Ba'a
Writing System
Ba'a script is written by scoring wood planks, tree trunks, clay tablets, or other firm materials with one's keratinized fingers, producing a form of writing closely resembling cuneiform. Lines progress from right to left at first, but proceed as a boustrophedon, switching direction after line breaks; speakers refer to writing as proceeding 'as the grand sheep chews' and claim that it is preferable so as to not the break the 'flow' of written text with reaching. Civil Ovinex have adopted Iuxataba as an auxiliary writing system for ease of transcription with their Rostran counterparts, employing a short, apostrophe-like vertical mark to gloss the glottal stop not found in Iuxat.
Ba'a features a 'new script,' which is an alphabet consisting of twenty glyphs used for phonetic transcription of words, as well as an 'old script' consisting of a hundred ideograms encoding the most common simple terms in the language. These old script glyphs are taught using a mnemonic involving the use of each of an ovinex's four fingers, the words being grouped into sets of twenty-five that share certain traits from the perspective of the typical ovinex mind (i.e. living things, body parts, tools and resources, and actions). Ideograms can be used in combination with the new script either singly for the meaning depicted or in-line with new script words for the sound of their first syllable. Old script can be used in this manner to condense a text, to lend an artistic flourish, or to convey shades of meaning not otherwise apparent from how the words would be read aloud.
Vocabulary
Numbers & Mathematics
Ba'a speakers employ a base four number system. Counting is generally accomplished with a single ovinex hand, which possesses two fingers and two thumbs. Even after the end of the Curved Time, up to around 1000 AE, the ovinex peoples were only numerate in the sense that they could count to sixteen; indeed, the word for four literally translates to 'handful,' and quantities of more than four handfuls were considered too big for most common folk to bother enumerating with any degree of precision. In modern times, beyond Civil Ovinex movements like the Baxbr, most ovinex speak of large numbers in terms of exponentials of four ('handfuls of handfuls of handfuls...') rather than getting more specific. For example, an ovinex might speak of nine blocks of mackerel tree wood as "two handfuls and one,' while an entire plantation's output might just be called 'a handfuls of handfuls.' Ba'a mathematics does feature positional radix-based notation, but is little-endian (least significant digit first) whereas most others under the Manifold Sky are big-endian (most significant digit first). Civil Ovinex with greater need for precision often resort to a base four variant of the Iuxat numbering system.Phonetics
Vowels: a, e, i, ə(u) Among a subset of speakers, especially male Native Ovinex speaking with strong emphasis, the voiced labial plosive 'b' might be rendered as a trill 'ʙ', the voiceless glottal fricative 'h' as the uvular 'χ', and the rhotic 'r' as a trill. This reflects an accumulation of moisture in the vocal tract that typically accompanies heightened emotional states.
Comments