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/

Tree-dwellers

03:01, 16 August 2023 (PDT)

There was a group of humans that retained many arboreal adaptations and thus were trapped in the rainforests unable to settle the mainland like the colonists did. They had full human language capabilities and could learn and speak the languages of the "groundling" humans who surrounded and outnumbered them. They were of little use to the groundlings, however, so humans generally did not bother to try to enslave them. They occasionally prospered when human societies fell into misfortune, but could not live comfortably away from the tall trees of the tropics. Pine trees and the like were useless to them.

Early history of Paba

03:01, 16 August 2023 (PDT)

See below. Rather than pirates, the invaders may have been part of the same trade union of colonists, which could be called Tapilula. This would better explain why the Lenians could not attack them despite their having attacked aboriginal nations without reserve and having not yet endorsed pacifism. This also would explain why the Lenians were more peaceful overall; they attacked aboriginals, but only because they had signed treaties with the aboriginals which admitted the Lenian colonies to the aboriginals' nations as though they were aboriginals themselves. Thus, Lenians were not fighting "colonists' wars", but simply fighting wars the way the aboriginals had always fought amongst themselves. The Lenians had more weapons and thus outperformed the aboriginals, and they maintained this advantage for several centuries because they had shipbuilding and access to the sea, but eventually the aboriginals who chose to ally with Lenians became strong as well. Those who did not tended to lose their wars, but even here some eventually surrendered and joined the Lenian-led colonies. The tribes who remained hostile tended to live in areas that later became almost 100% Lenian because they were the ones who did not marry into Lenian families.

This intermarriage is one cause of the later racial divisions among the ancestors of the Players; since the Lenians were pale-skinned and typically blond, they stood out starkly from the dark-skinned aboriginals, and even areas that had a Lenian majority were noticeably darker than the areas like Thaoa were there had been few aboriginals or where aboriginals had rapidly lost ground. However, the racism of some Players (not the ancestors of the Players) was mostly against the Eggs and other tribes who were recent immigrants from the tropics, not against the darker-skinned Players of the capital and other assorted territories such as "BC".

Second-order colonies

The Lenians' colonies were themselves colonized by at least three groups from the tropics: AlphaLeap, a TR nation, and the "Nik" tribe from Laba. The Andanese also colonized this area at around the same time but did not have the superior military power of the other groups. These three tropical groups were rivals of each other, not cooperating, and largely saw the Lenians as so defenseless that they were not worth allying with.

This second-order colonization proceeded slowly for several reasons, chief among them being that the military planners in the tropical nations wanted to see the Lenians weaken themselves through wars against the aboriginals, and then only when the aboriginals had been subdued would the tropical nations make a serious attempt at invasion. Even so, the Niks and the Andanese built their colonies in Lenian territory very early, when the aboriginal wars were still going on. AlphaLeap did not do this until around the year 1088 (roughly 300-400 years after the Lenians established their first self-sufficient colony), and the other TR nation(s) had footholds along the coast for trading purposes early on but did not attempt to invade until much later, possibly even then only in reaction to AlphaLeap's attempt to claim the whole seacoast for themselves.

The Lenians had seen this coming, and this is one reason why they were not eager to fight large-scale wars against the aboriginals. Often, they identified as pacifists even in their earliest years, but because they demanded a safe place to live, they knew that they needed to clear out aboriginals from at least some areas of their territory, and to resist attempts by the aboriginals to join their alliance. The Lenians therefore pushed out the aboriginals from their intended capital territory, having forged an alliance with a different aboriginal tribe that had been hostile to the tribe who lived around the intended Lenian capital. Thus the capital became safe, although the Lenians knew that even friendly tribes might turn hostile later. This is one reason why Lenians welcomed the aboriginals who had allied with them in the initial war to move to the capital territory, and did not insist that they take a low social status.

More about the Orange War

02:46, 5 August 2023 (PDT)

Historical background

Shortly after the Lenian settlers founded colonies in the eastern areas of what later became Pubumaus, they were attacked by pirates from the tropics. These pirates were largely colonists themselves, who spoke the same languages as the Lenians and could communicate with the Lenian leaders. Not wanting to suffer a military conquest, the leaders of the PSL Lenians (that is, those speaking what later were called Play substratum languages) legalized the sale of adult male slaves only, saying that the family of any man who boarded a ship headed for the Tropical Rim would receive a payment from the government which could be used to forgive family debts. But it could not be used to earn money a family did not yet owe, because the royals did not want people selling their own relatives into slavery. The royals figured this would be a good compromise with the pirates, as they would not have to fight a war to gain slaves, but because they could only buy adult men, these slaves could not reproduce and the pirates would need to make repeated journeys to get more slaves, unless their women were willing to breed with the slaves, which the PSL's figured would be unlikely. The pirates did in fact capture some female PSL's illegally to breed with the legally acquired men, but these were insufficient to start a new population of enslaved PSL's in the tropics.

