The Edassan Tomes

[Seonid he/him]

If you've been wondering if I'll ever stop worldbuilding and get to writing actual plot, I do not have happy news for you today...

But, if all you've ever wanted is to have a long-winded treatise on the way marriage and inheritance works among the Avran commonfolk, then...

Well, first, I'm a little bit concerned for you. But second, today is absolutely your lucky day. 

Most Avrans are worshippers of the Tribunal, and their marriage practices follow the prescribed rituals of that religion. Avran law understands marriage to be permanent, and does not permit divorce except under very rare circumstances. However, before a marriage is legally solemnized, the couple enters a betrothal contract. During this betrothal period, the couple lives together as if they were married and adjusts to life together. This state can persist for several years, to ensure that any incompatibilities will come to light before the couple is permanently joined, but generally ends once a child is born, or once it is obvious that the couple is compatible with each other. Since any gifts or alliances associated with the marriage are not actually legally transferred until the betrothal period is over, both households tend to put pressure on the newlywed couple to finalize their marriage sooner rather than later.

In general, the title to land stays within members of a household - only on exceptional occasions will someone inherit land from a separate household, such as when a holder dies with no hold-members remaining in their household to inherit.

Outside of these outlier cases, the only time land changes hands between households is during marriages. In an Avran marriage, at least one of the parties will be leaving their household to join a new one - if one or both families has enough land available, the couple might start a new household of their own with land given as a marriage gift. More commonly, however, one of the newlyweds will marry into their spouse’s household.

Marrying into a new household removes the spouse from the line of inheritance of the household they are leaving - at least, as long as any living heirs remain in that household to inherit. However, such a spouse often comes into their new household with a marriage gift of their own - money, valuable property, or even some land that passes to the new household in exchange for the marriage. As a result, which household the new couple will be a part of - and what marriage gifts will be given on either side - is a key part of marriage negotiations.
As a general rule, the heirs of a holder almost never leave their household - their spouse marries into the family to become a holder in their own right once their partner inherits. But even marriages between hold-members can still carry significant marriage gifts, even if the gift is just a formal connection with a wealthy and influential household.  These marriage gifts are held in escrow during the betrothal period, and are permanently transferred to the new households once the marriage is legally solemnized.

However, most marriages are not only driven by cold calculations of property and profit. Many families strongly weigh a child's happiness as part of marriage negotiations. Relatively wealthy households that let poor young people - or even trusted hired hands - marry into them are a relatively common fixture - even if the newcomer's household is desperately poor, at a minimum, the household gains a new person who can help work a larger area of fields or take care of larger herds without having to pay a hired hand, while also catering to their child's happiness.

Among serfs, the patterns are different - in part because any marriage to a serf must be approved by the noble who holds the serf’s land. Since no serfs own land, each new couple immediately forms their own new household. Often, the village will band together to build a new house for them, but the new household might also move in with an aging parent or parents to care for them, effectively dissolving the parent's household and replacing it with the child's.

Marriages between serfs and free households are uncommon, since the vast majority of them involve a free peasant giving up their free status to become a serf. Very few lords tend to allow their serfs to leave their service to join a free household - that would involve losing a serf; though wealthy or influential families can offer a sufficient gift to make it worth the exchange. However, wealthy villeins will sometimes marry the children of poorer householders, offering a significant monetary gift to outweigh the concerns of their child giving up their free status.

 

[Seonid he/him]

So, as it turns out, I've been gone for a while. My dad is rapidly going downhill, and I spent a lot of that time just unable to write or even worldbuild. But now that the end is in sight, I'm finding myself drawn back to Edassa. It's a drug I just can't quit. So I guess this is me announcing that I'm (kind of) back? I don't know what kind of worldbuilding information will show up here - possibly whatever I found interesting that day. And if anybody is all like "Ooh - I want to know the nitty gritty details of the marriage rituals for the Tribunal's worshippers," let me know and that will suddenly become the most interesting thing in my day

Also - apparently I'm the absolute last person on the planet to experiment with AI, but I did find myself playing around with it the past few days. As a result of my experiences, I'm going to make the following statement on Seonid's use of AI models in worldbuilding and writing.

1. I have not now and will not ever use AI to generate plot ideas, write prose, or anything even close to it. Ever. That's a red line (not to mention that the methods the AI would use to do that work involve the outright stealing of a great deal of copyrighted work).
2. I will not use AI to generate worldbuilding content. The whole point of Edassa is to have a world of my own to play with, and using AI to create the world for me just cheapens the experience.
3. I will not use AI to generate artwork about my creative work for public consumption. If I want art in a published book, I can darn well find an artist to commission for it.
4. I have used AI to check the linguistic consistency of my place-names and character names, and in the process have adopted some suggestions to retain as much of the original as possible while fixing any jarring "why is there a random dude with an Arabic name in the middle of my Anglo-Saxon kingdom" moments.

This deserves a longer story - I basically started by worrying (as I often do) that the leftovers of my junior-high school worldbuilding no longer tell a consistent story with Edassa as I have built and rebuilt it in the last few years. Since work has been pushing us very hard to use AI for literally anything we can use it for - which is ridiculous in its own right, but that's a different story - I decided to ask AI how a list of my names fit together from a consistency standpoint. Just for fun. (Also, it was late at night, I was tired, and I might very well have been depressed - so no judging).

