steorran_worulde | Recent Entries

From time to time I toy with the idea of a "musical" conlang - a conlang based on pitches and rhythms rather than consonants and vowels. The broad phonological framework I use generally goes about like this:

Beats are equivalent to syllables. A word contains a whole number of beats.
Each beat can be divided into up to 4 notes.
There are 7 notes, corresponding to the notes of a standard western scale.

*Which* scale can vary, though, to express things like mood. You could speak the same sentence in a major or minor scale, or a scale that's neither of those.

Also, rhythm within a beat can vary.

There may be phonotactic rules restricting which notes can occur in sequence, and adjusting some notes to avoid impossible sequences.

I've never gotten as far as inventing actual words or syntax for this language.

A raindrop grows in a cloud. When it's full-formed, it falls. This rainstorm doesn't come with wind, so it drops straight down. It hits a maple leaf in the crest of a tree and slides off. It falls through the tree and lands on the wet trunk - its neighbours have already arrived. It melds into the flow running down the trunk. When it reaches the ground, it soaks into the earth. Slowly, slowly now, it creeps along between the grains of dirt. Seasons pass until one day it oozes out of the earth into a little stream running down a hillside. It rushes and tumbles down the hill, until it comes to the bottom of the hill and joins a bigger stream quietly making its steady way along the bottom of the valley. It flows under water striders and over spawning salmon. After a while, it runs into a great river. The river is muddy with all that it has picked up from its bed and the beds of all the streams that have joined it over the space of many miles. It flows on, not too much farther, until it reaches the sea, and mingles its mud with the ocean's salt. The drop has come home.

A balance scale with a jar on each side. One side is for object-to-be-measured, other side is the counterweight side. Side for object-to-be-measured is lighter and must be filled with water to a certain level in order to balance the counterweight side. When balance is achieved, object-to-be-measured is completely submerged in the water. Volume of object is measured by how high the water rises. Water is added to other side to complete balance. Density is calculated by the ratio between displaced water and balancing water.

I've been thinking some about susceptibility to death in my flat-like-a-penny world. (I really should give it a better name some time...)

There are three kinds of rational beings: humans, elves, and stars. Humans are equivalent to humans from our world when it comes to death and mortality, so there's not much to say there. Stars and elves, however, are different.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, stars are mortal but extremely long-lived, living for thousands of years. Since then, I've figured a few more things out. Stars die exclusively of old age. They do not die of illness or injury. (It may be physically possible for them to be injured to death, but it would be very difficult, and there is nothing in their environment that causes them significant injury. With their roots in the sky, they have access to light and do not starve. So the only way they die is old age. It's pretty predictable how long a star will live, but it is not the same for all stars. Fainter stars live longer than bright ones; it may be almost like a quota of light output, and if you're brighter you shine that same amount of light out faster.

Elves, like stars, do not get sick. However, apart from that their mortality is almost opposite to that of stars. Elves do not die of old age, and in theory could live forever. But they can die by injury, including wounds and burning and freezing, and from bodily need like hunger or thirst. Even then, though, they do not die easily. They can be wounded to death, but since they are not subject to illness, wounds do not get infected, so it's harder for a wound to kill an elf. They don't die easily by hunger or thirst, because they have a sort of suspended-animation/hibernation state that protects them from it. Two such states, actually, of differing depths. Deep hibernation shuts off most bodily processes, so that very little food or water is used, and an elf can live in deep hibernation for a long time; however, since most bodily processes are turned off, it takes some very specific triggers to wake an elf out of deep hibernation. Deep hibernation does not protect against cold; because most bodily processes are turned off, there is no work going into maintaining body temperature. An elf can survive in deep hibernation down to near-freezing temperatures, but if the body actually freezes, the elf will die. Shallow hibernation's primary purpose is to conserve energy as much as possible while maintaining the body at just above freezing temperature. This takes more energy and bodily processes than deep hibernation, so an elf can't live nearly as long in shallow hibernation as in deep hibernation, but shallow hibernation will protect against cold. Switching between deep and shallow hibernation is basically involuntary, depending on bodily resources and temperature.

I tentatively suspect that one thing that will wake elves out of hibernation is having food placed in their mouths, which results in a societal habit of always carrying some food in case you happen upon a hibernating elf that needs to be awakened.

The ages of the world are accounted from the shining of the first star, from whom all other stars ultimately sprang. Before the first star shone was the time before the ages.

The First Age
The first age began with the shining of the first star. In this age, stars began to spread through the heavens, but they could speak only with their neighbours, since the language of light did not yet exist. At first this was little problem, because all stars were only a few steps from the first mother star.[1] Humans and elves were not yet awake on the earth.

The Second Age
The second age began with the invention of the language of light, and for the first time stars could communicate directly with far off stars.[2] In this age the stars continued to spread through the heavens.

The Third Age
The second age ended and the third age began with the death of the father star. In this age the stars finished populating all the heavens.

The Fourth Age
The fourth age began with the waking of elves and humans upon the earth. The elves woke first, and humans slightly later - unless it was that the stars noticed the elves first since they were more active at night. In this age the elves and humans knew nothing of each other's lands, and there was no traffic between the two.

