User:Soap/history

This is a scratchpad, and as such is not organized in chronological order or even geographical order, but rather in reverse order of when I came up with the ideas.

Additional content (mostly posts requiring graphical images) may be loaded at pabappa DOTCOM /scratchpad/

Hypothetical Tavatas society

If the area called Tavatas is home to a lineage of female rulers who have 75% female offspring, it must be explained genetically why they are not outbred by the 50% female society around them, who even if they are extremely feministic would still not be able to stop the inevitable genetic stabilization towards 50% male.

This name is given in Play for now, but this society is not part of a Play-speaking nation. It may be in Moonshine, but the Moonshine language right now is not developed beyond the early proto-language stage. The society might not be part of Moonshine either, although it would be at least geographically close, and well within Moonshine's sphere of influence.

If Tavatas exists, the sex ratio is real, and not simply falsified through infanticide of boys. This is because the women around them would not allow the Tava women to hide away during childbirth and therefore would know when a boy was born. This is the same situation in the Moonshine society that prevents women from killing unwanted babies, who are usually also boys.

For genetic reasons, it is actually easier to have a 100% female lineage than a 75% one, but if the Tava women were a mix between 100%-female mothers and 50%-female mothers, they would certainly notice who was who and would have no motivation to allow the "normal" women into their society.

Since tavata is the Play word for rose petal, these people could be called Roses, Petals, or Rose Petals. I dont remember where I came up with the name tavatas but I believe it is a coincidence because the rose petal word is listed in a "back page" that I dont usually check.

More about Shining Wave

07:02, 15 August 2022 (PDT)

It is possible that the SW settlers .... here called "Puňanupi" for convenience .... were peaceful from the beginning, even if not politically committed to pacifism, and that the other groups they settled with were peaceful as well, but the aboriginals were not. If this is so, it must be that the Punanupi were able to live more efficiently than the aboriginals, perhaps because of agriculture, and therefore had the ability to build settlements far from traditional food sources. In this model, their population would grow quickly and they could absorb the aboriginals without needing to fight a war. Even so, the Punanupi had distinct territories and did not simply claim the whole of the aboriginal territory as theirs from the moment they arrived onshore. This opens the possibility for wars in which the Punanupi would side with one aboriginal tribe against others, and almost certainly win, but they would allow the aboriginals to do most of the fighting rather than taking to the front lines as in the model below. The tribes living within the Punanupi territory would be described by a word similar in meaning to English "endemic" but without the association with biology, and therefore this term would not be seen as an insult. In the Play language the Andanese were also described with a similar term. Translating it as "native" would not work but it could be that the English word "native" corresponds to more than one word in these languages.

If the Punanupi were farmers, the loss of advanced agriculture after 2668 would simply be a consequence of the environmental catastrophe caused by the Oyster War. The proto-Play people were still farmers, but of a much more primitive sort, and within a few hundred years they were living a lifestyle similar to that led by the aboriginals thousands of years earlier: with a higher population, but concentrated around immediate food sources.

A better name for the people would be such as Niŋinǯašamba, but they may have acknowledged early on that their languages sounded different from those of the people around them, and accepted a name beginning with P or another labial sound.

Distinctive cultural traits

The Punanupi were in some ways like the Dreamers and in some ways like the Players who appeared thousands of years later in the same territory. This was no coincidence, as the Punanupi were a branch of the same tribe that produced the Dreamers, and were able to pass on some of their cultural traits within their territory even as political empires rose and fell.

Occupations

At first they were generalists, living in a society on their own and therefore handling all occupations by themselves. Aboriginals may have been at times welcomed, at times shunned, and at times killed, but there was never an all-out war with all of the aboriginals on the same side because they also had quarrels with each other.

Within a few hundred years, because of their relatively small stature and their belief that they were more physically delicate than all other tribes (even the Andanese, who were shorter) the Punanupi abolished their military and stated that they would prefer their military to consist of other tribes, even if it meant that their people would be defenseless and prone to abuse by both their enemies and their allies. They assigned men the most dangerous jobs, and made them the protectors of children, making Punanupi children the most sheltered in the world. Men also handled fishing, which required them to carry fishing spears, but they did not bring their fishing spears into the cities.

