Thaoa

Thaoa is a language, descended from the Gold language and spoken in southeastern Rilola and many islands. The formal date of separation from the other dialects of Gold is 1085, the date that the rulers of Thaoa seceded politically and became hostile to their western neighbors. Slowly, what had been a smooth transition between central (Babakiam) and the eastern dialects that became Thaoa came to be a very sharp border. Nevertheless, both Babakiam and Thaoa evolved fairly slowly, and mutual intelligibility among educated speakers on both sides of the border remained for more than a thousand years. Classical Thaoa was spoken around the year 2668 (present day is 8700).

Phonology

The phonology similar to that of the language of North Tapakunya in the year 18343 BC. Vowels are /a e i o u ə/ and consonants are /b p pʰ t tʰ k kʰ q qʰ s š č x h ʔ j ž m n ŋ l/.

Consonants

The voiced stop /b/

/b/ is the only voiced stop in the language. This arose in recent times from a voiced bilabial fricative; this is similar to what happened in the neighboring language Babakiam. However, unlike Babakiam, Thaoa's phonology is rather typical for a human language in that there is no greater representation of bilabial stops or other consonants produced in the front of the mouth as compared to consonants produced further back. The trait of having /b/ as the only voiced stop was also shared by some nearby Repilian languages and by the local dialect of Khulls.

Thaoa also shares with Babakiam the trait of having /ž/ as the only voiced fricative. In both languages, /b/ and /ž/ can be seen as hardened versions of /w/ and /j/ respectively. However, unlike Babakiam, Thaoa has not yet re-evolved a new /w/ phoneme; it only has /j/.

The uvulars /q/ and /qʰ/

There were no uvulars in the parent language. Instead they were taken from Old Andanese, and from sequences that were not uvular but were still found only in loans from Andanese. E.g. /ʔh/ from a vowel accented with final /ʔ/ plus a syllable beginning in /h/. This could only happen in loans from Andanese, so all uvulars were from Andanese, whether directly or indirectly. Although Old Andanese had a few consonant clusters, no words loaned into Thaoa involved a consonant cluster containing /q/. Thus, in Thaoa, /q/ was entirely immune from all sound changes other than the trading back and forth of aspiration.

The vowel /i/, when adjacent to /q/ in either direction, is backed to a central vowel resembling Thaoa's [y], which is IPA [ɨ]. This was true of the original Andanese as well, which did not have a phonemic /y/.

The glottal stop

Thaoa is usually analyzed with a phonemic glottal stop, spelled ʔ, which can only occur after vowels. This derives from the high tone of the Gold language, which also produced postvocalic glottal stops in Khulls. However, unlike Khulls, in Thaoa the glottal stop is often elided and the preceding vowel is lengthened. In Khulls, by contrast, a syllable ending in a phonetic glottal stop implies a short vowel.

Vowels

The schwa vowel /ə/

Both /ə/ and /j/ are Romanized as y. This does not generally cause problems because /ə/ cannot precede vowels except in loanwords and /j/ cannot appear between two consonants. It is similar to the situation in Poswa where the sound /w/ and the schwa vowel are allophones of each other, but because they occur in mutually exclusive environments, can be represented in Poswa's native scripts by the same symbol.

Unlike Poswa, there is no etymological relationship between Thaoa /j/ and Thaoa /ə/, which means that they can occur together in a word. An example of a word where both values are used is yyča /yəča/ "catfish".

Diphthongs

There are many diphthongs, unusual for this continent and even this planet. There are no tones and all words are stressed on the first syllable. In many ways it is like Poswa with less labial consonants, though actually this description would fit better on the Sakhi language, a descendant of Thaoa, which has the same six vowels but no aspiration distinction and no uvulars, thus being much more like Poswa.

Thaoa maintains the unusual distinction between /ae/, /ai/, /ao/, and /au/. Foreigners usually consider this the most difficult aspect of the language to learn. In the days of classical Thaoa, many foreigners were speakers of languages that had the diphthongs /əi/ and /əu/, which standard Thaoa lacks, and they substituted these sounds for the two higher diphthongs while retaining a near-proper pronunciation of the two lower diphthongs.

Nouns

Restrictions on root shape

Alone among the Gold languages, Thaoa requires noun roots to be at least two syllables long. Many words which had been inherited as monosyllables in early Thaoa, such as *hak "snow", were either discarded, reduplicated with themselves, or compounded with other morphemes to produce longer roots. This happened because Thaoa early on lost the noun declension patterns that had previously allowed monosyllabic nouns to be inflected.

This two-syllable root constraint does not include the classifier suffix as part of the root. Many nouns have obligatory classifier suffixes, meaning that the bare root is never used alone. Thus many words, even for basic concepts, are three syllables or more. For example, naʔtaek "arm" is formed from an inherited disyllabic root plus a suffix meaning "edible body part", and poipoim "eye" is formed from a reduplicated monosyllabic root plus a suffix meaning "inedible body part".

Consonant-based gender system

Thaoa has inherited the consonant-based gender system found in related languages such as Andanese, Khulls, and Babakiam. There are three feminine genders, one masculine gender, and three that could be considered neuter or epicene.

Thaoa's gender system is similar to that of Andanese in that it distinguishes women from girls but does not distinguish men from boys, instead grouping both into a common male gender. However, unlike Babakiam, Thaoa maintains the grammatical distinction between men and babies.

Summary of the gender system

Conso	Applies to
-----	----
 p ♁	Pregnant women; babies; humans in general; human epicene (not including neuters) 
 t ♂	Boys and men 
 č ☼	Young children; "preschoolers"
 m ♀	Adult women, married women 
 n ☿	Girls and young women; unmarried women
 h ⚲	Neuter (nonliving things and animals of indistinct gender)
 s ⚳	True epicene (all genders taken as one, including neuters)

The epicene consonants p and s are considered grammatically feminine because both are found as conditioned alternates of the primary adult female consonant m. The sound change that linked m with p is fairly recent and is not found in neighboring languages; the sound change that linked m with s is much older, and reflections of it are found even in distantly related languages, such as the alternation in Andanese between hi- and mi- in Andanese's own feminine gender.

