Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

[Radius Solis]

Radius: first off, an hour ago I'd say that I'd hate any major revisions of our maps. My idea behind the claim that we need more islands was basically to provoke a discussion which would clarify e. g. how big the island could realistically be which we already have north of the Tt. Arc in our most recent tectonic map, and whether there might be smaller islands around it. Also, I agree that groups of smallish islands would do the job as well, maybe even better since they'd provoke faster progress in navigation.

But your observation about our islands being already too large by whole order of magnitude is... ehm... embarrassing... May be we should discuss *this* first, before we make any decisions on migrations &like.

I am a real hardcore nube in geotectonics, so please bear with me. The example of Japan seems to illustrate that relatively large islands can look like part or continuation of subduction-zone island chains (the Ryukyus and the Kuriles in this case), and Wikipedia says this is due to back-arc basin type of formations. Is anything of that sort imaginable for Sumarušuxi and Ttiruku?

Back-arc basins are perfectly possible in the mid-ocean, as with the Mariana islands, but these do not produce Japan-sized islands if the overriding crust is not continental. That's the catch. There's only two clear examples of it on earth: Japan, which has formed a back-arc basin in the Asian continental crust, and Indonesia which is mainly continental crust too, but there it happens not to be quite thick enough to be consistently above sea level, so you get lots of large islands instead of a single landmass. All other back-arc basins in the world have overriding oceanic crust, and none of them feature large islands.

So adjacent continental crust is crucial to getting those large islands to happen at subduction zones, and in Ttiruku there clearly isn't any that's close enough. If there were, it would be evidenced by (at minimum) a number of equally large islands set back a ways from the front of the Ttiruku arc - like Indonesia, which has Borneo and Sulawesi and the Malay peninsula behind the islands of the arc front.

So to bring the Ttiruku islands more in line with Earthlike reality, there are only a few possibilities:

1. Scale down the islands' sizes by a factor of ten or so, and deal with the difficulties this presents for our migration and cultural scenarios.

2. Draw in a bunch of new large islands behind the front arc. And it will take lots, or extremely large ones, because it's an awfully long island chain - fully the equal of Indonesia's.

3. Reduce most of the islands' sizes but leave one large one that we deem important, and chalk it up to a hotspot or an ancient continent fragment. That would be completely plausible for one or even two islands if they're near each other, an example being New Zealand, just not for the 4+ we currently have there.

There is also
4. Declare that Akana's geotectonics are different enough from Earth's to support what we've already got, even though we have no idea what specific difference this would be, let alone what its other implications would be.

I don't really like any of those. That is why I still recommend:
5. Continue to ignore the error on the grounds that what we've got is not completely impossible, it's just way out at the far end of the probability curve. There's no doubt that many features of Akana conlangs are in the same position, and some of this just has to be accepted because we can't know everything about everything, and the most important thing is that everyone enjoy their participation. So I've mostly held my silence about island sizes for years, and brought it up today only to keep us from worsening it.

[Cedh]

Yes, the Ttiruku islands are too large for a purely oceanic subduction arc. However, I mentioned the possibility of an ice age land bridge recently, and that scenario presupposes that there is actually overriding continental crust north of the Ttiruku Arc. Probably the eastern half would simply be a mostly-below-sea-level extension of Tuysáfa, about the same width as the western tip of that continent, while the western half (i.e. Sumarušuxi) might be more compact and possibly (partly) split off by a stress fracture in the W Tuysáfa plate, caused by the push of the Siixtaguna plate. This would also help in directing more warm water towards the NW coast of Tuysáfa, compensating for the fact that continental crust might tend to block the warm currents more strongly than a subduction arc with overriding oceanic crust. Since the NW of Tuysáfa is mostly lowlands, we might not get many more islands in that area (preserving the general appearance of the map), but some islands of moderate size should reasonably be added, including the one that's already there on some of the maps (though its size and position might change a bit).

[Basilius]

The warning about the text below being written by a nube should be properly repeated before every paragraph; please be patient ;)

However, I mentioned the possibility of an ice age land bridge recently, and that scenario presupposes that there is actually overriding continental crust north of the Ttiruku Arc. Probably the eastern half would simply be a mostly-below-sea-level extension of Tuysáfa, about the same width as the western tip of that continent, while the western half (i.e. Sumarušuxi) might be more compact and possibly (partly) split off by a stress fracture in the W Tuysáfa plate, caused by the push of the Siixtaguna plate.

