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| '''Poswa''' is a language spoken in the center of Rilola. It is spread over more territory than any other language. Poswa is in many ways similar to its closest relative [[Pabappa]], but much more complex. | | :''This page presents the language as a grammar organized by subject. See [[Poswa/scratchpad]] for chronological updates.'' |
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| ==Culture==
| | '''Poswa''' is a daughter language of [[Play language|Play]] known for a somewhat simpler grammar and a more extreme development of the phonology. Where Play was seen as a language fit for children, outsiders muse that Poswa is the inborn language spoken by babies all across the world. |
| :''See [[Pusapom]].''
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| Poswobs historically descend from the lower class of Pabap society, who left the Pabaps to settle in the snowy pine forests of the much larger north. They are less pacifistic than the Pabaps but still very pacifistic. For example, more rabbits kill humans than vice versa, and rabbit vs human conflicts are considered to be a contest of equals, with each species hunting the other. Poswob women are often taller than their husbands and take leadership roles in society at a proportion equal to or greater than males. This however varies significantly by region; Pusapom is a large empire and some areas of it are thinly settled or consist primarily of non-Poswob people who themselves are very diverse from each other.
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| The trait of women being taller than men is a foreign adoption from the [[Moonshine]] empire to the north, where it is nearly universal. Thus Poswobs living in the north are more likely to be tall-femaled; those living in the south or the far west are generally of "normal" human proportions, like their ancestors, the ancient [[Babakiam]] people. However the Poswobs, being of both types, do not see males being taller than females as normal, but merely a variation along the spectrum between tall and short women.
| | ==Grammar overview== |
| | Poswa is simpler than the famously complex [[babakiam|Play]], but also more irregular. It could be a matter of endless debate which of the two languages is actually more difficult to learn and use. The two languages were never spoken at the same time, as classical Poswa only emerged 4,500 years after the time of classical Play, and Poswa speakers were generally uninterested in the distant past. |
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| ==Phonology==
| | In the speech register known as '''High Poswa''', there are no parts of speech; everything can be analyzed as a verb; therefore, everything can also be analyzed as a noun. |
| Phonologically, Poswa sounds like baby talk with most of its consonants being labial or labialized, but with much denser consonant clusters than Pabappa. It is fairly conservative in phonology, e.g. Diʕì ''məstăləka'' "seaweed" becomes ''psōlč'' in Moonshine, with four syllables compressed into one, but Poswa still has '''mystaruwa''', preserving the four syllables of the original (though usually the form in Poswa is just '''mystar'''). Nevertheless, due to the strong word-initial stress for 5000 years, examples of severe sound change compression do exist, such as "the sound change champions" below.
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| ===Consonants===
| | Poswa has lost the ability to make [[compound]]s, instead using an extensive list of derivational suffixes. Inherited compounds from [[babakiam|Play]] have become opaque, and indeed, many of the derivational affixes were once independent morphemes from the original Play compounds. Many of these derivational affixes have wide semantic scope, however, and it could be said that many words formed with them are effectively separate roots. This would give Poswa a large inventory of atomic root words. |
| There are 33 consonants, all in pairs of plain vs labialized, except /w/, which is considered a labialized version of silence. The others are /p b m f v t n s l tš dž š ž k g r/ and their labialized counterparts. Sometimes /tš/ and /dž/ are not considered proper consonants, instead being analyzed as clusters, which would reduce the number of consonants to 29. This is because they cannot occur in word-final position. Nevertheless, word-initial /tš/ and /dž/ have survived, whereas the other clusters /ps/ and /pš/ have been reduced to /p/ in word-initial and often also medial positions.
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| The consonants /f v/ are labiodental, but /fʷ vʷ/ are rounded and bilabial. /fʷ/ is very rare at the beginning of a word, except in loans, because the primeval /fʷ/ changed to a simple /w/. Likewise /g/ is rare in all positions because it changed to /dž/ in most environments and this change happened very recently. Presently most plain /g/ is either from /gʷ/ before a front vowel or is a loanword. | | The citation form for Poswa roots is often trisyllabic, in contrast to Play, where most roots were CVCV or shorter but compounds were frequent. With inflections, however, the effective root shape in Poswa is most commonly CVCVC- or CVCCVC-, thus behaving mostly still as a bisyllabic language. |
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| Labialization is robust and can be contrastive everywhere: '''rulpu''' "face" /rulpu/ and '''rulpu''' "bandage, napkin" /rulʷpu/ are not homophones and not even considered a rhyme.
| | ===Stems=== |
| | Poswa retains the '''A''' and '''B''' stems inherited from [[babakiam|Play]], and has added '''C''' and '''D''' stems as well. The C and D stems tend to correspond mostly to verbs in other languages, cannot stand alone, and often end in consonants that cannot occur at the ends of words in Poswa. (By contrast, the B-stems cannot stand alone either, but are always pronounceable according to standard Poswa rules.) |
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| ===The sound change champions=== | | ==Phonology== |
| *'''pobbas''' "war", from ''pau babibup mibeas''. Note that this was originally a euphemism meaning "to destroy unarmed people", replacing many other words for war which, however, still survive in compounds.