The masculine consonant t sometimes appeared in adjectives modifying feminine nouns when arising as a result of the conditional sound change nh ---> nt ---> t. These adjectives were therefore the same in both their masculine and feminine forms.

It could thus be said that Thaoa has four feminine genders and that even its one masculine gender sometimes behaved as feminine. Sociologists in Thaoa sometimes claimed that this unbalanced setup was responsible for the Thaoan men's apparent inferiority complex, such that they constantly sought confirmation that men were equals of women in their society, and not merely considered to be on the same level as young girls or children. However, most Thaoans believed that their cultural attitudes had little to do with the grammar of their language and a lot to do with their men's jealousy towards the physically larger Zenith people, an ethnic minority who were officially denied the right to live in Thaoa but often intruded upon Thaoa's territory anyway, particularly in the north.

Cultural influence from the Andanese language led to the informal use of k as an additional marker of the masculine gender, mostly found in personal names. However, this did not introduce a grammatical distinction between men and boys because this k was simply the Andanese cognate of Thaoa's own t gender, and did not itself distinguish between men and boys. Moreover, the k form of the gender did not appear in any grammatical operations inherited from the parent language; it was confined to personal names and a few neologisms.

Marking gender on animate objects

The choice of which gender marker to use on an animate object is far more complex. The animacy hierarchy comes into play here, with genders high up on the animacy hierarchy dominating those below. However, the pattern is not that simple, and there are different solutions appointed when two different genders that occupy the same rank on the animacy hierarchy are brought together.

Although the epicene is at the highest level of the animacy hierarchy, it is a compound gender, which means it can contain elements of lower animacy levels, and therefore it obeys some of the patterns for lower genders such as the unisex.

GENDER SYSTEM

Gender	Epicene ♁	Fem+ ♀	Common ⚳	Maiden ☿	Child ☼	Neuter ⚲	Masc ♂
SUBJECT	OBJECT
4 Epicene ♁	♁	♀	♁	☿	♁	♁	♂
4 Feminine ♀	♁	♀	♀	♀	♀	♀	♁
4 Masculine ♂	♁	♁	♁	♁	♂	♂	♂
3 Common ⚳	♁	♀	⚳	⚳	⚳	⚳	♂
3 Maiden ☿	♁	♀	⚳	☿	☿	☿	♂
1 Child ☼	♁	♀	⚳	☿	☼	☼	♂
0 Neuter ⚲	♁	♀	⚳	☿	☼	⚲	♂

Thus, when serving as objects, nouns lower on the animacy hierarchy are affected more than animate nouns by what gender the agent is.

Unlike many Gold languages, Thaoa uses explicit gender marking, which means that there are individual forms for each inflected version of each gender. There are 25 "forms" in all, including the neuters. This is a retention shared with Late Andanese, in which the genders were marked only with prefixes, but had distinct accusative forms. However, not even Andanese marked the accusatives distinctly for the gender of the subject; this Thaoa uniquity was due to the collapse of double morphemes into fused singles.

Sound changes

pre-Gold (1085) to Thaoa (2668)

NOTE: THIS LANGUAGE SPLITS OFF FROM the Tapilula-Gold line in 1085 AD, thus those sound chanes must be cut. (expect about 90 changes to bring this in line with Blop)

Initial phoneme inventory: /p b f v m w t d s z n l č ǯ j k g ŋ h ɣ r a i u ə/ NOTE: Unlike earlier sketches of the language, this Thaoa starts off with phonemic /f/ and rare variant /v/, but no /s/ or /z/. The inventory above has been left unadjusted to keep in line with the changes below for the time being.

Current fricative inventory for pre-Gold:

/f v h g hʷ gʷ/ 

Here, gʷ comes mostly from earlier [w]. The pre-Gold marginal phoneme /vʷ/, from earlier /fʷ/, was perceived as a simple /w/ in Gold, and likely also here. However, it's possible it could merge with /v/ instead.

It's possible that all of the vowel changes could be simplified since they are almost all unconditional but doing it stepwise allows a few intrustions of unfamiliar diphthongs from deletion of /h/.

1. ī > ei, ū > ou.
2. ʷa ʷi ʷu ʷə > ʷo ʷə ʷū wu. Possibly second one is uj.
3. High tone developed into the glottal stop ʔ at end of silab.
4. final ʔ disappears after diphthongs and long vowels (it was redundant).
5. All voiceless stops become aspirated in initial position.
6. Voiced stops become voiceless in initial position. ʕ became h.
7. ai au > ae ao; aʕi aʕu > e o.
8. əi əu > oi eu.
9. ā > aʕ, aa > ʕa.
10. pʕ tʕ kʕ > b d ġ. <--- even if aspirated?
11. mh nh ŋh > mph nth ŋkh.
12. bh dh gh > ph th kh.
13. Clusters like kʰn (in tʰikʰnan "vomit") become all voiceless and aspirated --- so tʰikʰtʰan (or tʰiktʰan), etc.
14. f v > s z (dentals).
15. z > l, including any preexisting non-dental /z/.

    NOTE ON POLITICS: Most Andanese words entered around this time.

16. The semivowel /y/ became /t/ between a voiceless stop and a vowel (e.g. kya > kta)
17. The semivowel /w/ became /p/ between a voiceless stop and a vowel (e.g. kwa > kpa)
18. The semivowel /y/ became /s/ between an aspirated stop and a vowel (e.g. khya > ksa)
19. The semivowel /w/ became /f/ between an aspirated stop and a vowel (e.g. khwa > kfa)
20. For the above changes, it was /d b z v/ if voiced.
21. For the above changes, if the cluster was word-initial, the first element disappeared. (e.g. kpi > pi)
22. For nasals, it's just /mm/ for the labial and ñ (spelled as ny) for the palatal.
23. The semivowel /y/ after a voiceless fricative turned that fricative into š and disappeared.
24. The semivowel /w/ became /f/ between a voiceless fricative and a vowel (e.g. swa > sfa)
25. tt > tš.
26. ly > ž, lw > ʕw.
27. voiced fric + y > ž; voiced fric + w > v (except ʕw stays ʕw). f was spelled "v" now.
28. Final -s > -t ?
29. The semivowel /w/ became /p/ between a voiceless stop and a vowel (e.g. kwa > kpa)
30. tp > pp.
31. voiced consonants became voiceless if preceded by a vless (even if over a vowel).

