#antarcticon

Mãsyowa Ngõtyã (lit. "the mouth [language] of the blood of the Great Lake of Origin") was spoken in the large central area of the Lakeland region of the Antarctic Continent, which extends from the border of the Ko Desert, all the way to the Coastal Range.

It was of the Lakeland language family, one of the three primary language families on the Continent, and serves as the model for the family as a whole. The Lakeland region is characterized by many mountains and valleys, with many small rivers and freshwater lakes.

The Mãsyowa language area was centered on the Great Primordial Lake, aka the Great Lake of Origin, from which humans first emerged, according to myths of the Lakelander peoples. Due to this prestigious location, The speakers of this language have been influential throughout the Lakelands and beyond, and have influenced the languages of the entire region.

A map of the Lakelands, with the extent of the Mãsyowa language at its height, circa 400 years before present.

The Antarcticon epic novel series is tentatively going to be set about 400 years after the height of the Mãsyowa language, after which time an outside imperial conquest, then a dramatic and cataclysmic fall of said empire occurred. In the modern period, Mãsyowa has evolved into several daughter languages, which diverge about as much as the Arabic dialects in our world, or perhaps similar to the Romance languages.

Mãsyowa was also spoken as a majority language in several enclaves throughout the Lakeland region, and as a family or minority language in many communities. This was due in part to the unified culture of the entire region, with people tending to see themselves as part of a wider Lakeland community, and still do to a lesser extent even today.

For example, legends and myth cycles tend to be shared across language groups, even though specific mythic events remain tied to specific real-world places, so that a Mãsyowa speaker might tell a story set hundreds of miles away, and consider it a native tale, rather than a foreign one. Extending from that concept, pilgrimages to various far flung Lakeland areas are common at specific times of year, and wholesale relocations have also happened in the past.

Typologically, here are some of the language’s features:

Ergative-Absolutive alignment

VSO word order

Palatalized consonants

Nasal vowels

Largely-prefixing verbal morphology

Noun class system with 10 different noun classes.

Agglutinative, though fusional in places, and isolating in others

Several auxiliary modal verbs and verbal particles in addition to several verbal prefixes. 

Also notable is the system of article-determiners, which are required to precede every non-proper noun, and encode both definiteness (4 levels) and distance (3 levels), while also agreeing with noun class.

And finally, here's a few examples:

BLUE = Absolutive argument phrase and agreement marker PINK = Ergative argument phrase

Ngengakyatĩkye drõ dukyũ bo byõ gugi. nge-nga-kyatĩ-kye drõ dukyũ bo byõ gugi 3sg.sing-past-eat-indirect DET man ERG DET cat That cat ate that man.

Nyut ngemukyatĩdi, nyut nyemuyatidi mokyesa. If he eats, then I will be happy.

Ra sẽngawĩ'õkye sõ pasyõ'e bo kyõ byonik! Ra sẽ-nga-wĩ'õ-kye sõ pasyõ'e bo kyõ byonik! COMP VEG.sing-past-hit-firsthand VEG.far.def tree ERG DIU.far.def lightning That lightning smashed into the tree!.

Ngengapũkikye nyet karoga bo byõ ngõgrut, byã bungakyigakye byõ nyongep. Nge-nga-pũki-kye nyet karoga bo byõ ngõgrut, byã bu-nga-kyiga-kye byõ nyongep. 3SG-PST-kill-FRST 1SG.POSS lover ERG DET.OVO.MED.DEF sabrebeak, therefore OVO-PST-stab-FRST DET.OVO.MED.DEF 1SG.ERG The sabrebeak killed my lover, therefore I stabbed it.

Until Next Time!

Welcome to my far future, ice-free Antarctica, known for now as the “Continent”! This is the setting I'm working on for a future epic fantasy series, code named "The Antarcticon".

The climate, flora and fauna are all unique, and may have been intentionally engineered by a precursor civilization, through science and/or magic. That precursor civilization, human or otherwise, did leave behind artifacts, including a massive basalt tower at the location of the South Pole.

The world is suffused with many types of magics, deriving from the auroras, the stars, and a variety of spirits from other dimensions. 

Monotreme mammals dominate the land (except for humans and a few other placental mammals) all laying eggs and having beaks or bills, but filling the ecosystem niches of placental or marsupial mammals in our world. A monotreme sentient race also exists in several of the large lake and wetland regions. 

Similarly, penguins have speciated into several types of (still-)flightless birds, from large and dangerous terrorbirds, to a domesticated chicken analogue. 

The climate is temperate overall, with equivalents of our temperate deciduous forests and temperate rainforests the most common, except due to elevation. The flora is unique as well, with a wide variety of mosses, lichens, and fungi filling most niches of plants, except for varieties and descendants of our world’s araucaria tree, which is highly dominant.

The Continent and associated islands are separated from the rest of the world by an endless tempest, uncrossable by humans.

Despite being very different from our current day Antarctica, due to climate change and likely a good bit of magic, and possible even alien technologies, one factor remains the same: the extreme polar day/night cycle. In almost all areas, “day” and “summer” are equivalent, while “night” and “winter” are as well, giving a cycle of roughly 5+ months of day, 5+ months of night, and a period of a few weeks of transition during the equinoxes. This has, as you might expect, affected human society quite a bit! In the recent past, before an imperial upset, societies all over tended to respond in major ways to the shift, with some of the possibilities being:

physically relocating en masse to new areas

switching from an egalitarian society to a strictly hierarchical one, or vice versa

otherwise completely adjusting societal structures, such as from matriarchal to patriarchal

speaking in a completely different register of their language, with differing grammar and vocabulary

Technology-wise it is still very much a work in progress, but I will be leaning on and enhancing a blended Paleolithic-meets-the Copper Age-meets-Medieval/Renaissance vibe in the technology levels.

The Languages of Antarctica

Three human language families make up almost all of the currently-known human languages on the Continent, and they all make up a large linguistic area, sharing a few general features:

Ergativity is common, though split systems of various kinds are common as well

Noun class systems that are at least partially inspired by the daysummer/nightwinter cycle, as well as the various kinds of flora and fauna, with some languages having 10+ of these

Shared conceptual metaphors (both used in idioms, as well as to philosophically extend the meanings of the above noun classes)

Common compound word calques, often extended from the conceptual metaphor system

Most common word order: head-first, VSO, prepositions/locative nouns

Prefixing in the verb system most common, this varies a lot by region

Morphological evidentiality is ubiquitous

Daysummer vs Nightwinter evident in grammar and in lexicon

fancified more intense grammar for one phase, colloquial lax vulgar grammar for other phase (which phase is which varies based on language and regional culture)

That's all for now! In the next few posts, I'll start sharing things about specific Antarctic languages!