The stupid AI kept asking follow-up questions (that's how they get you, kids - the follow-up questions), and before I knew it, I'd gotten to telling it about my characters and even the plot arcs of the story. (Also, apparently I might be a teensy-tiny bit lonely. Who knew? I wasn't aware I had time to be lonely with my spouse and 4 kids in the house.) It made all of the appropriate oohs and aahs, and kept trying to predict where the story might be going (in some ways, it was scarily accurate - in others it was laughably wrong). Luckily for me, it never tried to tell me what the story should be. Still, I felt a little bit icky after that session, and I think for good reason. It got too close to using AI to help me write, and I don't like that.

I followed up, however, keeping the next session much more focused on linguistics, character names, place names, and cultural consistency therein. And it was really helpful. It turns out my brain switches to worldbuilding plus-ultra mode when I'm being asked questions about my world that I have to answer - even if it's an AI asking the questions.

I'm not going to go back, I think. Probably. I hope. It's a slippery slope from asking AI "what do you think about this set of names" to "hey, I need ten names for minor characters from culture X - can you get them for me." It helps that I'm genuinely out of city, culture, and character names I was worried about - the high school/junior high leftovers pool has finally run dry - everything has been converted or renamed, one way or another.

And I can legitimately be happy that I have reasons to keep several of my favorite city names. (Not that I needed any reason beyond "I like the sound of that," but 30-something year old me is much more concerned with obnoxious things like "do these names form a coherent cultural picture?").

Anyways - that was my foray into the world of AI. I kind of hate it, even as I love that it was able to give me advice on making names more consistent. Maybe my next post will enumerate the changes I've made as a result of that.

[Seonid he/him]

Alright, let's chat about what's changed in Edassa. The first answer is: not much. I was deliberately trying to restrict the AI (I tried several models, but Claude was the most helpful for me) to talking only about linguistics and not getting into deeper withholding concepts, like cultural or religious practices. I didn't want the AI to help me with worldbuilding new stuff, I just wanted a sanity check on my old stuff to make sure it all fit together correctly.

First off, there were several spelling changes (and one or two outright changes) in the regional noble houses: for the French-inspired houses: House Samane became House Samand, House Feravut became House Feravaux, and House Verekai became House Verecay. For the English-inspired houses: House Calliester became House Chalester, and House Surrestor became House Surrester.

Some more minor changes happened in city/town names: Sirrienbourge went to Sirresbourge (a more French-sounding derivation), while Malach Crossings went to Malke's Crossings, Astreleur went to Astrelier, and Bellflower became Bellham (moving from the generic fantasy "string two words together" and towards a more Anglo-Saxon naming approach). In that same spirit (but without AI assistance this time), I went ahead and proactively changed Sprucevale to Spurdale, Ivyleaf to Ivyton, and Goldcrest to Fenwold.

But, as helpful as it was with making minor edits to get better linguistic consistency, the most useful parts of the conversation were where it helped me justify some of my favorite old names from my high school worldbuilding era.

Alaner (not a very good German city name) got justified by being named after the river Ahle, and then the local imperial officials Anglicized it. (Maryksberg just went to Mareksberg, but I'm saying that imperial cartographers and their unreasonable love of the letter y made the original the spelling you would see on an imperial map.)

Corento was supposed to be in a Slavic-inspired region, but it is very definitely not Slavic. Slavicizing it gave Korentyn as an original name, with Corentum being the Latinized version of the name in High Avran, and Corento being the Commonspeak or Low Avran version. As an added bonus, the local name of the river now gets to be named Korentka, after the city (although I'm still calling it the Minhara River unless I'm writing from the perspective of someone in or from that city).

Gadre (originally Gadhre in my earliest worldbuilding) was supposed to be a city well into the English/French cultural overlap zone, but it fit neither of those identities. AI helped me associate it with the Celtic inspired region to the west, having it be a remnant of a time when that culture occupied the plains. It actually suggested Gadhre, which was a delightful coincidence - I jumped at the chance to reclaim my original name from all those years ago - and suggested the Anglicization of Gadrey for a modern term, which I graciously accepted. 

Sergaho is one of the river kingdoms -city states who live in a wash of many cultures. It, unfortunately, has a name that came from "15-year old me looked the sound" and doesn't map well onto the existing mix. But the AI tried Welsh Ser-Y to start with, inventing the Welsh-ish word Gafon (the Welsh afon means river, so having a very similar term works). So Ser-y-Gafon meaning something like "stars over the river" becoming Anglicized to Sergaho, and maybe showing up in low Avran as Sergau was a delightful experience.

Several far-off cities with little to no relevance other than being close to my heart got saved - Gastor was from an old Celtic-inspired Gasda, later Latinized as Gasterium and Anglicized as Gastor, while Afert, Forthar and Malage got to be the Celtic inspired Averdun, Forthair and Maelagh, Latinized as Avertum, Fortarum and Malacarum, and then finally the local trade creole language renders them into their final forms. Having multiple layers of etymology helps, apparently! 

Now, we're moving to more substantial improvements. One of the things I kept telling the AI in order to keep certain city name elements in the Gaelet region was "this preserves remnants of an older culture that was conquered by the Avrans." Finally, it called me out on it and asked me what the culture was like so it could judge the remnant city names with the right metric.

