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. Classical Thaoa was spoken around the year 2668.

Pre-Gold (1085) to Thaoa (2668)

Initial phoneme inventory:

                       PLAIN                         LABIALIZED
Bilabials:             p   b   m   f   v                     mʷ      w  
Alveolars:             t   d   n       l             tʷ  dʷ  nʷ            
Postalveolars:         č   ǯ           y                       
Velars:                k       ŋ   h   g   ḳ                 ŋʷ  hʷ  gʷ

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. The long vowels ī ū shifted to ei ou.
2. The sequences ʷa ʷu ʷə shifted to ʷo ʷū wu. Possibly wi> uj.
3. High tone developed into the glottal stop ʔ at end of syllable. Thus, tones were eliminated.
4. The voiceless stops p t k ḳ shifted to the aspirated stops ph th kh kh in initial position.
5. The voiced stops b d ġ became the voiceless stops p t k in initial position. In the same environment, the voiced fricatives v g ʕ became f x h.
6. The diphthongs ai au əi əu > ae ao oi eu; then the sequences aʕi aʕu became e o.
7. ā > aʕ, aa > ʕa.
8. pʕ tʕ kʕ > b d ġ. <--- even if aspirated?
9. mh nh ŋh > mph nth ŋkh.
10. bh dh gh > ph th kh.
11. Clusters like kʰn (in tʰikʰnan "vomit") become all voiceless and aspirated --- so tʰikʰtʰan (or tʰiktʰan), etc.

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

12. The semivowels y w became t p between a voiceless stop and a vowel; thus word-initial clusters were created.
13. The semivowels y w became s f between an aspirated stop and a vowel.
14. The semivowels y w became d b between a voiced stop and a vowel.
15. The semivowels y w became š f between a voiceless fricative and a vowel. Then, fricatives disappeared before /š/.
16. The sequences vy ly gy merged as z. Then, hw vw gw shifted to f v.
17. The labialized nasals mʷ nʷ ŋʷ merged as mm. Then, any nasal followed by a /j/ shifted to ň .

    tt > tš.

18. The sequence ʔh (only in Andanese loanwords) shifted to qh.
19. The sequences tp db shifted to pp bb.
20. The sequences kp kt (unaspirated) shifted to simple p t.
21. Word-initial geminates simplified to singles; however, in some words, classifier prefixes were retained and therefore root-initial geminates, most commonly /pp bb mm/, still appeared.
22. The voiced consonants b d ǯ v g shifted to p t č f x if preceded by a voiceless consonant, even if over a vowel.
23. Final ʔ > long vowel.

Thus the final phonology of Thaoa was

Labials:        pʰ   p   b   m   f   v   w
Alveolars:      tʰ   t   d   n   s   z   l
Palataloids:         č   ǯ   ň           y
Velars:         kʰ   k       ŋ   x   g
Postvelars:     qʰ               h

The deaspiration similar to Grassman's Law had not taken place yet.

Grammar

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.

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 and macro-Repilian 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).

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

See here.