User:Soap/scratchpad

Doubly open fusional compounds

07:13, 6 April 2022 (PDT)

One very difficult aspect of Play for outsiders was the idea that two open classes, nouns and verbs, could fuse together to create new words that seemed atomic because they did not have an audible morpheme boundary and because both often underwent stem changes in addition. For example, pupa means book and vāu means to read, but neither of these words is audible in the compound word

Pukūavesa.

The book of yours that you read to me.

Which functions as a noun just like any other, since it begins with a root and ends with a classifier suffix, just like /pupa/ itself.

This is the verbal embedding written of below. Although Play did use a certain small set of a few dozen verbs much more commonly than all others, the fact that a phonetic formula existed for the embedding meant that the class of embeddable verbs was in fact the class of all verbs, and therefore was open.

Comparison to other languages

In most other languages, even highly complex ones, when fusion of two content words occurred, one of them belonged to a closed class.

Survival in Poswa

Poswa, a daughter language of Play, allowed fusion of the full set of nouns and verbs in its inalienables, such as pupabo "the field I plowed", and like Play this involves stem-changing, but the mutations are confined to the middle morpheme and are more severe than in Play; therefore Poswa speakers did not coin new words such as this quite so freely as did the Players, and teachers taught these words as augmented possessives. Poswa's augmented possessives are directly descended from Play's verbal embedding paradigm, but despite both morphemes theoretically covering the full open classes of nouns and verbs, in practice the middle morpheme was constrained both semantically and phonetically. This is because of sound changes in Poswa.

Moreover, these words are always inalienable nouns, because in Poswa there is no way to embed the verb without immediately attaching a person marker to that verb. In Play, there were no person markers, and the final morpheme in a verbal embedding construction was a classifier suffix, making such nouns behave like ordinary nouns.

Moonshine circumfixes

06:18, 1 April 2022 (PDT)

Moonshine's circumfixes (e.g. s-[woman]-č "woman's bathroom") can arise from zero-marked accusatives and locatives, but rapid change and analogy is required. These can be thought of as a rearrangement of Play's verbal embeddings, perhaps taking them inside-out, since the middle morpheme is always a noun and is bookended by morphemes that could be thought of as verbal; nonetheless, the result of the Moonshine construction is still a noun.

Demonstratives

11:40, 25 March 2022 (PDT)

Poswa has no demonstratives, and must use verbs with person markers on. (That is, "by me", "by you", etc.) It is possible that Play was the same way; but Play has a very complex noun structure already and adding a demonstrative suffix to it all would not overburden the speakers since it would only appear where certain other suffixes could not appear. For example, it seems logical that the demonstrative suffixes would never appear on nouns that were also tagged with the question particle tīs ~ tes (see below for derivation); if the question particle is also part of the same series of affixes as the "belief" mood markers, then it stands to reason the demonstratives can not cooccur with them either.

It would appear that Play does not have demonstratives, since verbal embedding and locatives are sufficient to cover both demonstratives of place and of deixis. Gold might have some inherited demonstratives, however, since verbal embedding was only just beginning to form.

Verbal embedding

14:15, 22 March 2022 (PDT)

Play uses verbal embedding to say things such as "the pillow you bought for me" and things even more complicated than that. Play can have up to four person markers on a single noun, and that is in addition to the noun itself behaving as a 3rd person object from the standpoint of other languages. The system may be entirely intact from Gold, for which reason it is described here. The Play system was:

NOUN + [Ø|ʕ] + VERB[A,B] + [Ø|s|p] + CLASSIFIER + [P].

The capital letters represent morphemes (A = agent, B = beneficiary, P = patient) while the lowercase letters represent Play phonemes; this is the fourth person marker, which can be called the possessor marker, although its semantic scope is much broader in this position than when it occurs alone.

In Play, it is commonplace to say things such as pukūaveepa "the book you read to me", from pupa "book". These words bewildered foreigners attempting to understand Play; note that the verb "to read" is vāu, hiding in a mutated form, much to the frustration of unfamiliar listeners.

The meaning of the [Ø|ʕ] morpheme is difficult to describe. Essentially it controls which of the two types of verbal embedding is used. If Ø is found, the rest of the word will be parsed with simple verbal embedding, like that of Thaoa (see below). If ʕ is found, a chain of morphemes follows, the complex verbal embedding paradigm, in which even the verb (the only content word) changes its form to agree with the morphemes around it. In Play, the /ʕ/ phoneme had long since gone silent, meaning that the structure served as its own marker; it may be that /ʕ/ was already silent in this position in Gold as well.

The [A,B] argument on the verb is a single morpheme, not two, and determines the agent and beneficiary (not patient) of the verb. It is strictly not a person marker, but rather a transitivity marker, whose person is determined by the following morphemes, which come from context.

The [Ø|s|p] morpheme is difficult to describe as well, but is a direct cognate of the possession markers, which are /p/ "self", /s/ "nonself", and /Ø/ "free".

The CLASSIFIER is mandatory, even if the free form of the noun has no classifier. This means that high-animate nouns, which can never take classifiers, cannot have complex verbal embedding; this in turn is no great inconvenience, since they typically are the agent of their own verbal phrase and do not need to have a marker for the agent.

Lastly, the patient marker [P] indicates the patient, which often refers to a verb OUTSIDE the embedding paradigm. Thus this morpheme links the word to the rest of the sentence. It is only used when the noun itself is the agent in this external verb; thus it is zero in a word like "the book you read to me", because the agent here is 2nd person, not the book.

Situation in Gold

It is almost certain that Gold pronounced /ʕ/ as /Ø/ in unstressed position, since the creation of this paradigm relies on it being ambiguous with the null stem; note that the logical choice for which case to use here would be the circumstantial, which has /-n/, not the locative with /ʕ/. But the locative spread because it was much easier to use. Yet Play managed to preserve /ʕ/ long enough for it to affect the following morpheme; this is a problem, though perhaps not an intractable one, as the speakers could have known the silent /ʕ/ was there and applied analogical lenition later on.

