The Moichic Continuum covers the vast majority of the Memoicha country and some northern parts of Müforia. In these regions a wide array of varieties are spoken that form the Moichic Continuum, all ultimately descending from Old Moicha. In particular there is a region in Eastern Memoicha called Kyuidȳįbaòtizỹ /kɜ́ɨ̞̀ðɜːɪ̃βaodɪzɜ̃/ which is a large juttance of land surrounded on three sides by the Kuiòduct River /kɨ̞́òðʊct/. This region is inhabited by a people called the Kionć /kɪ́ònt͡ʃ/ who speak a language variety on the Moicha Continuum which is of particular interest due to it’s unique substrate and influences. The variety (considered a dialect of Moicha due to politics) is called Keodō /kɛ́òdoː/ by it’s mostly monolingual native speakers. The speakers themselves are peculiar for Sumric people as they are monotheistic, worshiping only one god with quite a fervent devotion, while the rest of the Sumric peoples acknowledge a wide array of gods although they don’t devote themselves to them in a way that would be considered religious. The Kionć, despite having long been subsumed by the growing borders of Memoicha and having taken a great deal of influence from them, retain a stark sense of identity, with the individual considering his fellow Kionć kinsmen as an extension of his own being, and outsiders as permanent foreigners. The origin of this tribe stretches back to the Sumric Golden Age and has been passed down in mythology by the Kionć, and by fact in contemporary accounts and historical records. First I will tell the myth, and then the true events that happened. The following myth is one that appears in the classical text Sajelga Slavtyḥlca “The Sacred Memory Sagas”:

It was a late spring that allowed so many sumči (groups of nomads) to gather together in one place as the trees bore plenty of fruit and the land was trampled by many delicious beasts. As many as one hundred sumči had gathered in Mûmuiḥlgu (the Old Sumrë name for a region in what is now east and south Memoicha) and with the great abundance they had an easy time of living. Between the plentiful hunting and gathering the people drank together, sung songs, fought fights and laughed together. It was a time of great entertainment and leisure for the people. The great income of food raised the standards and expectations of the people which gave them great greed. The greed blinded them and made them abandon a core tenant of Sumric culture…”take only what you need and no more”. The people hunted so much and so often that the once lively forests and grasslands had become quiet and empty. When all the deer had been hunted they hunted the boars, when the the boars had been hunted they hunted the mammoths, when all the mammoths had been hunted they hunted the birds, when the skies were empty they emptied the river of every last fish. With all those beasts gone the greedy hunters turned their eyes to the grasslands. There they found prairie dogs who were easy to hunt as normally no hunter would pay any attention to them, but these greedy menaces took advantage of their ease around humans to hunt and kill every prairie dog that they could find. Whole neighbourhoods of burrows were left empty and lifeless. The people feasted on the meat in the evening around fires, getting drunk and dancing in fits of frenziness as they did so. This did not go unnoticed.

The god Orages was furious with these people, he was the god of prairie dogs and the slaughter of his beings brought an immense rage to him that no rutting bull could ever match. Unfortunately for these people, Orages was also the god of disease and sickness. Orages sought revenge by infecting all of the meat with a plague, every chunk of flesh, every drop of stew and blood, every last piece of marrow was infected, and the people ate it all without any knowledge of this. The next morning the plague had made itself known by the misery of the greedy hunters. At first many of the people had burning fevers so hot that the sun itself wouldn’t have dared to go near them. Within a few days the fever had swept throughout the camps rendering most of the populace weak and unable to hunt. The lucky few who remained healthy were now tasked with providing enough food and care to the hordes of the sick. The sickness was so bad and infectious that nearby camps has refused to let anyone from the infected camp come near them, they even went so far as to shoot down anyone who dared to leave. By the time that rashes had appeared over the bodies and faces of the sick, the people from nearby camps had erected many sâparotrësam (statues which serve to warn people of nearby danger) around the border of the camp. The statues bore the depiction of Orages himself, intending to warn travellers that a deadly sickness was nearby. The men from the nearby camps guarded the border of the infected settlement and killed anyone who attempted to walk past the statues. The people in the settlement were so desperate that they begged Orages for forgiveness. The ones yet untouched by the plague made elaborate sacrifices to the god, first the individuals who hunted the prairie dogs were singled out as sacrifices and brought before the statues, just close enough that the statues could see them but not so close that the guards would kill them. The sacrifices had their hands bound and their legs broken. Their heads were hacked off with hatched and tossed at the statues. The people hoped that by killing the ones responsible that the plague would be lifted. Unfortunately for them Orages wasn’t satisfied enough. In continued desperation, the healthy stood within sight of the statues and begged Orages, some wailed so loud for so long that they went mad. The insane threw themselves against the ground in a frenzy, some were so mad that they stripped naked and charged at the guards, despite the guards being armed, there were so many insane berserkers charging them that they were overwhelmed. Men were dragged past the statues only to be clawed at and to have chunks of flesh bitten away from their limbs by rabid shadows of humans. The bloodbath was so sickening that those who remained healthy and sane plotted to kill the madmen. The healthy people returned to their tents to fetch their weapons and when every man standing had a bow or spear, the slaughter began. The madmen had no weapons or wit about them so they were easy slain. The bodies were then rounded up and presented before the statues, hoping that Orages would take pity on them. Shortly after the skirmish a prairie dog emerged from a burrow and it entered the settlement with a sure and imposing walk despite being so small. The small beast perched on a boulder and it spoke with a deep and powerful voice, the voice of Orages. “You the diseased ones, the misery and torture that you suffer is but a fraction of what you gave to the beasts of this land. I have given you nothing less than what you deserve, but now that every man who struck my precious beasts is dead and his family dying, I may now offer relief on one condition. I order that every person not affiliated with my plague leave this settlement. Leave the sick here to die and do not bury their corpses, leave them for the beasts of this land to feast on them in the same way you have feasted them. I order that you all become subjects of Orages, that every year you will travel to this village to offer sacrifices. If any man dares to deviate from a single word of this command then his children and any further descendants will be plagued by disease and misery until his lineage is extinct.” The voice left the small prairie dog who fled to the nearest burrow when it came to its senses. The healthy people were awestruck by the message and they followed Orages’s command as best they could. That day the healthy people left the settlement, leaving the few lingering infected to die. One man named Linidûsi managed to sneak his sick daughter away in a bag. When he and his daughter arrived at a new settlement along with other healthy people, the stowaway was discovered. Linidûsi and his daughter were chased away into the grassland without any tools or their tent. Linidûsi walked to another new settlement but his daughter didn’t survive the journey. In time at the new settlement, Linidûsi found another wife and had more children, yet many of those children died of various sicknesses and those that managed to live long enough to have children ended up dying young themselves by some other horrible manner. This curse followed the family for several generations until they were rendered extinct.

