Play language

Bābākiam, commonly referred to as Play, is the name of the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa, spoken around the year 4200 in Paba. The name means simply "language of Bābā", where Bābā is the old name of Paba.

Scratchpad

Verbal mood and associated morphemes

True mood markers

Since there are no person markers (see #noperson below), all of the verbal modifiers like "need to", "want to", and so on behave like mood markers, and this system would need to trace back to Gold. Since they express the viewpoint of the speaker, they are mood markers in the strictest sense, indicating the speaker's emotions only.

It is possible to combine the mood markers with the transitivity markers, but note that "I want [me] to hit you" does not reverse to *"you want me to hit you", nor to *"you want [you] to hit me", but rather to "I want you to hit me".

But Players cannot use mood markers to express similar concepts where the person doing the wishing is not the speaker. Thus "You want me to row" cannot be a one-word sentence with just a mood marker in Play, even though it has one less participant than "I want you to hit me", because there is no such thing as a 2nd person mood marker.

Play inherited many of its mood markers from Gold, but because they were grammatically identical to the little-used postverbal locatives, any word indicating a location could be used metaphorically in a once-off manner just like a mood. Thus the Play mood markers formed an open class. However, they could not be stacked; every verb had only one mood.

The core mood markers in Play were:

Expressing knowledge

1. -Ø, the indicative mood. This was not a morpheme that had gone silent, such as /ʕ/, but simply a convenient construction to form a pattern.
2. -pa, the interrogative mood. This is etymologically the same morpheme used below in the strong desiderative mood, but without the linking [M] morpheme. It is also used as a conjunction meaning "or (else)". Note, however, this interrogative marker is never paired with the question marker -tīs, nor can one substitute for the other. Rather, /-pa/ modifies a complete sentence and /-tīs/ modifies a single word.
3. -ŋi ~ [M₂], the negative, expressing strong doubt.

   This cannot be compounded with the other mood markers, and thus behaves as a true mood. This means that there is no negative imperative, or any similar compound. Instead, to make a negative imperative, the part of the sentence that the speaker wishes to negate would take a negative morpheme. A compounded form exists, -[M₂]-u, but this has the same meaning as the bare form and appears only because the morpheme would otherwise reduce to just /i/ after passive verbs and would be ambiguous after verbs whose stem ends in /i/ because it would collide with the imperative. Note however that /-[M₂]-u/ is aimnu ~ imnu ~ emnu because the elided /d/ goes to /n/ instead of disappearing.

There is no Play mood corresponding to subjunctive, but the subjunctive grammatical category overlaps with some of the proper moods and also with the Play suffixes -p -s, which show relations between two verbs or verb-final clauses.

Likewise, Play has no clear match to the IE conditional mood.

Expressing desire

1. -m, the imperative mood. This is inherited from Gold's -ṅ.

   In Poswa, the imperative can take all three person markers. A Nenets grammar linked from Wikipedia describes these as hortative, imperative, and optative. Since these are just person-marked forms of a single mood, only one Play morpheme is required, but it could perhaps be better called the jussive mood.

   The imperative mood is also the form used after a particle like "if", meaning it can function as a conditional mood and explains why Play does not need distinct subjunctive and conditional moods.

2. -[M]-na, the common desiderative mood. Expresses the speakers' desire for the situation to come true; often used as a gentle imperative. This is formed by affixing /-na/ to the 1st person "dirty feet" morpheme below, meaning it appears variably as -amna ~ īmna ~ ūmna depending on the final vowel in the stem of the verb, and appears as -ana when the verb ends in one of /p s/, as in the case of reflexive and reciprocal verbs.
3. -[M]-pa, the strong desiderative mood. Expresses the speakers' immediate needs.

Note that the desideratives and the imperative can be marked for all three persons. The common desiderative often corresponds to an English word like "should" when used with the 2nd or 3rd person.

Expressing belief

Morphemes in this category may team up with, absorb, or lose out to the evidentials /bu bi ba/ that came to dominate in early Poswa. (The rise of /bu bi ba/ in Poswa was due to the convenience of beginning with /b/, and therefore, they could have been common in pre-Play, lost ground by the time of classical Play, and then gained it all back when they triggered an important sound change.)

1. -tau, the potential mood; this is a catch-all for statements where the speaker does not know how likely the statement is to be true, is not requesting an answer, and shows no emotional investment in the situation. It is similar to Play's habilitative and permissive verb markers ("the cat can run away"; "the boy is allowed to speak"), but applies also to inanimates ("the leaf might fall") and even to sentences without a verb ("it might rain"). Thus it does not require volition, and can be used in combination with volition ("The boy might be able to run away").

   This is from /tə̀la/, not */tə̀ndu/. It is very distantly cognate to the question marker tīs, but not even scholars would see the connection because /tīs/ lost the forms in which its presemblance was most evident. Nonetheless, note the morphemes expressing categories of belief below.

1. -tata, expressing strong belief.
2. -tiu, expressing weak belief.
3. -tetu, the dubitative, expressing doubt.

Despite the different vowels above, the first morpheme in all of them is /tə-/.

Evidentials

These are referenced in the #Pusiba_system section below, which is a later stage of the language when the transitivity markers -p -s -Ø had combined with evidentials to form new person markers. The combined forms already existed in classical Play, but were fluid and each evidential could combine with any of the three transitivity markers. This could be called color-flavor locking, using a physics analogy just as the 2x2 Play system is likened to gluons.

VARIOUS MORPHEMES USED IN MOODS

• ta, from Tapilula /tà/.
• te, from Tapilula /tə̀/, but most likely appearing as /ta/ most often. /tə/ + /ta/ is /tata/ and is a legal compound. The question particle tīs has a variant form tes, both of which appear to be related to /te/, since a simple infix could create both forms of the question particle. Indeed, they are ultimately related to each other, but at a much older layer of the language, and there was never an infix; /tīs/ and /tes/ go back to tìhə and tìhu, as shown by the Andanese cognates /ki/ and /kiku/.
• u, from Tapilula /ndù/. There may be a second use of /u/, originally not a separate morpheme, that is seen in such as /tau/ above. This is just from Gold /təl/, with /a/ instead of /ə/ for reasons given above.
• va, the /la/ needed to create the above. Likely not used in Play even as a fossil.
• ŋi, used in at least two morphemes.
• vi, used in at least one.
• tu, used in at least one.
• na, a second /na/ that is not related to the first and comes from pre-Tapilula /nat/.
• [M], which is from Tapilula /ŋà/ rather than the 1st person dirty feet suffix.

There was once a compound, -paim (for expected [M]-paim), a negative desiderative, but it fell out of use as the rule against compound moods became solid. The ones with /-t-/ are not seen as compounds and the dubitative is not seen as a negative mood, but only a weakly positive one. Similar constructions nonetheless existed to cast doubt on just a single part of a sentence ("the team's unlikely success") without using a mood marker. These could be described as irrealis NOUNS.

Future tense constructions

Like its descendants, Play has no proper future tense. However, the setup is very different: Poswa's grammaticalized -u- inflection, which marks the imperative, is actually the Play plural marker, having semantically shifted through the meanings of voluntary and then involuntary cooperation. This morpheme fills the same slot as the past tense marker -i-, and therefore the three-way Poswa setup of i/Ø/u is naturally intuitive and convenient. In Play, the morphemes could still be stacked, so plural past tense was expressed easily enough, as -uy- right alongside -ub- for plural and -ib- for past. (The /b/ insertions are normal and are not duplicated when the morphemes are stacked; thus /-ubib-/ was wrong. The expected analogical -e-, which could have arisen from the /ui/ > /ə/ sound rule, did not occur either.)

