Cupbearer Coast

The Cupbearer Coast is an area which in the 4100s came under the control of the speakers of the Play language, as several waves of mutually hostile invaders all spoke this language. Thus even when power changed hands several times in one century, the language of the population did not change. However, the Play speakers never fully drove out the languages of the indigenous inhabitants, such as Oyster, Middlesex, and North Dreamlandic.

The native population of Mipatatatai, also known as Tata, spoke the Baywatch language. But as the Dreamers, the Players, the Crystals, the Matrix, the Zenith, the Soap, the Tinkers, the Slopes, the Cold Men, the Mirror, the Phoenixes, the Dolls, the Cupbearers, and the Storms sent their armies into Tata to fight for control of the territory and adjacent Baeba Swamp, more languages appeared.

If both labialized consonants and prenasalized consonants are analyzed as clusters, the phonology would be

Bilabials:       p   m           b   
Alveolars:       t   n   s   l   r     

And the vowels /a e i o u/ in both short and long forms. The geminates /pp ss tt/ still remained, and there were sound gaps of */te so bo lo ro/, except in a few rare words where contraction of long vowels before geminates had created new short vowels there.

The coronal stop /t/ was allophonically [k] before any /o u/. Unlike the neighboring Dolphin Rider language, however, it remained [t] before /a/, and therefore [t] is considered the primary allophone. It was not palatalized before /e i/.

Cosmopolitan Play languages

This is likely within the Baeban Play dialect continuum, despite the sharp political boundary between Baeba and Tata.

It is required that the Play speakers become the majority in Lypelpyp no later than 6800 AD, and the traditional writeup requires them to be the majority already by 5500 AD, though this timeline relied on settlement of Play speakers coming from Paba (where the birthrate was high for thousands of years) rather than from the Baeba region.

Try to find the string halpa in open74 dictionary, as it may refer to the original Cupbearer party name.

Plup River

The Plup River (a place holder name) may be the route by which Play speakers left Baeba Swamp and moved northeastward into what had been an Oyster/Cappini patchwork, but since they had lost much of their power, they would not have been able to become the superstratum as they had along the coast. Any Play languages spoken in this area would have been fragmented and of no higher status than those of the aboriginals. Nonetheless, this is the most logical route to Lypelpyp, rather than relying on old roads.

Structure of society

The multiethnic Thunder quarter of the Anchor Empire broke down quickly after the great war in Baeba. At the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age, this area of the world was in a power vacuum, as it lay between Baeba, the Moonshines, and the Ghosts, but was not an attractive target for invasion by any of them. The Play speakers would likely have migrated down the Plup River, bringing their language with them, but even they may have been disorganized and so their language could have broken up into dialects and then separate languages, increasing the diversity of the area.

Height gap

It is possible that the multiracial society will segregate itself based on body type. Although the Dreamers, Oyster speakers (who were of diverse political affiliations), and Cupbearers all commonly had blonde hair, and thus were Lenians, they would have nonetheless considered themselves distinct. As elsewhere, the central divide would be not about skin or hair color but about whether it was women or men who were the taller sex.

Historically, the Dreamers had tall men and short women, while the other two tribal confederations were mixed. This means that Dreamer society could maintain itself, despite being cut off from Dreamland by both Baeba and the Players, as an endogamous social group within each nation. Then, the Oyster and Play speakers could marry each other but yet also soon form into two endogamous groups based on their height profiles, with some of the tall-male families blending into Dreamer society while others remained distinct for political reasons.

Physical appearance

Apart from the height profile, the three tribal groups were of similar appearance. They had weathered several invasions by tribes with dark hair and even dark skin, but because of the high latitude and cold climate, dark skin was maladaptive, and strong pressure existed for the children of mixed marriages to inherit a lighter skin color. Indeed, this may have been an unspoken reason why the dark-skinned Ghosts did not try to conquer nations that would have otherwise been an easy targets for them.

Of the three tribal groups, the Players would have had the darkest hair color overall because they were the only group with Andanese ancestry. The Oyster-derived tribes would likely have had the lightest. But because the Oysters and Players married each other frequently while the Dreamers were mostly endogamous, these differences may have soon become unnoticeable even to the locals.

It is also possible that there will be endogamous groups based on speech patterns, which by definition would have languages of their own. This requires that the Andanese strain of the Player tribes be recoverable, however, rather than blending into the wider society around them, and this is unlikely because they were forced into slavery for a period of time where they did not have the choice of who to marry.

New political parties

Because the tall-male and tall-female societies stood apart by mutual respect, they would not need to form political parties of their own. It is possible that political parties in this region were based primarily on ideology rather than tribal identity, defying the global trend towards identity-based politics.

Wineapple languages

Daughter languages here may be given names related to alcohol. This is not world-internally canonical because the speakers referred to themselves with ordinary tribal names. Rather it is sort of a weak double pun .... these languages were spoken near Moonshine and the speakers were also involved in the bottling and distribution of wine from warmer climates into cold regions such as Moonshine; they also consumed alcohol themselves.

The consonant inventory of Wineapple was

Labials:         p   b   m   f   v   w
Alveolars:       t   d   n   s   z   l   r
Postalveolars:   č   ǯ   ň   š   ž   y
Velars:          k   ġ   ŋ    

It may be that all consonants were palatalized before /i/, and that the postalveolar row can be reanalyzed as palatalized alveolars.

The vowel system may have been /a e i u ā ē ī ō ū/.

Even in 3958, the speakers were already in contact with Moonshine, and despite the early Moonshine speakers' closed society there may have been influence flowing in the opposite direction.