    NOTE ON POLITICS: This is near 2668, which is when Thaoa and Palli officially split. However, a few further changes could be shared due to contacts through the mountains.

32. Final ʔ > long vowel. (A change in spelling timed to coincide with Thaoa/Palli split.)
33. /awa aya/ > /ō ē/.
34. ǯ > /j/ or /ž/.
35. f v b all merge as b (indistinct /w/-like sound; b is to w as ž is to y). THis happened rougly in the year 2800?
36. mb > mp?
37. If two consos in a row were aspirated, the unaccented one loses aspiration.
38. ei > e; eiʔ > ei; ou > o; ouh > ou.
39. ao > ea; aoh > ao. The rare triphthong aou > ao as well.
40. Final ʕ changed to ŋ'.
41. t > tš (except in certain clusters, such as kt & pt, or if aspirated)
42. s z š ž; ṣ > s <------ LIKELY BAD ... this relied on a very different fricative setup in the parent language. However, it does mesh nicely with the change of t > tš, so it could be retained as a conditional shift.
43. g > x. (If so this is where Palli does v > f). ~3100 AD.
44. ei ou > ai au.
45. Aspiration was lost when a consonant was preceded by a glottal stop. e.g. ʔth > ʔt.
46. d ġ > t k.
47. Remaining voiced stops became nasals.
48. If two aspirated consoants occur together, the first loses aspiration. Thus word-initial /t/ was created.
49. ala > al, etc. (but not alaʔ)
50. eu > ia.
51. ael (but not ail) > al. CONTROVERISL !!! *pymphal
52. ʕy > ž .

Final phoneme inventory: /p m w t s n l č ñ j k h x ŋ ɣ r ʡ ʔ š | a e i o u ə/ maybe b ž There were also ā ē ī ō ū ai au ia ea ao

Treatment of stops

The early stage of the Gold language from which Thaoa developed had a stop system consisting of

1. The fairly common stops /pʰ tʰ d kʰ ḳ/, where the dot marks an ejective stop, and the other stops are strongly aspirated;
2. The somewhat less common stops /b ġ/, where the dot marks a voiced stop;
3. The somewhat rare sequence /dh/, which occurred over morpheme boundaries but was pronounced as an onset and thus behaved in many ways like an indivisible phoneme; and
4. The allophones [ṗ ṭ], which were properly analyzed as /ḳ/ in the very earliest stages of Thaoa but would soon become phonemic.

Thus, there were ejectives, voiceless aspirates, and voiced stops, but no plain voiceless stops, even allophonically. This situation had been the same for thousands of years, although in older stages of the parent language, the aspiration had been much weaker.

Very early after its divergence, Thaoa de-glottalized the ejective /ḳ/, including its allophones, thus adding the plain voiceless stops /p t/ to the language alongside the much more common voiceless aspirated /pʰ tʰ/. Shortly afterward, the rare voiced stops /b d ġ/ were merged with the plain voiceless stops in initial position, thus making the frontmost two stops more common, but still rarer than the corresponding voiceless aspirates. Also, /dh/ shifted to /tʰ/ unconditionally.

The situation of voiceless aspirates predominating over plain voiceless stops remained much the same for quite a long time, though aspiration was becoming weaker in some phonetic environments gradually throughout this time. Thus Thaoa stood out from its neighbors, which did not distinguish aspiration at all; even Babakiam lost its aspiration distinction (but not its voicing distinction) early in its development.

Evolution and relationships to sister languages

Thaoa is the basalmost member of the Gold family, having split off from all other Gold languages after a political revolution in the year 1085. This is about 800 years older than the split between Khulls and Pabappa. Thus Khulls and Pabappa are more closely related to each other than either is to Thaoa.

Thaoa's linguistic isolation was further accentuated by its position at the eastern end of the chain of Gold settlements; whereas all other Gold languages, even those at the other extremities of settlement, shared borders with several other Gold languages, Thaoa bordered only Pabappa. Throughout history, Thaoa invaded Paba many times and abused and enslaved the Pabaps, which meant that they took in almost no influence from Paba's culture or its language.

Name of language could be from the word for banana,but only if /awa/ > /awa/ instead of /o :/ or /ea/.

Dialects and descendants

Thaoa's territory was split during the Vegetable War into a northern dialect, Sakhi, and a southern dialect, Palli, which went on to become widely divergent languages. Smaller dialects also branched off from these, and these too became languages, but all of these smaller branches eventually became minority populations within the territory of another more wide-ranging language.

Sakhi

The northern dialect was Sakhi, literally meaning "fairy". Was essentially pure thaoa,no loans. The Sakhi were purists, and early in their history they launched the Sakhi Revolution, a project in which they intended to wipe out all of the foreigners in not only their own homeland, but any lands they conquered as they moved north. They thus called for eternal warfare, and did not feel guilty about this at all, because they believed that they were eliminating inferior peoples.

The Sakhi destroyed aboriginal macro-Zenith nations such as Loop, Umunises, etc, and killed the inhabitants instead of peacefully assimiliating them. The Sakhi won many lopsided victories because they were united and the other tribes were not. They were able to do this because by this time, Nama as a political union had been destroyed by an unrelated conflict, and there was no longer a united Naman military ready to defend the smaller states that the Sakhi tribes were invading. Neither were those tribes able to unite with each other. The nameless "Eastern Mountain Tribes" such as Hăla were ignored by the Sakhis; they focused on the weaker northern tribes.

