User:Soap/scratchpad

Hiboh era

14:50, 9 February 2022 (PST)

The very early maps drawn in 2007 could be used for the Hiboh era, and they show the Play language driving out all other languages on the entire mainland except Moonshine, although the tropics are actually labeled as Andanese. At the time, I may have been planning to derive Play from Late Andanese instead of from a MRCA. In either case, though, anything that was once Andanese should be given to Play. On the other hand, the northwest corner of the map, which is split between three Play-speaking cultures (Camia, Wamia, and Žefuny), could actually be multilingual, since it's most likely that a tiered society arose, with the Play-speaking classes biologically bound to speak the languages they did, and a Leaper-speaking overclass biologically bound to their own language. Nonetheless Dreamland ceases to exist according to this map, as it is in fact divided between four Play-speaking cultures, the fourth being "Wimpim", which was a placename and was probably also multilingual in reality.

Since Moonshine and Leaper are dialects of the same language at this time, a map could be drawn for the entire mainland with just two languages, Leaper and Play, each with their exclusive areas plus an area of overlap. The Players' area would be much larger and more populous, but the Leapers would always be socially dominant in the area of overlap, so neither group had a clear advantage over the other.

Semaphore

14:50, 9 February 2022 (PST)

If the intent was to spell words using a semaphore-like code, there may be very limited use of body parts other than the extremities. It could be that there are two arms, two legs, and two hands, for example, and that the hands would be visible from a distance only because they would always be grasping large objects. Therefore even 30 syllables could be difficult. It could be that body postures would spell out the remaining letters.

It is possible, purely based on the shape of the letters in the Tapilula syllabary, that consonants would be indicated by arm movements and vowels would be indicated by leg movements. That is, in the Tapilula syllabary, the vowel sub-symbols are inverted forms of the consonants. This is convenient because it happens that the consonants ("arms") always face up and the vowels always face down. The middle of the body would come into use only if necessary to help with leg movements (for example standing to the side could indicate the glyphs with only one "leg" visible).

This essentially rules out anything having to do with body motions representing the first syllable of an involved body part, since the entire consonant inventory is devoted to arm motions and the entire vowel inventory is devoted to legs and the rest of the body.

Body movements

Arms and legs only

The letters on which the semaphore code was based resembled human arms and legs, and always had a horizontal line through the middle, resembling a belt. (This was the only way to ensure the tops and bottoms of the letters always touched; note that Andanese "loosened the belt" by making it contrastive whether or not the belt was drawn in, and yet all its letter strokes were still connected because its total inventory was much smaller.)

It is easy to have 14 arm positions and 6 leg positions, without even using handheld objects, and it stands that this is the most obvious form of the syllabary to use, as it would not even be seen as a code, since the letter shapes resemble the body motions. Four of the six vowels require the signaller to turn sideways, but they are less common vowels, and partial turns could be visibly distinct enough to serve the purpose. A seventh vowel is in the script, used to mark syllabic consonants. Its legs are close together but not crossed. It was difficult to tell apart from the schwa vowel, which had crossed legs, but confusion was uncommon because sequences like /məba/ were not common.

The motions requiring only one arm are signed by leaving the other arm down by the waist. Two of the 22 consonants' arm motions are little used and 6 are undefined; none of these eight was considered a single consonant at the time of Tapilula. Only the least common consonants involve having two arms in different non-limp positions.

There were no arm motions in which the arm was extended horizontally in the basic 14; this is because the original consonant subletters of the syllabary did not have strokes in the middle (or bottom); only on the top and down the sides.

Tapilula had six vowels and there were seven leg motions defined in the semaphore guide. The unused seventh vowel, here symbolized as ∀, stood for syllabic consonants and for any consonant found in isolation, as in a foreign word. Originally, Tapilula's few clusters had their own symbols because they were analyzed as units, but some descendant languages continued to use semaphore and had evolved many more clusters than their arms could handle. These languages thus came to use the ∀ motion to indicate a lone consonant.