The idea of the landbridge, and of the Ttiruku Arc (or a significant portion of it) being an elevated part of a larger sunken landmass, seems to change a lot in terms of tectonics, right? And will require some revision of the maps anyway, probably?

And, on the other hand, revision of island *sizes* is not really necessary with it; is this correct?

Incidentally, when I first joined Akana, I perceived Ttiruku as an equivalent of New Guinea (which was only twice as optimistic, in terms of square miles, as Radius' more accurate current estimate), and the Ttiruku Arc as an equivalent of Indonesia.

Looking at the islands while viewing them as a sunken mountainous area is interesting, too. When inventing my scenario about Ttiruku as a region of extreme diversity etc., I imagined the island to have rather fractured relief. I thought of two or maybe three roughly parallel mountain ridges running E to W, with their spurs dividing most of the territory into small plateaus and valleys, whose inner portions would be partly levelled by alluvial processes at different heights.

But the coastline of Ttiruku as seen in our current maps, with peninsulas protruding in different directions, may suggest something more interesting. Basically, it looks like a node where several mountain ridges meet (their projections crossing not necessarily at exactly one point), and those ridges seem to run in three different directions (roughly, W-E, NW-SE, N-S).

Continuations of those ridges could be three groups of islands. The major one is already present in our maps as the western part of the Ttirukuan Archipelago (which is the eastern half of the larger Ttiruku Arc). The other two could be composed of much smaller islands, and our current maps don't show them yet.

* * *

One of them, which I'll tentatively label the Eastern Stopover Islands, would run N-to-S roughly parallel to (but not necessarily very close to) the western coast of Tuysáfa. These islands were part of the route in which the Tymúlaslì reached their ultimate home in the North.

The potential traces of a rather odd substrate in Máotatšàlì suggest that the islands weren't uninhabited, i. e. could be colonized by much more primitive folks a couple millennia before the start of the Isles Exodus.

* * *

The other group, the Eastern Stopover Islands, lies to the NW of Ttiruku. This is the area where the Mûtsinamtsys had gained enough strength to rival the Takuña by early 1st millennium BP.

Before the arrival of the Mûtsinamtsys the islands were probably uninhabited, i. e. they couldn't be reached until the Isles speakers appeared, having accumulated some nautical skills during the first phase of their migrations (along the coast of Ttiruku). This follows from my current vision of Mûtsipsa': no important innovations shared with other branches of the Isles family, no clear signs of contact influences, but instead a bunch of extremely conservative retentions of Early Proto-Isles features; all of this may suggest an early isolation.

It appears that pre-Mûtsinamtsys became a robust seafaring nation when still on the Eastern Stopover Islands; the arrival of Mûtsinamtsys at their new northern home looks like an organized colonization to me.

* * *

The above wants a headline like "Northern Route Hypothesis Triumphantly Coming Back" (this time the Northern Route starting from Ttiruku instead of Tuysáfa).

Yet there are problems that are obvious even to me.

As I understand it, Cedh's idea is that only a small portion of the Siixtaguna Ocean represents sunken continental crust; supposing this for much of the ocean would be probably utterly unrealistic.

But this means that the Stopover Islands as proposed above help to cross only a small portion of the distance between Ttiruku and the Northern Islands. A huge space remains in between, clearly too large for navigation methods available to most advanced nations of Antiquity.

Therefore, we still need some islands scattered over that space - perhaps, Polynesian-style volcanic archipelagos as with Radius' proposal?

So adjacent continental crust is crucial to getting those large islands to happen at subduction zones, and in Ttiruku there clearly isn't any that's close enough. If there were, it would be evidenced by (at minimum) a number of equally large islands set back a ways from the front of the Ttiruku arc - like Indonesia, which has Borneo and Sulawesi and the Malay peninsula behind the islands of the arc front.

[...]

2. Draw in a bunch of new large islands behind the front arc. And it will take lots, or extremely large ones, because it's an awfully long island chain - fully the equal of Indonesia's.

Can it help somehow if we consider the Ttirukuan Archipelago and the Sumarušuxi as formations of different types? (Cedh seems to point to something of that sort, but I am not sure I understand his idea...)

