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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Plants are weird. They do a lot of weird things we don't really understand.



This is the result of something called "crown shyness" or "canopy shyness". We have no idea what triggers it, how it happens, or what its purpose is. We think it has something to do with preventing parasites or diseases from spreading easily from tree to tree.

Trees get stressed about droughts and blights and can send distress signals through their roots. They don't actually do this directly, but use a symbiotic type of fungus that take nutrients from the roots and can send signals through mechanisms which, again, we don't fully understand.

When they're being grazed on, plants can emit hormones that warn other plants, and they can react by producing chemicals that make their leaves less edible. This is in addition to the usual arsenal of thorns and poisons.

Oh, and plants murder the shit out of each other all the time. It's not just strangling vines or racing for sunlight, they also parasitize each other directly, sucking the nutrients out of each others' veins, or pumping chemicals into the soil to alter its composition and make it harder for competitors to grow. Of course some plants produce chemicals that counteract those toxins, or have adapted to just survive them.

One of the world's largest and oldest organisms is a forest of some 40,000 trees that share a single root system.

So yeah, plants, give them a bit of credit.
 
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ScottishMongol said:
Plants are weird. They do a lot of weird things we don't really understand.



This is the result of something called "crown shyness" or "canopy shyness". We have no idea what triggers it, how it happens, or what its purpose is. We think it has something to do with preventing parasites or diseases from spreading easily from tree to tree.

Trees get stressed about droughts and blights and can send distress signals through their roots. They don't actually do this directly, but use a symbiotic type of fungus that take nutrients from the roots and can send signals through mechanisms which, again, we don't fully understand.

When they're being grazed on, plants can emit hormones that warn other plants, and they can react by producing chemicals that make their leaves less edible. This is in addition to the usual arsenal of thorns and poisons.

Oh, and plants murder the shit out of each other all the time. It's not just strangling vines or racing for sunlight, they also parasitize each other directly, sucking the nutrients out of each others' veins, or pumping chemicals into the soil to alter its composition and make it harder for competitors to grow. Of course some plants produce chemicals that counteract those toxins, or have adapted to just survive them.

One of the world's largest and oldest organisms is a forest of some 40,000 trees that share a single root system.

So yeah, plants, give them a bit of credit.
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Don't forget Boquila trifoliolata, the plant with clear enough vision to mimic the shapes of other plants - and even mimics fake plastic ones.
 
K von Carstein said:
Does this kind of conversations count as thread madness?
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Worse, this is what thread sanity looks like.

I'm actually sorta glad I'm not the only one asking these kinds of questions, only for me it's less about pain and more about definitions or the words. Or heck, colors. Try explaining "blue" to someone who can't see. Makes me wonder how the people who can would look at the same thing and see it in the same color, it's pretty insane we as a species got to agree to-
Haha, makes me remember that dress meme.

Anyway, I think the concept of language is the most important invention in the history of mankind, even if it cannot be strictly considered as such. Like, imagine trying to explain whether you feel acute pain or dull pain, but without words. Imagine trying to explain anything without words. Gestures can carry you along some, but gestures are pretty much a language, too, only with the body movements instead of the sounds.
 
Raiseth said:
Worse, this is what thread sanity looks like.

I'm actually sorta glad I'm not the only one asking these kinds of questions, only for me it's less about pain and more about definitions or the words. Or heck, colors. Try explaining "blue" to someone who can't see. Makes me wonder how the people who can would look at the same thing and see it in the same color, it's pretty insane we as a species got to agree to-
Haha, makes me remember that dress meme.

Anyway, I think the concept of language is the most important invention in the history of mankind, even if it cannot be strictly considered as such. Like, imagine trying to explain whether you feel acute pain or dull pain, but without words. Imagine trying to explain anything without words. Gestures can carry you along some, but gestures are pretty much a language, too, only with the body movements instead of the sounds.
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Oh it's even bigger than that. As far as we can tell, language is a scaffold that a growing brain latches onto and organises itself through. Without any language, brain development in infants and children is severely affected.
 
