@dazzleships
XD That literally made me lol.

Also, I’m reading/listening to Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books, so have been hearing a lot of Nac Mac Feegle speech, which that unsurprisingly brings to mind.

@Gnot Even
I was simplifying for our friend here :)

Fun fact: Yogh was still used in Scotland well into the printed era - the standardised spelling of the name “Menzies” (properly pronounced “Minghis”) is an artefact of that use of the printed z you mentioned, and led to the famous Scots limerick:

@Gnot Even
I visited iceland last year. It was neat.

Yeah, they are both a Norse thing. English picked them up during the period that Norse kings ruled more or less of the country. Iceland has retained a lot of Norse things (including thorn and eth) which have disappeared from all the other Norse countries. Probably most notable is in Iceland a child’s last name is it’s father’s name with “sson” or “sdottir” instead of having a family surname.

Thorn and Eth both make some variety of the “th” sound, and Icelandic still uses both. I actually see both in use here- five Ð/ð(Eth) and 4 Þ/þ(Thorn).

Y is thorn. I’ve already told you that twice. Yogh has a sort of gh sound, not th. Early day printers sometimes used a Z for it, but it was pretty much obsolete when printing came in so you hardly ever see that.

@dazzleships
Oh, believe me when I say I know the word y’all. I know it quite intimately. (I’m a Southerner. LOL.) I’m glad to see that you actually know where to put the apostrophe. For some odd reason, most people want to spell it ya’ll. Ugh! Irritating to me. LOL. I also know that y’all is a contraction of ye all. (Not you all as most people, even Southerners, think.) Now that I think about it, I believe the host of that YouTube channel did call the Y (th) yogh. Thanks for reminding me.

Not random at all. By the time printing reached England eth and yogh had pretty much fallen out of use. Thorn was still routinely used. Scribes in that era tended to be sloppy in their penmanship, and the loop on the thorn tended to get stretched upward: Ƿ. When William Caxton, who had the first printing press in England, went looking for a thorn in his typecase, and found he didn’t have one (because the press was from Germany, and German never used a thorn) he decided the thorn with a stretched loop looked like a Y, and that’s what he used.

@MviluUatusun
A lot of the confusion comes from late medieval printers not having type characters for the three most common Old English letters still used in Middle English (thorn, eth and yogh) and substituting random Roman alphabet letters they did have in their set. “Ye” is a valid Middle English word, pronounced like it looks, basically a precursor of ‘y’all’ - but “ye olde” etc. is unrelated, a legacy of printers using y when they didn’t have a letter for thorn to make “The”, and confusion with the actual word “ye” led to people pronouncing it “yee old” instead of “the old”.

@Paaaad
I can’t say for certain. I know that the host of the series is British and he did say that the signs that say “Ye Olde” (insert store type here) should be said The Old because the Y is/was used as one of the th sounds. If I could find the video again, I’d link to it for you so you could see what I’m talking about. But, as I think about it, I do believe the guy called the letter Eth but he had the capital Y as the letter.

@Gnot Even
I think the other one they were thinking of is Eth. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth)

Y is thorn. If someone told you otherwise, they’re wrong.

@Stellarator
I noticed on the page of the book that Luna was reading you used several archaic letters. It made it rather difficult for me to read but I did manage to figure it out . . . somewhat. Oh! While I’m thinking about it, on another page I made mention that there were actually two letters for the th sound. One, of course, is thorn the other that I failed to show (because I couldn’t remember it) is Y. Originally, Y was used for the, as I call it, soft th sound as in the and three. Therefore, Ye Olde Doughnut Shoppe, is The old doughnut shop. (I got that off of a YouTube video about archaic English letters.)

@Gnot Even
I believe it’s already been established that any strong emotion (anger, hate, love) or action (sex, fighting) is what they feed off of. Plus, they seem to be able to choose who they feed off of as was shown when Aria fed off of “Green Dude” and not Trixie. They can choose one pony or a crowd (i.e. at a concert).