This however meant that Play had the ability to create a past tense imperative.

better words for cardinal directions

cardinal directions

These words will all be inherited from Gold, but some may be padded or replaced. Gold in turn inherited the words from Tapilula, which was a maritime society, and therefore needed words for navigation. Gold is less likely to have replaced the inherited words, but may have used padding.

Play words here are nouns, meaning "northern area" etc and not verbs or abstract nouns such as "northern-ness" etc.

If pi "boat" survives, it could mean "south across a sea", etc.

the basic cardinal roots for the four directions are very repetitive: šavafa "north", šatua "south", sata "east", and šasuša "west"; these are mingling with the more specific terms that mean "north across the water" and the like.

In Play, initial s- š- p- can all shift to Ø after a preceding word in the (primitive) locative case; Leaper cannot do this. Thus Play can create words such as Pubumafuata "east of Pubumaus", Pubumafuaašatua "south of Pubumaus by sea", and so on, even using proper nouns. These words cannot be used for "eastern Pubumaus" and so on; they always indicate a place outside the root word placename. Another formula uses separate words and assumes a preexisting genitive case instead of the locative, in which case the consonants are not deleted. Yet another formula uses freestanding words such as piaipsata "east of the river by boat", with three morphemes (pi / paip / sata) stacked together, following the name of a river, and so on. The word pi "river" is ultimately not a duplicate of the p- "boat" morpheme, and did not gain its /p/ for thousands of years after the formula was created, and so would not seem redundant.

other directional words

the word piša can still mean "across the water" without specifying a particular direction. it would just be /pi/ "boat" + /ša~fa/ "directional location", with the middle morpheme removed. It may be better to make the word paipa, however, using the inherited /paip/ morpheme from Gold /paiḳ/.

new locative case

Play's locative case is marked by -m; inherited constructions survive, but tend to be bound to their morphemes. After this /-m/, any š shifts to f, but other consonants remain intact.

/si/ > /s/

05:06, 8 March 2022 (PST)

Note that the sound change of si to s before a vowel is usually incorrect. This is seen with, for example, the final suffix /sa/ replacing /-s ya/ in words like tasa "drink" that make use of classifier suffixes. It is still legal when the suffix is /-ba/ since /sb/ > /s/ in all Play words, but words like *vapasas "war" are incorrect and could at best have been created through analogy. The correct form would be vapasias, and in fact vapias was the most common word, without the middle morpheme.

The sound change IS legitimate when the /s/ derives from Trout's /f/ phoneme, since Gold did /fj/ > /f/, and then shifted all /f/ to /s/. (It may actually have been [f fj] > [fʲ] > [s].)

Also note that Play can use š here, since it can also generalize the pre-shifted Gold forms with /h/, and /hi/ > /š/ in all Play words before a vowel. But Play did not usually use these pre-shifted forms.

Particles

Poswa is analyzed as being entirely without particles, since the particles and conjunctions can all be analyzed as fronted verbs. This was probably true in Play as well, although perhaps less remarkable since the verbs have a zero morph form.

In Late Andanese, ka/ki/pa/pi mean "and/if/or/but", with /pa/ also serving as a question marker. In Play, the direct cognates of these would be ka/či/pa/pi if there were no semantic shifts, no reanalysis, and no analogy based on sound changes. However, it is unlikely that Play would preserve these single CV particles given the complexity of its grammar and that because such words were unstressed, they could be mistaken for the final syllables of words whereas this was much less likely in Andanese.

Andanese influence might explain the surprising conservatism of the Play particle inventory, where otherwise so many short words were lost or replaced with fusional inflections.

/ka/

There might be ka .... ka for "both ___ and ____" with the first /ka/ optional.

Play also had a second "and" word, ču, which survived into Poswa. The two may have coexisted even in Play. In some contexts, nonetheless, /ka/ might be replaced by pa if the word-initial /k/~/p/ alternation that affected content words spread analogically to function words.

/ki/

This would appear as /či/ in Play, and is not related to the later morpheme /pis/ that appears in Poswa, which comes from Play pes and tīs, the latter being a question marker (distinct from /pa/ below). However, pes might have meant "if" in Play.

Like /ka/ above, this could appear as pi in some contexts, because /č/ would also become /p/ in the alternation mentioned above. (č > ǯʷ > b > p) This still is not the ancestor of Poswa/Pabappa /pis/ but could have helped influence it, especially in Pabappa where i > i is possible.

/pa/

Preservation of pa as the question particle is likely. Poswa reflects it as /pu/, which is regular, but from Play /pū/ rather than /pa/. (The artificial /ču aa/ etymology is to protect /p/ from gradation in later stages of Poswa.) Play would not have used this, and therefore the Play question particle should be /pa/. Then Play could use pipa (/pi/ + /pa/) as its word for "or; but alternatively". This is a compound of the two words above and implies that /pi/ was probably not used alone but carried a meaning similar to "but".

The Spanish-like structure pa .... , pa ..... for "either, or" is likely to be valid in Play, however, and particles may in general be more protected from compounding when occurring in absolute initial position since they would not be mistaken for final unstressed syllables. It might be pa ... pipa instead, or both forms could be valid.

/pi/

This word means "but". It likely disappears in Poswa, and it may be that even in Play, it only occurred as the first element of a compound. Since Play already has pupi "polar opposite", it may be that this was the second element of that, and that further compounding was possible.

Other particles

It's not clear if Play would have atomic negative particles corresponding to "not", "neither", "nor", etc or if they are all just compounds of other particles with a prefixed (or perhaps suffixed) element carrying the negative meaning. Pu could be the catch-all negative morpheme here, but note that pi already means "avoid".

Better numerals

06:21, 6 February 2022 (PST)

Play society inherited long words for numerals just as the societies around them did. The Andanese had long numerals too; the tradition of monosyllables comes from using their syllabary, whose first ten members were a la ha i ka u ma ga na li and thus represented the digits 0 to 9. Play simply borrowed these rather than using the first ten members of their own syllabary, because the digits in the script were also borrowed. The Play speakers (at the time, usually known as the Pubu people) did not achieve Andanese-like numeracy even when they developed a strong school system, because they typically did not work in trades requiring strong math skills. Only after they absorbed the Andanese and took over commercial trades did they begin to use mathematics in daily life. Therefore the numeral system contained only a few basic roots, with even some low numbers being visibly derived from compounds of other numbers, or of transparent word roots.

Other important ideas

Play also had a different word for ten that was used in certain contexts and could have provided the basis for inflected forms like "tenth", "set of ten", and so on.

The correlation between pās "four" and fuppās "eight" is partly a coincidence, as the extra morpheme in the latter was originally an infix, not a prefix. There is no standalone numeral fup.

In the original scheme, the words for numbers were always expressed in the essive case, meaning that they did not become the heads of their noun phrases.

Ordinals, both the fractional type and the "place in line" type, were expressed using the locative case. The analogy here is that a half of something is the second part of it, and a third of something is its third part, and so on.

Thus the bare roots did not appear in daily usage. This cannot be preserved in the current setup, although something superficially similar will be in Play because most of the inherited numeral words end in -s, which although not historically a genitive, could be analyzed as one. Both Play and Leaper will have opportunities to lose this final /-s/, separately in each language, leading to the final forms being more divergent than one might expect.

In the Gold language, numerals were also long, since this is the ancestor of Play and Play mostly kept the syllable counts of inherited Gold words intact. In Leaper they became shorter, largely through analogy but also through ordinary sound change. The Gold numerals have a distinct Indo-European look about them since they mostly end in /-s/.

