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Pabappa to English English to Pabappa
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LOANWORDS During the Great Diaspora Period (1423-1675 AD), Pabaps were scattered throughout much of Europe and Africa. And when they began to move back into their native land, they found that it was under control of a friendly, but foreign power which forced them to speak a different language. Thus Pabappa ceased forever to be the first language of the Pabap people. Many Pabaps continued to learn and teach the language in order to feed their ethnic and religious pride, but they were few in number and could not prevent loanwords from creeping in to the language. At first, most loanwords were from Wamian, the official language of the Wamian empire they were now living in. Later, however, the empire itself changed languages to a conlang called Moonshine which was associated with a political movement originating from deep within the eastern empire of Russia. Moonshine was a much more phonologically complex language than Pabappa, having 54 consonants to Pabappa's 10 and 10 vowels to Pabappa's five. It also was much less phonologically repetitive than Pabappa. So in general, Moonshine words tended to be less than half the length of their Pabappa counterparts, and this proved very tempting for the Pabap speakers looking to improve their language. But since Pabappa had such a meager phonology, massive borrowing of Moonshine loanwords would result in massive confusion for the listeners. Moreover, some of them were only one phoneme long, and this violated the rules of Pabappa phonotactics. So Moonshine loans tended to be used mostly for concepts Pabappa could not easily express, and for abbreviations for Pabap terms when used in long compound words. In a later stage of the language, called Space Age Pabappa, the phonology was modified to give full accommodation to Moonshine loanwords, but loanwords from other languages such as Kxesh were still adapted to this new expanded phonology. The wordlist below indicates all of the commonly used loanwords in Pabappa as of 2008 AD, as well as the source language of the word, the original form, and the most commonly used Pabappa replacement.
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