Play language

Bābākiam is the name of the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa, spoken around the year 4200 in Paba. The name means simply "language of Bābā", where Bābā is the old name of Paba.

Phonology

Babakiam is the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa and thus shares with these languages many characteristics.

Vowels

There are four vowels, /a i u ə/, spelled a i u e. The first three vowels can also be long. The schwa is the rarest of the four vowels, and words with schwa are usually cognate to words with clusters or syllable-final consonants in closely related languages such as Khulls.

In its classical stage, Babakiam was notable for allowing unrestricted vowel sequences, particularly of /a/, for example bāaaau "(park) bench", which is syllabified as bā-a-a-au (four syllables), and paaapa "dark-haired". Such words were rare, however, and almost always transparent compounds (as in the case of bāaaau) or loanwords (as in the case of paaapa). Compounds were especially prone to triple vowels because they often preserved older sound changes in which a medial voiced consonant dropped out. The name of the most famous speakers of the Bābā language is Nuaaā, literally meaning "Swamp Boys", because they were a male-dominated society but their men saw themselves as mere boys in the face of the many great dangers amongst them. (The name used in this encyclopedia is Swamp Kids, however.) They lived in an era in which most people identified not with their ethnicity but with their political party. Thus, one could be a Nuaaā one day and a Mabimbižip the next.

Nevertheless, Bābākiam does maintain the unusual distinction between long vowels and a sequence of two short vowels, and minimal pairs of this type are very common. Vowel sequences often result from the deletion of voiced fricatives between vowels (/ž/ is the only voiced fricative remaining in the language), whereas long vowels generally were long in the parent language and result from a series of much earlier sound shifts. Other words, such as taīū "maple leaf", exhibit both types of changes.

The vowels /i/ and /u/ become /j/ (spelled "y") and /w/ (spelled "v") before other vowels and in some positions also after vowels. Thus a word like patiyiyibis "bladder" is phonemically /patiiiiibis/, with five /i/'s in a row.

Babakiam was still called Babakiam as late as the year 6000, because the dialects were mutually intelligible (and indeed almost identical) to the language spoken in Paba (then called Baba). No phonemes were lost going from Babakiam to Poswa other than the vowel length, which was lost early on. On the other hand, Pabappa lost many of its phonemes.

Consonants

The consonant inventory is very simple: /p b m f t n s š ž k ŋ/, but note that /w j/ are considered allophones of the vowels. It is unusual in that it lacks liquid phonemes entirely when all the languages around it have /l/ and most also have an /r/-like sound. Thus Babakiam sounds like stereotypical toddlers' speech. /b/ is the most common consonant, and in later stages of the language, it became even more common because /b/ was inserted to break up the monstrous sequences of /a/ and /ə/ that had existed in the parent language. Thus classical Babakiam taabābā "nest" became tabababababa and bāaaau became bababababar. The name of the speakers' capital city, likewise, changed from Bābā to Babababa. (Bābā was the word for "nursery, maternity ward", and is cognate to the word for nest above.) However, words as extreme as these were generally discarded after that sound change took place. The name of the city was changed from Babababa to just Baba (later Paba).

Labial vs non-labial consonants

Bilabial consonants are by far the most common, as in Pabappa, Poswa, and the Outer Poswob languages. However, Bābākiam is not as extreme as its descendants, which are almost entirely void of dorsal consonants.

Gender

Consonant-based gender system

In the Gold language, a robust gender system based on consonant harmony existed, and this is reflected in a few modern words, such as mume "wife" and tute "husband". Bābā speakers will often say that a word with a lot of t sounds feels masculine, whereas a word with a lot of m or n sounds feels feminine. This has little importance to the language at present because new words are not normally coined merely by changing their internal consonants around. But the gender system still operates in a limited set of words which can be considered a category of their own.

