Gerhard Richter Seestücke Seascapes 1972 51.7 cm x 36.7 cm Atlas Sheet: 200

For some reason I can't tag user @superlampa , but I think the one they're mentioning in the replies is this:

Chemical (orphaned work)

For @ladymacbethsspot’s beautiful canonverse getaway fic “Long Ride Home” <3 <3 <3

settle this for me once and for all

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

So, can we all stop making fun of this now?

Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”? 

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.

(Source) 

This is the post that would make Uncle Iroh join tumblr

Tea and linguistics. My two faves.

Okay, this is all kinds of fascinating!

Quality linguistic research

It’s fascinating indeed. Also i would like to point to the fact that until just a few hundreds years ago the majority of humankind didn’t really have a reason to travel more than a few dozens of kilometers away from their homes so i highly doubt they ever walked from one desert to some other desert or from one giant mountainside to another so if you asked locals what the desert or mountains or the forest or the lake was called, the chances are they would just tell you the local word for the desert, mountains, the forest, or the lake. Because they had like never seen any other such thing in their life. Even as far as stories go, phrases “in a land far far away” or “behind seven mountains” is about as far as oral tradition of carography goes until like the Rome empire, at which point cartographers simply adopted local names for stuff.

And btw, the same thing goes for our planet. Didn’t you guys ever wondered why we call it Earth? In slovak we call it “Zem” which translates as land, country, kingdom, ground, or soil depending on the context. Because like it’s the only planet we have ever been walking on and we are walking on soil and dirt and mud thus when asked “how do you call this thing you are walking in?” ancient people simply blinked in confusion on whoever asked this stupidly obvious question and said “the ground”

this post has everything, tea, linguistics, history, sources, and a heavy implication that ancient people were visited by aliens asking dumb questions

[partial image Id:

three charts from the wikipedia article Etymology of tea

1st is Derivatives of te

2nd is Derivatives of cha

3rd is Derivatives of chay end ID]

Article is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_tea

Hell, this applies to so much more than locations and food: Lots of human groups call themselves the equivalent of “the people”.

As for “chai”, it’s not a surprise that it got shortened to that on Starbucks menus and the equivalent. If I get tea in an Indian restaurant, even one catering to white people, they generally do list it as masala chai. It’s not just that English uses loan words for specific versions of things we already have a general word for: it’s also about making pithy, standardized coffee/tea shop menus. ‘Chai’ is one neat, compact word we didn’t already use for something else.

This is all rings true. I think every fic writer can relate to it. But I've said it before and I'll say it again- I've never seen a piece of fanart that has made me cry, but so many amazing fics have done that. I've read books that have changed my life, and fics that have too for that matter. No other type of fan-made media has ever touched me as deeply. I want everyone who writes to know that- what they're capable of, what their contribution means.

The first time that Erwin saw him, they were both children. They were in different schools, and they were both touring the capital building on separate field trips. But they found each other at the water fountain. They both stared. They forgot to drink any water. Neither of them moved until their teachers insisted. And they swapped glances over their shoulders while they were pulled away from each other.

Erwin remembered him and didn’t understand why. He thought that the boy must have lived near him. That wasn’t the case. He couldn’t find him again.

Twelve years later, Erwin was in a concert venue that was so crowded that he sweated through his shirt before the first band finished playing. The liquor that had been poured down the back of his shirt made him feel sticky. He couldn’t get a good breath with so many people around him, but he helped to pass along crowd surfers anyway. He could feel the music in his bones. The shared adrenaline of the room made his entire body throb. The headliner stepped onto the stage, and the crowd pushed forward.

Erwin felt someone pressed harshly into his right side. He lifted his arm to give the person room to move. When he looked down, Levi looked up at him. They stared again. Then, Levi leaned towards him and yelled something. Erwin couldn’t hear him. Before he could lean down, the hardest part of the best song began. The crowd began to part. Levi grabbed Erwin’s bicep so hard that sweat squeezed from the cotton of his shirt. Erwin grabbed a fistful of Levi’s shirt. Someone else wrapped their arms around Levi’s waist and pulled him away. Levi slipped out of his shirt. Erwin dropped it to move after him. The crowd was faster. Erwin watched while Levi was picked up and put on top of the crowd. Levi fought. The crowd carried him anyway.

A mosh pit began, and Erwin pushed away from it, keeping his eyes on Levi. The music increased to an impossible volume. He watched Levi float on top of the crowd around the mosh pit. When he saw Levi fall down into the crowd on the other side of the pit, he forced his way past three layers of people. He moved into the pit. A man threw a fist at him, and Erwin put his boot into the man’s ankle. No one took another shot at him while he moved through the pit. On the other side of the parted crowd, Erwin searched for him. He was gone.

After the concert, Erwin insisted that his group of friends wait with him outside of the venue. They stayed with him for an hour before they ditched him to go to the bar. He smoked half of a pack of cigarettes waiting for Levi to find him. Levi didn’t come. When there were only a few sparse groups of people left outside of the building, Erwin felt a pain in his right arm. He put the cigarette between his lips to hold it while he lifted his right sleeve. Levi had left fingerprint bruises and shallow, bloody scratches on his skin. Erwin exhaled smoke.

