User:Soap/scratchpad

Various related Dreamlandic ideas

Phonemic gaps

05:52, 17 April 2022 (PDT)

Dreamlandic has a lot of gaps in its root stock because it derived new consonants from tones, and because it went through a stage early on in which all words had to have alternating tone sequences (either HL or LH), except that classifier prefixes and perhaps some suffixes were always low-toned. This meant that, for example, there were no words such as /pitu/, /sisu/, and so on, because fricatives and stops were forced to take turns heading the syllables, again with a few exceptions such as geminates and classifiers. Also, nasals never occurred together either, because /mimu/ > /mpimu/, and so on. This last rule was ignored if compounding two CV monosyllables, but even this process could not get stops or fricatives to stack.

Possible preservation of infixes

06:17, 27 April 2022 (PDT)

It is possible that Dreamlandic could preserve a few infixes in closed classes, while losing them in open classes. For example, the -əh- morpheme that is so important in both the Gold/Play and the Andanic branches is best explained if it was already present in the MRCA of Play and Andanic, and because this stage of the language was only shortly after Dreamlandic broke away, it is most likely that Dreamlandic would inherit it too.

If -əh- exists, then -əg- and -ək- could as well. There may have been a fourth morpheme, -ə-, but Dreamlandic would have merged this with the /əg/ early on and it might have even been that Dreamlandic's Ø/g allomorphy was the original state.

Assuming that these are soon confined to a closed word class, it would make sense for it to be auxiliary verbs, or perhaps a wider class of strong verbs that later degenerates to just auxiliary verbs. The meanings of the infixes as seen as in Galà are not necessarily the originals, even though Play shows similar meanings.

Possible further VC infixes

Because the schwa behaves as an ordinary vowel in Dreamlandic, it is possible that Dreamlandic, at least at a very early stage, had other VC infixes as well, and that in both Andanic and Gold-Play the ones not having schwa were lost for the sake of convenience, not having been able to participate in the contractions. Remember that an early model for Dreamlandic, Fojy, used this very idea of inserting VC infixes into an otherwise strictly CV language.

Consonant alternations

Dreamlandic would quickly lose this morpheme because it affected the tone pattern of words, which in turn affected the consonants. This is because Dreamlandic never elided schwa. Thus, MRCA -əh- would appear in early proto-Dreamlandic with a triple reflex, -ip- ~ -ak- ~ -iak-, but would also make the preceding syllable high-toned, and therefore change most /p t k r/ into /f s h l/. (Not all, because of a few intermediary sound changes.) This would merge some words together.

This consonant alternation is in fact very similar to what happened in both Gold-Play and Andanic. For example, in Galà, the same infix caused a shift of /b d l m n/ to /p t s mp nt/, and the loss of the tone information on the following syllable. It may simply be that Dreamlandic was not so tolerant of such morphology, and eliminated the disruptives even though Galà and Play were getting along using similar ones. But note also that Dreamlandic's other grammar may have given the speakers an incentive to lose the infixes, especially if they never acquired a full set of such infixes as did some other languages.

Dreamlandic's m/t pronouns

16:37, 10 April 2022 (PDT)

Dreamlandic preserves the ancient suffixes -m- "my" and -t- "your" when padded by a following vowel of any origin. These were drawn from a tub of bath toys and thus the similarity to IE is a coincidence; even subconscious influence is not possible. In all other languages, the affixes were unnecessary because the early non-Dreamlandic languages used classifier prefixes such that "i" and "my" were the same, and so on. Tiny relics survive, such as Late Andanese /nu/ for 1p>2p (na-m-hə > nambə > nabə > nab > nō > no > nu).

Lava beds

In some languages mostly spoken near Play, all words in the sentence are marked for their relation to all the nouns in the sentence. This includes the nouns themselves.

One such language is Galà, only distantly related to Play but with some remarkable coincidences in its grammar. Play and Gala were not in close contact; it is merely that both were very conservative languages and preserved traits of the MRCA that had in other languages fallen away. For example, the verbal conjugation paradigm was similar in both languages even though Gala was head-initial and Play was head-final.