Capture of young men

Because the men were sold into slavery to pay family debts, it was not required that they be volunteers. Often, the least desirable unmarried young man in a family would be threatened with slavery if they did not work hard and turn over all the fruits of their labor to the family. This encouraged men to marry young, and since the population had a surplus of women due to the slave raids, most men had a relatively easy time finding a wife, even if they were of low social status. But both polygamy and homosexuality were legal, so even with an adult population heavily skewed towards women there were some men who could not find a wife and knew that they were prime targets for the pirates. Similarly, homosexual men were vulnerable to the pirates because they had no children and could not plead for protection to the royals who would consider the children to be at risk if they were to lose their father.

The pirates accepted that by buying adult male slaves legally from PSL territory, they would spare themselves the cost of raising slave children in the tropics. They figured they might also reduce the chance of organized revolt, as an all-male troop would have no women or children to fight for, and would be unwilling to risk their lives for each other. The pirates also knew that by creating an all-male slave population they would increase the risk of violence overall, as the men would be frustrated, but they believed the men would mostly direct their rage against each other because they were much weaker than their overseers both in terms of physical constitution (the natives of the pirate colonies were taller) and because they were kept weak in various ways.

Nonetheless, the cost saved by having PSL's raise young boys before selling them into slavery was not enough to offset the slaves' typical purchase price, so the pirates knew that they were making a sacrifice and that it would be more profitable for them to raise a slave population on their home soil, even paying for the cost of housing and feeding the women and children, because they would never again need to buy any more slaves from the PSL homeland.

Women run away

Some women wished to move to the tropics and sell themselves into slavery to pay family debts just like men did, figuring life in the tropics, even as a slave, might be better than life under the strict PSL rule. Occasionally, women would go with the slave raiders voluntarily, even knowing that their sacrifice would earn their families nothing, simply because they preferred to live in the tropics as an abused but protected underclass (the women knew their lives were more valuable than the men's) rather than struggle to make ends meet in PSL territory where the future was unpredictable. This was rare, and was classified as treason, but the pirates touted it as proof that more women would come voluntarily if they were legally allowed, and more still would come if they could pay off family debts by so doing. The pirates stated that if they were allowed to buy women, they would allow the slave men and women to marry and raise children, and even though these children would also be slaves, the pirates would still come to PSL territory to buy adults because they felt it would be too much of a strain on the land to raise their slaves entirely on home soil. Therefore there would be two classes of slaves: those who were born in the tropics to slave parents, and those who were purchased from the PSL government. The pirates promised to limit the size of the first group by keeping the slave families small. Even so, the PSL government refused to allow this, figuring that even a small slave population could quickly grow once established, and stated that only men were legally for sale.

Illegal captures

The Tropical Rim pirates therefore also illegally abducted women. In general, PSL civilians were unarmed, and could not defend themselves against an armed pirate. The pirates were physically distinct on sight and could not wander throughout the whole nation, so they stayed close to shore; this meant that unaccompanied PSL women were afraid to go to shore, and PSL men were forced to closely watch their wives whenever they traveled to a place where they felt pirates might be. None of the pirates' nations allowed the pirates to abduct children, and so when this did happen, the pirates were committing a crime both according to PSL law and to their own; nonetheless, PSL parents watched their children as well as they believed that there existed colonies of pirates in the tropics who were outside the reach of any government.

Thaoa's role

Meanwhile, Thaoa also invaded the PSL's after about the year 1088 when they broke away from PSL/Pubumaus. Thus the PSL's were being attacked by two separate empires, both seeking their people as slaves, and because they did not have the standard military defenses of most other nations, they could not resist this. Thus the leaders were forced to bargain with the Thaoans as well, saying that they preferred to give Thaoa adult men rather than women or teenage girls. But because Thaoa had a land border with PSL, they were much more capable than the pirates of taking what they wanted, and therefore captured many young female slaves and did not need to continue to pay for new slaves. Also, the Thaoans were willing to breed with their slaves and then raise the offspring as slaves, which most other slaveholding populations disliked. The only other sizable slaveholding nation in which the slave class was primarily of native stock was AlphaLeap, and this was a factor in their financial prosperity as compared with other slaveholding nations.

Thaoa's slave raiders deliberately targeted teenage girls, knowing that they would be able to give birth to many children and thus help Thaoa's slave population grow rapidly. As above, the Thaoan slavemasters had no prohibition against breeding with the slaves, so Thaoan men raped the captured women and raised the offspring of these unions mostly as slaves (but since they were family property, not the property of the state, they were sometimes given freedom). The PSL leaders tried to work out agreements with Thaoa in which the Thaoans would resign themselves to capturing adult men, even saying that Thaoa could abuse the men however they felt, so long as they spared PSL women and children. The PSL leaders said that it was the duty of adult PSL men to allow themselves to be abused by foreign men, saying that by shouldering the abuse they were doing the right thing for their nation and for their nation's women and children.