Comparison to Thaoa

Thaoa used verbal embedding as well, but three of the four morphemes were blanks. Thus the Thaoa system was just a minor subset of the Play system. Essentially, Thaoa always selects Ø from [Ø|ʕ], Ø from [Ø|s|p], and omits the patient (although it can use the same morpheme in a different way). It may not even be able to use the [A,B] morpheme.

Borrowed property

The Gold verb hàda "borrow" could be used to denote property which is borrowed, or as a form of politeness. The Play reflex of this would be /aa/, but it is unlikely that the verb would be used in common speech, even with Play's tolerance of long vowel sequences. For example, it would lead to words like saaaaapa "the rock you borrowed from me", representing pre-Gold sadaʕ hadagak plus a Play-innovated classifier suffix.

Since Play keeps the system alive, it does not need to rely on fossil morphemes, and can simply substitute a new word with a similar meaning, such as /muna/, which would lead to saamunaapa for the word above.

Gluons

06:25, 22 March 2022 (PDT)

Gold was able to indicate the person of both the agent and patient with just one morpheme, and that one morpheme took only four values: -k -Ø -s -ʕ for 1:1 1:2 2:2 2:1. (These are technically infixes, but presented here as suffixes due to their most common realizations.) The same quartet also indicates 3:1 1:3 3:2 2:3 by adding one argument into the sentence, and then, potentially, REFL 3:4 DIST 4:3 either by adding two arguments or by context in a sentence with zero or one arguments. (These could even be indicated as 3:3 3:4 4:4 4:3 to make the symmetry complete, but REFL and DIST had more than one use.)

This means that the other affixes, -l -n -ḳ, are free to mark other things on verbs. However, they may just be noun cases, since the first four are also used on nouns.

Resolving ambiguities

When the gluon system first evolved, likely before the Trout stage, the language still had classifier prefixes, so the three possible interpretations of each affix were never in conflict. But Play lost all prefixes of all types. Therefore, in Play, the word

mafa

can equally well mean "I like you", "I like [him]", and "[she] likes [him]". Play has no pronouns and no person markers, and the transitivity markers cannot be used to compensate for this. Play solves this problem by assuming the interpretation closest to the speaker (here, 1:2) when no context is provided, and otherwise reusing the agent and patient of the most recent sentence in which an agent or patient was named explicitly. Then, Play resets the context to the speaker-focused orientation when necessary by using certain morphemes that indicate that the context has been reset. For example, evidentials, or aspects (on the previous verb). Difficulties remain, but for fluent speakers the Play system works well. This is yet another reason why Play was considered a very difficult language to learn even by the speakers of related languages.

It is possible that the difficult Play system is absolutely identical to Gold's, with no changes at all in ~2500 years, simply because it is required that Gold pass through exactly this stage at some point in order to evolve into Play. Because Gold almost certainly had lost its classifier prefixes by the time of the Play/Leaper split, it would make sense that a system identical to Play's was already in place by this time. Therefore, either Play inherited the system, changed it, and returned to its starting point, or else it was the same system all along.

Classical particles

Question markers

06:46, 25 March 2022 (PDT)

Possible non-Play IE-style setup

As detailed at Play_language#Question_particles_and_suffixes, Play does not use case markers to form question words as does IE, even though the Play case system would serve such a purpose very well as the Play noun cases NOM/NOM/GEN/LOC/LOC correspond well enough to IE "who/what/when/where/why" and the duplicates could be rescued by additional morphemes. The accusative would also appear when the "who/what" words were the object of a verb. It is possible that somewhere else in the family, a system like IE's does exist.

The construction would most likely set up by taking one or a few bare CV stems, meaning "object", "place", "person", and so on, and attaching case markers to them, followed by the /ti/ question marker, which would later decay in some manner or other to leave either bare case markers or a slightly different form of the case markers. Even in such a language, it is possible that the Play strategy would be reflected in some manner.

Here is a setup for a toy language based on Trout:

bə "who/what" (subject or intransitive)

bəḳ "who/what" (accusative)

bəh "when; whose" (two meanings that merged)

bəl "for whose benefit" (dative); probably also covers "why"

bən "by what" (circumstantial); note that this noun case is rare on Earth but common in these languages because of the lack of pronouns. Essentially it presents in a sentence with an object and a verb, and asks who the subject is. It might not be necessary, however, if the nominative covers this.

bəg "where". This would probably have the same pronunciation as the nominative above.

There is no *bək. Also, note that /bə/ is the cognate of the numeral for 1, and so this form would be singular, and there would be corresponding duals, plurals, etc and most likely other forms indicating animacy and other aspects so that the auditory distinction between the various words would not fall on just the final consonant. This is particularly important since the system needs to have arisen at a time when it would be padded with a question suffix, which would mean that the consonants in the words above would not even be word-final.

This system could not have existed in Trout. Rather, these are the forms that would be constructed if the system had been in place at the time, and their reflections in a languagse such as Thaoa would follow the ordinary rules of sound cvhange.

tìhu doesnt exist

Since it would be odd to have a disyllabic question particle in a CV(C) language (that is, pre-Tapilula), the word pair tìhə ~ tìhu is likely spurious, and instead the two words could have been tìhə ~ tə̀hə, which would have given the same results in Gold and Play (at least for freestanding forms), and allow a cleaner analysis in the proto-language since /tì/, /tə̀/, and /hə̀/ already exist and have etymologies going back thousands of years. Play could still assume that its /tes/ particle had come from *tìhu by passing through a stage in which that particle was never inflected and was later adapted to the /-iCu/ paradigm.

Play/Gold innovations

The hə̀ morpheme is the primordial 2nd person patient marker. Therefore /tìhə/ would have meant something like "[I] ask you" and then evolved into a question marker as the patient markers fell out of use. Strictly speaking, the patient markers were placed after nouns, not verbs, so the /tì/ morpheme would need to be capable of functioning as a noun even if it were primarily a verb meaning "ask" or some such thing. Since only Gold would do this, Andanese *kiku cannot exist, and neither can there be disyllabic cognates in any of the other branches. This means that /tì/ and /tə̀/ were freestanding particles at some point, and it is possible that neither of them were able to function as a question marker on their own. If there is a question marker, it might need to rely on a morpheme somewhere else in the sentence to give it meaning since the particle itself would probably just be /tì/ and /tə̀/ would be a mood marker.

