Paba

Bābākiam 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.

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 three vowels, and words with schwa are usually cognate to words with no vowel in closely related languages such as Khulls.

In its classical stage, Babakiam was 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". Such words were rare, however, and almost always transparent compounds (as in the case of bāaaau) or loanwords (as in the case of paaapa). Nevertheless, Bābākiam does maintain the unusual distinction 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.

Babakiam was still called Babakiam as late as the year 6000, because the dialects were mutually intelligible (and indeed almost identical) to the language spoken in Paba (then called Baba). No phonemes were lost going from Babakiam to Poswa other than the vowel length, which was lost early on. On the other hand, Pabappa lost many of its phonemes.

Consonants

The consonant inventory is very simple: /p b m f w t n s š ž j k ŋ/, unless /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 children's speech. /b/ is the most common consonant, and in later stages of the language, it became even more common because /b/ was inserted to break up the monstrous sequences of /a/ and /ə/ that had existed in the parent language. Thus classical Babakiam taabābā "nest" became tabababababa and bāaaau became bababababar.

Most words end in vowels, but can also end in /p m s/.

Comparison of words:

4200 Babakiam peskavu sabayiuŋaus

6000 Babakiam pyskary šalergos

8700 Poswa pwaršalios

8700 Pabappa pospalerba "soap bubble wand"

Culture

Early settlement

Bābā (hereafter Paba) was founded very early by immigrants from Laba. Though later famous for being the most pacifistic people in the world, the early Pabaps were just like their neighbors. They landed and estabslihed a new city on the south coast called Panama. (Panama means "port, harbor" in Pabappa.) Here, they grew rapidly northwards, killing any aboriginals they met who refused to convert to the Yiibam religion. Some aboriginals tried to escape into the cold interior, but this was not often successful because the interior was already populated by Repilians, who had been their enemies for thousands of years, and were already taking kindly to the Pabaps who were doing that job that they had wanted to do for so long.

The Pabaps had come from the highlands of Laba, in which people rarely traveled outside their home village because travel through the mountains was so difficult. Thus they had a highly diverse culture internally. However, despite being confined to the mountains, they actually had an advantage in getting out of Laba because they had access to rivers which emptied into ports along the East Coast of Laba that were further north than the port cities of their primary antagonists on Laba. Thus, while one might have expected the settlement of Rilola to be dominated by oceanic Laban peoples such as the Tasnu, Pabaps had a far higher proportion of their population move over than did the Tasnu. Still, because the highlands were difficult to build large cities in, Paba's population was small compared to many other nations on Rilola.

Minorities

Paba was also a target of immigration from other Laban nations. The Andanese people moved from Laba to Paba and reached their highest population density in Paba. They did not convert to the Yiibam religion, which was a rare exception to Paba's policy of insisting that their new nation respect only the Yiibam religion. This was allowed because the Andanese in Paba had sworn to always be loyal ot Paba, effectively considering all of Paba to be Andanese home territory, rather than behave as they did in many other nations where the Andanese minority was aggressive and unwelcome and often collaborated with invaders during a war.

The Tarpabap people were the second largest minority in Paba. They had come from the far south of Laba, including the equatorial islands that were being rapidly flooded by rising ocean waters as the glaciers of the interior quickly melted. They felt they needed a new homeland to settle in and chose Paba. Earlier, Paba had had access to the most convenient port in all of southern Laba from which to embark on a sea journey to reach Rilola, but they had very few seaworthy boats because they had no coastland of their own apart from a few cities in Andanese territory in which they had become a majority but not achieved formal independence. Thus the Tarpabaps, being all along an oceangoing people, gave Pabaps their ships in return for a formal alliance in which the two peoples would stick together. The Tarpabaps converted to the Yiibam religion more easily than the Andanese since their native religion had already been similar. Nevertheless, not all Tarpabaps converted, and those who stuck to their oreiginal religion from the tropics were treated badly by others in Paba, including the other Tarpabaps.