Portmanteaus

11:51, 27 April 2022 (PDT)

Remember that Old Andanese and perhaps Middle Andanese (no longer listed here) had a stage intermediate between Lava Beds and the Late Andanese syllable harmony wherein words were built of portmanteaus with a single root and a single "person marker" which was itself a full content word.

Derivational cards

11:51, 27 April 2022 (PDT)

Also remember that "cards" were originally used for words like Altotta, which was built of the thematic consonants /l t/ and perhaps the vowel /u/. However, this word in particular could have also been syllable harmony if assuming was originally something like /alatautata/ with a thematic syllable /ta/ and the rest being "proper" syllables.

Like Play, the compounding is between two open classes, and there can be more than two root words in each compound word, highlighting extreme examples such as Late Andanese inuihuhatahupuunatata "road to a camp fire wood store" (derived from ihahukahaha "road to a store") bundling five inanimates together.

This system is derived from the gĭri speech register, which in Middlesex came to be seen as a children's speech register, but was merely seen as playful in other branches such as Andanic. It would also have survived in the Gold branch since it mimicked genitives, but then died out early on in Play.

This is derivational, not inflectional. Thus, the difficult word formation process was only encountered when the speaker created a new compound word, either as a proper name or as a new word for a complex concept uniting two or more basic concepts. Thus, unlike Play's noun-verb couplings, the listener did not have to immediately understand the new words in running speech, and the use of essentially opaque forms was commonplace.

Compounds and word trains

15:37, 20 April 2022 (PDT)

If a word break occurs, the inflections all need to occur again. Therefore, compounds of arbitrary length can form provided all the words within have the same arguments for 1st person, 2nd person, and any other nouns present in the sentence. This is mostly seen with adjectives and serial verbs (e.g. "runs and jumps and skips" would be a single verb). This avoids the notorious "Angoram problem" where nearly every word rhymes.

Comparison to Play

11:54, 20 April 2022 (PDT)

Note that it is not the case, as one might expect, that each noun in a Lava Bed language is marked for its agent, patient, identity, and observer. Rather, they are marked for their relation to the speaker, listener, third party, and fourth party; the latter two of these are the two nouns in the sentence. In each of these four morpheme slots, one of four morphemes must be placed, marking whether the relationship is one of AGENT, PATIENT, IDENTITY, or OBSERVER.

The minimal Lava Bed paradigm thus has sixteen morphemes, but in languages such as Galà, there are many more, because some morphemes encode pairs of indicators and because some morphemes work together to encode just one indicator.

The four markers for the relationship to the speaker are almost certainly cognate to Play's four gluons, which appear on verbs and mark TRANSITIVE, PASSIVE, REFLEXIVE, and RECIPROCAL verbs, respectively. The reciprocal marker has some legacy usage in Play showing that it once meant "observer" as well, which was necessary because of Play's lack of person marking.

First person relation markers

The Play null morpheme would in a Lava Bed language mean "1st person is agent", which would also mean possessor. This unusual situation is explained below; it may be that prefixes were required in addition to the infixes, and that a true bare form of the noun never occurred.

Taking the Play morphemes as direct survivals of the MRCA, the very early Andanic languages would inherit these:

-Ø- "1st person is agent/possessor". Despite being a zero morph, this might still interrupt vowel coalescence and therefore be distinct from no morpheme at all; a TRUE null morpheme would be needed when the inflection is "placed somewhere else" as in compounds.

-əg- "1st person is patient". Both Galà and Late Andanese shift all their /g/ to /Ø/, but there are other shifts in between that will allow for distinct results. Note that this /g/ is truly /g/, and not a variable /B/ phoneme.

-ək- "1st person is identity". It is possible that this paradigm will take over for the /Ø/ above, at least in cooperation with some other morpheme, if vowel coalescence cannot keep it apart from the /g/. In Galà, and perhaps other languages, clusters like /mk nk ŋk/ remained distinct for a time instead of all merging into homorganics. Remember the vowel alternations, however.

