User:Soap/scratchpad
Words for parents and family relations
- 05:04, 3 July 2022 (PDT)
Pre-MRCA had /am/ "parent; to carry, nurse, shoulder" which was already down to just a single à by the time of the MRCA, meaning that only Dreamlandic has the final consonant.
- tə̀ means man, not father, and therefore will not appear in ordinary content words, but might be used in baby talk (replaces the earlier idea of using /tàta/).
- ṁ means woman, not mother, but as above may appear in baby talk.
- nù means child (young person), not child (offspring), and probably will not appear in any words for family relations.
Lava Bed 3rd person gender marking
- 03:26, 20 June 2022 (PDT)
It may be that at least in Galà, the /g/ that marks so many nouns is "B" after all. A new morpheme "T" could be created, echoing the thematic consonant of the topic, thereby making most inanimate nouns agree with some animate argument of the sentence, since most topics are animate. (But not all, and inanimates can have their own thematic consonants.)
Early Andanic gluons
- 16:04, 25 May 2022 (PDT)
This is a near-duplicate of the Gala language seciton below but is here for convenience.
Stage 1
The MAP clade branched off after the IDT fields had reappeared, and therefore the minimal matrix is
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- Ø əl ək PAT əg --- --- əŋ IDT ey --- --- --- OBS əḳ əh --- əh
The zero morph had already moved up to the AGT:PAT position, meaning that there were now two /h/'s. This was because /l/ had moved to the new AGT:IDT slot, freeing it up.
The vowels were entirely schwas, which is important because all MAP languages have at least conditional schwa loss.
A new morpheme must be found to fill the OBS:PAT slot, and it must come from /ə/ followed by a primordial CV sequence. For example, if the verb were mì "to see", the sequence would be /-əb-/ in early Andanic, from an earlier /-mb-/. This morpheme arrived too late to conflict with the earlier unrelated /-mbə-/, so this is no problem. And since Andanic handles its schwa loss differently, there is no reason why a consonant such as /b/ cannot participate in this operation.
Stage 2
Therefore a list is:
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- Ø l ək PAT g --- --- ṅ IDT ē --- --- --- OBS əq ō --- h
The schwa is still the only vowel. /əb/ regularly proceeds to /ō/ even before a vowel. However, a new problem has appeared, in that /g/ cannot be relied on to contrast with /h/ or with /Ø/ because the vowel is not always present. Therefore this too might need replacement. Alternatively, the /e~o~i/ alternation freezes out and it becomes a vowel-only infix just as IDT:AGT is.
Stage 3
A possible further development from this state is
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- ō l Ø PAT ē --- --- ṅt IDT nē --- --- --- OBS k hō --- h
There are no new morphemes, just semantic shifts. Note the /k/, now without its schwa: it was contracted from /həq/, and therefore when a /k/ cannot appear, the sequence /heq/ takes its place.
Stage 3a
If the development below is not followed through, a stopping point along the way may be found:
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- ō --- Ø PAT (n)ē --- --- ṅt IDT --- --- --- l OBS k hō --- h
Finding a new OBS:IDT morpheme is very important, however.
Possible Galà developments
Sound changes would cause the /ē ō/ above to shift to /i u/ since they only occurred before a vowel. Likewise, clusters such as /pk tk/ could become /pp tt/ (essentially another way of spelling `p `t) if the /heq/ allomorph is lost for some reason. It is also possible that /heq/ will take on an independent existence as the missing OBS:IDT morpheme.
Dreamlandic gluons
- 16:04, 25 May 2022 (PDT)
Dreamlandic probably branched off about a thousand years earlier than the MAP clade, so it could have had a gluon system that was underdeveloped.
Past tense
- 21:08, 25 June 2022 (PDT)
Use the suffix version of the gluons below. Use either a specific past tense verb or the infix -ig-, as in Play, and choose the system that more closely aligns the two sets of suffixes with the two tenses.
ndà system
If the past tense morpheme is from MRCA ndà, then Dreamlandic would treat it as nč-...-ia because even the suffixes below are originally infixes which were reanalyzed because the two vowels on either side of the salient consonant were the same. Here, the vowels would not always be the same, and the final /-ia/ is a fixed choice. This means that the tense marker is outside the person marker, as a "hatelang" might do; this is the system that Galà escaped above. One advantage of this system is that it would allow the speakers to use the "B" morphemes below and not worry about the two separate verb conjugations.
ìg system
If DRM instead uses Play's /-ib-/ morpheme, this morpheme would be an infix into the dummy verb rather than replacing it. Thus the past tense marker would be /-ìgə-/ in the same sense that the present tense marker is /-ə̀(g)-/. It would also be affected by the two verb conjugations since it doesn't have a consonant to protect it from the verb stem.
Naively the person markers would then be infixed into the /ì/, essentially ruining the system and making it worse in all ways than the /ndà/ system. But whatever system DRM inherited would be quite old, and would not have lasted long were it so inconvenient. Since these are ultimately the same morphemes that Play uses, and were not originally person markers, it could be that the tense marker is in fact outside the person markers, just as Play uses opaque alternations like /-ap/ > /-aša/ instead of /-ap/ > *-ibap.
If the Play setup is the original, DRM would infix /-ìg-/ (that is, -(y)ić(ć)-) into the outermost morphemes listed below, and this might bind them to only using the A list. Therefore the tense marker would be further from the root than the person markers are, but would also seem quite heavy, as it would appear to carry the final vowel in addition (which would no longer obey vowel harmony with the root). That is, the past tense markers could appear to be something so long as /-a/ > /-yićći/.
Mixsed system
Both morphemes could be used if /ndà/ becomes an aspect marker. It would not work the other way around.
proto-Dreamlandic stage (infix version)
- 12:16, 6 June 2022 (PDT)
By proto-Dreamlandic (1700 AD) there was no longer any way to summarize the required morphemes in a chart, as below. They had developed forms dependent on the words they were in, and appeared throughout the word (as in Lava Beds) rather than in a single compact morpheme. However, it is not a Lava Bed system either as it is missing two key features of the Lava Bed paradigm.
- 3p > 3p tuppu-a
- 1p > 2p nia-tupp-ili-u-n-
- 2p > 1p i-tupp-ī-u
- 1p > 3p nia-tupp-ik-u-n
- 3p > 1p nia-tupp-iŋ-u
- 2p > 3p i-tup(p)-ikk-u
- 3p > 2p i-tuppu-: (that is, the vowel is lengthened. Historically, the morpheme causing this was an infix, just like in the words above)
It is possible that /ili/ above is just /il/, making it look more like the others, but the two major Dreamlandic languages both shift /lʲ/ > /l/ anyway.
The above are just one set of morphemes, since they depend on the shape of the word. For example, 3p>2p can be i-...-ip- instead.
It is also possible that the final vowel that above is /-a/ (which also changes) will be generalized to the other forms, even though it provides no useful meaning.
proto-Dreamlandic stage (suffix version)
This assumes that Dreamlandic essentially generalized all verbs into the single MRCA morpheme gə̀ and that it became a carrier for the infixes. Since it was itself a suffix, these infixes would appear to be suffixes.
For reasons not explained above (but due to tones), the /-n/'s have been removed as they no longer serve their intended purpose.
- 3p > 3p tuppu-a
- 1p > 2p nia-tuppu-a-la (this assumes deletion of the other /i/)
- 2p > 1p i-tuppu-a-ya (this assumes DRM allowed /ʷe/ for a period)
- 1p > 3p nia-tuppu-a-ka
- 3p > 1p nia-tuppu-a-ŋa
- 2p > 3p i-tup(p)u-a-kka
- 3p > 2p i-tuppu-a-pa
These are still only half of the morphemes, because a second set is required for verbs whose final syllables had high tones in the MRCA. This is true even if vowel sequences like /ua/ are taken as having been /uga/, and so on. The "B" forms of -la -ya -ŋa -pa might be -ra -ća -ŋa -:, the last being a vowel lengthener. The /k/ morphemes will not change because they are moved out of their context.