Babakiam's gender system describes age as well as biological sex. Young children, usually those under about six years old, are considered to be neither male nor female; their gender is "child", marked by /t/. However, children that are so young as to be inseparable from their parents are found not here but under another gender, including both babies and pregnant women, marked by /p/. The /t/ gender could be thought of as a group encompassing preschoolers.

It could be said that Babakiam does not have a true masculine gender, but merely marks the presence or absence of femininity. A group of humans with no females would be grouped under the /t/ gender: men, boys, and children of indistinct or unknown gender. The above example word of tute "husband" works because women do not often get married to young boys or girls.

Feminine genders

A group of humans with some females and some non-females would be grouped under the /p/ gender: humans in general; babies of unknown gender; epicene (but not including neuters).

A group of humans containing exclusively females would be grouped under either the /m/ gender (adult women; married women) or the /n/ gender (girls and young women; unmarried women). If the group contains both, the /n/ gender predominates. This could be compared to the English practice of referring to a women's bathroom as a "girl's room" if young girls sometimes use it but as a "women's room" or "ladies room" if (as in an elementary school) there is a separate bathroom for younger girls.

In all of the above cases, a "group" consisting of a single individual will still be given the same gender predicted by the descriptions.

Note that Bābākiam's gender consonants describe age as well as sex. The category of "girl" (/n/) is bounded from below by "young children of indeterminate gender" and from above by "adult women; married women". For the lower boundary, children who think of themselves as girls rather than merely children are old enough to be out of the "men, boys, and preschool children" grouping; and on the upper boundary, women that are married or are old enough to be married are out of the "girls" grouping unless they choose to self-identify otherwise. Since there is no masculine gender, men do not go through this process; they remain preschoolers for their entire lives.

Expressing masculine gender

Because there is no masculine gender in the language, there is no convenient way to indicate that something is male or pertains to a male. For example, mavama means "women's clothing", and navana indicates girl's clothing, but tavata could equally well mean men's clothing or clothing for young boys or preschoolers. To specifically indicate that a set of clothes is intended for an adult male, one must call it either tavata tatus, using the disambiguator morpheme tatu "adult male" in the genitive case, or tavataatus, a single-word fusion of the same morphemes, with the first -t- of tatu dropping out due to an old sound rule. Likewise, for young boys' clothing, one could say either tavata taās or tavataaās.

To indicate that someone or something is male, the essive case of the same word is used: tamamim "princess" (adult female), tananim "princess" (young girl), tatatim tate "prince" (adult male).

Nevertheless, in some cases, the defective masculine gender works because of context. For example, šepta means "teacher", and to indicate the gender of a teacher one can change the initial consonant of the word to match the thematic consonant of each gender. Thus one says mepta for an adult female teacher, nepta for a younger female teacher, and tepta for a male teacher of any age. While one might think tepta is ambiguous, the meaning is generally understood because young children and preschoolers generally do not teach classes in school.

Other genders

The same /t/ that has historically marked masculinity now also refers to young boys and to children of indistinct gender (i.e. "the crowd of children stood and stared). An adult woman will go with the /m/ sound, and a young girl (or unmarried woman) will go with the /n/ sound. For a group of people containing both females and either men or children of indistinct gender, the default human gender is used, which is /p/. This, in turn, is distinct from the epicene gender, which includes pairings of humans (of any gender) with neuter nouns such as nonliving things and some animals.

Metaphor and non-literal usage

Gender is confined to literal usages only, and any nonliteral use will be either misunderstood or understood as sarcasm.

Summary of the gender system

Conso	Applies to
-----	----
 p	Humans in general; epicene (but not including neuters)
 t	Men, boys, and children of indistinct gender
 m	Adult women, married women 
 n	Girls and young women; unmarried women
 b	Neuter (nonliving things and animals of indistinct gender)
 s	Epicene (all genders taken as one, including neuters)

The consonants /f š ž k ŋ/ are not part of the gender system. In some narrow contexts, such as people's names, some speakers have borrowed the /k/ gender from Andanese to give the Bābā people a proper masculine gender. However, this still does not distinguish between boys and men, and the use of this borrowed gender is not widespread in the language as a whole.