| | Poswa represents the most extreme phonological development of all the Play daughter languages, labial consonants predominating over all others combined, and also distinguishing labialization in both the onset and the coda. |
| *'''pwubo''' "salary, rate of pay", from ''pepibu miaau'' "career value".
| | ==Verbs== |
| *'''polfwatos''' "vegetarian", from ''pauyau pabaa kataus'', "able to eat fresh fruit".
| | Properly there is no part-of-speech distinction between nouns and verbs, so this section deals with roots as they express actions, regardless of which of the four stems they use. |
| *'''peffofapwa''' "red rose", from ''pipta babupte apusa''
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| *'''povbia''' "to want to become pregnant", from ''pusmabaupubiba''
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| Most of the extreme examples involve deletion of /b/ in unstressed syllables, resulting in vowel sequences which then contracted into single vowels.
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| Nouns have tenses, e.g. '''purfupo''' "lobster" and '''purfubbi''' "cooked lobster" (served as food).
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| ==Spelling==
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| Poswa is written with a very complicated syllabary, named Toppwe (or Pompoppwe to be more specific), in which some letters are drawn inside other letters. Not all possible syllables are represented, but all of the syllables that require two letters to spell are phonological reflexes of previously existing two-syllable sequences. Labialization, though not represented in the Romanized form of the alphabet, is distinguished in Toppwe. For instance the word '''pappa''' "medicine" contrasts with '''pappa''' "field" in that the second ''p'' in the second word is labialized. The first is spelled in Toppwe as ''pap-pa'', the second as ''pab-pa'' (because /bp/ is not a valid consonant cluster in the language and syllable-final /b/ is usually actually /bʷ/). All in all there are about 1500 letters in Toppwe, including a small number of bisyllabic graphemes representing common sequences such as /bies/ and a few abbreviations.
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| ==History==
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| Poswa has been a fairly conservative language for all of its history. Classical Poswa is generally considered to have begun around the year 7300, and is still readable for most Poswobs in 8733. Most of the changes in the last 1400 years involve frication and fronting of velar consonants and deletion of fricatives occurring after stops, so that for example the word for "wand, key" has changed from ''šalergos'' into '''šalios''' and the word for "world" has changed from ''pupsipšu'' to '''pupipu'''.
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| ===Loanwords=== | |
| Moonshine loans words to Poswa and a few Sakhi languages. Other languages, even those in close contact with Moonshine, do not borrow much because the phonology of Moonshine is so vastly different than its neighbors. The Poswa loans merge many words into one, for example, but this is okay because Poswa's Moonshine loans are generally for specific things and contexts where it is appropriate. e.g. čāc, čap, càt all merge in Poswa as '''tšap'''. Poswa generally loans ''c'' as /p/ at the edges of words (e.g. ''cē'' > '''pe''' "wheel") but as /ts/ in the middle of words unless an unacceptable consonant cluster would form. One might expect it to be /t/ at least word-initially, but in an earlier version of Poswa /ps/ was acceptable in word-initial position and it became /p/ in the later language. A few other very old sound changes are still obeyed, mostly because ignoring them would cause problems with noun inflection. Moosnhine ''pīp'' "icecap, large glacier" becomes '''pup''' in Poswa, because ''-ip'' never occurs at the end of native words (what is spelled -ip is actually /ipʷ/) and speakers would not agree on how to inflect it. In short-term loanwords that do use this ending, it is declined as if it were -up, so -up is what is used for long-term loanwords. As for why /ipʷ/ is not used, it is partly because -ip and -ipʷ are generally not cognate and partly because the writing system actually has -up and -ip more similar than -ipʷ and -ip (two letters versus one).
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| These words are not used in Poswa as everyday words. e.g. '''pobby''' is still the unchallenged word for wheel, not ''pe''. Rather they used in Japanese-like compounds and abbreviations, such as '''petužu''' "wheel axle", '''mežom''' "soap dispenser".
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| == Grammar ==
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| Poswa is the most grammatically conservative language in the world. In part this is due to lucky sound changes that just so happened to align well with the needs of the noun and verb inflection systems; e.g. the only five final consonants permitted in the parent language happened to also be the five that underwent a particular sound change that reduced the number of syllables in words derived from them by one; and these were the same five consonants that marked the six noun cases (the nominative case had a null ending). However, later sound changes essentially removed the "value" of this shift, so this is not the only reason for Poswa's grammatical conservatism.
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| ===Sample sentences===
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| *'''Pwopwabum pisfa šuppsiap žaegvabi.''' "The children walked across the frozen river". (treating "frozen river" as a single noun)
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| *'''Pwopwabum pisfa šuppsiap žaegvabi nappufas.''' "The children walked across the frozen river (while) holding hands". (nappup i babas)
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| *'''Pwopwabum pisfa šuppsiap žaegvabi nappufes.''' "The children walked across the frozen river while they were holding hands". (nappup i bīs)
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| *'''Fam pabbubup.''' "The palm tree is tall."
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| *'''Ritfabo.''' "I hear you."
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| *'''Vebo.''' "I see you." (An example of a verb whose stem collapses to just a single consonant, v-, in all tenses)
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| *'''Pemwep ritfabo.''' "I can hear the sea."
