User:Soap/scratchpad

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.

Nov 18, 2021

try to find the old climate-oriented map that had Pabaps in Dreamland, Andanese in Paba, etc .... these all assumed homogeneous cultures and could be used to plan out large-scale population shifts in the Hiboh era.

STILL NOT FOUND

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.