I reached back to the ancient world - since this region has been Avran for at least a thousand years - and figured that something like old Gaulish would be an excellent fit. So now I have an old Gaulish culture sitting underneath a layer of Avran domination (which now makes the original inhabitants related to the Celtic inspired hill folk across the river, which is excellent). The AI have a list of old Gaulish place name elements, and I picked (then adjusted to match my sensibilities) Venduri to be their culture name (or at least the Latinized version of it). The name comes from Vindo- (meaning bright or white) and -duro- (meaning waters), so "the people of the bright waters."

Their naming conventions let me keep Menkor [from medio- (meaning middle - reduced to men- with a consonant shift) and a reduced form of -coria (meaning market)] and Caedros [from catu- (meaning battle) and -ros (a suffix generally meaning great)].

And now we get to the big five - 5 names I was very worried about that are very important and I really didn't want to change but had been afraid for a while now that I'd have to: 

Two empire/culture names:

• The Kaloneri Empire (these days, it's meant to be Anglo-Saxon coded, but it wasn't even I named it). The name is now derived from the high Avran demonym that was used to describe their people - the Caeloneria (people of the sky, or sky-worshippers, referring to their practice of generating the constellations). When they formed themselves into an empire, they called themselves the Coelmaer, attempting to turn the foreign term into a self-identity - it's an amalgamation of Latin cael-/coel-, meaning heaven and the Anglo-Saxon -mawr/-maer, meaning great or large. The implied meaning is "the great realm under heaven." How much did the AI help? It helped run through ideas where the term "Kaloneri" could have come from, and offered the Latin-ish Caeloneria as an interesting backwards derivation. It also offered a list of elements from Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Celtic language that could be combined to be something that could be latinized into Caeloneria. Noticing the option for something heaven-associated in that list was all me though.
• The Alcorazimai Empire (no originating culture for influence, I just liked the name - it felt like something all my own). The AI said it sounded vaguely Turkic, so I reached for a Khazar basis for the language. Assuming Arabic-ish speaking neighbors (which actually works - the Rakalli are Arabic inspired), you can get Al- (definite article "the") plus Kharazim as the ethnic endonym. They call themselves Kharazim, their neighbors refer to them as Al-Kharazim, and it gets latinized to Alcorazim. The -im suffix indicates a plural, but an additional pluralization gets added on by further who don't realize that it was already there, so Alcorazimii goes to Alcorazimai by a local vowel shift. A little bit complex, to be sure, but I'm keeping it. 

Finally, 3 personal names:

• Samhain Seonid. I was in my "edgy early-oughts teenager" phase when I named him. So yes, I named him after the Celtic fall festival that happens around Halloween. The fact that Seonid is a Gaelic female name (roughly equivalent to English "Janet") is a happy accident. The AI flagged his name as not being appropriate for the local cultural mix - the Welsh inspired hill country wouldn't give us Gaelic names, and French and English certainly wouldn't. As it turns out, I have a Gaelic inspired culture right next to my Welsh inspired one, and the overlap zone is right next to the kingdom...it's actually terrifyingly serendipitous. Once the AI pointed me in that direction, things feel into place on their own. I already had him as the son of an enslaved woman - so having her be from that region wasn't hard. His mother giving him the name Samhain is also right in line with that. And as for how Seonid becomes his family name? I think it's sweet that, after he gets made into a noble, he names his new noble house after his mother.
• Areska Lasofer: this one was relatively simple. It has a Slavic feel, so I make him originally from the Slavic-coded Svorans, and there we are. Lasofer is less Slavic coded, but can be close enough if we squint. Las- is a Slavic root meaning forest. Oferta is a Polish word meaning offer or price, and connecting the two together gets us somewhere close. Only problem is that the -ska ending is a feminine ending for Slavic family names, roughly meaning "from." But I'm sure I'll figure out something there - we're already light years closer than we were.
• Najar Wyst. Here's the biggest problem. Najar is an actual word...in Arabic. It means carpenter, which is fine, but it's completely wrong for the time and place. Again, this was me naming things willy-nilly in my young, careless days. Now grown up me has to clean up the mess. In fairness, I think it cleans up rather pretty. The AI gave lots of suggestions, but the only one that I even remotely liked was Enjard - an invented French-ish name that keeps a lot of the sound qualities of Najar. I went researching on my own and found an Occitan (southern French) verb enjeura, which means to terrify. And if I decree that his mother was from the much-more-heavily-French southern region, or even the Godlands, then suddenly I have a plausible origin and an almost-close-enough-that-I-don't-hate-it name.

So there we are. That's what I got from AI. In fairness, I don't think I could have found a bunch of that linguistic information on my own - even with the mildly AI powered search tools in modern search engines. My linguistics research-fu just isn't good enough to compete.

On the one hand, the vast majority of these names were names I had created a long time ago, and all I got were justifications to keep them. On the other hand, having these justifications really does deepen my worldbuilding, and the line between what I create and what came from AI gets blurry.

I think it's fair enough to say that I don't want to go back to it, as helpful as it was.

So, we'll call it a learning experience, and keep our wonderful new derivations/linguistics stuff. (Also, since I really don't have any old stuff to fix anymore, I'm lucky enough to not have much temptation anymore. Convenient, that.)

Anyways, there's disclosure. For those of you who want to use AI in your own worldbuilding, here's an example of what it can do when you have your own high quality stuff already there. I'm not going to continue with it, because it makes me feel uncomfortable, and I feel like it cheapens the experience if I'm not doing the work directly.

