User:Soap

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Hi, I'm Soap and I have a 7½ year gap between my first and second edits  : )

UPDATE: I now (as of Oct 3, 2015) have crossed over 1000 edits here. Again, thank you to everyone keeping this site up.
Okay WOW. As of Feb 2020, I now have over 10,000 edits on this account plus nearly 9,000 on my other account. Right now I'm, judging by the diff ID numbers, almost one fifth of the total edit count here and probably therefore also about one fifth of the content (but not one fifth of the pages, as I tend to make very large articles.) However, I'm slowing down lately, both because I've run out of things to write on some projects and because some other projects are better suited to an HTML website rather than a wiki.


I work on conlangs that exist on the planet Teppala, and although I'm not very active I try to devote a small amount of time to conlanging each week. Right now I've got huge plans for a timeline stretching from 21000BC to 12850 AD, so 34000 years of sound changes, although only the middle is well developed.

Early on in my conlanging career I created a word for "embarrassmentlessness": du. That is one of my favorite words, since I seem to have a history of doing things that should be hideously embarrassing but just didn't faze me at the time. On the other hand, I get embarrassed over simple things that bother nobody else.

My conworld could be called Lapelpassa, which is Pabappa for "The Great Dream" (I came up with that name in 2008 but just rediscovered it in 2015). Normally, "the great dream" would be Passim passa, but that sounds too repetitive and Pabappa doesnt like near-reduplication. It could just be Passim. However, I dont really like those names, so I will just go by the name of its only inhabited planet, Teppala.

My conlangs are notable for various strong tendencies reuslting fromm y personal preferences:

  • An abundance of bilabial consonants, especially /p/. Sometimes mixed with abundance of other consonants, as in Khulls, sometimes left on their own to rule the entire phonology, as in the extreme examples of Poswa and Pabappa.
  • Plenty of words for soap.
  • Kinship terms are generally monosyllables, even in languages that have no other monosyllabic nouns.
  • Very strong noun inflection, based on fusion and infixation, and moderately strong verb inflection as well.
  • Extremely conservative grammars, retaining traits for over 10000 years with little change. For example, Poswa has retained six of the seven major noun cases of its ancestor from 8700 years ago, and added no new cases. However, some languages, such as Moonshine, have in fact rapidly changed their grammars and retain little resemblance to their ancestors.


Pages created:

I also have many others pages on KneeQuickie.

Conworld writing style

I am not a good writer. But one rule I've always held to is to never reject any of my ideas at all. Everything I've written since I was three years old is now and will forever be canonical. When one idea contradicts another, they are either both true at separate times or one of the names is changed. Since creating a nation called "Camia" when I was 11 years old, I've had several more Camias, thus explaining how "Camia" can be utterly destroyed by one of its enemies and then a few hundred years later be on the verge of conquering the world. People, too, can appear multiple times, under different names. The two powerful female leaders Ende and Joja were originally the same person in my writings, even though they lived 300 years apart. Both of these were originally "Nancy" who was the leader of a club for children in Camia who wanted to Save The World. A similar person, Afunyū, lived in the 1900s, but I now realize when I wrote that she was Nancy I was using a metaphor.

I did not hold to this rule early on. I just now found a note to myself "Remember, the plots of the book are completely detached from the comics, which gave way to the book in Nov '93." Neither the book I was writing then nor the comics that precede it are mentioned here however, as they dealt with fine details happening to just a few people whereas my history books deal with large events. However, a few things do appear in both, such as the firebirds' attack on Sala.

Particularly when I was younger, but even now that I'm in my thirties, I came up with ideas that seemed impossible to reconcile with other ideas later on. For example, when I was 13 years old, I wrote a story in which two 13-year-old boys in Camia learned that Camia's enemy, Wamia, was going to try to defeat Camia by crashing them into the sun. Even though Camia and Wamia were on the same planet, Wamia didnt worry about problems because they were fighting a "weather" war, and any increase in temperature, even to absurd levels, would not hurt Wamia. But when the two 13-year-old boys in STW discovered that Wamia was contemplating whether to "shoot the sun at them" they ended the war by destroying the sun. Then they fled to planet Nama to ponder whether they had done the right thing.

Since this event is still canonical, I have to find a way to work it into the story. My conworld no longer has computers or spaceships or interplanetary ballistic missiles, and I like it that way since there is no longer any possible way for one nation to "destroy the universe". Even with my insistence to keeping absolutely everything, I am willing to move events from one time period to another and thus greatly change the details of what happened so long as the event itself is preserved. Planets become countries.[1] Aliens become animals. Guns[2] become arrows and missile attacks become ground force invasions. Destroying the sun, however, has so far resisted my attempts at working it into the story. In a truly unintended irony, the names of the two young boys who fired the missiles that destroyed the sun were named the Golden Sun and the Red Sun, on account of their respective hair color, which was noticeable because they were immigrants into a city where the vast majority of the population was dark-skinned.[3] I didnt realize the irony because I wrote the story about destroying the sun four years before I got the idea to start giving everyone bynames instead of developing hundreds of conlangs for each time period and using names from those conlangs. In a second irony, the Red Sun was patterned entirely on a person I had known growing up who thought blonde hair looked weird in any context and often made fun of blonde people. The Golden Sun, meanwhile, was patterned entirely after myself, which is why the Golden Sun is the leader of the group and the Red Sun merely second in command. However, he (I) was "so generous" towards his friend that even though he was originally simply named the Sun, because of course the sun is yellow, he changed his name to the Golden Sun to show that he was considering himself merely the equal of his otherwise less-admired friend.

One thing I do know is that destroying the sun was the explanation for why the Raspara people, hideous parasites whose entire existence depended on abusing the people they lived amongst, suddenly had no power and could not prevent the ascendancy of a government run by the people they had abused for the last sixty years.


Notes

  1. ↑ I have kept one planet as a planet, though, Imama-Hamapaa, because I believed that that planet and its landforms appeared large enough in the sky to let the humans living on Teppala know that other planets existed. However, Ive just now realized that the term sister planet doesnt mean what I thought, and that it would probably just have to be a moon.
  2. ↑ My conworld has always lacked "guns" in the sense that most modern people conceive of them. I basically invented tasers when I was 11, and have no idea if they existed in real life or not at the time. Thus it was possible to fight a major war with absolutely zero deaths and few wounded. However, people still used fatal weapons of other types.
  3. ↑ Im backtracking a bit on the idea of not using "Golden". Also, I have no idea where I came up with the names. I only noticed several years further on that the Red Sun happened to have red hair and that the Golden Sun had brown hair but, since he was patterned after me, in all honesty should have been blonde at least when he was 13 years old. The fact that they lived in a dark-skinned country is also new, as Baeba Swamp was patterned after a town in Maine that was around 95% white, and in my stories was a mix between whites and Japanese. Why Japanese? I still at that time had not yet given up playing video games and therefore the foreign ethnicity I was most in touch with was the Japanese people who kept feeding me more and more video games that I loved.
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