Poswa

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.

Culture

See Pusapom.

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.

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 the Pabaps. 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.

Phonology

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.

Consonants

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.

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 sound change champions

• 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.
• pwubo "salary, rate of pay", from pepibu miaau "career value".
• polfwatos "vegetarian", from pauyau pabaa kataus, "able to eat fresh fruit".
• peffofapwa "red rose", from pipta babupte apusa
• povbia "to want to become pregnant", from pusmabaupubiba

Most of the extreme examples involve deletion of /b/ in unstressed syllables, resulting in vowel sequences which then contracted into single vowels.

Nouns have tenses, e.g. purfupo "lobster" and purfubbi "cooked lobster" (served as food).

Spelling

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.

History

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.

Grammar

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.

Sample sentences

• Pwopwabum pisfa šuppsiap žaegvabi. "The children walked across the frozen river". (treating "frozen river" as a single noun)
• Pwopwabum pisfa šuppsiap žaegvabi nappufas. "The children walked across the frozen river (while) holding hands". (nappup i babas)
• Pwopwabum pisfa šuppsiap žaegvabi nappufes. "The children walked across the frozen river while they were holding hands". (nappup i bīs)
• Fam pabbubup. "The palm tree is tall."
• Ritfabo. "I hear you."
• Vebo. "I see you." (An example of a verb whose stem collapses to just a single consonant, v-, in all tenses)
• Pemwep ritfabo. "I can hear the sea."
• Piššapetwum pimbatwop mušaba. "The mice are playing with the boy."
• Papapatum twampo. "I'm afraid of snakes."

• 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.)

Nouns

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.

• 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".
• Accusative: Always marked by -p, shows the object of a verb. Žazba pasliap blabwambi "The girl put out the fire".

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.

Verbs

Verbal morphology is the least conservative aspect of Poswa grammar.

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.

For example, the morphemes in the sentence "the snake bit the boy" can be translated as follows:

• papapat "snake"
• pimbatup "teenage boy"
• piras "to bite aggressively"

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

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

Papapat pimbatwani "The snake bit the boy."