This went on for a long time, with Thaoa sometimes agreeing to the terms and sometimes violating them. Thus Pubumaus' few wars were mostly small-scale raids against Thaoa in which they attempted to capture back the slaves that Thaoa had illegally taken from them. Generally, the PSL's considered slaves who were women or children to be illegal, even if they were the offspring of Thaoan women and PSL men (which was legal). The PSL's figured that this attitude could help them turn the distressingly passive slave population against the Thaoan leaders. However, the slaves never rose up in revolt against Thaoa, in part because the Thaoans threatened to deliberately attack children, and in part because they knew life in the PSL homeland was little better than slavery.

Comparison to later events

When the Dreamers invaded the Players in the Orange War around the year 4268, knowledge of the ancient history resurfaced in the Players' consciousness. The Players were a different population now than their ancestors had been; the most noteworthy change was that among the new Players, women were usually taller than men. This change had happened gradually and the culture had evolved. But rather than having women move towards a new role in protecting men, men had become treated as even more expendable than before, and the Play government promoted a war strategy based on deliberately putting their men in vulnerable positions, and then encouraging the Dreamers to wantonly abuse the Play men, just in the belief that if the Dreamers had their way with the Play men they might not move on into the heartlands to also abuse the Play women.

Cultural viewpoints on climate

08:33, 25 November 2022 (PST)

Late in their history, as various small nations came under the control of teenagers or even children, new cultural stereotypes spread. These were mostly inherited from the traditional nations that had preceded them, but often became distorted. For example, the Cold Men, who despite their name were very young, believed that weather shaped human abilities, and that the Players to their south were much stronger than the Cold Men because they lived in a hot climate, and that heat was more dangerous than cold. Nonetheless they took pride in their cold-hardiness and figured that since the Players were almost certain to invade the Cold Men rather than the other way around, the Cold Men would have one key advantage in battle.

This stereotype had been passed down to the Cold Men from their parents, but their parents did not identify weather as the determining cause. Rather, the parents had believed mostly that while they were obviously closely related to the Players, the Cold Men had absorbed Naman genetics and had thus become more physically delicate in just a few generations, whereas the Players retained the original ancestry that had made them so hardy. The children of the group did not understand genetics and never had the opportunity to learn.

The Dolphin Riders also believed in the same stereotypes about weather even though they were a traditional nation run by adults and with no great surplus of children with no time for school. They were simply more susceptible to this because they felt out of place in their hot climate and clung to an explanation for why they had recently performed so poorly in battle.

Very brief history of the Andanese people

18:09, 5 October 2022 (PDT)

The Andanese settled in the Play nation and nowhere else, and became the money-holding class of that nation. The Play speakers supported their own economic exploitation by the Andanese because the Andanese could not flee into another nation if they were attacked, unlike the Leapers who dominated the economies of many other nations. Therefore the situation was stable for thousands of years.

However, not all Andanese were rich. They had in fact started out as poor as the other tribes, and only became rich as the economy grew. Some Andanese people never moved to the cities and kept living in the hinterlands, poorer than the aboriginals had ever been, and increasingly shunned by the urban elite. These people dwindled in number but never died off and never fully married into the surrounding Play culture.

By around 4108, the Andanese urban elite had married itself into Play families to such an extent that they were no longer distinct tribes, and most people spoke both languages. The rural Andanese had become very few in number by this time, and were not as poor as they had been for most of their history, but they were surrounded by cultures that had little interest in their welfare.

In 4175, the last of the Andanese people found themselves trapped in a war in which they had nothing to gain and everything to lose. They had lost control of even their hideouts in the wilderness, and became a people without a land to live on, more vulnerable than the animals who lived in the trees. But some Andanese people remembered stories about an icecapped island a thousand miles to the north, surrounded by rich ocean waters still teeming with fish ready to eat, and safe from all wars. Believing themselves the hardiest people in the world, the Andanese people marched through the battlefields, up the mountains, down the rivers, and finally crossed the sea to reach the fabled island of Xema, where all people were nomadic and nations did not exist.

Economic and cultural situation of Play territory

Play's financial terminology is unusually rich for a historically agrarian society for several main reasons.

Introduction of Gold language

First, the Gold language was introduced to the territory around the year 1900 by the Leapers, the world's foremost economic power at the time, and who remained so for thousands of years afterward. The Leapers controlled much of the sea, and profited from their trade with the Play-speaking nations, but could not colonize the homelands as they had done in some other nations. Thus the Gold language broke free from the Leapers and evolved into the Play language while still in intermittent contact with the seafaring Leaper traders.

Andanese advances

Secondly, the Andanese minority living in Play territory were also financially adept. Indeed, the main reason the Leapers failed in their attempt to colonize the Play territory was that the Play speakers already had their own merchant caste, who lived only where Play speakers lived. The Play government did not merely tolerate, but actually endorsed the ongoing exploitation of their people by the Andanese overclass because they knew that they could check the Andanese hold on economic power in ways that they would not be able to do if the Leapers were to be allowed in. These are detailed below, and explain why the Andanese often felt that the illiterate Play peasants were actually living better lives than the hard-working Andanese merchants.

