Paba

Bābākiam is the name of the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa, spoken around the year 4200 in Paba. The name means simply "language of Bābā", where Bābā is the old name of Paba.

Phonology

Babakiam is the parent language of Poswa and Pabappa and thus shares with these languages many characteristics.

Vowels

There are four vowels, /a i u ə/, spelled a i u e. The first three vowels can also be long. The schwa is the rarest of the three vowels, and words with schwa are usually cognate to words with no vowel in closely related languages such as Khulls.

In its classical stage, Babakiam was notable for allowing unrestricted vowel sequences, particularly of /a/, for example bāaaau "(park) bench", which is syllabified as bā-a-a-au (four syllables), and paaapa "dark-haired". Such words were rare, however, and almost always transparent compounds (as in the case of bāaaau) or loanwords (as in the case of paaapa). Nevertheless, Bābākiam does maintain the unusual distinction between long vowels and a sequence of two short vowels, and minimal pairs of this type are very common. Vowel sequences often result from the deletion of voiced fricatives between vowels (/ž/ is the only voiced fricative remaining in the language), whereas long vowels generally were long in the parent language and result from a series of much earlier sound shifts. Other words, such as taīū "maple leaf", exhibit both types of changes.

The vowels /i/ and /u/ become /j/ (spelled "y") and /w/ (spelled "v") before other vowels and in some positions also after vowels. Thus a word like patiyiyibis "bladder" is phonemically /patiiiiibis/, with five /i/'s in a row.

Babakiam was still called Babakiam as late as the year 6000, because the dialects were mutually intelligible (and indeed almost identical) to the language spoken in Paba (then called Baba). No phonemes were lost going from Babakiam to Poswa other than the vowel length, which was lost early on. On the other hand, Pabappa lost many of its phonemes.

Consonants

The consonant inventory is very simple: /p b m f w t n s š ž j k ŋ/, unless /w j/ are considered allophones of the vowels. It is unusual in that it lacks liquid phonemes entirely when all the languages around it have /l/ and most also have an /r/-like sound. Thus Babakiam sounds like children's speech. /b/ is the most common consonant, and in later stages of the language, it became even more common because /b/ was inserted to break up the monstrous sequences of /a/ and /ə/ that had existed in the parent language. Thus classical Babakiam taabābā "nest" became tabababababa and bāaaau became bababababar.

Most words end in vowels, but can also end in /p m s/.

Comparison of words:

4200 Babakiam peskavu sabayiuŋaus

6000 Babakiam pyskary šalergos

8700 Poswa pwaršalios

8700 Pabappa pospalerba "soap bubble wand"

Culture

Early settlement

Bābā (hereafter Paba) was founded very early by immigrants from Laba. Though later famous for being the most pacifistic people in the world, the early Pabaps were just like their neighbors. They landed and estabslihed a new city on the south coast called Panama. (Panama means "port, harbor" in Pabappa.) Here, they grew rapidly northwards, killing any aboriginals they met who refused to convert to the Yiibam religion and were unable to escape into the cold interior.

The Pabaps had come from the highlands of Laba, in which people rarely traveled outside their home village because travel through the mountains was so difficult. Thus they had a highly diverse culture internally. However, despite being confined to the mountains, they actually had an advantage in getting out of Laba because they had access to rivers which emptied into ports along the East Coast of Laba that were further north than the port cities of their primary antagonists on Laba. Thus, while one might have expected the settlement of Rilola to be dominated by oceanic Laban peoples such as the Tasnu, Pabaps had a far higher proportion of their population move over than did the Tasnu. Still, because the highlands were difficult to build large cities in, Paba's population was small compared to many other nations on Rilola.

Minorities

Paba was also a target of immigration from other Laban nations. The Andanese people moved from Laba to Paba and reached their highest population density in Paba. They did not convert to the Yiibam religion, which was a rare exception to Paba's policy of insisting that their new nation respect only the Yiibam religion. This was allowed because the Andanese in Paba had sworn to always be loyal ot Paba, effectively considering all of Paba to be Andanese home territory, rather than behave as they did in many other nations where the Andanese minority was aggressive and unwelcome and often collaborated with invaders during a war.

The Tarpabap people were the second largest minority in Paba. They had come from the far south of Laba, including the equatorial islands that were being rapidly flooded by rising ocean waters as the glaciers of the interior quickly melted. They felt they needed a new homeland to settle in and chose Paba. Earlier, Paba had had access to the most convenient port in all of southern Laba from which to embark on a sea journey to reach Rilola, but they had very few seaworthy boats because they had no coastland of their own apart from a few cities in Andanese territory in which they had become a majority but not achieved formal independence. Thus the Tarpabaps, being all along an oceangoing people, gave Pabaps their ships in return for a formal alliance in which the two peoples would stick together. The Tarpabaps converted to the Yiibam religion more easily than the Andanese since their native religion had already been similar. Nevertheless, not all Tarpabaps converted, and those who stuck to their oreiginal religion from the tropics were treated badly by others in Paba, including the other Tarpabaps.

The Tarpabaps did not blend much with Pabaps because the two peoples were so strongly phyiscally different: Pabaps were among the shortest people in the world; Tarpabaps were among the tallest. However they occasionally did match up since neither group was monolithic in terms of body types. The presence of a few aboriginals who had converted to Yiibam and thus came to call themselves Pabaps helped with this, becayse the aboriginals here were in manys ways intermediate between the two other groups.

Many Tarpabap settlers in Paba figured that since the Pabaps were so small and physically delicate, they would be easy to push around, and that the Tarpabaps, despite being a minority, would soon be in control of the government of Paba. But they found that this was not so. Neither did they have success in dominating the Andanese minority, who were even smaller and more physically delicate than the Pabaps due to a lower amount of body fat. Both Pabaps and Tarpabaps were prone to violence, and they realized that they would be better off as allies than as enemies.