For example, if only the Ttirukuan Archipelago (i. e. the eastern half of the Arc) represents the type of formation in question: where would the front part be, and where would you expect the missing big islands to be located?

Also, why continental crust can happen to be less thick (like in Indonesia)? What shapes can be imagined for areas of such thinner-than-usual continental crust, and why?

There's no doubt that many features of Akana conlangs are in the same position, and some of this just has to be accepted because we can't know everything about everything, and the most important thing is that everyone enjoy their participation.

At the level of detail we have with our typical descriptions, I don't think we have anything utterly implausible. Some diachronic scenarios might be in fact odd though, and no-one has ever cared e. g. about glottochronology (in which one may believe or not, but having one's Swadesh 100-word list unchanged in 3 KY, or 50% replaced in 500 years [EDIT: except with loans], would look totally unlikely; luckily, our languages don't seem to have complete Swadesh-100's...)

[Radius Solis]

Can it help somehow if we consider the Ttirukuan Archipelago and the Sumarušuxi as formations of different types? (Cedh seems to point to something of that sort, but I am not sure I understand his idea...)

For example, if only the Ttirukuan Archipelago (i. e. the eastern half of the Arc) represents the type of formation in question: where would the front part be, and where would you expect the missing big islands to be located?

IMO, If the two ends of the archipelago result from different formations, then each part becomes individually plausible - but then we'd have two major retcons for explaining the archipelago, and to me that's worse overall.

If we were to insert the "missing" islands to make a continental-crust assumption plausible, there is no particular place they should go, except that they should be back from the front (south) edge of the arc but not so far back you can't tell they're part of the same large-scale system. Indonesia is our only case study for this, and we've got the Malay peninsula and Borneo - both of them immense - just sorta floating around behind Sumatra and Java. For reference, here's Indonesia on Google Maps, which makes water depth clear: the large mass of light blue is the continental crust.

Also, why continental crust can happen to be less thick (like in Indonesia)? What shapes can be imagined for areas of such thinner-than-usual continental crust, and why?

First, let me explain Indonesia:

Indonesia is in the final stages of the process that has caused Asia to form into a large landmass, and it's thin because the process is still incomplete there.

The breakup of Gondwanaland millions of years ago was really messy, and left the Indian Ocean full of scattered pieces of continental-type crust. These were all carried northward by the motion of the Indian plate until they hit Asia, enlarging it to its present size. India was one of these chunks, but most were smaller; Madagascar is another large piece that got left behind. But all those other pieces accreted onto Asia and compressed together until they formed a continuous landmass with it.

Small pieces of continental crust are often completely underwater, because they are not supported by having other pieces next to them, so they tend to slump. But when lots of them are pressed together again, this squeezes them and makes them thicker, so that they stick out of the water again. Look again at the Indian Ocean - see all those scattered areas of light blue? Those are underwater masses of the type we're talking about. Some of those are still destined to hit Asia, and when they do, compression will turn them into dry land.

So Indonesia's crust is thin because it is made up of pieces of slumped continental crust that are only beginning to squeeze back together enough to rise out of the water, and when they finish they will form a solid landmass. This compression, not a back-arc formation, is the reason Sumatra and Java are so large, and Borneo and Malaysia.

Now, applying all of this to Akana:

I do not see how any large piece of continental crust can be mostly below sea level without a scenario similar to Indonesia's. Except in polar zones, where situations like the Bering Strait can arise due to the action of repeated ice ages grinding away upper layers of the landmass, but that doesn't apply here and would tend to destroy any large islands anyway. So in order to be part of a continental crust area, the Ttiruku island chain needs to be undergoing compression of a much broader region of "thin" continental crust that recently merged together, and I have good reasons expect this compression to create more, and larger, islands than just the ones along the arc. There are no specific restrictions on where they can be located so long as they're roughly uniform (see below) across the the continental crust zone, which should reach maybe as far north as Lotoka all the way across the ocean.

And some of the "missing islands" would need to be huge, like Borneo. The relationship of the sizes of Java and Sumatra to that of Borneo and Malaysia is not an accident that we can just claim didn't happen on Akana! The continental crust's land/water ratio will be roughly constant across its whole area, because because unequal compression strain spreads throughout the mass until it equalizes. This is true of Indonesia, in the area from Sumatra through Sulawesi: any large slice you randomly select is highly likely to have a similar land/water ratio to any other large random slice.

