muslims is 1437, and the calendar’s epoch (basically, its starting date) was in 622. Simple arithmetic shows that 1394 solar years have passed since then, a difference of 43.

This doesn’t fit with the seasons, but it’s not really meant to. An alternative is to try to combine the lunar and solar cycles into a single calendar. In the West, we have only the remnants of that, in our months, but some other cultures use what’s called a lunisolar calendar. The most familiar example would be the Jewish religious calendar. Here, we still have twelve months, and they’re still based on the cycle of the moon. Normally. But this is a solar calendar, too, and the seasons are important. So, to keep them roughly where they should be, the Jewish calendar adds extra months. It’s like our leap days, but 30 at a time. Seven of these every 19 years keeps things fairly even, plus or minus a month.

From scratch

I’m not going to try to explain the Mayan calendar. It confuses me, so I don’t even know where to begin. Instead, I’ll move on to some thoughts on making a fantasy (or even sci-fi) calendar.

First things first, you need to know the relationship between the year and the day. That’s the key. If you’re working with Earth (or a reasonable facsimile), you already know this, and you can move on. Otherwise, you’re deep in worldbuilding territory, and you’ll probably have to work things out yourself. In that case, remember that it’s going to be pretty rare to have a year with an integral number of days. In fact, it’s almost impossible, and it’s surely temporary. Just about every calendar, with the possible exception of one for an interstellar empire, will have leap days of some sort. They might be scattered throughout the years, or they may come in bunches, but they will be there.

The year and the day mark the cornerstones of the calendar, no matter what kind you have. In between, however, things are wide open. Obviously, lunar-based calendars require at least one moon, and that moon needs to be in an orbit that fits. Phobos, the inner moon of Mars, would be completely useless for a lunar calendar, for example: its orbital period is about 7-1/2 hours. Multiple moons give us the possibility of measuring by conjunctions, but that can get into some heavy math that might be too much for a fantasy world. That’s not to say it’s not worth trying, just that it may not be worth the effort in the end.

Even without a big moon in a nice, useful orbit, cultures would likely develop divisions of time between the day and year. Seasons are appropriate for this, and I’ve got just such a post for that. Weeks are more of an invention of civilization. Our seven-day week dates back to Babylonian times, but many cultures have a shorter period of days than the month. Cyclical religious observances are one excuse for a week, but more mundane concerns, like markets, can also come into play. (A story I’m currently writing has a culture with a week of six days, while the French Revolution tried to institute a ten-day week. About the only place they succeeded was in D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting.)

Now, when the year starts is a question that depends heavily on not just your world but your culture. The Romans liked it in spring, and that has a lot going for it in an agrarian society. The Gregorians moved it to January (to have it closer to Christmas or something like that), but that put it in wintertime. There are arguments for just about any day of the year to be New Year’s, but it’s probably—though not always—going to be at the start of the month, and the date will likely have some cultural, religious, or economic significance.

We can go “below” the day, too, but we begin to run into limitations of technology. Hours are fairly easy, and many early cultures settled on numbers like 12, 24, or 60 of them in a day. Why? For the same reason that there are twelve inches in a foot and twelve (troy) ounces in a pound: it’s easier to divide into halves, fourths, and thirds. (Decimal numbers are great for working on paper, but horrible for eyeballing.) Of course, another planet with a different rotation period will have different hours. On Mars, the obvious “hour” would be about a minute and a half longer than ours.

Measuring minutes and seconds is…harder. It’s likely beyond the reach of many early civilizations, and they likely wouldn’t see the need for it, anyway. We have 60 minutes in an hour or seconds in a minute because, again, 60 is easier to work with until pen and paper are widespread calculating devices. If hours had only been subdivided after the French invented the metric system, we’d probably have 100 of them. (Put the metric system in ancient times, and we would all be using Swatch’s silly Internet Time today, I guess. Anybody remember that thing?)

Last but not least, we come to the reckoning of years. For the West, we count from a monk’s imperfect calculation of the birth of Christ. Muslims go by the rather more specific date of Muhammad’s move to Medina, while Jews start their calendar with the traditional date of the Biblical creation of the world. Other options exist, though. One common one in history is dating by years since a ruler’s rise to the throne; when a new ruler is crowned, a new era begins. Another is a cycle of years called indictions. In this system, the last year of one cycle is followed by the first of a new cycle. We might say that this is the seventh year of the 2010s, for example, or the sixth year of this decade. In a way, the Mesoamerican calendars function something like this. (I’ve actually seen this in fantasy before, too. Scott Lynch, in The Lies of Locke Lamora, has a kind of indiction system. Each year is named after one of the setting’s twelve gods, in a specific order. When the last one is reached, the whole thing loops back to the start.)

Happy New Year

However the calendar works, it gives an otherworldly feel to any fiction. To give you one example, my aforementioned story is set on a different planet. (Well, the first part is mostly set on Earth, but that’s neither here nor there.) That planet has a different day length (24 hours, 23 minutes, approximately) and year length (about 374.16 local days) than our own, meaning that I had to do some work.

What I came up with was a calendar of twelve months, each 30 days long, which doesn’t really have any relation to the orbital period of the planet’s moon; it’s more a matter of convenience. Each month is made of five weeks of six days. The extra days are scattered around the calendar, a few at the end of each season. There are more of them at the end of spring, and fewer at the end of fall, and this has a scientific basis: the eccentricity of the planet’s orbit. Days in this fictional world are 24 hours long, but their hours are slightly longer than our own. Hours can be divided into minutes, and further into seconds, but this is more a math trick than something practical.

You can do things differently, and you probably should. What you make should be tailored for your fictional world, for your story. The key is suspension of disbelief. It doesn’t really make much sense for a world with no connection to Earth at all to be calling their months October and their days Saturday. (I didn’t talk much about the names of the days. They’re pretty obvious, though: planets or gods, not that there’s much difference in older times.) Now, you can say that it’s an author translation of unfamiliar terms, and that’s fine, but taking a little bit of time to work things out can pay off in making your world feel more real.

