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Comic Discussion => ALICE GROVE => Topic started by: improvnerd on 09 Nov 2015, 23:22
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Blernd Firth?
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I really love the dynamic between the three protagonists. Poor Alice has been sort-of adopted into Ardent and Gavia's family, hasn't she? Alice may protest that she's stopped looking for friendship but it looks like she gets it anyway. Old Amos is another example, IMO.
Meanwhile, we are reminded that few things can deprive Ardent of his enthusiasm! Is he relentlessly upbeat or just stupid?
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Ardent doesn't seem to be able to think of getting close to someone without sex being involved.
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Ardent is, after all, a teenage boy from a "perfect" world. It doesn't surprise me how sex is high on his "needs for an interpersonal relationship" list.
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I think this might be one of my favourite comics in AG so far. Funny and a good representation of the character and their relationships..
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Blernd Firth?
Look at it this way, it could have been Ford Prefect
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I wanna know what Ardent was going to have said before he got "Shut Up"ed
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I wanna know what Ardent was going to have said before he got "Shut Up"ed
Gavia has been asking the most penetrating questions of the two space kids. I'm wondering if she's something of a "Hermione Granger in Space" who prefers spending time with the library tapes or sitting the the Praeses' Grove, listening to the tales the Trees tell. Naturally, Gavia doesn't want Ardent spilling that she's a bit of a nerd, all told, thinking that it would destroy what little respect Alice would have her. Actually, I think that Alice would respect her a bit more for having that depth... if she hasn't deduced it already which, based on how easily she took Gavia's talk about the lore of the Spacebourne, is a distinct possibility.
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Meanwhile, we are reminded that few things can deprive Ardent of his enthusiasm! Is he relentlessly upbeat or just stupid?
Yes.
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Just doing this before a certain kiwi does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7XfyyKYxnU
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qYbVQu7YAQ
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How does Alice maintain an acquaintance with someone outside the village who can't be reached while staying at home?
Is it someone who visits Alice occasionally?
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They get together to catch up every five hundred years or so.
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Pretty much. 'Occasionally' means different things when you're functionally immortal. Or maybe her associate isn't, and Alice goes to visit them every few years. Presumably the trip is going to take weeks, so it's not like stopping in to visit Amos. And Alice has watched over the townsfolk for several generations at least. But that doesn't mean she's always there. She may disappear every so often on 'witch trips'.
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If she turns out to have green hair and runs a Coffee shop, that will be a moment.
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Just doing this before a certain kiwi does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7XfyyKYxnU
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnKXiQzgbm0
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Blernd Frith
I used to know a family called Frith when I was growing up. 'Tis a real name.
Never did meet a Blernd, though.
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Never did meet a Blernd, though.
It's only one L away from a variant form of "Bernard", but still, "Blernd" sounds like a syllable that no sane language would ever produce, not even in names, which are a bit idiosyncratic in most languages.
If someone finds a counter-example, I will be grateful for augmenting my level of linguistic prowess, and will apologize for denying your language the "sane" label.
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I tried searching Google for "blernd" and it mostly brought up results from Alibaba (a Chinese version of Amazon) for blernd fabric, which I'm 99% certain is a misspelling of "blend."
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Ardent is still having the time of his life.
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Part bat. Part sloth. All adorable.
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Now... Is Alice being incredibly arrogant here or does her absolute confidence that she can keep the space-kids safe based on absolute personal knowledge?
Part bat. Part sloth. All adorable.
Agreed; I'm calling him "Flappy" and I suspect that Ardent has made a friend for life! I also suspect that Gavia is going to have a screaming fit whilst Alice is more gently annoyed than anything else.
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Alice can inflict massive losses on high-tech invaders. There is probably nothing on the planet she can't handle. She's been around long enough that many things know to leave her alone.
Na na na na na na na , Batsloth!
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Slowly, Robinsnail! To the Batsloth Cave!