Pacifism and language

See Play substratum language.

The Punanupi were already pacifists after just a few hundred years in their nation. Scholars in later years pointed out that their language (like Dreamlandic) had short words like kuekku "to be cut by thorns", but no corresponding words for humans committing violent acts or even for things such as cutting vegetables; these all needed to be expressed using a verb phrase of three or four words that was considerably longer than the passive verbs above. The scholars argued that this linguistic trait had cultured the Punanupi people to believe that it was much more natural for humans to feel pain and suffer injuries than to strike back, even against inanimate objects. But similar structures were present in closely related languages such as Andanese.

School system

02:39, 12 September 2022 (PDT)

The PSL tribes ran a public school system enrolling children up to age 13. They may have run the school systems for some (or even all) of the non-PSL tribes too, but they did not actually teach students of the non-PSL tribes. Thus the administration of each tribe's school system was done by members of that tribe alone, and students did not learn the other tribes' languages except as adults on their own time.

PSL schools

The PSL schools were vocational schools, paying little attention to academics. They did teach the alphabet, which was very simple, and perhaps basic arithmetic, but only for the purposes of the students needing to know how to handle money and to be sure that they were not being cheated of money when interacting with others. There was never a time when they pursued academics for its own sake. Even their vocational education was of poor quality, and school for the PSL's was largely a means to keep the children insulated from the problems of the adult world. The teachers were female. At the time, PSL was still a male-dominated tribe, and so occupations involving children were assigned to women, and the PSL's defined childhood as reaching all the way to age 13. Thus in some ways the 13-year-old PSL's were like the 6-year-olds of the later cultures that inhabited the same area.

Andanese schools

The PSL's owned the Andanese school system, but as above they did not learn Andanese and did not have great control over the curriculum. The Andanese schools were focused on academics and vocational trades about equally, and therefore Andanese students quickly learned their much more complicated syllabary, advanced mathematics, and specialized knowledge such as medicine that would be useful to only people wishing to specialize in that field. A stereotype spread that the Andanese were much smarter than the other tribes and that it was simply natural that their schools teach the advanced subjects and that their schools be for Andanese students only, as the other tribes simply could not handle the coursework.

Yet the Andanese schools also prepared boys to serve in the military, even though they were physically smaller than the other tribes including the PSL's. This is because the Andanese view of males was that they were expendable, and that their society was based on protecting women from harm, even if it meant that men would live painful lives.

Despite the Andanese schools teaching much more academic knowledge than the PSL schools, the Andanese were at the bottom of society, because PSL culture simply did not value academics, and because the PSL's controlled the food supply, which was seen as more important than money or medicine. The Andanese people had no nation of their own, so they generally did not complain, and continued to immigrate to PSL territory and not to anywhere else. The PSL's thus became the host nation for the Andanese generally speaking, and came to think of the Andanese as a burden even though the Andanese were worse off. This is because some Andanese families fled the cities and took on criminal lives, surviving by living in areas where the PSL's mostly would not go. The PSL's considered themselves hardy by nature, and therefore respected the Andanese for being even hardier, and were reluctant to pursue these criminals. The Andanese doing this were whole families together, not just adult males.

Other schools

The schools were ordered by language, not by tribe, so it is most likely that the aboriginals attended PSL schools as they learned to speak PSL, and any aboriginals who did not learn PSL would either have their own schools (supported by their own money) or would choose another language. These students would be children of mixed marriages because people could not simply declare themselves to belong to a different tribe than they were born into. It is possible that the aboriginals were placed in racially segregated classes at least during some periods, as attitudes changed periodically.

BC zone

See Star languages.

In one area of PSL society, there existed a pocket where the PSL's had assimilated to the aboriginal culture instead, and neither the PSL's nor the aboriginals spoke PSL, and these people had their own school system resisting all outside influence. This was seen as a problem by the PSL society around them, as the PSL's generally did not want their people to assimilate towards outside cultures even if they kept a similar lifestyle. This area was in some ways like a smaller Thaoa but inside the PSL nation instead of just bordering it.