Let’s make a language – 2016 Special

We’re taking a bit of a week off this time. Don’t worry, there’s more to come later on, but today is the first day of the new year, a time to take a break, a time to reflect on the 366 days to come. (2016 is a leap year, remember.) We’ve gone through ten parts of this series already, and we’ve come a long way. But there’s still a longer way to go, although the pace for this year won’t be quite as hectic.

So, to celebrate this new year of conlanging, here’s what we’re going to do. Today, you’ll get to see the first significant text in each of our two languages, Isian and Ardari. That text is the Babel Text, the first nine verses of Genesis 11. Sure, it’s a religious writing, but that’s okay, because we’re not interested in it for its theology, but for its linguistics.

Babel

The Babel Text is one of those “classic” tests of a conlang. It really has it all, grammatically speaking: tenses, moods, aspects, and all those different kinds of clauses. (Some of them we haven’t seen yet, but we can deal.) Plus, the story itself is about language, the Biblical account of the making of the world’s languages. Essentially, it’s a fable, one originally meant to be told orally. We’ll write it here, though, since that’s easier.

If you want to play along at home, you can use whichever version of the text you like. I’ve gone with this one, derived from the NRSV:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.

And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”

So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

So that’s what we’re working with. (Yours, of course, may be different.) Now let’s see how it looks in our made-up languages.

Isian

First off, here’s the full text translated into Isian:

Nec hi, e sota sata fanas yan sangoy wa es ilir beti.

Ad ha is mishas si way keres, is cosas ta abe e Shinar tor i, ar is dalegas.

Ad is kis lan es, “Cosa, ad tinte gados, ar becre sota hi sim.” Ar is fanas gadocat sencat afich, wa arcay empan afich.

Toc hi, is kis, “Cosa, ad oste lan ir ta eblon, wa ta farin ke ey poy e timirot i, ar tinte ni lan ir. Loydaro mit hade par nos basagima e fayan e sata o sos.”

E Domo esto cosas ha i chere e eblon wa e farin ke ostec im nakhit at terta.

Ad e Domo kis, “Chere, is e yan cudisa, ar sota sim o fana yan sangoy, ar ne yahi e cu nawe ed ke te im is o. Anocal ke is wachi cu te nec nos e arisosan im ir.

Cosa, esto wasa, ar golbata si sangoy til ni, ha is an nos noyta le gonas terta.”

Teti, e Domo hade basagis sim til fo e fayan e sata o sos, ar is tarcas cu oste e eblon.

Teyno, i par pasa Babel, ha e Domo golbatas til e sangoy e sota sata o todo; ar e Domo basagis til fo e fayan e sata o sos.

Grammar

Most of the grammar is what we’ve already seen. Some of it, though, is new, particularly the adverbs. We’ll get into the details in later parts but here’s a preview that tells you all you need to know to get through the text:

Isian adjectives (and some nouns) can be changed into adverbs by putting hi after them. This works much like the English suffix -ly: ichi “beautiful” becomes ichi hi “beautifully”.
Adverbs usually go before their verbs, but they can also be moved to the front of a sentence.
A whole prepositional phrase can be used like an adverb by putting ha before it.
Conjunctions are close to their English counterparts. They’re simple little words that link sentences; in the Babel Text, for example, we have ad and ar, both roughly meaning “and”, but with slightly different connotations. Again, we’ll give them a closer look later on.

We get our first tastes of word derivation here, too:

The suffix -cat, when attached to a noun, changes the meaning to that of a material: gado “a brick”; gadocat “brick”.
One way to make an adjective into its antonym is by the prefix/suffix pair a-an. We see this in arisosan “impossible”, which is actually derived from risos “possible”.
Finally, the suffix -nas can convert a verb into a kind of “abstract” noun: go “to speak”; gonas “speech”.

We’ll see a lot more of derivation in later parts of the series.

Vocabulary

Isian	English
abe	a plain
ad	and then…
ar	and (conjunction)
arcay	tar (or bitumen)
arisosan	impossible
basagi	to scatter
bet	word
cudisa	people, group
domo	lord
empan	mortar
esto	down, downward
farin	tower
gado(s)	a brick
gadocat	brick (material)
golbata	to confound
gonas	speech
hade	away
ilir	same
keres	while
loydaro	otherwise
misha	to move
nakhit	mortal
nec	now
noyta	to understand
pasa	to call by a name
sangoy	language
sencat	stone (material)
si	east
tarca	to stop doing
teti	so, because of this
terta	so as to…
teyno	therefore
til	there
timiro	heaven
toc	then
tor	a land
wa	and (noun phrase)
wachi	to desire, wish
yahi	only
yan	one

Ardari

Now, let’s switch to Ardari. Again, here’s the full text:

Lokhi omaritö jane kolrachevi sun lagrelltös nyas perodjyn.

Ysar sälltö tov tapsined ky vi, Chinare me dablan wi mokiti lim tonedjyn, ysar jeren wizèledjyn.

Lataj ry isedjyn, “Tonje, tyolton grätje, ajon warhan sechaje.” Gwanan bòte tyoltanvi, pyuryse bòte pamöre peredjyn.

Drä isedjyn, “Tonje, präzdanvi, qa me khaj èlyasòndös wi kombran lataj da mollje. All grätje, sinran omarini sòletö ori oprös utuweryll.”

Tsoratö qa sèlokynar molledadyt präzdantövi kombrantö ivit ky tèghdaradjyn.

Tsoratö isad, “Ivitje. Ysar jane banöladan èllejyn, ysar me laz jane kolrache perejyn, zalman qa aghell me sòto ky èlla. Duqom qa agh ky märyke ysar da urburdosdill.

Tonje, tèghdarje, ysoj kolrache jeren kamrulje, lataj me simënda rejvetell kyus.”

Èlladjyn Tsoratö ysar jeren tov omarini sòletö ori utuweradid kyus, ysar präzdantö moll ky uq.

Yse Babèle filtyda, Tsoratö omarini kolrache jeren kamruladjyn, jeren tov Tsoratö ysar omarini sòletö ori utuwerad byu.