But one day, as the Sakhi army set out to invade a settlement of Repilians, the soldiers were blocked by their own wives, who had decided to side with the Repilians because the Repilians were ruled by women. The soldiers could not punch through the wall of females in front of them, and they were unwilling to use force against their own wives and daughters. Thus the war was ended, the northern frontier of Sakhilat was handed over to Repilian rule, and the Sakhi men became feminized. They renamed themselves "Fairies" to show this change; the name Sakhi had not been chosen until this point. The fairies they named themselves after were actually the Repilians, a collection of tribes ruled entirely by women. These Repilians spoke Repilian languages, a language family which also stretched as far west as "Nippon".

The embarrassed Sakhi men were forced to sign the Feminist Compact, a multinational treaty joining Sakhilat to a group of nations mostly in cold climates in which the government was required to be run entirely by women. Nations in the Compact were not allowed to interfere with each other's politics and there was no common military between them. However, Compact nations were required to defend each other in the event of an outside entity invading one of them. However, there was one exception: a special clause in the Compact that applied only to Sakhi also required Sakhilat to allow itself to be invaded by Repilian nations as a reparation for the many invasions that Sakhilat had thrust upon Repilia in the past.

Additionally, the Sakhi army was dissolved, and military defense of Sakhilat was turned over to a multiethnic coalition army drawn from specific battalions of the wider Feminist Compact nations. This coalition army was declared to be the only official Sakhi army, despite being commanded entirely by foreigners. They allowed ethnic Sakhi solders to join, but they were given inferior weapons and told that defense of Sakhilat was not a priority for the coalition army. Thus Sakhi people began to worry about an invasion from their old southern rival and former ally, #Palli.

The Feminist Compact did not have a leader, but the unofficial "champion" nation of the Compact was Moonshine.

Geography of Sakhi

Sakhi was spoken mostly inland in cold, mountainous territory, but did have some territory on the south coast, and this area contained a river that originated in the mountains. However, the river was too steep for shipping given the technology of the day, and most of Sakhi's trade was actually with other inland nations.

Contacts with the Andanese

In the years immediately after the handover of power to the Feminist Compact, the Andanese people who had been living in the wilderness were emboldened to claim full citizenship. They knew that they were invaders, but since there was no longer a military of any kind in Sakhilat, the Andanese believed that they could claim the rights they claimed were due them. An Andanese leader met with the female coalition government of Sakhilat and claimed that his people would henceforth be known, among other names, as the Disobedient. By this he meant that he was accepting feminine rule, but stated that one difference between the Andanese people and the native Sakhi people was that Andanese men were allowed to disobey their women, whereas Sakhi men were not. They thus frustrated the Sakhi men even further while simultaneously strengthening the feminine coalition government. Some Sakhi men tried to fight back, but by this time the Sakhi men had been so utterly humiliated that their preferred form of protest was to yell obscenities at women and threaten to join a new movement embracing male homosexuality in the pursuit of freedom from female domination. The Andanese leaders decided that this meant that the Andanese were now the only men in their nation.

Palli

See Palli language.

Southern dialect was Palli (a woman s namel. Lots of loans from Andanese, but conservative phonology. The Palli territory resembles Greece physically, in that it has a heavily indented coastline with offshore islands. The climate was cool temperate in the earliest days after the split with Sakhi, but warmed up steadily over time. There are not nearly as many islands in Pallilaha as there are in Greece, but the Palli people were nonetheless dominated by their ocean.

Despite being named after a woman, Palli had been invaded by the aggressively virile Andanese people and opposed Sakhi's embrace of radical feminism. When the Pallian leadership learned that Sakhi had been forced to sign a Feminist Compact putting Sakhi firmly under female control and shutting down their military, they contemplated an invasion, planning to use the Sakhi men as slaves and the Sakhi women as prostitutes. But no action was taken, because the two nations were separated by the difficult Sucithasi mountains, and even with their superior male standing army the Pallians knew that such a war would be very difficult.

Palli is an exonym; the native name was Halai. This is due to a sound change of v > b > p in the outer dialect that provided this name, and of v > f > h in Palli itself, as well as an aberrant vowel mutation not due to a regular sound change.

Palli's main tribe was the Nakūna people (Old Andanese Naqùna).

Taborpa

In between Sakhi and Palli was a branch called Taborpa, which corresponded to the historical Thaoa homeland that was invaded and conquered during the Vegetable War, thus cutting the northern and southern parts of the empire off from each other. It had been founded by the Tarpabappa people, dark-skinned invaders who spoke Pabappa (then called Babakiam). They drove the Taborpa language through changes that made it come to resemble contemporary Babakiam, including having almost no /k/ or other dorsal sounds. Taborpa was no more divergent from its parent language than Sakhi and Palli, however; all three languages had changed considerably.

Sound changes in Taborpa were mostly conditional, and often polyconditional. But as a general rule, vowels were mostly unaffected while consonants were shifted forwards in the mouth and aspirates became fricatives. The uvulars /q qʰ/ became /k x/, the velars /k kʰ/ merged as /š/, and postalveolars became alveolar. The alveolar consonants had complex developments, sometimes remaining in place and other times moving forward to become dentals or labiodentals, which in a few cases moved further forward to become true bilabials. Meanwhile, Thaoa /b/ had become /p/ unconditionally, meaning that Taborpa did not have voiced stops (the name is an exonym). Consonant clusters were simplified, with mostly Khulls-like rules, but intervocalic consonants generally persisted. Thus, words generally retained the same number of syllables as their Thaoa originals. A series of labialized consonants arose from certain clusters, and then changed to pure bilabials.

Bé

The Bé language was another highly divergent daughter language of Thaoa, to such an extent that it resembled Thaoa less than did certain languages that were not even descended from Thaoa. Its main distinguishing feature, diachronically, was that it had lost many unstressed vowels, leading to consonant clusters at the ends of words (all Thaoa words had initial stress), which were then simplified by subsequent changes. By contrast, there was little vowel loss in Sakhi and none in Palli, meaning that words in Palli always had the same number of syllables as their original Thaoa forms.

