It may seem like Statler and Waldorf are willfully ignoring that Ike has said many times that he was not raised by manticores and doesn’t know anything about them, but honestly they’ve never seen anyone who looks like a manticore that wasn’t forced to live the manticore life. They’re as confused about Ike as Ike is about them.
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Ohh there’s so many mysteries about manticores!
Am I detecting Old Man Yaoi?
wait… I thought Waldorf was a girl they have a very lioness look to them. Or at the very least, they don’t have a full mane like a male lion.
Ike referred to them both as “gentlemen” on the 17th page of this chapter.
I was assuming that manticores were somehow an all-male species like harpies are all-female. No, I have no idea how that would work logistically.
i love these incredible gay lion gentlemans
I think these two …are my new favorite characters. <3 <3 <3
Why do I get the feeling that they’re full of it, and Statler is going to be going off on some ridiculous bird whistle, trumpeting lunacy, just to take the piss out of Ike?
I dunno. I get the feeling that they really do want to teach Ike about Manticore things. They’re just a little incredulous that he doesn’t know any of these things.
Okay. Now you got me curious how whistles and trumpeting incorporates into written language…
Or is that using some 3D-form of writing with ink that manticores themselves secrete into the 3D letters?
Probably it’s scratch-based, made with the claws
It could be made with the spikes/spines, but the tails variety would make it more… personal or non-doable
How about the equivalent of accents, umlhaut, jota… ?
We haven’t even gotten to the modulated fart noises yet.
I mean, assuming an alphabetic or syllabic language, you’d just need characters to represent those sounds. Xhosa uses clicks, but it just specifies using particular characters for the click sounds. It’s even easier if it’s a logographic language, because then the symbols don’t have to represent the sound at all. That part seems easy enough.
I’m more curious about the fact that only manticores can write it. Is it simply because no one else knows it, or does it rely on their physiology in some aspect?
Exactly that. If it’s just text on paper, no matter how nuanced or intricate, it can be produced by anyone able to scribble.
So saying it’s manticores only really does hint it being some beyond-mere-text type of writing.
Maybe the letters need to smell right in order to be correct words or sounds.
Do we have a reason to believe that only manticores are capable of writing manticorsh? It’s the vocal range that limits non-manticores from speaking it, but afaik we haven’t heard anything about a writing system yet.
It’s likely (imo) that only manticores know how to write it simply because no one else has taken enough of an interest in “monsters” to learn their language.
(All this also assumes there is an extant written form. In this day and age, it’s kind of hard to imagine a language without one, but many languages didn’t until the last few centuries. I would bet on there being one–I definitely agree re: claw marks, since a lack of thumbs makes penmanship tricky–but I wanted to throw that concept into the ether anyway.)
The third last picture, first bubble from Waldorf: “Only manticores CAN speak AND WRITE manticorsh.”
So yeah. By their statement we have reason to believe that only manticores are capable of writing manticorsh.
Could be just blowing airs, but the statement has been made and now we are indeed in position of discussing how such a statement could ever be factual.
It depends on the other features of the language. If there’s only a few types of whistling or trumpeting sound, and the rest of the language is mostly human pronouncable they could just get letters like the other consonants and vowels. If the whistling/trumpeting is layered over other consonants and vowels or over each other or there’s many different types of whistle or trumpet sound, then you’d have to rely more on digraphs and diacritics. But it could be done with the regular Latin alphabet.
the fact that only manticores can *write* the language makes it sound like there’s some kind of magical component
Yeah those two are 100% dating.
To be fair, I get the impression that a LOT of people willfully ignore whatever Ike says.
Poor Ike. ;-)
“It’s our langage!”
Not completely sure if it’s a typo or if Statler is too flabbergasted to enunciate properly.
Oops, that is indeed a typo! Haha, let me fix that.
Heh. Oughta be interesting to see how that translates to images.
I definitely feel like Ike every time my heritage comes up in the context of someone with a shared ethnic heritage who thinks that languages are somehow transmitted genetically. So many people expect me to just somehow know Hebrew or Polish, and then consider me to not be *really* of that ancestry when I don’t.
I get the impression that, in this case, the assumption is as much about inheriting the ability to pronounce the language as that it’s part of his (unknown) heritage.
As it happens, almost all humans are born able to produce all the speech sounds of every human language. Learning one’s mother tongue (whichever it is) narrows the focus to the sounds that are used in that language. That’s part of why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn other languages.
Ike may well be able to learn Manticorsh, but I would expect it to take serious effort. Also, the degree of his shape-shifting may affect his pronunciation.
Well, this is about to get loud. I still think this is about to be the definition of doing terrible things in a crowded theatre, if you get my drift.
Well now I really want to see these two singing karaoke in Manticorsh.
I do believe they are taking the piss out of our poor boy.
*click*
*sees same page*
*click again*
*finally realizes shi’s caught up*
Uh… yay for binge reading…?
Welcome to the hole… You can never return to where you were before…Sour in the darkness of this depression, but rejoice while basking in the light of new updates!
The hole welcomes all!
I wonder when we’ll see North America again? We haven’t been west of Britain since 2013. Twelve years out of the 19 the comic has been running…
…i thought the laughing and sarcasm at the bottom of the previous page was because there’s no such thing as a ‘legal’ name when you ‘legally’ don’t exist… so the ONLY names they have are technically nicknames…
..and now i’m confused how ike knew that statler and waldorf wouldn’t be their real names…
Statler and Waldorf are famous muppets.
aaah okay thanks
Specifically, they’re the two old guys who heckle people and go “Dohohoho!”