Grammar

Ardari looks much different, doesn’t it? Much more complicated, too. As with Isian, we haven’t really gone over all the grammar bits you need, so here’s a primer:

Ardari lets you use most adjectives directly as adverbs, with no changes needed.
Nouns, noun phrases, and some adjectives instead require you to follow them with èll ky. (This is the infinitive form of èll- “to be”.) An example would be kone èll ky “like a man, manly”.
“Subordinate” clauses are complicated enough that the full story will have to wait. Some of them let you use a bare verb stem followed by ky, like above, and you use them as a postpositional phrase before a sentence’s head verb. Others appear mostly as normal, but they follow the verb. (This is the only way Ardari lets you put something after the main verb of a sentence.)

Ardari’s words also tend to have more subtle shades of meaning, and these don’t always line up with their English translations:

nyas means “now”, but only as an adverb
drä, meaning “then”, connotes a time long in the past
jeren “there” is used for things very far away; closer things instead use pren
oprös normally works as an adjective meaning “other”; as an adverb, its meaning becomes “otherwise”
kyus denotes an effect or implication
èllad literally means “it was”, but it’s also used to introduce a subordinate clause
filt- “to know as” is a ditransitive verb, like “to give”

We’ll see conjunctions later on, but we have two here. They’re suffixes, not bare words, so you might not have even noticed. They both mean “and”, but -vi is used for noun phrases, while -jyn is for verbs. To use them, you suffix them to each head word (noun for -vi, verb for -jyn) except the last one.

And then we have a few regular derivations we can point out:

-ölad (alternate form -ëlad) creates “mass” nouns for substances, collections, and things like that.
ur- negates adjectives; urburdos “impossible” is the antonym of burdos “possible”.
-önda (alternate form -ënda) creates abstract nouns from verbs: sim- “to speak”; simënda “speech”.

Vocabulary

Ardari	English
banölad	a people
bòte	instead of
dabla	land
drä	then
èlyas	heaven
filt-	to know as, call by
ghinyas	therefore
gwana	stone
jan	one
jeren	there (far)
kamrul-	to confuse, garble
kolrach	language
kombra	tower
kyus	so that, because of
lagri	word
lòkh	whole
märyk-	to propose, plan
moki	a plain
nyas	now
oprös	other, otherwise
pamör	mortar
pyurys	pitch, tar
rejvet-	to understand
säll	east
sèlokyn	mortal
simënda	the act of speech
sun	same
tapsin-	to migrate
tèghdar-	to descend
tsor(a/i)	a god
tyolta	brick
uq-	to stop doing
urburdos	impossible
utuwe-	to scatter
warhan	thorough
wizèl-	to settle
zhi	thus, in this way

Conclusion

So there you have it: the first full text in both Isian and Ardari. I hope you’re playing along at home, and you’re close to making your own translation of the Babel Text (or whatever you prefer).

Starting in the next part, we’ll be filling in the blanks that I had to leave in here. That should keep us occupied for a while. And then we’ll need some more words.

By this time next year, Isian and Ardari should be radically different. It’s my hope that 2017 will open with something far more…intense. By then, our conlangs will be well on their way to general usability. They won’t be complete, mind you, because when can you say a language is complete?

Holidays

This time, I have a much better reason for taking some time off: the holidays. Remember, I write most of my posts beforehand, and the run-up to Christmas has taken its toll on my writing schedule. So I’ll use the lame-duck week between Christmas and New Year’s to take some time for myself, to enjoy all my wonderful gifts (yeah, right; I’m 32 now, I honestly like giving more than receiving these days), and to build up for next year. “Let’s make a language” continues apace, however. The timing for it worked out perfectly, and I had the latest parts done well in advance. (Part 9, for example, was actually written in late October!)

So, have a great week, and I hope you have had a wonderful holiday season, whichever holiday it is that you celebrate. I’ll see you again next week, and next year.

Let’s make a language – Part 10b: Relative clauses (Conlangs)

(Editor’s note: I wrote this two weeks ago. It’s only the calendar that put it out on Christmas Day.)

As I said before, I think relative clauses are hard to wrap your head around. Fortunately, once we know the basics, it’s much easier to put them into a conlang. Let’s do that now, with Isian and Ardari.

Isian relatives

Isian relative clauses always appear at the end of a noun phrase. That one’s pretty much the only non-negotiable part of the nominal grammar. But how do we make them? As it turns out, in one of two different ways, depending on what we’re relativizing.

For subjects, Isian uses a simple gap strategy. The only way you’ll know it’s a relative clause is by a special marker ke that goes before the verb. For example, “the man who saw me” translates as e sam ke cheres men. In a sense, ke functions almost like English that, as a complementizing particle, but it’s more tightly bound to the verb than the noun.

A couple more examples, using only old vocabulary:

es esher ke dalega e sush talar “the girls that live in the blue house”
ta almerat shes ke barda e ficha shimin “a wise woman who prays at the river”

Everything else that needs to be relativized works differently. (This, by the way, is an example of the accessibility hierarchy in action.) For these, Isian uses a resumptive pronoun. This is just a personal pronoun in the appropriate case and number, and it takes the place of the relativized argument. Changing our first example around, we would have e sam ke chereta im, meaning “the man I saw”. (Literally, this would be “the man I saw him”, which is ungrammatical in English.) Note that ke is still used, but im appears as the object, in a resumptive context.

More examples include:

e talar ke dalegan em i ed “the house where I live” (or “the house in which I live”)
lichacal ke rococan em ed “everything I have written”
es des ke an din fanama des mit “the things we can’t have”

Also, in this type of relative clause, Isian’s normal SVO word order isn’t quite as rigid. Resumptive pronouns can be fronted for emphasis, although they can’t come before ke and the verb. Actually, in these cases, the normal word order almost becomes VSO, with VOS a distinct alternative.

So, that’s the basic outline for Isian relative clauses. Compare that to the length of the last post, and you can see what I mean when I say that they’re hard to understand, but easier to implement. Now, let’s take a look at Ardari.