Bé is of course no relation to the Bé people of Almea; see here.

Contact with Proto-Moonshine speakers

Late in their history, the Proto-Moonshine people came to brush up against the borders of the Sakhi people. They spoke a language called Moonshine, which was also highly divergent from its parent language. The form of the language spoken at this time was later renamed Proto-Moonshine (PMS) to distinguish it from the Classical Moonshine language that had yet to evolve.

Despite the fact that PMS was not descended from Thaoa, the various Thaoa daughters were so divergent from each other that PMS actually resembled Thaoa more than did some of the actual daughters. Since the Sakhi people were aware that their language was related to Bé, Palli, and the other minor dialects, they believed that PMS was also related to Thaoa, and considered the PMS people to be long-lost sisters of themselves. The PMS people were not flattered, however, as they considered the Sakhi to be their enemies.

Orthography

Thaoa was primarily written with the ornate Andanese syllabary, despite it being poorly suited to the language. However, Thaoans had retained the usage of their inherited Gold language alphabet, and this was more common especially in the northern dialects that became Sakhi and had little Andanese influence. As in the parent language, vowels and consonants were considered to belong to two different alphabets, and either of them could be placed first, but consonants were more commonly found first.

Letter order for consonants

 l  j  h  k  kʰ ŋ  p  pʰ m  t  tʰ  n  s  x  š  b  ž  č  ň  ʔ

(etymology of above:

ʕ  l  j  h  ḳ  k  ŋ     p  m     t  w  n  hʷ g  s  d  ġ  b  z  č  ǯ
   l  j  h  k  kʰ ŋ  p  pʰ m  t  tʰ    n  s  x  š        b  ž  č  ň  ʔ
)

Letter order for vowels

a i u y e o

Culture and history

Early history

Thaoa was settled by people from the cold uplands of Laba, similar territory to that which produced Paba. They spoke a language of the Outer Poswob family, but not of the Haswarabic subset of the Outer Poswob family. But they were different from Paba in several ways.

Religion

Thaoans worshipped Mappamensam as the supreme deity. In nearby related religions, Mappamensam is the goddess of pregnancy and childbirth, and is considered to be the most powerful deity, but her power is balanced by other deities, most of whom are also female. The Thaoa religion believes that Mappamensam is above the other gods and that, for example, she is more powerful at dark magic than even Baxathoina, the goddess of dark magic.

However, Thaoa does not believe that the other goddesses are evil; they believe that the other deities have submitted to Mappa and that some of them in fact worship her. Thus Thaoa, like most neighboring religions, is a positive polytheist religion, but unlike nearby religions, they worship only one of the gods that they believe in.

Contrasts with Paba

Thaoa contrasted sharply with nearby Paba in many ways relating to their cultures. For example, Paba had been founded on cultural diversity; the Pabaps encouraged ethnic minorities to move to Paba and, for the most part, offered them civil rights superior to those given to the native Pabaps. This was largely done with the intent of appealing to the foreign nations from which those immigrants were arriving; that is, the Pabaps figured that, for example, the Nik people would not likely start a war with Paba if they knew that Nik people living in Paba lived healthier lives than Nik people living outside Paba, and that Paba encouraged those Niks living outside Paba to move in. Likewise, Paba declared itself early on to be a pacifist empire and promised not to wage wars against foreign powers even on those rare occasions when a foreign power decided Paba was not being submissive enough and chose to invade Paba. For example, when Paba was invaded by the Star Empire, they mobilized their army to provide the invaders a safe path deeper into Paba in the hopes that the enemy soldiers would be willing to settle down and marry Pabap women.

Another crisis hit Paba during the famine of 1823, when the warm climate suddenly turned cold. Nama invaded the Pabaps, knowing that because the famine had not affected the ocean, Paba still had an ample food supply. Here, the Namans occupied Paba's shoreline, refusing to let Pabap fishermen off their boats until they had first disbursed their food supply to the hungry Namans. Often, the Pabaps did not have enough food left over to feed themselves.

Many of the immigrant groups moving to Paba were of tribes and religious groups who were so violent that they were unwelcome even in their own homelands, and had nowhere else to go. For example, when Paba's military leaders heard that the Gilgosi people living in Lobexon were massacring Pabaps and turning Lobexon into a war zone, they sent their navy to Lobexon in order to adopt the Gilgosi people and settle them all over Paba. They passed a new tax on the Pabap people in order to fund welfare payments for the Gilgosi in the hopes that if the Gilgosi were pampered from the moment they were born, they would not have to work for a living and would be less aggressive towards the Pabaps they wanted to massacre.

For the most part, Paba's submissive foreign policy won them many friends, and kept them out of the dangerous wars that wrought havoc on many of Paba's neighbors. However, the Pabaps faced many difficult internal challenges as a result of their willingness to adopt even the most hostile outside groups as citizens of Paba. For example, shortly after the immigration of the Gilgosi, the Crystal people, also from Lobexon, settled in western Paba and moved into preexisting Pabap cities. The Pabaps saw that the Crystals were not interested in working for a living, nor were they interested in learning to speak Pabappa. Therefore, the Pabaps realized that they would need to pay out even more generous welfare payments to the Crystals in order to keep them happy in Paba and attempt to avoid a violent conflict. However, the Crystals took the money and used their abundant free time to build weapons and plan out a civil war against the Pabap people who had invited them in. Fearing the worst, Paba's neighbors sealed their borders in order to prevent the Pabaps from attempting to push the Crystals into a neighboring nation. Paba attempted to pacify the Crystals by sending unarmed diplomats who had learned the Crystal language in order to negotiate with them, but the Crystals killed the diplomats, and the war was on.

