User:Soap/scratchpad
Andanese body part letter pairings
The diagram of the human body where each body part is paired with an Andanese syllable has likely been physically lost. A new one must be made, but if it is done at the 30-syllable stage, it is likely to see little use outside Andanese and cannot possibly have influenced Dreamland. If it was instead inherited from a version with around 100 syllables, it would make more sense to preserve it. This 100 syllable setup could have in fact been as few as 10 body parts, however, with the other syllables being for verbs or indicating finer detail.
Semaphore
If the intent was to spell words using a semaphore-like code, there may be very limited use of body parts other than the extremities. It could be that there are two arms, two legs, and two hands, for example, and that the hands would be visible from a distance only because they would always be grasping large objects. Therefore even 30 syllables could be difficult. It could be that body postures would spell out the remaining letters.
It is possible, purely based on the shape of the letters in the Tapilula syllabary, that consonants would be indicated by arm movements and vowels would be indicated by leg movements. That is, in the Tapilula syllabary, the vowel sub-symbols are inverted forms of the consonants. This is convenient because it happens that the consonants ("arms") always face up and the vowels always face down. The middle of the body would come into use only if necessary to help with leg movements (for example standing to the side could indicate the glyphs with only one "leg" visible).
This essentially rules out anything having to do with body motions representing the first syllable of an involved body part, since the entire consonant inventory is devoted to arm motions and the entire vowel inventory is devoted to legs and the rest of the body.
Arms and legs only
It is easy to have 14 arm positions and 6 leg positions, without even using handheld objects, and it stands that this is the most obvious form of the syllabary to use, as it would not even be seen as a code, since the letter shapes resemble the body motions. Four of the six vowels require the signaller to turn sideways, but they are less common vowels, and partial turns could be visibly distinct enough to serve the purpose. A seventh vowel is in the script, used to mark syllabic consonants. Its legs are close together but not crossed. It was difficult to tell apart from the schwa vowel, which had crossed legs, but confusion was uncommon because sequences like /məba/ were not common.
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.
There were no arm motions in which the arm was extended horizontally in the basic 14; this is because the original letters of the syllabary did not have strokes in the middle; only on the top or bottom and vertically.
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.
Descendants
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.
The semaphore signals disappear early on in Andanese, and Andanese cultural influence may keep them out of Play as well. 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.
The "Laban" language
- 08:04, 7 February 2022 (PST)
It is written in the red notebook that ALL of the Bombadiers (sic) could speak Laban, and this language is the same language that arrived in Play territory in the 4180s. 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.
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.
Bombadiers
The Bombadiers were like Tinks, but mostly led by women. Rather than a separate political party, it could be that they were a group of Tink women, since Tink women otherwise had no political identity at all.
Under their leadership, their nation spent more than 43% of its GDP on its military, according to the red notebook. (However, this is not saying much, as the entire adult male population was required to serve in the military, which included noncombative duties, and the female population presumably were involved in helping them.)
Since even the masculist Tinks sent their women to school, it is possible that they were better educated about economics than their men and helped send funds to the military while other women tried to reduce funding for the military. Even so, the power to allot government funds was reserved for the men in the Parliament and women could only RAISE money.
A Gold name set up for the Bombadiers is nʷadās līʕ nil. This name could be rearranged into Play vīpanua tašap tep, "the turtles that eat fish". This would not be a legal party name, but they were not a political party, and so could simply be a trade name Sea Turtles.
It can even be said that the women organized into a corporation, Vīpanuapa Pimatu, shedding the rest of their name, and that it could be called the Sea Turtles as well or the Sea Turtle Corporation. /-pa/ here is the classifier for sea life and so mentioning the fish is not necessary.
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.
Nov 18, 2021
try to find the old climate-oriented map that had Pabaps in Dreamland, Andanese in Paba, etc .... these all assumed homogeneous cultures and could be used to plan out large-scale population shifts in the Hiboh era.
- STILL NOT FOUND
Oct 31, 2021
Building classifier suffix
Play needs a classifier suffix for buildings, like both its ancestor (Gold) and its descendants Poswa and Pabappa. It would be unlikely for this to be a purposeful omission, since a classifier for furniture exists. This classifier would neither be descended from Gold's (since Gold still used a prefix), nor related to the daughters' (since this originates from a disyllabic standalone word /kaa/).
Possible forms for the Play suffix include ba bi pa pi, all four being derived from variant remoldings of the same original standalone word wòi in Tapilula. using the "pine tree" trick, /oi/ can be reinterpreted as /o/, which would then evolve to /a/ in Gold and therefore also in Play. Alternatively, /oi/ can be read as being originally /əi/, which would evolve to /i/ Gold and then be retained in Play. Likewise, the /p/~/b/ free choice is due to whether or not the initial labial glide /w/ is treated as part of the word or part of the disappearing classifier prefix /nu-/. Note that the Tapilula word originally did have /a/, not /ə/.
It is not a problem for the classifier suffix to be the same as another .... for example, there would be little confusion if it were /-pa/, which otherwise indicates objects found in the sea, since few roots would appear in both classes. /-ba/ is a suffix used in Play for handheld objects which disappeared in Poswa and Pabappa because it would have interfered with the grammatical suffixes. /-bi/ would also have disappeared. Thus all three of these are viable despite at first appearing to pose problems. Lastly, /-pi/ is also viable, though it might have sounded to the speakers as if it referred only to wooden buildings.
Note that *pu "rock" did not exist in Play, as the word still meant a large, heavy fruit at the time, and the later use of it to mean rock was metaphorical. It would in any case never have meant a building, but only a rock used to make a building. The classifier suffix for furniture is -na, but it is unlikely that this could also be the suffix for buildings because of its etymological history, being an example of a new formation which was unstressed from the beginning, whereas the traditional Play suffixes were originally heavy syllables that carried stress and then lost it by analogy. Even after this process had finished, Play speakers would have been mindful of the difference.
Other words that could serve as classifier suffixes include Gold həʕ "shelter', and Gold kaiʕ, also meaning shelter, though the latter only if it were reinterpreted against its etymology, as this word began with a true /e/ in Tapilula, neither /a/ nor /ə/. Nonetheless, the so-called pine tree contraction could remold Gold /kaiʕ/ into /ka/, the speakers assuming that the word had actually never had its /ʕ/ (which became silent early on in Play), and that /ai/ was actually /e/, which in turn could have believably come from /ə/, which would allow a Play reflex of /ka/ (but this time not /ki/, as Gold would have had no reason to retain a special form of this word). The /k/ would likely have been replaced by /p/ during the time of classical Play, shifting back to /k/ in Poswa and Pabappa as the reflexes of the two consonants merged. Since /kaa/ came to be the classifier suffix for buildings in both Poswa and Pabappa, it is possible that it could have been mixed with /ka/ at one point, but this would bring it into conflict with the inherited /-pa/ for sea objects.
Both -ka and -še could have participated in "dirty feet" type orientations, while also getting even more dirty since the operation was repeatable.
If the Play parliament is called Pupumūs, the suffix -še must be in use, even if it is not the only suffix. The name was chosen to mimic the Andanese name Nuhutuhuku, both making use only of the vowel /u/.
A portmanteau word of this could be such as Nufutufupupumūs. Tufu means "public, available to all" in Play and therefore this would make a good pun; note, though, that in Andanese the morpheme boundary is at the opposite syllable.
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[1] 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)[2] 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
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.