-əh- "1st person is observer". That is, the 1st person is not connected in any way with the object being named. One might expect this to be a zero morph, but in fact, the Andanic languages dutifully infixed an /h/ into every such noun, meaning that it was a marked state for a noun to not involve a SAP.

All Andanic languages lost their schwas early on. This would be expected to lead to the collapse of this paradigm just by itself, since clusters like /pg/, /tk/, and the like did not survive for long in any of the Andanic languages, but because /ə/ alternated with /e/ and /o/, the system could have been artificially preserved for some time; also note that /əh/ became /ʰ/ and therefore survived as a consonant gradation paradigm in most Andanic languages (not Late Andanese).

Possible alternatives to Play

It is possible that the morphemes did not actually have schwas. The ancestor language of Play could have analogized these in because of other coincidences in the vowel paradigm. At least /-əh-/ is definitely true, however, presuming it is identical to the genitive morpheme.

Remember that the reason for the generalization of schwa in Gold was because Gold did /ə/ > /Ø/ before *ANY* other vowel, and therefore there could have in fact been other vowels that were later assumed to have been schwas.

Even so, /-ək-/ is likely to be true as well since it appears even where it "gets in the way" and thus where Play would be expected to have used something else. This leaves just /-əg-/.

Second person relation markers

Observer

The 2nd person observer marker must be /-h-/, /Ø/, or some other marker that would make it coalesce with the 1st person observer marker. Therefore, the absence of any other morpheme here is sufficient to mark the 2nd person observer status. Likewise, if the noun has a marker saying "2nd person is observer" but one of the other 1st person markers is on, there needs to be a way to disambiguate this, since as it stands, they would all blend in too.

Patient

If the four 1st person markers are just single consonants padded by a schwa, it would be convenient to have the other second person markers all be single vowels. Play could have lost this because it collapsed its vowel system. This would rule out Play using infixed /-i-/ and /-u-/ in this manner, however, and Play clearly has a second set of infixes consisting of single consonants. Note that the 1st and 2nd person relation markers can be the same if it is assumed that this is the means by which Lava Bed languages mark "we, us", but that this rules out the 2nd person also being on the other side. e.g. "we=agent" would rule out "you=patient".

The second person patient is already marked by an -ʰ- at the beginning of the stem of the word, but it might help to supplement it with a vocalic alternation before the 1st person indicator, especially since some of the 1st person morphemes cannot survive in Andanic languages and must have acquired vocalic padding even in bare form.

The consonant pairs in Galà are as follows:

m n ŋ > mp nt ŋk  (even though /ŋ/ is secondary, it still works because ntʷ > ŋk)
b d  >  p t
l > s
y > s
Ø > h  (when from earlier /g/)
Ø > k  (when from earlier /q/)

For this rule to stand alone, the language would need to analogize roots beginning with the consonants on the right side of the divide to those on the left. Some other Andanic languages did this. However it is most likely that Galà will not, and thus that the 2nd person patient will be marked by both an insertion of /ʰ/ at the beginning of the root and by some sort of vowel alternation next to the 1st person indicator.

Agent

Ideally this would be a vowel. The vowel /o/ can with equal plausibility be analogized to either 2nd person patient or 2nd person patient. It is even possible that it will be both, but this would mean that yet another means of marking the distinction must appear, which could bring it to three morphemes.

Identity

It is possible that the 2nd person agent and identity markers will be identical

Third person relation markers

These form from independent morphemes, mostly or entirely suffixes, but they end up being tied to the 1st and 2nd person markers since they partly rule each other out. 1st and 2nd person IDENTITY should probably be ruled out by the presence of any 3rd person marker other than OBSERVER, and a 3rd person AGENT marker will probably rule out 1st and 2nd person AGENT as well. (That is, plural persons will be indicated in other ways.)

Topic

The classifier prefix slot goes to the topic of the sentence, regardless of if it is the agent or not.

Age and gender

Languages using this system likely mark animate nouns for age in addition to gender, or more properly speaking, include at least one gender for children that is not part of some other noun class. For example, in Dreamlandic, small children are neuter and older children are masculine and feminine. Thus Dreamlandic is not part of the Lava Bed sprachbund.