So you can see why I don't prefer doing this on Akana. The map changes would be too drastic.

There are other problems for this scenario, but I'd have a hard time explaining, and this post has taken me more than an hour already, so I'll stop here.

[Basilius]

Radius: thank you so much - it's a very clear and quite detailed explanation; the links you gave help a lot, too!

I understand that this is time-consuming - it took me over an our to compose my previous message, too - but the matter seems indeed very important.

So please excuse me for asking more noobish questions...

(1) Can a chunk of mostly-below-sea-level thin continental crust - the type seen in the Indian Ocean - run into a convergent boundary? Can its edge adjacent to the boundary be elevated to form an island chain?

(2) It seems to me that Cedh meant something different:

[...] that scenario presupposes that there is actually overriding continental crust north of the Ttiruku Arc. Probably the eastern half would simply be a mostly-below-sea-level extension of Tuysáfa, about the same width as the western tip of that continent [...]

- basically, a portion of a continent getting lowered (?). Is this a plausible thing? Do we have any examples? How would such a process interact with a convergent boundary?

(Sorry for abusing your patience, and I don't expect a quick reply...)

[Radius Solis]

Sorry for leaving this so long; I've been very busy lately.

(1) Can a chunk of mostly-below-sea-level thin continental crust - the type seen in the Indian Ocean - run into a convergent boundary?

Definitely.

Can its edge adjacent to the boundary be elevated to form an island chain?

Not if the crust on the other side of the boundary is seafloor-type. In that case you get volcanism, which can create a chain of small islands, but there isn't much uplifting. Uplifting happens when two continental-type pieces of crust converge, and only if one of them is large.

Here's an example in the Aleutian islands of a small piece of continental crust - the one that makes a big curly-shape, on the left - which is right up against a convergent boundary, with seafloor-type crust on the other (south) side. You can see that the its presence makes no clear difference in the size of the islands at that location. But on the right, you have the same boundary with a big piece of adjacent continental crust, and there it makes a major difference in the size of islands produced - or a peninsula in this case, but that's not important.

(2) It seems to me that Cedh meant something different:

[...] that scenario presupposes that there is actually overriding continental crust north of the Ttiruku Arc. Probably the eastern half would simply be a mostly-below-sea-level extension of Tuysáfa, about the same width as the western tip of that continent [...]

- basically, a portion of a continent getting lowered (?). Is this a plausible thing? Do we have any examples?

We have examples. The Bering Strait (previous link) is one example of continental crust getting lowered, and so is Hudson Bay in Canada, and the vast region of shallow water north of Siberia. But plausibility is not so easy, because all of these examples are largely caused by interactions with polar ice. In all of these cases, eons of ice sheets advancing and retreating, during ice ages, have scraped off the top layers of the crust and dumped them further south. Most of the American Plains region is covered in a bed of this glacial till up to 1 kilometer thick, all of it scraped off of Canada... that's a LOT of material, so you can see how strong the effect can be.

This is not a good choice for Ttiruku for several reasons. First, in another 50,000 years, if there are no more ice ages, most of these regions will rise back above sea level by crustal rebound. Maybe only 20,000. This happens much faster than it would take for Tuysafa to move so far away from the polar regions, and much faster than it would take for plate convergence to cause uplifting. And second, because Ttiruku is at the end of the continent with only ocean on one side. Ice takes the path of least resistance, even on very large scales, so if it it's possible for the main force of the ice to go around a landmass instead of over it, it will. Also, ice sheets capable of the scraping we're talking about need a much larger mass of land and/or shallow water than Tuysafa offers.

So you can see why this scenario has serious problems for Akana. There's only two other ways I know of to get a large enough region of underwater continental crust, one being the Indonesia scenario we already discussed, and the last being the Kerguelen scenario where it forms as the result of an enormous volcanic upheaval. There is only this one example on Earth of such a large mass forming, so this process appears to be rare.

How would such a process interact with a convergent boundary?

On this I can do no better than to point again to the Aleutian Islands, which are the only current example.

[Radius Solis]

On another note, I've been looking today through the Buruya Nzaysa lexicon in my free time, hunting for words to borrow into Puoni, so I've gotten a much more thorough look at it than I previously did.