Ardari relatives

Grammatically speaking, this is one instance where Ardari is actually far simpler than Isian. It uses a full complementizing gap strategy throughout. The relative argument, whether subject, object, oblique, or genitive, is fronted and replaced by qa. The relative clause then slides into the noun phrase just before the head noun.

Subject: qa tyèketö wi reje sèdardös, “the children playing in the house”
Object: tura qa grätod ènglatö, “the long sword I made”
Oblique: qa chès tatyerod astitö, “the friend I danced with”
Genitive: sli qa me kyure yfilyod nälitö “the beautiful woman whose hand I held”

Postpositions are fronted, but not replaced, so they’re effectively “dangling”, although it’s impossible to end the sentence with one. (This should cause such a conflict in grammar pedants’ minds that it will shut them down for good.) The last two examples above illustrate this, with the postpositions chès “with” and me “of”; the latter is the way to make an Ardari genitive in a relative clause, since qa doesn’t have case forms. Putting these two in a “standard” form would give us astitö chès tatyerod “I danced with the friend” and slini nälinitö kyure yfilyod “I held the beautiful woman’s hand”, respectively.

Conclusion

There’s not much else to say, really. Again, the hard part is understanding relative clauses enough to know how to put them in your conlang. Putting them in turns out to be almost trivial in comparison. Who would have guessed?

Next time, we’ll look at the “other” kind of relative clause, more properly called the “adverbial” clause. Before that, though, next week will be special. See you next year!

First glance: Unreal.js

With Christmas coming up, I don’t exactly have the time to write those 2,000-word monologues that I’ve been doing. But I want to post something, if only because laziness would intervene otherwise. Inertia would take over, and I’d stop posting anything at all. I know it would happen. I’ve done it once before. So, these last few Wednesdays of 2015 will be short and sweet.

This time around, I want to talk about something I recently found on a wonderful site called Game From Scratch. It’s called Unreal.js, and it’s open-source (Apache license). What does it do? Well, that’s the interesting thing, and that’s what I’m going to ramble on about.

You’ve probably heard of UnrealEngine. It’s the latest iteration of the game engine used to power a wide array of games, from Unreal Tournament to AAA titles like the newest Street Fighter and Tekken to hundreds of up-and-coming indie games. The most recent version, UnrealEngine 4, is getting a lot of press mainly because of its remarkably open development and friendly pricing scheme. (Compared to other professional game engines, anyway.) Lately, Unreal has become a serious competitor to Unity for the middle tier of game development, and competition is an indisputably good thing.

But Unreal has a problem compared to Unity. You see, Unity runs on Microsoft’s .NET framework. (Strictly speaking, it runs on Mono, which is a Microsoft-approved knockoff of .NET that used to be fully open, to the point where most Linux distributions preinstalled it a few years ago. Now…not so much.) Anyway, Unity uses .NET, and one of the nifty things about .NET is that, like the JVM, it’s not restricted to a single language. Sure, you’re most likely to use C#, but you don’t have to. Unity explicitly supports JavaScript, and it used to have full support for a Python clone called Boo. (Supposedly, there are ways to get other languages like F# to work with it, but I don’t know why anyone would want to.)

Unreal, on the other hand, uses C++. From a performance perspective, that’s a great thing. C++ is fast, it can use far less memory than even C#, and it’s closer to the hardware, making it easier to take advantage of platform-specific optimizations. However, C++ is (in my experienced opinion) one of the hardest programming languages to learn well. It’s also fairly ugly. The recent C++11 standard helps a lot with both of these problems, but full support just isn’t there yet, even 4 years later. C++17 looks like it will go a few steps further in the “ease of use” direction, but you’ll be lucky to use it before 2020.

The makers of UnrealEngine know all of this, so they included a “visual” programming language, Blueprints. Great idea, in theory, but there are a lot of languages out there that you don’t need to invent. Why not use one of them? Well, that’s where Unreal.js comes in. Its developers (some guys called NCSoft; you may have heard of them) have made a plugin that connects the V8 JavaScript engine from Chrome/Safari/Node.js/everywhere into Unreal. The whole thing is still in a very early stage, but it’s shaping up to be something interesting.

If Unreal.js takes off, then it can put Unreal well ahead of Unity, even among hobbyists and lower-end indies. JavaScript is a lot easier on the brain than C++ (take it from someone who knows both). And it has a huge following, not just for webapps and server stuff. The Unreal.js project page claims support for “(Full) access to existing javascript libraries via npm, bower, …”

That’s huge. Sure, not all npm packages are of the highest quality, but there are plenty that are, and this would let you use all of them to help make a game. Game engines, historically, have been some of the worst about code reuse, 3rd-party libraries, and other niceties that “normal” applications get to use. Well, that can change.

And then there’s one other factor: other languages. Since Unreal.js is pretty much just the V8 engine from Node, and it can load most Node packages, that opens the possibility of using some of the many “transpiled” languages that are transformed to Node-friendly JavaScript. Think CoffeeScript, TypeScript (which recently released its new 1.7 version), or even my April Fools’ Day joke language Elan.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Unreal.js will fizzle. Perhaps it’s destined to join the legions of other failed attempts at integrating game development with the rest of the programming world. I hope not. The past few years have seen a real move in the direction of democratizing the art of game-making again. I’d like to see that trend continue in 2016 and beyond.

Holidays: reality and fantasy

Today, for me, marks the winter solstice. (Officially, it happens just before 5AM tomorrow morning, going by UTC time. I’m in the US Eastern Time Zone, which is 5 hours behind that, so it’s a few minutes before midnight locally.) As the days grow shorter and the year runs out, thoughts naturally turn towards the holidays, of which there are so many right now. Christmas, of course, is only a few days away. Hanukkah isn’t too far behind us. New Year’s Day is on the horizon, bringing 2015 to a close. And that’s not counting the not-so-holy holidays this time of year, like Pearl Harbor Day (and the birthday of one of my uncles) back on the 7th or Boxing Day (and the birthday of a different uncle) on the 26th.

