Poswa phonology

Poswa is a language spoken in the center of Rilola. It is spread over more territory than any other language. Poswa is in many ways similar to its closest relative Pabappa, but much more complex.

Phonologically, Poswa sounds like baby talk despite its many long words. The consonants p and b are particularly well represented, as in the sample sentences below:

Pappel poppepa₁ pwaepaba₂, puppypi, papopob, pypembaba₃ poppapwop₄ wa₅ poppupwop.₆

The teenager sat₂ in the bathtub₁ like an obstacle, wearing a shirt, and holding₃ two feathers₄ and₅ two knives.₆

Baby wa bebobo babaem bubwi, bububibepi wa bubožbabepi bibabi.

We jumped with our kids in the playground, licking four coconuts and five cantaloupes.

The above sentences could easily be expanded, the first by giving the teen in the bathtub other things to hold onto, such as a dandelion (pape), a snake (papap), a pineapple (one word is pappypa), and so on. Meanwhile the people in the playground could look around and realize their playground is full of mud (bebbo) and spiders (bibubby) and so return home (bibia).

Most words begin with a single consonant. Very few words begin with vowels, and there are only a few permissible initial clusters. However, note that Poswa considers labialized consonants such as /pw/, /bw/, etc to be single consonants rather than clusters.

Consonants

There are 33 consonants, all in pairs of plain vs labialized, except /w/, which is considered a labialized version of silence. The others are /p b m f v t n s l tš dž š ž k g r/ and their labialized counterparts.

/tš/ and /dž/

Sometimes /tš/ and /dž/ are not considered proper consonants, instead being analyzed as clusters, which would reduce the number of consonants to 29. This is because they cannot occur in word-final position. Nevertheless, word-initial /tš/ and /dž/ have survived, whereas the other clusters /ps/ and /pš/ have been reduced to /p/ in word-initial and often also medial positions. If /tš/ and /dž/ are analyzed as clusters, they are usually analyzed as /t/ + /š/ and /t/ + /ž/, because there is no /d/ in the language. However, this presents a problem, because Poswa does not allow dissimilar voicing in clusters.

Labiodentals

The consonants /f v/ are labiodental, but /fʷ vʷ/ are rounded and bilabial. /fʷ/ is very rare at the beginning of a word, except in loans, because the primeval /fʷ/ changed to a simple /w/. Likewise /g/ is rare in all positions because it changed to /dž/ in most environments and this change happened very recently. Presently most plain /g/ is either from /gʷ/ before a front vowel or is a loanword.

Labialization in syllable-final position

Labialization is robust and can be contrastive everywhere: rulpu "face" /rulpu/ and rulpu "bandage, napkin" /rulʷpu/ are not homophones and not even considered a rhyme. Another such pair is peftum "tantrum, frenzy, spasm" and peftum "arrow, weapon".

Consonant symbolism and expressive use of rare consonants

The most commonly used consonants in Poswa are /p/, /b/, and /m/. In general, the further forward in the mouth a consonant is, the more common it is. Thus, the velar stops /k/ and /g/ are very rare, and any words containing a /k/ or /g/ stand out sharply from the rest of any sentence they appear in.

Indeed, most occurrences of the Roman letter k or g in Poswa are actually examples of the phonemes /kʷ/ and /gʷ/, which are considered to be separate consonants in Poswa. Whereas labialized consonants in general are less common than their plain counterparts, for velar consonants, they are actually more common because sound changes have turned most /k/ into /t/, /p/, or /w/, and most /g/ into /dž/ or a vowel hiatus, but both sets of sound changes affected the labialized forms of these consonants less frequently.

Remnants of the Gold consonant gender system

In the Gold language, gender was indicated by the consonants in a word, and there were eight genders. Gender was used both literally and metaphorically at this stage. The word for husband was ṭutə; the word for wife was mumhə. These words have survived in modern Poswa as tuti and mumi respectively, and most Poswobs are aware that the resemblance of the two words is no coincidence. However, the gender system ceased operation thousands of years ago and nobody could coin a new word by changing consonants such as this and expect to be understood.