These people are here called BC's. They were notable for appearing to maintain a racially segregated society despite a thousand years of friendly cohabitation and resistance to the growing PSL society around them. That is, although they were all BC's, there were BC's with Lenian appearance (light skin and often blonde hair) and BC's with dark skin (aboriginals). In fact, there were many mixed marriages, but the two-tone society was maintained because outsiders quietly began to join the BC society to escape the PSL society around them. The dark-skinned people who joined mostly were not aboriginals but rather members of the other dark-skinned tribes, but by this time the pure-blooded aboriginals had almost disappeared and people began to think of anyone with dark skin as an aboriginal.

BC was a gap in Shining Wave's territory. The Wave name for it would be something like Yatta-Uzatta but the aboriginal name would be wholly unrelated.

Insisting that they were not PSL's was a means for the PSL people in BC territory to gain political autonomy from their king. The government had two sets of laws: those that applied to the whole empire and those that only applied to the PSL tribe. PSL's were better off than most but were barred from certain trades, and in later years, they were also disarmed and prohibited from joining the military or police forces. It is likely that the BC nation existed before this later change, meaning that the PSL's were still armed and posed a threat to the BC's, and therefore that they held off the PSL's at least in part by force despite being outnumbered.

By joining the BC's, the PSL tribes lowered their status in society but also lightened the burden of the laws on them, since the royals had little means of enforcing laws specifically targeting BC's or even aboriginals.

It is possible that the language of BC territory was actually an early-branching PSL language with lots of loanwords from the aboriginal languages, rather than the PSL's actually learning to speak the dying Star language whose speakers had mostly already learned PSL anyway.

Shining Wave vs Dreamland

11:56, 24 July 2022 (PDT)

This section is almost redundant with the one below, but describes a different point of view.

It is possible that the early Shining Wave and Slime Forest settlers (hereafter called Pubu, even though this is an exonym) were anti-Dreamer already as far back as 500 AD, and resented being compared to the Dreamers. The Pubu people were part of a multiracial colonist group settling the easternmost extent of Star territory. These three groups were the dark-skinned "Pejo" people, the Pubu people, and the Andanese. Only the Pejos had control of the sea such that they could also colonize the western tropics; the Pubu and the Andanese were confined to this territory, which later came to be called many names such as Pubumaus.

The Pubu people likely did most of the fighting against the aboriginals, and came to think of the land as theirs. The Pejos were less attached to the land and mostly remained along the southeast coast to live a life of subsistence fishing. The Andanese lived primarily, perhaps entirely, within the Pubu settlements and did not seek a nation of their own. Thus although the Pubu had won nominal control of the nation for themselves, all but the upper class considered themselves worse off than the two minority groups, the Andanese and the Pejo.

These groups both knew about the Dreamers who were settling thousands of miles away in the far west. The Dreamers and the Pubu people had the same blonde, blue-eyed body type, which set them apart from the aboriginals, the Pejos, and the Andanese. The Dreamers were considered to be vulgar-minded, physically delicate, and requiring a luxurious lifestyle. The Pubu people resented this, and especially so because they were much shorter than the Dreamers, meaning that if people viewed the Dreamers as weak, they could easily think that the Pubu people would be even weaker. The Pubu did not deny that they were short and would be no match for some of the taller tribes in a one-for-one fight, but said that they were wholly unlike the Dreamers in that they were physically hardy, well in control of their emotions, and able to find happiness in very difficult living conditions. Indeed, they won control of their territory in large part by occupying areas of land that the aboriginals had traditionally shown little interest in, and which many believed were not fit for human habitation.

The negative stereotypes associated with blonde hair faded as the various groups in Pubumaus lost their memories of the Dreamers and came to realize that the Pubu people were fine soldiers after all. Yet, within a few hundred years, the Pubu people disarmed themselves and declared that they had become a pacifist nation, and at the same time allowed the non-Pubu tribes to violate these laws and take up arms even as they realized that they would only be forcing the Pubu people into the lowest position in society, comparable to slaves. This was due to international politics. The Pubu continued to think of themselves as physically hardy, but now said that they were not meant to be soldiers, and that they would rely on other people to fight their wars, even if it meant that the unarmed Pubu people would sometimes be left vulnerable to an opposing army and with no way to defend themselves.

