Subumpam

Temporary name.

Mimalebra' is a culture and language spoken just to the west of the ancestral Pabap homeland. They built cities such as Wabula Pipem. The culture died out in this area fairly early, crushed by Khulls and Pabap expansion, but by then they had already explored much of the interior of the continent (reaching 39N in the east) and became the substratum in the territory of Goga. They lived in the vicinity of the area of Blop, but did not settle Blop because there were at the time many other rivers and lakes nearby. The planet was still much colder then, with glaciers quickly retreating but still present in many areas which were much warmer than 32°F. Thus they found that by moving west they could easily find warmer territories, with mild summers but winters just as warm as their original homeland in the south.

The modern name of their territory is Subumpam, but the borders do not correspond very well. Today Subumpam is mostly populated by Poswobs rather than Pabaps, and in its western part there are many Khulls speakers as well.

In the north, they settled in what are now the Poswob states of Tuppy, Wawiabi, and Fweb.

Phonology

Overall the language is "soft" and childish, like Pabappa, but to a lesser extent. It shifted all of its labialized consonants to pure labials, e.g. /kʷ/ > /p/, and then shifted its plain velars to palatals and sometimes on to coronals. Thus there are few dorsal consonants remaining in the language. However, the voiceless ejective /ḳ/ was immune to the second of these changes, and thus survived as a plain velar in the classical form of the language.

It is also unusual in that for most of its history, it had an /r/ but no /l/ sound, the opposite pattern to most og the languages around it. However, Babakiam had neither of these sounds (the 'r' in Poswa and Pabappa is a uvular approximant.)

Vowels

/a e i o u ā ē ī ō ū/ Tones have been eliminated, but the ā tone survives as vowel length. Macrons are also used to tell diphthongs like ūi (/uj/) from simple sequences like ui (/ui/, often [wi]).