Shared homeland

The Andanese did not have a nation of their own, and so their existence was dependent on the Play speakers' continued survival. If any Andanese people were to move to another nation, they would be of the lowest class, because the Leapers dominated the finances of most of the wealthier nations, and any areas out of reach of the Leapers would be out of reach for the Andanese too.

Physical traits

Andanese people tended to be physically smaller than all of the other tribes around them, and were also thin, not having much muscle. Whereas the Leapers were among the tallest in the world, and so the Play speakers preferred to associate themselves with people who could not intimidate them just by standing close.

However the Play speakers did not intimidate the Andanese, because they were required to be unarmed, whereas Andanese shopkeepers typically had one means or another of protecting themselves from theft.

Difficult schoolwork

The Andanese people were hard workers, and sent their children to school beginning at age 5. In some periods, the Play speakers depended on child labor and so the Andanese felt pity for them, but often the Andanese children needed to do some work on top of their schooling as well, so they felt kinship even there. In earlier periods, the pre-Play population (PSL's) were sending their kids to school just like the Andanese, but they had much easier coursework and essentially received a non-academic education to keep them together and out of danger.

The Andanese determination to succeed in school made Andanese the language of scholarship for much of the period of cohabitation. It was only very late in their shared history that the Play speakers emerged with their own schools, and only because of their much greater population size, that caused Play to be seen as the language of scholarship.

Early poverty

Andanese and Play speakers shared some important cultural ideals, such as the belief that they were physically hardy people despite both being of small stature. Even though the Andanese were rich overall, they had begun their colonies by settling in the worst habitats, where even the aboriginal tribes were unable to survive, just as the Play substrate people had done. There was a long period of time where the Andanese merchants became very rich but did not pass this wealth onto their poor population, who mostly remained in the wilderness, as they were expected to be content with that due to their supposed hardiness. Later, Andanese poverty was eliminated by various means, and the memories of their early history were extended to the whole Andanese population. That is, the less-rich Andanese did not identify themselves with the peasants and the more-rich with the merchants; all Andanese came together and considered themselves the descendants of peasants who had become rich.

Building upon this was a longstanding mutual preference among Play and Andanese speakers to loan terms between the languages by calques rather than direct loanwords. This was because of the great difference in acoustic impression the two languages had. Therefore, Play added new words calqued from Andanese to its already rich vocabulary inherited from the Gold language.

Destruction of habitat

In the Oyster War in the year 2668, the Leapers defeated their enemies and then turned against their allies, winning control of the Play seacoast for the first time. They introduced a new constitution that pushed the Play speakers into a servile position, putting them last in line for access to food even though they were the ones producing the nation's food. The Play speakers came to depend on child labor just to feed themselves, and their birthrate quickly rose far beyond that of all other nations. Even though the Play-speaking peasantry had been disarmed by the recent treaty, the Leapers were again unable to maintain a land occupation of the territory. The treaty had left the Andanese in place as the merchant caste, and the Leapers had been hoping to force them into a middle-man position, but it soon became plain that this would not happen and the Andanese maintained their position at the top of the financial hierarchy.

Child labor and population growth

Over the next 1,500 years, the population grew rapidly. Even though the Leapers were gone, they had left behind a nation plagued by recurring famines, originally caused by the environmental destruction of the Oyster War. Play territory had lost many of its important food sources, and these could not be replenished from elsewhere because there were no other areas with a similar climate and environment. Child labor became universal for Play speakers and also for most Andanese. A high infant mortality rate kept the nation's population from overgrowing its borders, but even so, the cultural preference for large families was firmly entrenched, and any time the population became healthier than normal, the population swelled, and a famine soon followed.

Play speakers steadily migrated out of their nation into the wilderness around them, mostly settling in difficult habitats where they were more at risk of being eaten by animals than killed by the natives of their target nations.

Intermarriage

Gradually, Play speakers began to marry into Andanese families, and because they grew faster, the nation became ever more homogeneous as a Play nation. But the Andanese language remained strong for cultural reasons detailed elsewhere. Thus, the Play language continued to depend on the Andanese merchant caste even as they came to have more and more close family ties with each other, and new words continued to enter the Play lexicon.

Leapers' view

The Andanese had the same status in the Play nation for 3,500 years — a financial overclass, with much more wealth than any other group, and living nowhere outside the Play nation. They could not take their wealth with them to foreign nations, and therefore whenever a catastrophe struck the Play nation, the Andanese suffered in kind with the other groups. This was one reason why the Play speakers were emotionally attached to the Andanese and considered them a pillar of stability, while holding a low opinion of the Leapers who dominated the economies of many of the nations to the west.

Since the Leapers had a nation of their own, any tangible wealth they acquired from the peoples of other nations could easily be moved to AlphaLeap, and if necessary the Leapers themselves could flee to their homeland if one of their many nations was struck by calamity. The Leapers were not well-liked, and were even privately jealous of the Andanese, who seemed to get away with extreme abuse of the Players and yet be showered with admiration.