Indeed, in our modern, Western calendar, every month is chock full of holidays. (Except August, much to my brother’s delight; it’s totally bare, so his birthday is all by itself.) But that’s one culture, in one time, and nothing says that everybody has the same holidays. It’s common knowledge that Jews and Muslims don’t celebrate Christmas, for example, while Thanksgiving is an American tradition with no counterpart across the Atlantic. Many countries celebrate Independence Day, but only the USA has it on the Fourth of July.

And what about fictional cultures? What holidays do they have? Tolkien’s hobbits were good English folk, and they essentially used our calendar and our holidays, just with the Christianity filed off. That’s good enough for a lot of stories, but we might want to go deeper. To do that, we need to understand the origins of holidays.

For every season

For a “traditional” pre-industrial society, whether agrarian or hunter-gatherer, life is sustained directly by the earth itself. Food comes from nature, and it is the single most important facet of life. And food follows the seasons, whether the growing seasons of plants or the mating or hibernating or migrating seasons of animals. Life, living, is governed by the calendar. That’s where most of our traditional holidays come from. As it turns out, they might have different names, but almost every culture has a similar set.

Imagine an analog clock face. Now, imagine that this represents the year. Summer, the season with the highest temperatures, can go at the top, with the solstice at the 12 o’clock position. Winter, conversely, will be the low point: 6 o’clock. The spring and autumn equinoxes then fit in at 9 and 3, respectively. And time passes like this in its eternal cycles. Simple, right? Each of those four points I identified are important markers in the year that are recognized by most cultures. (Tropical cultures are a bit of an exception, since they don’t have the most obvious distinction of the seasons, the changing length of the night. But they can still tell the seasons by patterns in rainfall, winds, and the natural behavior of plants and animals.)

For a lot of places in the temperate zones, the spring (vernal) equinox marks the point in the year when temperatures are warm enough to make planting viable. In the same way, the autumnal equinox is a good sign that cold weather is moving in soon, and it’s time to start thinking about harvests and preparing for winter. Since temperate locales tend to show a big difference between hot and cold seasons, this is a very important part of the calendar. Freezing weather kills many plants, including most of those a pre-industrial society depends on for food. Planting too early and harvesting too late are both very real dangers that can, at the worst, lead to widespread famine. (Look up the Year Without a Summer for a fairly recent example of this.)

In a similar vein, the solstices are milestones in the calendar. Among older cultures, the winter solstice has been historically more important, whether as a time to look forward to the spring ahead or to celebrate the passing year. Summer, in temperate regions, is a relative time of plenty already, so it gets less attention. Besides, no one who lives a pastoral life looks forward to the lean times of winter.

So, for many cultures that haven’t reached the Industrial Age (where advances in technology allow food yields to increase faster than the population), these four times are some of the most likely suspects for holidays. And we can add to them four more: the midpoints between each pair. On our imaginary clock, those are at 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, and 10:30; on the calendar, they’re around the beginning of February, May, August, and November. Indeed, some calendars—the Celtic calendar is one example—use those to determine the seasons, while our familiar equinoxes and solstices become their midpoints.

Altogether, then, we have eight days that make obvious sense for agrarian holidays. On our calendar, roughly, they are: February 1, March 20, May 1, June 21, August 1, September 23, November 1, and December 21. And true enough, the Western world has seasons for just about all of them:

Early February: Groundhog Day is a modern spectacle that hearkens back to actual folk wisdom regarding the coming of spring. The Christian feast day of Candlemas probably replaced many of those “pagan” traditions. And America’s bloodsport of choice has its biggest day around this time, too: the Super Bowl.
Late March: Essentially everybody celebrates the first of spring. (If you’re a Celt, then that was in the last section, as Imbolc. Otherwise, it’s probably right here.) Most of the European rituals were subsumed into Easter, but the pagan origins are still evident. Look elsewhere in the world, though, and you’ll find planting holidays and end-of-winter feasts aplenty.
Early May: By the middle of spring, lots of flowers are blooming, and that’s the basic idea around these holidays. Nowadays, May Day celebrates workers in industrialized countries, but the floral connection still exists. The US has never really been a big May Day place, so Mother’s Day pops up here. It’s not a traditional festival-type holiday, though, so we’ll get to it later. The Celts, by the way, started counting summer here, calling it Beltane.
Late June: Again, we don’t really have a lot going on this time of year, but that wasn’t always the case. Midsummer was celebrated by plenty of cultures, and it’s a very big thing in northern Europe to this day. Christianity appropriated it as St. John’s Day, but find somebody in America who knows that. Of course, we have the nearby Fourth of July, so it’s understandable. Anyway, midsummer holidays tend to celebrate the long days, maybe even with bonfires that try to further drive back the night.
Early August: By August, summer is starting to run out, and fall is approaching. The earliest harvests start around this time, and the traditional Anglo-Saxon calendar marks August 1 as a “first harvest” festival for wheat crops, called Lammas (Lughnasa by the Celts). The timing doesn’t work everywhere, nor does it work for every crop, so not everybody has a harvest holiday around here, although they’ll have one somewhere.
Late September: Traditional harvest festivals tend to fall around the first of autumn. In other words, right here. The Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the equinox, and its light can be seen as a blessing to those working the fields, giving them a little extra to see by. Harvest, of course, is a time of hard work, but also of feasting. Before modern food storage techniques, people had to eat what they could, lest it go to waste.
Early November: Celts have Samhain, Christians have All Saints’ Day, and children have Halloween. These are all connected, as the Church took over the pagan festival, then the people took over the holy feast. Some other cultures have something here, but this one isn’t that big a time to celebrate, as it means that winter is coming. Maybe if you’re a Stark…
Late December: In modern times, we’d see it as ending the year with a bang. For a lot of people (not just Christians, for that matter), Christmas is the holiday. But it has its pagan origins, too: traditional Yule and Roman Saturnalia. All of them have the same general idea, though. A feast to get through the long winter nights, a time to look forward to spring, a day to reflect on the year that was and the year that soon will be, all of that fits this time of year. So does gift-giving, that most popular of Christmas traditions. What better time to give to those in need, if not the shortest day of the year?