Thus a new stereotype against blonde hair emerged, saying that people with blonde hair were peaceful, but also the first to submit in a fight, and would rather lose a war than be forced to fight in one. As the groups intermarried, their identities remained firm, because all of the involved groups agreed to a longstanding cultural tradition from the colonists that no person could belong to more than one tribe. Thus, whatever their physical type, every citizen was Pubu, Pejo, Andanese, or one of the other small minority groups (the aboriginals had been mostly assimilated by this time, but those who had not sometimes preferred to remain outside the system altogether). This meant that the stereotypes existed within each group and were not just stereotypes of the other groups against the Pubu.

As pacifists, the Pubu people could not defend themselves from foreign invaders, and the groups that were allowed to carry weapons often had other interests. Yet their pacifism succeeded and Pubumaus maintained its existence for more than 3,000 years, though never a power player in world politics, and militarism returned around the year 4121 when the Play party took control and began aggressively expanding in all directions.

Paba vs Dreamland

06:46, 3 May 2022 (PDT)

The territory sometimes called Paba should be renamed, as the name only appears very late in history, and for much of the first 2600 years of its settlement, its language was not acoustically distinct from its neighbors (it was replaced partway through). The early settlers of Paba were the Trout people, and at the time, the tribes settling in what later became Paba were not remarkably distinct from the rest.

It is possible that the ancestors of the Pabaps could be called the Pùgu tribal confederation; this is the same word that later generated the toponym Pubumaus. The only advantage this name has is that it begins with /p/ and thus serves as a reminder of what the people later became; ordinarily the name would be translated just like the other tribal names were. The meaning of this word in its speakers' languages is not clear; it is cognate to a word that means "woman" in some other languages (e.g. it is cognate to proto-Dreamlandic /fuppu/), but because this word only had this meaning with the female classifier prefix on, it is not clear what it could have meant in bare form. It is possible this is no more than the Lenian version of the ethnonym "Lephal", which means human in some tropical languages but outside the tropics means a type of skirt worn by women, at least with the clothing classifier prefix on. It may be that both words actually mean types of skirts but also serve as words for humans; as perhaps Lephals gave skirts to both sexes because Pùgu only to women.

At any rate, the Pùgu were a subset of the Trouts, and therefore it is accurate to refer to them as Trouts at least in the proper context.

Settlement of Paba

The territory of "Paba", be it called Pubumaus or anything else, was settled very quickly around the year 630 AD. The Trouts quickly invaded and subdued the strongest of all of the aboriginal Star tribes because they had superior fishing boats with which they trapped the Stars on land, depriving them of their primary food supply. Then, the Trouts signed pacts with other aboriginal tribes and came to participate in politics as though they were merely one more tribe amidst the others. Few new Trouts arrived in the territory after the initial settlement, and so it appeared to many that the aboriginals would unite, take back the Trout lands, and restore the aboriginal way of life. This did not happen because the Trouts maintained their control of the sea, their superior shipbuilding skills, and trade links with other nations, including aboriginals, that the Stars had been out of contact with.

Although hostile to the aboriginals overall, the Trouts picked sides in fights between two outside groups, and therefore some aboriginals ended up on the Trouts' side, and moved into Trout society. Thus the Trouts were soon of mixed ancestry, except for those in Thaoa who had settled in an area with few of these aboriginals (because it was disputed territory even before the Trouts arrived) and because they refused to allow aboriginals to move in.

Within about four hundred years — that is, by the 1060s — despite sustained rapid growth, the Trouts abolished their military and declared themselves pacifists, saying that even if other nations invaded them, they would meekly roll over and accommodate their abusers. This was because they had run into the same limitation that the aboriginals earlier had; they were unable to move north because of the hostile aboriginals of the mountains (very different culturally from those of the lowlands), and their strength was derived from sea contacts with nations that could at any time betray the Trouts and invade. Rather than attempt to hold off such an invasion, the Trouts invited the peoples of the tropics to come on in and start slaughtering Trouts, while also inviting the aboriginals of the mountains to do the same. Thus they figured the two greater powers around them would fight over who got to control the Trouts and as such the continued existence of the Trout nation, though difficult, would be ensured.