The Fifth Age
This age began when elves first found a way to humanland, and traffic between elves and humans began. Over the course of this age the interactions between elves and humans worsened.

The Sixth Age.
The sixth age was a troubled age in humanland. It began with the founding of the first elven tyranny in humanland, and in it, tyrannies of elves came to dominate much of humanland.

The Seventh Age.
The seventh age began with the destruction of the elven tyrannies in humanland.

---

I don't know about the ages past this. I worry a bit that after the beginning of the Fifth Age, the definitions of ages are too humanland-focused. (I'm not too worried about definitions being based on events on earth rather than events in the heavens among the stars, since one of the major things stars do is observe earth. But they observe both sides of the earth equally.) One thing that should be included in the account but I don't know yet where it goes is mention of when communication is established between stars and elves, and when it is established between stars and humans.

[1] Stars, reproducing by asexual reproduction, have neither sex nor gender. When they communicate with earthlings using encodings of spoken languages, they refer to themselves with masculine and feminine terms interchangeably and apparently randomly, using both masculine and feminine terms to refer to the same star.

[2] It begins to seem as though mind-to-mind root-communication is the native communication system of stars, while the language of light is something learned secondarily - similar to reading and writing for humans.

Some more thoughts on my flat-like-a-penny world.

I've mentioned at one point or another the three major kinds of rational beings that I know of for this world: humans, elves, and stars.

As I mentioned in my post on flat world astronomy problems, stars are rooted in the sky like trees, but are thinking, speaking beings. They are extremely long-lived, but not immortal; their lifespans are probably thousands of years long. They have two major methods of communication, both fairly foreign to humans; one is more like telepathy, and another is more like speech. Stars are rooted in the sky; I think they reproduce by runners. So their roots are intertwined with their ancestors. But I think also, stars that grow near one another may come to entwine their roots even if one didn't spring from the other. Stars are able to communicate basically telepathically through the root system, but only to a star that they are directly connected with. For a telepathic message to be transmitted to a non-root-adjacent star, the intermediate stars would have to pass the message along. And the message may get garbled in transmission, like a game of telephone. So telepathic communication is usually only used with near neighbours.

For more distant communication, stars use a language. Their language is based on the shining of their light; it is encoded by the different colours that a star can twinkle, and their durations/speeds. Essentially, stars twinkling is (or can be) their speech. (I say "can be", because it may be like humans making sounds, or even like signing humans speaking sign language - the basic bodily mechanisms that we use for producing language are also used for other non-speech purposes.)

Stars have extremely keen sight, and can see considerable detail of things that happen on earth, both in humanland and in elvenland (probably enough to recognize different individuals, but probably not enough to be able to be able to read a book with ordinary-sized letters.) However, they can only see things that happen at night; during the day, the sphere of the day sky is lit by the sun and becomes opaque to them. They also can't hear anything that happens on earth. (They may very well have no sense of hearing at all, even for things that happen in near them.) And even at night, their view is sometimes blocked by clouds.

As a result, they have a very different perspective on what happens on earth than anyone on earth does; they can perceive both more and less at the same time.

I am beginning to suspect that elves are nocturnal and have vision that works best at night. Their eyes work well enough in low-light conditions that they can see well enough to get around even under starlight with no moon; they see most clearly, however, under a bright moon or at mid-dark twilight. They do not see particularly well in daylight. Bright sunshine is not painful to them, but it dazzles their vision, and they can't see well in the overwhelming brightness; it's actually comparable to being too dark - as things get brighter, their vision is more and more overwhelmed with light and they have a harder and harder time seeing, until in fully-bright daylight they may be able to see very little or nothing (but still without pain). When elves do venture out during the daytime, it tends to be on darkly clouded, often stormy days. Thus, when humans encounter elves, it's usually either at night or in storm.

Because humans are mostly diurnal, while elves are mostly nocturnal, stars see much more of elven activity than they do of human activity.

Regarding the night sky and the day sky:
The outside of the universe is a hard boundary. Coating that is the material - I'm not sure exactly what it is, but light permeates it - that the stars grow in. Covering the sky-soil is a layer of dark stuff - I'm not sure if it's turf-like small sky vegetation, or if it's a flexible skin/cloth like material. But it's dark and thick enough to prevent any of the light from coming through, except where the stars poke through and drink up the light through their roots and release it out to the world through their branches.

The sun and moon go around the world considerably closer in than the night sky. Outside the course of the sun is a crystal sphere; the sun lights it up during the day, making the blue day sky. This is what blocks the stars' view of the world during the day.

I've been thinking about what the fundamental units of the Venus-based calendar I was sketching should be called. The calendar has 5 fundamental units, of the following lengths:
1 day
73 days
365 days (5*73)
584 days (8*73)
2920 days (40*73; 8*365; 5*584)

Some of these units are easy to name, and others are harder. The obvious ones are:
1 day: day
365 days: year

Not entirely obvious, but still easy to name, is:
73 days: season ("month" would be another possibility, but 73 days/5 per year seems more like a season than like a month; it'd be rather long for a month).

