Merar

Not to be confused with Meromo.

Merar was a nation of people who had immigrated from Paba to Subumpam during the late stages of the Vegetable War after they had pushed the battlefronts westward out of Paba. After the war they stayed in Subumpam and married Subumpamese women. THey set up a new government stating that only military officers were allowed to hold government posts. Without irony they told the Subumpamese that they had a history of being submissive to outside powers and that they had come to put an end to it by turning Subumpam into the world's strongest military power. The Merar claimed that they themselves had moved to Subumpam but were here to stay, and held no allegiance to any other nation, and thus were themselves not an "outside power".

Language

The Merar language was also known as Tarpabappa. It was identical to standard Pabappa at the time of the war; the language had not yet dropped the intervocalic non-labial voiced fricatives /ð z g/, which meant that the number of syllables in Merar words was usually the same as their ancestral forms in the Gold language. After the split, Pabappa underwent this change and Merar did not, leading to an unusually early loss of mutual intelligibility between the two languages. Thus, what became of Merar resembled later Pabappa very little.

Common Central Subumpamese (i.e. Bipabumese) remained the common language of the Subumpamese people after the conquest. Later on, many Merar people learned Khulls, Pabappa, or both; and thus Tarpabappa monolinguality came to be associated only with people who were ethnically Merar but locked out of access to the ruling class and its power.

Phonology

Consonants

Merar had a fairly large consonant inventory, but was unusual in that it lacked both /l/ and /r/ sounds. However, there was a distinction between a true /w/ and a pharyngealized rounded approximant, often spelled ʕʷ, but which in foreign words is often transliterated r. However, this sound had begun to lose both its rounding and its pharyngealization early on, and some speakers did not distinguish it from the otherwise rare sound /v/.

                   PLAIN                               LABIALIZED
Bilabials:         p   ṗ       m   f   v                               hʷ  w  
Alveolars:         t       d   n   s   z   dʰ          tʷ      dʷ  nʷ
Palataloids:                       š   ž       y
Velars:            k   ḳ       ŋ   h   g
Postvelars:                        ħ   ʕ                               ħʷ  ʕʷ

The unusual voiced aspirate dʰ arises from the consonant cluster /hd/ in the Gold language; there was no corresponding bʰ or ġʰ because in the Gold language, both of those stops were restricted to word-initial position and to unstressed syllables directly following a long vowel, which meant that there could not be an /h/.

The voiced stop d was pronounced as a fricative, [ ð], between vowels. The vowel system was the same as Gold.

Early sound changes

As the Merar people moved into Subumpamese territory, they adopted a few features of the various Subumpamese languages. Most of the women that they married were peasant women, not of the ruling class, which meant that their wives' native languages were generally not the imperial standard Subumpamese of the capital city but rather one of the many rural languages that had survived alongside it. As the various Subumpamese tribes absorbed the Merari colonists, they sometimes loaned several different forms of the same word into Merar.

For example, the word for catfish was feyiba in Common Central Subumpamese, but various other words in other languages.

History

see here.