After the Oyster War, the Leapers tried to position themselves as the new leaders, even though they realized that they would need to start out splitting power with the Andanese. They failed, and became ever more frustrated as they watched the Play nation crumble from afar. The Play birthrate almost immediately reached unheard-of heights, the Leapers knowing a major famine was coming and that famine might rule the Play nation for many generations to come. The Andanese were dominating the economy peacefully now, and did not even have a proper army, because they were bordered to the north by the pacifist nation of Nama, which refused to invade even to provide humanitarian aid. The Play government abolished school and sent children to work the fields at the age of five. Parents favored large families because these small children were well-suited for certain farm tasks that adults could perform only slightly more efficiently.

The Leapers were wrong about one important thing. The Andanese were in control of the nation's finances, but not of its government, which was controlled by wealthy Play-speaking families who believed that their nation's stability rested on separating control of finances from control of the food supply, and likewise separating other basic needs from each other so that no one group could control them all. Thus, to the Play leadership, castes were a good thing and were not seen as unfair at all. The Leapers by contrast dominated as much as they could of the nations they settled in, and were a closed-entry party, so the peasants could not simply become Leapers.

Comparison to PSL

However, in the early days, the Andanese were not well-liked either. The embryonic nation was poor and war-torn, so the Andanese were also facing threats to their subsistence, and had a high rate of crime, being particularly known for robbing non-Andanese, even though they were much richer than the people they stole from.

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 Shining Wave/PSL 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.

Although much less outstanding than Play and its daughter languages, the PSL languages were already noticeable for their heavy use of the bilabial consonants /p b m/, and so PSL speech sounded childish to speakers of Andanese and other neighboring languages, as if the PSL population lacked true adult men. This was subconsciously accepted by both the PSL's and their neighbors, and language became an identifying trait such that merely speaking the language was seen as an act of emasculation on the part of PSL men, and the other tribes took pity on PSL men for being legally and biologically bound to their language. It was not widely known in PSL society at the time that PSL's had anatomical difficulties pronouncing the languages of the other tribes because so few of each tribe learned the languages of the others, and because PSL was not quite so differentiated in its early stages. Later, when Play emerged as the language of the nation, the anatomical problems were known to all and the stereotype of Play being an emasculating language never fully took hold because the Play speakers were a majority and even though the nation was still officially pacifist the Play-speaking men had taken control of most of the jobs requiring heavy manual labor whereas the Andanese mostly worked with money and intellectual trades.

Pacifism and other traits

There were periods of time when the PSL's (and later Play speakers) were allowed greater access to alcohol than the other peoples they lived with. This was because the men of the other tribes were bound to military service, and the military commanders most often forbade their soldiers to drink wine even during peacetime. Then, to be seen as fair, they also forbade the women of their tribes from drinking wine. Therefore, wine was produced and consumed by the PSL people only, except when others broke the law. It is likely that most alcohol never traveled far outside the vineyards where it was produced, and therefore when people of other tribes stole wine they robbed the vineyards rather than going to a bar or a store to find wine for sale. Nonetheless, wine bars did exist because not all PSL's had access to vineyards.

At other periods of time, however, the PSL's had difficulty accessing wine for various reasons.

Lacking weapons, they could not fight back when the government forced them to shut down vineyards in order to grow food during times of famine.

Similarly, even when they had vineyards, sometimes the government would confiscate their crops and then force them to buy the product back from authorized resellers, although this only happened a few times in the 3,000+ year history of Pubumaus.

A third happening was that sometimes an armed criminal group would take control of the alcohol distribution, typically respecting the farmers' right to hold on to their harvests, but making profits from distribution of alcohol to people wishing to drink but who did not have physical access to the vineyards. These customers would be both PSL's and people of other tribes.

Lastly, sometimes alcohol was considered a medical product, and therefore distribution was shared with the Andanese tribes, who were the only doctors in the nation because they were the only ones whose school systems taught medicine.

Laws about alcohol

Most of the time, the PSL's could only sell alcohol to fellow PSL's, and therefore their bars refused entry to anyone not fluent in the PSL language or who was visibly of a different tribe. This was not seen as racial discrimination because the PSL's mostly opposed these laws, as they wanted more customers, and the laws were enforced by the tribal authorities of each tribe, who had passed the laws not because of discrimination against their own kind, or even to deny service to the PSL people, but because they believed alcohol was unfit for a soldier, and all of their men had to serve in the military.

Later years

These laws came and went as governments changed over time, and there is no general truth that can describe the situation for the entire ~3500 year period. But laws such as this continued to come into force even during the latest years of the territory, when Play speakers and Andanese speakers were the only two tribes left in significant numbers, and had become physically indistinguishable from each other, their differences being marked by language and by lifestyle. Since most people were bilingual, it was easy for an Andanese person to pretend to be a Play speaker and therefore enter a bar, but they would be punished by their fellow Andanese if they were discovered, and it was difficult for them to hide this, because they could not easily bring alcohol with them to consume at home and bars were located in public accessible places.