It is even possible that Play continued to see the true etymologies .... tìhə ~ tə̀hə .... and that the creation of *tifu happened post-classically. This would make sense if the scattering of the /ə/ in the mood markers to /a/ and /i/ messed up the original paradigm such that /t[V]/ was seen as the original question particle. Even so, it is unlikely that Play would be able to use the /tə~ti/ word without the 2p patient suffix.

Mood markers

06:41, 17 March 2022 (PDT)

See Play_language#Verbal_mood_and_associated_morphemes; these morphemes are primarily CV and the class traces back to Tapilula (even if the morphemes were slowly created and discarded). It is possible that Play's -pa, expressing a strong desiderative, is actually the same morpheme that means "or" and that it already had such a double use in Tapilula.

Late Andanese mood markers

Play's te, pa, and na particles are likely to have direct cognates in Late Andanese, and /pa/ is the same /pa/ below. Play uses ŋi for the negative, and this too is likely found in Andanese, but perhaps not as a mood marker. It would appear as /ni/.

Late Andanese does not use suffixes, so these morphemes could only be preserved if they were suffixed to an auxiliary verb that later lost its meaning. Since /tə/ > /t/ > /Ø/, the stem of the auxiliary verb would take over for the lost /tə/ morpheme. In the other Andanic languages such as Galà, suffixes were rare but still in use, and at least some preserved closed syllables, so the structure in Galà would be much as it was in Play, despite Galà and Play being otherwise almost opposite in morpheme order.

Late Andanese uses ki as its question particle. This is not directly derived from /tə/, even though that would be the expected form (when stressed), but rather derived from Tapilula /tìhə/. It might help preserve the /tə/ mood marker, though, so that it could occur freely instead of needing an auxiliary verb.

Basic four free particles

The "and/if/or/but" particles that are ka/ki/pa/pi in Late Andanese are directly traceable to the proto-language Tapilula, and are all high-tone CV sequences. Therefore they would all be expected to lenite their fricatives to stops in proto-Dreamlandic; however it is possible that they irregularly behave as though they were low tones because of their usually unstressed nature. Remember that /i/ > /ii/, and these particles are not the source of proto-Dreamlandic pi "of", which actually comes from Tapilula hə and shows the change of /h/ > /p/ because the PREVIOUS word imparted its stress pattern to the particle.

It is most likely that the particles ki pi had /i/ in Tapilula, even though Andanese could have derived its /i/ from an earlier /ə/. If the original vowel was /ə/, it would have exhibited the triple reflex /e~ə~o/ and then evolved to /i~Ø~u/ in Late Andanese instead of just holding /i/. In Gold and Play, the reflexes would be /a~ə~a/. The Play reflexes či pi therefore assume original /i/.

At some stage, Dreamlandic grammar may evolve a particle mii (for Tapilula /mì/) that precedes the object in an SOV sentence, where one would ordinarily expect to see SVO.

Bound particles

It could be said that there is no such thing as a bound particle, and that these are all classifier prefixes with very abstract meanings, the most common of which is "of".

Andanese vs Dreamlandic genitives

In Andanese, the genitive prefix hi- was used sparingly and was usually NOT confused with the other /hi-/ prefixes, such as the masculine patient, 2nd person patient, and feminine agent prefixes. As examplained below, this is because the constructions where ambiguity could arise are those where the genitive prefix is omitted, and because Andanese also can omit the prefix even when a genitive meaning is intended.

In Dreamlandic, the genitive prefix was conflated with at least the patient prefixes early on because the switch to SVO made it necessary to repeat the object prefix explicitly. (The accusative female in Dreamlandic was different, but this led to problems of its own.) The collapse meant that the genitive came to be expressed by an accusative marker in some constructions, and because not all noun classes had distinct accusatives, double prefixing was needed. Thus the reverse of the Play-like ergative=genitive conflation ("my soap" = "I have soap" = "I, with my soap," = "I [VERB] my soap") appeared in Dreamlandic, but this was stable because by this stage there was no longer a proper case system and the word order was becoming more fixed.

It could be that Dreamlandic used the genitive pi- alone when it was a genitive, but compounded it with the noun's inherent prefix when it was an accusative, although this strategy goes against the grammar and structure of other languages which resemble Dreamlandic. For example, at least in Andanese, a construction like hi-ti-nu-kiyika would mean "of his house", stacking three classifiers (genitive, masculine, building) in such a way that it could not be confused for an accusative structure. But hi-nu-kiyika, without the masculine marker, leaves open the interpretation of "his house [ACC]", since /hi-/ can also be the male patient marker.

archaic morphology in Dreamlandic

07:23, 11 March 2022 (PST)

French-like liaison

See Primordial scratchpad.

Dreamlandic might preserve the accusative suffix -i, which is probably not related to the accusative infix -i- which arose later but died out sooner (they were /i/ at different stages of the language, one being /ɨ/ while the other was /i/, even though in the end they both ended up the same). This would be during the early stages of Dreamlandic when it was still SOV, and the liaison would link the object to its verb. This would be more likely if the verb classifier were dropped, however, which is unlikely at that stage of the language. It is nonetheless possible that the suffix survived in some limited use, perhaps as part of an "OS compound" (that is, the classifier prefix is for the object and it forms words like "human stung by bee") and then generalized back out to something like what it had been primordially. Later, Dreamlandic evolves towards SVO and the suffix becomes unnecessary, but even so it might narrow its use a second time and survive as some different type of accusative marker.

Sickness and remedies

Note that this affix is already very sick (as Moonshine teachers would describe it) by ~1700 AD. It is sick in the sense that:

1. it demands lost knowledge (the final consonant that didnt appear in the bare form),
2. it ruins retained knowledge (it merges final /-i/ and final /-ia/ into just /-ia/),
3. it even merges with a form it is supposed to contrast with (because /-ia/ > /-ia/). This is because primordial -a -ai -ə -əi > proto-Dreamlandic -ia -ia -i -ia.