Thus it could be said that the morphemes nia and i are 1st and 2nd person topic morphemes, as they give no information about agent or patient. Something similar happened in Andanese, but the Andanese speakers repaired the system by stacking the topic markers (which also served as classifiers) together. Dreamlandic would have less motivation to do this, though it would still be possible.
Dreamlandic is less likely to move morphemes from word to word than languages like Andanese, except for the topic markers.
Possible future evolutions
- See Lenian languages for diachronics.
Note also that the final vowels must agree with the preceding vowels, making them useless, unless they take over the job of tense marking, but it would be awkward for tense markers to appear further from the root than person markers.
Perhaps DRM will create a past tense verb that then takes person markers.
It could happen that -ka and -kka erge into an emphatic active voice marker, bringing it to the 3p>3p position as well, while also allowing omission in the original positions. Thus there would be a system of only four morphemes, -la -ya -ŋa -pa, for 1>2 2>1 3>1 3>2, with the others usually unmarked. Again remember that the vowels are tied to those occurring earlier in the word, so the morphemes really just consist of single conosnants, /l y n p/, but there is no way to get rid of the final vowel.
The system above faintly resembles Play's /-av- -ay-/ and /-ām -ās/ (that is, the "dirty feet" morphemes). The optional /ka/'s are the cognate to Play's /-p/. If the Play system is stable, the reduced form of it could appear here, even though the Dreamers had no contact with the ancestors of the Players at this stage of their language. Proto-Dreamlandic was spoken about 2,300 years before Play, and it could be that the system above does not actually survive much longer.
BRACKET
NOTE: the below are the proto-forms, and are from different stages.
Maximal development
AGT PAT OBS AGT --- əl ək PAT ey --- əŋ OBS əḳ əh Ø
Minimal development
AGT PAT OBS AGT --- lin nan PAT yi --- yi OBS gə li Ø
Compare the older system below:
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- ln nn n PAT re --- rit ri IDT mbə lm --- m OBS gə l t Ø
A good incentive for Dreamlandic using -əli-...-n is that it would preserve consonant qualities. The MAP languages would not need this. At some point, the inserted -ə- needs to be justified; presumably it comes from a /gə/ which lost its meaning, which implies that it cannot have remained in an important slot such as OBS:AGT even in a far-off branch such as Dreamlandic.
The IDT fields disappeared and then resurfaced in the MAP clade, but the morphemes were totally lost and therefore the 4x4 matrix is for convenience. Nonetheless the functions were similar at both stages and it may be that the basic system works better with a 4x4 matrix.
Lava Bed 1P/2P matrix
- 10:58, 25 May 2022 (PDT)
There will need to be thirteen forms for every content morpheme to handle the 1P and 2P morphemes. This is 4x4 minus three, since AGT:AGT, PAT:PAT, and IDT:IDT cannot exist, but OBS:OBS does exist. (The "we" morphemes would be considered 1st person and marked in an entirely separate way.)
Each Lava Bed language will have its set of thirteen mutations. Since AGT and IDT often overlap, this list could shrink to nine, removing PAT:IDT, OBS:IDT, and their inverses. But AGT:IDT and IDT:AGT are still valid. This results in a graph with a stranded OBS:OBS off on its own. The others are AGT:PAT, AGT:IDT, AGT:OBS, PAT:OBS, and their inverses.
The system below assumes that the MRCA had the ancestors of Play's Ø k ʕ h gluons, plus another four corresponding to l ḳ y ŋ, for a total of eight. Note that /y/ was once /r/.
Possible MRCA matrixes
Minimal efficient MRCA system
Here there are nine gluons, but /h/ occurs twice in the assumption that context will disambiguate. It is possible that one of the /h/ sounds comes from an earlier sequence like /ti/ since at the very least /ḳ/ was also originally a sequence.
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- Ø l k PAT g --- --- ŋ IDT y --- --- --- OBS ḳ h --- (h)
However, it is not likely that the system was ever this clean. The distinction between /Ø/ and /g/, for example, is mostly an elaboration of the MAP clade, and so there would be a collision between AGT:PAT and PAT:AGT, which are important to keep distinct. This indicates that perhaps /g/ was not the original value of PAT:AGT, or that the MRCA did not use morphemes in this slot at all.
Minimal defective MRCA system
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- --- l k PAT --- --- --- ŋ IDT y --- --- --- OBS ḳ h --- ---
Here there are six morphemes, but AGT:PAT, PAT:AGT, and OBS:OBS are all missing, meaning that they cannot be indicated in any way by an infix. This stage of the language is too early to have vowel harmony and therefore cannot use e~o~ə for that (although such an elaboration would make perfect sense since there are exactly three empty slots).
It is possible that OBS:OBS was in fact filled, but with a morpheme that was later replaced by /h/.
A smaller matrix, assuming that a distinct IDT form was a Lava Bed innovation, and that OBS:OBS was the original zero-marked form, could be as such:
AGT PAT OBS AGT --- l k PAT y --- ŋ OBS ḳ h Ø
Because /ḳ/ is historically compound, this system cannot be very old. Since /ḳ/ often comes from clusters like /tr/ and /y/ comes from /r/, it may be that an even older system had a /t/ in the bottom left corner, which was lost because of sound changes that made dorsal phonemes more convenient. Therefore a still older system suggests itself:
AGT PAT OBS AGT --- l k PAT r --- ŋ OBS t $ Ø
Here the dollar sign indicates a dummy phoneme, probably an /s/, that had become /h/ by the maturation date of the MRCA.
It happens that /t/ appears in the pre-primordial 2nd person pronoun, and since the infixed vowel is schwa, it could be that the pronoun itself was the infix, although this would not explain any of the rest of the table except perhaps the /ŋ/ for PAT:OBS (since /ŋ/ was the first consonant of the 1P passive morpheme). These consonants are in different places in their respective morphemes, however.
Further breakdown is unlikely, because while in theory there could have been /ti/ > /$/ > /h/, /ni/ > /ň/ > /ŋ/, and the like, the system itself may not have existed at such an early date.
Applesauce system
This assumes that the least appealing system was the original, based on the idea that /t/ was originally /gət/ and that therefore the full pronouns are being infixed at least for one set of morphemes. There is no way to get from /nam/ to /k/, of course, so this requires that another set of pronouns must have existed.
AGT PAT OBS AGT --- l?m nam PAT rit --- ri OBS Gət l? Ø
Here, question marks indicate unknown phonemes, but the required slots may not have even existed.
Note that this system only explains, at best, the /l y ḳ Ø g/ morphemes, requiring that /k h ŋ/ all be innovations and that the distinction between Ø~g be a separate (later) innovation.
This system is projected so far back that the syllable structure was different, and it could be that they were not infixes at the time, but freestanding words that came to be seen as infixes when CVC roots began taking them before vowel-initial suffixes that later came to be seen as part of the roots. That is, /CVC V/ alternated with /CVC-VC V/ and later it came to be seen as /CVCV/ and /CVCVCV/.
An /-ɨ/ suffix, for the accusative, could have supplied this paradigm just by itself, since it begins with a vowel and could conceivably appear further from the root than the morphemes that later produced the Lava Beds. e.g. yam nam ɨ would be the accusative form of yam nam "my fish".
