kårroť scratchpad (necroes still welcome)

[Pedant]

Here's another question for you: where did you go to start up your own wiki?

[mèþru]

miraheze.org

[mèþru]

In kårroť, all species of mushroom contain psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms. I'm thinking right now about how this affects society.
I think that in most societies, mushroom use is considered okay as long as you don't consume so much that you hallucinate. If you do, then you are locked up for everyone's safety including your own. Psilocybin is thought to have potential as anti-headache medicine in our world, so I'm thinking it might be a big part of folk medicine there.
In many cultures, an extract from mushrooms is traditionally added to dandelion tea/coffee.

[mèþru]

I wonder how far can medicine develop without steam or electric technology.

[Pedant]

I wonder how far can medicine develop without steam or electric technology.

That depends...do you mean theoretically, practically, or both?

[mèþru]

Both I guess? Not sure what you mean by theoretically vs practically.
The kårroť Wiki has moved and now also hosts my alternate history project: methru.miraheze.org

[Pedant]

Both I guess? Not sure what you mean by theoretically vs practically.

What I mean is, do your people know about germ theory, or do they still conform to pre-scientific methods?
On the practical side, have they developed all the medical techniques and technology up to the point that electricity makes it possible to do more--for instance, how good can their microscopes get without electric lights? If someone has a cataract, would they be stuck with someone pulling out the lens and possibly leaving them blind, instead of having a plastic lens put in place? How many herbal or folklore remedies are used instead of chemicals isolated for the purpose of treatment, and how many of the folklore remedies work?
On the theoretical side, how much is known about diseases? Are they considered a sign of bad character, or a punishment from the supernatural side of life, or do people understand the physical side? Are there prognoses and diagnoses? Is medicine thoroughly linked to religious practice, or partially, or not at all? Do people believe they can pass diseases through curses, or through bottled air? Are there any sorts of medical records that people can rely on?

[mèþru]

They subscribe to germ theory, but with only early 19th-century level microscopes I don't know how far they can go.

[mèþru]

There are secular medical traditions; I don't know how well they can isolate individual chemicals without modern technology. The idea of elements in a Mendeleveen sense is recent, and the theory of air being composed of other elements only gained widespread acceptance about 2 centuries before the timeline cut-off.

[alynnidalar]

There's no reason to think that medical discoveries would occur in the same order or by the same timeline as those in the real world. If some particularly clever or insightful person made a theoretical leap earlier, they could develop medicine in quite a different order or by a different pattern than we did!

Of course some medicine relies on electricity (X-rays are pretty difficult to produce without electricity, for example), but plenty of medicine doesn't really. For example, while forms of physical therapy have been used in medicine for years, physical therapy as a rigorous field of study only dates back to the 1800s--yet this is a field of medicine that could clearly be developed with no electricity whatsoever.

[mèþru]

Spontaneous generation of animals is disproved by experiment in the late Varikevi empire (about early medieval era equivalent?), but remains prevalent in theory of disease
the germ theory is adopted in ancient times, but the combination of rejecting spontaneous generation and germ theory gains credence among some theorists only two or three centuries before my timeline cutoff (the invention of a practical steam engine), and it takes time for them to use microscopes to come up with the idea of reproducing bacteria and then convince the medical community of the validity of their theory
the idea that sperm is manufactured by the body leads to a rejection of the idea that microscopic contagions could be animals, so it is then thought that some contagions may be forms of yeast or non-vascular plants, which are still thought in the later part of the Varikevi Empire to be a result of spontaneous generation.
a connection between spores of mushrooms and the many fungal diseases of kårroť on the other hand are understood and studied from the rejection of spontaneous generation of animals (not that the diseases come from mushrooms, but the idea that something like mushrooms spores from some unknown type of mushroom-like thing may be the cause of the diseases)
--------
I'm going to have to get into viruses, as it turns out that many of them are needed to make the atmosphere breathable, the oceans bio-diverse and animal life (including humans) healthy
I thought I could make a world without them but they are too vital

[mèþru]

This means that in the blank slate interpretation (the one where we assume kårroť is in the same universe as Earth and its species coming from Earth), in the absence of microbial parasites in the founding population of the planet viruses will have the most diseases because they evolve quicker by virtue of having the shortest lifespans/reproductive cycles and both viruses and bacteria can easily turn from benevolent to malevolent with few mutations. I planned for most human diseases to be from fungi.
The blank slate interpretation is not canon; there is canonical position on whether kårroť is in the same universe as Earth or not. However, in looking at my world from a Doylist perspective I am using something similar but not identical to it.