Raiseth said:
I'm actually sorta glad I'm not the only one asking these kinds of questions, only for me it's less about pain and more about definitions or the words. Or heck, colors. Try explaining "blue" to someone who can't see. Makes me wonder how the people who can would look at the same thing and see it in the same color, it's pretty insane we as a species got to agree to-
Haha, makes me remember that dress meme.
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This is actually debated too. The use of 'wine-dark sea' in the Iliad and the Odyssey has caused a lot of debate over linguistic relativity in regard to colours, and the most common conclusion is that the Ancient Greeks didn't differentiate between dark blue and dark red. In fact, if you look back you find a lot of languages just don't have a word for blue at all. Elsewhere in Greek writing you have chlooros, which is variably used to describe the colour of honey, olive bark, a horse, sand, a scared person's face, and a plague victim's skin. One theory I've seen that might solve this is that the Ancient Greek conception of colour was primarily about its shade rather than its hue, so things would be described as pale or dark rather than as red or blue or green or yellow. Does that mean that Ancient Greek people would actually interpret the world differently as a result? Does thought shape language, or language thought, or both at the same time? It's a tough topic to wrap your mind around, but I suppose it always is when the mind starts to contemplate itself. Please open this box with the crowbar inside the box.

(A more clearly culturally-rooted example is the opening line of the novel Neuromancer: 'the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel'. Originally it meant static, nowadays many would think it means a clear blue. How long until it doesn't make any sense at all?)
 
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Aule said:
Yes, I'm aware. I made a response thinking of worms and snails, and by the time I realized the brain fart Boney already replied to it.

That said, nothing you wrote contradicts the post you replied to?
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Snails are... weird. Logically they shouldn't be capable of much, but apparently they can become 'used to' specific people after extensive exposure and sometimes even stop retracting their eyes if stroked behind them.

Also depending on the worm, apparently they make decisions on whether to investigate a 'food' odour. We don't know what those decisions look like, but sometimes even when their nervous system registers the input, they just don't react the way they 'should'.
 
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I've heard the theory before that cultures develop words for specific colors when they can make dyes for it.

The main source of blue dye back then was lapis from around modern-day Iran, which wasn't common in Greece. Or at least, not common with the breakdown in trade during the Bronze Age Collapse.

That's the theory I've heard, anyway.
 
Hey, you don't need to tell me that. My native language doesn't differentiate between blue and green, so it's pretty much "blue grass" this and "green sky" that.

Only, it's biologically related instead of culturally or conceptually or whatever, the way I heard it, since living on the steppes makes for some weird adaptations in the eyes, something to do with the cone cells.
 
Boney said:
The use of 'wine-dark sea' in the Iliad and the Odyssey has caused a lot of debate over linguistic relativity in regard to colours
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When I first encountered that line, I found it extremely obvious: Of course the sea can be a dark green, not dissimilar in color to that of wine leaves. Only when I heard other people discuss that line did I realize it referred to wine as a beverage and not wine as a plant.
 
Boney said:
This is actually debated too. The use of 'wine-dark sea' in the Iliad and the Odyssey has caused a lot of debate over linguistic relativity in regard to colours, and the most common conclusion is that the Ancient Greeks didn't differentiate between dark blue and dark red. In fact, if you look back you find a lot of languages just don't have a word for blue at all. Elsewhere in Greek writing you have chlooros, which is variably used to describe the colour of honey, olive bark, a horse, sand, a scared person's face, and a plague victim's skin. One theory I've seen that might solve this is that the Ancient Greek conception of colour was primarily about its shade rather than its hue, so things would be described as pale or dark rather than as red or blue or green or yellow. Does that mean that Ancient Greek people would actually interpret the world differently as a result? Does thought shape language, or language thought, or both at the same time? It's a tough topic to wrap your mind around, but I suppose it always is when the mind starts to contemplate itself. Please open this box with the crowbar inside the box.