It is possible, however, that /-ai/ > /a/ in this instance, using the "pine tree rule" where primordial /ai/ was read as though it had come from /aɨ/ which always shifted to /o/ and then to /a/ in Dreamlandic. Primordial /ɜɨ/ would most likely also shift this way although it is not listed in the sound changes. In this case, the /ai/ > /aɨ/ substitution is actually legitimate.

cardinal directions

See also Play_language#cardinal_directions.

left and right

The words for left and right are nouns in the Gold-branch languages, meaning "the right side", etc, which means that compounds and inflections are required to express concepts that would be atomic in English, and therefore that the morphemes can collapse to CV monosyllables and still be intelligible. Tapilula had ŭdə-k- for "right side" which turns into dʷə in Gold, a rare use of the sequence /ʷə/.

The word for right may disappear in Play, or be padded with additional morphemes. Even though Gold preserves /ʷə/ here, instead of the much more common /ʷa/, Play would change the vowel to /a/ because the classifier suffixes -ba -ya would both trigger the /ə/ > /a/ rule.

One word for left in Tapilula was muhŭŋi-k-, which is cognate to a word that means treasure chest, and is not an atomic morpheme (but the word for treasure chest also has one additional morpheme, so neither of them contains the other).

Dreamlandic might preserve the /k/'s by taking both words as being verbs and therefore padding them with an affix. The nouns would then be derived from these verbs, meaning that two extra morphemes essentially cancel each other out, but the derivation would have long since become opaque by this time.

north, south, east, and west

Words used in navigation, from the Tapilula stage:

• pì boat; navigable water (classifier prefixes differentiate the two meanings). It is possible the two meanings are untethered later on because Play has a word /pipi/ meaning "line, straight path", but which could have come from a meaning such as "boat in water", and this word could have even been used in Gold.
• (g)à fish. This word is likely not involved at all but is listed here because it is homophonous with one below.
• (g)à to move, navigate, push. This is not likely to be the same as /gà/ meaning fish, even though fish move through water just like boats, but it is of little importance whether the two are the same word or just homophones.
• ìḳi the sun. Gold reflexes point to wìḳi, which may be a remnant of a classifier prefix that hung on, or generalization of the plural /u-/ to uncountable nouns (there is only one sun, so it is uncountable).
• wò ~ ùga water; ocean. Different from /pì/ above. Both forms of the word were in use even in the MRCA.
• ndăku-kʷ- migratory; moving in all directions. this requires preceding /gà/, so it is actually gandăku, just as gòḳi below.
• ndò-kʷ- a possible variant of above, assuming that /pʷŏndo-kʷ/ "fishing boat" is just /pì + gà + ndò-kʷ/.
• gòḳi moving along an east-west axis (gà + ìḳi)
• pʷò boat in motion (pì + gà). Possibly also the source of the Gold verbal mood marker -pa-, but largely irrelevant to navigation.
• pʷòḳi boat in motion along the east-west axis; boat following the sun (pì + gà + ìḳi)
• hʷò-kʷ- directional location (from earlier /$uBakʷ/, thus not part of the /mʷ/ > /mfʷ/ > /hʷ/ shift). importantly, /hə̀n/ + /hʷò/ produces hòtʷo, not *hòhʷo, because n$ʷ > ntʷ while nmfʷ > mfʷ > hʷ. In Gold and Andanese, this was almost certainly conflated with the unrelated /hʷò/ below, which led to different accent patterns.
• hʷò cloud; to hide. Again, likely not involved at all, but listed here because of homophony in Gold & Andanese with the other hʷò. Dreamlandic preserved the distinction.

SELF-CONTAINED WORDS

• hàla north
• hə̀n south
• mà-t- east
• hàmʷu west

Theese four words above likely did not actually mean the cardinal directions, but could have been nouns denoting other things. For example, just as north=bear in early IE. By chance mà-t and hə̀n look like they are related to two of the number words, but it is unlikely that they would actually be cognates. At least hə̀ "four" never had a coda, and mà-t- is the word that means "plus one".

Gold developments

In Gold, pʷòḳi > paiḳ, and it stays as an atomic unit, even if the morpheme order of the other morphemes changes. This would pass on to Play paip, and Play scholars would still recognize that the /-ip/ part was related to their word for sun, pip, appearing just as if there had been lenition in a compound. Likewise pʷŏndo-kʷ and pwondăku-kʷ would appear in Gold as păda and padăku respectively; the first is already the Gold word for boat, as /pì/ was too polysemic. Thus /păda/ could take over.

Play vs Leaper

Play uses šavafa "north", šatua "south", sata "east", and šasuša "west" alongside similarly formed words for things like "north across a sea" and non-cardinal directions. In Leaper, these would be xalăxa, xàla, săta, and xasŏxa through direct inheritance if no analogy happened. Leaper would also have just as many accessory words as Play.

The fact that three of the four compass words begin with ša (Play) and xa (Leaper), while the fourth begins with the very similar-sounding sa- is a strong incentive for the words to retain the anomalous Gold prefixing morphemes like /paiḳ/ even though ordinarily the morpheme order would be reversed. /ḳh ḳs/ would lead to /k ks/ in Leaper and /p ps/ in Play (because the proto-Players would have been using the morpheme independently).

In Play, the initial consonants would all delete when occurring as the second element of a compound where the first is a locative. Leaper cannot do this, but could perhaps use nonsyllabic morphemes such as /kʷ/ to get better use out of the syllables.

Late Andanese

In Late Andanese, all four cardinal directions begin with /h/. They are halahu / hupu / hapu / hahuhu, and thus even more repetitive than those in Play and Leaper. In this case, retention of the /paiḳ/ morpeheme would do little good, since Andanese never did the Gold vowel collapse.

Dreamlandic

The four cardinal directions are unlikely to be handed down to proto-Dreamlandic. Though Dreamlandic is usually conservative, in this case the four morphemes are essentially ruined by the sound changes, turning into yaria / a / mia / yamuu, assuming no analogy and a free word order (that is, they were not fused with the suffix as in Tapilula, even though Tapilula was the parent language). The word for the directional is wapa.