Possible paths for vowel evolution are:

1. /e/ > /ə/, /ē ō/ > /ai au/, thus imitating Play, though there would be no */əi əu/.
2. Conditional /i u/ > /ʲ Ø/, followed by conditional /e ē ī ō ū/ > /i i i u u/, probably followed by loss of at least one intervocalic consonant. This also imitates Play, but would make more sense if Play were peripheral to the area and that Wineapple was really being influenced only indirectly.

Cultural evolution of Olansele

The Play speakers became the dominant culture in the region after about 4220 AD, but they were likely not strong enough to create a Play-speaking state and therefore Olansele was at least bilingual and possibly trilingual (Play, Wineapple, Oyster).

On the other hand, it is also possible that the Play speakers seceded, taking the best land for themselves, and that the inland areas of Olansele formed a much poorer state which was economically dependent on the Play-dominated coast.

A third possibility is that the Play speakers never truly established themselves along the coast of Olansele, and though they may still have dominated sea trade, they did not control the land and therefore there was no daughter of Play that was spoken in Olansele, meaning that Wineapple was dominant after all.

Wineapple (3958) to Craft Brew (4800)

The consonant inventory of Wineapple was

Labials:         p   b   m   f   v   w
Alveolars:       t   d   n   s   z   l   r
Postalveolars:   č   ǯ   ň   š   ž   y
Velars:          k   ġ   ŋ    

1. In posttonic position (nouns were stressed on the penultimate mora, while verbs were variable), the vowels e i u shifted to Ø ʲ ʷ. Long vowels could not be posttonic, so after this shift, the only vowel allowed in posttonic position was /a/.
2. In immediate pretonic position, the vowels e i u usually collapsed to Ø ʲ ʷ in a manner precisely identical to the previous shift.

   Note that many of the relevant words were compounds in which this shift was automatically applied because the first element of the compound had a free form in which the involved syllable was posttonic. However, the shift failed to occur if the pretonic syllable stood alone. It also did not occur when the first consonant of the tonic syllable was a voiced stop, as these were still pronounced prenasally. It may also have not occurred before a voiceless stop, since these were historically geminates. This would require a preexisting shift, however.

   It may be that new pseudo-suffixes of /e i u/ were generated by this shift, since e.g. some roots would have shapes like /bep/ as nouns and /bepi/ as verbs.

   Likewise, because of the noun classifier prefixes, this shift allowed the creation of monosyllabic verbs beginning with clusters, corresponding to nouns that were either CVC[a] or CVC.

3. Palatalized labials passed their coarticulation to a following consonant if there was one, and then depalatalized.
4. It is possible that unstressed /o/ shifted to /a/.
5. The high vowel u shifted to o if an adjacent tonic syllable contained a mid vowel.
6. In unstressed position, the mid vowel e shifted to i if an adjacent tonic syllable contained /i/ (but not /u/).
7. All consonants other than labials became palatalized before any /i/.
8. All short e, even in stressed syllables, shifted to i if any other syllable contained a high vowel. Note, however, that this shift was quite rare, as all of the /i/ in classifiers prefixes and most other unstressed syllables had been lost by this time.

Because of the vowel reductions, all classifiers except those containing /i/ contracted into single consonants. These lost their function as classifiers, as they could no longer carry the rhythm of the original CV classifiers, and therefore became inseparable prefixes on certain words. For example, Baywatch pensele "shirt" became fzel, with the f- reflecting the clothing classifier prefix but no longer seen as such. Instead there simply came to be a lot of words for clothes that began with /f/.

Baywatch (3370) to Tata-A (4800)

This is cladistically part of the Minor Lenian languages and was even in contact with some of them.

This should probably begin around 4100 AD instead of 3370.

Note that the substratum language had likely already lost its /f/. see Oyster_language#Proto-Oyster (~2050) to Birch (~3310). Note also that the four-vowel inventory /a i u ə/ was not found in this area at the time, so there is no great pressure on this language to follow its shift of /o/ > /a/ with a shift of /e/ > /ə/.

Birch (which is probably intelligible with Plume) had lost its inherited freestanding /š č/, and although new palatals had been created from consonant + /j/, these were fairly rare, so there is no great pressure on Tata's Dreamer dialects to develop palatalization either.

It is also possible that the mainline Baywatch dialects influence this one.

1. The alveolar stop t shifted to k before any /o u/.
2. The vowel o shifted to a.
3. In word-initial position, the sequences pp mp tt nt shifted to p b t d.
4. The sequences s ss shifted to h s. It is likely that /hu/ was pronounced much like [ɸu], and perhaps other allophones existed before the other vowels; because these allophones arose after the shift of /t/ > [k], though, there was no contrast before historical /a/ vs /o/.
5. The sequences mp nt ns shifted to mb nd z.
6. The mid front vowels e ē shifted to ya yā. It is possible that the shift was just to /a/, but note that Middlesex was spoken nearby and did a conditional shift without its /e/ previously being iotated.
7. The sequences ia ua (from pre-Baywatch deletion of /w/) came to be pronounced ya wa. There may also have been a iu, which could shift to yu. Also, it may be that these new sounds were pronounced much like IPA [je wo], as they had come almost entirely from similar sequences.

At this point, the Play army invades Tata and drives out the competing adstrates, meaning that influences from Crystal and Oyster cease to be significant.

1. The long vowel ō shifted to ū. This was with Play influence. It is possible that it broke to /au/ instead, as Play was shifting /əu/ rather than /au/.
2. Labialization was defeated. This left a new true /o/ vowel.
3. All vowels became palatalized before /i/. This may have created a new phonemic /e/. However, Play's dialect continuum terminated in a three-vowel language, so it is possible that even these new vowels soon disappear.