Associated culturebound stereotypes

As above, the PSL's were not blamed or categorized as racists, because they were the ones who were trying to abolish the discriminatory laws. However they were often blamed for trying to corrupt the morals of the other groups, it being said that the PSL's were the only ones who needed alcohol to get through the day, and that the other tribes were therefore of more stout moral character and of a hardier personality type. This was more insulting to the PSL's than any accusation of racism could be because the PSL's took pride in their physical hardiness and willingness to perform heavy manual labor outdoors.

PSL's nonetheless accepted the stereotype that they were more controlled by animal instincts than were other people. In their earliest years, they had tried to assign this stereotype to the Dreamers, but the Dreamers were soon forgotten. Soon even mentioning the Dreamers had become a joke among the other tribes, as they seemed to come up in conversation only when the PSL's felt they were being unfairly disparaged and needed a way to parry the joke to an unseen target who could not answer back.

Comparison to Dreamers

In later years, alcoholism came to be associated with the perennially hated Dreamer nation, but people in Pubumaus who drank wine simply said that they did not suffer addiction the way Dreamers did.

Duřanuunma and the politics of crisis

Relations were well in PSL society until a natural disaster around the year 750 (only about two hundred years into the period of settlemnt) in which many PSL people died but the other tribes were largely unaffected. This was not a plague, as any plague would have spread throughout the population about equally. It may have been a famine, in which the PSL's who were mostly farmers were made to give up their food and the other people were not, but this is not the only possible explanation, and it has weaknesses, because the PSL's were known to have maintained a relatively sheltered lifestyle because they controlled the food supply even though in many other societies farmers were little more than slaves and had the lowest standard of living; here, the PSL's were comparable to and even in many cases above the Andanese who were the merchant caste and were financially better off.

In particular, the PSL's had expected the other tribes to suffer as much as they were, but were at first surprised, and then angry, when they realized that the disaster was not affecting the other tribes much at all. Then, next, they figured that although some of the other groups may be doing well, there would likely be at least one other group, perhaps the Andanese, who were also suffering as much as the PSL's. When they realized that this was wrong as well, they turned to leaders like Duřanuunma to exert their interests against the other tribes, even though traditionally their society had prospered due to the lack of examples of "all against one" and "one against all" mentalityt where one group considers itself oppressed by the others cooperatively and therefore consideres it justifiable to seek additional power above what htey would normally be afforded by the cooperative treaties of the government.

EC voting

Though not a democracy, they used the "EC" voting system (same as what appeared thousands of years later). EC does not stand for electoral college but rather a ciphered abbreviation of a Play word that is irrelevant in pre-Play society. The PSL term for the system might be something like nupa yabāša.

In the EC system, there was a king and a parliament. The parliamentarians had a flexible number of seats, but they typically were only a few dozen in number, unlike the much larger parliaments of later years in which every town was allowed at least one representative at the imperial level.

The parliament could not increase its power by admitting more members, and that is why they preferred to be small. New members were admitted from the general public (though often they were children of existing members), and citizens could also nominate themselves by traveling to the Parliament building in the capital (later called Pūpepas, because it is the same city).

Admission of new members

NOTE: Such an arbitrary number (decided by a die roll) can easily be replaced by another one, but the important idea is that it comes up twice. If kept as 76, the fact that 3:1 is very close to 76% provides a near third use, because the people at this time used base 10.

Admission was given by the "Rules of 76".

Entrance was guaranteed unless a nearly unanimous vote of the sitting parliamentarians denied admission. In this vote, those from the applicant's hometown could not vote, and this usually meant that they were not blood relatives of the applicant either, but known blood relatives also could not vote even if they lived in a different town. If a sitting member were found to have voted illegally, they would be thrown out but the applicant would be allowed to remain.

It could be that an applicant would accede to Parliament with the support of just one sitting member, depending on certain other rules. The maximum ratio that could allow accession was 75:1, that is, with the support of just one member for every 76 in Parliament. Since there were usually fewer than 76 parliamentarians, even if the candidate was required to pass a heavier burden (according to other rules), they could still be admitted with the support of just one sitting member. This was because the framers of the system realized from the outset that the Parliament had a strong incentive to remain with a small number of representatives, and that it could in theory shrink to just one family if the sitting parliamentarians kept dying without appointing new members other than their own relatives. Women could serve in Parliament, so they could even marry each other.

Hurdles

The above rule applied to the most qualified applicants. Others would have to earn the support of more than just one person. The highest this could be (that is, the minimum ratio that could be used to deny accession, minus one) was 3:1. Therefore even the worst-qualified applicant — a criminal, illiterate, with vulnerable dependents at home, etc — would automatically be approved to Parliament if at least one fourth of the sitting members supported their accession.