International tile and block scripts

07:00, 2 March 2022 (PST)

The Clover kids used a floor tile script, but did not fully understand it. Essentially they used "Batam", believing that the floor tiles represented the shapes of objects rather than letters. One reason for the children's failure to learn the script was that STW did not teach them Late Andanese, and the Players had not yet come up with ornate scripts (neither tiles nor blocks) for Play. Thus the Clovers did not understand the other artistic scripts either. Yet, some of the kids understood the script better than others, and were able to notice patterns.

Tornado verbs

07:00, 2 March 2022 (PST)

Find the ton/tòo/tò document and see if there is any missing information.

Numbers outside Play and Gold

Thaoa

Thaoa: 3=xfāma 4=xfeeh??? need to find out what happens to final /-h/. The initial cluster /xf/ is also unlikely to stay. Might need to shift to /kf/ because there wont be any word-initial /kʷ/ anyway. Note that Thaoa does not have /hu gu/ > /hʷu gʷu/ and that it might not need to distinguish /w/ from /gʷ/. If there is just a /w/, it becomes /b/ and the cluster /kf/ probably does not exist.

Use Trout languages, not Thaoa, for scratchpad.

Primordial infixes

08:05, 17 February 2022 (PST)

The Gold infix system developed from the primordial fluxibility between prefixes and infixes. The infixes were all high tone and reversed (VC) forms of the toneless CV prefixes. That is, prefix hə- corresponded to infix -ə̀h-, and so on. Play kept only those infixes whose vowel was schwa or consisted of a lone vowel. Since the schwa always changed to match the next vowel, the infixes no longer seemed "backwards" in any way, and the extensibility of the system was lost for the sake of feeling natural. In the other branches, it is likely that even fewer infixes were retained.

It is possible that the growth of the infix/prefix system nonetheless continued into the history of Gold, or even Play, in the sense that freestanding words such as *kə may have existed, come to be seen as prefixes, and then analogized into infixes, even if only because they fit the C+schwa pattern of the inherited prefixes. This may explain why Gold and Play seemingly have more such infixes than their parent language had. However, note that /k ḳ h/ are the traditional "low" consonants of Andanese, so it may be that Andanese also had these prefixes, but lost them because the infixed forms would have led to clusters like /pk pḳ/ alongside the more comfortable /ph/. If this is the case, then the primordial mu- ~ mfu- that marks reflexive verbs would have been mostly or entirely redundant with the /-ək-/ infix, which must have also had a prefix form /kə-/. Perhaps it was an Andanese innovation, since even in a prefix, the /ə/ would have been clumsy. Note, though, that even if prefix /kə-/ existed, it is possible that changing it into an infix happened in the Gold branch by analogy even after new infixes stopped being created.

It is possible that Trout, and therefore Thaoa, had therefore not created the accusative infix -Vḳ- or the polysemic infix -Vk-. Or the locative -Vg-, circumstantial -Vŋ-, etc. This solves the "yog" problem, the question of how Trout could have had suffixes like that if it had not yet dropped final /g/. Essentially, the suffixes did not exist in Trout except as (stressed) standalone words, and therefore might not have existed in Thaoa either.

Notes on Thaoa

Thaoa separated from the other languages around 1088 AD. In its later years, as it had split into Palli and Sakhi, it came to be disliked by outside parties. Moonshine and the Players both disliked the Thaoa languages. The Palli-Sakhi split was around 2668 AD, and it's not clear how much of what the outsiders disliked had taken place before the split.

To the Moonshines, Thaoa (both branches) was a "sick" language, meaning that it retained morphology that no longer worked, in contrast to Play, which was even more complex but still made use of the processes by which its old word stock had been created.

Classifiers

For example, the classifier prefixes of Trout had been worn away in Thaoa to the point where they could no longer make useful distinctions between different words, or even to coin new words by switching to a different class, but yet the prefixes remained because they had fused to the roots, unlike in Gold (and therefore Play and Moonshine) where they had been dropped entirely because of sound changes reducing initial vowels.

Thaoa's prefixes were "mostly, but not all" vowel-initial, so no similar sound change could take place.

Meanwhile, Play and Moonshine had developed new location-based classifier suffixes that had brought back the ability to coin new words from existing words, whereas Thaoa, not having done the shift of /g/ > /Ø/, could not do this.

Hiboh era

14:50, 9 February 2022 (PST)

The very early maps drawn in 2007 could be used for the Hiboh era, and they show the Play language driving out all other languages on the entire mainland except Moonshine, although the tropics are actually labeled as Andanese. At the time, I may have been planning to derive Play from Late Andanese instead of from a MRCA. In either case, though, anything that was once Andanese should be given to Play. On the other hand, the northwest corner of the map, which is split between three Play-speaking cultures (Camia, Wamia, and Žefuny), could actually be multilingual, since it's most likely that a tiered society arose, with the Play-speaking classes biologically bound to speak the languages they did, and a Leaper-speaking overclass biologically bound to their own language. Nonetheless Dreamland ceases to exist according to this map, as it is in fact divided between four Play-speaking cultures, the fourth being "Wimpim", which was a placename and was probably also multilingual in reality.

Since Moonshine and Leaper are dialects of the same language at this time, a map could be drawn for the entire mainland with just two languages, Leaper and Play, each with their exclusive areas plus an area of overlap. The Players' area would be much larger and more populous, but the Leapers would always be socially dominant in the area of overlap, so neither group had a clear advantage over the other.

Semaphore

14:50, 9 February 2022 (PST)

Acrobatic semaphore

Early on, sailors imitated the shapes of the letters in their syllabary by using their arms and legs. They used only static positions, not motions; however, some signallers moved so quickly that they were able to use incomplete motions, and sometimes jumping was used in place of certain leg motions.