Table

Numerals

	Play	Late Andanese	Gold	Leaper	proto-Dreamlandic
0
1					(pi-)huanči
2	nūs	nuka	nūs	LEAPER	anupia
3	pama	hama	gʷàma	LEAPER	amia
4	pās	hika	gʷās	LEAPER	ipia
5	putas	hia	gʷutas	LEAPER	alupia
6	putamas	alukimaka	gʷutamas	LEAPER	arumia
7	batanās	apunuka	gʷatanās	LEAPER	kuana
8	fuppās	kulika	hʷukpas	LEAPER	ihu
9	butapās	kukuluka	gʷutapās	LEAPER	kuhuapa
10	mabumās	mukuka	magʷumās	LEAPER	muahu

The Gold words above are those chosen to best match the Play descendants, and were not the only forms in use. For example, the initial /gʷ/ in some words could revert to its original /h/, matching Andanese, in some constructions, and this was part of an alternation still alive at the time. Essentially it distinguishes whether the words were seen as extended plural markers or as nouns in their own right. Thus Play appears more conservative than it is.

The Leaper words will be almost identical to those in Gold, but as above, may descend from different forms because they were variable at the time.

Dreamlandic diverged earlier than the others, but because the numbers are old, it can be considered to have branched off at the exact same time. The only way in which it appears as an outlier is that the numbers are treated differently in the grammar. For example, only the numbers 4 and 5 attained the -pia postclitic that evolved to -s in Play and to -ka in Andanese (in the number for 2 it was part of the root even primordially). They may also be the heads of their noun phrase, whereas in Gold they were not and in Andanese the distinction wasn't meaningful. All numbers from 2 on upward are prefixed with u- ~ w-, which is why the bare vowels did not fall off. This changes for classifiers. The numeral for 1 also takes classifiers.

Possible extensions

These are mostly etymologically unsound, though some are based on cognates.

• buta(s)- "plus five", by analogy between the numerals for 9 and 4. This is helped by the similarity to the numeral for five and by Players' familiarity with opaque alternations of initial consonants between related words. But Play does not use prefixes of any form, so the speakers would need to also assume that numeral words belong to a special class. Note that the insertion of /s/ here is because /sp/ > /p/ in all Play words.
• fup- "double", by analogy between the numerals for 8 and 4. See above about the lack of prefixes in Play, and note that a dual suffix -bup already exists. It would thus have to be that again numerals are a special class that go even after suffixes and yet can stand alone. See also below for a reason why fup may fit well up front after all.
• -ma(s) "plus one", the only etymologically sound derivation, though one that would be more likely if there were at least some lingering use of /pa/ to mean a pair of something. Moreover, since /sm/ > /s/ in all Play words, it would have to be that the final /s/ in /putas/ was already being analogized as a genitive even though other /s/'s were not.
• Pabappa uses the word tam to mean "cardinal numbers", but it was probably a noun, and not a morpheme that actually appeared on the number words. This word was added at a time when the words for the numbers were much shorter.

Other assorted number words

Those in Play

• -(t)eu "to agree"; used to form expressions like "both", "all three", and so on. It is possible that this is actually a prefix. Note that this might be redundant with the "all" below, but also that the form below is construed as an ordinal. If /teu/ is a prefix, the redundancy might be tolerated.
• -šafu- forms fractions; attaches to locative, which can by itself also signify fractions. Play uses the same word for "fifth (part)" and "fifth (in line)", but can disambiguate when needed. /šafu/ is really šaus and may appear as such if it is not itself padded with a second locative suffix.
• tap "to clap the hands"; used for multiplication by ten. Possible replacement for inherited mabu ~ mapup, which is transparently derived from the numeral for ten.
• fa, another word for ten. This is simply a doublet of /mabu/, deriving from a variant form of the word 4,000 years earlier in which the analogical medial /g/ ("to keep the rhythm") was not retained. That is, mʷŏgu ---> /mabu/ and mʷŏu ---> /fa/.

• This is the same /fa/ that means "cloud", "to hide", etc. and thus also appears in the words for zero and for "each, every".

• -bup, the dual ending. Appears irregular but is actually regular (c.f. /bip ~ pip/ "sun" for a similar alterntion).
• -bu, the "separate" plural ending. Originally a doublet of -bup (hence the comment above about it appearing irregular), but evolves to an independent morpheme by the time of Play. The oblique stem of both is pu-. The meaning of "separate" plural may have evolved from a construction like -bem-bu.
• -bem, the "working together" plural ending. May be also a collective. The oblique stem is mi- and survives as such into Poswa and likely Pabappa.
• -nem, meaning one, and may behave differently than other numerals.
• nasu ~ nafa, meaning "all, whole, entire". At least in its /nasu/ form, it changes meaning to "expand, make larger" in Poswa. May have a variant form /namu/. Note that Poswa gets its word for "each, every" from /fau vis/, where the /fau/ is yet another variant of /mabu/ (and probably should be replaced in the lexicon by either /mabu/ or /fa/). See below, as it is possible that the /fa/ may be separable.
• ta, used in the words for zero (pume fata) and "each, every" (nafata). At least in the case of /nafata/, it is construed as an ordinal ("the all'th place; all of them") rather than a cardinal.
• pume, a Play-specific word for zero, but cannot be used alone. Cognate to pupi "polar opposite" and therefore likely found only inside Play.
• na, the palm of the hand. Used to plump up the word /fata/ to mean "each, every". Thus /nafata/ is a very succinct way of saying "that which is hidden in the palm of the hand, (now) shown". It can only be formed inside Gold because of the monosyllabic word for palm. It is possible that this is perceived as standing in for a numeral, and that when speakers say "all seven" and so on, the /na/ is dropped so that the ordinary number word can stand in. See also the /teu/ prefix above.

Gold and others

The very old Play morpheme /fa/ appears in proto-Dreamlandic as mua. The expected variant reflex /mpua/ does not appear at least in the numerals up to 10, but may appear elsewhere as the morpheme was flexible even in the MRCA.

• duʕ is the Gold word for zero. It means "in the /dù/" where dù is a word for something sacrificed or cut off, and also functions as a negative in some other constructions.

Morpheme order in higher numbers

In Play, the word for "times ten" would almost certainly be placed in initial position, unlike IE. Rather than having two roots for ten, Play had a root word meaning ten and a root word meaning "a group of ten", rather as English has "twelve" and "dozen". Put another way, Players would see 60 as six tens, not ten sixes, and thus the word for 60 would not be analyzable as "six [times ten]" as in English. Rather, it would be something like fa(p) or tap followed by the ordinary word for six. It may or may not have a mandatory classifier suffix. ša(p) is also possible, but less likely.

Possible better nominal possession marker

WHY THERE ARE NO PRONOUNS AND NO PERSON MARKERS

10:31, 11 February 2022 (PST)

Play nouns can take up to FOUR person markers: possessor, agent, patient, and beneficiary. No other language, even Poswa, has all four of these inflections marked on nouns. For example, from fapasa "pillow", one can say

Fapašavaapās "the pillow which you bought for me which (got) you"

which combines four person markers on one word. The 1st person is marked twice, once for possessor and once for beneficiary, but in English it would be uncommon to repeat it twice. Since there are only three persons in Play, any noun with four person markers on will have at least one pair of markers that is the same. The verb in the sentence is not present here, but implies that the listener was affected, as for example if the pillow had fallen on their head. Nonetheless fapašavaapās is a noun, and can be the subject of a sentence.

Note that it is still possible to analyze Play as having no person markers because all the morphemes that here mark 1st person really just match the possessor marker, and since that is the same marker, it can be claimed that there is only a "self:non-self" distinction except for the patient markers.

The possessor also serves for "i am a doctor", etc, since by context the speakers assume a state of being instead of a relation of ownership. Therefore the possession marker has nothing to do with the gluons, unlike in Poswa where the counterpart of gluons is considered an augmented possessive. This means that the "verbalizer" is the same as the possession marker except that the possession marrker is padded by a classifier suffix.