That night, at home, he took off his shirt and looked at the marks in the mirror. He searched for Levi online until the sun came up. He couldn’t remember everything. But he could remember the nights Levi would come to his room. He remembered the desk in his office. The lingering scent of black tea. He remembered the way Levi’s hair looked when it was stuck to his forehead with sweat. He knew the way Levi tasted. And that was enough to keep him hopeful for a year. Then, he stopped looking.

Three years later, Erwin leaned over and snorted the line of coke on the bar. When he stood upright, the bottle of Rush was pushed under his nose. He closed his eyes, pressed his other nostril shut, and inhaled until he felt himself stop thinking. The flood of heat in his face made him smile, and he leaned back in his chair. Erwin grabbed his boyfriend by the hair and shoved his tongue into his mouth. His hips bucked involuntarily, and they were laughing when their mouths parted. His boyfriend leaned over the bar. Erwin saw Levi on the other side of the room.

Levi’s mouth was pressed against another man’s, and both of his hands were pulling on the man’s belt buckle. Erwin stood from his chair, and his boyfriend caught him just before he fell. He heard laughter, and he felt himself being moved. He pushed. The man kissed down Levi’s neck. Levi leaned his head back and opened his eyes. Levi’s lips parted. His hips moved. Erwin tried to be seen. He needed Levi to see him. He opened his mouth and no sound came. He felt himself being picked up. He felt drool running down his chin.

Erwin watched the ceiling pass by while he was carried out of the bar. Outside, he waited for Levi to find him while he counted stars. Then, he was being pushed into a cab.

The next night, Erwin went back to the bar and asked the bartender about Levi. No one had ever seen him before. Erwin went to the bar every night, with and without his boyfriend. His boyfriend hated it. Erwin ended the relationship. He kept looking.

For three more months, Erwin went to the bar every night. Levi never showed. He stopped looking again.

A year later, he finished his Master’s degree. He met his future wife.

Four years later, he had a wife and a son and a daughter. They had his eyes and her hair. He was working on his doctorate, and he had a small office in the University. His days were routine and scheduled. He loved helping to bathe the kids and put them to bed. He felt an ache in his chest with every goodnight kiss. His favorite part of the day was having a glass of wine with his wife after the babies were in bed. Her laugh made him smile. Her head on his chest made it easy to sleep.

One evening, Levi’s mugshot was on the news. Erwin almost knocked his wine glass over  when he grabbed the remote to increase the volume. She complained that he would wake the kids. He memorized Levi’s legal name.

“Do you know that guy, Ellis?” she asked. Erwin shook his head.

“No,” he said. He turned the volume down again. “I thought I did.”

“You don’t know anyone like that,” she said. He smiled at her.

“Like what?”

“I hope you don’t know anyone who’s dumb enough to try and rob a bank,” she said. He kept smiling, but he felt the resentment take root. He wanted to start a fight with her. He wanted her to regret the words. And he hated it. He resisted it. He tried to force himself to forget. He changed the subject. They watched her favorite movie. He rubbed her feet. He took her to bed and kept her awake all night. She spent twenty minutes combing the knots from her hair the next morning. The makeup that he wouldn’t give her time to remove was smudged all over their wet sheets.

Erwin sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the water running while she showered. He thought about Levi while he rested his head in his hands.

His routine helped to distract him. Erwin didn’t deviate from his normal schedule. That’s how he was able to resist for so long.

In December, Erwin couldn’t stop himself. He looked up the address of the penitentiary. He researched how he should address the letter. He read all of the rules about things that might stop Levi from receiving mail. Erwin put pen to paper. Over and over again.

Hello

Dear

My name

I’ve seen you so many times

Do you believe

I think I know you

I have to try

Erwin threw all of the crumpled pieces of paper in the garbage. He pulled out a single index card and wrote on the lined side.

Is your name Levi Ackerman?

-Erwin Smith

He sealed the index card in the envelope and sent it out with the mail that day.

Two days later, Erwin flipped through his mail at work. He ripped open the envelope as soon as he saw it. The same index card that he had used had been sent back to him. A response was written under his own words.

I can get visitors on Sundays from 13:00 to 17:00.

-Levi

Erwin pulled a sheet of notebook paper from his desk. He put his pen to the paper and stared at the response. Levi’s handwriting was just the same. It was beautiful. Erwin looked away from the index card, and the pictures in frames on his desk caught his eye. He stared at his wife’s image. The pictures of his children stung. They had his eyes and her hair. His jaw went slack. His heart broke painfully. He imagined going to the prison to see Levi. He imagined living with his wife until his children were older. Levi could get out of prison in fifteen years with good behavior. He imagined the entire betrayal. The divorce papers. His mouth felt dry, and his eyes felt wet. Erwin closed his mouth and swallowed. He blinked until he could see clearly.

I can’t

Levi, I tried to find you but

I’m marri

I want

I have two

I didn’t think you were real

I want to murder every man who has ever seen you orgasm

I’m so sorry

I can’t wait

Why did

I shouldn’t have written

Erwin looked at the sheet of paper with broken words. His eyes turned to the index card.

I’ll see you on Sunday.

- Erwin

Comission for @/Mmemacbethsspot on Twitter

<3

Thicker than Water by @ladymacbethsspot

I’d also like to add these Eruri fics I’ve enjoyed:

The Astronomer’s Winter Over by @minxiebutt​ (background Mikenana)

Search and Rescue by @world-war-eruri​ (Mobuhan- and Moblit narrates!)