This leaves two harder-to-name units.
I have no idea what to call the Venus-synodic-period-length unit of 584 days. A noun derived from "Venus" or another name of Venus might be a possibility, but I don't want to just call it "a Venus", because that's clumsy.

The long unit of 2920 days is decade-scale in length, but decade is obviously not a good name for it, since it isn't 10 of anything long. The idea of "decade" brought to mind a possibility of using something like "octade" or "octad" to signify that it contains 8 years; that's naming it with 8 according to years but ignoring the fact that it contains 5 Venus cycles. Alternatively, I thought of naming it after the pentagram shape traced by the 5 successive inferior conjunctions, and calling it something like a pentagram or a pentangle or just a pent, but that doesn't quite feel right.

And then, while writing this up, I discovered that there is in fact a term for an 8-year cycle: octaeteris (pl. octaeterides). I think for now I'm going to adopt that term. So that just leaves the Venus cycle nameless.

EDIT, the same day:
I think for now I'll designate the Venus cycle a "circuit [of Venus]"; "circuit" suggests the idea of the planet running its course, and is general enough that can mean its course around the sky relative to the sun as seen from Earth, as opposed to, say, "orbit", which I think is inextricably linked to the planet's sidereal year.

So now I have the following units:
Day: 1 day
Season: 73 days
Year: 365 days
Circuit: 584 days
Octaeteris: 2920 days

This is a calendar concept sketch that could go either with Earth or with Domil, since Domil is astronomically equivalent to Earth. Chances are that if it sticks to anything outside itself, it'll get assigned to some Domil culture, but it might just stay on its own without getting integrated into anything larger.

So I was thinking about the coincidental neat relationship between the length of Earth's year and the length of Venus's synodic period relative to Earth and Sun.

It takes about 365.25 days for Earth to return to the same place relative to the sun and the surrounding stars. (1 earth year.)

It takes about 583.9 days for Venus to return to the same place relative to the Earth and the Sun (for instance, from one inferior conjunction to another). (1 Venus synodic period.)

If we round each of those to the nearest integer, we get:
365 days * 8 = 2920 days
584 days * 5 = 2920 days

So basically, every 8 years, Earth, Venus, the Sun, and the stars are all in alignment; or, equivalently, Earth's back at the same time of year, and Venus is back in the same configuration with Earth.

If you connect the dots between the inferior conjunctions of the 5 synodic periods that go into this 8-year cycle, it makes a pentagram shape. Each point of the pentagram marks a different time of year that a inferior conjunction can happen at; the spaces between them basically divide the year into 5 equal segments.

So what happens if we divide 365 days into 5 seasons of equal length?
365 days / 5 = 73 days (Isn't that a beautiful nother coincidence? There's no reason the number of days in the (nominal) year had to be divisible by 5, but it is.)

5 seasons of 73 days each make up a 365-day year.
But also, 8 seasons of 73 days each make up a Venus synodic period:
73 days * 8 = 584 days.

That makes a nice basis for a calendar.
( This gets long. )

I've had a couple posts now set in a flat world I'm nicknaming "flat-like-a-penny", because I don't have a real name for it. I first came up with the idea for this world some time in my teens, but it's never been a major focus of my worldbuilding; it's a longstanding on-the-side project with not a lot filled in. Obviously, with a nickname like that, it is not like Domil in being astronomically equivalent to Earth..

The core idea is what the nickname refers to: the earth is flat - but it's not flat with one habitable side, it's flat like a penny with two habitable sides. One side is inhabited by humans, and the other side is inhabited by elves. Each would be living on the other's antipodes. In between the two sides flows the ocean of light, which extends beyond the main world to the celestial sphere that encloses the entire universe. The inside of the celestial sphere is not bare, but rather contains the material in which the stars grow. Stars grow kind of like trees, poking through the "ground" that covers the celestial sphere; I think, though, that they multiply with a runner-like system, so that their roots are all connected to each other. However, stars are not plant-like in that they are thinking, speaking beings.

So far, so good. Stars are small, but extremely bright, and far away on the celestial sphere, so they are point-like at night. That's star-like.

But go much beyond that, and astronomy gets tricky - even accepting the fact that on a flat world, celestial mechanics will be observably different from celestial mechanics on a round world, because celestial mechanics are so intricately tied to the shape of earth, and other objects' distances from it and motions relative to it and each other.

Apparent motion of the stars? That's probably doable; some relative rotation of earth/celestial sphere, whether we want to call it the flat world rotating, or the celestial sphere rotating. What's the axis of rotation? Well, I think I'll suppose that it's neither parallel nor perpendicular to the plane of the world, thus from humanland there would be one visible pole, some circumpolar stars (which never rise in elvenland), some stars that rise and set (and do the same in elvenland), and a portion of the sky that never rises above the horizon (but is circumpolar in elvenland). This still basically works, though it's clearly going to differ experientially from earth, since going "north" or "south" isn't going to change which stars are visible, while going between humanland and elvenland will basically do the celestial equivalent of a sudden hemisphere shift.

