Šima

THe Šìma are a collection of tribes of Khulls ancestry that live in the Poswob Empire. They are stereotytpically associated with bananas, despite living in temperatre climates with no easy access to the tropics.

Language

The Sima language is very conservative compared to its relatives. The phonology of Khulls was highly unstable, and unlike Moonshine, Ogili, Sarapios, etc, which all changed it rapidly into something completely different, the basic topple-prone structure of both the vowels and consonants is mostly intact in Sima. However, the inventories are noticeably smaller. There are no labialized consonants, no ejective consonants, no long vowels, no pharyngealized vowels, and no new phonemes of any kind.

It is less subhuman-sounding than its ancestor Khulls, but still stereotyped nevertheless as an extremely guttural and aggressive language. "Everyone speaks Sima when they're pooping in a field" is a common example of stereotype.

Culture

Šìma people are aggressive and boastful of their status as slaveholders in the Poswob Empire, and their lack of empathy for the abuses they inflict on the Poswob slaves. The United Pacifist Treaty, signed about five thousand years ago, gives the Sima (and any other Khulls-descended tribe) unrestricted rights to rule the Poswob territories forever, and to use Poswobs as slaves. The treaty gives the slaveholders power far beyond what the original authors of the treaty had ever intended. The Šìma are the people whose abuses go even go beyond that, and largely consist of people who are unwelcome in their own home country because of their crimes, or because of political or religious exile status. Sima do not share a common ancestry beyond being Khulls (a very large category), but they do share a common language because they need to closely cooperate with each other in order to survive. By mutual agreement, anyone not learning the Sima language is not considered a Sima.

For example, a group of mostly Amadean and Safizian Khulls people named the Ghosts of Comfort was expelled from Amade for their beliefs. To survive, they massed together and rode over the mountains into Pusapom. Here they took control of a previously mostly-free town along a narrow point of a river, forcing the population to build it up into a large city, and install floating waypoints along the river so they could collect tolls from any Poswobs wishing to pass through. Although the Treaty doesnt dforbid this, it had been common practice for the preceding 5000 years that slaveowners are generally not allowed to take money from slaves, either their own slaves or anyone else's, because any money a slave manages to create after fulfilling the work of his master is considered inalienable. The Crystals in Safiz consider taxing slaves to be a crime even when it happens in another country, but cannot feasibly do anything about it because the Ghosts, like most other Khulls tribes, built their city so deep inside the Poswob Empire that it would be a dangerous journey just for the Safizians to get there.

Later, these same settlers declared

We will at last overcome our oppressors, having endured the unspeakable horrors of our enemies' endless abuse of our efforts to work relentlessly to set things right.

They considered Poswobs to be oppressors because Poswob civilians had massed along the border of between the Poswob state of Popypobbem and the Khulls state of Safiz, as they were told to do in the wording of a treaty. They were using themselves to try to stop the Ghost army from attacking the nearby nation of Safiz, which was for the most part an ally of Pusapom despite being the home of many of the most abusive slaveholders. The Ghosts solved the problem by slaughtering the entire Poswob population of Popypobbem as they passed through, compensating the slavemasters by contributing some newly captured slaves as replacements. However, their victory against the unarmed Poswobs was beset by a decisive loss against the heavily armed people of Safiz, and Safiz finished them off by riding uphill and taking control of their fortress city.