Subumpam

Temporary name. Subum is actually a Pabappa word meaning "because of (military) victory", and -pam is Pabappa for "state" (though it was borrowed into Subnumpamese). It served as the capital territory of the Gold Empire around the year 1950. This was an alliance of states situated around the coasts of the Golden Bay intending to keep Nama, the largest state, from controlling the right of way of all the other states. Nama itself was invited to join the union but did not.

Subumpam is a culture and language spoken just to the west of the ancestral Pabap homeland. They built cities such as Wabula Pipem. 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. They lived in the vicinity of the area of Blop, but did not settle Blop because there were at the time many other rivers and lakes nearby. The planet was still much colder then, with glaciers quickly retreating but still present in many areas which were much warmer than 32°F. Thus they found that by moving west they could easily find warmer territories, with mild summers but winters just as warm as their original homeland in the south.

The modern name of their territory is Subumpam, but the borders do not correspond very well. Today Subumpam is mostly populated by Poswobs rather than Pabaps, and in its western part there are many Khulls speakers as well.

In the northeast, they settled in what are now the Poswob states of Tuppy, Wawiabi, and Fweb.

In the northwest, they settled in Goga.

Between Goga and Wawiabi they settled all across the north coast, but here they were otunumberd by aboriginals to a much greater extemnt and therefore did not actually create "Subumpamese" settlements, but merely made the existing aboriginal settlements a bit more diverse.

To the southeast of Subumpam, along the coast, is the Pabap state of Pipapi. Its borders today include some land that was originally within Subumpam.

Phonology

Overall the language is "soft" and not intimidating, like its neighbor Kava, and to a lesser extent also like Pabappa and Poswa. 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]).

Consonants

/p b m f v w/ for labials; /t d n s z r c ʒ/ for dentals/alveolars; /č ǯ š ž j/ for postalveolars/palatals; and /k ŋ/ for the velars. The vowel /i/, be it short or long, palatalizes any alveolars before it, and therefore the palatal series can be considered to instead be /cj ʒj sj zj j/, reducing the number of consonants by four. Voiced stops and fricatives are fairly rare. In syllable-final position, the allowable sounds are /m n ŋ/, /t d n s z c ʒ/, and /k/. No vowels were deleted, so any final consonant in Subumpamese was a final consonant in Gold as well.

Culture

Despite being commonly associated with Pabap culture due to similarities in appearance, culture, and language, the two groups are not particularly closely related. Both tended to have blonde hair, but they had different facial features. Subumpamese people were taller but markedly thinner than Pabaps even from the earliest days of their coexistence. However, they commonly blended with each other due to the close proximity of their nations. However, both groups blended more with Andanese, who were still numerically superior at this time.