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Answer 69-c Another rival polycosmic polity is the Verdant Plasmic Autarky. The ruling class of the Autarky are understood to be human, although there are skeptics since they are seldom seen by outsiders. According to their own propaganda, they displeased a very powerful god who levied an ongoing curse on them to have everything made by hand or mind unmade by their touch. In practice, the effect is pronounced but not normally instantaneous, and seems to tend toward natural life rather than mere entropy and waste; If they occupy a city for long its structures collapse and greenery shoots up through the cobblestones. Armor and weapons rust and wagons rot and collapse with unseemly swiftness. They are drawn to cities and industrial buildups since they cannot make these things themselves; as they collapse, the Verdant move on, (usually) leaving wild forest and savannah in their wake. The Verdant's many subject peoples often build cities, occupy them for a few generations and then move on, letting the Verdant use the city briefly while they break ground on a new settlement, perhaps in a fertile area that was a desert before the Verdant passed through it. Outsiders dealing with subject peoples in their short-term cities wonder how the subject peoples are kept in line; dissent and rebellion seem minimal, yet the Verdant seem like a crude extortion racket with minimal oversight ability that could easily be overthrown. In terms of population, the Autarky is comparable to Calledron, the Concordat or the Church, but in acreage it is substantially larger; the Autarky has many "fallow" cosmi at any given time, in which the rulers have created a vibrant wilderness and the subject peoples have not got around to recolonizing yet. The Verdant seem to settle policy in a democratic manner, but one must be one of the "cursed" to have a vote.

Answer 70 Language is frequently a problem for even the savviest polycosmic wanderer, and linguistic barriers play no small part in the "a few civilized empires dominating many uncivilized tribes" vibe that pervades this portion of the polycosm. The last portal-building civilization, the Rebel Daeva, collapsed 17 centuries ago; there have been three or four waves of portal-using societies since then, depending on who's counting. Modern Tonic is widely studied as a vastly simplified version of Daevic, having abandoned gender and most cases but kept the eight-tense understanding of time, and fully 20% of known languages can be shown to be descended from Daevic. In addition, most highly technical discussions must make use of Daevic or Tonic terminology. Ton has more surviving records than you'd expect written in Daevic or transitional forms, which form the basis of this study of language. Oppuhan (as Calledron still calls its language) has a much simpler tense structure but retains more distinctions of gender, rank and agency, which some scholars attribute to being basically a military dialect. They aren't THAT hard to bridge conceptually, since both are pro-drop grammars with flexible word order; a few people speculate that they diverged from a common ancestor prior to that age, perhaps whatever the Daeva were rebelling against. In any case, in a conversation between Calledron and Ton, the Calledron is likely to get rank and gender wrong, since the Tonic doesn't bother to make it explicit, while the Tonic is likely to get order and timing wrong, since the Oppuhan can't make fine distinctions the way Tonic can.

Oppuhan isn't obviously related to anything in the area; they came from a long ways away. Rahalar is unrelated to Daevic, but in an urbanized or long-settled cosm you're likely to find a handful of people who still know Rahalar. Known human languages can be broadly divided into four near-equal categories; Daevic-descended, Rahalar-related, Verdant-related, and Weird. Older portal-building societies have scripts understood by few people and subject to bitter conjecture; indeed, the farther back you go, the more inhuman they seem to get, with the first 12 being, er, unsuitable for human brain architecture. One of them has a grammar particle which indicates a logical stack swap, which humans can laboriously work out on paper but could never speak in real time; another consists of starbursts where the number and length of the arms defines the words. Then there's the Madrigal Network, based around song, or at least regular, repeating harmonic structures. A cosm whose inhabitants really seemed to speak something related to civilizations 13-17 would be exciting and controversial.

The chanovat really all speak dialects of one language. Upon receiving the communion fluid, a new chanovat's brain builds a language center in the space of three weeks, as opposed to the human six months at age 2. It imprints dialect and sociolect structures from the ones around it (and can come out bilingual if exposed to non-chanovat in this narrow window). However, the speed of construction forces it along a fairly specific predetermined plan which sharply limits the possible variations. Arguably, there can be only one chanovat language, despite regional variations.

Question 107 Describe the collapse of the Rahalar empire. Did its portals fail all at once, or slowly and intermittently? How did the central government react? The people? Was this predicted, or a complete surprise? How long ago did this happen?