And I'd just like say again how awesome it is. I think it may well be our highest-quality lexicon in Akana. Points I particularly like:
- large arrays of loanwords from neighboring languages that, aside from a few curiosities, look very appropriate for their cultural relationships. And there should be a few curiosities anyway, so it's all good.
- My word that's a lot of backformations - sort by etymology and they all come together. The Buruyans must be very prone to folk etymology! But all of the examples are good.
- Actually following up on the line in the NT grammar where I wrote that the Ndak tended to form new lexical items by set phrases and idioms. Nobody else has done much with that, not even me, and it's a pleasure to see it in action just as I originally hoped.

I can only hope Puoni's lexicon turns out so well. To that end I've skimmed 35 words off B.Nz. on the first run-through and I'll probably grab ten or twenty more when I have a better idea what gaps I'll need to fill, as the native words' semantic changes are nowhere near done. To give a teaser though, here's eight words in their modern Puoni form that originate from Buruya Nzaysa, see if you can guess the etymons of all of them:
kuehia "money"
intalaira "professional, smooth"
dumela "offerings, goods on display"
pauaimo "fortress, keep (of a castle)"
secoia "one's betrothed or beloved"
huvada "culture, way of life"
impinia "chicken"
miepora "brood; 'crop' of newly raised farm animals"
("c" = /ts/, the rest ~= IPA)

[Cedh]

Thank you.

that's a lot of backformations

15 out of 1040, that's less than 2%... and some of these haven't even changed in meaning compared to their NT ancestor, but simply become phonetically contaminated when morphological reanalysis occurred, and thus they have irregularly dropped (mbontai > tsi, wimlau > mlu) or gained (daing > dɛñə) phonetic material (the regular outcomes of these words would have been *mvotsi, *wəmlu, *dɛ).

Here's eight words in their modern Puoni form that originate from Buruya Nzaysa, see if you can guess the etymons of all of them:

[highlight for spoilers]
kuehia "money" < kwexiya "coin"
intalaira "professional, smooth" < ntsa əlayra "very convincing"
dumela "offerings, goods on display" < dumela "that which is displayed"
pauaimo "fortress, keep (of a castle)" < pawaymó "city walls"
secoia "one's betrothed or beloved" < sɛpsɔya "significant other"
huvada "culture, way of life" < xuvəda "culture, lifestyle"
impinia "chicken" < mpiña "chicken"
miepora "brood; 'crop' of newly raised farm animals" < mɛspɔra "raise animals"

[Basilius]

Radius: Thank you! It appears that we have little choice indeed...

...Then - hopefully, the last stupid question from me about tectonics.

I looked over Google Maps searching for areas of thin continental crust not too close to polar zones, and the Australia - NG area caught my eye.

Basically, this:



Neither the sizes nor the shapes are exactly what we need, but the overall disposition of landmasses looks kinda familiar, No?

* Australian plains = flat portion of W. Tuysáfa.
* Cape York = our yet-unnamed peninsula where Proto-Isles dialects were originally spoken.
* New Guinea = Ttiruku.
* One of the fancifully curled island chains attached to NG = a chain of small islands that works as incomplete bridge between Ttiruku and Sumarušuxi (the latter potentially representing a different type of formation).

(EDIT) Probably this illustrates my idea better:



(/EDIT)

What do you think?

(Cedh, Corumayas, please don't keep silent; obviously I don't qualify to discuss tectonics...)

[Corumayas]

(Cedh, Corumayas, please don't keep silent; obviously I don't qualify to discuss tectonics...)

No more do I.... I used to think that both Indonesia and New Guinea were formed by the Australian plate beginning to crunch into Asia, but it seems there's more to it than that. (While we're at it though, what about the West Indies? Could the Gulf of Mexico be a model for the Bay of Kasca, with the Greater Antilles as Sumarušuxi? The main difference seems to be the way Florida and Yucatan almost close it off; but it wouldn't take much of a change in sea level for Florida to be mostly underwater...)

In any case, I wouldn't particularly mind some changes to the map if we decide they're necessary; I've often had a vague sense that several of the islands on the world map (not just the Ttiruku chain) looked a little weird and maybe too big, though I couldn't have explained why. Making most of the islands on Akana smaller wouldn't bother me personally.