Getting religion

So that’s it for the agrarian calendar. Add religion to the mix, and things get hairy. For Christianity, it’s mostly simple, as the Church subsumed the pagan holidays into its own, sometimes only by changing their names. They did add some of their own, like Ash Wednesday or the feast of the Assumption, that don’t match up to the seasons. Judaism and Islam, which keep their own calendars, have their own holidays, like Hanukkah and Ramadan, and the same would be true even for fictional religions.

Here, it’s hard to give guidelines. Religious observances that aren’t anniversaries of known events can fall anywhere in the year. They can even be movable, and not in obvious ways: calculations of the date of Easter drove centuries of Christian astronomy. And those that are annual commemorations don’t necessarily need any connection to the actual date the event happened. After all, there isn’t even Biblical evidence that Jesus was born in December. (That he was crucified in spring is pretty solidly confirmed, however.)

My best advice is to think about the religion. What days are most important? Those will likely be the ones most celebrated. Then look at the rest of the calendar. People like feasts, but they don’t want too many too soon. That gets expensive. So the next most celebrated holidays will likely be those far from other holidays. It’s not an exact science—it doesn’t explain the American August drought—but it’s a good start.

Also, if your story involves a polytheistic religion, think about the different gods and their functions. Gods of agriculture and nature are going to be more tied to the seasons. Death and winter are often linked, for obvious reasons, so a death god might have a holiday in or near winter. Spring is seen as a time of love, fire goes with summer, and I’m sure you can find other relations.

Inventions

As states become more centralized, especially once industrialization comes about, the nature of holidays begins to change. Sure, the usual suspects are still there: harvest feasts, planting festivals, summer bonfires and winter gifts. But these are increasingly accompanied by a new set of holidays, and we should spend some time on them.

Many of our “secondary” holidays originally had a religious significance, largely stemming from the Catholic saints’ days. Valentine’s Day is one of these, though it also falls on the day of a Roman feast (Lupercalia) that had many of the same romantic connotations. Saint Patrick’s Day is another, but it’s also a “nationalist” holiday, with its strong Irish connection. For these, as for Christmas and Halloween, it’s a case of the secular overtaking the religious. Likewise, Thanksgiving originally had some religious overtones, but these are all but forgotten.

Other holidays are directly nationalist, and these obviously depend on the country. But they all have in common the idea of commemorating a person or group. In the US, for example, we have holidays to honor Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther King Jr., veterans (originally of World War I, but later expanded to all of them), mothers, fathers, workers, and presidents. The specifics will differ, but a fictitious country would likely have its own set of honored people. This would depend on history, societal norms, technological advancement, and the circumstances around the formation of that country, all of which are good topics for future posts.

Elsewhere

On other planets, the seasons still work the same way. A terrestrial planet with a year like Earth’s will have a natural calendar like Earth’s. The names and dates will be changed, but the broad outline will remain the same.

We don’t even know what kind of life can arise on less-familiar worlds, but it stands to reason that they’d have similar ideas about the calendar. Of course, around a red M star, a habitable world’s year only lasts a few weeks, so things will likely break down at this extreme. At the other end of the spectrum, habitable planets around F stars might have years 3 or more times that of ours, meaning longer, more extreme seasons. More holidays would appear in a longer calendar like this, if only to break up the monotony.

Now, a society spanning multiple worlds has a conundrum. Most of the holidays, at first, would be those of the homeworld. But colonies would soon become like nations on Earth, each developing their own set of observances (for the same reasons, no less). Almost all of these would be purely local, but some would rise in prominence, as St. Patrick’s Day has done here.

Conclusion

However you do it, holidays add flavor to a world. They’re an important part of life. They have been for thousands of years, and they will be as long as we continue to observe them.

Most of a culture’s holidays are going to come from its roots, and each will have a story. Some are religious, others entirely dependent on the whims of the seasons. A few started out as movements for political or social change, or to honor the leaders of such. And today, every day of the year has been claimed in the name of some organization. (My own birthday of October 16, for instance, is Boss’s Day, which would be great if I had employees. It’s also World Food Day and World Anesthesia Day, because of historical anniversaries.)

As I said before, most stories won’t need this level of detail. But it can find a place in worldbuilding, and it’s always good to have the answers to the kinds of questions you never thought to ask. So, consider this a gift. And whichever holiday you happen to be celebrating over the next week or so, I hope you enjoy it.

Let’s make a language – Part 10a: Relative clauses (Intro)

This time around, we’re going to look at what I think is one of the more confusing bits of a language: the relative clause. That is, it’s confusing in theory, as in understanding how it works. Implementing it in a conlang turns out to be a bit easier, but it marks a kind of turning point, in that we’re moving out of the simple grammatical concepts (like plurals or the past tense) and into the more complex world of phrase-level grammar. I guess you could even say this starts “Part 2” of the series.

It’s all relative

Relative clauses. What they are is right there in the name. First of all, they’re clauses, meaning that they are essentially self-contained phrases that have all the necessary parts to state a fact about something. (This is different from the prepositional phrases from last time, which can only really add information to an existing clause.) And second, relative clauses are relative. In other words, the new facts they provide somehow relate to something else.

That’s a grammatical definition, anyway. In English, what relative clauses are is fairly obvious: they are the phrases that we use to put more meaning in a sentence. (Conveniently enough, that last sentence ended with one.) Unlike an adjective phrase, a relative clause works more like a whole new sentence embedded in an existing one, except that one part of it refers directly to something in that existing sentence.

For example, let’s take a simple sentence with a relative clause: The nice man who lives next door has three big dogs. Okay, I’m not the best on example sentences, but it’ll work, and it doesn’t use any other grammar we haven’t already seen in the series. So what have we got? Well, let’s break it down. Starting at the end, we have a predicate phrase, has three big dogs, which contains a verb (has) and a noun phrase (three big dogs).