The sun and moon, though, get tricky. Let's suppose they're spherical. The problem comes in with angular diameter. Assuming the sun and moon should have roughly the same apparent size as sun and moon from earth, each of them should have an angular diameter of approximately half a degree.

Okay, so, angular diameter is determined by size and distance. Same size, twice as far away = half the angular diameter. Sun and moon are going to have to be pretty far away. At minimum, we need to figure out the size of the flat world, so we know how far away from the centre of the world their paths are. But, another issue: If the world is inhabitable right to its edge, and the sun and moon rise and set near the edge of the world, for someone who lives near the side of the world where they rise, the sun and moon will appear much larger at their rising (since it's on the same edge of the world) and much smaller at their setting at the opposite edge of the world. So that would suggest that it's desirable to add extra "padding" from the edge of the habitable world to the paths of the sun and moon, so that their apparent size doesn't change drastically if you aren't in the very centre of the world.

Okay, so, how big should things be?

For rough approximation purposes, I've been working with a main-habitable-world diameter that's a round number similar to the diameter of Earth. That'll give less surface area, since we're dealing with a disk rather than a sphere, but still in the same ballpark. Earth's diameter is - well, it depends where you measure it, but approximately 12,700 km. Let's make that 12,000. So, radius of the basically-habitable part of the world is 6000 km. Let's first of all ignore the edge-of-the-world problem. If someone was standing in the middle of the world, and the sun or moon was rising 6000 km away at the edge of the world, how big would the sun/moon have to be? Using this angular diameter calculator, I get that for an object 6000 km away to have an angular diameter of .5 degrees, that object has to be about 52 km in diameter. That's fairly big. And it still leaves the edge problem - someone living near the near edge of the world would see it as far huger than .5 degrees, and someone near the far edge of the world would see it as much smaller than 5 degrees. Someone at the opposite side of the world would be 12000 km away, and would see the sun/moon as having an angular diameter of only .25 degrees. Someone even only halfway between the middle of the world and the near edge would see the sun/moon as having an angular diameter of a whole degree.

So let me add some padding - maybe some mostly-empty ocean with perhaps some scattered strange and questionably-inhabitable islands; maybe some area where the ocean of light projects out beyond the main world for some ways before we come to the paths of the moon and sun. Some numbers I found that seemed semi-satisfactory while fiddling with things are (if I am interpreting my notes from the other day right, and got things calculated correctly):

Moon: 200 km diameter, path 24000 km from middle of the world
Moon's rising/setting:
From the middle of the world: 24,000 km away, moon's angular diameter .477 degrees.
From the near edge of the (habitable) world: 18,000 km away, moon's angular diameter .637 degrees.
From the far edge of the (habitable) world: 30,000 km away, moon's angular diameter .382 degrees.

Sun: 300 km diameter, path 36,000 km from middle of the world
Sun's rising/setting:
From the middle of the world: 36,000 km away, sun's angular diameter .477 degrees.
From the near edge of the (habitable) world: 30,000 km away, sun's angular diameter .573 degrees.
From the far edge of the (habitable) world: 42,000 km away, sun's angular diameter .409 degrees.

This seems like as good a solution as I'm going to get. The angular diameters still vary pretty substantially - they'd be plainly observable, I think, especially for the moon - but at least they're still all in the half-degree ballpark.

I'm not happy with the moon and sun having diameters that large. That's almost small-world-sized, and if they are small round worlds, why is the earth flat? But it seems unavoidable. If I put them any closer (to allow them to be smaller), the angular diameters will vary too much.

And that's not even thinking about the details of the paths of the sun and moon, or how exactly their angular diameters would work with solar eclipses. (And are there lunar eclipses? And if so, what causes them? Since it can't be the earth's shadow.)

Another flat-world-astronomy-related problem: Location-based climate? How does that work? Is the north cold?

An unexpected stretch of history in the relationship between humans and elves in my flat-like-a-penny world seems to be developing.

So, elves aren't inherently either good or evil. There are mostly-good ones, mostly-evil ones, and in-between/neutral/morally-ambiguous ones.

I am moderately sure that for a substantial stretch of human history, humans basically only had interaction with evil and neutral/morally-ambiguous elves, with the result that having voluntary dealings with elves was seen as very questionable, probably blamable.

A more tentative sketch of how this came about:
In very early human and elven history, while not a lot of elves came to humanland, the range of elves that came was quite varied; you had mostly-good ones, mostly-evil ones, and ones somewhere in between. Humans learnt a lot from elves, and elves could do things humans couldn't; elves were strange and different and powerful. One result of this was that there was a tendency for humans to begin to worship elves. Different elves responded to this differently. Mostly-good ones will have done things like refuse and avoid worship; when people persisted in trying to worship them, they largely ended up withdrawing from humanland. Mostly-evil and some neutral/ambiguous ones in varying degrees tolerated, exploited, and encouraged the tendency for humans to worship elves. Some of the elves accepted and encouraged worship, and set themselves up as something like divine kings over subject humans. This problem may have been exacerbated by elves who had committed certain kinds of offences back in elvenland being exiled from their home realms in elvenland, and coming to humanland seeking power.