In Play, -p -s -Ø can mean both "I am a ____" and "I have a ____" depending on the classifier suffix (if present), and that in both cases, they are attached to the oblique form, which is the same as the Poswa B-stem, and was analyzed as a verb. Therefore there is no need for "another" verb to serve as the nucleus of the sentence.

Even if the paradigm in Gold was originally -k -s -ḳ, there would have been an unmarked form. Thus Play has -p -s -Ø because it gets its third person from the unmarked form, in essence substituting "a book" for "his book", etc.

The outermost markers are in fact etymologically derived from true person markers, but because the 3p form is Ø, Play teachers analyze them as being like the others and distinguishing just self vs nonself (with the speaker as "self").

Gluons

08:34, 29 January 2022 (PST)

It can be that the Gold accusative markers were -k -s -ḳ for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, meaning that they were inherently marked for person. These could have been possession markers too, although their basic meaning would have still been verbal, .... that is, "I have a ___". Genitive -s is older than Gold, though.

Vowel-initial roots

If a verb /a/ existed, its infixed forms /aka aha/ etc would merged to /a/ when suffixed, meaning that /a/ could be a verb.

The four gluons

08:18, 23 January 2022

Gold was able to indicate the person of both the agent and patient with just one morpheme, and that one morpheme took only four values: -k -Ø -s -ʕ for 1:1 1:2 2:2 2:1.

Play then changed /ʕ/ to /m/ by analogy since it had also changed a noun case ending in -ʕ to -m. Thus, these markers have nothing to do with the "odrty feet" markers that came from swallowed noun classifier prefixes, although by happenstance there is an /s/ in 2nd person in both and the /ʕ/ that gets replaced by /m/ is a passive just like /m/.

This setup still leaves -l -n -ḳ free to mark other things on verbs in Gold, so it could be that while Gold could indeed get by with just four person markers (including null), they used more even so.

The 1:1 1:2 2:2 2:1 probably correspond to 3:1 1:3 3:2 2:3 since the ohlny difference is the presence of an additional argument in the sentence. Then, there would be 3:4 and 4:3 for /Ø ʕ/ and reflexive and distributive for /k s/.

Evolution into Play

Even in Gold, the /ʕ/ phoneme had already mostly merged with silence. It may have hung on as a verbal marker indirectly by affecting tone. But Play lost its tones too, and therefore it was no longer possible to distinguish /ʕ/ from silence. Thus, Play retained the Gold verbal markers but they wre no longe sufficient to stand on the ir own. This is why Play ended up sticking evidential morphemes on, which were unrelated to the Gold verbal markjers. They were all third person verbs, maninfg that their marker was silence all along. Thus, there was no need to "inflect the inflections" in Play.

This means Play loses the irregular tense markers as well. Also, it means that Play starts out by using the reflexive verb markers for 1st and 2nd person, but the transitive verb marker for 3rd person. It may be that Play has a confusing system in which old, new, and ephemeral features are all mixed together. Try to avoid using evidentials as object person markers, however, since they need to evolve into subject person markers in Poswa and Pabappa.

Possibility of verbal embedding

If these verbs, which are both tenseless and seen as personless, are embedded within noun phrases, monstrously complex inflection paradigms could appear, mostly ending with /s/ plus a vowel. Essentially, rather than behaving as content morphemes, these incorporated verbs behave as inflections. Though very difficult, the system is maintained because Play's small syllable inventory ensures that there can only be so many different inflectional paradigms to memorize. Thus simplicity preserves complexity.

For example, from fausa "door", one could derive faufuufupusa "the door you opened for me", all without any markers for person, number, or tense. If such words were commonplace, it would help explain why Play was so notoriously difficult to learn. The internal meanings of these morphemes might take a few steps in their own direction, for example /s/ could be a reciprocal/distributive instead of being tied to just the 2:2.

Moreover, this would mean that Play has a feature which Poswa does not, and therefore that the evolution of Play into Poswa was not simply a linear progression in which more and more features were gained while none were lost.

Further examples:

1. pupumuba "toy blocks" + pata "play" =

   pupumuatasa "the toy blocks that I play with". The elision of /p/ is optional here because etymologically it was dropped when it came from /p/ but retained when it came from /kʷ/.

   pupumuataasa "the toy blocks that you play with"

   pupumuatašasa "the toy blocks we're playing with together"

   pupumuatakasa "the toy blocks we're playing with individually"

And so on. Note however that there is no way to distinguish "we" from "I" in the fourth example, because it is a true reflexive, whereas in the third example, it is a reciprocal and therefore must be plural.

Use with third person and unmarked arguments

Note that it is still possible to say, for example, sapupaipa "swimming fish", which is /sapu/ + /pai/ + /pa/. Importantly, the word for fish is in the nominative and not the oblique stem.

This looks like it can also mean "the fish I swim", but this is just because /sp/ > /p/ and the forms overlap. When the classifier suffix is /-ba/, this ambiguity is resolved, but note that handheld objects typically only take intransitive verbs. It is likewise for other classes. Thus for example pūpu "palm tree" becomes pūinupu "tall palm tree"; here, howver, a passive is possible: pūinuppu "palm tree taller than me".

Private verbs

Some constructions can be made with private verbs, which are monosyllables inherited from the ancient Tapilula language, mostly obsolete already in Gold. Play preserves the system, but sound change has worn down most of the consonants so that the private verbs today are mostly just single vowels. This means that their meanings are extremely broad and must be understood from context. For example, a has over a dozen meanings, including the bare possessive "to have" (although it is possible that Play had a zero-marked possessive construction, as if there were a silent private verb, that was replaced in Poswa and Pabappa by /a/).

Nonetheless, just as English has verbs such as "get", "do", "run", and so on, so too does Play have formations such as these:

1. sapūaapa "the fish you bought for me", showing that they do not always end in /s/ + vowel.
2. namaŋašasa "the chair you're sitting on".

The private verb va typically means "buy" when used with the handheld object classifier -ba, even though this /b/ is always swallowed by the infix /s/, and therefore not transparent. Even here, though, it can also mean "throw" or "clean".

The only consonants permitted in the private verbs are /m n ŋ p/ and the semivowels /v y/, which Play teachers consider to be allophones of the vowels. The /p/ comes only from /gʷ/ and not from primordial /p/, though some conflation of meaning has taken place since there are freestanding words /pa pi pu/ that can serve as verb stems.

Possible null construction

05:23, 25 January 2022 (PST)

There may be a null construction as well, for example, from fabu "to share one's war strategy" there can come fapupuse "the war strategy you shared with me". Note that it uses /pu/ instead of */u/; the "cards" here are /a i pu/, not /a i u/. The final -e represents the classifier suffix /-be/ "speech, song".

It could be said that the null construction above does not have a null verb, but rather a null stem. That is, the construction is Ø + PRIVATE VERB rather than NOUN + Ø.

Strictly speaking, however, it seems that a silent /ʕ/ should precede the construction, even though such a phoneme could never have stood alone. Since this would lead to a great many vowel-initial words, which occur nowhere else in Play, it is likely that the construction does not exist, and that Play must use *simple verbal embedding* instead. The passives below such as "you took from me" would become actives.

Examples:

1. vumaaba "the handheld object you took from me" (/vuma/ "to take away" with /-aa-/ replacing /a/, thus as if representing a single "card" infix /-a-/).
2. tamavumaaba "the leash you took from me", as above, assuming that the null construction can be analyzed as Ø + PRIVATE VERB and therefore take an additional morpheme to fill in the gap.