But in Late Andanese, where the noun classifier system could be analyzed as an open class, there is a separate gender for babies, for small children, for boys, and for girls, none of which overlap with each other, with the neuter gender, or with the masculine and feminine classes whose titular nouns are for adults. Thus Late Andanese has four separate gender classes just for children. On the other hand, because the noun class system is so fluid, they also have a gender for turtles, for rabbits, for coins, and so on; the Lava Bed system might differ from this in having the noun class system be closed but very large, and having more noun classes for animate nouns, especially humans, without following Andanese in also having so many noun classes for inanimates.

Outsiders see this system as absurdly complicated even compared to the already difficult Play, and the Players themselves do not hold such languages in high regard, but they have an easier time learning languages like this because their own is similar.

The importance of /g/

The system relies on replacing the voiced velar fricative g with some other consonant to mark the noun (be it agent, patient, or identity), and if the referent is neuter the /g/ is "replaced" with another /g/ and yet the word may still change.

The Tapilula language historically had a rotating /g/ and a non-rotating /g/. The rotating /g/ can be spelled B for etymological reasons, but the two were confused early on in some words and so etymology cannot always predict whether a /g/ in a given word can or cannot change to mark nouns.

In Dreamlandic, all /g/'s became fixed. If the classifier prefixes ever had B, this would be an exception to that, but it is possible that the classifier prefixes had hard consonants all along.

In both Andanese and Gold, the inheritance of /g/ is irregular and nearly arbitrary, since they inherited a living system. Essentially, they reflect /g/ when it is useful to have a stable consonant, and reflect B when it is useful to have a flexible consonant. Nonetheless, since both Play and Late Andanese always reflect /g/, it must be that the living system their MRCA inherited was still capable of evolving to a degenerate "always /g/" system and leaving just a few irregular words such as gā where gà was expected.

Source of infixes

If this setup is old, it could be the source of all infixes in Tapilula's daughter languages, because in Tapilula, all VV > V, and the disappearing consonant B could be part of the paradigm. Thus all VBV > V, where both V's are the same, and the original -BV suffix is reanalyzed as a -VB- infix. Later, Play and Gold in some cases assume that it was -əB- instead, because in at least some cases, there was a "hard" schwa in a prefix that got turned into an infix.

Possible early origin and ties to Andanese

Lava Bed morphology only occurs in the clade that includes Galà and therefore Andanese, but excludes both Play and Dreamlandic. It is possible that its evolution can be back-dated to include languages like Middlesex (see Tropical Rim if the link is red), even if at a lesser stage of development; note that Middlesex is already "difficult enough" for having different male and female speech registers even to the point of the genders having two different phonologies.

If this is so, then it would be that Dreamlandic never developed Lava Beds, and that it began to develop in the Andanese-Play branch, finishing its development in Andanese while disappearing again in Play. It seems likely that some infixes must have been present even in the MRCA that includes Dreamlandic, since there is no convenient way to explain how -əh- ended up in both Play and Andanese if it was not inherited as an infix from the beginning.

Tropical Rim

This would also mean that within the Tropical Rim sprachbund, a sharp divide would occur at the Fern-Pabahais border, with the very difficult Lava Bed languages to the east (even if they have an incomplete system much simpler than that of Galà) and the much easier, Dreameresque languages to the west. Both groups of people were of similar appearance and had ultimately come from the same place, but the ones with the difficult languages had taken a difficult journey from the east and all the way along the coast, whereas the ones with the easier languages had also taken an easier journey. This could interplay with politics if the later generations of scholars noticed it, but note that Kxesh, belonging to neither of these groups, conquered both areas and may have caused the peoples to think of themselves as one.

These people were strongly attached to their languages. It is possible that the tribes with the Lava Bed languages would take pride in this and pressure the western tribes to adopt one, but there was no obvious language with a leading role to serve this purpose, and because none of these people had contact with the Dreamers, the typical negative stereotypes against the Dreamers would have made no sense if applied to the western tribes.

Nonetheless, note that all of the eastern Tropical Rim languages (the ones that might have developed Lava Beds) except Middlesex are overrun by outside tribes, leaving just the Dreamer-style languages of the west.

