Icemannish Thread: Sails and Skins
Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2019 3:09 pm
Another con-culture, this time in the far north of the world. This is for you, Frislander; you ask for more about the Icemannic peoples, and I provide!
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Regions of the Icemannic World
3. Proto-Icemannic: Phonology and Basic Morphology
4. Skins and Sails: Naval Technology and Appearance
INTRODUCTION Those who spoke the language known as Töhysyttäh ("our collective, cyclical recitation") spread no earlier than a twelve hundred years ago across the frozen north of Ajjamah. These are the Icemannic peoples.
The above description is broadly incorrect for three very important reasons.
The first is that the north is really not that frozen...the southern shores are temperate, even relatively mild, although the winter winds blowing down from the Far North are a bit of a pain sometimes. The lands that gave the Icemannic peoples their names are those that border the great ice sheet covering most of the continent of Borealia, where winters are hard and summer is a brief respite--but there are also communities living on nearby islands, or who travel in great longships across the Northern Passage (Hüsüvänü "The Nearby Sea"), or who've settled in lands that they once raided on the southern shores, or even tried their luck in Tailtiinu, the Land of Wine, far to the east. The entire area is about 14 million square kilometres--the size of Antarctica--and that doesn't even begin to count the new expeditions into Tailtiinu.
The second is that there is no single universally-accepted Icemannic language out there. Technically speaking there are seventeen major dialects, spread out across the north, but none lay claim to total control. The two languages largely discussed here are Proto-Icemannic, spoken some fifteen hundred years ago, and Icemannic Dialect 17, spoken by the inhabitants of Tailtiinu. The former is polysynthetic VOS (when it needs to be), and head-first. The latter is agglutinative (with vowel harmony), SOV, and, well, head-first. Compare the two sentences below, the first in Proto-Icemannic and the second in Icemannic Dialect 17: [1]
*puiquuliłuiʁivik qinaatal?
HAB-fish-eat-3pfGEN 3inanPASS-reason-Q
Puulimit hinaatal pölörihäym?
Fish-ACC-PL why HAB-eat-3plACT
Why do they eat fish?
The third and final reason the description of the Icemannic peoples is technically wrong is that, if they were to refer to themselves in that manner at all, they would call themselves the Ice Women. They refer to themselves generally as Ohopaluttah "our people living in the frost" or just "Okaalitah "our people"; the term "Iceman" is a calque of the Irthironian word Stirwana, which is actually gender-neutral as "man" was in older English texts. Icemannic society, however, is matriarchal, matrilineal, and natalocal. They are also perhaps the most brutal raiders in the world, with people from the Sealander Coast to the Telepath Empire living in fear of their longships and their thrall-spells, for the Trancers as a people and the Icemannic tribes as a whole have a particularly frightening type of magic, the blood-runes (huunahyarat "oath-makers"), where one is bound by one's own blood to serve as one's mistress commands until one dies.
I hope here to discuss the history, culture, and language of the Icemannic peoples in greater detail, as well as how they interact with the surrounding peoples, including the Statues, the Botanists, the Cannibals, and the Irthironian Normal People (who live on a completely different map).
[1] Note that occasionally, for purposes of comparison, I may briefly talk about Icemannic Dialect 3, spoken on the peninsula of Irungiutan on the northwest side of the map. It preserves more of the sounds and grammar from Proto-Icemannic, and is a more common lingua franca among the hunting parties on Borealia proper.
[2] The Proto-Icemannic particle *-taq, which resolves in Icemannic Dialect 17 to -tah/-täh, is feminine-primary; if a group is mixed, it's assumed the women take priority.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Regions of the Icemannic World
3. Proto-Icemannic: Phonology and Basic Morphology
4. Skins and Sails: Naval Technology and Appearance
INTRODUCTION Those who spoke the language known as Töhysyttäh ("our collective, cyclical recitation") spread no earlier than a twelve hundred years ago across the frozen north of Ajjamah. These are the Icemannic peoples.
The above description is broadly incorrect for three very important reasons.
The first is that the north is really not that frozen...the southern shores are temperate, even relatively mild, although the winter winds blowing down from the Far North are a bit of a pain sometimes. The lands that gave the Icemannic peoples their names are those that border the great ice sheet covering most of the continent of Borealia, where winters are hard and summer is a brief respite--but there are also communities living on nearby islands, or who travel in great longships across the Northern Passage (Hüsüvänü "The Nearby Sea"), or who've settled in lands that they once raided on the southern shores, or even tried their luck in Tailtiinu, the Land of Wine, far to the east. The entire area is about 14 million square kilometres--the size of Antarctica--and that doesn't even begin to count the new expeditions into Tailtiinu.
The second is that there is no single universally-accepted Icemannic language out there. Technically speaking there are seventeen major dialects, spread out across the north, but none lay claim to total control. The two languages largely discussed here are Proto-Icemannic, spoken some fifteen hundred years ago, and Icemannic Dialect 17, spoken by the inhabitants of Tailtiinu. The former is polysynthetic VOS (when it needs to be), and head-first. The latter is agglutinative (with vowel harmony), SOV, and, well, head-first. Compare the two sentences below, the first in Proto-Icemannic and the second in Icemannic Dialect 17: [1]
*puiquuliłuiʁivik qinaatal?
HAB-fish-eat-3pfGEN 3inanPASS-reason-Q
Puulimit hinaatal pölörihäym?
Fish-ACC-PL why HAB-eat-3plACT
Why do they eat fish?
The third and final reason the description of the Icemannic peoples is technically wrong is that, if they were to refer to themselves in that manner at all, they would call themselves the Ice Women. They refer to themselves generally as Ohopaluttah "our people living in the frost" or just "Okaalitah "our people"; the term "Iceman" is a calque of the Irthironian word Stirwana, which is actually gender-neutral as "man" was in older English texts. Icemannic society, however, is matriarchal, matrilineal, and natalocal. They are also perhaps the most brutal raiders in the world, with people from the Sealander Coast to the Telepath Empire living in fear of their longships and their thrall-spells, for the Trancers as a people and the Icemannic tribes as a whole have a particularly frightening type of magic, the blood-runes (huunahyarat "oath-makers"), where one is bound by one's own blood to serve as one's mistress commands until one dies.
I hope here to discuss the history, culture, and language of the Icemannic peoples in greater detail, as well as how they interact with the surrounding peoples, including the Statues, the Botanists, the Cannibals, and the Irthironian Normal People (who live on a completely different map).
[1] Note that occasionally, for purposes of comparison, I may briefly talk about Icemannic Dialect 3, spoken on the peninsula of Irungiutan on the northwest side of the map. It preserves more of the sounds and grammar from Proto-Icemannic, and is a more common lingua franca among the hunting parties on Borealia proper.
[2] The Proto-Icemannic particle *-taq, which resolves in Icemannic Dialect 17 to -tah/-täh, is feminine-primary; if a group is mixed, it's assumed the women take priority.