Comparison with Leaper and Gold

Play inherited the gluon system from Gold. In Gold, there was an alternation of classifier suffixes with -ga/-gi/-gu for the free forms, -ka/-ki/-ku for the 1st person forms, and -ha/-hi/-hu for the 2nd person forms. In Leaper and Moonshine, because of the accent, the /h/'s would all shift to /k/ as well, breaking the system. Note that most of the classifiers with /g/ correspond to those with /p/ in Play. NOTE, these are probably not person forms at all, but rather internal case markers as is Play -s-. They would be person forms if Leaper omits the Play -s-, however.

Because Leaper did not delete intervocalic /g/, the direct cognates of the Play gluon forms would be exceptionally long, and unlike the characteristic Leaper language. On the other hand, some are not.

For example, the Leaper cognate of Play sapupa "fish" is săhoga, so the Leaper cognate of Play sapūaapa would be something like saholâka with /sg/ > /k/ because of the accent rule. Thus the word only gains one syllable to go from "fish" to "fish you bought me". Thus, Leaper beats Play by one syllable (remember that /aa/ in Play is two syllables, not a long vowel). But an intransitive form like saholakăka adds two syllables instead of one, whereas the Play cognate, sapūakapa, is the same length.

Since Leaper is typically much more efficient than Play, the existence of a "tie" would somewhat embarrass the Leapers, and it is unlikely a structure such as this could have survived in the language for thousands of years. However, there must be some answer to the Play setup, since it is needed for everyday speech in Moonshine and for polite speech in Leaper.

Possible olsution

One possible solution for Leaper is to reduce the first vowel in every pair of identical vowels, as Leaper had done this elsewhere in its word stock. For example, the sequence -akă- above contains only one meaningful vowel, and the other is an echo vowel. This "wasted vowel" paradigm was common in Play, and even survived into Poswa and Pabappa, but was discarded by Leaper early on in most (but not all) cases. The reason it could not be discarded entirely is because doing so would create illegal consonant clusters.

Leaper would be replacing the first vowel in each VCV pair with /ə/, which in this case was etymologically true. Play analogized it, though this had likely happened at the Gold stage and was then undone in Leaper rather than Leaper being conservative. Thus Play "wins" again. And because the schwa collapses into labialization, Leaper gets consonant clusters, which in almost all cases reduce into single consonants, meaning that the various private verbs fall together, creating a complex system, delivering yet another win to Play.

Another problem with the Leaper solution is that it leads to a backwards internal morpheme order. For example, saholakăka above would become sahokʷăka (lak > lək > lʷk > lʷkʷ > kʷ). The surface structure of this is /kʷ/ "1st person intransitive" + /a/ "private verb" + /k/ "dummy morpheme". It is possible that the Leaper morphemes are separable, and end up being primarily used as a freestanding suffix, but there must be a stage in which the infix form was dominant if the alternations like /g/ > /k/ are to remain. Furthermore the infix has the advantage of meaning that the case marker is still the outermost morpheme, whereas if the gluons are external, they come after the case marker and do not have case markers of their own.

At any rate, Leaper at least at one stage has an infix -ʕʷâk- "that which you show to me", corresponding to Play -paas-, which may outlast the system even if the gluons end up becoming otherwise freestanding words. This is used as a politeness morpheme. It may have an alternate form -gâk- used after labials, and perhaps likewise also with /gʷ/ and with plain /ʕ/, which would behave as /Ø/ after /i/.

Consonant clusters in etymologies

/st/ and other clusters

Remember that while /st/ appears frequently in the etymologies of words given in Play, this cluster did not occur in Play itself. Rather, it appeared in Poswa and Pabappa after those languages independently underwent vowel syncope, creating the opportunity for new compound words to be coined from Play words containing the cluster /st/, which previously would have been automatically reduced to /t/. This also applies to various other clusters, such as /pf sf sp ss/ and perhaps any cluster with a fricative in either position. note that /pp pt/ are etymologically sound, but that /pk/ might not be, which would mean that /pk/ would only appeal in late coinages and therefore can be replaced by /pp/ arbitrarily. (The intent here is that /pk/ would only ever arise from the sequence /kʷk/, which would have become /kʷ:/ and thus /pp/.)

Later /st/ can either reflect Gold s + t or Gold s + d; these were pronounced /tʰ/ and /dʰ/ respectively, but since all voiceless stops were aspirated, this is just /t/ vs /dh/. Then, Play turned these into /t/ and /Ø/ while in Leaper they merged as /t/.

Nouns

See Pabappa/scratchpad#Scratchpad_ordered_by_date.

Dirty feet

It is likely that Play and Pabappa both lack pronouns just as Poswa does. Instead, 1P and 2P patient is marked on the agent of the sentence, using captured prefixes from the Gold/Trout era. The Gold 1P patient morpheme was -ŋa and the 2P patient morpheme was -hə. The "feet" of the nouns thus get "dirty" with the otherwise lost prefix of what had once been the following word. (Although the metaphor could just as easily be soap, so long as it's something that's sticky and has weight.)

Thus the dirty forms of the nouns are, for 1st person, -a -i -u -e > -am -īm -ūm -am, and for 2nd person, -a -i -u -e > -ās -īs -ūs -ās. Note the asymmetry and that the final -s can be lost in all four examples.

Accusatives could also be padded .... e.g. -p changing to -pu when the agent is plural (and also perhaps -ptu for /du/, which could indicate a single boy). -pi would be a 3rd person singular female agent (possibly also plural all-feminine) and either -pa or -pte for a 3rd person singular male. In theory the 1st and 2nd person agent could also be marked here, probably with -a and -e respectively (that is, the same vowels as are used for the patient forms), but since person is already marked on the verb, these markers would either be redundant or would be confined to peculiar verbless constructions. (Poswa does not have this problem because the verbal person markers are identical to the padding on objects in verbless sentences.)

There is also potentially a -ŋu when the patient is 3rd person but a child, and -a ~ -e if the patient is 3rd person masculine singular. Lastly, the feminine would be -i. These are etymologically sound, but it may be that the 3rd person patients were never marked, since nearly all such sentences would have the word for the patient explicitly present anyway. But consider that if gender were retained for patients (even if not for agents), these could be used to allow the speaker to avoid repeating words. This system is most likely to be retained if Play had a means of marking the gender of the agent on the verb.

These endings are similar to what later evolved in Poswa .... where inanimate (and 3rd person) agents are padded by person markers for the patient, and must take passive verbs, and in which accusatives are also padded in some constructions with the person markers for the agent (because there are no pronouns). It could be that Poswa's system arose as the Play system began to break down through sound change. Unlike Poswa, however, there is no tense marking.

Note that this is SLIGHTLY similar to proto-Semitic, but not quite the same.

Possession on nouns

The means by which Poswa and Pabappa mark possession on nouns evolves from the Play oblique case, which likely no longer stood alone with any meaning even in Play. It is possible, even so, that the 1st and 2nd person possessed forms could simply be derived from the oblique followed by -p and -s respectively, if assuming that these would not be confused with case-marked free forms.

Alternatively, the OBLIQUE + -a- + verbal person marker construction (whether with /-p -s -Ø/ or with longer forms) existed even in Play. But note that this construction exists in Poswa and Pabappa primarily because it participated in a sound change which made it much shorter; it would have been rather inconvenient in Play as it could have made words two or even three syllables longer just to mark possession (e.g. /tap/ > /takaakas/).

It is possible, also, that instead of /-i/ > /-ip/, it would be /-iši/, which respects the true etymology, which means that it would collide with the reflexive past.

Verbs

Remember the -V-š-V reflexive past, which might be effectively a past participle. e.g. "he scratched me" etc. It corresponds etymologically to a merger of the past tense forms of /p/ and /s/, so it might come to mark tense alone.