The Trouts in Thaoa seceded at this point, figuring they would be the first to be overrun since even the other Trouts were against them now. The result of this was that the outside powers began immediately exploiting the western Trouts, the pacifists, and left Thaoa alone. Thaoa said that this proved their decision to secede had been correct, and then Thaoa even joined in on the abuse of the western Trouts. At this point they began to refer to the western pacifist territory with a single name; this name cannot be "Paba", however.

Later evolution

Pacifism would define the foreign policy of Pubumaus (here, a term of convenience that variously includes and excludes Thaoa depending on changing borders) for the next 2,900 years; essentially, until 3958 when they were united with the Anchor Empire. Essentially, all wars in Pubumaus between ~1100 AD and 3958 were opportunistic invasions, where an outside power invaded Pubumaus and achieved disproportionate gains because the Pubu people were unarmed and in many cases forbidden from resisting even soldiers that were slaughtering their people. Sometimes, the people did fight back, but there was no common army and the fractural military forces that did exist in Pubumaus did not always cooperate with each other. Yet Pubumaus continued to exist because they were the grand prize of various foreign empires, who would join in whenever Pubumaus was invaded in order to keep control over as much Pubu territory as possible.

The soldiers in Pubumaus were of separate tribes, not part of the Pubu majority, and even had their own languages. They were mostly tall (not the Andanese) and considered themselves physically hardier than the Pubu people. After a major war in 2668, an environmental disaster destroyed so much of Pubumaus that the people became wholly dependent on agriculture, and Pubu farmers put their children to work in the fields. The dependence on child labor caused the Pubu birthrate to soar, and within a few hundred years they had grown so fast that the military tribes in their nation had become scarce and the nation was effectively defenseless again.

Agriculture

This postwar agriculture primitivist era is perhaps the only one that can properly be called Pubumaus, and it is little written about here; it is possible that Pubumaus was invaded dozens or even hundreds of times between 2668 and 3958 and that they continued to survive not because of help from outside powers but because their rapid population growth continually replenished losses in battle, even when they were vastly disproportionate.

It is at least certain, however, that Pubumaus maintained a navy of sorts during this period because they needed to fish far out to sea, and their fishing spears were also capable of killing humans, and that the area to their north was still part of Nama, though growing weaker every century, and that Nama had little incentive to invade Pubumaus as they were losing wars in their own territory and also had little access to the south seacoast without relying on Pubumaus.

Settlemtn of Dreamland

By contrast, the Dreamers took 1,400 years to settle Dreamland, and then another 600 years in a more or less stable condition where they neither took more land nor lost land to outside powers (except one invasion from Baeba). The Dreamers never fought an organized war against the aboriginals, and therefore the Dreamers' "conquest" of their land was entirely peaceful. This is why it took so long. The aboriginals eventually blended into the Dreamer population, but there was little evidence of this because unlike in "Paba" the Dreamers mostly lived separately from the aboriginals and because Dreamers continued to arrive in waves throughout time.

Commonalities

Both the Trouts and the Dreamers were blonde, blue-eyed people with light skin; that is, they were Lenians. And they were both conquering territory inhabited by dark-skinned aboriginals who were about the same height as the colonizers. And in both territories, the invaders and the aboriginals were both masculist tribes, meaning that their men were taller than their women. And both territories were bordered by the territory of Nama, the other aboriginals spoken of, who were feminist and were hostile to all masculist tribes, seeing the aboriginals and the invaders as two of a kind in both Dreamland and the Trout territory.

The Dreamers and the aboriginals of Dreamland were taller than the Trouts and the Stars. Despite the coincidences of skin color, the various groups did not typically see each other as kin. The western Trouts had already become pacifists by the time the first Dreamers landed on their peninsula, and the now-separate Trout tribes had mostly come to define themselves by their political ideology rather than their tribal identity. (Though since many Trout nations were not democratic, their tribes were ruled by a single party.)