The "Laban" language

08:04, 7 February 2022 (PST)

It is written in the red notebook that ALL of the Sea Turtles (Bombadiers (sic)) 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.

It is possible that this so-called Laban language could be one of the Lava Bed languages. This is not a subconscious association between the name of Laba and the English word "lava", because my teenage conception of the Laban language was precisely one that was so difficult to comprehend that outsiders could not even find the word boundaries. However, this would make it difficult to explain politically. So, another possibility is that the language the Turtles learned was simply Play, and that this was significant because at the time, there was still a sizable fraction of monolingual Andanese speakers in their population. Thus, rather than learning a minority language, they spoke exclusively the majority language. Still, this has problems of its own, since Šasuasa also speaks this language, and it would be unusual for her to speak Play in a Play-speaking nation and yet be known for standing out from the rest.

It is essentially impossible for "Laban" to be Middlesex, as Laba would have no incentive to let the Middlesex-speaking Crystals in; note that this was really Laba, not a rebel faction such as Lohi.

Possible survival in Gold

This system dies out in Play. It may have been reduced to a closed class already in Gold, but perhaps these words with rotating consonants could be seen as their own part of speech, maybe participating as verb endings for a time before freezing out into a closed class. For example from gās "feces" one could form tās "he (did|does) [VERB] disrespectfully" just by changing the neuter /g/ into a masculine /t/, thereby marking it as having a masculine agent, making it transitive. This has no tense marker, and it uses the bare stem of the noun, not an instrumental or some other case. There would also be some means of marking the patient on this, possibly Gold-specific, since it would likely rely on analogy such as schwa-dropping in the Gold branch and same-vowel dropping in the Andanic branch.

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. Note that the common agentive suffix -ta is not a classifier, but rather behaves as part of the stem.

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)

Remember that Play's question markers tīs and tes both include fossilized 2nd person patient markers, meaning that the speaker is addressing someone, essentially saying "I ask you", and that this needs to be taken into account when deriving question words for languages such as Dreamlandic, which never had that set of person markers. Even Andanese would not have been able to use this.

Question markers in Andanese

Whatever solution is devised for Andanese may also serve as the general purpose solution for all languages not part of the Dreamlandic or Gold clades (Gold includes Play but not Trout). Andanese preserves the irrealis mood marker ki, which is the same morpheme that appears as te in Play (and its many variant forms in which both the consonant and the vowel can be changed).

Question markers in Dreamlandic

Dreamlandic will probably also have the irrealis mood marker, which would appear as si. (Not /ši/, which would be the cognate of the word for "ask".) This, however, is likely to have no role in forming questions in Dreamlandic.

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.)

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.

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.

Small phonology

Note that proto-Dreamlandic's phonology can be smaller than that given in Lenian languages. The Dreamers just used /a i u/ for vowels and /p m f t n s l r k ŋ h/ for consonants. Anything else was spelled as some sequence. Since there are 11 consonants and 3 vowels, there are 36 "syllables", defining them by the script and not by the speech. This is the same analysis by which Late Andanese later came to be analyzed as having only 30 syllables. However, sequences like /ia/ are much more common in Dreamlandic than they were in Late Andanese.

Late Andanese also passed through a 36-syllable stage. It is possible that the Dreamers could have independently created something much like Late Andanese semaphore (the two-stick version, not the one-stick body part code).

The Dreamers might arrange their consonant inventory as something such as:

p  m  f
t  n  s
k  ŋ  h
r  Ø  l

Because /l/ patterns similarly to the fricatives. But note that clusters could be onsets, and that the Dreamers considered these to be single consonants. Also, they may have preserved the original consonant order to some extent, which resembles early Andanese.

Other ideas

Size of glyphs

NOTE: it is possible that, despite what is written below, the Dreamers did not have glyphs larger than 2x2 in their original script, and that the 3x3 glyphs only appeared in later stages when long vowels were no longer segmentable. If this is so, the humans would have been small from the beginning.

