Tarise

The Tarise language can refer to either of two distantly related languages, both spoken in the state of Taryte.

Gold Tarise

Gold Tarise was an independent branch of the Gold family with only one member. It was spoken in the Gold Empire, having split off from its parent language around the year 1700 AD. (Seven thousand years ago.) Although the majority of Taryteans were loyal to the Gold Empire, the state of Taryte produced several independence movements, and uprisings within Taryte repeatedly attempted to overthrow their Gold masters. When these failed, a group of Taryteans decided to invade the Gold stronghold of Subumpam. Here they were put into slavery, but were eventually freed and became a welcome minority within Subumpam.

Sak Tarise

Sak Tarise was a dialect of Thaoa spoken by immigrants from the nation of Thaoa who moved in after their own empire was defeated in the Vegetable War. This was a gradual migration, as the immigrants were poorly equipped for long journeys and were forced to migrate across difficult mountainous terrain in order to avoid their many enemies. When they reached Taryte, they settled mostly in the highlands, where the population density was lowest. While the majority population of Taryte consisted of tall dark-skinned people, the invading Thaoans (who called themselves Saks) were short and light-skinned, often with blonde hair. They thus resembled the Pabap people whom they considered their primary enemies. At first, the Saks and the other Taryteans blended together, but the Saks who remained in the highlands retained their Thaoan language and soon came to think of themselves as the only true Tarises. Yet, they claimed a political alliance with the dark-skinned people of Taryte, and never wavered.

Around the year 3696, after a long period in the highlands, the Tarises invaded the light-skinned people to their east, who were at this time calling themselves the Lantern people, and they invaders had the dark-skinned people of Taryte firmly on their side. They were able to do this partly because of the presence of the many mixed families that had arisen over the generations and partly because Tarise had a long tradition of avoiding ethnic wars and dividing its people by politics and religion rather than by race and language.

Politics, race, and language

Although the Saks had also had a long history of political parties, they had only allowed ethnic Thaoans to participate in their government, and they took this attitude with them as they migrated across the mountains. In Tarise, they forged a difficult new identity for themselves as "tropical people", saying that they were more light-skinned than others because they lived mostly in alpine climates, but that they considered themselves to be as one with the other Tarises, and that they still considered the Pabaps (the majority in the Lantern Empire) to be their primary enemy. They thus saw little irony in invading an empire of people who often resembled them in appearance while claiming racial identity as their primary motivation for that conquest. Their ethnic alliance was based on Tarytean nationalism, not skin color, however; the Saks had no sympathy for the dark-skinned people living even further east in Tarwas who were being invaded by the very same blonde Lanterns that were being invaded by the dark-skinned people from Taryte. Indeed, the Saks planned to eventually colonize Tarwas themselves, but realized that they would need to bite through thousands of miles of Lantern territory in order to get there, and did not consider the conquest of Tarwas an immediate priority.

Disambiguation

Despite the Sak Tarises being the more aggressive of the two, the Gold Tarise language is the one most commonly referred to as simply Tarise, while Sak Tarise has often been described with names such as "Tarise Thaoa", showing that it is a dialect of Thaoa spoken in Taryte rather than a dialect of the Gold language spoken in Saklo. Gold Tarise is the language referred to as "Tarise" from here on.

Phonology

The phonology of Tarise is fairly conservative, resembling that of the Gold language from which it originated. Being west of Khulls, it shares none of the common traits of the languages spoken to the north and east of Khulls, but shares some traits with Khulls itself.

Culture and demographics

Khulls speakers often divided the peoples around them into two groups. Those living to the north and east, such as the Pabaps, the Repilians, and the Thaoa, were considered too soft and submissive to be fully human. The Khulls speakers pointed out that even though these people had diverse languages, all of them lacked "sharp sounds" such as ejectives and seemed incapable of sounding aggressive. Pabappa had not yet acquired its modern "baby talk" sound, but it had lost its ejective consonants early on. Pabappa, indeed, at this time resembled Thaoa with all /l/ shifted to /w/.

By contrast, the people living to the south and west of the Khulls speakers were considered too stupid and violent to be truly human. Their languages were harsh and guttural, full of ejective consonants and other stereotypically sharp sounds such as /k/ and /t/, but with relatively few "nice" sounds to balance them out. Thus, the Khulls speakers said, the Tarise were too quick to resort to violence, and should be approached only with caution. The Tarise people accepted this stereotype, and promised each other that they would outgrow and subdue the Khulls people even as the Khulls people preyed upon the "soft" people all along their northern border.