In the Gold language and its early descendants, the consonant gender system became increasingly messy due to sound changes, and it stopped being operative in Babakiam when a series of sound changes eliminated many intervocalic consonants entirely. The t and m shown above were preserved, but many other consonants were lost, and some sound changes caused certain consonants to merge with others, frustrating the gender system.

Use of consonants in early Poswa to show metaphorical gender-like traits

When the gender system ceased to be used for literal purposes, an extension of the setup used for metaphorical expressions remained. For example, the masculine consonants t and k were inserted into words with vowel hiatus to form a word describing a larger, sharper, or otherwise more dangerous version of the object being described. Few words coined in this manner remained in the language, since their existence was dependent on the listener mentally substituting one word for another while parsing the sentence.

Instead, a much more common process at this time was syntactic drift. Words containing the masculine consonants t and k, for example, tended to change meaning over time into describing objects that were seen as more inherently masculine. Likewise, the feminine consonants p and m took on the implied meanings of softness and delicateness.

However, as the language developed, its phonology changed more and more into the infantile setup seen today in modern Poswa. The Gold language had been fairly guttural, with six of its 19 consonants being velar or postvelar, and with the voiceless velar ejective /ḳ/ tending towards a uvular pronunciation in some dialects. But Babakiam lost the ejective series, softened the velar fricatives /x g/ into the postalveolars /š ž/, and lost the voiced velar stop /ġ/. Moreover, the only two remaining dorsal consonants, /k/ and /ŋ/, disappeared from many words due to many other sound changes. For example, /kʷ/ became /p/ unconditionally, and in many positions, the plain /k/ became /p/ too. For example, the Gold word ʕʷakmaḳ "snake" became Babakiam papap; every consonant in the word had been pushed into the same outcome: /p/.

Thus, from the standpoint of a speaker acquainted with the Gold language's consonant gender symbolism, it was very difficult in Babakiam to talk about anything strong or dangerous; everything seemed to be soft and feminine. When speakers of the Moonshine language invaded the Babakiam homeland about 4800 years ago, they found the Babakiam military leaders adorable and promised to teach their children to speak Babakiam in the hopes that learning a soft, effeminate language would make their own people more peaceful in the future.

Remnants of the gender system in modern Poswa

As Babakiam developed into Poswa and Pabappa, its sound system changed far more than it had before. In Pabappa, velar consonants are entirely absent, and in Poswa they are very rare. But consonant symbolism has not died out; it has merely changed. Modern Poswobs no longer see the very rare velar sounds /k g/ as their preferred choices for describing something dangerous or aggressive; they are so rare that their presence makes a word sound foreign or remarkable, but not necessarily dangerous.

Unable to use their velar consonants, modern Poswobs have turned to other sounds to give a word an aggressive or dangerous feel. Primarily, these are taken from subconscious associations with words whose definitions are already associated with violence and danger; often these are words for weapons and other sharp objects. It has turned out that in modern Poswa, the consonants most clearly associated with violence are the labiodental consonants /f v/ and the rounded labiovelar approximant /w/.

The voiced labiodental fricative /v/ is entirely new to the language; even Babakiam had not had such a sound. Thus, /v/ is not a particularly common sound in Poswa, and due to the circumstances of the sound changes which caused it to arise, it is most common in word-internal position, and fairly rare at the beginning of a word. Since all words are stressed on the first syllable, modern Poswa's consonant symbolism relies heavily on the first letter of a word to give it its flavor. Thus, those few words beginning with /v/ have often come to take on violent associations even in those cases where their original meaning was less specific. This is especially true of verbs.

Examples of consonants used symbolistically to describe aggression

Below are some examples of words which have acquired aggressive meanings by subconscious associations with their consonants, particularly their initial consonants.

Vaffebi pispipypiep.

I destroyed the termites.