Those are nothing new, so we’ll ignore them completely and focus on the first half of the sentence, the subject phrase: the nice man who lives next door. Clearly, man is the head of this phrase, and the and nice are an article and adjective, respectively. And that leaves who lives next door, which is our relative clause. It’s formed almost like it could be a sentence, with its own verb (lives) and everything, but the subject is all wrong for that.

In a sense, we’ve combined two sentences. We have the main statement, the nice man has three big dogs, but we also want to clarify some things about this nice man, so we have another sentence, he lives next door. In both cases, we’re talking about the same man, and that’s the “hook” that lets us put the relative clause into the original statement.

Subjects and objects

In our example, the subject of the “outer” clause was the same as that of the relative clause. That doesn’t always have to be the case. In English, as in many languages, it’s possible to switch things around. You can also have, for instance, objects with attached relative clauses: I talked to the man who lives next door. Inside the relative clause, the man is still the subject, but on the outside, he’s the direct object. Similarly, the “relativized” part can be the object of its own clause (the man that I saw yesterday), or part of a possessive or other construction (the man whose dogs are always barking).

English, admittedly, makes all this a little unclear. In cased languages, it’s a lot easier to keep track of everything, and that’s one of the grammatical pedant’s arguments in still using whom for relativized objects. (Their opinion on sentences ending in a preposition comes into play here, too, because that comes from the different ways relative clauses are made in English and Latin. In Latin, you can’t “split” the preposition from the relative pronoun, like you can in English.)

Not every language allows all types of nouns to be relativized, though. There are a few different roles available, and it seems to be a linguistic universal that they fall into a naturally order, called the accessibility hierarchy:

Subject
Direct object
Indirect object
Oblique argument (English prepositional phrases)
Genitive (where English would use whose)
Comparative object (such as the people I am older than)

As the theory goes, if any one of these can’t be relativized, then nothing lower on the list can, either. In other words, any language that allows relative clauses at all is going to allow them for subjects, while one that doesn’t let you use them for objects won’t let you for genitives, either. English offers the full range, as do most of the “big” world languages, but that’s not always the case.

Those languages that don’t let you use the full hierarchy often have some way of accomplishing the same thing. There might be a special verbal voice (like the applicative or the antipassive), for example.

Other ways

Now, just because our language creates relative clauses a certain way by default (using a relative pronoun like “who”, “whose”, or “which”), doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do it. And that’s where things can get interesting. Indeed, English itself gives you a few options:

First off, you don’t actually need a relative pronoun; you can get by without one: the girls I saw outside has a relative clause with no pronoun. This one pops up in a lot of languages, and linguists refer to it as a gap strategy. The “gap” refers to where the relativized part of the sentence would go.

Second, you can use the gap strategy with a kind of linking particle, sometimes called a complementizer. This one is also an option in English, using that: the girls that I saw outside. This is common throughout the world, and it has become a kind of catch-all in English, much to the despair of some.

Both of the above alternatives carry less overt information than the relative pronoun typical of European languages. But we can go in the other direction, as well. We can add a resumptive pronoun, which is a regular personal pronoun that appears where the relativized argument would, as if we could say the girls that I saw them outside. (This one can appear in spoken English, when a speaker gets too bogged down in relative clauses. It’s happened to me plenty of times.) The resumptive pronoun can also be moved to the front of the relative clause in some languages, but that doesn’t change the core “method”.

A relative clause can also show up as some other kind of clause. Turkish has a nominalizing construction that would render our example as something like the girls of my seeing outside. Some languages of East Asia, conversely, use a genitive construction that would come out closer to the girls of I saw outside. Constructs like these tend to work best when independent words denote such meanings, rather than case affixes. If a language has a passive voice, that’s another possibility for relative clauses. Our running example in this section makes this one more cumbersome, but you might get something like the girls seen outside.

Finally, a few languages dispense with relativized clauses altogether. These have internally-headed clauses, where the clause that would be relative is simply inserted into the main sentence as-is. Using our original example sentence, this might come out in a literal translation as the nice man lives next door has three big dogs. (This kind shows up a little bit more often among the native languages of the Americas, but also in a few scattered locations elsewhere in the world.) A similar option is found in Hindi, which uses a reduced correlative word or phrase in the main clause, almost the opposite of the “relative pronoun” process of English. Our example sentence might be literally translated in this case as which nice man lives next door, that man has three big dogs.

Seeing all your relatives

That just about covers the largest category of relative clause, but it’s not the only one. We can also have something called a free relative clause, which isn’t really relative to much of anything. Wikipedia’s English example is I like what I see, which nicely illustrates this. Languages don’t have to allow this one at all, but many of them do; a different wording might be I like that which I see, which sounds very stilted in English, but more explicitly shows the grammar involved.

Another clause that “sounds” relative is the adverbial clause, something like when I came home. I mean, it looks like it’s a relative clause, right? It’s got when, and that’s in the same class as who and where, isn’t it? But it isn’t, not really. It is, however, the topic for the next part of the series, so we’ll leave that discussion for later.

Wireless woes

I’m really not trying to get out of posting Wednesday stuff. It’s just that fate seems to be conspiring against me. Last week, I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. This time around, the illness has moved to my wireless router.

It started a couple of weeks ago, when my trusty old RT-N16 started acting up. Wireless speeds became unbearably slow, and latency was horrible. (We’re talking a 200 ms ping to the next room.) So, after eliminating all other potential sources of trouble, I bought a new router: an RT-AC66, also by Asus.

That, apparently, was a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the AC66 is a great router. But there’s a big problem, and it turns out that it’s the same problem that the N16 had.

After some research, I think I’ve pinpointed the problem: the wireless chipset. Both routers use essentially the same one for the 2.4 GHz band. And both of them use essentially the same firmware, thus the same driver for that chipset. That driver, however, doesn’t exactly work.

On various forums, Asus support people have said that a fix is in the works. They’ve said this in posts dating back to 2013, in fact. Yet no fix has solved all the problems.

So I’ve got a few options. I could try alternate firmware (DD-WRT, for example). That’s a road fraught with peril, as you may know, and there’s no guarantee it would really help. So, I’m going with option 2: get a third router. This one is a TP-LINK Archer C7. It’s a different manufacturer and a different chipset. That, of course, will mean a different set of problems, but (hopefully) some that are fixable.

