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On the east coast of Tiptum,
far east of Tepat,
there are of coastal valleys, lined with commercial cities like
coins in pockets. This is the East Coast - also known as
Amtom ("Coast East"), from the Yuk Tepat Hamtum
(which also means "Coast East"). Amtom refers to the eastern
coast, particularly of the northern half of the continent.
There are currently nine nations that are considered
"East Coast," roughly in order from north to south: Takn,
Kotlinas, Pazx, Ghozr, Lilshtit, Pahas, Kutsu, Plstnas, and
Nelotil.
For the juicy information about infanticide, furries, and name
copyrights, keep scrolling.
Unlike the open areas to the west, in the east, the mountains abut very closely to the sea, and the shoreline is much more irregular than other parts of the continent. Compared to Tepat, Amtom streams are typically swift, deep, and narrow. Off the coast lies a subduction zone, which is capable of producing massive earthquakes, at least one per century. Their threat is mitigated by the aptly-named Barrier Islands (not yet on the map). During the winter, warm dry winds roll over the mountain slopes, keeping the harbors ice-free; during the summer, rain is provided mostly in the form of afternoon thunderstorms (though milder than in Tepat), and less frequently, but more dramatically, in the form of typhoons.
The mountainous interior is forested by large deciduous trees, largely the same species found in Eastern Tepat, and at higher elevations and latitudes, needleleaf trees. There are great differences between the boreal forests in the north, and tropical ones in the south. Offshore, the islands have essentially the same profile of trees and wildlife, though with some unique species here and there in the Barriers. Not too important in the early days of the civilizations, they became more important after potatoes, adopted from Muqali, turned out to thrive here, and even more so in recent years when the great troves of minerals and other powerful substances were uncovered and exploited.
The lack of grassy pastures has conspired to keep herd animals off of the East Coast. By comparison, the endlessness of the sea has meant that fish is always in large supply. Large empires could not be formed because each individual state was relatively secure in itself, and it was difficult to take over due to ocean and mountain barriers. (Compare to the Tepat-Swira continuum, most of which is just one big flat plain.) Therefore the political landscape remained fractured and the states just traded with each other. Pressed by mountains against the waves, it is no wonder that the Amtomites looked out to sea rather than their meager lands for the opportunity for glory.
The majority of the states are bound together in a League. Together they are the younger brothers of Tepat in the brotherhood of civilization. With time, they have come to rival Tepat in economic influence. As cultured, civilized people, they stand together in defending civilization, but differ on other matters of policy. They are notable for allowing many things that are banned in Tepat.
One of the salient features of East Coast (Amtom) culture is the
customary sorting of society into tribes, each with particular
totems. Most families had a χvakʷ, a
god or totem animal - also translatable as "clan" or "taboo." This
imposed certain obligations on them. Members of the family were
forbidden to eat or otherwise harm their totem. Thus, someone
whose totem was the orca would be forbidden to eat whale meat.
Large land-owning families might use part of their property to
maintain parks or sanctuaries where their totem animal could
dwell. The same species might be the totem for many different
families, in different societies even, which provided a kind of
cross-family solidarity and identity. Two people who’ve just met
might find that they bonded over both being orcas. Some
particularly widespread totem animals might have large social
organizations joining the families. These could act as
conservation societies. They also organize festivals, parties, and
other events each year, often timed to the breeding, birthing, or
spawning season of their animal. People’s personalities were
assumed to be determined by their corresponding animal, having
personal qualities that matched the animal’s characteristics or
behavior. The Amtom equivalents of newspaper horoscopes printed
advice according to one’s totem.
The exception were the Nasic people, who instead of a family
totem, were assigned personal guardian animals, upon puberty or
adulthood. This could be assigned by family members, a priest, or
chosen by the person him or herself. The occasion might be marked
by taking a new, or an additional name, which included the name of
the totem animal.
Politically, representation was often apportioned by totem groups rather than districts. This system cut straight through the territorial organization of city-states - every state had parallel sets of clans, and many joined together in transnational clan associations. People often preferred to do business with their totemmates. Thus an easy way for a trader visiting a new city to establish contacts would be to find a Temple or Society dedicated to his totem and visit it and participate in its activities. So our hypothetical orca-man, once he traveled to a new city-state, would find the Orca Temple, and announce his arrival, and begin to meet people. The “houses” of particular totems operated dormitories for travelling traders from other places who shared that totem. When negotiating deals, treaties, or the ends of wars, care was often taken to have talks take place through national representatives who were members of the same clan or totem, on the principle that they would work well together. People from Tepat, or other nations which did not have totem systems, who acted as diplomats or otherwise had frequent business with eastern nations, were often ‘adopted’ into a clan or given a totem animal and name to facilitate trade.
