Pabappa

This page presents the language as a grammar organized by subject. See Pabappa/scratchpad for chronological updates.

Pabappa is the daughter language of Play that remained in the original Play homeland around the capital city.

Pabappa is a Lava Bed language, like its sister Poswa, and its parent language Play. The grammar is noticeably simpler than in these other languages, but still retains the classic Lava Bed trait of using suffixes and infixes that can affect all parts of a word, even the beginning, hence "erupting" and molding all of the available space.

Unlike Poswa, Pabappa continues to make use of compounds.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants are

Bilabials:    p  m  b  w
Coronals:     t  n  d  l  s
Dorsals:               r

The pronunciation of r varies widely according to the speaker and the place in the word, as it is the only dorsal consonant in the language and is thus very distinct. The l phoneme sometimes appears as IPA /j/ after a vowel. The other consonants have very little allophony.

Vowels

The vowel inventory is /a e i o u/, and this is the native Pabappa alphabet order as well.

When two vowels occur together, they are pronounced as a sequence, never as a diphthong. The only diphthongs are those involving a vowel followed by one of /l r/.

Verbs

Most verbs belong to the U-verb class, cognate to Poswa's, but radically expanded in Pabappa. U-verbs (and most other verbs) have an object slot after the stem, which can either be a single consonant (usually -p- for reflexive and -s- for reciprocal), a noun classifier word, or empty. If it is empty, then the /-u/ suffix directly abuts the stem of the verb, and may cause stem changes.