The Tarpabaps did not blend much with Pabaps because the two peoples were so strongly phyiscally different: Pabaps were among the shortest people in the world; Tarpabaps were among the tallest. However they occasionally did match up since neither group was monolithic in terms of body types. Some Pabaps had intermarried with the taller, stronger aboriginal people, and formed an intermediate group. These generally converted to Yiibam and thus came to call themselves Pabaps. There were also a few Subumpamese people in Paba. The Subumpamese shared the blonde hair and blue eyes of the Pabaps but had facial fewatures and a body type more like the dark-skinned Tarpabaps, so in some ways they were a bridge between the two. Still, this led to Tarpabaps marrying Subumpamese, not Tarpabaps marrying Pabaps.

Many Tarpabap settlers in Paba figured that since the Pabaps were so small and physically delicate, they would be easy to push around, and that the Tarpabaps, despite being a minority, would soon be in control of the government of Paba. But they found that this was not so. Neither did they have success in dominating the Andanese minority, who were even smaller and more physically delicate than the Pabaps due to a lower amount of body fat. Both Pabaps and Tarpabaps were prone to violence, and they realized that they would be better off as allies than as enemies. Likewise, the Pabaps were not afraid of being dominated by the Tarpabaps, and kept sending out ships to Laba to encourage ever more people of both races to move to Paba.

However, soon the population began to experiecne overcrowding. Some people in Paba began to explore other nations on Rilola, but found that essentially all land had been occupied. Although they had easily massacred the aboriginal population of Paba just a few hundred years ago, it was not so easy anymore because most of the land around them had either been settled by fellow Laban cultures that were materially successful but mostly hostile to accepting even more Labans, or by aboriginals who had never been as weak as the ones living in Paba because they were not cut off from the rest of the world by mountains.

Expansion

This is one area where the Pabaps and the Tarpabaps tended to break apart culturally. The Pabaps preferred to live along the warm southern coast, and if they ran out of land, they planned to settle other tropical areas even if they were controlled by hostile powers that would only allow Pabaps to move in as an underclass. This was because Paba had in its short time on the continent already become a master of naval trade, and its people felt comfortable living under foreign powers because they would often live better lives than their supposed dominant cultures and because their mastery of sea power would give them an easy exit if the host nation turned suddenly hostile.

The Tarpabaps, meanwhile, typically preferred expansion into the much larger and more open northern territory of Repilia, even though Paba was walled off from Repilia by the world's tallest mountain range. Tarpabaps were not happy being simply a minority in another nation's culture; they wanted a country of their own. Thus ironically the two peoples had essentually switched places: Pabaps were descended from rural mountain peoples with extremely low living standards but had become the masters of sea power and among the richest peoples in their new home continent, while the Tarpabaps, who had come from the hot wet jungles of Laba's equatorial maritime region, were already giving up "sea life" in the hopes of forming a huge invincible mountain nation for Tarpabaps only.

Early Tarpabap settlements in the interior focused on Repilian territory, as Repilia surrounded Paba on all sides. This led to revenge attacks against Paba and strained relations between the Pabaps and the Tarpabaps. Paba always had been an ally of Repilia, even if for morally questionable reasons: the early Pabap settlers had attacked the native aboriginal Sukuna people, who had been the blood enemies of Repilians for thousands of years. Thus there was never any animosity against Paba from the Repilians, and Paba had welcomed Repilian settlement into Paba, giving Repilians their only access to the south coast. But now Tarpabap people were cutting their way through the mountain passes and setting up shop in the choicest pieces of land, even daring to launch preemptive attacks against Repilian settlements in order to increase the security of their own.

Since Paba itself had a second nation, Pubapi, inside Naman territory, and Repilia was a part of Nama, the Namans tried to put pressure on the Pabaps to stop Tarpabapla's explosion into Repilian territory, saying that they would shut down Pubapi if the attacks on Repilia did not stop. But even Nama knew that they were in a very weak position, because other nations were poking their borders as well, and they had up until now seen Paba as a strong ally and specifically as a naval ally.