This led to a rather dark time in humanland; it's not yet clear how it ended, though I suspect it may have involved some of the mostly-good elves from elvenland briefly intervening and returning home. After that, the great power-hungry elven kingdoms in humanland weren't an issue anymore, but there was still a tendency for the elves that were around to be either more subtly evil, or at least not-exactly-good. So there was a wide mistrust of elves and of people with explicitly elven knowledge or dealings with elves. (However, I suspect that by this time the widespread worship of elves had stopped.)

Tentative biological tidbit: Possibly, elves can't reproduce in humanland (either any time they're in humanland, or after being there for a while), and humans can't reproduce in elvenland; this prevents elven sovereigns in humanland from easily producing heirs and developing an increasing foothold in humanland (though also they just reproduce slowly as a mostly-immortal species). It also makes it rather difficult for a human-elven couple to produce children (exact degree of difficulty depends on whether reproductive impossibility is dependent simply on being in the wrong land, or whether it only arises after you've been there for a bit.)

"Some think it is possible to read messages in the motions of the Sun and the Moon and the other Wanderers" she said. "They do not understand. It is not the Wanderers who speak from the sky; they dance a beautiful dance, but it has no words; it is the Stars who speak, by their glittering and their flickering colours. It needs a keen and quick eye to read their speech, and it is strange and difficult to understand, but some have learnt it."

For some weeks (months?) now, the following forms have been sticking to each other in my mind:

Vegas (the city)
Vega (the star)
vegan (not eating animal products)/Vegan (relating to Vega)
vegans/Vegans

They look a lot like the different case/number forms of an Indo-European (non-neuter) noun, and I've been wanting to work out what that paradigm could look like, and what the developments from Proto-Indo-European to the hypothetical language with this paradigm would be. So today I decided to actually try to work it out

My first draft was:

Singular
Nominative: *weg-os > vegas
Accusative: *weg-om > vegan
Vocative: *weg-e > vega
Genitive: *weg-os > vegas

Plural
Accusative: *weg-ons > veg-ans

Sound developments:
Stress: becomes fixed on first syllable of root
*w > v
*e > e in stressed syllable
*g > g
*e, *o > a in unstressed syllable
*n > m word-finally

Then I realized that if I derived it from a root *weǵh-, it could be an o-stem noun from the same IE root that English way comes from. Also, I can work out what a few of the other forms are based on these rules - and some of them actually surface the same as these forms.

So, here are the parts of the paradigm I could work out, with an additional rule that long vowels merge with short vowels, and typical handling of laryngeals:

Singular:
Nominative: *weǵh-os > veg-as
Accusative: *weǵh-om > veg-an
Vocative: *weǵh-e > veg-a
Genitive: *weǵh-os > veg-as
Ablative: *weǵh-ōd
Dative: *weǵh-ōi
Locative: *weǵh-oi
Instrumental: *weǵh-oh₁ > veg-a

Plural:
Nominative: *weǵh-ōs > veg-as
Accusative: *weǵh-ons > veg-ans
Genitive: *weǵh-om > veg-an
Dative: *weǵh-omus
Locative: *weǵh-oisu
Instrumental: *weǵh-ōis

Sound development rules
Vowel + laryngeal = long vowel (coloured by laryngeal as appropriate)

Stress becomes established on the first syllable of the root.
Long vowels are shortened.

*w > v
*e > e in stressed syllables
*e, o > a in unstressed syllables
*ǵh > g
*m > n word-finally
*s > s

None of the other forms have a necessary development based on the already established rules, and for none of them have I been able to come up with an obvious English form that should be thrown in to this silly-derivation mix, so the rest of the paradigm is blank for the moment. One possible extension is to have *weǵh-ōi and *weǵh-oi become "veggie" and *weǵh-ōis become "veggies", with *oi > /i/ and palatalization of /g/ before /i/. Although "veggies" is problematic because it would have *s > /z/ while "vegas" has *s > /s/. And the equivalences work better in pronunciation, while the original equivalences work better in spelling. So I think I won't incorporate them for now.

mc776's comments on this post have drawn my attention to the fact that the hypothetical-future scenario it's basically based on is actually a science fiction setting. I guess I hadn't really thought of it that way, because I hadn't really thought of it as something-for-stories-to-be-based-on; I'd just thought of it as a what-if-the-future-turned-out-this-way? Which really doesn't sound all that different when I put it that way...

It's basically a scenario where some kind of infrastructure collapse has happened - probably at least in part by fossil fuels becoming inaccessible, or at least prohibitively expensive, although the detaiils of the cause are not worked out. As a result of infrastructure collapse, people are forced to rely largely on things produced locally.

I've thought about it basically on two levels: more on the level of basic logistics, and less on the level of societal structure and impacts.