As I see it, there's two main reasons to avoid making such changes:

1. The sheer amount of time and work involved in drawing new maps. This is a serious concern; and whether it's surmountable is probably up to Cedh, unless someone else is willing to take on all the mapmaking that he's been doing. (I'd volunteer, but I'm afraid my skills and tools aren't really up to par.)

2. The changes might disrupt other things. In my opinion, human history is not a major problem in this case; partly because most of our history (at least outside the Edastean sphere) is still pretty vague, but also because I think the human migrations we've plotted across the Ttiruku chain would work just as well with a chain of many small islands as with a few giant ones. The issue for early humans is not the size of the islands, but the distances between them.

However, I have another concern: the old chestnut of Tuysáfan biology.

If we stick to an in-world "parallel evolution" scenario such as Cedh described here (which is definitely what I'd prefer to do), then the lifeforms found on each continent have to be constrained by the tectonic history of Akana. Given my understanding of that history (which I recently diagrammed here), I'm afraid that Tuysáfa is in danger of having, not horses, not giraffes that look like horses, not even something like marsupial horses, but actually no indigenous mammals at all-- unless it can be somehow connected to Peilaš or western Zeluzhia, sometime within the last 200 million years or so. And in fact, since we already have words for a number of familiar mammals in Proto-Isles and some of the other Tuysáfan languages, I think we really want a connection specifically with Peilaš, and much more recent than that, if at all possible; otherwise (as I wrote in the linked thread) the restrictions on what can and can't exist in Tuysáfa are liable to be very inconvenient to work around.

Cedh has said that he thinks a Ttirukuan landbridge-- at least a partial one-- is possible, provided we can have an ice age in the southern hemisphere that lowers the sea level significantly. If he's mistaken about that, we probably need to figure out some other solution...

[Yæd]

Hi folks!
Sorry for my interruption, but I wanna say to all you that I'm gonna create a new langage family, which should be in the southern part of the Akana globe. My username on AkanaWiki is Wedeigu (you should know what it means ) and the language family name is Waku family. Thank y'all for paying attention.

[roninbodhisattva]

What are some of the features of the family?

[the duke of nuke]

A new contributor! Welcome. Do you have much familiarity with the Akana setting, and do you have much idea of where you want to set the Waku family? The more we know about the family (and which Akanaran families it resembles) the easier it will be to find some possible places for it.

I'd also like to take to opportunity to say that Cedh's Buruya Nzaysa thematic dictionary looks superb

[Taernsietr]

Hello guys! I'm also willing to participate... (I've PMed Cedh about it, but I'm still kinda lost). I've been trying to read up on some areas of Akana, but it's just too damn much XD.

So... aside from the tectonic plate discussion, where could I be of assistance?

[Alces]

Hello guys! I'm also willing to participate... (I've PMed Cedh about it, but I'm still kinda lost). I've been trying to read up on some areas of Akana, but it's just too damn much XD.

So... aside from the tectonic plate discussion, where could I be of assistance?

Akana is pretty open-ended. You can derive a daughter from any of the languages already created (provided it's plausible; e.g. it's probably not plausible for Adāta to have another daughter since it has so many); you can create a proto-language for an entirely new family. Of course, you could also do some conworlding. There's three large continents, and of those one (Zeluzhia) is almost completely undeveloped, another (Tuysáfa) has only a few proto-languages and a basic outline of its early settlement, and the other (Peilash) has quite a lot of languages in the northern region, some reasonably detailed history but only in the Aiwa area and from around -2000 to 1000 YP... so there's all sorts you can do, really.

[roninbodhisattva]

Has there been any work done on where the population of Akana would have originated and how it would have spread throughout the world? I was thinking that it would be interesting to work on something in Southern Peilaš, but don't know / how that part of the continent would have been populated.

Also, what level of technology does Akana have, generally, in various periods? What kind of time scale are we talking in comparison with Earth?

[Cedh]

Southern Peilaš is where Akana humans originate from, so it can have lots of languages completely unrelated to everything further north and east.