The semaphore positions varied considerably from one culture to another. On top of this, the syllabary by nature had a fixed number of syllables (that is, there were only (22 * 22 = 484) possible glyphs), and different language communities that continued to use the syllabary adopted different spelling conventions. For example, when Late Andanese evolved a vowel inventory of just /a i u/, they used the glyphs for A E O to spell them, because the E and O symbols were simpler than the I and U symbols. By contrast, during Dreamlandic's earlier /a i u/ stage, the Dreamers used the glyphs that had earlier been used to spell O A U respectively, since that choice meant that all of their vowel glyph subparts faced the left. Thus, a Dreamlandic /a/ was an Andanese /u/, a Dreamlandic /i/ was an Andanese /a/, and the other vowels did not overlap. This made bilingual communication difficult both in the traditional script and with coded forms such as semaphore. This helped create the tradition of using a single maritime language, even when that language was culturally hostile to the signallers. The language that served this role towards the end of the "Gold" era was Late Andanese, primarily because of its simplicity and not cultural relevance.

Arms and legs only

The letters on which the semaphore code was based resembled human arms and legs, and always had a horizontal line through the middle, resembling a belt. (This was the only way to ensure the tops and bottoms of the letters always touched; note that Andanese "loosened the belt" by making it contrastive whether or not the belt was drawn in, and yet all its letter strokes were still connected because its total inventory was much smaller.)

The motions requiring only one arm are signed by leaving the other arm down by the waist. Two of the 22 consonants' arm motions are little used and 6 are undefined; none of these eight was considered a single consonant at the time of Tapilula. Only the least common consonants involve having two arms in different non-limp positions.

Tapilula had six vowels and there were seven leg motions defined in the semaphore guide. The unused seventh vowel, here symbolized as ∀, stood for syllabic consonants and for any consonant found in isolation, as in a foreign word. Originally, Tapilula's few clusters had their own symbols because they were analyzed as units, but some descendant languages continued to use semaphore and had evolved many more clusters than their arms could handle. These languages thus came to use the ∀ motion to indicate a lone consonant.

Tones

The script was also tonal; the tones are marked by replacing the 6 leg movements with more difficult ones. Since there is only one tonic syllable per word, this does not cause great difficulty for the signaller, and helps the viewer identify the rhythm of the word.

High pitch was indicated by kneeling positions and low pitch by sitting down. Only the tonic syllable was marked, and by tradition, only the high tone was indicated by the signaller. Tapilula did not have low tones on monosyllabic words either, so the tone was not marked at all on a monosyllabic word. Since only the kneeling motion was required, the signallers often substituted a simple bow-like motion, bending their legs but also bending their upper body to create the impression of a greater leg motion. The Ǝ vowel could not be easily executed in a kneeling motion without injuring the signaller, so they substituted the otherwise unused ∀ (or "upside down A") vowel. This, in turn, was no problem, since there was no such thing as a high-tone vowelless syllable.

The high tone could also be executed by having the signaller jump in the air. Typically they jumped only very slightly, since a high jump would make it difficult to keep their arms and legs in the right positions. At first, the kneeling variant was the standard, since it mimicked the appearance of the high tone letters in the script.

But signallers felt it was more reasonable to indicate a high pitch by having the signaler jump higher, saying that the bar at the bottom represented the signaller being lifted up, and then languages arose in which low tones could have stress too, and therefore there needed to be more than one way of indicating a stressed syllable. At this point, the semaphore system lost its connection to the inherited script, since the inherited script only had a high/unmarked contrast, and therefore the signallers created their own signs. Jumping was used by some signallers and kneeling by others, meaning that the contrast between the two could not arise, and the low tone had to be indicated by sitting down. Still later, a three-way tone contrast appeared in some languages, but these typically did not use semaphore.

Variants with other body parts and motions

Because the standard semaphore script used only the arms and legs, there was no obvious use for the rest of the body, or for motion within a single sign. Early on, some signallers used hip motions instead of turning their bodies to indicate the I and U vowels, but still turned their bodies to indicate the E and O vowels. This made these signs more distinct. I and U were the only vowels in which the signallers' two legs were in different positions, again because of the script letters, and therefore were more difficult to sign than the less common /e o/. (This is why the Andanese selected the mid vowels e o to spell their /i u/ when their vowel inventory shrank.)

Dreamlandic acrobatic semaphore

The Dreamers, a seagoing people, had ample use for semaphore on ships. They soon developed a written form of the semaphore script for artistic use, but for the first 1300 years of settlement their main script was the inherited angular Tapilula syllabary.

The Dreamer signallers were typically men wearing brightly colored clothing, but in art they were mixed, with maximally variable appearance so that the script, even in art, would be easily readable, and with full-figured women taking a prominent role in the script.

Mixing with ideograms

The Dreamers likely continued using the body movement signals for as long as they continued using their inherited Tapilula script. The ideograms were probably not invented until around 1300, and because not every CV sequence was a word in Dreamlandic, some ideograms could have been borrowed from hand and leg motions. This could solve the "R" problem, that being that Dreamlandic has no native CV words beginning in /r/ except where analogy has taken off an initial vowel.

Dreamlandic would have needed 17 consonants and 7 vowels, assuming that they repurposed old positions for their new sequences. It is possible, however, that they were not so prudent, and used only 3 vowels because they saw /ya wa yi wu/ as sequences. This would not really help the signaller move their legs, since they would need to move just as much to spell the sequences as they would have to spell them as single vowels. But the 3 vowel method is the only way to really preserve /a/ as a common position, since otherwise the /a/ would become /e/ and the signaller would be standing with their legs twisted most of the time. This is similar to how Andanese selected the /e/ and /o/ rows to spell their /i/ and /u/ vowels, even though they likely didnt use semaphore by this time.

If there are only three vowels in Dreamlandic, then many CV syllables would need two body movements to spell. e.g. almost all /i/ is really /yi/ and would need to spell as CV + i. Nonetheless, this is probably the system that the Dreamers ended up using, as the leg movements were tedious and it was easier to spin around between three leg positions than to handle less frequent movements to seven.