Vivi, bipos lattšop twifebi.

I cried when I hurt my thumb.

Vabžebi potibemwop.

I gobbled the candy.

Vubwab pummatšop wipiswebel.

The alligator bit off my leg. (The word puswam also means alligator but is less commonly used.)

Although Poswa considers /vʷ/ to be a separate consonant from /v/, it still carries some of the same associations:

Levobampobiepi vwambebi.

I ate the strawberries rapidly.

For the other consonants mentioned, the association is also stronger when the word being used begins with that consonant rather than merely including it somewhere else:

Wiwibebi webabiep.

I blew on the leaves.

Sabas watubbwa.

The man is dangerous.

Vowels

Poswa has a six-vowel system, /a e i o u ə/, with no distinctions of tone or length; a system that is common on their continent. For example, it is the same system found in Thaoa. The order of the vowels in the native Poswob alphabet is the same as above, an order taken from Pabappa.

The sixth vowel is spelled y but corresponds to a vowel similar to the IPA schwa /ə/. For convenience, it is here referred to as /y/ in phonetic notation as well.

The scarcity of /y/

The vowel y is mostly an allomorph of consonantal labialization, appearing when the reduction of a previously existing /o u y/ to simple labialization was not possible, generally due to being blocked by consonant clusters on one or both sides, or by occurring at the end of a word after a cluster. For example, the word puppypem has a true syllabic /y/ because the expected sound change to *pupppem could not occur. (Triple /p/ did briefly occur at one stage in the development of the language, but both before and after this stage, it was illegal, and remains so today.)

However, there are a small number of words that have /y/ in a position in which it could have collapsed to form a legally permissible consonant cluster but did not. One example is pampyte "(to) promise". One might expect the /y/ to reduce, since /mpʷt/ is a valid consonant cluster, and then for the /t/ to drop out due to the sound rule mpt ---> mp, thus leaving /mpʷ/. However, in this word the /y/ remains as a full vowel. Words like these are always either compounds or words that had previously had denser consonant clusters. Pampyte is of the latter type; it was earlier spelled pampfyte, a cluster from which the -y- could not be dropped.

Diphthongs

The only firm diphthong in Poswa is /ae/.

Poswa allows the vowel sequences /ia ie io iu/, which are pronounced by most speakers as falling diphthongs (that is, the /i/ part of the diphthong is longer), but by other speakers, particularly in the southern states, as vowel sequences. This is due to influence from Pabappa, where all such vowel combinations are pronounced as two-syllable sequences. The origin of these sequences is a mixture of previously existing diphthongs and previously existing vowel sequences.

In some border areas near the isogloss border, they are pronounced as two-syllable vowel sequences when the first vowel is stressed, but as falling diphthongs when the first vowel is unstressed. Since all words are accented on their initial syllable, this is equivalent to saying they are pronounced with hiatus when occurring in an initial syllable.

The consonant /rʷ/ is pronounced [w] after a vowel, and thus words like pwar "bubble" can be analyzed as [pʷaw], and thus as containing diphthongs. However this is a property of allophony and these words are not considered by most speakers to contain diphthongs because they cannot take additional consonants in the syllable coda. That is, a word like

Pwaem!

On the bottom!

Is a valid word, but a word like *pwarm cannot exist. Instead, the locative case of pwar "bubble" is

Pwarom!

In the bubble!

Resolution of vowel sequences

Very few Poswa words begin with vowels due to a historical sound change which inserted a consonant which later became /b/ at the beginning of a vowel-initial syllable if that syllable was accented. At that time, most words were accented on the initial syllable. Nevertheless, a few native words beginning with vowels do exist, and when noun compounds are made with these words as the second element, sound rules apply in order to resolve the illegal vowel sequences. Below is a chart detailing these rules, with nouns as example words:

Vowel Sequences

	apa	etto	ipi	oba	umu
apa	afapa	apaetto	apaepi	afoba	apomu
pupe	puplapa	pupletto	puplipi	puploba	puplumu
ipi	iplapa	ipletto	iplipi	iploba	iplumu
etto	ettarapa	ettaretto	ettaripi	ettaroba	ettarumu
umu	ubrapa	ubretto	ubripi	ubroba	ubrumu
plae	plalapa	plaletto	plalipi	plaloba	plalumu

Note that the vowel /y/ is not on the chart because words that end in it are considered to end in an allophone of /w/, and because no native words begin with it. Likewise, very few native words begin with the diphthong /ae/, and those that do, such as aežo "expansion, buildability" behave fully as if they began with the simple /a/ vowel.