[Seonid he/him]

So I might have gotten lost in the weeds on my linguistics binge. Hypothetically. You know how I said I wasn't gonna go back? Well, I was doing research, and it appears you can't do research on Google anymore without getting the AI results. And then I wanted to feed those results back into the conversation where I had already done linguistic consistency checks (to make sure it had the background), and a week later, I have somehow gone through the linguistic origins of an entire continent. Again, not asking the AI to create anything, but to check existing names and offer up either ways to fix existing names or plausible derivations of existing names so I get to justify them as actually fitting in the cultural melange. So I get to add a couple of points to my AI thoughts. So much for not wanting to go back to it. (I kinda feel a little embarrassed).

4. I feel that using AI as a research aid is a valid and appropriate use of the technology, as long as you are aware of its limitations and don't just blindly trust what it tells you. And disclose that you used it.

5. I seem to somehow have fallen into the situation where I have an AI chatbot as my personal linguistics checker. Having that has done wonders for my confidence in the linguistics aspect of my worldbuilding (I have plenty of confidence in just about everywhere else, but naming has been something I've been self-conscious about for a very long time. I've avoided going in and fixing it because when I do something, I want to do it right. And doing linguistics right required a lot of knowledge/education/research that I wasn't sure I could actually go do, and then there was the worry that I'd have to change names I'd been using for decades because they really didn't fit, and...); anyways - once I had chipped away at that wall, the floodgates opened and I wasn't just checking junior high names any more, everything was going through the filter. Most of it stayed intact, but a lot of the cultures that I had only passing familiarity with (or, honestly, had used random name generators from the internet to generate some city names) turned out to be compounds of several cultures, used in ways that didn't make sense. So I got to fix those errors too.

Anyways, Claude now knows at least a few lines and a list of names about almost every single culture on the continent. Which might be scary. The good news is that I didn't really have to get rid of just about anything. And my stance on using AI for actual content creation remains unchanged.

In the near future, expect to see some regional overviews talking about different areas, the people who live there, what they call themselves, and what languages they speak.

[Seonid he/him]

So, it turns out that picking Chinese characters for things is fun. And I mean that completely un-sarcastically. I've been working on the language of the northeast, which is the home of the Cheng people and the various groups who have - at one point or another - been under their Empire. This writeup is primarily focused on names and languages, because that's what I've been doing. Content was created by me, but translation, chinese characters, etc. were powered by AI.

If anyone has any expertise (however limited) in Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean, I would very much appreciate critique on the names/conventions.

In the following writeup, names are written in the Commonspeak equivalent. It should be noted that the Commonspeak rendering is not the same as the modern romanization for Chinese characters (and, to be clear, Shora is not technically the same thing as Mandarin, but Mandarin is what I'm using to represent it because I really don't feel like spending 30 years learning linguistics in order to develop all of the actual languages my world is meant to have), but I will give the Chinese characters, the standard phonetic romanization, and the translation (sometimes with some literary/poetic license) after them. As you will see, the Commonspeak equivalent is often a very bad transliteration or attempt to repeat the phonetic structure of the name. In some cases, the culture is minor enough that most speakers of Commonspeak will have never even heard of them, their cities, or their language. In those cases, brackets [] are used to denote what the Commonspeak rendering might be if it ever became relevant.

For the characters and pronunciation in the following posts, characters in green are pronounced with Mandarin pronunciation, characters in orange are read as Japanese Kanji using the Sino-Japanese on'yomi pronunciation, while those in red are read as Kanji using the purely native kun'yomi pronunciation. Finally, characters in blue are read as Korean Hanja, using the Sino-Korean eumdok pronunciation, while characters in cyan should be read using the native hundok pronunciation.

The Chéng

In the northeast of Edassa, around the bay called the Glass Sea (镜海湾 - jìnghǎi wān, "Mirror Sea Bay"), is the great city of Osan (澳杉京 - Àoshānjīng, "the Imperial Capital of Cedar Bay"), named for the misty cedar forests that line the northern coasts of that bay. It lies at the mouth of the river [Ton] (湍涧 - tuānjiàn, "rushing mountain torrent"), and features an extensive series of canals the redirect the waters of that river, which once flooded the poorer parts of the city every spring as the snowpack melted. The city is the home of the Imperial court, and lies in the heartland of the Cheng people (承 - chéng, "the ones who inherit"; see also 承代 - Chéngdài, "the Era of the Inheritors" and 承朝 - Chéngcháo, “the Dynasty/Empire of the Cheng”). Scholars writing in High Avran 

The Empire serves as the major binding tie connecting the cultures of the northeast - even in its faded state, its script, the Chengwen (承文 - chéngwén, "the script of the Chéng people") is used across the entire region by every major language. There are three major languages among the Cheng people. The first, and most widespread, is the Shora (索话 - suǒhuà, "the cord language"), the trade language. It uses a simplified form of the characters, and has only half the tones of the dialect used by the Imperial Court. It's name comes from the knotted strings that were once used by merchants to hold collections of coins together. The second language is the Chengwa (承话 - chénghuà, "spoken language of the Chéng people"). It is the primary language of the Cheng heartland, although most everyone also speaks and uses Shora, because of its massive utility for trading with other provinces of the empire. The third and final language is called by westerners Yaya, though this is a much shortened form of its true name (正承雅言 - zhèngchéng yǎyán, "the correct refined speech of the Chéng people"). This is an extremely complex language - closely related to Chengwa, but with a great deal more opportunity for nuance and wordplay. It is the language of the Imperial Court, and pretty much nobody outside of court officials learn it because of the difficulty in getting it correct.