Animals aside, mythical heroes, trees, large landmarks, and even
certain objects could be totems. The taboos attendant on totems
varied depending on the kind of totem. People who had an animal
totem were forbidden from hunting or eating that animal. People
with a pine totem would be forbidden from cutting down pines and
would live in houses made from other kinds of wood, or even from
stone. People with an arrow taboo could not break arrows, while
those with a knife taboo could not give away or sell an inherited
knife. Infractions would require some form of repentance, such as
payment to the clan, or ritual cleansing or ablution.
Issues:
The order of names for most Amtom societies is first the Clan or
Totem name, followed by the patronymic, then the personal name.
The first name would be composed of the totem, typically an
animal, which may be suffixed by the person forming suffix -im. It
will be in the genitive case if possible, and prefixed with a
possessive prefix - first person plural if the person speaking is
of the same tribe, second person plural if it is the speaker’s,
and third person plural if the tribe is unconnected with anyone in
the conversation. In neutral contexts, and on forms, the tribal
name can occur in an uninflected form, with no possessive affixes.
Thus the name of the Leviathan tribe would be Holčim. A
person speaking of himself would refer to the Qholčim,
with the personal prefix q-.
The patronymic is simply the father’s name, and so is
indistinguishable from a personal name, except for being in the
genitive. A personal name could be made up of one element, or two
elements compounded. The elements usually referred to qualities or
attributes that were positive, and appropriate to or typical of
the person’s totem animal.
For personal names, the main rule in Amtom is that there are no restrictions on name elements, except that everyone’s name must not duplicate anyone else’s name - unless with the permission of the prior holder of the name. People with a certain name could register and assert something like copyright over the name.
If two people were encountered who had identical full names, the
older one could force the other one to change his name, on account
of name infringement. So, for example, once one child in the
country has been named “Michael Jackson,” everyone else in the
country is blocked from having that name. Anyone with the
misfortune to have been mistakenly named “Michael Jackson” must
either change their name or move to a region where the name is
still unused. Until a new name had been found, they might be
assigned a number for identification.
Hence, great care was taken to avoid duplicate names. However,
some names were owned by lineages or clans, and considered
“common” within them, and generally safe to use. This resulted in
the growth of government records concerning individuals and their
names, and name consultants that relied on them, and helped
clients give their babies suitable, and legal, names. The rich
were able to afford these services and thus still give their
babies “cool” names. They would then typically register the name
for exclusive use in their families, but then the next generation
would want new unique names, resulting in a glut of exclusive,
unused names accumulating in a few families. Meanwhile, the poor
or middle class could not use consultants, so they would take the
safe route and reuse their own names - father’s or grandfather’s
names. One common pattern was to name the child after the most
recently dead lineal ancestor. So while the rich got ever more
naming options that they didn’t use, more and more people got
stuck with a shrinking pool of names. When they ran out of names,
they would make longer names, make up unflattering names like
"Farty Whale" (using name-elements that nobody else wanted), or so
on.
Hence, a cultural trait supposed to reflect individualism resulted in extensive homogeneity, easy association of people as members of a local group or class, growth of bureacracy, and government-assigned ID numbers. But that’s the price of freedom.
Furries. Clan-oriented
rituals had long involved impersonations of animals, so
people are long since used to the idea that grown adults wear
animal costumes. There are both realistic, modern fur suits,
and traditional ones made of wood, wicker, and bark. (Suits are
never made of real fur - fibrous inner bark imitates it. Making a
wolfsuit of actual wolf fur would be a huge sin.) Furries are
welcome - provided their fursona matches their assigned totem
animal. However they reject people whose furry identity or
orientation runs contrary to their affiliation. E.g., an orca
clan member who dresses as an orca is OK, as is a wolf clan
member who dresses as a wolf, but an orca clan member who
fantasizes about being a wolf is beyond the pale.
The Mis-Furred. These “misfurs” or “mis-totemists” evoke an aversion comparable to transgender people in many terrestrial cultures. Proper, socially respectable “cis-totem” furries reject them, and emphasize their own loyal attachment to the proper traditional totem. Although in general Amtom celebrates individual freedom as foundational to its culture, and to the creation of one’s own destiny, there is nevertheless an acceptance that certain aspects of identity are immutable, not to be altered according to personal fancy - particularly aspects as crucial to one’s functioning in society as the animal you owe devotion to.
