Subumpam

Temporary name.

Mimalebra' is a culture and language spoken just to the west of the ancestral Pabap homeland. The culture died out in this area fairly early, crushed by Khulls and Pabap expansion, but by then they had already explored much of the interior of the continent (reaching 39N in the east) and became the substratum in the territory of Goga.

Phonology

Overall the language is "soft" and childish, like Pabappa, but to a lesser extent. It shifted all of its labialized consonants to pure labials, e.g. /kʷ/ > /p/, and then shifted its plain velars to palatals and sometimes on to coronals. Thus there are few dorsal consonants remaining in the language. However, the voiceless ejective /ḳ/ was immune to the second of these changes, and thus survived as a plain velar in the classical form of the language.

It is also unusual in that for most of its history, it had an /r/ but no /l/ sound, the opposite pattern to most og the languages around it. However, Babakiam had neither of these sounds (the 'r' in Poswa and Pabappa is a uvular approximant.)

Vowels

/a e i o u ā ē ī ō ū/ Tones have been eliminated, but the ā tone survives as vowel length. Macrons are also used to tell diphthongs like ūi (/uj/) from simple sequences like ui (/ui/, often [wi]).