Mixing with ideograms

The Dreamers continued using the body movement signals for as long as they continued using their inherited Tapilula script. The ideograms were not invented until around 1300, when it became realistic to write for artistics' sake and not just for communication.

Proto-Dreamlandic's vowel inventory (syllablc nuclei) was arguably very rich, with such as /a i u ya yi wa wu ā ī ū/ being common and sometimes also having /i/ and /u/ after that. But they used only 3 vowel positions, since /a/ was uncommon alone and the signaller would be standing with their legs twisted most of the time if there were so many twisted positions. This is similar to how Andanese selected the /e/ and /o/ rows to spell their /i/ and /u/ vowels, even though the Andanese motivation was to simplify their written script rather than the semaphore.

Many CV syllables would needed two body movements to spell. For example almost all /i/ is really /yi/ and needed to spell as CV + i. Nonetheless, the leg movements were tedious and it was easier to spin around between three leg positions than to handle less frequent movements to seven.

Soon the human signallers came to be used primarily for CV onsets followed by a vowel. That is, in the syllable /pia/, the /pi/ part would be spelled with a drawing of a human and the /a/ by an ideogram. A tradition developed of not having two humans stand together. Since there were only three bare-vowel syllables (see below for why longs are not spelled as such), there were only three ideograms that could be used in this position. These spelled words that stood alone: /a/, /i/, and /u/.

By contrast, an ordinary CV syllable would be spelled as an ideogram, so long as a proper CV word with a concrete meaning existed. This is the "R" problem: there were very few words beginning with /r/, and none were truly monosyllabic, since initial /r/ could only arise when a classifier prefix was deleted. Yet glyphs for these syllables were needed because they were common in longer words.

Silent symbols

Grammar words, punctuation, certain abstract concepts, and silent consonants all continued to be spelled with the square Tapilula symbols, which were slightly taller than the human symbols, and therefore also much broader than the human symbols. That is, the human symbols were 3x1 with arms stretched, but 2x1 in most other positions, and because the square symbols were drawn with thick lines, they extended outside their boxes whereas the humans did not. Moreover humans only reached their full width of 1 when either their arms or their legs were stretched horizontally, meaning for the arms that they could not also be stretched vertically. The average apparent size of the humans was therefore something like 1.5 x 0.5, making them just one-fourth as wide as the angular glyphs.

Although the Dreamers could have shrunken these symbols down, the scribes explained that their script was not intended to save space, and that vowel sounds should be wider than consonant-glide onset symbols because they took longer to say. Then, the other symbols, even silent ones, would also be wide because they were squarish, like the vowels.

Humans with /a/

Note that since most human symbols spelled [C]i- or [C]u- before a vowel, there was not much use for the /a/, and that this could help relieve pressure on the scribes since the /a/ and /u/ symbols were visually similar. Thus it happens that the Dreamers' legs mostly oscillate between two positions and don't do much at all. The /a/ positions will nonetheless at least be used for classifier prefixes, which come to be seen as detached pronouns.

Depiction of human anatomy

Length of arms

The Dreamer scribes originally drew the human glyphs with arms about the same length as their legs, since this is how the original square glyphs were drawn, and because the arm positions were the most salient part of the glyphs. In ornate styles, they preferred realistic anatomy, meaning that the arms were drawn at their biologically normal size, and that the humans therefore were no taller than 2x1, even with upstretched arms. This change did not affect the overall appearance much, because the height of the humans excluding arms had already come to be smaller than 2x1 for precisely the reason that doing so had made the arms more visually prominent. But the Dreamers did not magnify the human bodies when shrinking the arms because they held to their traditional rule that the human glyphs could not be wider than 1 (that is, one half of the square glyphs' width).

All of this contributed to the distinctive "crushed" look of the script, where the humans were boxed in on both sides by larger, broader glyphs in most words, and in most words the most salient part of the word was also the most difficult to see.

Another variant of the script used in ornate designs was to have the humans holding long sticks, meaning that the elbows would be in their normal position but the distal part of the arm would appear lengthened. This was unpopular because it looked unnatural when drawn quickly, and was troublesome to draw realistically.