In Pubapi, the Pabaps told the Naman diplomats that Paba's army was not as strong as it seemed; they were afraid that if they tried to stop Tarpabaps from settling Nama, the Tarpabaps would turn back around and attack Paba. Since Tarpabaps were now much stronger than the Pabaps, they were worried about total conquest. Indeed, when Repilians did launch revenge attacks into Paba, they targeted ethnic Pabaps, not ethnic Tarpabaps, because even though the Pabaps were basically innocent they tended to be unarmed and therefore much easier to kill. Already some Pabaps had begun to fear that Tarpabap conquest was inevitable and decided to move to the Tarpabaps' new nation, Tarwas, and essentially become Tarpabaps themselves. Tarwas allowed Pabaps to live in Tarwas despite earlier saying that it would be a nation for Tarpabaps only, because they too had weaknesses and did not want to alienate a culture that provided them their only access to the sea, and was still actively importing more Tarpabaps from Laba. Some believed that in the far future, Tarwas would be strong enough to rush back down the mountains, conquer all of Paba, and become the world champion of military power both on land and at sea, since they would take control of the Pabap navy and learn from the Pabaps how to build ships. But even the most aggressive and optimistic Tarpabaps realized that this could only happen many hundreds of years in the future, if at all, and that Tarwas' best military strategy for the time being would be to consider itself an absolute inseparable ally of Paba. The leaders of Tarwas told themselves that their people had been living in Paba for many generations, and had never attacked Pabaps, whereas Repilia had, and yet the Pabaps still considered Repilia their ally. This was also their argument to Paba to convince Pabap to stay loyal to Tarwas even if meant losing the support of Repilia and Nama, which were much stronger.

Reform in Paba

However, the Pabaps became uncomfortable when they realized they were now threatened just going about day to day life in their own home country. They did not call for a slowdown of settlement of the tropics by Pabaps, as they felt that few of them would return voluntarily. They merely wanted to better strengthen Pabaps in Paba so that they did not have to worry about beign attacked by Tarwas or Tarpabaps within Paba (even Repilians living in Paba were attacking Pabaps now, although they mostly went after Tarpabaps).

Paba was unhappy at the problems caused by the cultural differences between them and the Tarpabaps they were hosting in their nation. Paba wanted to settle outworld areas in the tropics, which led to expanding Pabap power overseas but very little growth at home even with rapid immigration from the Pabaps' home area in Laba. Meanwhile, few Tarpabaps left, so their population in Paba grew rapidly, approaching 30%, and they actually had a majority in the army now since the Pabaps were focusing mostly on their navy. Paba was worried about an ethnic conflict arising within its own army, with Tarpabaps massacring Pabaps, if Tarwas decided to invade Paba. Tarwas was still a strong ally of Paba, but Paba felt that this was largely because of the Pabaps' strong assistance they were giving to Tarwas, even going on missions to Laba to gather boat after boat full of Tarpabap people desiring to immigrate to Paba. A small subgroup of settlers spoke an early branch of the Pabappa language that had eliminated the letter /p/, drastically changing the sound of the language. They persisted with this language for several hundred years but as time went on and more settlers arrived it became increasingly pressed down by standard Pabappa.

Settlement of the north

However, some Pabap settlers had essentially given up trying to settle teh tropics, and moved northward just west of the Tarwastas. They were much stronger than the Repilian people that had been there before, and provided a check on westward expansion of Tarwas. Even though they were also invading Repilian territory, they had better relations with the Repilians and were much less violent than the Tarpabaps, so their settlements tended to prosper. They actually reached the north coast of Rilola in 2412, but did not settle very much there because the climate was still too cold, with the harbors frozen most of the year apart from a few narrow inlets where the ice thawed out into "lakes" surrounded by land on one side and ice on the other. Nevertheless, the new countries of Ŋapkamša, Šim, and Paemža were created along three natural harbors. These three soon came to think of themselves as nations, as travel between their new homes and Paba was impossible. Their religion, Yiibam, worshipped gods that were physically present in Paba, and although Yiibam did not discourage Pabaps from leaving Paba, these new settlers had cut themselves off from their parent society in a way that had not been done for thousands of years.