Tones

The script was also tonal; the tones are marked by replacing the 6 leg movements with more difficult ones. Since there is only one tonic syllable per word, this does not cause great difficulty for the signaller, and helps the viewer identify the rhythm of the word.

High pitch was indicated by kneeling positions and low pitch by sitting down. Only the tonic syllable was marked, and by tradition, only the high tone was indicated by the signaller. Tapilula did not have low tones on monosyllabic words either, so the tone was not marked at all on a monosyllabic word. Since only the kneeling motion was required, the signallers often substituted a simple bow-like motion, bending their legs but also bending their upper body to create the impression of a greater leg motion. The Ǝ vowel could not be easily executed in a kneeling motion without injuring the signaller, so they substituted the otherwise unused ∀ (or "upside down A") vowel. This, in turn, was no problem, since there was no such thing as a high-tone vowelless syllable.

The high tone could also be executed by having the signaller jump in the air. Typically they jumped only very slightly, since a high jump would make it difficult to keep their arms in the right positions. At first, the kneeling variant was the standard, since it mimicked the appearance of the high tone letters in the script.

But signallers felt it was more reasonable to indicate a high pitch by having the signaler jump higher, saying that the bar at the bottom represented the signaller being lifted up, and then languages arose in which low tones could have stress too, and therefore there needed to be more than one way of indicating a stressed syllable. At this point, the semaphore system lost its connection to the inherited script, since the inherited script only had a high/unmarked contrast, and therefore the signallers created their own signs. Jumping was used by some signallers and kneeling by others, meaning that the contrast between the two could not arise, and the low tone had to be indicated by sitting down. Still later, a three-way tone contrast appeared in some languages, but these typically did not use semaphore.

Variants with other body parts and motions

Because the standard semaphore script used only the arms and legs, there was no obvious use for the rest of the body, or for motion within a single sign. Early on, some signallers used hip motions instead of turning their bodies to indicate the I and U vowels, but still turned their bodies to indicate the E and O vowels. This made these signs more distinct. I and U were the only vowels in which the signallers' two legs were in different positions, again because of the script letters, and therefore were more difficult to sign than the less common /e o/. (This is why the Andanese selected the mid vowels e o to spell their /i u/ when their vowel inventory shrank.)

Descendants

Preservation in Dreamland

The Dreamers likely continued using the body movement signals for as long as they continued using their inherited Tapilula script. The ideograms were probably not invented until around 1300, and because not every CV sequence was a word in Dreamlandic, some ideograms could have been borrowed from hand and leg motions. This could solve the "R" problem, that being that Dreamlandic has no native CV words beginning in /r/ except where analogy has taken off an initial vowel.

Dreamlandic would have needed 17 consonants and 7 vowels, assuming that they repurposed old positions for their new sequences. It is possible, however, that they were not so prudent, and used only 3 vowels because they saw /ya wa yi wu/ as sequences. This would not really help the signaller move their legs, since they would need to move just as much to spell the sequences as they would have to spell them as single vowels. But the 3 vowel method is the only way to really preserve /a/ as a common position, since otherwise the /a/ would become /e/ and the signaller would be standing with their legs twisted most of the time. This is similar to how Andanese selected the /e/ and /o/ rows to spell their /i/ and /u/ vowels, even though they likely didnt use semaphore by this time.

If there are only three vowels in Dreamlandic, then many CV syllables would need two body movements to spell. e.g. almost all /i/ is really /yi/ and would need to spell as CV + i. Nonetheless, this is probably the system that the Dreamers ended up using, as the leg movements were tedious and it was easier to spin around between three leg positions than to handle less frequent movements to seven.

Dreamer script

The Dreamers based their script on the original Tapilula script, not on the semaphore, but nonetheless, when they began to add ideograms into their script, the original letters were restyled after the semaphores in order to remove the juxtaposition of sharp angular shapes with depictions of natural objects such as corals and fruits. The ornate script drew the figures with recognizably human bodies, even though the arms and torso contributed no meaning to the letters. This became an obstacle to writing, as it was considered distasteful to omit the head, even if other body parts were simplified as when writing a long passage with a brush on paper. The angular script had always included a middle bar through each letter, which was similarly unnecessary, but was considered improper to remove, as it would mean that some letters would consist of two detached parts. This corresponded to the belts on the human figures, which the Dreamers considered optional. Eventually, the Dreamers conceded to allow the use of figures without heads, but only if the other parts of the figures were also made less human.