The verb person markers are -p -s -Ø for first, second, and third person, despite the fact that these same markers also mean reflexive/reciprocal/direct.

This system cannot cleanly evolve into that of Poswa. Poswa gets its person markers from Play's evidentials, but the tense markers go inside the evidentials instead of the original suffixes. Strictly speaking this is bad syntax, but the speakers must have gradually lost their knowledge of the original meaning of the morphemes. (But perhaps it is not so bad, since Poswa ends up doing the same thing with its remaining evidentials: they always stack onto present tense verbs, regardless of when the action occurred.)

An infix of -ay- or -[V]y- to mark passive voice is possible, assuming that all passive sentences would have third person subjects and that person would therefore no longer need to be marked. (Though hypotheticals like -k[V]y- would be understood by the speakers as ad-hoc formations.) This -y- survives into Poswa, meaning it must have been inherited from Play, and could have been the present tense counterpart of the V-š-V morpheme above, assuming there were no person markers.

Pusiba system

It is likely that the person markers -p -s -Ø belong to one conjugation, and -pu -si -ba to an extension of that conjugation, where they have been padded with evidentials. This system may not have been fully solidified at the time of the unified Play language, meaning that there could still have been -pa, -su, etc, but the context-dependent grammaticalized sound change of *pb *sb > p s had taken place long before this time and was therefore inherited rather than innovated separately in the daughters. (Poswa discards the interior person markers entirely, and adopts /-bu -bi -ba/ for its person markers, meaning that the evidentials must have persisted as independent morphemes, capable of being added to 3rd person verbs, until at least 5500 AD.)

The V-š-V morpheme above could easily be reinterpreted as simply reflecting the genitive, turning the genitive ending -s into a past passive participle marker. This would lead to endings -su -si -š-V for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person past passive participles, although these would be best suited for daughter languages where /-si/ was not also the ordinary 2nd person present tense ending. Thus, this development might happen in side branches of Pabappa but is less likely to happen in the branches that begin diverging before the split of Poswa from Pabappa.

Otherwise, past tense could be infixed into the evidentials, making the forms for the past -pe -sei -bī. This corresponds to the /-be -bei -bī/ that gave rise to the system used in Poswa.

Other information

Diachronics

Scope

Although the Swamp Kids ruled from Săla instead of Paba, it's likely that the dialects were interchangeable, since the entire Empire underwent massive internal migrations. Therefore, Bābākiam is also the parent language of the Swamp Kids' outposts in Amade and Pipatia.

Gold (1900) to Play (4100)

The Play language evolved from the Soft Hands dialect of Gold, also known as Wolf in Wool, Broken Shields, and perhaps at least one other name. It drove out the Lazy Palms language and took relatively few loanwords. There were also several other languages spoken in this territory, including one language spoken by Star immigrants, probably a branch of Amade.

Wolf in Wool had not yet evolved its characteristic sound, so the relative scarcity of loanwords was not due to the acoustics of the language, but rather a cultural identification with the new language being imported from overseas. Any loans that were taken in had /e o/ shifting to /ə/ for the entire time period of this language, though /ē ō/ may have been borrowed as /əi əu/ or /ai au/ or either.

1. At the end of a syllable, the pharyngeal fricative ʕ disappeared and changed the previous vowel to a high tone. It also voiced the following consonant.
2. Syllable-final k ḳ ŋ changed to kʷ ḳʷ ŋʷ.
3. Feeding on the above change, in compounds, if the final consonant was one of /kʷ ḳʷ/ and the first consonant of the next morpheme was one of the velars k ḳ h ŋ, it also became labiovelar. Thus for example /kk/ > /kʷkʷ/ or /kʷ:/. It did not happen for other consonants. Prenasals did not shift; later, the cluster /ŋʷk/ becomes /mk/, which is pronounced as spelled but later becomes [ŋk], [mpt], etc depending on dialect.
4. In initial position, the labialized coronals tʷ dʷ nʷ shifted to t d n. Elsewhere, even in clusters, they decoupled to the sequences tu du nu.
5. The bilabial approximant w changed to v (in internal reconstructions, also spelled "β") before a vowel.
6. Then l lʷ both became w (not */v/) in all positions although it retained a rhotic allophone. The distinction between this new /w/ sound and the one that had just changed to /v/ is important later on, as it keeps sequences like /ʕl/ from being corrupted to /ʕʷ~gʷ/ and then on to /v/, /b/, and /p/. Rather, /l/ stays as /w/.

   Notably, the sequence sl (which was pronounced as IPA [hl] or for some speakers [ɬ]) shifted here to sw, and did not become */hʷ/ or */f/. That is, it behaved as the sequence that it was morphologically, instead of sliding with the phonetics into a new single consonant.

   NOTE ON POLITICS: Proto-Highland Poswa breaks off here.

7. The labiovelar consonants kʷ ḳʷ hʷ gʷ became p ṗ f v unconditionally. This includes sequences like /kʷl/, despite the precedent set by /sl/ above, because in this case, /kʷl/ was already [kʷ] at the surface level in the proto-language.
8. Sequences of two vowels in which the first vowel was i or u became rising diphthongs. Then all clusters of a consonant followed by a semivowel came to be pronounced as coarticulated single consonants. Thus pua became pʷa, pia became pʲa, and so on.
9. Stressed syllabic nasals were opened to sequences containing a schwa.
10. The voiced fricative g assimilated to a neighboring glide /j/ or /w/, thus creating sequences of /jj/ and /ww/. The shift thus was gj jg gw wg > jj jj ww ww. This includes g after /ī/ and /ū/.
11. The voiced fricatives d dh g became silent between vowels and occasionally in initial position (due to compounding).

    When I wrote this, there was no /ž/ in the language at this stage, and so it is possible that ž also shifts to Ø.

    NOTE ON POLITICS: This time period is around 3100 AD, near the beginning of the "Time of Happiness" (Yeisu Kasu: 3138 - 3302 AD). The branches of the language that fork off from mainline Bābākiam in 3138 all die out, and therefore all of their names in the history are written in Babakiam, but they could be revived as minor local languages, and there would be quite a lot of them.

12. A voiced consonant in a cluster after /p/ or /s/ changed briefly to ʕ and then disappeared.

    This shift is responsible for important consequences in verb morphology in Poswa more than 5000 years later. Note that the inherited clusters gh hg had been merged as h already in Gold; /hg/ was morphologically equivalent to /sg/, which explains why /sg/ shows up in Play as š instead of s like the others. Lastly, this shift explains why the Play toponym Fanašasa corresponds to Leaper Xʷanaxanta.

13. The voiced fricatives v z ž g changed to b d ǯ ġ before a high tone. Unlike other languages, Play considered the long vowels to be high tones here.

    This is how Play does /g/ > /k/ even though /g/ was a fricative. Note however that in hypothetical words like /vuau/, where a /d/ dropped out, the initial /v/ was part of a separate syllable, not stressed, and so did not shift to /b/.

14. The post-velar fricative consonants ħ ʕ, which had been developing labial compression, changed unconditionally to f v.
15. The velar fricatives h g were fronted to š ž unconditionally. šʲ žʲ became š ž. This includes the /čʲ/ sequence, which had long ago become [šʲ] but was maintained in spelling because of its importantly distinct grammatical behavior.

    Importantly, this shift included conditions in hiatus ("holes" in Play terminology), so that čiva became čua.