Tarwas considered these nations to be intrusions on their territory, as the part of Repilia they had chosen was already claimed by Tarwas, but held off on declaring war. However they did prey on the inhabitants of Šim, the largest of the three nations, and import them into Tarwas as slaves. Thus Tarwas adopted slavery. However, perversely, the people of Šim cooperated with the slave masters, and profited from exporting their people to Tarwas. Many Subumpamese people moved to the three new colonies, and FILTER exported its people as well, adding an element of Feminism to the new countries. They also brought in the Sisnasi religion, and many Pabaps converted to Sisnasi, a very unusual occurrence helped in large part by their isolation from their ancestral homeland.

The blending of Pabap and Subumpamese culture helped solidify the identities of the new nations as being non-Pabap, and they formally unified into the Mabimbižip Alliance several years later. Mabimbižip means "soap bubbles" but it is not related to the Bubble Party or any of the other soap-related names that Pabaps came to use for themselves in later years. The use of the name "soap" had actually begun with FILTER, and was originally a Subumpamese word, mayinī. (They later changed their name from Soap Bubbles to just Soap to avert confusion.)

Tarpabap treaty with Paba

Tarpabap settlement of the interior had reached a new phase where instead of explosively spreading out all over the place they built cities and forts in their strongest areas and did not generally expand far beyond them. They had acheived their goal of creating a new nation for Tarpabaps only, and they had chosen the best land available to live on. Their new nation, Tarwas, split Repilia right through the middle, meaning that Repilians wanting to travel from "West Repilia" to "East Repilia" and vice versa would need to go through Tarwas (unless the ice along the north coast melted). Tarwas was happy now and did not want to expand further. Thus even though the Tarwastas had killed many Repilians and destroyed their culture, the Repilians living just shy of the borders of Tarwas began to believe that perhaps they were at least finally safe from a Tarwasta invasion.

Likewise, the fear in Paba of a Tarwasta invasion also began to subside, as even though the Tarpabap minority in Paba had reached 35% (and about 15% Andanese, 20% Repilians, 25% Pabaps, 5% mixed) the Tarpabaps in Paba no longer considered themslves kin of the Tarpabaps in Tarwas (who had come to call themselves Tarwastas).

Ships from Laba continued to bring Tarpabaps to Paba, but now the majority of Tarpabaps stayed in Paba instead of moving north. Those that did move went to other tropical areas since Tarwas itself was no longer interested in drawing in much more immigration, and the other cold northern lands were becoming steadily more difficult to invade. Thus the population of Tarpabaps in Paba began to grow and soon became a slight majority. On the other hand, the new generations of Tarpabaps mostly stayed near the coast and often did not consider themselves Tarpabaps. Unlike the mainline Tarpabaps, they retained their original Laban languages instead of learning Pabappa, which led them to be increasingly isolated not just from Pabap society but also from each other. So instead of calling themselves Tarpabaps, they retained their original tribal names and considered themselves simply minorities within Paba. Yet thse people considered themselves citizens of Paba only, and did not want independence.

Colonies grew along the south coast of Paba, one for each Tarpabap nationality, with one more for the new-Tarpabaps that had chosen to learn Pabappa after all and one more for the Pabaps themselves. These were not strictly racially segregated habitats, but rather religiously and linguistically segregated. Still, the profound difference in body types between the Pabaps and the various Tarpabap groups led to relatively little intermarriage.

Tarpabaps who learned Pabappa found themselves better off economically than those who did not, and although they mostly preferred to stay in Paba for now, some of them moved to neighboring countries such as Subumpam and Thaoa, or even to Nama. Not as many moved to Lobexon, even though the government of Lobexon promised them immunity to its slavery laws, because the Tarpabaps preferred to live in places where Pabaps also lived.