As for technology, some of the most important innovations are listed on the history overview page. The Ndak (-1900 YP) are a bronze age culture; the Fáralo and Dāiadak of "classical times" (c. 100 YP) may be roughly comparable to the Romans. As a general guideline, we can conclude from these dates that the tech level of a given time period in the Years of the Prophet calendar is roughly similar to that of Earth at a similar CE date. However, the order and temporal distance of specific innovations is not the same, and most of the details still need to be worked out. All in all, technological development on Akana is somewhat slower than *here*. One very important thing we've decided is that the wheel should be invented a lot later on Akana (as compared to c. 3500 BCE *here*); this was originally based on the simple observation that no Akana language had a word for it. We haven't really figured out though at which time it should be introduced, and this decision is quite important because the invention of the wheel will realistically have had a huge impact on history...

[roninbodhisattva]

Southern Peilaš is where Akana humans originate from, so it can have lots of languages completely unrelated to everything further north and east.

Awesome. I may start working on some kind of language / family to put down there.

[Yæd]

The Waku family has three possible placements:
A) The southernmost cape of Peilash, which has no mountain ranges and rivers, and is a subtropical zone;
B) East Twin Continent, in front of the three big islands at its east, in a Rathedaan-like climate;
C) That peninsula of the Antarctic Continent which goes northwards.
I attach an image of the possible locations and I leave you to choose.
(in blue the major rivers, set by me, in red-orange-salmon the possible zones, in greenish the hills and hill-like mountains, and obviously in brown the mountain ranges)
As you see, my technology isn't as advanced as yours , so the best I can do is just writing the grammars Thank you!

[Yæd]

Waku (in the second millennium YP) should:
- Have vowel lenghth, represented using a macron;
- Be agglutinative with some fusional elements, but generally synthetic, near polisynthetism (BUT NOT polisynthetic!);
- Generate pitched/tonal daughter-langs, with a largely fusional grammar;
- Have high dialectalization which should influence the development of daughter-langs;
- Have strong-weak-middle verbs, which should have personal suffixes and prefixes, aspect, object suffixes BUT NOT VOICE;
- Have mood attached to the noun, ex. I-think you--want.not be-angry;
- Have distinction between dynamic and static verbs, ex. I stand (static: it represents a feature of mine), I break the window (dynamic: it represents a change of state of the patient);
- Have not adjectives, substituted by static verbs;
- Be head-first in all fields (VOS, NRP, etc. etc.);
and other, other features. I'll also place some similarities to North Peilash langs lexicon in my lexicon to suggest a correlation between the two families.
I'm working on the grammar, I will post it on FrathWiki. It'll take a lot of time so don't wait it soon. Thank you!

P.S.: what's the present here in Akana? 5000 YP? Because I would like to know if I can do some daughter languages of the descendants of Aedhade or Atháta or someone else... thank you

[Cedh]

I would advise against placing the Waku languages on the eastern Twin continent. We're not even sure whether Akana humans can reach it at all before they have at least 17th-century-like sailing technology. But it seems you're going for the southern tip of Peilaš anyway. (Even there, vocabulary similarities to any known Akana language would be highly unlikely. Southern Peilaš alone is about the size of all of Africa, and the peoples of northern Peilaš won't get anything near the southern tip before 1500 YP... except maybe, maybe the Xšali, but their language has not been described in detail.)

We don't have a "present" for Akana. A roughly "modern" tech level might be reached around 2500-3000 YP, but apart from a few obsolete remarks in the earliest grammars, history has not been described past the invention of printing in 1289 YP. Most conworlding in the Edastean sphere so far focuses on the period between 0 and 1200 YP, and in the Western sphere on the period between -1000 and -300 YP.

Which language would you be interested in specifically for creating a descendant?

[Basilius]

Waku (in the second millennium YP) should:
[...]
- Generate pitched/tonal daughter-langs [...]

The easiest way to achieve this seems to be via a protolanguage already having tons of contrastive suprasegmentals + lots of segments that might produce phonational -> tonal distinctions when deleted... Is this anywhere close to your plans?

- Have high dialectalization which should influence the development of daughter-langs;

(Trying to translate this for myself...) that is, the focus of your work will be not on the "ultimate" protolanguage, but rather on a somewhat later stage, where there was already some dialectal differentiation? Which probably means that some features of the ultimate common ancestor of those dialects can be consciously left a bit underspecified, allowing for a later retro-fitting as needed? This would be interesting in terms of the Big Game, indeed!