@dazzleships
That response makes me squee with delight, because that is more or less exactly what I was going for! I did a moderate amount of research to make it authentic-ish while focusing on it being understandable. Eeee! :D :D

Now I can only HOPE my attempts at Latin fare as well if somebody looks at them. XD

@Stellarator
Well, I don’t think it’s “bad” at all! You have to bear two things in mind; firstly, there was no universal standard spelling or even orthography for ME, and customs differed between individual institutions and scribes, even within the same manuscript, so it’s not like being able to do a spelling and grammar check on something from the last couple of hundred years. Secondly, even if there was an accepted standard, you’re deliberately toning it down to be comprehensible by people who aren’t academics or time travellers (or centuries old sirens). It wouldn’t necessarily pass muster if you were forging a 12th Century manuscript or something, but it’s clear you did at least some research into things like phrasing or what thorn and eth do. Luna’s question to Sonata is better than the codex text, which takes some liberties for readability’s sake and/or jokes, and there are a couple of spellings you obviously made up to sound right and “old” instead of using a more likely ME word that readers might not have recognised, but on the whole I’d say you did pretty well, and it definitely works much better than if you’d got some professor to translate it for you!

@dazzleships
Out of curiosity… on a scale of “bad, but you tried” to “incoherent and appalling”, how did I do?

Luna is Sneaky in this one but I like it.

@dazzleships
Oh dear! Hopefully I didn’t make you tear your hair TOO much! XD

@SwingtownDerp
That is an interesting point. There are a few ways I could go with this.

I actually minored in Middle English, so yes, I read it all with a big grin :) @Stellarator

@Stellarator
I see. That also makes sense. Though I do still wonder if they can get more energy from direct physical contact.

Yeah considering it’s implied their gems were a part of them since birth, they would feel like a part of themselves are missing after they broke. But working on filling a void in your life is more interesting than a quick fix. Sonata has discovered actual love, and rather likes it. I wonder what the others will discover to make themselves feel whole one day as well.

@dazzleships
I wasn’t sure if anyone would actually try to read that stuff. Apparently people will. Glad I put work in, then! :)

@SwingtownDerp
They don’t quite need physical contact. The first time Sonata fed on Peppermint ( >>2506110 ) she wasn’t actually touching him during it, but she was right up close, which is all it takes.

But yeah, for their gems to be restored, there would have to be a good reason. From their perspective, they’d want that even if they were not planning to use their more malign powers, just because a part of them is missing and they’d want to feel whole. But that might not be enough for The Powers That Be.

@khaelin04
A lot of people have the thought that their gems being broken would destroy their longevity, which is interesting.

@Gnot Even
It’s because she didn’t feel like feeding at that time. She was basically there to have some drinks and pretend that she didn’t like hanging out with Peach. :) If she’d been out to feed, she probably would have just had sex with him even if she didn’t like him very much. She’s less picky when she’s hunting and just going to prey on somepony and then ditch them.

I never showed hunting scenes like that, though. “Ugh, fine, just get it over with” doesn’t make for very good porn. XD (Unless that’s your thing, I suppose)

@Gnot Even
@rautamiekka
@Shooterism
@Paaaad

Guys. Please. Comments under an image aren’t really the place to discuss staff decisions / tagging guidelines / applicability. Take any further discussion either to the forums, DMs, or the “Site-and-tag-discussion” channel on the official Derpibooru Discord.

Any further comments on the topic will be treated as Rule 6 and will get deleted.

Thank you~

The use of questable has varied quite a lot over the years, from “showing bare boobs/plainly implicit sex” to “sort of hinting at nudity/vauguely implying sex”. There are plenty of images so tagged, with fully clothed characters with just a hint of areola or similar, which don’t really justify the tag.

In this case, it seems reasonable to tag restrictively to avoid raising curiousity in the young minds that questionable is intended to protect. It makes sense to allow filtering all of Stellator’s work, rather than let someone read one and start looking for a way to see the rest.

Lastly, if an author tags an image, it seems the author’s judgement should be respected, and if Stellarator wanted it questionable, we should leave it so.

In other words, I agree on the fallibility part, but I think you’ve failed in deciding to remove the tag.