Later divisions and separatism

Because of the settlement of the north, economic conditions along the coast actually began to decline. Tarpabaps reached 55% of the population of Paba, with Pabaps only about 20%, and began to complain. Some wanted total control of the government; others wanted a multiethnic coalition government. Paba decided to shut off immigration from Laba for the time being, except for a few "Paleo-Pabaps" that were suffering from famines in their ancient homeland. Pabaps were becoming worried about being trampled in their own capital city. Yet they still had total control not only of their own coastline, but also the coastlines of every nation to the east of them, and quite a few to the west. They decided to cement this control by passing a law stating that the only navy allowed eastward of Nama was the Pabap Navy (Vabapami). They threatened war on any nation that did not comply with this rule, even if they had been previously an ally of Paba. They then told the Tarpabap diplomats that they had been extremely generous for hundreds of years, and in fact that they had allowed Tarpabaps representation in government so long as they converted to the Yiibam religion, but that they were now shutting down this system as well, saying that the Tarpabaps had been unfaithful to Yīa (the god of Yiibam) and that many of them were not even pretending to believe in Yīa. They even threatened the Andanese, who had previously been immune to Paba's religious doiscrimination laws.

Tarpabaps were upset. They had a strong majority in the army, and considered erupting a civil war against the ruling but largely weaponless Pabaps in the city center. But they still had a strong cultural taboo against killing small people, and Pabaps were still very small compared to Tarpabaps as there had been almost no intermarriage. In fact, they had become slightly smaller over time since the ones marrying out tended to be taller than average, and because of a small amount of blending with the Andanese. Average adult male Pabaps were about chest-high compared to the Tarpabaps, about the same size as an average Tarpabap 9-year-old. This is the main reason why Tarpabaps were so overrepresented in the army to begin with. For the time being, the Tarpabaps worked out an agreement not to seek power in Paba even by nonviolent means so long as the Pabaps would pay them money to fix their economy and also let the Tarpabaps open holes in the naval shield so they could carry on independent trade without relying on the Pabap ships.

Still, the Pabaps realized that they had a problem with their army. Their standing army was now almost entirely non-Pabaps: it was about 80% Tarpabaps, and the rest mostly Andanese. There were actually far more Pabaps living over the border in Subumpam now than in Paba itself, but those Pabaps were increasingly loyal to Subumpam rather than Paba, despite maintaining their religion. They contemplated the radical idea of dissolving their army, becoming entirely undefended on land, even though they knew that the last country that had voted to dissolve its army (1950's Subumpam) was immediately invaded and conquered for more than a hundred years. They figured that this could work if they could find a trustworthy nation to defend them, in return for an alliance at sea. But Pabaps did not want to submit to Nama, as they had survived several disastrous wars that Nama fought in right on their borders without themselves suffering any significant damage. They also contemplated ending themselves altogether by marrying into Tarpabap families and essentially handing over their power. But this would put them at odds with the many Pabap minorities that had settled other nations, and at risk of losing the alliance with Nama. Even the Tarpabaps realized this, and had long preferred the face of their diplomats to be Pabaps. They also contemplated splitting the army into sections corresponding to each geographical area of Paba. Previously, they had deliberately blended everyone together so that there would be no possibility of religious or sectional infighting in their army. This had always worked well. The city of Paba was located in the state of Yakīs, for example, and if Yakīs had its own army, there would be no possibility of Yakīsian Pabaps being attacked by foreigners serving in their army. They could then dwindle the proportions of the non-Pabap areas of their state without significant objections from those areas. But they did not want to disrupt a system that seemed for the time being to do well. And so the Pabaps held off on making any changes to their army, while publically telling their soldiers that they would in the future try to bring more Pabaps into the army, and more Tarpabaps into the navy, and might decide to split the army along geographical lines.