Across the Glass Sea from Osan is the mighty port of Hangchew (航筑城 - Hángzhù Chéng, "the Sail-ward Citadel"). It is the premier naval base of the empire, a major site of shipbuilding, and one of the richest trading cities on the eastern coast, rivaling even the great merchant cities of the Taravoy at Selechor and Ayolok. It sits at the mouth of the Shee River (奚川 - Xīchuān, "Xi river system"), which drains nearly everything east of the steppes and north of the mountains.

Because the climate of the northeast sees dry, hot summers and long, wet winters, the river is the lifeblood of the civilization; irrigation from the river is the only way most agricultural communities can sustain themselves, and the Empire has built a vast network of canals to connect different channels of the river system with each other - both to aid irrigation and as a means of travel.

A short distance upriver from Hangchew lies the third of the great Cheng cities - Seni (瑟霓城 - Sèní Chéng, "The City of Rainbows and Refined Music"). It was long a rival of Osan, and centuries ago the cities warred with each other often. Now, the rivalry is for prominence and prestige within the empire; each city proclaims itself to be the beating heart of Cheng culture. The rivalry is so severe that the capital even uses different characters to represent the city, calling it 色霓城, "The City of Painted Clouds." To the folk of Seni, that is a pointed insult, implying that their city possesses only superficial beauty instead of transcendence.

The Empire is much faded from the days of its greatest power, when it could summon the great horselords of the steppe  to pay obeisance before the throne, or demand tribute from Svalding chieftains or war across the steppes with the Carstine Empire. But even the fading remnants of its glory are awe-inspiring; their canal system stretches from the interior steppes to the sea, irrigating a thirsty plain, while even the petty warlords who have seized their own territory on the edges hesitate to disrupt the mandatory school system that takes every child, no matter how poor - except for the highland tribes, who refuse to send more than a token number of their children each year, and trains them to at least read and write the Chengwen script, perform basic mathematics, and to speak the Shora trade tongue by the time they are twelve years old.

This education system is so renowned that the wealthiest of the noble families of the Midlands still send their children north to receive an education at a Cheng finishing school, often at ruinous expense.

The Sunhwa

South of the Shee River basin lie the Tannen Mountains (天南山脉 - tiānnán shānmài, "mountains of the southern sky"), and beyond that, the Tandow region (天南道 - tiānnándào, "Province of the Southern Sky"). The Imperial Court refers to all of the people in the area simply as Tanjamen (天南诸民 - tiānnán zhūmín, "Various Peoples of the Southern Sky Region"), but at least four distinct cultures made their homes there before the region was absorbed by the Empire.

Of these, the most prominent are the [Sunna] (淳禾民 - chún hé mín or sunhwa-min, "pure grain people"). They are numerous and prosperous, living in the fertile valleys and lowlands of the [Wang River] (晃河 - huǎng hé or hwang-ha, "bright/dazzling river"). Their ancestors took their name from that river, calling themselves the [Wangamen] (晃天民 - hwangcheon-min, "people of the bright/dazzling sky"). Today, the Sunna happily embrace the name the Imperial bureaucracy gave them, reflecting the awe those officials showed when they saw how easily and abundantly grains grew in the fertile valleys. The prefectures of the Sunna are the breadbasket of the empire, and in good years the empire has even sometimes used the surplus to feed starving Nessei tribes (using the aid to exercise control over steppe politics).

There are two primarily Sunna prefectures in the valley, with their capitals at Jinya (金原府 - jīnyuán fǔ or geumwon-bu, or “golden plains prefecture”), which covers most of the upriver territory, and Fangsang (豐倉府 - fēngcāng fǔ or pungchang-bu, "abundant/bountiful storehouse prefecture"), at the mouth of the Wang River.

The Haneul

The foothills on the south slopes of the Tannen Mountains are rich in some minerals and valuable quarried stone, and are home to a pastoral people, cousins to the Sunna in the lowlands. They are cousins to the Sunna and descended from the same ancestral people, but they had split long before the Empire came. They know their ancestors as the [Bithnal] (晃天民 - Bithaneul-gyre, "people of the bright sky"), and see themselves as the only true inheritors of that legacy, but they believe that they have fallen far from the time when they could claim that name for themselves.

The Empire calls them the [Sockyawn] (石峴族 - shíxiàn-zú or seokhyeon-jok, "stone mountain tribe"), but they know themselves as the [Hannul] (落天族 - baraen-haneul-gyere, "The Faded Sky Clan") - among outsiders, they call themselves the Haneul-gyere (often shortened to Haneul), or "Sky Clan," but among themselves in ritual and ceremonial contexts they use the word Baraen, or "Faded" as a self-descriptor to emphasize how far they have fallen from the glory of their ancestors.

To this day, many of them still follow the same pastoral lifestyle, but others have been conscripted to work in the many quarries and small mines in the region, or in the settlements that serve them. There is only one major city in the foothills, though - [Sisha] (石沙城 - Shíshāchéng or Seok-sa-seong, "stone dust city"), but the natives remember a time when it was the winter camp for their whole people, when every tribe who could come would descend into the valley to shelter their herds from the cold. In those days, they called it [Dupgaul] (庇谷 - deupgol, "sheltered valley").