(An alternative reading of your statement is that you're going to design and document a real-looking history of a whole dialectal continuum for a prolonged timespan; I haven't seen anything like that done by any conlanger before, and I suspect it'd take one years to finish, realistically speaking...)

But it seems you're going for the southern tip of Peilaš anyway. (Even there, vocabulary similarities to any known Akana language would be highly unlikely. Southern Peilaš alone is about the size of all of Africa, and the peoples of northern Peilaš won't get anything near the southern tip before 1500 YP... except maybe, maybe the Xšali, but their language has not been described in detail.)

Sure, and the subcontinent's relief appears to be more varied (than Africa's on the average), suggesting several Sprachb{u|ü}nde. BTW, it would be interesting (and helpful) to sketch their tentative locations... any ideas?

We don't have a "present" for Akana. A roughly "modern" tech level might be reached around 2500-3000 YP, but apart from a few obsolete remarks in the earliest grammars, history has not been described past the invention of printing in 1289 YP.

Also, it's been proposed that technological progress might be much slower on Akana than it was on Earth, postponing the beginning of Computer Age to e. g. some date after 6000 YP; the idea being that Akana's main focus seems to be condiachronics, and curious diachronic scenarios require huge timespans.

The proposal hasn't been definitely rejected (AFAIC), but there hasn't been a real discussion yet of what might explain the drastic slowdown *after* the invention of printing.

[4pq1injbok]

We don't have a "present" for Akana. A roughly "modern" tech level might be reached around 2500-3000 YP, but apart from a few obsolete remarks in the earliest grammars, history has not been described past the invention of printing in 1289 YP.

Also, it's been proposed that technological progress might be much slower on Akana than it was on Earth, postponing the beginning of Computer Age to e. g. some date after 6000 YP; the idea being that Akana's main focus seems to be condiachronics, and curious diachronic scenarios require huge timespans.

The proposal hasn't been definitely rejected (AFAIC), but there hasn't been a real discussion yet of what might explain the drastic slowdown *after* the invention of printing.

Hm. My first thought on seeing it laid out like that: technological "progress" of course doesn't have to be monotonous. Could there have been some kind of broad societal / technological collapse at some distance after 1289 YP that knocks northern Peilaš cultures hard out of the running towards the Computer Age for awhile? It could be the climax of an entirely different, later crescendo of development that finally gets there in >=6000 YP.

[Basilius]

Could there have been some kind of broad societal / technological collapse at some distance after 1289 YP that knocks northern Peilaš cultures hard out of the running towards the Computer Age for awhile? It could be the climax of an entirely different, later crescendo of development that finally gets there in >=6000 YP.

While a catastrophic scenario is indeed the first thing that comes to mind here, I believe it won't look very convincing (a structurally conditioned global collapse before globalization? an external deus ex machina like meteorite bombing?).

Our Terran precedent is somewhat overloaded with unique factors, and it is difficult to extrapolate from a single point; I mean, we can't say anything positive about how much time it would take China or India or the Islamic world to develop an equivalent of what we call science; we only know that a somewhat retarded marginal region like Western Europe can *suddenly* develop it while simultaneously becoming culturally dominant on a global scale.

What I'm trying to say is that our main scenario might look more like "essentially like in Europe, *minus* a couple key factors", and that might be enough to give us a few spare millennia...

Which reminds me of the observation that so far no description of our languages/cultures seems to have mentioned 'wheels' or 'wheeled vehicles'. How much could this contribute to the overall slowdown, if we indeed assume that all the major cultures we've been working on are wheelless?

Which other missing key factors might contribute?

[Yæd]

Thank you all for replying!
@Basilius:
I'd like to have a proto-language with very simple vowel length, but I'll consider your purposes too.
That uncomprehensible sentence I wrote meant that the Waku proper dialects had characteristics (final elysion, diphthongization of long vowels ecc., I'll think about them while writing the grammar) which later influenced the developing of daughter languages. It should be like if Wede:i had a Purongelian dialect in which the nasal vowels weren't pronounced in position _C, which later influenced the development of Cuolese, having now nasal vowels).
@cedh audmanh:
So Akana hasn't a present at all, and this is good. I'd avoid the Aedhade branch, they are too much , and I tend to a sister language of Ayaasthi, descendant of Adhasth.