Supersufficient MRCA systems
Contrapositively, the MRCA may have had more morphemes than it needed, including a robust distinction between AGT and IDT. This would make most sense if the morphemes were originally very short and that some of them arose from compounds such as /ḳ/ being originally /tr/. Here, the only blanks are AGT:AGT, PAT:PAT, and IDT:IDT. The rest need to be filled in, possibly with clusters of the others.
"Half Lava Bed"
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- l tm m PAT r --- ŋt ŋ IDT nt(r) tn --- n OBS t(r) ti G Ø
Here, /g/ and /Ø/ are distinguished even though the language may not have been able to do this phonetically. This is based on the assumption that the grammar was fairly complex and allowed for irregularities that might patch up where a lost phoneme once was.
/l r/ now look out of place and it may be that /G/ was not distinct from /Ø/ in the first place.
/tm tn/ were probably pronounced as /mm nn/. /nt/ and /ŋt/ would be distinct, however, and thus the (r) is unnecessary.
N Rim system
A much more likely alternative:
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- ln nn n PAT re --- rit ri IDT mbə lm --- m OBS gə l t Ø
There are three morpheme slots at this stage, and they are for AGT, PAT, and IDT rather than for 1st and 2nd person. Thus this is nothing like the Lava Bed system and a lot more like a traditional person-marking language.
Thus the morphemes are:
- 1st person
- n agent, ri patient, m identity/possessor
- 2nd person
- gə agent, l patient, t identity/possessor
Any fusion is due to regular sound change.
It is most likely that the -i accusative was added anaologically, and that the patient morphemes are really just r and l, and that these may have been both /l/ at some point, which could have been a pronomimal accusative affix that attached to the agent form. Thus, for example, /nl/ > /nr/ > /r/ and while /gəl/ > /gəl/, the /gə/ drops off by analogy or repetition. Thus there is no missing vowel, and the morphemes are:
- 1st person
- n agent, ::m identity/possessor
- 2nd person
- gə agent, t identity/possessor
- Accusative suffix
- l 1st or 2nd person pronominal accusative suffix (common nouns use -ɨ)
Galà matrix
THE NINE GLUONS
Tentative Galà system
AGT PAT IDT OBS AGT --- Ø ol ok PAT e(n) --- --- ṅt IDT ē --- --- --- OBS ēh è(k) --- əh
AGT:OBS could also be Ø in context, as in Play.
There is no schwa in Galà, so the /ə/ vowel here indicates a harmonizing vowel that can be any of /e o i/, with the last being very rare, or not show up at all (depending on the preceding consonant).
Likewise, the capitalized letters are harmonizing consonants that contrast with Ø and with each other. Σ is not B, but might come to be analogized to each word's B-value without necessarily becoming B.
Underlines and empty spaces are undetermined values.
ək for AGT:OBS can only have come from an earlier system in which it was IDT:OBS or PAT:OBS. Galà got rid of the distinction.
The /ol ok/ morphemes might actually be /il ik/ if some analogy is taken from prefixes. è for OBS:PAT is difficult but could have arisen at a time when there were still reliable classifier prefixes. Note that the distinction here between /e/ and /o/ is not etymological, but is still sound because it comes from the variants of /ə/.
There is no reflex of /q/ because it seemingly can only occur where /h/ occurs, and /qh/ > /k/.
2P agent can have a [B] value of /d/ or /k/, while 2P patient has a [B] value of /s/. This may allow the gluons to share homophonous values, especially if the single-consonant morpheme gets duplicated. This cannot be reflected back to the MRCA, however. The MRCA may have relied on vowels to show the 2P morphemes, but note that because /-u-/ is the plural, this would cause problems.
1P=IDT + 2P=AGT means such as "you use my soap to ____" and therefore a 3rd person morpheme is mandatory. The speaker is the owner of the soap, but not the agent.
More Lava Bed ideas
- 11:20, 17 May 2022 (PDT)
The locative construction only exists for objects in the "place" classes, which include o- for natural places and probably at least one for buildings and one for political entities. It is probably a bare locative. Therefore for example "under the sky" as in the Ring Poem would need to be two words, one for "sky-LOC" and one for the verb that means "under". However, this verb would be part of the antecedent, so e.g. "three-rings-for-the-elven-kings-under" would all be one word.
The real meanings of third and fourth person
- 08:48, 25 May 2022 (PDT)
Consider that the 3rd and 4th person arguments might be renamed as proximal and distal or some such thing. Traditionally in Earth languages (and even languages like Poswa) a 4th person is always a patient, whereas in a Lava Bed language the patient is usually (not always) closer to the verb.
Overlap
It is possible that sentences like "The student read the book that the teacher assigned him" need to have identical markings on the word for book for the student (3P=AGENT), teacher (4P=AGENT) because it is the patient of two different verbs. These verbs would also both mark the book as the patient (4P=PATIENT), but the verb for "assign" is trivalent, so there seemingly needs to be yet another argument.
"i will give for him the Jedi Knights the justice they so truly deserve" \
Test in Galà
Leipzig glosses in Lava Bed languages may lie outside the limits of human comprehension; a layered system may make more sense. Or perhaps a table where each word is on its own line and columns show the mandatory morpheme slots.
- hikìqa hunasàqa
- hu-ì-h-Ø-ʔ-h-a hu-nal-h-a-ʔ-h-a
- The sun loves me.
The Leipzig gloss is (with each word on its own line)
- celestial.TOPIC-sun<2P.observer>-Ø-<1P.patient>-3P.agent.celestial-nonhuman
- celestial.TOPIC-love<2P.observer>-Ø-<1P.patient>-3P.agent.celestial-nonhuman
Note that the only difference between the two words is that "sun" (ì-...-Ø) changes to "love" (năl-...-a). The phrase thus can appear as just hinasàqa since all morphemes enclosed by like circumfixes can meld to each other. However, while saving time, such compressed forms are typically used for set phrases; here, it would be most appropriate if "sun-love" (with the sun as the agent) was a common concept.
Note also that syllables are split CVC-V because the infix always goes after the consonant.
A table-based gloss could be such as
TOPIC ROOT 1P 2P 3P 4P hu ì PAT OBS AGT OBS hu năla PAT OBS AGT OBS
Although AGENT and IDENTITY are separate grammatical concepts, it is most likely that they are merged in most of their forms, especially for inanimate objects.
Remaining issues
There are problems with the above use example, one being that -h- already means "3rd person is patient, and is male". In most languages this might not be such a problem, but here, animates and inanimates share the same morpheme slots and a sentence can make sense either way. It is not clear what the listener would think with a sentence where the arguments were PAT-OBS-PAT-OBS, but it might be that the actual table of morphemes will automatically shift one of the OBS arguments into an AGT/IDE argument and therefore change the meaning of the sentence.
The topic prefix hu- partially helps disambiguate, but it is not required that the topic be the agent or even that it be 3rd person. Even so, it could be said that the /h/ here is not a literal /h/ but a repetition of the first consonant of the word. Therefore it would still collide with /hi-/ and some other prefixes but not with wider sets.
Test in Galà (2)
This time the third person is not the topic.
TOPIC ROOT 1P 2P 3P 4P meaning hu onàku OBS OBS AGT OBS planet hu nat ( ) to visit, be located at
- honakunàtokā
- hu-onàku-nat<h><h>Ø-kā-Ø
- The boy is on the planet.
It is possible that the /kā/, here placed in the third person slot, should in fact be in the fourth person slot with the third person slot occupied by the morpheme for celestial objects. This morpheme is just an /h/, but in the example higher up it was assumed that it acquired a CV shape over time.
It is also possible that nàto above will need to become natòko, in the thinking that if one /ə/ can be inflated into an /o/, all of them must be, and therefore there are two /o/'s.