Edited Saturday at 06:07 PM by Seonid
Fixing anglicization of Hangzhu and character meanings for Chengdai. Added Chengchao

[Seonid he/him]

Here's a second post! In the same week! It's a June miracle!

To start off with, a note on how the languages interact with each other:

All of the languages in the Northeast use the Chengwen script, but they all pronounce it differently - often radically so.

To people versed in the language of the court, the Chengwa sounds flat and lifeless, missing the ability to add nuance to every syllable, but they can understand most of what is being said. Similarly, a speaker of Chengwa can understand the basic message of a Court official speaking the elevated language of the Court, although they will miss most of the nuanced shading in the delivery of the words.

For both, however, the Shora is completely unintelligible - the two languages are as far apart as Cantonese and Mandarin (which is related-but-can't-be-understood-by-each-other). However, Chengwa has accrued a great number of loan words from Shora, and some level of crude communication is possible.

The Sunhwa and Haneul speak their own language, which the Imperial Court calls the [Sunnaspeech] (晃天民 - chunhe-hua, "language of the pure grain people"). To the natives, however, it is the [Wangspeech] (晃天語 - hwangcheon-eo or bithaneul-mal, "language of the bright sky people"). It is not intelligible to any of the Cheng languages, but nearly all of the Sunhwa and many of the Haneul learn the Shora in order to interact with Cheng merchants or other outsiders.

Next, I neglected a major city in the Xi River basin - the city of Wickoo (會渠都 - huìqú fǔ, "Prefecture of the Converging Canals"). Wickoo is the central hub in the Imperial canal system - it sits on the convergence of the Xi with its last major downstream tributary, and manages all of the grain barges that come from upstream to provide food for the major cities on the bay. This city was once the heart of a separate culture that has now been nearly completely assimilated into the Cheng people. It still marks the place on the river where the Chengwa stops being useful and Shora becomes the language of choice.

Now, let's move on to the next set of cultures, two more from the south side of the Tannen Mountains.

Denshō

South of the sheltered Sunhwa lands are several rich coastal provinces that surround a jutting southward spur of the Tannen Mountains as they run to the southwest. These were once the lands of the [Denshi] (殿照民 - Denshō-min, “People of the Shining Halls”), a powerful kingdom that rivaled the early Cheng empire. They were conquered five centuries ago during an expansion phase of the empire, but due to their constant rebellions, the first century of Imperial occupation saw a brutal campaign of cultural erasure, with Imperial officials burning any and every cultural artifact that could connect a family to their forbears and forbidding even the use of the native language, [Denshi] (殿照語 - Denshō-go, “speech of the Densho people”).

Today the bureaucracy knows them as the [Pingamen] (平辉民 - pínghuīmín, “The Pacified Radiant Subjects”), a mostly peaceful people enjoying the wealth and prosperity of the empire. The three provinces are split. The northernmost is centered around the city of [Shanting] (昌定府 - chāngdìng fǔ or shōtei, “The Prefecture of Stabilized Prosperity”). This major port is located less than 40 miles up the coast from the ancient capital of the Denshi kingdom. That city was burned to the ground after the last rebellion, and a new town built over the ashes, named [Pingwey] (平辉县 - Pínghuī xiàn, “the County of Pacified Radiance”). Although the locals have given up rebellion against imperial rule, the countryside still remembers the old name [Kishon] (輝紫苑 - Kishien, “The Estate of Purple Radiance”), and the old songs about its wonders and gardens are still sung in taverns and homes when Imperial ears are far away.

Further south, along the coast, are two provinces that have fallen out of the grip of the empire entirely. Two centuries ago, a deposed branch of the Imperial family fled to the far southern provinces to escape retribution, sealing the passes behind them with the small number of soldiers loyal to them. In order to command the loyalty of the locals, they ended the restrictions on speaking the native language and ancestral cultural objects, and promoted local traditionalists to high-level positions.

Today, their descendants rule over these provinces with a heavily militarized regime, which they name the Sayshow (正承朝 - zhèngchéng cháo or seishō, “true cheng empire”), propped up by thorough propaganda and heavy reliance on local collaborators. The degree of militarization has only increased over the years, with it now being a requirement that every single adult give six years of military service - with exceptions only being given in special situations, such as deferring eighteen months of service for a woman who falls pregnant. The local government schools even begin compulsory weapons training as early as eight years old.

The traditionalists who rule most of the territory demand the entire population follow the precepts of the Warrior's Path (将雅道 - shōgadō, "The Way of the Refined Commander"), which they believe to be an immutable part of the traditions of their ancestors. This is a strict code of honor that emphasizes martial virtues, respecting strength, offering honorable surrender to a defeated foe, and avoiding any sources of shame. In truth, the revivalists interpret it more strictly and enforce it more broadly than the Denshi ever did. They also enforce the use of the Denshi language and harshly punish those who use the Shora outside of the marketplaces or interactions with officials from the court-in-exile.