Development of hereditary classes in society

As above, the Pubumaus people had a low social status in their own territory and were enslaved everywhere else. They had maintained their pacifism during the Oyster War, and therefore, the only reason they were on the winning side of that war was because they had submitted to occupation by the power that ended up winning, namely the Star Empire. The Leapers were part of this winning coalition, and in the aftermath of the war they became the dominant partner, and then occupied the coastline of Pubumaus.

The Leapers wrote the new laws of Pubumaus (there was no formal constitution; they governed through the Pubu royal family). The Andanese, called "vampires" by the Leapers, were allowed and in fact encouraged to continue their parasitic lifestyle, taking food from Pubu farms and giving nothing back, and depositing Andanese orphans in Pubu foster homes only to take them back when the children became old enough to care for themselves. Other minority groups were also given stipends to allow their people to live in Pubumaus without working, all supported by taxes paid by the Pubu people only. Traditionally, the explanation for all of this was that the non-Pubu tribes were required to serve in the military, and the Pubu, being hereditary pacifists, were not. But now the Leapers said that on top of all of their other burdens, the Pubu people needed to also serve in the military, taking a defensive role, and that they would not be allowed weapons or armor to defend themselves if the traditional military around them failed to protect them.

The Leapers controlled the sea and had previously made much talk of their ability to come out on top in every war, fighting little but gaining the most, and writing treaties that abused both their enemies and their allies. The Leapers had signed similar unfair treaties with other participants in the war, and figured that they would succeed in Pubumaus because even though they had also cheated the Stars and the Oysters, neither of those groups was well represented in Pubu society and therefore they would not be able to unite with the Pubu people and write a new treaty lifting them from their bottommost position in society.

The Pubu royal family cooperated with the Leapers in writing the treaty, because the Leapers allowed the royals to remain in power despite the rest of the Pubu tribe being pushed into a slave-like position. The royals collectivized agriculture, saying that Pubu people were meant to work on farms and fisheries, and that they would never be allowed to keep their own food. Instead, all food would be taken from them by the government, and then distributed according to the government's designs. The royals said that the pre-existing tribes mentioned in the treaty would have priority for food distribution, even though they did not work and had no other duties so long as the nation was at peace, and that the Pubu people would only get access to their own food after everyone else was done, and that the food distribution to Pubu families would be in accordance with the number of children in their family, with adults getting no food provisions of their own.

The result of this was that the Pubu birthrate exploded dramatically, and within a few generations the nation was in famine again, but the unified government broke down and there was no way to restore order. Some of the new Pubu successor states abolished the new laws, but those who kept the food distribution tied to family size experienced the most rapid population growth.

Closer ties with Andanese

The treaty bluntly referred to the Andanese as parasites, as though it were simply a law of nature that Pubu families must work hard for a living while the Andanese were legally allowed to steal their food and other belongings. It was illegal for the Pubu people to retaliate for this in any way, even with nonviolent means such as taking their stolen goods back, but for various reasons, the Andanese thieves had traditionally been the poorest class in society despite all of this, and lived not in the cities but in poor natural environments where neither agriculture nor fishing was a viable way of life.

The Oyster War had so devastated the environment that agriculture became difficult. Many species of animals and plants went extinct, and because their habitat was isolated from the rest of the tropics, they could not simply be reintroduced; the animals on the other side of the sea were different and needed to feed on plants which Pubumaus did not have. Hunting remained viable, but the animal population did not recover immediately in the aftermath of the war. The people came to subsist on vegetables and fish, and had to compete with animals such as rabbits who could eat the woody, immature vegetables before they were ripe enough for humans to also eat them.

Gender roles in society changed at this time. In the runup to the war, men had still been in control of Pubu society despite their being officially pacifists and this being attributed to their nature. Now, people said that Pubu men were just defective women, "humans without breasts", as though the ideal human were female.