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My question:
Was Batsloth a Batsloth before Ardent touched it?
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The more I see of the animals here the more I'm wondering if DNAmy was involved at some stage
And that Batsloth is gonna take your head off Ardent.
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Considering his ability to befriend animals - is Ardent a Disney Princess?
Gesendet von meinem GT-N5110 mit Tapatalk
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No Disney princess was ever as horny as Ardent, with the possible exception of Ariel.
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Anyone else wondering if the Batsloth is blind?
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Probably just nocturnal. When it wakes up, Ardent's gonna have his hands full.
And possibly something vital bitten off...
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That's okay. His delightful tail will grow back again.
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His head might be another story, though.
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Is there no second comic this week?
So curious to see what else they bump into, out there in the night.. also hoping for another cameo from the Nightwalker. :psyduck:
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Why does Alice appear so surprised by the batsloth? Frankly, if something is surprising HER, you've encountered something weird.
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Is there no second comic this week?
Jeph said on Twitter yesterday that he was running late and that Alice would probably post this afternoon.
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That's a lot of blood from one BatSloth. Also, I wonder if the children will survive this journey with their sanity intact.
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Apparently Alice needs to worry more about Things touching Ardent than Ardent touching Things.
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Ardent seems to be quite charming for the local planet.
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'Mr Flappy'? Well, any doubt whether Jeph reads this thread is resolved. Meanwhile, Ardent is re-establishing his credentials as the strip's Butt Monkey. I figure that he'll have been attacked by literally every vaguely carnivorous bit of fauna (and probably flora too) by the time this caper is over!
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Well, that made the trip a bit more exciting
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This seems to be implying the flora and fauna is only a bit less dangerous then that in Harry Harrison's "Deathworld".
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... "Blernd" sounds like a syllable that no sane language would ever produce, ...
It amazes me that you are saying that in English, and apparently with no intended irony.
English has CRAZY phonotactics! Seriously? The ridiculous language you speak has words like 'twelfths' - which literally has FOUR consonants in a row with only the first one voiced, and can't be pronounced by anyone else in the world except maybe Germans and Poles, you're saying you don't think a sane language could ever come up with 'blernd' which is all voiced and has no more than three consonants anywhere? Or just two consonants if you're pronouncing the 'r' as a vowel modification instead of by itself?
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English spelling may be crazy - but to an Englishman that word would still not fall within its possibilities.
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'Blernd' violates English spelling rules only. If it were spelled 'blearned' and used as a past-tense verb, it wouldn't have attracted a second look. In fact you have already words like 'learned', 'burned', 'blend', 'bland', 'blind', ... There is nothing in that word, and no combination of noises, that isn't in English.
So, when you say that no sane language could come up with that syllable, I may doubt you or agree with you - but whether that's true about sane languages or not, English is crazy like a dancing goat, and that syllable is perfectly reasonable in it.
And, argh, don't get me started about your 'th' consonant! NOBODY (except German, again and some further-north European languages) has a consonant like that! When is it voiced and when not? No clue from the spelling. I had to practice for months before I could even say it by itself, let alone in the middle of a wreck of a word like 'twelfths' (or for that matter 'months').
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That used to be indicated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth) (and still is in Icelandic), but some printers got lazy in the 15th century. If you see "Ye olde ..." in, say, a renaissance fair, the 'Y' was in fact a thorn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29).
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And, argh, don't get me started about your 'th' consonant! NOBODY (except German, again and some further-north European languages) has a consonant like that! When is it voiced and when not? No clue from the spelling. I had to practice for months before I could even say it by itself, let alone in the middle of a wreck of a word like 'twelfths' (or for that matter 'months').
Mm. Greek has the voiceless "th(eta)"; Castilian Spanish has both (written "c/z" and "d", each in particular contexts); so does Welsh. And that's just sticking to Europe.
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Have English speakers ever noticed that sane languages usually have only five or six vowels, and not ELEVEN?
