Haswaraba

NOTE: this language cannot exist, but I am keeping it up because I may use the sound changes to derive a daughter of Paleo-Pabappa.

Haswaraba is a language family located at the northern edge of Outer Poswob territory on the large tropical island of Nī around the year 200 BC. Its speakers have bled out into Paleo-Andanese lands and influences have gone in bhoth directions. Haswaraba is the name of the parent language; its descendants are called Haswarabic languages. The form of the language was essentially unchanged when the asteroid strike hit and the people began migrating to Rilola. However, even though the boats were leaving from Haswaraba country, the ancestors of the Pabaps and Poswobs abandoned this language very early on for the Tapilula language, which was already the native language of the upper class paleo-Poswobs living further south.

Language

Haswaraba is notable for the collapse of all short vowels (which were much more commonm than long vowels) into /a/ and the loss of length distinctions. Haswaraba had three major vowels: /a i u/, of which /a/ was far more common than the other two, and some marginal vowels: /â/ (seen as /aa/), and /wo/ (which comes from POP3 /oo/). The language is toneless and entirely CV, although it has a lot more elision of its vowels than Tapilula, and therefore sounds very different from Tapilula.

Consonants

The consonants systsem is very asymmetrical. /p b bʷ m mʷ w t d dʷ n nʷ l ʎ r s sʷ č š ñ ć ś j k ġʷ h hʷ/

The dot over the "g" is to emphasize that it is a true stop, not the voiced velar fricative that is muich more common in this area. All in all, the language has a strong preference for bilabial consonants, a trait that appears in all of the other languages spoken by Pabaps and Poswobs in later years. This is in contrast to the rather guttural Tapilula language. For example, Haswaraba bala "lips" is cognate to Tapilula ḳà (IPA /k_>á/).

Vowels

/a i u/. /a/ could be considered non-phonemic, since this is a CV language and therefore any /a/ can be elided in fast speech. e.g. the name /hasʷaraba/ can be analyzed as /hsʷrb/ since it cannot be anything else. However the vowrel â, respresenting a sequence of two /a/'s, cannot be ommitted. It could be just as well treated as a conosnants, though, such as /ʕ/, and so can intiial /a/. Likewise /apapupa/ "border, frence" is /ʕppup/.

Since in a previous stage of the language, all word-final vowels had become short, and later all short vowels became /a/, all words end in /a/ except monosyllables and compounds whose final element is a monosyllable. This final /a/ was generally elided already in the proto-language, even before a word beginning with another vowel. However, loans from Haswaraba into Tapilula generally include all of the elided /a/'s, because Tapilula is also CV except for its occasional syllabic nasals.

Culture

Thse people were essentially paleo-Pabaps, who at the time of their divergence in 0 AD believed in the Yiibam religion. At first Haswaraba was merely a stopover on the journey from the more developed parts of Laba to the new land of Rilola, but in later times, as settlement continued, Haswaraba became a starting point on its own. But even so, Haswarabic languages never established a foothold on the continent of Rilola except in isolated areas of Nama where its people were not in common contact with the other Pabaps.

Note that Haswarabic people lived commonly among Andanese people on Laba, and that many loanwords and linguistic traits went in both directions, but that all of the Andanese population at this time was speaking not Andanese but Paleo-Andanese, which had branched off about 14000 years earlier and was only called such because its speakers were in almost every case the same people who later adopted Andanese.