Immutable Species. After all, while advanced transmogrification can sculpt flesh, creating new genitals and other physical characteristics (assuming you have bookoo dollars), one’s totem clan is dependent on lineage and relatives, which cannot be altered no matter how much the physical body is tinkered with, making “totemorphosis” an absurdly unattainable goal.
Frontline of the Culture Wars. Once personal freedom
had esconced itself as a cardinal value on the East Coast, the
number of Misfurs has grown. Awareness of this phenomenon has led
to backlash. Misfurs lie about their identities, while various
clan and furry associations have erected complicated membership
procedures to root out those masquerading as animals they are not
related to. There have been several pushes to criminalize false
representation of one’s spirit animal. To win the support of
moderates, these have been presented not as attacks on Misfurs per
se, but as an issue of fraud. Similarly, there have been pushes to
have “totem dysphoria” classified as a mental disorder,
accompanied by marches in the street by conservative furries. The
majority of people are probably OK with misfurs dressing up, as
long as they do so alone at home and don’t shove it in the
public’s face. Despite this, there are others who see acceptance
of mistotemists as a crucial test of their society’s commitment to
liberty - breaking one of the last chains of the collective used
to enslave the autonomous individual.
They kill babies.
The most well-defined linguistic subarea of Tiptum is Amtom. The
influence of the East Coast has been so strong that the languages
who have joined the club often resemble each other more than they
do their relatives west of the mountains. Their commonalities
include not only phonological and grammatical similarities, but a
vast shared stock of words called ‘Common Amtomite Vocabulary,’
relating to many distinctive aspects of life in the region. They
are bound also by the use of the lingua franca Tradespeak for
communication, which further spreads words around.
The languages of this area are of diverse origins. The Sprachbund contains members of four of the Big Five families: Macro-Taknic (Takən), Macro-Swiric (Kotliseu, Ogenseu, Rafter), Macro-Tepatic (Teenotkutsu), and Macro-Muqalic (Plstnas, Nelotil). Macro-Witayic is the only large family without any languages that can be considered East-Coast. It also preserves several smaller languages, such as ʕozr, Pazx, and Lilštit. The three languages are sometimes referred to as ‘Core Amtomic,’ because they do not have any relatives outside the East Coast, predate the arrival of members of other families, and seem to have descended from the original inhabitants of the coast. The shared vocabulary of these three languages is nearly coterminous with what is considered the ‘Common Amtomite Vocabulary,’ and largely forms the basis of Amtomite Tradespeak. They are sometimes united in a Malkic family, reflecting the words of the form malk which mean ‘coast’ in these languages. However, their cultures have been adjacent to, and mingling with, each other for so long it cannot be told which forms are ancient borrowings and which are common inheritances.
Commonly shared features of East Coast Languages include:
Volitionality. A word more about this. In English, some verbs differ primarily in the degree of control or volition of the person involved, such as fall or get down (but many verbs are silent on the distinction). In East Coast languages, these verbs are usually expressed by the same verb root. The difference is still expressed, but in morphology: most of the languages of Hamtum distinguish a verbal category which I will call ‘volitional’ or ‘voluntative,’ for lack of a better term. To use fall etc. as an example, the difference between going down intentionally or accidentally is expressed by a suffix on the verb. For transitive verbs, additional suffixes not only mark a verb as transitive, but also distinguish whether the patient (or recipient) was affected by the action willingly or unwillingly. The situation in various languages is quite a patchwork. In some languages, one value or another may be unmarked, or different verbs may have different "unmarked" volitional traits. Additionally, the voluntative may be fused with other categories, such as voice / valency. (The causative in particular is often merged with this.)
The lingua franca of the region. Grammar tends to be simpler
than, but largely parallel to the tendencies of the languages of
the East Coast. The lexicon draws broadly on languages that are
spoken on the East Coast, but the majority of words come from the
so-called Malkic languages (~50%). Additionally, a small number
(related to government, philosophy, and education) are derived
from Tepat.
Because of the use of Tradespeak, there was widespread diglossia
in the East Coast, with local use of the native language and
public use of Tradespeak. ‘Public language’ and ‘family language’
as words for the lingua franca and national tongues of Amtomic
states, and code-switching as a way of indicating whether a matter
is public or personal. There was, for a time, even an amount of
triglossia, with educational and official use of Yuk Tepat on the
East Coast. (Many East Coasters learn another East Coast language
too, and so quadrilinguals are also not rare.) Many Tepatic loans
are filtered first into Tradespeak, and then into local languages.
Pinning down the language is difficult, because in each case, the
creole itself has dialects. The jargon tends to be spoken
differently in each of the nations around the coast, influenced by
the underlying language.