Or that in sane languages there are never more than two consonants in a row in the same word, and not FIVE?
Or that in sane languages voiced and unvoiced consonants are almost never mixed without a vowel inbetween? (yes, I know that happens even more in Eastern european languages, but the point stands...)
Or that in sane language that use alphabets (as opposed to abjads, logograms, syllabaries, or ideographic writing), the pronunciations and the spellings are usually pretty closely related?
To get through school in much of the world you have the choice; you can study three different sane languages, or you can study English. The kids who are ambitious take English - it's harder than three sane languages, but it gets you further.
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Have English speakers ever noticed that sane languages usually have only five or six vowels, and not ELEVEN?
Is Portuguese an insane language? French? Vietnamese? The fact that the International phonetic alphabet has far more than 11 symbols for vowels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_vowels) (and not all of them are used in English...) should indicate the error in this thought.
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Standard French has about thirteen oral vowels (there's some dispute as to the exact number) and four nasals. Latin had ten. Standard Italian has seven. Standard German has fifteen.
The Slavic languages are notorious for their consonant clusters; the Polish word "wszczniesz" begins with a cluster of four consonants. (That, at least, English does not do.) There are American Indian languages which have words with no vowels whatever.
Most times that English adjoins voiced and voiceless consonants, one of them assimilates to the other. ("Dogs" ends with a /z/, for example.)
As for spelling and pronunciation, I give you French and Irish as counterexamples.
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And, argh, don't get me started about your 'th' consonant! NOBODY (except German, again and some further-north European languages) has a consonant like that!
German doesn't have that sound, actually. We have soft and hard ch to compensate. On the other hand, with Spanish and Arabic two of the most widespread languages on earth do have soft as well as hard th sounds, afaik.
I wasn't talking about the amount of consonants (growing up with Angstschweiß and stuff), but rather about the specific syllable 'blernd' (or blearned or however you would want to spell it).
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The "th" sound is closer to a middle ground between "d" and "c/z" in Spanish, honestly. Just because people from Madrid say "madriz" it doesn't mean it isn't a "d" sound in the end.
And Morituri, exactly what do you mean by "Sane" language? Because I think only Italian and Spanish fall under your description.
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And, argh, don't get me started about your 'th' consonant!
Boring. How many distinct British pronunciations of "ough" can you come up with? (You can hear me speak ten in the second half of this recording (http://this recording), listed in this post (https://forums.questionablecontent.net/index.php/topic,28054.msg1087383.html#msg1087383).)
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Eh. Whatever.
While people following English spelling rules would never come up with 'blernd', people who grew up pronouncing English words have no reason to have trouble with it.
And for everyone else: Math is easy. French was easy. English is HARD.
In a few months study you can make yourself understood, which is a lower bar for basic communication than most; but really being good at it; understanding people at full speed and speaking properly with the right sounds so you don't sound like a foreigner, and the right grammar and the spellings and everything, is RIDICULOUSLY hard.
And whatever you claim, any language where you can have five consonants in a row at the end of a syllable that started with three consonants in a row, IS crazy.
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The Czech word for ice cream has no vowels, as I recall.
I knew a Pole who would sometimes spell his name Christoph, and sometimes Krzysztof. I never discovered the function of that z.
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One of my colleagues is Polish, first name Krzysztof, but he usually goes by Kris. The "sz" is pronounced like English "sh". If the name were Czech, the "rz" would be a really rare sound, which I can't describe; Polish and Czech are closely related, so I suspect that at one time the Polish "rz" was pronounced like the Czech one, but by this time it's simplified to just "zh". (Kzhishtof, in other words.)
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The Czech word for ice cream has no vowels, as I recall.
I knew a Pole who would sometimes spell his name Christoph, and sometimes Krzysztof. I never discovered the function of that z.
Yes, but that's not a consonant, for speaking purposes. That's just a spelling convention. I don't know about what Polish does with it, but I suppose that It's probably like English where certain spellings are not part of your possibilities, or where you signal which version of a vowel you used by sticking in letters that usually stand for other sounds, but which aren't pronounced when they are used as signals.