16. The labialized voiced stops bʷ dʷ ǯʷ ġʷ changed to b.
17. The palatalized voiced stops bʲ dʲ ǯʲ ġʲ changed to ǯ.
18. Any remaining voiced stops b d ǯ ġ changed unconditionally to p t č k (except when in clusters).
19. The voiced fricative žʷ changed to v.
20. Tones were eliminated. However the stress accent (nouns on the penultimate syllable, verbs on the ultimate) remained and became regularized.
21. The voiced stops d ǯ ġ (now found only in clusters) changed to n nʲ ŋ unconditionally.
22. Remaining v changed to b.
23. Remaining z changed to s.
24. Newly created vowel sequences beginning with i or u collapsed into rising diphthongs, thus creating a new series of palatalized and labialized consonants.

    This same shift happened twice but many words missed by the first change were captured by this change. Note, however, that the reflex of /buya/ is still /buya/; it did not become /bʷia/ and then /bia/.

25. The labialized consonants bʷ žʷ changed to b unconditionally. (Despite the fact that a nearly identical sound change had occurred only shortly before this one, this rule was very common in verb forms that were created by the shift of /bua/ > /bʷa/ > /ba/, and likewise for other vowels.)
26. The palatalized consonants bʲ žʲ changed to ž unconditionally. (The above shift also applies here; many verbs underwent a shift of /bia/ > /bʲa/ > /ža/.) This shift did not apply to words such as bivu, from earlier /buivu/, because the /i/ in this word was not [ʲ] but still a true /i/.
27. A schwa ə in a word in which the following syllable had /a/ changed also to a. Note that this is the only vowel change in the entire history of the language going back 3500 years, even before the Gold language, except for a few diphthongizations such as /ua/ > /wa/. However, the vowel system became very unstable in the succeeding period as the language developed into Poswa and Pabappa.
28. The stress was shifted to the first syllable in all words.

Phonology

Babakiam is the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa and thus shares with these languages many characteristics.

Vowels

There are four vowels, /a i u ə/, spelled a i u e. The first three vowels can also be long. The schwa is the rarest of the four vowels, and words with schwa are usually cognate to words with clusters or syllable-final consonants in closely related languages such as Khulls and Proto-Moonshine, which are separated from Babakiam by about 2700 years of divergence.

Play is notable for allowing unrestricted vowel sequences, particularly of /a/, for example bāaaau "(park) bench", which is syllabified as bā-a-a-au (four syllables), and paaapa "dark-haired". Words with three or more vowels in a row are usually transparent compounds (as in the case of bāaaau) or loanwords (as in the case of paaapa). Compounds are especially prone to triple vowels because they often preserve older sound changes in which a medial voiced consonant has dropped out. Play also distinguishes between long vowels and a sequence of two short vowels, and minimal pairs of this type are very common. Vowel sequences often result from the deletion of voiced fricatives between vowels (/ž/ is the only voiced fricative remaining in the language), whereas long vowels generally were long in the parent language and result from a series of much earlier sound shifts. Other words, such as taīū "maple leaf", exhibit both types of changes.

The vowels /i/ and /u/ become /j/ (spelled "y") and /w/ (spelled "v") before other vowels and in some positions also after vowels. Thus a word like patiyiyibis "bladder" is phonemically /patiiiiibis/, with five /i/'s in a row. When the vowel sequence /əa/ or /əā/ (spelled ea and eā respectively in Romanization) occurs within a word, it does not form a diphthong; the two vowels are pronounced as separate syllables. The /ə/ in this case is pronounced a bit higher than normal, approaching IPA [ɨ]. It was not confused with /i/, even in rapid speech, because /i/ in this position was always pronounced as a non-syllabic palatal glide [j].

Consonants

The consonant inventory is very simple: /p b m f t n s š ž k ŋ/, but note that /w j/ are considered allophones of the vowels. It is unusual in that it lacks liquid phonemes entirely when all the languages around it have /l/ and most also have an /r/-like sound. Thus Babakiam sounds like stereotypical toddlers' speech. Bilabial consonants are by far the most common, as in Pabappa, Poswa, and the Outer Poswob languages. However, Play is not as extreme as its descendants, which are almost entirely free of dorsal consonants.

Gender

Consonant-based gender system

In the Gold language, a robust gender system based on consonant harmony existed, and this is reflected in a few modern words, such as mume "wife" and tute "husband". Bābā speakers will often say that a word with a lot of t sounds feels masculine, whereas a word with a lot of m or n sounds feels feminine. This has little importance to the language at present because new words are not normally coined merely by changing their internal consonants around. But the gender system still operates in a limited set of words which can be considered a category of their own.

Babakiam's gender system describes age as well as biological sex. Young children, usually those under about six years old, are considered to be neither male nor female; their gender is "child", marked by /t/. However, children that are so young as to be inseparable from their parents are found not here but under another gender, including both babies and pregnant women, marked by /p/. The /t/ gender could be thought of as a group encompassing preschoolers.

It could be said that Babakiam does not have a true masculine gender, but merely marks the presence or absence of femininity. A group of humans with no females would be grouped under the /t/ gender: men, boys, and children of indistinct or unknown gender. The above example word of tute "husband" works because women do not often get married to young boys or girls.

Feminine genders

A group of humans with some females and some non-females would be grouped under the /p/ gender: humans in general; babies of unknown gender; epicene (but not including neuters).

A group of humans containing exclusively females would be grouped under either the /m/ gender (adult women; married women) or the /n/ gender (girls and young women; unmarried women). If the group contains both, the /n/ gender predominates. This could be compared to the English practice of referring to a women's bathroom as a "girl's room" if young girls sometimes use it but as a "women's room" or "ladies room" if (as in an elementary school) there is a separate bathroom for younger girls.

In all of the above cases, a "group" consisting of a single individual will still be given the same gender predicted by the descriptions.

Note that Bābākiam's gender consonants describe age as well as sex. The category of "girl" (/n/) is bounded from below by "young children of indeterminate gender" and from above by "adult women; married women". For the lower boundary, children who think of themselves as girls rather than merely children are old enough to be out of the "men, boys, and preschool children" grouping; and on the upper boundary, women that are married or are old enough to be married are out of the "girls" grouping unless they choose to self-identify otherwise. Since there is no masculine gender, men do not go through this process; they remain preschoolers for their entire lives.

Expressing masculine gender

Because the masculine gender is indifferent to age, additional words are sometimes needed to clarify difference. For example, mavama means "women's clothing", and navana indicates young girls' clothing, but tavata could equally well mean men's clothing or clothing for young boys. To specifically indicate that a set of clothes is intended for an adult male, one must call it either tavata tatus, using the disambiguator morpheme tatu "adult male" in the genitive case, or tavataatus, a single-word fusion of the same morphemes, with the first -t- of tatu dropping out due to an old sound rule. Likewise, for young boys' clothing, one could say either tavata taās or tavataaās.

Often, however, disambiguation is unnecessary. Šepta means "teacher", and to indicate the gender of a teacher one can change the initial consonant of the word to match the thematic consonant of each gender. Thus one says mepta for an adult female teacher, nepta for a younger female teacher, pepta for a pregnant teacher, and tepta for a male teacher of any age. While one might think tepta is ambiguous, the meaning is generally understood because young children and preschoolers generally do not teach classes in school.

Other genders

The same /t/ that has historically marked masculinity now also refers to young boys and to children of indistinct gender (i.e. "the crowd of children stood and stared). An adult woman will go with the /m/ sound, and a young girl (or unmarried woman) will go with the /n/ sound. For a group of people containing both females and either men or children of indistinct gender, the default human gender is used, which is /p/. This, in turn, is distinct from the epicene gender, which includes pairings of humans (of any gender) with neuter nouns such as nonliving things and some animals.

Metaphor and non-literal usage

Gender is confined to literal usages only, and any nonliteral use will be either misunderstood or understood as sarcasm.