NOTE

There ma be cme residual of the "KARAOKE shift" whereby all vbowels become high before other vowe;ls. that is, they become /i/ or /u/.

Sandhi and other morphonological processes

Poswa does not have extensive sandhi. What exists is difficult to untangle from morphological processes, since analogy has led sandhi changes to extend to environments in which they did not originally occur.

Wet syllables

Wet syllables (pompamba twom) are those beginning with the consonant clusters ps pš pf and their labialized counterparts. In some environments, they lose the fricative offglide and retain just the p. This is mostly a historical process, and speakers do not need to think of it, but it does come into play when conjugating verbs and forming certain compounds.

For example, papsa means "white", and one can say

Bibabatšo papsa.

The top of my tongue is white.

However, if used as a compound, the papsa word is unstressed, and therefore one says

Bibabappapwa.

White (top of) tongue. (A symptom of candidiasis).

Since color words are nearly always used as adjectives, and all have the same historical -(y)s- infix, analogy has led them to be sometimes used without the -(y)s- even in stressed form. Generally, the -s- is retained when a color word is used as a noun, for example

Apsa babuba.

The red one is hot.

Wet syllables in initial position

Historically, the wet clusters ps- and pš- occurred in initial position, but they have both changed to a simple p-. On the other hand, pf- still exists.

Spelling

Poswa is written with a very complicated syllabary, named Toppwe (or Pompoppwe to be more specific), in which some letters are drawn inside other letters. Not all possible syllables are represented, but all of the syllables that require two letters to spell are phonological reflexes of previously existing two-syllable sequences. Labialization, though not represented in the Romanized form of the alphabet, is distinguished in Toppwe. For instance the word pappa "medicine" contrasts with pappa "field" in that the second p in the second word is labialized. The first is spelled in Toppwe as pap-pa, the second as pabʷ-pa (because /bʷp/ is not a valid consonant cluster in the language, it is automatically read as /pʷp/). All in all there are about 1500 letters in Toppwe, including a small number of bisyllabic graphemes representing common sequences such as /bies/ and a few abbreviations.

Sound changes and vocabulary retention

Poswa does much better than Pabappa at retaining old monosyllabic vocabulary from the Babakiam language due to its larger phonology and slower rate of sound change.

With the Poswobs' strong knowledge of their written history, some words which would not be used in normal speech, such as i "bubble" and ti "dream" are nevertheless widely understood and can be used in abbreviations and poetic compounds. For example, mabem means soap, and mabemi is widely understood as meaning "soap bubbles, lather" without having to use the longer form mabempwar. Note also that i as a standalone word is still widely understood to mean "buoy", as it has for the last 4000 years.

Nevertheless, the ability to create all-vowel sentences is long gone, and most words in Poswa have at least two syllables.

The sound change champions

• pobbas "war", from pau babibup mibeas. Note that this was originally a euphemism meaning "to destroy unarmed people", replacing many other words for war which, however, still survive in compounds.
• pwubo "salary, rate of pay", from pepibu miaau "career value".
• polfwatos "vegetarian", from pauyau pabaa kataus, "able to eat fresh fruit".
• peffofapwa "red rose", from pipta babupte apusa
• povbia "to want to become pregnant", from pusmabaupubiba

Most of the extreme examples involve deletion of /b/ in unstressed syllables, resulting in vowel sequences which then contracted into single vowels.