Split-up spelling
For clarity, the morphemes could be spelled out as separate words, so the above would be h onaku nàto kā.
But this will cause issues with morphemes that overlap syllables; already there is a stranded /h/ and the morpheme meaning planet has lost its stress due to the following "word". It will still nonetheless make morphemes easier to recognize, and the "stuck" morphemes could be considered clitics. For example, the 1P and 2P morphemes would go to the last content word in the phrase; here nàto is thus visit.1POBS.2POBS.
If the proper word for "boy" were added into the sentence, it might require the topic to change. This could mean that the topic must always be in contact with the first content morpheme, and that they could be considered to be a single word even in the "split up" spelling style. This would not affect verbs however.
Paleo-Pabappa
Perhaps Thaoa's secession around 1088 did not create a sharp border between the different Trout languages after all, even if the nations were immediately hostile and voluntarily migrations stopped. This may be a misconception based on the fact that the Gold language later drove out Paleo-Pabappa. The royals were speaking Gold by the 1900s, but Paleo-Pabappa may have hung on as late as 2668 in the southeast.
Some Andanese homophones
The Andanese word kupu means:
- pine tree (from MRCA kòpo, earlier /kaipə/)
- pine tree (from MRCA tʷòpo "treetop, canopy")
- pine tree (from MRCA tŏmbo "tree")
- pine sap (from MRCA kawòndʷu)
- young boy (from MRCA ndʷowòndʷu)
- barrier to soldiers (from MRCA ndʷòtʷo, cognate to DRM word for peace)
- nettle (from MRCA tʷŏpʷo)
The first three words were entirely unrelated in the MRCA but all fell together due to sound changes and therefore converged on the meaning of pine tree, the most common type of tree in Andanese territory. The word for pine sap was also unrelated, and had a root homophonous with that for young boys even in the MRCA, but in this case it was the classifier prefixes that coalesced. The two remaining meanings are also unrelated to the above and to each other.
Many of these words have cognates in Play, which lost its classifier prefixes and then added suffixes; the words here are presented without those suffixes. The first word, kòpo, is cognate to Play te and still means pine tree. The meanings "treetop, canopy" and "nettle" merged in Play as tapa, and are distinguished by classifier suffixes (tapafa and tapaa respectively), or by use in compounds. The word that originally meant a generic tree appears in Play as taa, with a meaning specifically narrowed to maple trees; it has also merged with an unrelated word for cactus. Play has pau for both "pine sap" and "young boy"; this word has also merged with some other unrelated words, and it is not the most common word for boy in Play, that being taā which looks related to the above words but is not. The remaining word, meaning a barrier to soldiers in Andanese, is not found in Play.
Play-speaking scholars recognized that many of the Play words on this list began with the voiceless stop t, and that the two words that did not also happened to be homophones, just as they were in Andanese. The Players knew of some other words that began with t in Play for which corresponding words began with k in Andanese. Like other scholars, the Players did not understand the details of sound change processes, but did understand pattern recognition, and therefore the Players realized that their language was related to Andanese.
Pine cones and fishing boats
- 09:16, 12 May 2022 (PDT)
The MRCA was a head-initial language, meaning that nouns preceded the object they belonged to. Thus "house of cards", not "card house", and so on. The exception was that animate nouns always came first, so that "horse ears" was correct, and "ears of (a) horse" was always wrong. This is important because it means that the derived nouns are themselves animate.
Primordially, the head-final construction was also head-initial, but the second morpheme was a verb. The classifier then served as a nominalizer. Thus, "horse ears" was really "that by which the horse hears", and so on.
With objects such as trees, the decision was more fluid, but because pine cones are parts of a pine tree, the animal model is followed, at least in languages where trees are considered animate. Though trees were not commonly the agents of verbs, they nonetheless still had some, and pine cones could be "that by which the pine reproduces", or the verb could simply be unique to the construction as though in English the word "cone" could be a verb specifically meaning to reproduce like a pine tree does.
Because a fishing boat is not made of fish, it is an inanimate object despite the fish morpheme, and therefore the order is head-initial, "boat of fish". Nonetheless, it does not simply pattern like the essive or partitive case. For example, describing furniture, such that the tree is no longer visible or attached, the head-first order is more common.
/ə ~ əni/
- 02:01, 12 May 2022 (PDT)
The place classifier prefix ə- (used for placenames, land masses, etc. but also furniture and other things in which people commonly situate themselves) is related to the locative prefix əni-, which only appears in languages that lose the initial schwa, and therefore not in Dreamlandic. This means that it may have been a suffix originally that got reinterpreted, even though it behaves as though it had come from second-order classifier in the languages where it survives.
Therefore proto-Dreamlandic may have a locative morpheme nii. It may be a suffix, a second-order prefix (since Dreamlandic probably at least had /ə-/), or a standalone morpheme.
Note that the primordial form of this morpheme was with a true /i/ vowel, not the more common /ɨ/, and therefore that if the morpheme order were reversed primordially, it would have evolved into /ŋə/, and that a standalone prefix /ŋ-/ would take the place of /ni-/ whenever a vowel followed. This would be more efficient than any other system, but note that both Andanese and Dreamlandic separately lost the distinction between /ŋ/ and /n/ at least partially.
The ŋə form of the morpheme would evolve to ŋ̇ in Old Andanese, potentially leaving its effects in Late Andanese through sound changes but not surviving into the open-syllable era. In Galà it would simply become ŋ, filling the optional coda slot and thus meaning that no other morpheme could appear there.
Primordial past tense /-i-/
- 07:19, 28 April 2022 (PDT)
See below, as it is difficult to construct the MRCA without a past tense infix resembling /i/, which evolves to /-ib-/ in Play. It may trigger consonant gradation in some other languages. In Dreamlandic, it is eventually crowded out by a standalone past tense prefix derived from MRCA /nda-/. If this morpheme were also preserved in Andanese, it would be /ta/, but it is difficult to see how the same development could have occurred in such widely separated branches of the family since the MRCA only needed the infix.
Early Dreamlandic
Even so, it is possible that the reflex persists into early Dreamlandic in strong verbs and auxiliary verbs. These would stand out from other morphology in that the /g/ was suppressed, so that e.g. pre-MRCA monosyllabic /miu/ was monosyllabic into early Dreamlandic rather than being replaced by such as /migu/, which would have changed the tone pattern.
However, this distinction is difficult to justify for the other branches. It could only have come from an earlier /iy/ sequence, not from a bare /i/, because a bare /i/ would have turned into consonant gradation (not the same type as above). A pre-primordial sequence like /-ɨr-/ or /-ɨř-/ could work, but would require analogy. Even this would have been expected to drop its /ɨ/ and create a cluster, but since the sound change that would do this was thousands of years back, it can potentially be explained some other way.
Genitive and instrumental prefixes
- 03:06, 12 May 2022 (PDT)
The proposed genitive prefix /pi-/ is probably untenable since the MRCA prefix was hi- and not hə-. A handheld prefix /hə-/ still exists, which could mean that Dreamlandic uses this as its prefix for handheld objects, and indeed this could also come from the prefix /gə-/.
Locative
See above (search for "əni"). But also, /nii/ was originally a verb, meaning that it was originally conjugated. Dreamlandic would be able to use this in one of three ways (possibly making more than one choice):
- As a verb, meaning it could originally be placed after the noun it modifies, and then "freeze out" when the language switches from SOV to SVO and be seen as an inflection. Then, a new verb would be created, or the copula would be used (I dont know offhand of any languages that have a true locative case but also use a copula, but they probably exist. try Finnish, Hungarian, etc). Even if a copula exists, DRM would probably use something else because it would enable a narrower meaning such as "in", "upon", etc.