Summary of the gender system

Conso	Applies to
-----	----
 p	Humans in general; epicene (but not including neuters)
 t	Men, boys, and children of indistinct gender
 m	Adult women, married women 
 n	Girls and young women; unmarried women
 b	Neuter (nonliving things and animals of indistinct gender)
 s	Epicene (all genders taken as one, including neuters)

The consonants /f š ž k ŋ/ are not part of the gender system. In some narrow contexts, such as people's names, some speakers have borrowed the /k/ gender from Andanese to give male names more variety. However, this still does not distinguish between boys and men, and the use of this borrowed gender is not widespread in the language as a whole.

Sticky sibilants

Babakiam has three sibilants, /s š ž/. However, the native syllabary includes a row for a sound that can be Romanized /č/. This arose originally from /k/ before a high vowel, and was for a long time pronounced /č/, but today this sound is actually pronounced identically to /š/, and is thus usually Romanized as /š/. However, the native alphabet indicates it with a separate letter because it behaves differently in some grammatical processes.

The voiceless postalveolar fricative /š/

The main difference between the two is that /š/ is a sticky consonant, meaning that it will change to accommodate the thematic consonant of any word it occurs in, or that of any word modifying the word it occurs in. Thus, the surface /š/ is not a very common consonant. Much of the [š] heard in speech is actually the phoneme that was historically pronounced /č/.

Thus, for example, šamša means "rabbit", but one says

Paupim pampa.

Forest rabbit.

Because both š sounds in the word for rabbit change to p when modified by paupim "(in the) forest".

/š/ is found in the inflected forms of words that end in -s, and this š also changes to reflect the thematic consonant. Thus, for example, the genitive form of tapis "paper" is not *tapišis, but rather tapitis.

Relatively few Bābā words begin with vowels. Those that do, however, obey the sticky process dutifully, meaning that an š in the proper place is replaced with silence, often leaving a vowel hiatus. For example, šimu means "texture", but one can say:

Ūa imu.

Thumb texture.

Taken as a single compound ūaimu, this provides Babakiam its word for fingerprints. This process of consonant deletion can lead to large vowel sequences; a dentist living in Pipapi may use words such as ūaaa "to stick the thumb into (something)" and yaaau "to push with the tongue".

The replacement of š with silence can trigger other sound rules. For example, šamša "rabbit", used above, contains two š sounds, one of which occurs after a closed syllable. When compounded with iši "cave", one hears

Iši aŋaa.

Cave rabbit.

Because the deletion of the second š causes the previous syllable-final -m to return to its older pronunciation of /ŋa/.

Note that the sounds /j/ and /w/ (spelled y and v in Romanization) are treated as allophones of the vowels by this sound rule, and therefore they also cause vowel sequences to erupt:

Vape aŋaa.

Carrot rabbit.

By tradition, in older forms of Babakiam the sticky consonant /š/ always remains voiceless when reflecting the voiced sounds /b/ and /ž/. At this stage of the language, the voiced counterpart of /b/ was /f/. Thus, given the word šapu "flower; bloom, blossom", one would have said beunus fapu "national flower", where /f/ reflects the previous word's initial b-. Many words of this type became incorporated into the lexicon, and indeed, have made /f/ a more common consonant than one would expect given its scarcity in the parent language. However, this rule has been voided in the modern language, so words such as this are no longer being produced, and the consonants now reflect the thematic consonant exactly. Thus one would say today

Beunus bapu.

National flower.

Other sticky consonants

There are a few words in the language in which other consonants seem to have become sticky as well; these are due to older grammatical processes related to the consonant-based gender system, however, which at the time was a distinct grammatical process. The "silence" phoneme /0/ has, in a few words, been mistaken for an alternation of /š/ and therefore had a new consonant, usually /p/, inserted in its place. This is due to influence from Andanese.

Phonotactics and sandhi

Most words end in vowels, but can also end in the grammatically feminine consonants /p m s/.

Sound changes

Babakiam stands apart from other descendants of the Gold language by its labial-friendly phonology. But it also stands apart by being extremely conservative with sound changes applying to vowels, having only one change in 2200 years, and that a rarely seen polyconditional one that shifted accented ə to /a/ when followed by another /a/ in the next syllable. Thus Nəma, the name of a large empire, became Nama in Babakiam. (This schwa vowel is normally written e in Romanized Babakiam, so the old name would have been Romanized Nema.)

Comparison of words

4200 Babakiam peskavu sabayiuŋaus

6000 Babakiam pyskary šalergos

8700 Poswa pwaršalios

8700 Pabappa pospalerba "soap bubble wand"

Nouns

person marking

Still preserves -p/-s/-Ø, not yet followed by evidentials bu/bi/ba.

Noun cases

Babakiam preserves the noun case system of the parent language, Gold language, including chirality and the oblique case.

Chirality

Each noun case has three forms: left, central, and right. Below is inflection of the regular inanimate noun pafa "reed":

pafa

	Left	Central	Right
Nominative	pafī	pafa	pafū
Oblique	pafiba	pafa	pafuba
Accusative	pafibap	pafap	pafubap
Locative	pafibam	pafam	pafubam
Possessive	pafibas	pafas	pafubas

Many irregular nouns exist. The most common irregularities are found in the chiral forms, where instead of the analgoically regular infixes -ib- and -ub-, one finds fused forms of the infixes, creating sound changes such as bi > ž and its opposite, žu > b.

Differences between the chiral forms of noun cases

Approximate meanings of the cases and their chiral forms are as follows:

pafa

	Left	Central	Right	Notes
Nominative	Essive	Nominative	Instrumental
Absolutive		Possessed		The absolutive forms of a noun cannot be used alone; they are used with possessor morphemes that reform the noun into a nominative. It also serves as the accusative for inanimates.
Accusative	Partitive	Accusative	Causative
Locative	Becausative	Locative ("in")
Possessive	Membership(?)	Possessive

However, nouns must agree in chirality. with other nouns in the same phrase

Expressing the agentive

The agentive suffix -a mutates to depict the gender of the participant. Since vowel hiatus corresponds to the neuter gender, this suffix is almost never seen in bare form. Instead, the gendered forms -pa -ma -na -ta -sa are heard. However, the neuter form has been repurposed as an "experiencer" affix, which is not specific to whether the noun being attached is the agent or the patient of the action. For example, from mas "to give birth" is formed, with normal mutation of š to the feminine form m, mamā "mother, one who has given birth"; but from mei "sword" is formed mebī "sword stabbing victim".

Note that the long vowels in the words above are not etymologically justified; the forms "should" be *mamaa and *meya, with the final -a remaining separate. But a process of vowel mutation that actually took place more than 3000 years before the age of classical Babakiam was generalized to this circumstance and therefore came to be seen as a separate derivation rather than merely the neuter form of the agentive affix.

Gender

Note: see Proto-Moonshine_language#Nouns. It is not clear if Babakiam retains any of this at all. If it does, feminine is still s~m as in PMS, epicene is 0~p, masculine is 0~t. Thus, in both PMS & Babakiam, mascs &epicenes merge in accusative, but in different ways.,

Orthography

see history for older informaiton

scratchpad

Andanese /la li lu ha hi hu/ = Play /ba bi bu ža ži žu fa fi fu ša ši šu/. The matching of the syllables may take advantage of Play's late sound shift of /bʷ žʷ bʲ žʲ/ > /b b ž ž/, such that Andanese syllables could be matched to Play consonants. For example perhaps /li lu/ could spell /ž b/, though this leaves open the question of how to read a plain /l/. Remember that Play did still have /žī bū/ etc.

since nearly all /ž/ in Play is from CVC collapse, it is overwhelmingly likely that the L glyph will "lean" to /b/.

Daughters

See Cosmopolitan Play languages, Cupbearer Coast, and possibly more.