Meanwhile the ornate script moved towards realistic body depictions of humans. However, notably, the human figures were smaller than most of the objects used as ideograms. This was because they often appeared with their arms stretched upward, and thus were required to be shorter than the line height when not appearing with upstretched arms. Furthermore, the jumping human figures came into use to represent high tones early on (though Dreamlandic soon lost tones). A tradition developed of dividing the glyph space into a 3x3 square, with the largest possible glyphs occupying the entire square, while humans were confined to 3x1, and only when their arms were upstretched. Thus most human figures fit into a 2x1 rectangle. Meanwhile, the ideograms came to exclude humans so that there would be no confusion between the ideograms and the semaphore glyphs. This meant that humans were depicted as unnaturally small compared to most of the ideograms, which often represented physically small objects.

Even the ornate script came to include ideograms for very common syllables such as /a/, since the Dreamers at least early on had decided to analyze their language as containing only the three vowels /a i u/ and to analyze all vowel sequences as such rather than creating new symbols or creating new consonants /n̆ š kʷ/ etc. to represent /ni si ku/.

The tradition of drawing humans smaller than other objects persisted for at least 3,000 years in the Dreamer script. Although smaller glyphs did arise, 1x1 and 1x2, these were decorations, and therefore the human glyphs came to be seen as decorations too. A tradition later arose of using height-2 glyphs for short syllables and height-3 glyphs for long ones, but even here, most of the glyphs were round or square in shape, and thus still took up more space than the human figures.

Preservation elsewhere

It is possible that a maritime culture that had a very conservative could have preserved the body signals fairly well, though even here it would be impossible for the exact original values of the consonants to be preserved, since the speakers would be unlikely to remember the assignments for consonants that dropped out of the language and then later reappeared.

AlphaLeap could have preserved the signals even though their language quickly grew beyond 22 consonants, making sign language impractical unless they were to innovate even more arm signals, perhaps relying on using hands separately.

Use in Andanese

Andanese body part letter pairings

The inherited semaphore signals disappear early on in Andanese, and Andanese cultural influence may keep them out of Play as well because even though both languages had much use among sailors, the Andanese speakers were more literate for most of their coexistence. This is because the Andanese reordered their syllabary to make common syllables easier to write, so that, for example, the /wa/ syllable came to be /u/. This would make it difficult for the signaller to keep things together in their mind. Play may nonetheless borrow the script from Gold or even rediscover it in its original form after the year 4175. AlphaLeap, also a maritime power, may have kept semaphore alive but this does not mean that the Players would imitate it.

Instead, the Andanese may have associated the letters of their syllabary with a specific body part, perhaps one whose first syllable was the syllable in question. If it is done at the 30-syllable stage, it is likely to see little use outside Andanese and cannot possibly have influenced Dreamland. If it was instead inherited from a version with around 100 syllables, it would make more sense to preserve it. This 100 syllable setup could have in fact been as few as 10 body parts, however, with the other syllables being for verbs or indicating finer detail. Thus Andanese is "so simple it's complicated", having 30 items where a language with a larger possible inventory would stop at 10. This is one trait Andanese had in common with Play.

Late Andanese semaphore

It is possible nonetheless that semaphore is reintroduced to Andanese in a much different form, such that the arms do most or all of the signaling, and the Dreamers are jealous that Andanese mariners have such an easy time communicating. The Players probably would use the Andanese system as well, but imperfectly and most sailors would probably speak at least some Andanese. The original intent (c. 2005) of the Andanese semaphore system was to have five positions for each arm, meaning 25 signs, and 5 signs with only one arm in use, for a total of 30. Try to find the original semaphore pictures.

