I'm asking this for some conlanging of my own, the point of which is to avoid too much similarities with Indo-European languages.
I put down that list on the Grammar Table of the VulgarLang website last night, and it didn't transfer through. Despite writing down the base-20 numerical system, for example, it went ahead with base-10, anyway. So how do I rewrite any of these grammatical features that the website could pick up?
In this sci-fi/fantasy scenario, there is a very huge ship--enough to fit the population of Tokyo at most. It's either damaged from a war or retired from service. Whatever its origin, it has become grounded and stationed into a city. Now there are problems turning a ship into a city. For one, narrow corridors would make good sidewalks but awful roads. Standard crew quarters would have to be enlarged into larger stores and markets. Many closed environments would have to be opened up. The purpose of the bridge, situated right at the front of the ship as it is air force rather than naval, would have to be reoriented. How can any of this be pulled off? What, ultimately, would a city that was originally a ship look like that would differ from a city that was originally a city?
For anyone not in the know, the Younger Dryas was a sudden climate catastrophe that marked the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. Earth was on the verge of warming up from the last ice age, but in just one short decade, the temperature nosedove back to being frigid and stayed down for one millennium, the very speed of which put a real strain on the global biosphere. Humans, whose population numbers and density at the time were low and not stationary, got hit hard, with the famous Clovis culture being driven to extinction. The megafauna, who carried low numbers of calves for long periods of time, also couldn't keep up with the sudden nosedive and they, too, got severely extirpated. (It probably didn't help that, in the thousands of decades since they first coexisted, humans had been putting dents on their numbers.)
The question isn't really "what if the Younger Dryas never happened", but really how to prevent that from happening.
(Oh, and before you bring up aliens, don't. That's shorthand and therefore cheating.)
Right now, I'm exploring the possibility of a setting being some kind of moon orbiting a large planet or, better yet, an extramassive brown dwarf within the habitable zone of a larger, brighter star. Right now, the angular distance varies between 7.3 degrees (almost 15 times as large as our view of the moon) and 3.7 degrees. Do these changes happen daily (in which the 7.3-degree diameter happens during the day and the 3.7-degree diameter happens at night) or seasonably (in which the 7.3-degree diameter occurs at perihelion and the 3.7-degree diameter occurs at aphelion)?
Brown dwarves are bodies similar in diameter to Jupiter but anywhere between 13 to 80 times more massive. If this world were tidally locked like a planet, then that would mean one side is stuck on permanent "light", relatively speaking, and one side would be stuck in permanent darkness. But if it were tidally locked like a moon, then it might possibly develop a day-night cycle, with only one side ever seeing the dwarf.
In this scenario, the brown dwarf is situated within the habitable zone of a more massive, brighter star, hence how the world orbiting the brown dwarf is "habitable" in the first place.
Extra detail: No, Wind in the Willows won't count as a viable example because Badger, Ratty, Moley and Toad are anthros, not xenofictional animals. Which means that Narnia won't count, either, because while they do have more realistic animals, they lean too far into fairy tale fantasy. What I'm aiming for are animal characters that look, act and perceive their world like their respective species. How can they integrate organically to a society built primarily by humans or other Homo species, real or made-up?
In this sci-fi/fantasy scenario, there is a very huge ship--enough to fit the population of Tokyo at most. It's either damaged from a war or retired from service. Whatever its origin, it has become grounded and stationed into a city. Now there are problems turning a ship into a city. For one, narrow corridors would make good sidewalks but awful roads. Standard crew quarters would have to be enlarged into larger stores and markets. Many closed environments would have to be opened up. The purpose of the bridge, situated right at the front of the ship, would have to be reoriented. How can any of this be pulled off? What, ultimately, would a city that was originally a ship look like that would differ from a city that was originally a city?
Set in the same seedworld as in my previous post, we now move to the opposite extreme--latitude 90 degrees. At that latitude, the thermometer fluctuates from an average of 104 degrees Fahrenheit at perihelion (the point where the world is closest to its two F-type suns) to an average of negative-243 (as cold as winter on Mars!) at aphelion (the point where the world is farthest from its two F-type suns). Despite this, there are no ice caps--at least until the first day of orbital winter, when the thermometer drops past 32 degrees Fahrenheit (or zero centigrade). Instead, we see a mix of taiga, tundra, steppe and desert.
The atmosphere at latitude 90 degrees is the thinnest in the world, whereas the atmosphere is thickest at the equator, though how "thick" or how "thin" has, peculiarly, never been quantified. This is the only explanation we can think of as to the poles' temperature swings.
In my previous post, the issue was getting Earth plants to colonize a low-latitude zone so extreme that the 78 days (156 Earth days, considering the world's 48-hour rotation) of orbital summer are just one same hypercane, an issue in which, thankfully, we have found a potential solution. But in this one, the highest latitude has its own set of problems--dealing with temperature swings far greater than even in the Gobi Desert. This is where we would expect to find a desert, but there are also taiga and mammoth steppes, landscapes that aren't used to such extreme heat. You'd think that they'd do better in the cold of orbital winter, but remember, it's as cold as Mars, which is colder than even Antarctica. Yet, in spite of that, the plants survive and thrive in the form of forests, grasslands and deserts.
So currently, the seedworld I've been working on has a very extreme set of orbital parameters. It has no axial tilt, which means both hemispheres get the same season at once. A single year lasts 640 days, though with its 48-hour rotation, that translates to 1,280 Earth days. On top of that, it orbits its two F-type suns P-style in an elliptical orbit, which results in seasonal asymmetry. Specifically...
At perihelion, the closest point in its orbit, the two suns shine at 126,000 lux, or over one-quarter brighter than daylight on Earth. At aphelion, the farthest point in its orbit, the two suns shine at 40,000 lux, or 93 percent as bright as daylight on Mars. During the orbital summer, tropical climates (which is to say, hot, wet and humid) extend no farther than 54 degrees in latitude only to shrink to only 12 degrees during the winter. At the summer period, the equator scorches to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, made worse by 100% humidity. This extra heat has turned 25 degrees North to 25 degrees South into a single storm band that develops at the end of orbital spring and dissipates at the beginning of orbital autumn. And what is a storm if not dark? So dark, as personal experience would say, that it would often be mistaken for night. And the extra heat also creates more wind, turning the storm band into essentially one singular 78-day-long hypercane (600 mph at the fastest.)
So in the event that Earth plants get spread to colonize this planet, they would have to deal with the absolute darkness, the literally hellish mix of heat and humidity, the nonstop rain, the relentless winds and the constant lightning bombardments. How can this be pulled off?
I will accept genetic engineering, but ONLY as a last-minute last resort.