Basic logistics are things like:
Okay, so we have to rely on things produced locally. And we probably have to do a lot of stuff ourselves. What resources could we use? For food, what could we grow or harvest? How much land would be needed to support one family? How would we produce fibre and make clothing? What about tools? What kinds of transportation might we have? How long would it take to get from one place to another using those kinds of transportation? Basically for all of this, my thought has been pretty much limited to southwestern BC - i.e., "home" for me. Some about the Sunshine Coast, and some about Vancouver Island, because part of my working out these ideas took place with Heather in Metchosin.

Societal structure thoughts go something like:
Okay. We have a lack of resources. Who has resources, who has power? It seems to me that there are two obvious kinds of resources: land, and skills. There's going to be a shortage of land for farming to feed people, and people who have control of land have control of resources, and therefore power. On the other hand, people who have control of land may not have the skills to work it effectively; if they have large amounts of land, they almost certainly won't have the labour force to work it effectively. They also may not have the skills to make other necessary things like buildings and tools and clothing. Based on this, I can imagine a sort of system of patron/dependents springing up, especially where there are large landholders. Farmers with agricultural skills are dependent on patrons for access to land; however, patrons also depend on their tenants for food. In addition, patrons may have other kinds of dependents who produce other things. Skilled tenants (such as farmers) on large estates may in turn have unskilled labourer dependants. People with small tracts of land and without farming skills might have a simplified patron/dependant relationship, possibly even with landholder and skilled landworker living together quite closely.

I imagine in some of these relationships, the skilled members would worry about their skills being acquired by too many people, thus potentially putting them out of a job.

I also imagine that *owning* land would not necessarily guarantee control of land; if land is a scarce resource, people will try to make use of it if they can, even if it's not theirs; this could lead to squabbles over land, and large landholders having some sort of force to maintain control over their land (and small landholders at least having, say, a dog, or someone keeping watch at night, to make sure no one steals food). I can also imagine some patron/tenant relationships arising from people starting to grow stuff on land that doesn't belong to them, landowner coming along and saying "Hey, that's my land! So, technically anything you grow on it is mine too. And I can kick you off if I want to. But, I'll let you keep growing stuff if you give me X% of the produce."

I've long had a not-very-well-worked-out idea of a semi-language. It's a communication system that's much more limited than natural human languages, but still has more properties of language than known animal communication systems. (Who or what would use this semi-language? I don't know.)

It has words. It doesn't have morphology: every word is monomorphemic. And the only syntactic unit larger than a word is a two-word sentence. Anything beyond that is pragmatically determined.

At the moment, I think the way I'd work this out is that every sentence has a subject and a predicate. The subject comes first, the predicate comes second. (Okay, single-word sentences, as just a "nominal" or just an argumentless predicate, are probably also possible.) There are no pronouns. There are obviously no transitive predicates, but there may be corresponding (morphologically unrelated) predicates for the two halves of a transitive relationship:

man strike
tree be.struck

where "strike" and "be.struck" are two monomorphemic independent words.

Obviously the kinds of things that could be communicated with this system would be more limited than what can be expressed with natural language.

"When I was younger, before the collapse, tea wasn't a Sunday-only special drink like it is now. We drank tea pretty much every day - sometimes I even had six cups of tea in a day."

"Six cups in a day? Wow! How did you get that much tea?"

"Well, we make our own tea now, from the camellias out at the side of the house, but back then we didn't have to do that. Remember, back then it was still easy and cheap to get stuff from a long ways away. So the tea was mostly made in places like India and China, and then imported to over here. It's really expensive to get things from there nowadays, but back then, things from overseas were actually often cheaper than things made locally, so tea really wasn't expensive at all. It also wasn't quite the same as the kind of tea we have now. The original tea plant is a kind of camellia, but it's not the same species as the one we get our tea from. The kind we have grows better in this climate, but it doesn't make quite as nice of tea as the original tea plant. It's still pretty good, though. You know how every now and again, on really special occasions, we have fancy tea from the Island? Well, that's from a farm out there that grows the original tea plant. It's pretty expensive, so we only have it occasionally, but it's like the tea I grew up with, and I love it."

Kiel came over today and we ended up coming up with an interesting imaginary scenario for a colony on Ceres.

First, some basic info about Ceres, taken mostly from this page on the Planetary Society website and the Wikipedia article on Ceres.

Orbital properties:
Semimajor axis (roughly, radius of orbit): 2.8 AU (Mars: 1.5 AU; Jupiter: 5.2 AU)
Orbital period: 4.60 years / 1680 days (Mars: 1.88 years / 687 days; Jupiter: 11.86 years / 4333 days)
Eccentricity: 0.079 (Earth: 0.017; Mars: 0.093)
Inclination to invariable plane : 9.2° (Earth: 1.6°; Mars: 1.7°)

Rotational properties:
Rotational period: 0.38 days / 9.1 hours
Axial tilt: about 3° (Earth: 23°; Mars: 25°; Mercury: 2'; Jupiter: 3°)

Basic physical properties
Diameter: about 950 km (about 1/13 or 7.5% of Earth)
Mass: 9.43 x 10^20 kg (0.016% of Earth)
Density: 2.10 grams per cubic centimetre
Equatorial surface gravity: 0.028 g (Earth: 1 g; Mars: 0.38 g; Moon: 0.17 g). (Something that weighed 100 units on earth would way only almost 3 units on Ceres.)
Maximum surface temperature: 235 K (about -40° C)

Ideas for an imaginary colony
Okay, with those basic physical properties in mind, how could a colony on Ceres work? Here's what Kiel and I worked out.