Dreamer script

The Dreamers based their script on the original Tapilula script, not on the semaphore, but nonetheless, when they began to add ideograms into their script, the original letters were restyled after the semaphores in order to remove the juxtaposition of sharp angular shapes with depictions of natural objects such as corals and fruits. The ornate script drew the figures with recognizably human bodies, even though the arms and torso contributed no meaning to the letters. This became an obstacle to writing, as it was considered distasteful to omit the head, even if other body parts were simplified as when writing a long passage with a brush on paper. The angular script had always included a middle bar through each letter, which was similarly unnecessary, but was considered improper to remove, as it would mean that some letters would consist of two detached parts. This corresponded to the belts on the human figures, which the Dreamers considered optional. Eventually, the Dreamers conceded to allow the use of figures without heads, but only if the other parts of the figures were also made less human.

Meanwhile the ornate script moved towards realistic body depictions of humans. However, notably, the human figures were smaller than most of the objects used as ideograms. This was because they often appeared with their arms stretched upward, and thus were required to be shorter than the line height when not appearing with upstretched arms. Furthermore, the jumping human figures came into use to represent high tones early on (though Dreamlandic soon lost tones). A tradition developed of dividing the glyph space into a 3x3 square, with the largest possible glyphs occupying the entire square, while humans were confined to 3x1, and only when their arms were upstretched. Thus most human figures fit into a 2x1 rectangle. Meanwhile, the ideograms came to exclude humans so that there would be no confusion between the ideograms and the semaphore glyphs. This meant that humans were depicted as unnaturally small compared to most of the ideograms, which often represented physically small objects.

Even the ornate script came to include ideograms for very common syllables such as /a/, since the Dreamers at least early on had decided to analyze their language as containing only the three vowels /a i u/ and to analyze all vowel sequences as such rather than creating new symbols or creating new consonants /n̆ š kʷ/ etc. to represent /ni si ku/. Even vowel sequences that had never been disyllabic were spelled as such, for example Tapilula /a/ regularly reflexed as /ia/ in proto-Dreamlandic, but was never anything but [ja] or [ʲa] phonetically. Yet the Dreamers chose to indicate this as a sequence because it was easier for the signallers even though it was slower.

The tradition of drawing humans smaller than other objects persisted for at least 3,000 years in the Dreamer script. Although smaller glyphs did arise, 1x1 and 1x2, these were decorations, and therefore the human glyphs came to be seen as decorations too. A tradition later arose of using height-2 glyphs for short syllables and height-3 glyphs for long ones, but even here, most of the glyphs were round or square in shape, and thus still took up more space than the human figures.

Preservation elsewhere

It is possible that a maritime culture that had a very conservative language could have preserved the body signals fairly well, though even here it would be impossible for the exact original values of the consonants to be preserved, since the speakers would be unlikely to remember the assignments for consonants that dropped out of the language and then later reappeared.

AlphaLeap could have preserved the signals even though their language quickly grew beyond 22 consonants, making sign language impractical unless they were to innovate even more arm signals, perhaps relying on using hands separately.

Remember the dream about Play culture preserving the original 22x22 syllabary despite its inapplicability to the developing Play language.

Use in Andanese

The inherited semaphore signals disappear early on in Andanese, and Andanese cultural influence may keep them out of Play as well because even though both languages had much use among sailors, the Andanese speakers were more literate for most of their coexistence. This is because the Andanese reordered their syllabary to make common syllables easier to write, so that, for example, the /wa/ syllable came to be /u/. This would make it difficult for the signaller to keep things together in their mind. Play may nonetheless borrow the script from Gold or even rediscover it in its original form after the year 4175. AlphaLeap, also a maritime power, may have kept semaphore alive but this does not mean that the Players would imitate it.

The Andanese were not typically a seagoing people, but by this time they lived only among the Play speakers (the Pubumaus people), and therefore sailors learned to speak rudimentary Andanese even when their daily language, the language they spoke on land, was Play.

Stick semaphore

Late in their history, the Andanese nonetheless reintroduced a type of signalling similar to semaphore. They did not imitate the shapes of the letters, however. Instead, the Andanese had associated the letters of their syllabary with a specific body part, typically one whose first or last syllable was the syllable in question. Then, the signallers indicated each syllable by pointing with a stick to the proper body part, either with the end or the middle of the stick (that is, the stick could either point to or cross over the body part being indicated). This was done at the 36-syllable stage, not the 30-syllable stage. However this was not an efficient means of signaling, and did not replace semaphore.

Note that the signallers carried a long, rigid rod, and not one rod in each hand. This is why so many of the signs crossed over the body part in the middle and not at the end. Notably, left and right sides of the body were considered different signs; even though the language did not have inherently different words for e.g. left arms and right arms, the signs were different because they mostly had originated from a distinction between front and back or between outside and inside.

Late Andanese semaphore

Traditional semaphore was reintroduced to Andanese shortly afterwards. Here, they still did not imitate the shapes of the letters, but rather used a system where the signaller carried a stick in both hands, brightly painted and easily visible.

There were two arms involved in all 36 signs, with six positions each, 0 1 2 3 4 5, of which the zero was the resting position. This would mean that there would be no way within the system to indicate word boundaries, but the signaller could simply turn around, bend their legs, or wave their arms, so this is no problem.

These numbers were counted as a two-digit base-6 number. Therefore, when the syllable inventory reduced to thirty, the signs with "5" as the big-end digit were removed.

The "Laban" language

08:04, 7 February 2022 (PST)

It is written in the red notebook that ALL of the Sea Turtles (Bombadiers) could speak Laban, and this language is the same language that arrived in Play territory in 4186. They knew that they were learning the language of their historical enemies, but did not consider it to be Dreamlandic. They considered Laba a distinct cultural entity even though, at the time, it was indeed part of Dreamland. (It broke away in 4186.)

NOTE: The red notebook ideas are extremely old, but I believe I had at least separated Late Andanese from Laba at the time, since Late Andanese was never the language of Laba, only "borrowing" from it in a plot hole that I later eliminated.

Pronouns

06:43, 7 February 2022 (PST)

Cannot use the 1994MS pronouns *ā ē ō because they are used to generate the vowels for Tapilula. Nonetheless it suggests that there could have once been a generic third person pronoun instead of using gender markers.

oct 14, 2021

Vanamaa_Fana is a ridge, not a swamp

re-read "close to original writeups" document ... it has many unused pieces of history, e.g. "tinks on Nama" (sic)

Oct 1, 2021

"leaving just Ezra" indicates that at a very late stage of the war, STW rebelled and came to support Amade, and in particular the Firestone party. However they were likely moribund by that time.