That's the kind of rule 'blernd' violates - 'ernd' isn't allowed as a _spelling_, so you stick an 'e' and an 'a' that you don't pronounce into words like 'earned' when you write down a syllable that uses that _sound_.
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IIRC, in Sanskrit (still sticking with the Indo-European language family), what are commonly translated as ṛ or ṝ are considered semi-vowels, with the former being much like the "re" in pretty.
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'ernd' isn't allowed as a _spelling_
In a regular word, but you're ignoring the fact that names aren't bound by language rules.
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Math is easy. French was easy. English is HARD.
And Finnish is impossible. :-\
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I thought that was Welsh?!
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(http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45162000/jpg/_45162744_-2.jpg) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm)
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Thank you for making my point for me
:-D ;)
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Ydy, mae'r Gymraeg yn amhosibl.
Mwy o dystiolaeth.
Since I was a little late with this.
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T'hoH??
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Y'know, I'm really starting to lose faith in Alice as a caretaker. What's-His-Name's worry about Gavia burning the town while Alice was distracted is proving more and more to be legitimate, since twice now in the past minute has Ardent ended up in mortal danger while she was looking the other way.
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... since twice now in the past minute has Ardent ended up in mortal danger while she was looking the other way.
You're missing the real point: She was distracted with Gavia. I suspect that Gavia isn't anywhere near as likely as Ardent is to be able to get up to mischief/in trouble without Alice being around.
I'm not sure what kind of relationship is developing between the two of them; big sister/bratty younger sister is the closest I can get. My guess is that Gavia shares lots of personality characteristics with Alice. This fascinates her; she hasn't had a disputant to debate with on her intellectual level probably for millennia so she's really the focus of Alice's attention right now.
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... since twice now in the past minute has Ardent ended up in mortal danger while she was looking the other way.
You're missing the real point: She was distracted with Gavia. I suspect that Gavia isn't anywhere near as likely as Ardent is to be able to get up to mischief/in trouble without Alice being around.
I'm not sure what kind of relationship is developing between the two of them; big sister/bratty younger sister is the closest I can get. My guess is that Gavia shares lots of personality characteristics with Alice. This fascinates her; she hasn't had a disputant to debate with on her intellectual level probably for millennia so she's really the focus of Alice's attention right now.
Sure, that's nice, but she was only distracted with Gavia the *first* time that Ardent was put in danger. The second time, she was actually talking directly to Ardent, and got caught up in her monologue.
It's not necessarily a bad character trait, having her be so old and overconfident that she actually doesn't consider the dangers all around her, leading to other people being injured or put at risk. I'm just pointing out that, good character or no, she isn't shaping up to be a good caretaking figure.
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At what point was she supposed to be? Her handling of the town seems to be hands off until they get into trouble or her authority is challenged. Then she goes for the throat. She does the same for the kids. She lets them get into trouble, then steps in to fix it when real danger is about to happen. Also, as far as the giant chameleons go, she wasn't expecting them to be active, so wasn't looking out for an attack from them. It wasn't like the batsloth where it was right in front of her. And the fact that she didn't immediately react and kill the giant chameleon likely means Ardent isn't in that much danger from them.
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At what point was she supposed to be?
Maybe when she told Gavia "You're with me this time, you have nothing to worry [about]." Or when she physically threatened Jebediah for questioning the safety of her actions, and used the fact that she was the one in charge as a reason why she shouldn't be questioned.
Also, as far as the giant chameleons go, she wasn't expecting them to be active, so wasn't looking out for an attack from them.
Is this supposed to help my confidence in her? "She wasn't arrogant, just incompetent!" The fact of the matter is, she assumed she had things under control, and then was immediately surprised by something happening that she didn't expect. I doubt Jeph is going to kill someone off, especially this early in the overarching story, but if the Chameleon is something that would kill Ardent quickly, or if it had been some other viscous predator that was more immediately threatening, or if the Batsloth had attacked a second before Alice reacted...
