Play language

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 four vowels, and words with schwa are usually cognate to words with clusters or syllable-final consonants 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). Compounds were especially prone to triple vowels because they often preserved older sound changes in which a medial voiced consonant dropped out. The name of the most famous speakers of the Bābā language is Nuaaā, literally meaning "Swamp Boys", because they were a male-dominated society but their men saw themselves as mere boys in the face of the many great dangers amongst them. (The name used in this encyclopedia is Swamp Kids, however.) They lived in an era in which most people identified not with their ethnicity but with their political party. Thus, one could be a Nuaaā one day and a Mabimbižip the next.

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 stereotypical toddlers' 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. The name of the speakers' capital city, likewise, changed from Bābā to Babababa. (Bābā was the word for "nursery, maternity ward", and is cognate to the word for nest above.) However, words as extreme as these were generally discarded after that sound change took place. The name of the city was changed from Babababa to just Baba (later Paba).

Labial vs non-labial consonants

Bilabial consonants are by far the most common, as in Pabappa, Poswa, and the Outer Poswob languages. However, Bābākiam is not as extreme as its descendants, which are almost entirely void of dorsal consonants.

Consonant-based gender system

In the Gold language, a robust gender system based on consonant harmony existed, and this is reflected in a few modern words, such as mume "wife" and tute "husband". Bābā speakers will often say that a word with a lot of t sounds feels masculine, whereas a word with a lot of m or n sounds feels feminine. This has little importance to the language at present because new words are not normally coined merely by changing their internal consonants around. But the gender system still operates in a limited set of words which can be considered a category of their own.

It could be said that Babakiam does not have a true masculine gender, but merely marks the presence or absence of femininity. A group of humans with no females would be grouped under the /t/ gender: men, boys, and children of indistinct or unknown gender. A group of humans with some females and some non-females would be grouped under the /p/ gender: humans in general; babies of unknown gender; epicene (but not including neuters). A group of humans containing exclusively females would be grouped under either the /m/ gender (adult women; married women) or the /n/ gender (girls and young women; unmarried women). In all of the above cases, a "group" consisting of a single individual will still be given the same gender predicted by the descriptions.

Note that Bābākiam's gender consonants describe age as well as sex. The category of "girl" (/n/) is bounded from below by "young children of indeterminate gender" and from above by "adult women; married women". For the lower boundary, children who think of themselves as girls rather than merely children are old enough to be out of the "men, boys, and children" grouping; and on the upper boundary, women that are married or are old enough to be married are out of the "girls" grouping unless they choose to self-identify otherwise. Since there is no masculine gender, men do not go through this process; they remain children for their entire lives.

The same /t/ that has historically marked masculinity now also refers to young boys and to children of indistinct gender (i.e. "the crowd of children stood and stared). An adult woman will go with the /m/ sound, and a young girl (or unmarried woman) will go with the /n/ sound. For a group of people containing both females and either men or children of indistinct gender, the default human gender is used, which is /p/. This, in turn, is distinct from the epicene gender, which includes pairings of humans (of any gender) with neuter nouns such as nonliving things and some animals.

Conso	Applies to
-----	----
 p	Humans in general; epicene (but not including neuters)
 t	Men, boys, and children of indistinct gender
 n	Girls and young women; unmarried women
 m	Adult women, married women
 s	Epicene (all genders taken as one, including neuters)
 b	Neuter (nonliving things and animals of indistinct gender)

Sticky sibilants

Babakiam has three sibilants, /s š ž/. However, the native syllabary includes a row for a sound that can be Romanized /č/. This arose originally from /k/ before a high vowel, and was for a long time pronounced /č/, but today this sound is actually pronounced identically to /š/, and is thus usually Romanized as /š/. However, the native alphabet indicates it with a separate letter because it behaves differently in some grammatical processes.

The main difference between the two is that /š/ is a sticky consonant, meaning that it will change to accommodate the thematic consonant of any word it occurs in, or any modified by the word it occurs in. Thus, the surface /š/ is not a very common consonant. Thus, for example, šamša means "rabbit", but one says

Paupi pampa.

Forest rabbit.

/š/ is found in the inflected forms of words that end in -s, and this š also changes to reflect the thematic consonant. Thus, for example, the genitive form of tapis "paper" is not *tapišis, but rather tapitis.

There are a few words in the language in which other consonants seem to have become sticky as well; these are due to older grammatical processes related to the consonant-based gender system, however, which at the time was a distinct grammatical prcoess.

Phonotactics and sandhi

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"