- As a bound prefix just like in Andanese, even if the morpheme order is different. DRM would be more likely to use /ni-ə-/ instead of the Andanese model /ə-ni-/.
- As a verb, but putting the noun it modifies into the oblique case, therefore adding an extra syllable, and probably also changing the consonant in that oblique case. This could then create a third noun case, even though the final syllable, which actually carries the meaning, would be redundant at first.
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.
Past tense infix
Play's past tense infix, -ib-, might need to be projected back to the MRCA as well, since it is difficult to see how it could have arisen from a suffix or prefix if assuming Play's other infixes were inherited. The use of an infix with /i/ could "relieve pressure" on the others for being all stacked with schwas. It is even possible that the /i/ and /ə/ could marry, but Play avoided this.
It is possible that the past tense infix -ib- is identical to the passive voice marker -i-, through the same logic as English "worked" being both a past tense and a passive (this has come up before in Icecap Moonshine and I remember explaining that it made sense and was not simply a coincidence in IE; note that it happened in both Germanic and Romance if not elsewhere too). This would prevent the past tense infix from coupling to preceding consonants, following vowels, or both.
Dreamlandic languages such as Baywatch and Dolphin Rider would probably lose the past tense infix because they had vowel-initial verbs to couple with their innovated past tense PREFIX (from /ta-/), much as had been planned for Late Andanese. Late Andanese could not have shared the innovation, however, if the infix was the primitive form, and therefore a new past tense prefix will need to be made for Late Andanese.
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).
MAP-associated morphology
- 00:05, 30 April 2022 (PDT)
The so called MAF languages are the best examples of Lava Bed morphology: Middlesex, Andanic languages, and the Fern languages that originated in the core tropical area but were pushed through Play territory to the east. Later, Play pushed further west and separated the Andanic languages from Middlesex as well. Thus, Play appeared at the center of this discontinuous distribution, and came to be associated with the languages even though it was not a Lava Bed language itself. This was helped by the fact that Play was notoriously difficult to learn even early on. The paraphyletic grouping MAP can be used for the cultural association between the MAF languages and Play. Here, Fern drops out because of its weak cultural prominence, the other languages being spoken primarily in the tropics. But, remembering the Ferns' early contributions, the grouping could also be labeled FAP.
Portmanteaus
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. Canonically, this required at least a CV sequence in common between the two roots, out of a 75-syllable inventory (tones were ignored).
plohkeloy
remember Yurok.
sappa sappi
and remember the type of word formation where only one element changes, meaning the information content is " 2nd syllable /a/ > /i/" ... this is slightly more nutritive than just saying /a/ > /i/ because there are four possible places for the change. in the original intent of this change, /sap/ was probably functioning as a pseudo-classifier, but it would not need to be so in a new language.
Lava bed third person markers
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.
Third person markers (additional information)
- 12:57, 28 April 2022 (PDT)
In Galà, the roots for boy, "teenager" (see above), and woman all have the null consonant /Ø/, just as they all have /b/ in Middlesex. This could lead to a setup where new consonants are inserted to signify biological sex and the vowels are left to signify age. Perhaps this is unlikely, though, and rather the vowels could be used to signify the 4th person marker while consonants signify the 3rd person marker. Then, the words for boy, teenager, and woman would shift in meaning to male, epicene, and female, meaning that the 4th person would not have marking for the age of the participant. Note that it is still possible to distinguish agent from patient in this morpheme even with no consonants, so the 4th person marker would not simply become a patient marker.
Yet another word for boys is găḳa, which survives in Play as a term of address (/žakas/ "hey, boy" and /žakap/ "I, the boy" (needed because of Play's lack of pronouns)). In Galà this would evolve into àa, which constraints with the existing /ā/ and which would also evolve to have the same form whether it stood for the agent or the patient. It might be seen as more "distant" and therefore default to a patientive meaning, and then later evolve into an atomic morpheme that indicates both agent and patient. This would not happen in the other Lava Bed languages and the term might not even participate in LB morphology outside the Andanic family. Thus it would be part of an isogloss with Play, meaning that the term was geographically bound rather than following linguistic family boundaries.
Gold has the word dʷàta "girl, woman", which is cognate to Andanese puta "child". The first syllable is the same as that in the word for boys below. This could replace /pùgu/. It might also be present in Andanic despite not having a /b/.
Middlesex 3rd person markers
The ā/ă alternation is early enough to appear in Middlesex and other Tropical Rim languages but they would not have the word for boy evolving to just a single vowel. Therefore this might be confined to Galà or at least to Andanic, and would need a name of its own, as it is not crucial for Lava Bed morphology and arguably does not "erupt" in the same way that the core Lava Bed infixes do.
Middlesex would be able to get to a stage where bā ~ bă meant "3P is agent/identity ~ 3P is patient" and that the 3P was a boy; with the /b/ remaining in place, it is most likely that the meaning stays close to the original instead of becoming generalized to humans as in Galà. Perhaps suffixes could be added to disambiguate meaning, resulting in the perhaps odd situation of the affixes for adults being derived from those for children. The existence of this word is mere happenstance; it seems as though Galà had it planned all along, but in fact, the root word was just one of many words for people. Thus, its existence in Middlesex is no surprise.
Words for humans at large
If Play's ta "human" has a cognate with a similar meaning in Middlesex, that word would be shorter than the word for boy; this is no guarantee, however, as the Play word (earlier /dà/) almost certainly underwent semantic shift from some narrower meaning and thus might not mean "human" in Middlesex or even in Andanic. Play's ta word is probably MRCA ṗò "teenager; adolescent", however, as it was gender-neutral from the beginning and had an easy path to supplant any preexisting word for adults because it was monosyllabic. Moreover, it came to also signify adults in Moonshine.
Skirts
Middlesex could perhaps use the unrelated word ḷbă "human", which is their cognate of the ethnonym Lephal. This word also means "skirt", but this sense is most likely secondary, as it could have been used to set the people apart from tribes who did not wear skirts, but would have had no such meaning when they were in isolation. The PATIENT form of this would probably be ḷbà. Thus, a chain could set up, where ā <-> ă <-> à, in both Middlesex and Andanic, and would define the perception of tones. The syllabic /l/ would become plain except when preceded by a consonant. Then, this would pair with the preceding syllable and take the stress; this could be a problem since it would take the tone away. It is possible that /l/ will not do this in Middlesex, even though patterns suggest that it should.
Thus, for example, Middlesex /gìma/ "to trace" produces gimpabā "the boy traces" and gimpabă (or /gimpàba/ by stress-shift) "the boy is traced", but with the generic human affix, the resulting word gimpalba can either mean "the human traces" or "the human is traced".
Note that the dictionary for Middlesex currently has nh > nʰ (in other words, no change), but md > mb, which is unlikely to coexist. It is perhaps more likely that Middlesex will do /mh nh ŋh/ > /mp nt ŋk/ like its relatives in the Andanic and Fern families.
There is ANOTHER word for skirt which, with a different classifier, can mean "people" in Dreamlandic and Play, but means "woman; woman's skirt" in the Lava Bed languages, despite the fact that Play emerged from within Lava Beds and Dreamlandic was out of contact for 1,500 years. This is essentially a coincidence but can be explained by the Dreamers and pre-Players having their men wear skirts while the people in between did not.
- Sex-based speech registers
Note that Middlesex has b as one of the consonants which men and women are made to pronounce differently, with women using [f] or [v] while men must only use [b].
Other Lava Bed ideas
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.