The people of the new settlements gave up their nomadic life to become permanent residents of the region. And so they had become the Chilnči “the diseased ones”

This myth is rather accurate to what actually happened. Obviously some exaggerated elements had snuck into the story such as the needless hunting of animals, the talking prairie dog and the cursed family, but the rest of the events really did happen. What really caused the event was a sick bat. Not one of the small bats native to Malomanan, but a huge specimen brought ever by the Nanarukr Di Wa people when they emigrated from the Henda continent a few centuries earlier. Contact between the Sumnë and Nanarukr Di Wa was very limited and so the Sumnë never had much of a chance to be exposed to the new diseases brought over by the foreign bats. One day a domestic bat had escaped from its cage, flying free in a land not familiar to it. It was spotted by some native hunters who shot it down and ate it. The hunters were not aware of thee disease which the bat carried and they soon fell ill, as did anyone they came into contact with. The deadly infection caused nearby groups to quarantine the infected population by force and indeed there were sacrifices, skirmishes and bloodshed. The survivors of the plague opted to remain in settlements nearby instead of returning to a nomadic life, naming the region Chyldûfinbaltisûn” where the sickness is trapped”. Over time that name would become Kyuidȳįbaòtizỹ. It is not known how many sumči were present at the time of the plague, the myth says that there were one hundred, but that number was derived via a Gematria-like tradition instead of fact, as in the native Rësyra script each letter has a number assigned to it and the numerical values of each letter in a word are added up to find the “word’s number”: s 11 + u 19 + m 8 + č 44 + i 18 = sumči 100. So we can assume that the number of sumči’s cited in the myth is a piece of fiction.

Since the Chilnči (the Old Sumrë term for Kionć) now rarely left the area, and nomads rarely entered as they were warded off by the warning statues, the speech of the people began to diverge until they had their own dialect. This dialect which they named Chëldrë “disease language” was mostly different with its vowel shifts and presence of /ʍ/.

Eventually however the rest of the Sumnë began to form settlements themselves and in time many daughters of the Old Sumrë language had diverged. Not too far east and south of Kyuidȳįbaòtizỹ, a daughter of Old Sumrë had formed, named Old Moicha. The Old Moicha speakers began to migrate west and there they came into contact with the Chilnči. The result of this contact was that the Chilnči started speaking Old Moicha instead of their native Chëldrë dialect, but Chëldrë served as a substrate for the Old Moicha spoken in Kyuidȳįbaòtizỹ, the phonology was taken wholly from Chëldrë and many basic words and words relating to settled life were loaned into the local dialect of Old Moicha. Although the vast majority of words were taken from Old Moicha they were all adapted to the local phonology, most of the changes were to vowels where the Old Moicha vowel would be substituted by the nearest equivalent vowel in the local phonology and so the following vowel correspondance formed:

i – ɪ bidel /bídel/ → /bɪ́dɛl/ “needle”

a – ə sẹleva /sɘ̀léva/ → /sɜ̀lɛ́və/ “morning”

e – ɛ tōige /tǿːge/ → /táːgɛ/ “week”

y – ɨ̞ ēmylṓn /eːmỳlóːn/ → /eːmɨ̞̀lóːn/ “mortal”

yː – ɨ̞ː cȳca /kýːka/ → /kɨ̞́kə/ “mound of slush”

u – ʊ dwu /dwu/ → /dwʊ/ “mushroom”