Terraforming Ceres as a whole would never be plausible; it's not massive enough to maintain an atmosphere. So you'd want something to hold the atmosphere in - say, a dome of some sort over the region you were colonizing.

Even this raises an interesting problem. The density of Ceres (2.1 grams per cubic centimetre) is lower than that of rock (about 3.4) and higher than that of water ice (about 0.94). This is one of several indications that Ceres contains a significant amount of water ice along with rock; based on density, about 17% to 27% of Ceres' mass could be water ice. Ceres probably has a differentiated structure, with a rocky core, and a water ice mantle 70-120 km thick. We don't see a lot of evidence of water ice on the surface of Ceres, though, so it's probably covered in a fairly thin layer of rocky materials. (Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any suggestions about how thick this layer is, but I'm under the impression that it's more likely to be measured in metres than in kilometres). Ice close to the surface is both a resource and a challenge: resource in that it provides an abundant supply of liquid water, and challenge in that you need to make sure it doesn't melt under you. If you just put up an atmosphere-holding dome, fill it with atmosphere, and heat it to a good temperature for growing the plants you need to support you, you're probably going to melt some of the under-ice with those high temperatures, and that will be problematic.

So Kiel and I came up with a possible solution (although it might depend somewhat on what impurities the ice has in it, and so what temperature it would melt at). We thought about arctic climates and permafrost. Maybe you could set things up so that inside your dome you basically have an arctic: thick ground, with the lower part permafrost; artificial climate set up to maintain permafrost, with part time 'winter', below freezing, allowing the ground to freeze, and part time 'summer', above freezing, allowing arctic plants to grow. The permafrost layer would keep the Ceres ice from melting. There could be greenhouses and other smaller-scale warm spots that would not melt through the permafrost and would allow things to grow that need warm temperatures.

Ceres is very unlikely to have a significant magnetic field. That means people there will need to be protected from radiation by some kind of shielding. Kiel said that for astronauts going from Earth to Mars, 1 metre thickness of water is thought to be capable of shielding humans even from a major solar radiation event. That must be the thickness required at Earth orbit; presumably, out at Ceres, the thickness of shielding would be less. We came up with the idea that you could have a dome over the colony with water sandwiched between two transparent layers. Additionally, you could have things grow in that overhead sea! Seaweed, fish, etc. (Although you would probably want to make sure that the living stuff was confined to the inner part of the water, where it would be at least partly shielded from radiation effects that you wouldn't be protected from in the outer part.) Imagine having a mini-sea over your head!

Mineral resources might be a problem, but a look at what's thought to be on the surface of Ceres suggests that there would probably be a reasonable variety of minerals around, so it might be okay.

I know there were a few other things we talked about, but those are the main ones that come to mind, and I need to go to bed, so I'll stop here.

A bit ago, I read a couple articles about the origins of money that

conuly linked. She linkedthis, which is a follow-up on this; I posted about them on my main journal here. In particular, it makes the point that there is no evidence for a pre-monetary economic system based on barter.

They made me wonder what kind of economic system the Nitɬ'am have. Do they have money? If so, how did it arise? (And when in their history? It could have changed in the periods that I've thought about.) If not, how does their economic system work?

I wonder what the experience of echolocation would be like in a context where lots of people around you were also echolocating. How much information about your surroundings could you get by secondhand echolocation - listening to other people's clicks and how the environment modified them?

Before I get onto the main topic of the post, one more comment about the name Nitɬ'am. The medial cluster is ejective, which is not a kind of sound most English speakers have learnt to make. It's a little bit awkward to have given them a name which is not readily pronounceable by most English speakers, but I think it's also realistic - it's realistic that those sounds would be in their language, and there are plenty of people groups even in our world that have sounds that English speakers can't readily pronounce. I would expect English speakers to anglicize Nitɬ'am to Nitlam; for people who don't know the International Phonetic Alphabet, the first syllable of the anglicized version sounds like 'neat' and the second syllable sounds like 'lamb'.

One thing I've been thinking a bit about, and not quite sure what would work best, is how Nitɬ'am society originated. How did it come to be that there was an island where the whole population was genetically blind?

The first scenario I thought of, some time ago, depended on prejudice: there was a community with some blind people in it, and due to prejudice they were basically expelled from the community and marooned on this island. I didn't especially like this scenario, but it was the only one I could think of.

I've come up with the basics of another scenario that I think is both more pleasing and could even actually be more practical. It would probably start the same as the prejudice scenario. In both scenarios, there was probably some initial event reducing genetic diversity that made a significant blind minority in the population. Parallels would be the genetic situation that led to a substantial deaf population on Martha's Vineyard from roughly 1700 until the early 1900s, and the genetic situation that led to a substantial colourblind population on the Micronesian island of Pingelap.