The Andanese people were the largest minority in Pubu territory whose women were taller than their men, and this was one of the reasons why they were not hated by all of the others. Now, intermarriage was causing this trait to enter the Pubu population as well. This caused a lessening of the physical differences between the Pubu and Andanese people, and the Pubu people saw less of a reason to keep allowing the Andanese to parasitize them. They could not overturn the laws, but the Andanese people also came to be more sympathetic, and some abandoned their parasitic lifestyle to live like the Pubu people. The laws did not allow either the Andanese or the Pubu people to change their identity, but children of a mixed marriage could belong to either group. This was still not up to the parents to decide, however. Therefore both groups continued to exist.

New military orientation

Although groups such as the Ferns, Zeniths, and others could have theoretically shared in the rapid population growth since they were not required to work, at the individual level there was no incentive for couples to have large numbers of children, and so the Pubu and Andanese groups quickly outpaced the rest, with the Pubu also growing more quickly than the Andanese. Soon the outside groups were so few in number that the Pubu farmers simply accepted their financial burden, but they also realized that their nation now had a very small army for its size and that the Leapers may have seen this coming when they had earlier written in the treaty that the Pubu people were required to form a defense-only military of their own.

By this time, however, there was no longer a unified Pubu state and the Leapers had accordingly lost control of the Pubu's coastal sea. No single Pubu navy had replaced the Leaper navy, but rather, the Pubu fishermen had taken control, as their fishing boats, though small, could out-compete Leaper warships along with the warships of any other naval power. This situation was common elsewhere on the planet and was due to the lack of accurate range weapons.

Pubumaus remained officially pacifist, and no outside nation, even their allies, was willing to trade weapons and armor into the Pubu nation. Instead, the Pubu people manufactured their own, using knowledge that they had gained from intermarriage with the Andanese. The Andanese still retained the legal right to parasitize Pubu families, as the Pubu people were generally unwilling to overturn this tradition, but increasing intermarriage led to warm relations between the two groups and the Andanese began to take up productive economic roles in society, becoming a merchant caste, and dealing with many skilled trades that did not involve handling food. They increasingly moved to the cities. Living in the old manner became a source of shame, and the Andanese families who remained in poor habitats were often robbed by others, even though this was illegal, and this increasingly went unpunished. Even so, the general culture of Pubumaus respected people who lived rough lives, and neither the Pubu nor the urban Andanese made moves to outlaw the lifestyles of those Andanese who remained in the wilderness.

History of Eastern Pubumaus

NOTE: All names in this section, unless appearing elsewhere, are simply abbreviations, numbers, or even English words run through the Players' Uauepakapa cipher, which was developed thousands of years later. They are not representations of the native languages of the speakers. This cipher seems to have a problem with stacking initial vowels so these names may change.

Eastern Pubumaus therefore declared itself an independent nation, Io-Masupulimu (MSL). The overwhelming majority of MSL's opposed the Ferns who had cut them off from the royals, but also opposed the royals. These were the Io-Palipipupase (PPP). A small pro-Fern group, called Ui-Apamusika or Ui-Opapiupe, also existed. This latter group believed that the Ferns would be better able to protect them than they could protect themselves, and did not mind being at the bottom of society.

Cultural divides in the tropics

NOTE: This section may be rewritten as a narrative from the Moonshine point of view, which would allow the satirical statements to become real since some Moonshine scholars believed foreign languages were genuinely so inefficient that they presented obstacles to daily life activities. It could then be inserted into Play_language/history#Criticism_by_foreign_scholars even though it is primarily not about Play.

Maps of MAPs

The primary linguistic divide was between the very difficult Middlesex-Andanese-Play clade of languages, spoken in the eastern Tropical Rim nations, and the much simpler Hipatal languages spoken in the nations to their west. The MAP speakers welcomed foreign spies into their nations during war, knowing the war would be over by the time the spies managed to tell the difference between a battle plan and the directions to the nearest bathroom.

This was despite the fact that Hipatal and MAP were separated by only a few thousand years of evolution, and that they were both chewing away at the aboriginal groups which were much older. The aboriginals split their allegiances because they were much weaker than the colonists, and for the most part they gave up their aboriginal languages as well.