Addition
dùhai dìta dìta dù shows that /ai/ behaved as one syllable. This phrase was actually pre-tonal. In fact, primitively even the vowel /ù/ is composite, so the thematic syllable is /dì/ and the /dù/ at the end is also composite. Nonetheless this situation would not have lasted into the recorded history of Andanese.
Still, one could respect a dissection of this such as
- dɨ-w-ha-ɨ dɨ-ta dɨ-ta dɨ-w.
Late Andanese would preserve the morpheme boundaries instead of using both /di/ and /du/ as classifier prefixes. This would result in hiatus, so the resulting sentence would be such as
- Suku tika tika su.
Although it is unlikely Andanese would preserve such short morphemes.
Compounds and word trains
- 15:37, 20 April 2022 (PDT)
If a word break occurs, the 1P and 2P inflections need to occur again, but not the others. The outer morphemes (topic/class and 3P/4P/etc) are only used once in any clause.
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.
Old ideas
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",[1] 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",[2] 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.)
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.
NOTE
Although difficult to understand, this is the system that Play inherits, and it does not "fix" the system by making 1:2 serve as 1:3, etc. And when using verbal embedding, the root at the head of the word does not count as context, so e.g. "book I read you", not "book I read", but the final -p/-s/-Ø does.
Play may sometimes use 1:2 where English would use an intransitive, however. It may for example be that "tree I planted for you" is simply the only way to express "tree I planted" when no context is provided.
Classical particles
Other particles
- 15:52, 3 May 2022 (PDT)
Dreamlandic requires the existence of a particle nə̀, with a meaning like "(if....) then", and which is a prefix to the second clause. Dreamlandic does not even preserve this itself, but this is because Dreamlandic essentially loses the entire system and replaces the particles with verbs and possibly nouns. This would probably appear in Play as na, either because of early /ə/ > /o/ > /a/ or because of the later vowel harmony rule. In Old Andanese it would be a syllabic ṅ, changing to a normal /n/ in Galà but with an unclear future in Late Andanese. If it survives it might be tied to a "rescue" morpheme. Normally, schwa can be rescued as /i/ or /u/ through the /e~ə~o/ alternation, but in this case /ni-/ and /nu-/ are important prefixes already.
Dreamlandic uses this particle in generating its word for "or", nimia(-ni), meaning that there was a longer form, nə̆ma, either in the MRCA or in the very early history of Dreamlandic.
This also requires the existence of a particle mà meaning "not", though this need not survive into Play.
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). It is not cognate to Andanese ki "if" but the similarity of meaning may have led to them being merged early on.
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/.
Dreamlandic particles
- 10:35, 3 May 2022 (PDT)
Dreamlandic
Proto-Dreamlandic has a root fampua for "and; with; accompanying", and this requires the instrumental prefix ya-, so it takes three syllables just to say "and". Essentially it is a verb just like the Play particles are verbs, but Dreamlandic lost both the original root and the ability to use such roots in their bare form instead of padding them with an instrumental prefix. It is even possible that this further requires the use of the genitive prefix pi- on the following noun. Later Dreamlandic languages would shorten this down; it simply appears that proto-Dreamlandic was the stage just after the original inherited root /ka/ ceased to function and the grammar became burdened with additional affixes that had not been needed before.
It is possible that the surprisingly inefficient system arose because Dreamlandic was switching from SOV to SVO, and that these few preexisting SVO constructions (since conjunctions were verbs) were seen as ungrammatical. Note that 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.
The "and" root /ka/ survives at least in proto-Dreamlandic ćamia(-ni) "but, except", from an earlier meaning "and not"
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
- This section may be spurious if there was no genitive /hi-/, but it could be reused if a new genitive is created.
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,[3] 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
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:
- it demands lost knowledge (the final consonant that didnt appear in the bare form),
- it ruins retained knowledge (it merges final /-i/ and final /-ia/ into just /-ia/),
- 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. The labialization would also drop out, potentially leaving just /a/ as the root.
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 for north/south/east/west, 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.
wipe attitudes toward the other side
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. (But note that this ignores clusters.) This is the same analysis by which Late Andanese later came to be analyzed as having only 30 syllables.
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.
New traditions
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.
The Dreamers also used the elbows more than their forebearers had. For example, one gesture was similar to shrugging one's shoulders, and could be performed either with one arm or with both.
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.
Two-stick 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. The leg were not used.
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[4] 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)[5] 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.
HISTORY SCRATCHPAD
Paba vs Dreamland
- 06:46, 3 May 2022 (PDT)
The territory sometimes called Paba should be renamed, as the name only appears very late in history, and for much of the first 2600 years of its settlement, its language was not acoustically distinct from its neighbors (it was replaced partway through). The early settlers of Paba were the Trout people, and at the time, the tribes settling in what later became Paba were not remarkably distinct from the rest.
It is possible that the ancestors of the Pabaps could be called the Pùgu tribal confederation; this is the same word that later generated the toponym Pubumaus. The only advantage this name has is that it begins with /p/ and thus serves as a reminder of what the people later became; ordinarily the name would be translated just like the other tribal names were. The meaning of this word in its speakers' languages is not clear; it is cognate to a word that means "woman" in some other languages (e.g. it is cognate to proto-Dreamlandic /fuppu/), but because this word only had this meaning with the female classifier prefix on, it is not clear what it could have meant in bare form. It is possible this is no more than the Lenian version of the ethnonym "Lephal", which means human in some tropical languages but outside the tropics means a type of skirt worn by women, at least with the clothing classifier prefix on. It may be that both words actually mean types of skirts but also serve as words for humans; as perhaps Lephals gave skirts to both sexes because Pùgu only to women.
At any rate, the Pùgu were a subset of the Trouts, and therefore it is accurate to refer to them as Trouts at least in the proper context.
Settlement of Paba
The territory of "Paba", be it called Pubumaus or anything else, was settled very quickly around the year 630 AD. The Trouts quickly invaded and subdued the strongest of all of the aboriginal Star tribes because they had superior fishing boats with which they trapped the Stars on land, depriving them of their primary food supply. Then, the Trouts signed pacts with other aboriginal tribes and came to participate in politics as though they were merely one more tribe amidst the others. Few new Trouts arrived in the territory after the initial settlement, and so it appeared to many that the aboriginals would unite, take back the Trout lands, and restore the aboriginal way of life. This did not happen because the Trouts maintained their control of the sea, their superior shipbuilding skills, and trade links with other nations, including aboriginals, that the Stars had been out of contact with.
Although hostile to the aboriginals overall, the Trouts picked sides in fights between two outside groups, and therefore some aboriginals ended up on the Trouts' side, and moved into Trout society. Thus the Trouts were soon of mixed ancestry, except for those in Thaoa who had settled in an area with few of these aboriginals (because it was disputed territory even before the Trouts arrived) and because they refused to allow aboriginals to move in.
Within about four hundred years — that is, by the 1060s — despite sustained rapid growth, the Trouts abolished their military and declared themselves pacifists, saying that even if other nations invaded them, they would meekly roll over and accommodate their abusers. This was because they had run into the same limitation that the aboriginals earlier had; they were unable to move north because of the hostile aboriginals of the mountains (very different culturally from those of the lowlands), and their strength was derived from sea contacts with nations that could at any time betray the Trouts and invade. Rather than attempt to hold off such an invasion, the Trouts invited the peoples of the tropics to come on in and start slaughtering Trouts, while also inviting the aboriginals of the mountains to do the same. Thus they figured the two greater powers around them would fight over who got to control the Trouts and as such the continued existence of the Trout nation, though difficult, would be ensured.