So, there's a community with a significant blind minority, say about 10% of the population. In the prejudice scenario, the blind minority is seen as inferior/undesirable and expelled from the community. But in the other scenario I'm thinking of, the blind minority is integrated into the community. There's plenty of work that needs to be done, and it's not feasible for 10% of the population to not be doing useful things, so ways are found for blind people to do all sorts of work. Maybe not all the kinds of work that sighted people could do, but lots of them. There would have been households where everyone was blind, so ways would have been worked out for blind people to do everything that's important for daily life. They wouldn't at that point have had to develop ways for blind people to do everything that's important for maintaining the community, because it would be possible for blind people to do some parts of it and sighted people to do other parts. For example, I can imagine that blind people might have worked in gardens while sighted people went out hunting. Being blind would have been within the range of expected normal, though it may have been expected that blind people would fit in certain niches of the society.

At some point, there was a community division and it ended up that the people who settled the island (or stayed on the island while the rest of the community left) were all or almost all blind; the reasons for this separation may have had nothing to do with blindness. It could be something like that a ship got lost at sea and washed up on this island, and it so happened that the sighted navigators either died en route/in the wreck, or simply didn't end up having any descendants, while blind people who were on the ship doing other things survived and had children.

This scenario has one big practical advantage over the prejudice scenario: it makes it understandable how the people who ultimately were the founders of the blind society had gained the skills necessary to carry on life - to produce food, build houses, make clothes, etc. In a prejudice scenario where blind people are thought of as worthless and incapable, it's less likely that they'd have had a chance to gain those skills; conversely, in a society where they had gained those skills, they'd be less likely to be considered worthless and incapable.

~~~

I remember once, as a child or teenager, reading a book about a boy who was stranded on a tropical island - a coral reef island in the Caribbean, if I remember right. He was temporarily blinded by the shipwreck that stranded him and had to figure out to survive on the island without sight. I'd be interested to figure out what that book was, and maybe have another look at it.

EDIT: Apparently the book is The Cay, by Theodore Taylor. I'd forgotten that it's actually two people who get stranded on the island - a white boy and an elderly black man, and one of the things the book deals with is the white boy's prejudice against the black man. But I was right in remembering that the boy goes blind.

The Nitɬ'am get around the world on a daily basis using a combination of echolocation and canes. It's a good combination. Canes can give certain kinds of information about the immediate environment that echolocation can't - according to one of the videos on human echolocation that I've watched, a cane can allow you to notice a sudden drop-off or hole that you wouldn't catch with echolocation. Echolocation, on the other hand, can give you information about things outside cane-reach distance, and more directionally distributed than a cane can give you at any one point in time. So they complement each other nicely.

Canes are probably made of, well, cane, or other lightweight sturdy grass-like plants such as bamboo. Children get their first cane at a very young age - probably around one or when they first start walking. (I wonder how they are taught not to wave the cane around in ways that will hurt people standing nearby. I'm sure they can work something out for that, though.) Children probably learn to use canes by a combination of exploration (give someone a tool and they'll figure out what they can do with it), observation (e.g., noticing an adult tapping something with their cane and figuring out what they're doing), and incidental teaching ("Hey, why don't you tap it with your cane and see if you can figure out what it is?" "If you poke with your cane like this, it won't get stuck in the grass like that.")

Because echolocation is in use by everyone all the time, children will hear echolocation sounds around them from birth. In our society, many blind children begin to figure out echolocation on their own at a young age, but unfortunately most of them are discouraged from making weird sounds by parents who don't realize the value of it. In Nitɬ'am society, children will of course not be discouraged from exploratory echolocation efforts, and they will also have models of echolocation all around them and will probably copy the sounds they hear others making. So they'll almost certainly figure out echolocation on their own, with no intentional instruction. However, there is probably also at least informal instruction added to the naturally-figured-out echolocation, refining it further, and possibly even formal instruction after a certain point to teach the subtlest aspects of echolocation.

I'm not sure whether they would wear shoes. It seems like shoes have both benefits and drawbacks.
Benefit: Shoes protect your feet from things you might step on that are sharp or sticky or prickly or slimy etc. If you can't see exactly what things are like where you're putting down your feet, this might be useful. (Also, shoes protect against cold; this is no different in a blind society than in a sighted society, though.)
Drawback: Wearing shoes, you can't feel as well what's underfoot; thus, you get less evidence about your environment.

I think what I'm going to go with at the moment is that they wear thin leather shoes, along the lines of moccasins - thin enough to get some significant information about the environment, though not as much as with bare feet, but still offering some protection against things stepped on.

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steorran_worulde

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Steorran worulde

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Musical conlang

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Density measurer

Death and mortality among stars and elves

The ages of the world, according to the stars

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Flat world astronomy problems

Problems with elves

The speech of the Stars

vega(n)(s)

Hypothetical future

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Tea in the olden days

Ceres colony

Economic system?

Secondhand echolocation?

Nitɬ'am: societal origins

Nitɬ'am: everyday navigation