By contrast, Thaoa early on had simply banned all ethnic minorities from settling in Thaoa, except those taken as slaves. Thaoa refused to allow a foreign nation to control where they lived within their new territory, and relied on their own boats to settle the mainland instead of the boats of the Tarpabaps. Thus, they said, they had created a nation with no border, rather than a nation whose borders were determined by how far an outside minority with no allegiance to their country was willing to go. Population growth early on was slow, but was helped by the lack of any serious enemies in Thaoa. Because they did not allow ethnic minorities in, there were few minorities early on in Thaoa. The only native aboriginal tribes were Repilians, as Thaoa was just slightly east of the easternmost settlement of the Sukuna people.

Unlike Paba, Thaoa allowed slavery. Thaoa consisted mostly of flatlands that in the early climate were ideal for producing both meat and vegetables. THey enslaved the Repilian aboriginal population, but this soon led to revolts, so they looked west and began enslaving Pabaps. Thaoa at first was surprised at how obedient the Pabap slaves were; the slavemasters were well trained in the use of whips, rods, wax candles, and heated iron pitchforks, but found that with Pabap slaves underneath them, such tools were no longer necessary. Paba seemed not to mind, as indeed Pabap governors were more than happy to consign huge numbers of Pabaps to the Thaoan slavemasters at low prices, keeping the money to enrich themselves as they had little contact with the Pabap lower class and considered slavery morally acceptable as it seemed to lead to better food production in Thaoa versus the warmer but somehow poorer Pabap farmers who did everything with only their own family's labor.

However, in some respects, the Thaoans were actually more peaceful than Pabaps: whereas Paba settled in Naman lowlands and killed the entire aboriginal population save those few who converted to the Yiibam religion, Thaoa demanded an ever-growing territory of its own but allowed aboriginals to peacefully exit this territory so long as they were willing to settle in other lands nearby, of which there were plenty. Thaoa soon took over the coastline of many aboriginal nations to their east, and forced those nations to adopt aboriginals of other tribes that had been chased out by the Thaoan settlers. However, for the most part this policy was not due to kind-hearted generosity from Thaoa but rather due to the fact that Thaoa simply found mountainous climates unsuitable for agriculture and was lucky enough to be the easternmost "settler" nation, thus being granted lordship over all of the aboriginals to its east whereas the other nations such as Paba only ruled over their own tiny home territory.

Natural environment

Partly due to its being near the original center of many waves of human migration on Rilola, Thaoa had the world's highest rate of mental retardation and birth defects, and a higher than average incidence of plagues and transmissible diseases, so even though Thaoa was very wealthy, the population was not very healthy.

Ethnic groups

Unlike Paba, Thaoa did not welcome ethnic minorities. They said that Paba was stupid for inviting potentially hostile outsiders into their nation, paying them just to live there, and even going so far as to put them in the army while the native Pabaps went around their lives unprotected. They admitted that Paba's strategy was more successful than that of Subumpam, because it seemed to keep Paba out of foreign wars, but THaoa believed it could hold all the advantages of Paba's military setup with none of the drawbacks.

However, there were some minorities in thaoa, because they did not kill all the aboriginals.

Repilians The aboriginals of most of Thaoa's territory. Some were killed, but since Thaoa had almost unlimited land, most were more gently pushed out to make room for Thaoa's platnations. The Thaoans found the Repilians difficult to enslave and mostly let them go. The first Repilian rebellion was the event that made Thaoans realize what the purpose of their relationship with Paba would be.

Suxaŋ An ethnic group in the mountainous northern fringes of Thaoa that is disliked by all, even the oppressed Repilian peoples. They are the ancestors of the 'Zenith political party but did not become an intellectual organization with opinions on politics until very late in their history. They lived primarily in Sučithasi, the "Mountains of Wisdom", which is north of Thaoa. Thus, fewe Suxaŋ live in Thaoa itself, but they often hunt animals just over the border.

Pabaps Mostly slaves.

Andanese

Large-scale cohabitation of Andanese people began in the year 1848. At this point the Andanese people spoke a single language, Old Andanese, which was already very different from Thaoa, but with which scholars on both sides could recognize evidence of their former shared unity. Nevertheless, Thaoa declared that the Andanese people could live in Thaoa only if they accepted the inferior social status which Thaoans chose to give them, and the possibility that they could become enslaved if the annual delivery of fresh slaves from Paba ever gave out.

Most Andanese people in Thaoa accepted their fate as an underclass; those that did not moved to Paba. The Andanese population grew slowly over the centuries, but more Andanese people entered Thaoa when Thaoa's government collapsed in The Vegetable War.

Other ethnic minorities

All other ethnic minorities are simply subtribes of Thaoa: Tuq, Thaenyphi, Palli, Sakhi, etc. These did not consider themselves minorities, however, because none of them, not even Sakhi, was ever large enough to become a majority.

Bé

The Bé people were an enemy of Thaoa. They called themselves the world's only true liberals, and said Thaoa was too conservative. Yet, in many ways , all of the other nations in the world were even more conservative.

Wars against Paba

Thaoa criticized Paba's 2000 year old obsession with the height gap between the native Pabap people and all of the much taller immigrants that the Pabap people were bringing in to live in Paba. THey said that Pabaps would not be getting beat up in their own capital city if Paba's government wasn;'t continually bringing in hostile foreigners. Thaoans were only slightyl taller than Pabaps , they said, and did not have a problem with being small because it was not a liability when they were the only ones around. Thaoa admitted that this meant that Paba's land army's soldiers were stronger than Thaoa's, even if both sides were well-armed, but said that Thaoa would still beat Paba in any serious war because they could feed more THaoans on the same amount of food than Paba could feed of its minority groups such as the very tall Tarpabaps.