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Apparently they're Chamelee-Yummy!
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The blood on Alice' arm disappeared rather quickly.
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Just a subtle reminder there that Alice has pretty much seen it all in her time. Watching a girl use nanotech-magic to kill a giant chameleon? Well, she's more worried that the best cuts get salvaged for provisions!
The blood on Alice' arm disappeared rather quickly.
Yeah, well Jeph isn't on the top of his game right now; I think that we need to make allowances for that.
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Well, that's Dinner taken care of.
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Well, Gavia gets points for rescuing her little brother.
And we have confirmation that she is actually up for combat beyond scaring a few natives!
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"You are not eating my delightful tail!"
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Unrelated to the Chameleon, but... Is Gavia gaining weight? Her hair is certainly more unkempt than it was in her first appearance, (Nice subtle touch on the art, by the way,) but comparing her first appearance on (what is currently) Comic 91, she's gotten less skinny. She's almost twig-like there, with a narrow face, tiny neck, scrawny (almost emaciated) arms, and really thin body, but as of the last few comics, she's gained some mass and looks a lot healthier. I'd chalk it up to art development, except that Ardent and Alice look almost identical to their first appearances. (Minus wardrobe changes for Ardent and the addition of shading after Gavia's introduction.)
So... Maybe Gavia is putting on a little muscle now that she's actually having to be active and do things? (Even if she has micro machines do all the work for her, she's still moving around more than I presume she normally would.) Or am I reading too much into this?
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Maybe!
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It wouldn't surprise me really. I imagine their diet changed quite a bit after being abandoned on Earth as well. They don't seem to have pie up there after all. So it stands to reason the kids might start putting on a bit of weight and muscle mass. It just might not show on Ardent yet because some of those extra calories went into rebuilding his delightful tail.
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It just might not show on Ardent yet because some of those extra calories went into rebuilding his delightful tail.
Then again, Ardent is also doing actual physical labor and was (presumably) physically active before the comic started, so the different diet probably wouldn't be as much of a system shock for him and he's likely to be burning a lot more calories than his sister.
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Oh, he's physically active alright.
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It wouldn't surprise me really. I imagine their diet changed quite a bit after being abandoned on Earth as well. They don't seem to have pie up there after all. So it stands to reason the kids might start putting on a bit of weight and muscle mass. It just might not show on Ardent yet because some of those extra calories went into rebuilding his delightful tail.
I suspect that Gavia's attitude towards herself was that she was a floating, biological computer that interacted with its environment via nanotech, so she probably subsisted on vitamin and other supplements (perhaps even taken intravenously) rather than real food. Now, that's changed; she's having to eat real food and, whilst she's still mostly relying on her nanotech, I've got the feeling that Alice may be requiring her to do stuff physically. So, her body is bulking up. I'm wondering if she'll even recognise herself in a few months' time.
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Indeed
I wonder if there will come a point where Gavia actually stops relying so much on her Nanotech abilities. This may be part of the lesson that the Praeses wanted Alice to teach her.
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The blood on Alice' arm disappeared rather quickly.
Obviously she licked it off. No sense in wasting protein, is there?
I wonder if there will come a point where Gavia actually stops relying so much on her Nanotech abilities. This may be part of the lesson that the Praeses wanted Alice to teach her.
I think the Praeses is targeting Alice for lesson-teaching, myself.
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Not to dig up an old argument, but I found this thing (http://www.textmap.com/ethnicity/) which claims to identify origins of names by their phonetics. It identifies "Blernd Frith" as "GreaterEuropean, British."
edit -- On the other hand it also rates "Kim Jong-Il" as British. :psyduck:
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At least we know that if she'd accidentally killed someone while burning the forest down when she arrived, she'd have felt really bad about it.