The only place where these prescriptions are curtailed are in the twin capitals, where the descendants of the Imperial Family live in decadent luxury, attempting to mimic the opulence and culture of the original court in Osan. The first of these is Mayzing (玫津京 - méijīn-jing or baishin-kyō, "The Imperial Capital of the Rose Gem Ferry") which is the administrative and economic capital of the regime. It sits at the mouth of the Jinkay river (銀渓川 - yínxīchuān or ginkeisen, “river of the silver valley”). The second is Walee (华篱都 - huálí dū or kari-tō, "The Capital Metropolis of the Splendid Palisade"), the military capital, a heavily fortified city on the eastern coast that guards the northern approaches to the province. In these capitals, the Shora remains the primary language, for the convenience of the court. In the court itself, however, the original Yaya language is used - preserved in a somewhat archaic dialect compared to the current court in Osan.

Amakure

The upper branches of the Jinkay river flow through high-altitude mountain valleys, nestled between the main ridge of the Tannen mountains and the southward spur that juts out towards the coast. In these heavily forested valleys live the [Maycure] (天隠民 - ama-kakure-bito; shortened to amakure for everyday use, "People Hidden/Sheltered by the Heavens"). They speak their own dialect of the Denshi language, which they call the [Maycure] (天隠語 - ama-kakure-go; shortened to amakure-go, "The Language of the ama-kakure people"). This dialect preserves older pronunciations of the Shora characters, called the kun’yomi, as opposed to the on’yomi readings used in the lowlands.

The people of these valleys are so remote that the old imperial ledgers have almost no information on them, and simply call them the [Unzans] (雲山民 - yúnshānmín, “people of the cloudy mountains”). The lowland regime calls them the [Quinn] (空隠民 - Kūin-min, “People Hiding in the Sky”), replacing the mystical character 天 with the more clinical 空.

The regime views them as non-compliant and stubborn, and is able to exercise only limited control in the upper reaches of the valley; almost none of the folk of these upper valleys report to their mandatory service, or give anything beyond a bare token of grain towards the taxes levied by the lowlands. In the lower reaches, especially near the city of [Sukaw] (津川 - shinsen or tsukawa, “river harbor”), which is the cultural heart of the Maycure, they are able to rule more directly, controlling the markets through which trade from the upper reaches flows down. Sukaw sits on an upper confluence of tributaries of the Jinkay river. Above Sukaw, the river is known as the [Shiro] (銀峡川 - ginkyosen or shirogane-hazama-gawa, shortened to hazama-gawa for everyday use, “Silver Gorge River”).

For the Maycure people themselves, they define themselves by their relationship to the mountain valleys around them. They live primarily in small kin-groups, farming and gathering the land. They call the mountains [Amasan] (環天山脈 - amatsutsumi sanmyaku; often shortened to ama-san for everyday use, "The Mountains of Heaven’s Embankment"). In their most foundational myths, they are called Megurusora no Yama, “The Mountains of the Encircling Sky.”

Fundamentally, they view themselves as the people who were protected by the mountains in times past, when gods and spirits warred among themselves. Those mountains still perform a similar protective function to them today.

Other than Sukaw, there is one other major city in the upper valley. This is the fortress city of [Sakamen] (坂門 - sakamon, “The Gateway on the Slope”), which sits guarding the only pass through the mountains to the Sunhwa and Heurin lands on the other side. Here, the Maycure and Denshi cultures have mingled so long that the name of the city does not preserve either a pure kun’yomi or on’yomi reading of the characters. Instead, the first character is read with the on’yomi and the second with the kun’yomi - a unique form called jubako’yomi.

Edited yesterday at 03:29 AM by Seonid
correcting kun'yomi reading of 銀峡川

[Seonid he/him]

Wait, a third post? That's gotta be a record, right?

Today we are going to finish up the northeast by exploring some the cultures on the margins of the Cheng sphere.

Palmsh-gu

On the north side of the Shee river basin are the [Bey Hills] (北铁岭 - běi tiělǐng, “north iron hills”), a rugged region that rises above the river valley towards the heights of the [Showan Mountains] (朔寒山脉 - shuòhán shānmài , “northern bitter cold mountain range”).

The land here is cold and rugged, not suited for agriculture at all, and the semi-nomadic people who live here make their living foraging off of the land and herding goats and sheep. The empire has, however, maintained a tight grip over this province because of the rich iron deposits in the hills. Many of the locals, which the empire knows only as the [Tyling] (铁岭族 - tiělǐng-zú, “tribes of the iron ridges”), are forced into settlements where they are used as brute labor to mine or refine the ore. The only large city in the hills is the provincial capital at 鐵渠府 (tiěqú fǔ - “iron canal prefecture”). Here, all of the refined ore is gathered and shipped down via canals and local streams until it reaches one of the tributaries of the Shee river.

The only other notable settlement is the important border garrison of [Hanling] (寒嶺塞 - hánlǐng sài, or “cold ridge fort”) in Shora. It guards a saddle in the ridge that separates these highlands from the northern coast, and guards against the raids of Svalding sea-raiders.

The locals have their own language, called Imperial Court calls the [Tylingspeech] (铁岭话 - tiělǐng huà, "language of the iron ridge people"), but which they call the [Palmish] (Palmsh dif - “language of the Palmsh people”). Further foreign nouns in this section are given exclusively in that language. In their own tongue, they call themselves the [Palmish] (Palmsh-gu - “kin of the mountain people”). These people revere bears as the great mountain spirits, another clan or people as sophisticated as humans, and who merely put on the animal skin or coat when they visit the mortal world from their otherworldly palaces. In the distant past, these mountain people are believed to have visited their ancestors and adopted them as their kin, giving them the gifts of speech and writing as a token of that relationship.