Bellhop system

If the five hand positions are numbered 0 1 2 3 4, it could be that the position 00 corresponds to the resting position and cannot be used for a syllable. In the original Tapilula semaphore, the resting position was valid as a consonant because the legs were also involved in signalling and had their own resting position corresponding to a vowelless syllable. By assigning the resting position to hiatus, the Tapilula sailors did not need a special signal for the end of a word; any "syllable" with neither a vowel nor a consonant was silent and therefore served to separate words.

Airplane system

On the other hand, it may be that the Late Andanese semaphore originated or predated the stage when the Andanese language still had 36 syllables, and therefore there would be two arms involved in all 36 signs, with six positions each, 0 1 2 3 4 5, of which the zero is the resting position. This would mean that there would be no way within the system to indicate word boundaries, but the signaller could simply turn around, bend their legs, or wave their arms, so this is no problem.

36 signs would be just barely enough to cover the Leaper consonants and the Leaper vowels, but not both; thus Leaper would need to incorporate leg movements, having at least two positions, or else find some other way to distinguish consonants from vowels. It is perhaps most likely that the Leaper sailors, at least in later years, simply learned Andanese, despite Andanese having little relevance to the Leaper nation or culture. It would simply be that they saw Andanese as the language of the sea, even if the Andanese speakers — who by this time were firmly embedded within Pubu (Play-speaking) culture — were hostile to the use of their language overseas.

The "Laban" language

08:04, 7 February 2022 (PST)

It is written in the red notebook that ALL of the Sea Turtles (Bombadiers) could speak Laban, and this language is the same language that arrived in Play territory in 4186. They knew that they were learning the language of their historical enemies, but did not consider it to be Dreamlandic. They considered Laba a distinct cultural entity even though, at the time, it was indeed part of Dreamland. (It broke away in 4186.)

NOTE: The red notebook ideas are extremely old, but I believe I had at least separated Late Andanese from Laba at the time, since Late Andanese was never the language of Laba, only "borrowing" from it in a plot hole that I later eliminated.

Pronouns

06:43, 7 February 2022 (PST)

Cannot use the 1994MS pronouns *ā ē ō because they are used to generate the vowels for Tapilula. Nonetheless it suggests that there could have once been a generic third person pronoun instead of using gender markers.

Oct 31, 2021

Building classifier suffix

Play needs a classifier suffix for buildings, like both its ancestor (Gold) and its descendants Poswa and Pabappa. It would be unlikely for this to be a purposeful omission, since a classifier for furniture exists. This classifier would neither be descended from Gold's (since Gold still used a prefix), nor related to the daughters' (since this originates from a disyllabic standalone word /kaa/).

Possible forms for the Play suffix include ba bi pa pi, all four being derived from variant remoldings of the same original standalone word wòi in Tapilula. using the "pine tree" trick, /oi/ can be reinterpreted as /o/, which would then evolve to /a/ in Gold and therefore also in Play. Alternatively, /oi/ can be read as being originally /əi/, which would evolve to /i/ Gold and then be retained in Play. Likewise, the /p/~/b/ free choice is due to whether or not the initial labial glide /w/ is treated as part of the word or part of the disappearing classifier prefix /nu-/. Note that the Tapilula word originally did have /a/, not /ə/.

It is not a problem for the classifier suffix to be the same as another .... for example, there would be little confusion if it were /-pa/, which otherwise indicates objects found in the sea, since few roots would appear in both classes. /-ba/ is a suffix used in Play for handheld objects which disappeared in Poswa and Pabappa because it would have interfered with the grammatical suffixes. /-bi/ would also have disappeared. Thus all three of these are viable despite at first appearing to pose problems. Lastly, /-pi/ is also viable, though it might have sounded to the speakers as if it referred only to wooden buildings.

Note that *pu "rock" did not exist in Play, as the word still meant a large, heavy fruit at the time, and the later use of it to mean rock was metaphorical. It would in any case never have meant a building, but only a rock used to make a building. The classifier suffix for furniture is -na, but it is unlikely that this could also be the suffix for buildings because of its etymological history, being an example of a new formation which was unstressed from the beginning, whereas the traditional Play suffixes were originally heavy syllables that carried stress and then lost it by analogy. Even after this process had finished, Play speakers would have been mindful of the difference.