The Trouts in Thaoa seceded at this point, figuring they would be the first to be overrun since even the other Trouts were against them now. The result of this was that the outside powers began immediately exploiting the western Trouts, the pacifists, and left Thaoa alone. Thaoa said that this proved their decision to secede had been correct, and then Thaoa even joined in on the abuse of the western Trouts. At this point they began to refer to the western pacifist territory with a single name; this name cannot be "Paba", however.
Later evolution
Pacifism would define the foreign policy of Pubumaus (here, a term of convenience that variously includes and excludes Thaoa depending on changing borders) for the next 2,900 years; essentially, until 3958 when they were united with the Anchor Empire. Essentially, all wars in Pubumaus between ~1100 AD and 3958 were opportunistic invasions, where an outside power invaded Pubumaus and achieved disproportionate gains because the Pubu people were unarmed and in many cases forbidden from resisting even soldiers that were slaughtering their people. Sometimes, the people did fight back, but there was no common army and the fractural military forces that did exist in Pubumaus did not always cooperate with each other. Yet Pubumaus continued to exist because they were the grand prize of various foreign empires, who would join in whenever Pubumaus was invaded in order to keep control over as much Pubu territory as possible.
The soldiers in Pubumaus were of separate tribes, not part of the Pubu majority, and even had their own languages. They were mostly tall (not the Andanese) and considered themselves physically hardier than the Pubu people. After a major war in 2668, an environmental disaster destroyed so much of Pubumaus that the people became wholly dependent on agriculture, and Pubu farmers put their children to work in the fields. The dependence on child labor caused the Pubu birthrate to soar, and within a few hundred years they had grown so fast that the military tribes in their nation had become scarce and the nation was effectively defenseless again.
Agriculture
This postwar agriculture primitivist era is perhaps the only one that can properly be called Pubumaus, and it is little written about here; it is possible that Pubumaus was invaded dozens or even hundreds of times between 2668 and 3958 and that they continued to survive not because of help from outside powers but because their rapid population growth continually replenished losses in battle, even when they were vastly disproportionate.
It is at least certain, however, that Pubumaus maintained a navy of sorts during this period because they needed to fish far out to sea, and their fishing spears were also capable of killing humans, and that the area to their north was still part of Nama, though growing weaker every century, and that Nama had little incentive to invade Pubumaus as they were losing wars in their own territory and also had little access to the south seacoast without relying on Pubumaus.
Settlemtn of Dreamland
By contrast, the Dreamers took 1,400 years to settle Dreamland, and then another 600 years in a more or less stable condition where they neither took more land nor lost land to outside powers (except one invasion from Baeba). The Dreamers never fought an organized war against the aboriginals, and therefore the Dreamers' "conquest" of their land was entirely peaceful. This is why it took so long. The aboriginals eventually blended into the Dreamer population, but there was little evidence of this because unlike in "Paba" the Dreamers mostly lived separately from the aboriginals and because Dreamers continued to arrive in waves throughout time.
Commonalities
Both the Trouts and the Dreamers were blonde, blue-eyed people with light skin; that is, they were Lenians. And they were both conquering territory inhabited by dark-skinned aboriginals who were about the same height as the colonizers. And in both territories, the invaders and the aboriginals were both masculist tribes, meaning that their men were taller than their women. And both territories were bordered by the territory of Nama, the other aboriginals spoken of, who were feminist and were hostile to all masculist tribes, seeing the aboriginals and the invaders as two of a kind in both Dreamland and the Trout territory.
The Dreamers and the aboriginals of Dreamland were taller than the Trouts and the Stars. Despite the coincidences of skin color, the various groups did not typically see each other as kin. The western Trouts had already become pacifists by the time the first Dreamers landed on their peninsula, and the now-separate Trout tribes had mostly come to define themselves by their political ideology rather than their tribal identity. (Though since many Trout nations were not democratic, their tribes were ruled by a single party.)
Development of hereditary classes in society
As above, the Pubumaus people had a low social status in their own territory and were enslaved everywhere else. They had maintained their pacifism during the Oyster War, and therefore, the only reason they were on the winning side of that war was because they had submitted to occupation by the power that ended up winning, namely the Star Empire. The Leapers were part of this winning coalition, and in the aftermath of the war they became the dominant partner, and then occupied the coastline of Pubumaus.
The Leapers wrote the new laws of Pubumaus (there was no formal constitution; they governed through the Pubu royal family). The Andanese, called "vampires" by the Leapers, were allowed and in fact encouraged to continue their parasitic lifestyle, taking food from Pubu farms and giving nothing back, and depositing Andanese orphans in Pubu foster homes only to take them back when the children became old enough to care for themselves. Other minority groups were also given stipends to allow their people to live in Pubumaus without working, all supported by taxes paid by the Pubu people only. Traditionally, the explanation for all of this was that the non-Pubu tribes were required to serve in the military, and the Pubu, being hereditary pacifists, were not. But now the Leapers said that on top of all of their other burdens, the Pubu people needed to also serve in the military, taking a defensive role, and that they would not be allowed weapons or armor to defend themselves if the traditional military around them failed to protect them.
The Leapers controlled the sea and had previously made much talk of their ability to come out on top in every war, fighting little but gaining the most, and writing treaties that abused both their enemies and their allies. The Leapers had signed similar unfair treaties with other participants in the war, and figured that they would succeed in Pubumaus because even though they had also cheated the Stars and the Oysters, neither of those groups was well represented in Pubu society and therefore they would not be able to unite with the Pubu people and write a new treaty lifting them from their bottommost position in society.
The Pubu royal family cooperated with the Leapers in writing the treaty, because the Leapers allowed the royals to remain in power despite the rest of the Pubu tribe being pushed into a slave-like position. The royals collectivized agriculture, saying that Pubu people were meant to work on farms and fisheries, and that they would never be allowed to keep their own food. Instead, all food would be taken from them by the government, and then distributed according to the government's designs. The royals said that the pre-existing tribes mentioned in the treaty would have priority for food distribution, even though they did not work and had no other duties so long as the nation was at peace, and that the Pubu people would only get access to their own food after everyone else was done, and that the food distribution to Pubu families would be in accordance with the number of children in their family, with adults getting no food provisions of their own.
The result of this was that the Pubu birthrate exploded dramatically, and within a few generations the nation was in famine again, but the unified government broke down and there was no way to restore order. Some of the new Pubu successor states abolished the new laws, but those who kept the food distribution tied to family size experienced the most rapid population growth.
Closer ties with Andanese
The treaty bluntly referred to the Andanese as parasites, as though it were simply a law of nature that Pubu families must work hard for a living while the Andanese were legally allowed to steal their food and other belongings. It was illegal for the Pubu people to retaliate for this in any way, even with nonviolent means such as taking their stolen goods back, but for various reasons, the Andanese thieves had traditionally been the poorest class in society despite all of this, and lived not in the cities but in poor natural environments where neither agriculture nor fishing was a viable way of life.
The Oyster War had so devastated the environment that agriculture became difficult. Many species of animals and plants went extinct, and because their habitat was isolated from the rest of the tropics, they could not simply be reintroduced; the animals on the other side of the sea were different and needed to feed on plants which Pubumaus did not have. Hunting remained viable, but the animal population did not recover immediately in the aftermath of the war. The people came to subsist on vegetables and fish, and had to compete with animals such as rabbits who could eat the woody, immature vegetables before they were ripe enough for humans to also eat them.
Gender roles in society changed at this time. In the runup to the war, men had still been in control of Pubu society despite their being officially pacifists and this being attributed to their nature. Now, people said that Pubu men were just defective women, "humans without breasts", as though the ideal human were female.