Calculations of hurdles

The above hurdles were calculated by the "rules of 76". The two extremes of 75:1 and 3:1 can be rewritten as 1/76 and 19/76. That is, for a hypothetical parliament of 76 members, the applicant needed to get the support of at least 1 and at most 19 sitting members to be admitted to parliament. The precise number was calculated from how qualified they were, as above, with traits such as education and past history counting for or against them. Family ties did not factor into this because of the above rules regarding relatives voting.

The required number was always rounded up, so e.g. if there were just 30 members in parliament, this would round to 1/30 and not to zero.

Tribal parliaments

Each tribe (and later, caste) had its own parliament, and each one only could make laws that applied to that tribe. The aboriginals and those excluded from the system were assigned to the PSL's, and theoretically could accede to the PSL parliament, but the PSL's chose to not admit any ethnic minority members. The "Sukuna" aboriginals (the ones who had lived in the capital city area) were excluded because they had a traditional government system of their own and the other groups considered this sufficient to prevent conflicts in which one group would be able to commit crimes because they were breaking only their own laws and could not be tried under the other tribe's court system. The other groups were simply not considered citizens.

Early PSL school system and demographics

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.

Rural-urban divide

The countryside was almost entirely Lenian PSL except for the BC zone (see below). There were only three major coastal cities in the central part of empire and in all three, Lenians were a tiny minority (4%, 12%, and 11%), despite the empire being founded and expanded by Lenians. Moreover the Lenians in the imperial capital city (the 12%) had become a closed-entry group and cut themselves off from the rest, meaning that effectively there were 0% Lenians there if defining Lenians as an open-entry tribe.

The people living in the BC zone were the only significant group of rural dwellers with aboriginal ancestry, but even they were mostly Lenian. The BC capital was in some sense more Lenian than the Lenians' own capital. Taking these groups together, they identified as PSL's and were the only farmers in their territory. Thus, although they were poor and were often cheated in commerce in the cities, they controlled most of the food supply (the rest was from fishing) and maintained a sense of solidarity they felt would help them if their nation were to ever break up into civil war.

Also, there was one city in the east, Ňiyašinžata, which was in fact 89% Lenians, but was not closely connected to the others by roads and functioned as a rural market town rather than trading with the cities or with other nations. It was the only major city that was inland. Further east was Thaoa which was at this time culturally united and considered itself PSL.

Farming in early PSL society

Vineyards

Grape wine (PSL babun bata) was not native to the area. The Lenian farmers moved in and commediately inverted the forests into vineyards, growing crops in areas where none had grown before. Thus, they did not decrease the food supply by focusing on wine. Thus the PSL's controlled the wine industry just as they controlled the food supply, and since they were the majority, they were most of the consumers as well, but they made profits from selling wine to the non-farming groups.

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.

The PSL capital city had been taken from the aboriginals, and that meant that the aboriginals no longer had a capital city, or even a city, of their own. At first the PSL's had been hostile, but they never attempted to remove the aboriginals from their territory because they were mostly living in the woodlands where few aboriginals had been. Most people in the capital city had aboriginal ancestry even if they were enrolled into the PSL tribe. The outlying rural areas however were almost entirely PSL because there had been few aboriginals and they could not make a living with the PSL's occupying their land.

By the mid-700s, PSL's of Lenian ancestry were scarcely one tenth of the population of their capital city, Badamulibi. This was for several reasons. Firstly, the aboriginals were the ones who had built the city in the first place. Also, many PSL's married into aboriginal families. Additionally, the Lenians could not prevent the immigration of other tribes into their territory because of pro-Andanese shipping treaties, which affected only the Lenians and not the other groups, and the Andanese and other immigrant groups almost always moved to Badamulibi rather than to the countryside or to other cities. The Andanese had taken control of the sea east of Badamulibi and were already seeking to accumulate wealth and power.

The Lenians in the capital city worried that a tribal conflict was coming and that they would lose because they were outnumbered in their own territory by a substantial margin and did not expect that the other groups with them would turn against each other. They hoped that the PSL's in the rural areas, who were still overwhelmingly Lenians, would side with the Lenians in the capital, but because the Lenians in the capital withheld entry to those very people, the rurals identified more with the commoners in the capital than with the Lenians, who were accumulating wealth and power and attempting to stay the Andanese and other groups who were aiming for the same high status.

There was no PSL identity based on racial heritage. Although it was hereditary, the rural people had been driven together with the aboriginals by the actions of the Lenian rulers in the capital and by the immigration of other groups, such as the Nik and Rasula people, who had effectively created nations of their own and did not mend ties with the aboriginals who had earlier owned that land. However, there was still a tribal identity based on language, so it was not true to say that the PSL's and the aboriginals had become part of the same tribe.

At this time, the Lenians, the Andanese, and the Rasula were all vying for economic control of the capital city, though the Rasula were forced to do this mostly from offshore, as the Lenians had decided that because they had their own territory they did not need to live in the capital city and could not become citizens. However they were unable to keep out the Andanese, and because the Andanese had their own language and were mostly not marrying the other groups, they felt the Andanese would post a threat their power in the future more than the Rasula or other groups would. The Lenians had financial control of the Andanese school system but not to such an extent that they could appoint pro-Lenian teachers. They could only threaten to withhold funds or to force the Andanese students to work child labor to pay their tuition.