The changing of the seasons

Winter is coming. It’s not just a catchy motto from Game of Thrones, you know. No, winter really is on its way, as the seasons move on their eternal cycle. And this change from fall to winter can make you wonder. We know why the seasons change: our planet’s tilt, combined with its movement around the sun. But what does that truly mean? And, from a worldbuilding perspective, does it have to be that way? Well, let’s take a look.

Reason for the season

The Earth is tilted on its axis. Anybody past about the third grade knows that, and it’s patently obvious just by looking at the sky at different points in the year. Right now, our world has somewhere in the vicinity of 23° of axial tilt, and that’s a fairly stable number. It hasn’t changed much at all in written history, and only within about a degree either way throughout all of human existence. In the distant past (millions of years ago), there were periods where it was much higher or lower, but things are much more settled in this modern era.

Now, the axis doesn’t move, at least on scales of a single year. (We’ll ignore precession and other effects for the moment, as they tend to work on much larger periods of time.) What does that mean for us? Only that different parts of the world will get more sunlight at different times of the year. And that’s what causes the seasons to change.

Summer, of course, is when your part of the world gets the most direct sunlight, and that happens when your half of the world points more towards the sun. Winter is the exact opposite, and it’s on the other side of the year. Spring and fall (autumn, if you prefer) are in the middle, when the planet’s tilt is roughly perpendicular to the sun’s rays. But the Earth has two hemispheres: northern and southern. They can’t both be pointed at the sun, thus the complementary seasons that make Christmas a summertime holiday in Australia.

Tropical highs and lows

There’s a lot more to it than that, though. Because of the Earth’s tilt of about 23°, we can divide the world into a few sections. First, we have the tropics, the area around the equator, from the Tropic of Cancer in the north, to the Tropic of Capricorn in the south. Coincidentally enough, these lines are at exactly the latitude equal to the axial tilt. (It’s not a coincidence at all; it’s the whole reason why they exist.) Every point in the tropics will have the sun directly overhead at some time in the year.

The polar regions are also defined by the tilt. The Arctic and Antarctic Circles are at a latitude of about 67°, or as far from the pole (90°) as the axial tilt, or in math terms: $90° – a$. Everywhere in a polar region will have a time when the sun is at the nadir, and a day where it doesn’t rise at all. But it will also have days where the sun doesn’t set, giving us the “midnight sun” of Alaska and Scandinavia.

In between the polar and tropical regions lie the temperate zones. In these, the sun will never be directly overhead or directly below, and it will rise and set every day. And it’s here that seasonal variation has the most visible effects.

Day and night

If the Earth wasn’t tilted, there wouldn’t be any seasons. Every night would be 12 hours long, no matter where you were. But we don’t live in that world, we live in one that is tilted. Thus, our nights change in length. At the equinoxes, the lengths of day and night are equal, hence the name. At the solstices, they’re as far apart as can be. In between, there’s a gradual shifting that gives us the feeling that days are growing longer or shorter.

As you get farther from the equator, the variation grows. Thus, at my latitude of around 35° north, I might only get about 9 hours or so of daylight on the winter solstice, but summer nights will also be that short. Up in New York, it might be split 16/8, while London might be 17/7 or 18/6. Helsinki, up near 60°, is going to have some long winter nights, but there will always be a sunrise. Barrow, Alaska and McMurdo Station in Antarctica are both inside the polar region, so they’ll have days without nights, or vice versa.

An added complication

The whole thing would be perfectly symmetrical but for one little detail. Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a perfect circle. It’s an ellipse. That ellipse doesn’t move any more than the axis does. (Again, we’re ignoring precession.) As of right now, the perihelion, the point closest to the sun, comes around in January, during the northern winter. Orbital mechanics dictates that the aphelion, then, is six months later.

As anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program knows, things move more slowly at apoapsis. (“Aphelion” is just the apoapsis of something orbiting the sun.) Therefore, since our apoapsis occurs in July, northern summer is a little bit longer than winter, while the southern hemisphere is the other way around. It’s not much of a difference, only about one or two days, so it doesn’t affect the climate that much. But it’s something you may have to keep in mind.

Another world

So all that works for Earth. How about a different planet? How would the seasons work? The answer: about the same. Earth is simply the most convenient example, since we’re already living here. Mars has seasons, too; the Phoenix lander was killed by the rigors of a Martian polar winter. For the rest of the solar system, things get dicey. Jupiter doesn’t have much tilt, for example, while Uranus is practically lying on its side. Mercury has its resonance-lock thing going on, which screws everything up. And moons don’t really work the same way.

But for your ordinary, habitable, terrestrial world, seasons are going to be like Earth’s. Summer and winter, spring and fall, they’re all going to be there. They may be different lengths, based on the planet’s orbital period and eccentricity. The tropical and polar zones may be larger or smaller, if the tilt isn’t our 23°. The division of day and night might scale differently, due to these same factors. But from a scientific point of view, that’s all you have to worry about. The years-long summers and winters of Westeros are scientifically implausible; you need magic to account for them.

Summer is always going to be the hottest part of the year, with the most sunlight and shortest nights. Winter will be the coldest; the sun will hang low in the sky, and its rays will strike more glancing blows on the world. Spring and autumn will both be marked by equinoxes, days when the periods of daylight and darkness are the same length. Spring tends to get warmer as you go through it, while autumn cools down.

In the tropics of your fictional world, there won’t be as much seasonal variation, especially close to the equator. The poles, by contrast, will be marked by long summer days, cold winter nights, and periods of total darkness or everlasting sunshine. In between will be the temperate zones, where civilization tends to flourish. And the southern hemisphere will always be backwards when it comes to the calendar.

But this is all speaking from the view of orbital mechanics. On the ground, there is a lot of room for change. Latitude only determines the kinds of seasons you have, whether tropical, temperate, or polar. A location’s climate is certainly affected by this, but many more factors come into play, so many that I’ll dedicate a future post to them.