[Pedant]

Um...I hate to bring this up, but how closely connected are Earth and kårroť if there are humans on both worlds?

[mèþru]

That's open for the reader. Perhaps kårroť doesn't exist in the same universe, perhaps it was settled by Earth. I'm not declaring any correct answer.

[mèþru]

I've been in a long term denial about the fact that with the current numbers, kårroť is a mostly uninhabitable hellhole.
I'm redoing the numbers regarding the atmosphere, water distribution and the moons' orbits.

I previously wrote

The amount of water in the oceans is only 45%, an outstanding number compared to 96% of our water. Also, only 50% of the world’s water has salt in it, and much of the salt water not from the ocean is so brackish that it is almost fresh. 24% of the world’s water appears in surface lakes and rivers, and the rest is underground. This does not count ice as water. The oceans are way less deep than ours, and could be alternatively be considered very large seas.

I think that's probably physically impossible for so much of the world's water to be underground; tectonic activity and pressure from stomping animals and growing plant roots would cause much of the extensive systems to be caved in. What's the minimum reduction I can make of 76% of the world's freshwater?

[mèþru]

I guess this also means that many freshwater lakes must be as deep as the oceans
I think that I'll just rewrite the water numbers from scratch, I don't think the text even remotely describes my intentions anyway
I wanted the world to be about as much ocean as land + freshwater on the surface, and I wanted salt to be rarer. Beyond that, I can rewrite the rest of that.

[mèþru]

oh wait I misinterpreted a chart
76% of freshwater that isn't ice is actually *much less* than the Earth proportion!

[mèþru]

latest conlang
/m n̪ ɲ ŋ/
/p t̪ ʈ k ʔ/
/s̪ ʂ ħ h/
/t̪͡s̪ ʈ͡ʂ/
/β ɥ j/
/i u a/ + long
Diphthongs: /i̯o̽ u̯e̽/, diphthongs are as long as long vowels and are phonemically analysed as /iu/ (or /ia/ from suffixation) and /ua/ (or /ui/ from suffixation)
Stress is phonemic. On a phonemic level, it works on morae instead of syllables.
[β ɥ j] > [ɸ çʷ ç] syllable initially unless if intervocalically
[hβ] > [ʍː]
[ħβ] > [ħʍ]
[hɥ] > [ɥ̊ː]
[ħɥ] > [ħɥ̊]
[hj] > [h͡çː]
[ħj] > [ħç]
[ht̪ ħt̪ hk ħk] > [ht ħt hq ħq]
[ht̪͡s̪] > [ht͡s]
[hs̪ hʂ] > [s̪ʰ ʂʰ]
Codal [h] elides if it does not aspirate a fricative or devoice a semivowel
Codal [h] nasalises the previous morae, regardless of if it elides or not
Unstressed short vowels reduce in the syllable before the stressed one

[mèþru]

I'm going to make it a caseless ergative-absolutive language that tends to be isolating but uses person and gender agreement in nouns and adjectives. Anyone good examples of ergative-absolutive natlangs without case?

[akam chinjir]

I'm going to make it a caseless ergative-absolutive language that tends to be isolating but uses person and gender agreement in nouns and adjectives. Anyone good examples of ergative-absolutive natlangs without case?

You mean with ergative agreement? Here's a paper I liked about those: Ellen Woolford, Ergative agreement systems. (I think I've mentioned it around here before.) It mentions Jacaltec, Selayarese, Abkhaz, and Yimas. If I remember the details right, she argues that in all cases what you have is true agreement with an ergative argument, and clitics cross-referencing absolutive arguments.