(A more clearly culturally-rooted example is the opening line of the novel Neuromancer: 'the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel'. Originally it meant static, nowadays many would think it means a clear blue. How long until it doesn't make any sense at all?)
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This isn't just a greek thing

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
This is an observed phenonemon across a lot of languages, colours categories tend to get assigned in an order.


I think this is the same thing but barely scanned it.

Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

As for how this refers to what we think? Now we're into Whorfianism

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXBQrz_b-Ng
 
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Boney said:
This is actually debated too. The use of 'wine-dark sea' in the Iliad and the Odyssey has caused a lot of debate over linguistic relativity in regard to colours, and the most common conclusion is that the Ancient Greeks didn't differentiate between dark blue and dark red. In fact, if you look back you find a lot of languages just don't have a word for blue at all. Elsewhere in Greek writing you have chlooros, which is variably used to describe the colour of honey, olive bark, a horse, sand, a scared person's face, and a plague victim's skin. One theory I've seen that might solve this is that the Ancient Greek conception of colour was primarily about its shade rather than its hue, so things would be described as pale or dark rather than as red or blue or green or yellow. Does that mean that Ancient Greek people would actually interpret the world differently as a result? Does thought shape language, or language thought, or both at the same time? It's a tough topic to wrap your mind around, but I suppose it always is when the mind starts to contemplate itself. Please open this box with the crowbar inside the box.

(A more clearly culturally-rooted example is the opening line of the novel Neuromancer: 'the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel'. Originally it meant static, nowadays many would think it means a clear blue. How long until it doesn't make any sense at all?)
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There is also a theory that how many distinct colors you can see in a rainbow is partially dependent on your language.
 
Aule said:
There is also a theory that how many distinct colors you can see in a rainbow is partially dependent on your language.
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Proof that Shrimp have the most advanced language system of all animals and are just waiting for humans to destroy ourselves before rising up to claim the planet for their own.

The theory sounds like bunk to me, more likely that the more words you have for colours in your language the more you distinguish between the colours you observe. They still see the same rainbow, however when the linguist asking you questions gets an answer it creates an apparent difference.
E: Damnit.
Article:
We have reviewed two broad recent findings here: that language affects color perception primarily in the right visual field probably via activation of language regions of the left hemisphere, and that color naming reflects both universal and local determinants. Neither of these findings is anticipated by the traditional universalist-versus-relativist framing of the debate over language and perception, and neither sits particularly comfortably with it

So language affects how a rainbow looks, but only through the right eye?
 
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Boney said:
There's an element of that, but a big part of it is her role in society. In the Mordheim campaign and the Karak Eight Peaks Expedition, she was rejecting her place in the Jade Order and looking for a new one for herself, and what she found was that of a mediocre siege weapon to people who didn't trust magic. But after K8P was established she became an irreplaceable farming consultant to people who held farming to be extremely important and who quickly came to completely trust her insight, and after that she started interacting with Mathilde as much more of an equal.
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Yeah. I think it's sort of like how a lot of people who are just total dorks in high school or college (even if adorkable) turn out to be reasonably level-headed and competent types with a firm sense of self and sensibility once they actually get things squared away to do stuff in real life that keeps them within their wheelhouse most of the time.
 
I wonder if the Lornalin Trees, or at least the insights in making them, could be applied to make Chamon Windsoak Musrooms. Which immediately makes me wonder if the amount of metal content in such a mushroom would be a significant concern for journeyman gold wizards.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
There's also the Japanese "Ao", which covers a spectrum of colour that western languages have divided into "blue" and "green".
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There is Japanese word for green - "midori" - though apparently it's a relatively recent addition and the lines between them are a bit blurry.

Japanese stands out in this context a lot btw, since ancient language apparently only had four distinct words for colors - black, white, red and blue.
 
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