Thaoa said that Paba had been the luckiest nation in the world, and it was on the best land in the world, and had the best possible location from which to grow a world superpower, but that they had failed because their people were so perversely submissive that they found every possible way to hand their victories over to their enemies. Essentially all of the problems, they said, in Pabap society were due to its radical commitment to pacifism and refusal to protect their people against any of the dangers around them. For example, Paba's government gave welfare benefits to ethnic minorities in Paba that were above the wages earned by full-time Pabap workers, meaning that these people could live entirely on welfare benefits for their entire lives and never need to look for jobs. Most of this money was said to be awarded because the immigrants could not speak Pabappa, but they did nothing to encourage the immigrants to learn Pabappa.

During the Star Empire War of 1989—2057, Paba's army had invited enemy soldiers to move in with the Pabap soldiers and become friends, or even move to Paba to start a new family. Then Pabaps were bewildered when the enemy soldiers were not thrilled about Paba expecting them to go to war to fight for Paba.

Even Thaoa itself admitted it was guilty of abusing Paba, as Thaoa had consumed the most Pabap slaves of any nation in the world. In later generations, an anti-slavery political party in Thaoa called Olathilaet came to regret the slave trade, but even they still blamed Paba for swinging its doors wide open and doing nothing to stop the pro-slavery Thaoans from filling their carts with crate after crate of screaming Pabap slaves.

When Paba launched a nationwide celebration in honor of Paba's having reached 1000 years without a major war, Thaoa reminded them that Thaoa had also gone 1000 years without a major war, and that the only minor wars Thaoa had fought were those where Thaoa had invaded Paba. In essence, they said, while both empires disliked war, Thaoa was superior because Thaoa had still fought a few wars when it felt like it, and Paba had only fought wars when their enemies felt like it.

All in all, though, Thaoa rearely declared war against Paba because they wanted to keep the slave trade flowing. In later history, many slave empires were so aggressive that they actually declared war on the nations from which they were buying slaves, saying that the victim nations were being unfair in demanding high prices for their people's labor and needed to compromise with the slavemasters who wanted them for free. Thaoa considered Paba a strong ally, even if not an equal, and never approached this level of selfishness.

But Paba did declare war on Thaoa several times. In all cases but one, the war erupted at a time when Thaoan slavemasters were being flagrantly abusive of their agreements with Paba, and were taking in far more illegal Pabap slaves than legal ones, meaning that young children were being abducted while walking home from school. Although Paba had a strong army and a strong police force, both were trained to react to conventional situations rather than a war of adults fighting toddlers. Nevertheless, Paba's wars were usually successful in releasing all of the child slaves because Thaoa did not want to shut off relations with the nation that its economy depended on, and therefore did not mobilize its entire army, and in fact often spent more time fighting Thaoans who did not want to give up their slaves than the Pabaps they were officially at war with.

The one war that Paba fought against Thaoa for reasons other than slavery came as such a shock that Thaoa was unable to react and did nothing at all as Pabap soldiers overran not only Thaoa, but most of the territories that Thaoa had conquered in previous wars. However, within a generation, Paba disowned the occupied territories and therefore they became once again foreign nations, even though their governments were now military instead of religious.

Political parties

Thaoa was one of the rare nations that had political parties. Unlike Paba, for example, which was an absolute monarchy, Thaoa allowed its people to vote on issues affecting them. Thaoa was not a democracy because these representatives were not elected by the people, but the people could revolt and cause the party in power to change hands if they felt their representative was no longer responsible to them.

Olathilaet is a party founded specifically to oppose slavery. Most members want to free all Pabaps living in Thaoa, but some say that they should be sent home to Paba instead, or exported to colonies such as Qoqendoq.

Čekhak The preexisting pro-slavery party. They have always been pro-slavery, but before the uprisings of the Olathilaet, they had no serious opposition on this issue, and chose to mostly organize around other issues. When it became clear that slavery was going to the primary political issue in Thaoa for a long time, the Čekhak party took in all of the other minor pro-slavery parties and re-founded them as Čekhak.

Čekhak has its own diplomatic organizations since it considers itself the ally of the Pabap royal family. Beginning around the year 1650 AD, Paba's government invited Thaoans of the Čekhak party to move into various cities in Paba to help gather Pabap slaves to export back to Thaoa. They also cooperated on military issues as well, which is why Thaoa stopped its periodic invasions of Paba after around 1650. Thus, Paba reliably supported the party that existed to abuse Paba and rejected the party that wanted to help them become free.

Šeaŋtal A party representing the interests mostly of the Andanese. The name is simply the Thaoa version of the name of the Andanese.

Isyna The Ilhina party, not the same as Litila.

Litila Litila (this was a transnational name).

Having political parties was so unusual that the Pabaps never really understood the concept. Over and over, Thaoa's diplomats living in Paba would have to explain that they were not members of the Čekhak "tribe", as there was no such tribe, but only a political party consisting of members from all of the Thaoan tribes who shared the same ideology. Even Nama was not sure how to treat Thaoa's parties; Nama had many political parties, but they were seen inherently as defining people by religion whereas Thaoa's political parties were inter-religious. (Litila is an exception, as it really was a religion, but Litila had specifically come to them from Nama.)

The Famine of 1823

In the year 1823, a severe famine struck Thaoa, Paba, Subumpam, and other nations to the west and east. Some Thaoan farmers, finding their plantations useless, took their Pabap slaves and either ate them or sold them in meat markets so they could afford to move to southern Paba in search of a more stable food supply. Thaoans who did not own slaves generally took a more peaceful route and moved into the still largely aboriginal nations of the Qoqendoq Peninsula, where the famine was just as severe but there were more fish available because the aboriginals did not have boats capable of making long sea journeys into the deeper offshore waters.

Settlements in the interior

The Thaoan peasantry had gone into panic when its farms were shut down, and replaced their traditionally vegetable-rich diet with a diet rich in the flesh of ethnic Pabaps. After the famine was over, Thaoa apologized to the Pabaps for eating them and asked Paba to send them more slaves so their plantations could return to normal productivity levels. Paba was happy to hear that they were still in business, as they had been worried over the last century that their favorite customer was breeding slaves so successfully in their home territory that they might soon no longer need to buy them.