Sep 23, 2021

Search all documents for sarabism.

"close to original writeups" document

There are details about the Rapala stage of the government which could be projected backwards to the Anchor Empire generally or else attributed to a revival of Thunder-era government policies. For example, note that one person was able to outvote the entire Parliament on issues relating to the military, but not on the other issues. This could also be projected forwards into Fayuvas. In this same system, Emon (who may not be mentioned at all in the current writeup, but is canonically the same person as the Red Sun) managed to have a total lock on power within a specific geographic region of the country, in all domains — meaning we could overrule his friend the Golden Sun on military questions, even though the Golden Sun had more than half of the Parliament's power on military matters by himself.

An old writeup called "close to original writeups" describes Taboo as "a lukewarm Crystal". These events seem to describe the war in 3958, not the later wars involving the Players and Raspara. Thus, this is the stage of government that preceded the Anchor Empire. Nonetheless, it is possible that it could have been revived later on.

The "Jecaja" city that the Womb Justice party moved into (whose name was Mirebane in at least one Dreamer language) was also mentioned in this writeup.

This CTOW document also states that the Tinks considered themselves a wing of the Crystal party after their treaty with the Crystals, meaning that they would no longer have been able to wield authority over the Players. At this time, the Players in Paba were bound by an agreement that the Play party was subsumed to Tinker authority, but the old writeup ignores the Players and may not have addressed the situation from their perspective; it could be that the Tinks had already pulled away from the Players within just the first few months of their reign.

CTOW also says that a Dreamer politician named Paetal (Nettanetu?) had been promoting another Dreamer invasion of the Anchor Empire and that the Flower Bee invasion was in response to this, rather than being unprovoked. It also describes the Ik army (in the Yoy language) as wanting to live in Tata, which may mean that they considered themselves Players, but because CTOW does not mention the Players by name, this is not certain. Tata would not have been thought of as a "middle ground" territory at the time because the Players in Tata were the ones occupying Dreamland, and were thus more anti-Dreamland than the Tinks.

Neamaki

Remember that the Dolphin Riders are the same group as the Neamaki, who were known for their contacts with Moonshine. CTOW even describes them as defending the Cold Men and the Crystals, while opposing Wax and AlphaLeap, and supporting both pacifist movements and dissent from within their own party. CTOW has the Neamaki victory in the year 4112, four years off of what it is in the current writeup. This document also puts the renaming of the DPR party to Gold in this year; thus, they would have been practicing a Gold-style international government for nearly a hundred years before they took over the Crystals.

voting

Camia under the Theyape government was a democracy - meaning all citizens are in the government, and are at once executive, judicial, and military. (Since the country was technically controlled by the military, it was necessary to grant all citizens membership in the armed forces, whose actions were voted on by its members.) There were no offices, only quotients for each citizen showing the amount of voting power that person would have on a particular question. Everyone had a different quotient for each situation, and these quotients were constantly changing to reflect changes in the person and his environment. Superficially, this was essentially the same system as the Cold government. All actions had to be presented as questions and voted on by the entire population, which by 4425 numbered about 18 million, though it was growing very fast.

Dreamland's STW clone

Dreamland had over 400 years earlier come to make an alliance with Adabawa to fight against Camia. When the war ended, the war-era emergency government (called "Wamia Major") refused to pull out, and became even more repressive on formerly democratic Dreamland. Even when Adabawa fell from power in 3992, Wamia Major held on, moving toward a government independent of Adabawa. In 4014 they sealed off their territory, trapping the rest of the Dreamers inside.

Afterward they refused all change unless absolutely necessary; they felt their original order was correct and wished to preserve it as well as possible. Just as STW had grown inside the "Camian" government, a new STW-like corporation called Kapa (in full, Nobolē Kapa) began to form inside Dreamland. The Kapa corporation was entirely controlled by the stupendously rich Yukiese family, which kept the population weak and poor by monopolizing all wealth and refusing to sell goods to anyone who carried weapons. By 4544,^{placeholder date} the Gold-style Dolphin Rider government was vestigial; the real power lay in the Yukiese quasi-cephalist system that placed all military power in their hands, so that they would be able to survive and keep their wealth even if the entire country revolted against them.

The Yukiese enterprise was a tangled mass of red tape that was, in fact, a very good imitation of STW. The difference was that the Yukiese were concerned only with staying in power and keeping money for themselves.

Note that the Kapa name of the corporation is the basic form, but it could have appeared as any of kapa ~ opa ~ papa ~ pepi given different coinage dates (it was a compound) and analogy. The names beginning with /p/ would be possible reflexes only if the word had been created thousands of years earlier.

Other early developments

This may be moved toCosmopolitan Age.

Note that the "Camians" were planning on war against Dreamland, but canceled the war because their own allies were also arming themselves and Camia had more to fear from Bèdom than from Dreamland. Thus, Dreamland was never invaded.

In 4150, the Sepu Resinio party formed in Dreamland. Their name could be translated as Combs, Cover, or (pejoratively) as Underwear or even Diaper, as the party had purposefully chosen to use a term (resi) that without its classifier prefix had a variety of possible interpretations. The Comb party that formed later on in Play territory was not named after this party.

Feb 15, 2021

User:Soap/Playful planets

this is partly on wikipedia now.

Feb 13, 2021

It is possible that the supposed Hapoto and Atopa tribes of Dreamland are not Dreamers, but rather participants in a distant conflict that some Dreamers believed they should involve themselves in. The strict reading of the original text suggests this, as the Hapoto tribe is also called the Islanders. However, it could still be that one of the groups is the Dolphin Riders, whether or not the other is the Baywatchers.

In my teenage years, I attempted to create a narrative story for the Dolphin Riders, and to get started I used gender-swapped versions of the Islander superheros, meaning that I associated the two groups with each other .... but one was feminine and the other was masculine. This may have led to me using the Islanders name outside of its usual context. Note that in my original writing, the Dolphin Riders and the Islanders lived in the same place, merely at different times.