They also have their own script, which takes the form of dense spirals and flowing curved lines. They regard this script as sacred, and refuse to permit any outsider to learn it. It is so stylistic that Imperial scholars refuse to believe it is a script or language of its own, believing it to be merely artwork that communicates some basic logographic concepts. While many of them learn the spoken Shora language, only those few who are appointed by their clans to be intermediaries with the Imperial occupiers learn the Chengwen script

Atuy-kur

Across the waves of the Nenning Sea (內寧海 - Nèiníng Hǎi, “Inner Secured Sea”) lie the islands of the [Dongamen] (東島族 - dōngdǎo zú - “Eastern Island Tribe”). While the inner shores of these islands face the calm waters of the Nenning Sea, the eastern shores look out into the frigid waters of the Haluan Sea (東冰洋 - Dōngbīngyáng, “The Eastern Ice Ocean”) - the Commonspeech name comes from the Taravoy name for it, Lautan Haluan Utara, meaning “Ocean of the Northern Course/Passage.”

The islanders are a peaceful people, living off of the ocean’s bounty, supplemented by the agriculture they can support during the short northern summers. While they readily learn the Shora and the Chengwen to communicate with the Imperial visitors, they speak exclusively in their own language among themselves, which they call [Anwit] (aynu itak, “language of the people”). They have their own flowing script, which they also use to the exclusion of all other scripts, except where communication with foreigners is required. Further foreign words in this section are given exclusively in Anwit, as the Imperial bureaucrats pay little attention to the islanders except as subjects to tax, which they pay in fish or shells to be ground into dye.

They call themselves the [Hawun] (haw-un-untari, short for atuy-haw-un-utari, “people of the voice” and “people who dwell within the ocean’s voice”), but the name they use with outsiders is [Atoy] (atuy-kur, “people of the ocean”).

The western side of their islands is humid and wet, taking the brunt of the storms that blow off the coast of the continent. In the winter, these drop a steady pattern of snowfall onto the island, significant enough that the accumulation can bury villages over time if it's not dealt with. Still, the water of the Nenning Sea is placid compared to the pounding waves of the Haluan, and so all of the harbors of the Atoy are built on the western coasts. On the east side of the island, the weather is sunny and calm, shielded from most storms by the low mountains that rise from the center. Although many villages and farming communities are found in the foothills or on the low plains that stretch towards the coast, the only Atoy communities found on the eastern shores themselves are ritual sites.

The islanders believe that the ocean is the physical manifestation of a divine spirit, which they name Atuy; they view the rhythmic pounding of the waves on the eastern coast as the voice of that god, and spend long hours contemplating it.

While there are many small shrines for contemplation along the eastern coast of all of the islands, there are two primary ritual sites; Kamuny (Kamuinai - “River of the Spirits”) on the southern island and Otasia (Otasiriwa - “Beach of the Sacred Peaks”) on the south island.

Nessei

West of the upper branches of the Xi valley, the land slowly becomes colder and more arid, transitioning into the vast steppes that dominate the center of the continent, stretching all the way to the Bearclaw Mountains (西冰雪嶂 - xī bīng xuě zhàng, “the grand glacial walls of the west”, also used for the Skiefyr mountains, which the empire does not distinguish as separate). These steppes are home to numberless nomadic tribes that roam the territory, following their herds of horses and bison across the rugged highlands.

The ones nearest the fringes of the empire are labeled in the Imperial Archives as the Nessei (内塞部 - nèisài bù, “Inner Frontier Tribes”); these are the tribes the Empire has had extended contact with over the centuries, many of which have negotiated grazing rights within the Imperial frontier districts, send their youth to serve as auxiliary cavalry in Imperial armies, or have treaties guaranteeing Imperial protection of their traditional ranges against the tribes of the [Wassei] (外塞部 - wàisài bù, “Outer/Beyond Frontier Tribes”).

Sulonnei

As the deserts in the rainshadow of the Bearclaw Mountains spread, more and more of the steppe nomads find themselves pushed off of the steppes to find refuge in the cities that dot the edges. The transition zone around the headwaters of the Xi River and its tributaries is home to a number of Cheng settlements that have taken in increasing numbers of these refugees over the centuries. These have predominantly impacted the [Wayfeng District] (外風衛 - wàifēng wèi, “district of the outer winds”), named after the Cheng cultural concept of “Outer Winds” (外風) - the eroding influence of ideas, customs, traditions, and unassimilated people from outside civilization. The district is administered by the stronghold of [Wayfeng] (外風城 - wàifēng chéng, “City of the Outer Winds”).

In the settlements within this district, these refugees form a distinct minority ethnic group, but in some they are even segregated into their own housing districts. The Imperial bureaucrats call them Sulonnei (朔落流民 - shuò luò liú mín, “Refugees from the Fallen North”), because the refugees who were first noted in the archives were from the northern portion of the steppes; subsequent waves have been aggregated under the same label.

While first-generation refugees don’t connect strongly with a single ethnic label - defining themselves instead purely by their family, clan, and tribal ties, later generations have adopted the [Suloo] (朔流 - shuò liú, “Northern Flood/Torrent”) moniker to describe themselves, slowly amalgamating into a single minority group defining itself against outside pressure.

Edited yesterday at 02:51 AM by Seonid
Fixing colors and editing script information. Corrected spelling on Atuy-kur