Paba now charged very high prices for its people, and while Thaoa had often in the past simply paid their bills with food, it was not presently possible to do that. This meant that they mostly had to sell manufactured goods, including armor and weapons, which meant that Thaoa's traditionally strong army was now under-clothed and under-endowed. Thaoa promised to start exporting vegetables again soon, knowing that metal was not a renewable resource and that they did not have access in their own territory to mines where more metals could be found. They thus proposed expanding Thaoa northward into the mountains.

Later history

Early Thaoan civilization was essentially like the other Gold civilizations to its west. Thaoa was the easternmost of them all. It also had, proportionally, the largest number of Andanese people living within its borders of all the Gold nations. Thaoa was not a democracy, so even when the Andanese became a majority they did not pose a threat to the central government, but the Thaoans did not want to allow Andanese people to serve in their military given that they had shown elsewhere they were much more loyal to Andanese living in other nations than they were to other people living in their home nation. So they had a military that excluded most of their population, which meant that the Andanese had the privilege of citizenship without (for males) the duty to defend the nation. To compensate, they eventually passed laws that established a system that, while not truly slavery, kept the Andanese in a low position in society. This soon had the effect of turning the Andanese into an openly hostile majority, rather than merely a subgroup less trustworthy than other Thaoans in a war.

Soon the Thaoan population began to divide politically into two sides: one side wanted to essentially give up, and let the Andanese take over the society, and become the first Andanese-majority power, even though they knew that they risked being killed by the newly powerful Andanese majority, who were already responsible for most of the violent crime in their society despite being legally denied the ability to own even basic weapons.

The other side favored a total war against the Andanese, saying that they would offer peaceful exile, but expected nearly none of the Andanese to accept this offer. They noted that Thaoa was already a military champion, and despite a rapidly growing population, was not suffering from famine in the way many other nations were because they were able to control their sea space many miles offshore and bring in fish to eat. They knew that other nations around them would almost certainly all side with the Andanese, both because they had Andanese people living in them and because Thaoa was already an enemy of many nations to its west, particularly those aligned with Nama, due to territorial disputes relating to the ongoing settlement of the deep interior.

The weak, pessimistic third side of the debate hoped that peace was still possible between the two tribes, and generally favored equal status for the Andanese, but believed that Andanese revenge against the Thaoans could only be prevented if an outside power intervened that was so strongly against both sides that the two enemies would have to make peace in order to survive. Thus they secretly hoped that Nama would invade Thaoa on the basis of being revenge for attacks against Repilians living nearby, even though they knew this would be the most bloody solution of all since it would be a world war instead of a local war. They also knew that even if it were to happen, Nama would probably side with the Andanese anyway because it would help them win the war and because the Andanese were not generally responsible for any intrusions into Nama, as they preferred to stick to the tropics. These people had no representation in government and were afraid to even publicly express their beliefs.

Modern civlization

That is, although the Saks strove to eliominate all minorities form the ir terrritory, and got a lot of them, they didnt settle deep inland so a lot of minorities still sruvive. The Bachon people, who today consider themlseves Poswobs, have some territory here and some in Pusaponm.

The Palli language is descended from Thaoa as well, and is spoken in the southernmost state in their empire.

Thaoa is a very warlike culture, unlike most humans on planet Teppala. "We have our teeth in the arm of the Poswob Empire" is their statement that they have unopposed settlements in Pusapom and are interested in taking over the entire gigantic Poswob empire, saying that they could beat a Poswob army 40 times their own size simply because Poswob soldiers are so supple and delicate, meeting the Sakhi army's spears and swords with only their soft hands and bodies.

However, for the most part, their conquests have been directed towards areas even further east then themselves, including back-migrations to Laba to conquer the territories from which humans were born. This is because it is much easier to conquer an island, or mainland territory enclosed by mountains, whose people have no escape, than to invade even the very soft and unsuspecting Poswob Empire which is separated from the Sakhis by the planet's tallest and most rugged mountain range.

Poswobs have even begun to settle in the northern areas of the Sakhi Empire, despite warnings from the inhabitants that Poswobs literally have no rights and can simply be killed at any time without the murderer needing to worry about punishment. (They generally do not have trouble crossing the mountains because they come slowly, with supplies, and along roads through mountain passes. Moreover, Poswobs often settle high mountain areas even where the climate is extremely cold.) They are there primarily to support peaceful trade between the two empires, but some Poswobs have visions of their empire not always being locked out of the east coast by the tiny but aggressive Thaoa settlements, and would like to overcome the barrier whether through peace (trade) or war. The Treay of Rumpamna establiushed this, and the settlers helped seal the treaty by exchanging their children with those of the other side, so that Thaoans raised Poswob children and vice versa. This is not the source of the claim that Thaoans have settlerments in Pusapom, however; those are a separate entrainment.

Not all Thaoa nations are warlike; essentially all of Thaoan territory was cut out from Nama, and many Naman cltural traits remain. The nation of Nupsynta has no military and follows a strict policy of refusing to retaliate against any attacks made on it. Private citizens are expected to defend themselves and their families. This is unlike the pacifism of Pusapom and Paba, which goes even further, and where in some areas people are forbidden even from owning weapons that could be used to defend themselvbes from animals,m so a wild animal will leave a path of blood behind it as it slashes its way through throngs of fleeing, helpless humans trying to escape.

Hisory

The "chaos of Nama" (Umunises, Loop, etc) was here. Se repilia was the most diverse place, h it was the first thing seen from nama. Hala, etc,was here. It is not because it is the border of the 2 greatet races & where they mixed ...but because it is the place where the 2 races split from. $

cherry Foundation

Mt. Cherry may have also been here. That is, although the Saks strove to eliominate all minorities form the ir terrritory, and got a lot of them, they didnt settle depp inland so a lot of minorities still sruvive. The Bachon people, who today consider themlseves Poswobs, have some territory here and some in Pusaponm.

The Palli language is descended from Thaoa as well, and is spoken in the southernmost state in their empire.