Other words that could serve as classifier suffixes include Gold həʕ "shelter', and Gold kaiʕ, also meaning shelter, though the latter only if it were reinterpreted against its etymology, as this word began with a true /e/ in Tapilula, neither /a/ nor /ə/. Nonetheless, the so-called pine tree contraction could remold Gold /kaiʕ/ into /ka/, the speakers assuming that the word had actually never had its /ʕ/ (which became silent early on in Play), and that /ai/ was actually /e/, which in turn could have believably come from /ə/, which would allow a Play reflex of /ka/ (but this time not /ki/, as Gold would have had no reason to retain a special form of this word). The /k/ would likely have been replaced by /p/ during the time of classical Play, shifting back to /k/ in Poswa and Pabappa as the reflexes of the two consonants merged. Since /kaa/ came to be the classifier suffix for buildings in both Poswa and Pabappa, it is possible that it could have been mixed with /ka/ at one point, but this would bring it into conflict with the inherited /-pa/ for sea objects.

Both -ka and -še could have participated in "dirty feet" type orientations, while also getting even more dirty since the operation was repeatable.

If the Play parliament is called Pupumūs, the suffix -še must be in use, even if it is not the only suffix. The name was chosen to mimic the Andanese name Nuhutuhuku, both making use only of the vowel /u/.

A portmanteau word of this could be such as Nufutufupupumūs. Tufu means "public, available to all" in Play and therefore this would make a good pun; note, though, that in Andanese the morpheme boundary is at the opposite syllable.

oct 14, 2021

Vanamaa_Fana is a ridge, not a swamp

re-read "close to original writeups" document ... it has many unused pieces of history, e.g. "tinks on Nama" (sic)

Oct 1, 2021

"leaving just Ezra" indicates that at a very late stage of the war, STW rebelled and came to support Amade, and in particular the Firestone party. However they were likely moribund by that time.

Sep 23, 2021

Search all documents for sarabism.

"close to original writeups" document

There are details about the Rapala stage of the government which could be projected backwards to the Anchor Empire generally or else attributed to a revival of Thunder-era government policies. For example, note that one person was able to outvote the entire Parliament on issues relating to the military, but not on the other issues. This could also be projected forwards into Fayuvas. In this same system, Emon (who may not be mentioned at all in the current writeup, but is canonically the same person as the Red Sun) managed to have a total lock on power within a specific geographic region of the country, in all domains — meaning we could overrule his friend the Golden Sun on military questions, even though the Golden Sun had more than half of the Parliament's power on military matters by himself.

An old writeup called "close to original writeups" describes Taboo as "a lukewarm Crystal". These events seem to describe the war in 3958, not the later wars involving the Players and Raspara. Thus, this is the stage of government that preceded the Anchor Empire. Nonetheless, it is possible that it could have been revived later on.

The "Jecaja" city that the Womb Justice party moved into (whose name was Mirebane in at least one Dreamer language) was also mentioned in this writeup.

This CTOW document also states that the Tinks considered themselves a wing of the Crystal party after their treaty with the Crystals, meaning that they would no longer have been able to wield authority over the Players. At this time, the Players in Paba were bound by an agreement that the Play party was subsumed to Tinker authority, but the old writeup ignores the Players and may not have addressed the situation from their perspective; it could be that the Tinks had already pulled away from the Players within just the first few months of their reign.

CTOW also says that a Dreamer politician named Paetal (Nettanetu?) had been promoting another Dreamer invasion of the Anchor Empire and that the Flower Bee invasion was in response to this, rather than being unprovoked. It also describes the Ik army (in the Yoy language) as wanting to live in Tata, which may mean that they considered themselves Players, but because CTOW does not mention the Players by name, this is not certain. Tata would not have been thought of as a "middle ground" territory at the time because the Players in Tata were the ones occupying Dreamland, and were thus more anti-Dreamland than the Tinks.