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| *'''Piššapetwum pimbatwop mušaba'''. "The mice are playing with the boy."
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| *'''Papapatum twampo'''. "I'm afraid of snakes."
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| *'''Pwopwabum pisfap šuppsavas žaegvabi nappufas.''' "The children walked across the river while it was frozen, while they were holding hands." (šuppsadžebas. Note thast the tense marker actually disappears here, but is unnecessary, because this form of the word can only be used with a verb that already has a tense marker.)
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| === Nouns ===
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| Poswa preserves the six noun cases of the parent language with almost no changes in meaning or form, apart from regular sound changes. The possessive has weakened into a genitive when used with definite nouns, however. e.g. '''teppiopwas mupawabub''' "the length of the rope". Poswa has not added any new cases; so there is still no dative case and the various uses of the locative case are not distinguished.
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| *'''Nominative''': The default form of the word, used as the subject of a sentence and also in genitive phrases when not indicating possession; '''paslam''' "fire"; '''paslam boša''' "fire hearth; fireplace".
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| *'''Accusative''': Always marked by -p, shows the object of a verb. ''Žazba '''pasliap''' blabwambi'' "The girl put out the fire".
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| Possession markers can be placed on any noun, e.g. '''papwopwa''' "dog"; '''papwopio''' "my dog"; '''poppup''' "knife" ---> '''poppuwio''' "my knife". The stem to which the possession marker attaches is called a ''soppu''.
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| === Verbs ===
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| Verbal morphology is the least conservative aspect of Poswa grammar.
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| Most transitive verbs have an omitted prefix '''wi''' which signifies that the preceding object is put into the accusative case. Any prefix other than ''wi'' is still omitted when the verb is used transitively, but requires that the object be not placed into the standard accusative case, but rather into an "exotic case" that in some cases is unique enough that the verb itself can be omitted.
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| For example, the morphemes in the sentence "the snake bit the boy" can be translated as follows:
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| *'''papapat''' "snake"
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| *'''pimbatup''' "teenage boy"
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| *'''piras''' "to bite aggressively"
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| The accusative case of ''pimbatup'' is ''pimbatwup'', so one might expect the sentence to be ''Papapat pimbatwup pirašebi'', and although that would be understood, the proper form is
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| ::'''Papapat pimbatwani pirašebi''', but even in this sentence, the third word is merely for emphasis, since in most situations only verbs describing biting would be used with this particular exotic case, and that case is marked for tense, making the verb entirely unnecessary. Educated speakers would thus simply say
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| ::'''Papapat pimbatwani''' "The snake bit the boy."
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| [[Category:Teppala]]
| | ===Conjugations=== |
| | Arguably Poswa could be said to have distinct verb conjugations, even as nearly all of the verbs are in the unmarked standard conjugation. |
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| [[Category:A priori conlangs]] | | ==Notes== |
| | [[Category:Languages of Teppala]] |
- This page presents the language as a grammar organized by subject. See Poswa/scratchpad for chronological updates.
Poswa is a daughter language of Play known for a somewhat simpler grammar and a more extreme development of the phonology. Where Play was seen as a language fit for children, outsiders muse that Poswa is the inborn language spoken by babies all across the world.
Grammar overview
Poswa is simpler than the famously complex Play, but also more irregular. It could be a matter of endless debate which of the two languages is actually more difficult to learn and use. The two languages were never spoken at the same time, as classical Poswa only emerged 4,500 years after the time of classical Play, and Poswa speakers were generally uninterested in the distant past.
In the speech register known as High Poswa, there are no parts of speech; everything can be analyzed as a verb; therefore, everything can also be analyzed as a noun.
Poswa has lost the ability to make compounds, instead using an extensive list of derivational suffixes. Inherited compounds from Play have become opaque, and indeed, many of the derivational affixes were once independent morphemes from the original Play compounds. Many of these derivational affixes have wide semantic scope, however, and it could be said that many words formed with them are effectively separate roots. This would give Poswa a large inventory of atomic root words.
The citation form for Poswa roots is often trisyllabic, in contrast to Play, where most roots were CVCV or shorter but compounds were frequent. With inflections, however, the effective root shape in Poswa is most commonly CVCVC- or CVCCVC-, thus behaving mostly still as a bisyllabic language.
Stems
Poswa retains the A and B stems inherited from Play, and has added C and D stems as well. The C and D stems tend to correspond mostly to verbs in other languages, cannot stand alone, and often end in consonants that cannot occur at the ends of words in Poswa. (By contrast, the B-stems cannot stand alone either, but are always pronounceable according to standard Poswa rules.)
Phonology
Poswa represents the most extreme phonological development of all the Play daughter languages, labial consonants predominating over all others combined, and also distinguishing labialization in both the onset and the coda.
Verbs
Properly there is no part-of-speech distinction between nouns and verbs, so this section deals with roots as they express actions, regardless of which of the four stems they use.
Conjugations
Arguably Poswa could be said to have distinct verb conjugations, even as nearly all of the verbs are in the unmarked standard conjugation.
Notes