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.

The Andanese did not accept that they were more intelligent by nature than the people around them. They believed that the PSL's and others could also handle mathematics and medicine and other skilled trades, but because the Andanese were already vulnerable, they had no desire to share their knowledge, and so occupations requiring advanced knowledge soon became the exclusive domain of the Andanese, and all literature was written in Andanese so that it was inaccessible even to others who wanted to learn.

The Andanese shared the cultural trait of pursuing the rugged lifestyle that the Players later called žaipa. It may have had a name like gògʷo in the early Andanese language.

Niklas

The Nik people arrived shortly after the Lenians, and were unable to work out a treaty that both sides agreed with, so they went to war and conquered much of the Lenians' westernmost territory. Outside powers later forced the Niks and Lenians to cooperate, but the frontier in the wilderness never had a defined border.

Niklas is the poorest part of the empire, and the only part without a cash economy.

The Nik capital city had a name that would have been Gʷulgəkun in Gold and Pūvepum in Play. (This name is therefore not the Niks' native name, but it will be used here because the Nik language is not part of the Gold family.)

By the mid-700s, the Nik people were a 94% majority in their capital city, despite having arrived in their territory later than all of the other groups. This is much higher than the majorities in other territories, including the PSL's own capital city.

Nik schools

Like the Lenian/PSL people, the Nik schools were directed towards non-academic pursuits, mostly war and the acquisition of food.

Rasula

This group is similar to the Niks above, but they were themselves related to the Leapers and may have had a higher standard of living provided by superior boat-crafting technology and contact with foreign nations through trade. They were located in the southeast, which was far from AlphaLeap but nonetheless easily reachable by boat.

The Rasula capital city had a name that would have become Ḳəŋūtupa in Gold and then Keŋūtupa in Play, and as above this was not the native name for that city, nor even the Players' name for it, but rather what the name would have become.

By the mid-700s, the Rasula people were about 2/3 of their capital city's population, with aboriginals making up most of the rest, though the PSL's also were about one tenth. This is despite that they were there slightly earlier than the PSL's and Andanese. They were a closed-entry tribe with a small originating population (only about 20,000), and expected to become a minority ruling class over time, meaning that they would be much richer than the people they ruled over and would need to worry about revolt. Like the Lenians in the capital, they sensed that the rural population was against them, and unlike those people they had no hope of finding allies in the countryside at all. They wanted to establish family ties by having their lower classes marry in to the PSL and aboriginal families, but realized that few aboriginals would be interested and that the rural PSL's were moving quickly towards identifying as aboriginals themselves. That is, even though the PSL's had invaded and pushed out the aboriginals in the rural areas, they had won the respect of the aboriginals in a way the other groups had not, and the aboriginals did not complain about wanting their land back from the PSL's even as they complained about the Nik and Rasula invasions. As above this was because the PSL's had chosen to put themselves in a low standard of living, except for the ruling class in the capital, and that ruling class was another closed-entry group (though not a tribe) and therefore the rural PSL's sided with the aboriginals instead of with their relatives in the capital.

Rasula schools

Rasula schools taught academic subjects, including finance, and they were the richest part of the territory, but their standard of living was still not much higher than the other colonist groups because they were confined to a small area with few natural resources, and because they could not patrol the sea the way the Leapers did.

Thaoa

Thaoa was still part of the empire at this time. Their capital city was Satarisaňesin, but more often known by its local name, Mpippi. These people were Lenians and the political divide that characterized later centuries had not appeared yet, so they had no political parties of their own.

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.

Tribal boundaries

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 from rural areas such as this (not from the capital), and people began to think of anyone with dark skin as an aboriginal.

Outsiders believed that the BC's were racially hostile to each other because of what appeared to be a dearth of intermarriage, again not realizing that it was because of immigration, and therefore people such as the Lenians in the capital hoped to spark a racial conflict in BC in which they would spur the Lenians to attack the aboriginals, and then spread the war to the whole nation. Assuming that they would easily win, they would sign a treaty offering amnesty to the aboriginals if they would disarm and accept a low status in society.

Other info

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. It was near the capital and played a small part in defining the future ancestry of the capital dwellers (e.g. the Players), but the population of BC was small by comparison to the cities.

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.

Language of BC

The Star language remained the official language of BC, even though most of the population was of other origins, because they did not want to speak the same language as the rulers in the capital, as tribal ancestry was mostly based on language, and they realized that if they were PSL's that they would need to attend PSL schools and follow PSL laws. Thus a new "Star" tribe was formed.

Later developments

Because of the BC zone, there was no firm line between PSL and aboriginal ancestry, and therefore the laws for the PSL's came to apply to aboriginals as well. Thus the Lenians in the capital ordered both groups to disarm instead of just the aboriginals. This included the people of Nik and Rasula entry who had claimed to be aboriginals in order to join BC.

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.