Neamaki

Remember that the Dolphin Riders are the same group as the Neamaki, who were known for their contacts with Moonshine. CTOW even describes them as defending the Cold Men and the Crystals, while opposing Wax and AlphaLeap, and supporting both pacifist movements and dissent from within their own party. CTOW has the Neamaki victory in the year 4112, four years off of what it is in the current writeup. This document also puts the renaming of the DPR party to Gold in this year; thus, they would have been practicing a Gold-style international government for nearly a hundred years before they took over the Crystals.

voting

Camia under the Theyape government was a democracy - meaning all citizens are in the government, and are at once executive, judicial, and military. (Since the country was technically controlled by the military, it was necessary to grant all citizens membership in the armed forces, whose actions were voted on by its members.) There were no offices, only quotients for each citizen showing the amount of voting power that person would have on a particular question. Everyone had a different quotient for each situation, and these quotients were constantly changing to reflect changes in the person and his environment. Superficially, this was essentially the same system as the Cold government. All actions had to be presented as questions and voted on by the entire population, which by 4425 numbered about 18 million, though it was growing very fast.

Dreamland's STW clone

Dreamland had over 400 years earlier come to make an alliance with Adabawa to fight against Camia. When the war ended, the war-era emergency government (called "Wamia Major") refused to pull out, and became even more repressive on formerly democratic Dreamland. Even when Adabawa fell from power in 3992, Wamia Major held on, moving toward a government independent of Adabawa. In 4014 they sealed off their territory, trapping the rest of the Dreamers inside.

Afterward they refused all change unless absolutely necessary; they felt their original order was correct and wished to preserve it as well as possible. Just as STW had grown inside the "Camian" government, a new STW-like corporation called Kapa (in full, Nobolē Kapa) began to form inside Dreamland. The Kapa corporation was entirely controlled by the stupendously rich Yukiese family, which kept the population weak and poor by monopolizing all wealth and refusing to sell goods to anyone who carried weapons. By 4544,^{placeholder date} the Gold-style Dolphin Rider government was vestigial; the real power lay in the Yukiese quasi-cephalist system that placed all military power in their hands, so that they would be able to survive and keep their wealth even if the entire country revolted against them.

The Yukiese enterprise was a tangled mass of red tape that was, in fact, a very good imitation of STW. The difference was that the Yukiese were concerned only with staying in power and keeping money for themselves.

Note that the Kapa name of the corporation is the basic form, but it could have appeared as any of kapa ~ opa ~ papa ~ pepi given different coinage dates (it was a compound) and analogy. The names beginning with /p/ would be possible reflexes only if the word had been created thousands of years earlier.

Other early developments

This may be moved toCosmopolitan Age.

Note that the "Camians" were planning on war against Dreamland, but canceled the war because their own allies were also arming themselves and Camia had more to fear from Bèdom than from Dreamland. Thus, Dreamland was never invaded.

In 4150, the Sepu Resinio party formed in Dreamland. Their name could be translated as Combs, Cover, or (pejoratively) as Underwear or even Diaper, as the party had purposefully chosen to use a term (resi) that without its classifier prefix had a variety of possible interpretations. The Comb party that formed later on in Play territory was not named after this party.

Feb 15, 2021

User:Soap/Playful planets

this is partly on wikipedia now.

Feb 13, 2021

It is possible that the supposed Hapoto and Atopa tribes of Dreamland are not Dreamers, but rather participants in a distant conflict that some Dreamers believed they should involve themselves in. The strict reading of the original text suggests this, as the Hapoto tribe is also called the Islanders. However, it could still be that one of the groups is the Dolphin Riders, whether or not the other is the Baywatchers.

In my teenage years, I attempted to create a narrative story for the Dolphin Riders, and to get started I used gender-swapped versions of the Islander superheros, meaning that I associated the two groups with each other .... but one was feminine and the other was masculine. This may have led to me using the Islanders name outside of its usual context. Note that in my original writing, the Dolphin Riders and the Islanders lived in the same place, merely at different times.