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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.