Abaka

Abaka is a fork of Pabappa intended to give the language a phonology more closely resembling a typical average language. It achieves this by the remarkably simple step of deleting all /p/ in the language, with a few exceptions largely explained by grammar. I have several variants of Abaka. The rules for deriving the primary form of Abaka from Pabappa are below:

• All /p/ is deleted UNLESS:

1. It occurs at the end of a word, in which case it is instead changed to /s/. (This is due to a grammatical relation in Pabappa itself in which /p/ and /s/ change places at the ends of words in some operations.)
2. It occurs as the first element in certain consonant clusters. For example, -ps- becomes -ts-, -pt- becomes -tt-.
3. It occurs as the second element in a consonant cluster with itself (/pp/) or certain other consonants, in which case it becomes /k/. Note that this means /pp/ becomes /k/, not /kk/.
4. It results from an earlier /f/ sound, in which case it remains as /p/. That is to say, Abaka shifted away all of its /p/, but then participated in Pabappa's later shift of /f/ to /p/. Thus Pabappa papabom "drum" becomes apabom, as the older form of the word in Pabappa was pafabom. Additionally, any Pabappa /w/ that results from a historical /f/ is also changed to /p/. Knowledge of the etymology of the word is thus necessary to complete this shift. Note that Abaka's different paths for historical /f/ and /p/ causes some words which have become homophones in Pabappa to remain distinct. For example, Pabappa pippi "sad, depressed" becomes Abaka ippi, but Pabappa pippi "labor contractions" becomes Abaka ispi.

• Vowel sequences resulting from the lost /p/ are left intact, although sequences of two or more identical vowels are spelled with macrons. Thus Pabappa pipipi "city" is simply Abaka ī. (Extensions of words are used to disambiguate homophones, just as in Pabappa itself.)

As the examples above focus primarily on the exceptions to the rules, it may seem that Abaka is not that different from Pabappa after all. But when using more common words, the difference is great, as can be seen by example sentences below:

Pabappa: Wempabopis, pobur blibipumup pababa pirinibi.

Abaka: Wenkabois, obur blibiumus ababa irinibi.

English: The boy's parents helped him carry the eggs.

Note, the sound rules above lead to there being no path to getting initial /k/ in Abaka. I could say that /f/>/k/, /v/>/p/, but this makes me uncomfortable.

Variants of Abaka

I have come up with several alternate forms of Abaka. These are not true dialects because they are derived from simple sound rules rather than historical sound changes. For example, an earlier form of Abaka deleted all of Pabappa's /p/, even the ones that came from earlier /f/, and then shifted all of Pabappa's /b/ to /p/, thus ending up with a more balanced stop system of /p t k/ and a marginal /d/, whereas standard Abaka has /b t k/ and a marginal /p d/.

Earlier, I used /h/ to break up vowel sequences, but I abandoned this idea early on.

It's possible that all /w/ could change to /j/ (it would be spelled "y" however).