Body shape

Even in the most hurried form of the script, the human torso was always drawn with a rectangular shape, not like a stick figure, because arms needed to be able to reach partway across it but not all the way across.

Nonstandard signs

As the tradition of writing the signs in art grew, the semaphore signals became more elaborate. It was trivial to draw humans in various positions in a picture, but difficult for signallers to imitate those positions in life. Therefore, there arose a sport similar to acrobatics in which athletes would be made to spell various difficult words, including words from foreign languages that required nonstandard syllables.

All Dreamlandic languages had lost their tones by this time, and the Dreamers did not have regular contact with the maritime populations such as AlphaLeap that both still had tones and still used semaphore. Some Dreamers knew that tones had been originally signaled by changing leg positions and later by jumping; but now, to write the tones of non-signalling languages, the Dreamers developed the idea of having the signaller turn around, stand on their hands, or both. To signal a syllable while facing away from the viewer was very difficult because the hand positions would need to be reversed in order to be correct, and this requirement disoriented the signallers. Those few signallers who could stand on their hands would also be required to position their hands as though they were legs, while positioning their legs as though they were hands. These signs were considered impossible in practical use but just barely within reach of the trained acrobats who considered semaphore a sport.

The Dreamers also elaborated new signs in the traditional manner. They created finer distinctions among some of the existing signs, and new hand positions that had previously been unused. For example, one traditional sign had the signaller hold their arms across their chest, but there had never been a sign in which only one arm was held this way while the other was free to sign a consonant; the Dreamers thus created an array of such new signs, even though none of their languages needed signs for these consonants. Likewise, traditionally null-onset syllables had been signed by having the signaller hold both hands in front of them, essentially over their crotch, and the Dreamers now created one-handed signs of this type as well, and told their signallers to imitate the motion of urination with one hand and sign the consonant with the other. These were not /s/ sounds, because Dreamlandic was already signing [s] using a variant of the /t/ position. No language of the Tapilula family preserved the original /s/ series. Lastly, the Dreamers created a few signs in which one or both hands was held behind the signaller's back, which had previously not been possible.

Still other signs were based on body motions, such that they were easier to sign than to draw, but the Dreamer artists found ways to handle this as well.

Other elaborations were impossible to imitate in life; for example, some artists made a distinction in their writing between a male and a female signaller, or between signallers wearing different clothes. This was nonstandard, however, and never became part of the writing system. The only officially accepted use of such elaborations as sex and clothing was to make the existing signs more distinct since they were relatively small.

Politics

In later years, the Play party considered the Dreamer script obscene, even though the signs involving urination were never standardized. They did not consider the Andanese body part signals obscene, even though five of the thirty surviving signs were executed by pointing to or across the signaller's genital area. This was because the Players considered the Andanese to be at one with nature, just as the Players were, whereas the Dreamers were described as being perverted and obsessed with their bodily functions. To their credit, however, the five Andanese signs existed because they matched preexisting words in the language, whereas the Dreamers' urination signs could be described as gratuitous because they corresponded to no syllables in any contemporary Dreamer languages.

Andanese semaphore codes

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.

Visual impressions

Five of the thirty body parts used in the sign language could be considered obscene: hip, buttock, vagina, urine, anus. These were differentiated by holding the signaling rod in five different positions as it crossed over the signaller's genitals; this is why the hip sign was grouped with the others. Since Andanese words were quite long, this meant that nearly every sentence included one of these signs, and many sentences included quite a few, sometimes more than one per word.

The militant Helper faction of the Play party admired the Andanese body part sign language, even as they ruled that the Dreamers' semaphore code based on body motions was obscene and therefore illegal in Play territory. This was due to political bias: the Players claimed the Andanese script as part of their culture, and sought to cast it in the brightest light possible. They said that it would be highly inconvenient for a script based on body parts to ignore a region of the body that was so large, important, and conveniently located near the hands' resting position. By contrast, the Helpers and even the non-Helper Play factions criticized the Dreamers for what they called gratuitous obscenity, adding obscene body motions to a semaphore code that had clearly been fully sufficient without such signs, as it had been initially based primarily on arm movements with minor involvement of the legs.

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.

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.