Sticky sibilants

Babakiam has three sibilants, /s š ž/. However, the native syllabary includes a row for a sound that can be Romanized /č/. This arose originally from /k/ before a high vowel, and was for a long time pronounced /č/, but today this sound is actually pronounced identically to /š/, and is thus usually Romanized as /š/. However, the native alphabet indicates it with a separate letter because it behaves differently in some grammatical processes.

The voiceless postalveolar fricative /š/

The main difference between the two is that /š/ is a sticky consonant, meaning that it will change to accommodate the thematic consonant of any word it occurs in, or that of any word modifying the word it occurs in. Thus, the surface /š/ is not a very common consonant. Much of the [š] heard in speech is actually the phoneme that was historically pronounced /č/.

Thus, for example, šamša means "rabbit", but one says

Paupim pampa.

Forest rabbit.

Because both š sounds in the word for rabbit change to p when modified by paupim "(in the) forest".

/š/ is found in the inflected forms of words that end in -s, and this š also changes to reflect the thematic consonant. Thus, for example, the genitive form of tapis "paper" is not *tapišis, but rather tapitis.

Relatively few Bābā words begin with vowels. Those that do, however, obey the sticky process dutifully, meaning that an š in the proper place is replaced with silence, often leaving a vowel hiatus. For example, šimu means "texture", but one can say:

Ūa imu.

Thumb texture.

Taken as a single compound ūaimu, this provides Babakiam its word for fingerprints. This process of consonant deletion can lead to large vowel sequences; a dentist living in Pipapi may use words such as ūaaa "to stick the thumb into (something)" and yaaau "to push with the tongue".

The replacement of š with silence can trigger other sound rules. For example, šamša "rabbit", used above, contains two š sounds, one of which occurs after a closed syllable. When compounded with iši "cave", one hears

Iši aŋaa.

Cave rabbit.

Because the deletion of the second š causes the previous syllable-final -m to return to its older pronunciation of /ŋa/.

Note that the sounds /j/ and /w/ (spelled y and v in Romanization) are treated as allophones of the vowels by this sound rule, and therefore they also cause vowel sequences to erupt:

Vape aŋaa.

Carrot rabbit.

By tradition, in older forms of Babakiam the sticky consonant /š/ always remains voiceless when reflecting the voiced sounds /b/ and /ž/. At this stage of the language, the voiced counterpart of /b/ was /f/. Thus, given the word šapu "flower; bloom, blossom", one would have said beunus fapu "national flower", where /f/ reflects the previous word's initial b-. Many words of this type became incorporated into the lexicon, and indeed, have made /f/ a more common consonant than one would expect given its scarcity in the parent language. However, this rule has been voided in the modern language, so words such as this are no longer being produced, and the consonants now reflect the thematic consonant exactly. Thus one would say today

Beunus bapu.

National flower.

Other sticky consonants

There are a few words in the language in which other consonants seem to have become sticky as well; these are due to older grammatical processes related to the consonant-based gender system, however, which at the time was a distinct grammatical process. The "silence" phoneme /0/ has, in a few words, been mistaken for an alternation of /š/ and therefore had a new consonant, usually /p/, inserted in its place. This is due to influence from Andanese.

Phonotactics and sandhi

Most words end in vowels, but can also end in /p m s/.

Comparison of words:

4200 Babakiam peskavu sabayiuŋaus

6000 Babakiam pyskary šalergos

8700 Poswa pwaršalios

8700 Pabappa pospalerba "soap bubble wand"

Nouns

Expressing the agentive

The agentive suffix -a mutates to depict the gender of the participant. Since vowel hiatus corresponds to the neuter gender, this suffix is almost never seen in bare form. Instead, the gendered forms -pa -ma -na -ta -sa are heard.