Pabappa

NOTE, ALL POSWA AND PABAPPA ARTICLES ARE FAR OUT OF DATE AND WILL BE FOR QUITE SOME TIME. I WILL UPDATE THEM WHEN I GET A CHANCE. THANK YOU.

Pabappa is the most iconic language of present-day planet Teppala, although not the most widely spoken, either in terms of number of speakers or geographical extent. It is similar to Poswa, but much simpler in almost every way. Since splitting off from Poswa about 3200 years ago, it has changed more quickly than Poswa, again in almost every way. However, the general acoustic impression of Pabappa is closer to that of their shared parent language, Bābākiam, than is Poswa's, because both languages underwent various sound shifts that created new consonants and consonant clusters, but only Pabappa later simplified them back to a system similar to Bābākiam.

NOTE: Because most of my writing in this encyclopedia concerns the time period from 1700 to 4268 AD, nearly every mention of the word "Pabappa" in fact refers to its ancestor, Bābākiam. The use of the name Pabappa is to make it clear that it refers to the language spoken in Paba, while the use of the name Paba is to show its historical and geographical continuity with the present-day Paba.

Scratchpad

need to check semantic shifts on all words with "wall" in the original definition, as there are far too many and these must have come from an experiment with different forms

"square, tile" also occurs suspiciously often

Phonology

See Pabappa phonology.

Grammar

Unlike Poswa, Pabappa has a copula verb, pip, which means that "good ice cream" and "the ice cream is good" are different sentences.

Nouns

See Pabappa nouns.

The inflection of Pabappa's nouns is similar to that of Poswa, but with less irregularity. A Poswa speaker can generally handle Pabappa nouns with no problem whereas a monolingual Pabappa speaker will have trouble learning the traps and tripups of the many irregular nouns of Poswa.

Verbs

See Pabappa verbs.

Pabappa verbs are again similar to those of Poswa, but much simpler. Verbs are inflected for tense only, unlike Poswa where they are inflected twice for person, and once each for tense, aspect, mood, and voice. Thus, pronouns are used much more commonly than in Poswa.

Sample sentences

• Blumpurpum pesaunamap piliblilabi. "the children walked across the frozen lake".
• Pom map peminiba. "I hear you."
• Pom pempomop peminiba. "I can hear the sea."
• Wipambi wapibup pisa. "The palm tree is tall."

Geography

Pabappa is spoken in warm climates, considered to be tropical because they are on the south coast, although temperatures are not as high as those associated with the tropics on Earth. Vegetation rather than temperature determines whether a given climate qualifies as tropical or not. It is largely urban, with most speakers living in the cities of Paba or Lunila (Lunila is an Andanese city).

Paba

Largest city in the lowlands; it is over 4000 years old. It is governed and mostly populated by "White Pabaps", the traditional ruling class of Paba and many other territories. Their rule is very strict, yet peaceful. People are not allowed on the streets at night without permission from the governors.

Lunila

The city of Lunila was where the god Lun was worshipped by the Andanese. (Sometiems the whole are was called "land of the gods", but the other parts of the empire didnt like this,.) The god's name in Andanese was Ini, and the city was named Ini Ilasa. Lasa = temple, cognate to Pabappa pala.

Recently Pabaps in despair at their land being swarmed and assimilated into the Poswob Empire have begun moving out of the empire, generally into other tropical areas. Even though by doing so they are giving up their citizenship, for many emigrant families, this seemed like the right thing to do.