True Ferns

The Fern languages are those spoken in Atlam. These people invaded the aboriginals of the Equatorial zone and then lost their territory, so they invaded Pubumaus next, the territory that the Players later arose in. They quickly pushed through Pubumaus and invaded the aboriginals of Repilia, who then invaded Lenia, causing Lenia to invade the aboriginals of Baeba Swamp, only to lose and suffer an invasion from Baeba, which was being invaded by the Crystals who had invaded the Tropical Rim and driven the other aboriginal tribes to invade the Ferns who had invaded the aboriginals in the first place.

Since the Ferns were originally the westernmost nation in the MAP clade, it could perhaps be more properly relabeled FAP, but because the Ferns were also the first of the colonists to lose their conquered territory, they were pushed the furthest out, and therefore became the northernmost (and nearly the easternmost) of the colonist groups, and the only landlocked nation among them all.

Although the Ferns lost a war against the aboriginals they had earlier colonized, they remained as a distinct population in the newly reclaimed territories, and the earlier colonial name Atlam remained in use. A sizable Lenian minority also remained in Atlam as late as 2668, during the Oyster War. However, the Lenians may not have arrived until the 2100s, and indeed may have needed to wait for the Fern colonists to lose their war in order to safely enter Atlam themselves.

Moonshines' dreams of colonies

Colonies in the tropics

These tribes did not divide themselves into alliances based on language, but outside groups such as the Moonshines did. Since the Moonshines were descended from the Crystals, who were part of the MAP clade, the Moonshines took the MAPs as being "their people" in the tropics even though the early Moonshine nation switched to a different language. Then, the Moonshines grouped the western tribes with the Dreamers and added this to their long list of reasons to hate the Dreamers.

Some Moonshines wanted to colonize the tropics, saying that they were only returning to their original ancient homeland, and that the MAP tribes would for sure side with the colonizers against the Hipatals even though they had been getting along with the Hipatals for thousands of years. The Moonshines hated the aboriginals of Kxesh for taking back their equatorial homeland of Atlam from the Fern colonists who had invaded the area before being pushed back and then invading Pubumaus and Tarwas in turn.

Moonshine-Play relations

Early contacts

The early Moonshine scholars found the Play language adorable, as it reminded them of the way Moonshine toddlers spoke, and the Moonshines felt it was their duty to take over the Play nation so they could protect the Players from the societies around them where people actually grew up. The Moonshines sent anthropologists into Play territory to study the Players' way of life. They expressed sympathy for the Players' situation, understanding that it was difficult to get by in a society where everyone was childlike and stupid. The Moonshines promised that they would sacrifice their own time and effort to fill the role of the missing adults and tell the Players what to do. The Moonshines proposed a new law mandating a universal bedtime so that the Players would be sure that they were getting enough sleep. They also offered to inspect shipments of food into Play territory to ensure that the foods were healthy.

The Moonshines were puzzled to find out that the Play speakers at the time of first diplomatic contact had more than one nation, however. Their largest nation was Memnumu, run by the Play party, but there were clear Play-speaking majorities in hostile nations like the Cold Men and even the Clovers living near the border of Baeba Swamp. The Moonshine anthropologists could not understand how a people with such simple minds could have evolved politics and the ability to fight wars over differences in politics. The Moonshines concluded, therefore, that the scattered Play-speaking nations were being exploited by foreign powers and therefore needed to be rescued by the Moonshines.

The Moonshine diplomats called for a meeting with the Players to figure out what was going on. They placed soft blankets on the Play side of the table so that the Players would not injure themselves on the hard wooden seats, and brought with them plenty of toy wooden blocks to keep the Players amused while the Moonshines finalized their plans.

Later contacts

Later the Moonshines realized their mistake, and decided that the Players were in fact the smartest people in the world. The Moonshines figured that Players would make ideal laborers because they were very smart but also physically small and therefore easy for Moonshine bosses to control. Thus the Moonshines added the Players to the list of tropical nations whom they admired and wished to colonize. Still, the Moonshines were sure that their own people were also smart, and so they set about to learn the Play language.

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.