Little Tiny Things p.30

i'm a french speaker so i also knew this was supposed to represent some sort of conventional french bird sound, but the idea of adding meaningless symbols to represent the untranslatable birdness of the sound is a lovely idea though =) re: Tolkien's languages, because i've dug into those yesterday for no special reason, he took inspiration for his elvish languages mostly from celtic languages such as Welsh. When you see diacritics in romanized text (e.g. "Barad-Dûr"), they represent vowel length: ú = long û = extra-long. This is a fairly common convention, i think he also took it from Welsh, though that's not the way diacritics are used in French (they sometimes change the sound, as in "é" vs "è" but may also just serve to distinguish two words that would otherwise be spelled the same, or are historical relics from sounds that have disappeared— english also has loads of those, e.g. "knight" vs "night"). The script with the pretty curls and dots which Tolkien invented ("Tengwar") is a bit different, in that it follows the logic of scripts like Devanagari (used for Hindi and other languages of India & Nepal) where the "main characters" represent the consonants while the vowels are expressed with dots and dashes above it. It's what linguists call an "abugida" (as opposed to an "alphabet" like the one we're using, where vowels and consonants are written in a single linear sequence, using individual signs of the same basic size, which is of course very convenient for printing when you have to arrange lead types by hand)

milù

Love the little seagull 😊

Zoltanina

'Dy-ah-cry-ticks', eh? Cor blimey, what'll they think up next? Nah, just kidding, thanks for the info! I knew those sorts of symbols existed, but I didn't really know anything about them. I was thinking more in terms of fantasy languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien - those sorts of things. He tended to have dots and things put above and below letters in the words that his characters wrote - no doubt inspired by real human languages and the symbols that they use! I was thinking about special languages that only birds and beasts could speak, and the only way that human text could get close to representing them would be with special symbols - that kind of thing!

Yajoovya

(or from any other french-speaking country actually)

Do you mean the "â" ? That's a french diacritic ^^ Guess that bird is French (or Belgian).

The little points above the 'a's in the bird's speech bubble make it look like they're speaking a special bird language!

Yajoovya

yayyyyy 2nd chapter =)

milù

I've been very careful not to read Little Tiny Things until a couple of pages were out for everyone to read. I wanted the normal experience. To discover it all on the website, a few pages at a time. And it is lovely ! Simply lovely. I've been a fan of GGAR for years and I didn't connect with Headless Bliss so I was a bit scared I wouldn't enjoy LTT and loose the connection I had with your work, Clover. I am delighted to say that has not been the case. I love LTT? I can't wait to meet all the Little Tiny Friends that we'll get to meet in this new adventure.

Diana.H.

the struggles of a house with no wifi and at the edges of cell-phone range. 😄

Ramona Wanders