The Andanese people were the largest minority in Pubu territory whose women were taller than their men, and this was one of the reasons why they were not hated by all of the others. Now, intermarriage was causing this trait to enter the Pubu population as well. This caused a lessening of the physical differences between the Pubu and Andanese people, and the Pubu people saw less of a reason to keep allowing the Andanese to parasitize them. They could not overturn the laws, but the Andanese people also came to be more sympathetic, and some abandoned their parasitic lifestyle to live like the Pubu people. The laws did not allow either the Andanese or the Pubu people to change their identity, but children of a mixed marriage could belong to either group. This was still not up to the parents to decide, however. Therefore both groups continued to exist.
New military orientation
Although groups such as the Ferns, Zeniths, and others could have theoretically shared in the rapid population growth since they were not required to work, at the individual level there was no incentive for couples to have large numbers of children, and so the Pubu and Andanese groups quickly outpaced the rest, with the Pubu also growing more quickly than the Andanese. Soon the outside groups were so few in number that the Pubu farmers simply accepted their financial burden, but they also realized that their nation now had a very small army for its size and that the Leapers may have seen this coming when they had earlier written in the treaty that the Pubu people were required to form a defense-only military of their own.
By this time, however, there was no longer a unified Pubu state and the Leapers had accordingly lost control of the Pubu's coastal sea. No single Puby navy had replaced the Leaper navy, but rather, the Pubu fishermen had taken control, as their fishing boats, though small, could out-compete Leaper warships along with the warships of any other naval power. This situation was common elsewhere on the planet and was due to the lack of accurate range weapons.
Pubumaus remained officially pacifist, and no outside nation, even their allies, was willing to trade weapons and armor into the Pubu nation. Instead, the Pubu people manufactured their own, using knowledge that they had gained from intermarriage with the Andanese. The Andanese still retained the legal right to parasitize Pubu families, as the Pubu people were generally unwilling to overturn this tradition, but increasing intermarriage led to warm relations between the two groups and the Andanese began to take up productive economic roles in society, becoming a merchant caste, and dealing with many skilled trades that did not involve handling food. They increasingly moved to the cities. Living in the old manner became a source of shame, and the Andanese families who remained in poor habitats were often robbed by others, even though this was illegal, and this increasingly went unpunished. Even so, the general culture of Pubumaus respected people who lived rough lives, and neither the Pubu nor the urban Andanese made moves to outlaw the lifestyles of those Andanese who remained in the wilderness.
Cultural divides in the tropics
NOTE: This section may be rewritten as a narrative from the Moonshine point of view, which would allow the satirical statements to become real since some Moonshine scholars believed foreign languages were genuinely so inefficient that they presented obstacles to daily life activities. It could then be inserted into Play_language/history#Criticism_by_foreign_scholars even though it is primarily not about Play.
Maps of MAPs
The primary linguistic divide was between the very difficult Middlesex-Andanese-Play clade of languages, spoken in the eastern Tropical Rim nations, and the much simpler Hipatal languages spoken in the nations to their west. The MAP speakers welcomed foreign spies into their nations during war, knowing the war would be over by the time the spies managed to tell the difference between a battle plan and the directions to the nearest bathroom.
This was despite the fact that Hipatal and MAP were separated by only a few thousand years of evolution, and that they were both chewing away at the aboriginal groups which were much older. The aboriginals split their allegiances because they were much weaker than the colonists, and for the most part they gave up their aboriginal languages as well.
True Ferns
The Fern languages are those spoken in Atlam. These people invaded the aboriginals of the Equatorial zone and then lost their territory, so they invaded Pubumaus next, the territory that the Players later arose in. They quickly pushed through Pubumaus and invaded the aboriginals of Repilia, who then invaded Lenia, causing Lenia to invade the aboriginals of Baeba Swamp, only to lose and suffer an invasion from Baeba, which was being invaded by the Crystals who had invaded the Tropical Rim and driven the other aboriginal tribes to invade the Ferns who had invaded the aboriginals in the first place.
Since the Ferns were originally the westernmost nation in the MAP clade, it could perhaps be more properly relabeled FAP, but because the Ferns were also the first of the colonists to lose their conquered territory, they were pushed the furthest out, and therefore became the northernmost (and nearly the easternmost) of the colonist groups, and the only landlocked nation among them all.
Although the Ferns lost a war against the aboriginals they had earlier colonized, they remained as a distinct population in the newly reclaimed territories, and the earlier colonial name Atlam remained in use. A sizable Lenian minority also remained in Atlam as late as 2668, during the Oyster War. However, the Lenians may not have arrived until the 2100s, and indeed may have needed to wait for the Fern colonists to lose their war in order to safely enter Atlam themselves.
Moonshines' dreams of colonies
Colonies in the tropics
These tribes did not divide themselves into alliances based on language, but outside groups such as the Moonshines did. Since the Moonshines were descended from the Crystals, who were part of the MAP clade, the Moonshines took the MAPs as being "their people" in the tropics even though the early Moonshine nation switched to a different language. Then, the Moonshines grouped the western tribes with the Dreamers and added this to their long list of reasons to hate the Dreamers.
Some Moonshines wanted to colonize the tropics, saying that they were only returning to their original ancient homeland, and that the MAP tribes would for sure side with the colonizers against the Hipatals even though they had been getting along with the Hipatals for thousands of years. The Moonshines hated the aboriginals of Kxesh for taking the equatorial zone of Atlam from the Fern colonists who had invaded the area before being pushed back and then invading Pubumaus and Tarwas in turn.
Moonshine-Play relations
Early contacts
The early Moonshine scholars found the Play language adorable, as it reminded them of the way Moonshine toddlers spoke, and the Moonshines felt it was their duty to take over the Play nation so they could protect the Players from the more intelligent societies around them. The Moonshines sent anthropologists into Play territory to study the Players' way of life. They expressed sympathy for the Players' situation, understanding that it was difficult to get by in a society where everyone was childlike and stupid. The Moonshines promised that they would sacrifice their own time and effort to fill the role of the missing adults and tell the Players what to do.
The Moonshines were puzzled to find out that the Play speakers at the time of first diplomatic contact had more than one nation, however. Their largest nation was Memnumu, run by the Play party, but there were clear Play-speaking majorities in hostile nations like the Cold Men and even the Clovers living near the border of Baeba Swamp. The Moonshine anthropologists could not understand how a people with such simple minds could have evolved politics and the ability to fight wars over differences in politics. The Moonshines concluded, therefore, that the scattered Play-speaking nations were being exploited by foreign powers and therefore needed to be rescued by the Moonshines.
The Moonshine diplomats called for a meeting with the Players to figure out what was going on. They placed soft blankets on the Play side of the table so that the Players would not injure themslves on the hard wooden seats.
Later contacts
Later the Moonshines realized their mistake, and decided that the Players were in fact the smartest people in the world. The Moonshines figured that Players would make ideal laborers because they were very smart but also physically small and therefore easy for Moonshine bosses to control. Thus the Moonshines added the Players to the list of tropical nations whom they admired and wished to colonize. Still, the Moonshines were sure that their own people were also smart, and so they set about to learn the Play language.
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.
- ↑ This assumes that all of the /s/ markers on the Play language page are wrong and should be /p/. However, this is not certain.
- ↑ Check this later. The vowels are right but the meaning might not be.
- ↑ The homophony of these is not a problem because the 2nd person patient marker nearly always occurred before a verb, whereas the 3rd person male patient marker typically occurred before a masculine noun and then also a verb. There were 3rd person sentences where the patient was omitted, but in some cases the agent prefix would still help pull the two meanings apart.
- ↑ from an unrelated event; essentially saying, "by the time this happened, in Dreamland they...."
- ↑ possibly cognate to a verb meaning to remove dirt rather than to a noun