ɵ(:) – ɜ(:) cọ̄ /kɵ́ː/ → /kɜ́ː/ “slush”

ə̴ – ɜ têigu /tə́igu/ → /tɜ́igʊ/ “muscle”

ø – ə bēcoir /béːkør/ → /béːkər/ “enemy”

øː → əː → aː tōige /tǿːge/ → /táːgɛ/ “week”

Their dialect of Old Moicha would then go on to have its own changes separate but areal features were a rampant force along the Moicha Continuum, some sound changes for Old Moicha → Middle Moicha spread to Kyuidȳįbaòtizỹ while others didn’t. During the Middle Moicha period most varieties on the Moichic Continuum innovated new verbal morphology by turning copulas into verbal affixes and this spread to Keodō. Even though Keodō derived its copulas directly from the original Chilnči dialect of Old Sumrë, the resulting verbal morphology bears heavy resemblance to that in other varieties of Moichic Continuum (through no coincidence as all of them derive their copulas ultimately from Old Sumrë and they have shared many sound changes since). Post-Middle Moicha, Keodō has had areal features from both the Foriab language and the Modern Moicha language, although being considered a dialect of Moicha, Keodō being slightly more conservative in its sound changes resembles Foriab more than it does Moicha (mostly due to both Keodō retaining /z/, retaining nasal vowels and by sharing the same lenition patterns). This can be seen in the paradigm of the verb for “to attack”:

Moicha, Keodō, Foriab

1S: petma, petmaz, patmez

2S: petmre, petmari, petmer

3S.ANIM: petmze, petmąz, patmlez

3S.INAN: petme, petmą, patmę

1P: petmereu, petmarik, patmeru

2P: petmere, petmra, patmera

3P: petre, petrį, patrę

Also during this time, the innovation of definiteness spread throughout the continuum. Keodō stands out as instead of borrowing the actual definite articles, it rather took the concept of definiteness and innovated its own definite article from the demonstrative se (as opposed to other varieties which either innovated the definite article from other pronouns or via loaning from the nearest epicentre). The difference can be seen in Moicha e l’ejur “the genius” vs Keodō s’ajur “the genius”.

Although there is little subdialectical variation within Keodō, there are three main isoglosses which are based on how the infinitive is formed. In the far west and north of the region the infinitive suffix –ad is used which is directly taken from the Chëldrë dialect of Old Sumrë, reflecting the word final denasalisation that occurred in the dialect (with the infinitive ultimately coming from the Old Sumrë infinitive –en). In a wide strip of land stretching from the south west to the north east is where the infinitive –ą is used which is from the Old Moicha infinitive –en (the vowel was replaced early on to match the one in –ad). This is because during the Old Moicha period, influence from Old Moicha was more significant in the south east which had more exposure to Old Moicha speakers and so the Old Moicha infinitive pushed the Chëldrë infinitive to the north west. Then during the Modern Moicha period the use of the infinitive –a/-e appeared, from Modern Moicha –e (Modern Moicha had denasalised all of its vowels). The newer influence first manifested in the south east lf the region by simply denasalising –ą to –a which pushed the –ą infinitive further north and west, then the influence manifested by borrowing the Modern Moicha infinitive –e wholsesale. The –a/-e infinitives occur in the same place but –a is mostly used by elderly people. So in Kionć there are four possible ways of forming the infinitive as shown by the verb for “to attack” which can be: petad, petą, peta, pete.

As well as being influenced by sound changes, Keodō has loaned a large deal of vocabulary from various sources such as Foriab: juzwi /jə́zwɪ̀/ “to wash an animal” (← F. jazwi “to wash a horse”), and the Tuuric language Vougerå: omju /ɔ́mjə/ “tomato” (← V. omjü “tomato”). The loanwords from Vougerå is due to Kyuidȳįbaòtizỹ being surrounded by the Kuiòduct River which acts as a border between Memoicha and the Vougerå speaking country to the north. The Kionć openly trade with their northern neighbours and words for trade items, such as “tomato”, tend to be loanwords. Basic core vocabulary tends to be substrate words taken directly from the Chëldrë dialect of Old Sumrë (note that while the Moicha and Foriab forms are from Old Moicha, they are still cognate to the Keodō forms via Old Sumrë):

mother = lun /lə́n/ ← Chëldre /lə́ɲɛ̀/ (cf Moicha le /lɛ́/ and Foriab lą /lã́/)

father= arnry /ǽrnrɜ̀/ ← Chëldrë /ǽrnɜr/ (cf Moicha jenre /jɛ́nrɛ̀/ and Foriab janur /jánər/)

older brother = ćuodō /t͡ʃʊ́ðòː/ ← Chëldrë /t͡ʃʊ́dnɔ/ (cf Moicha cwo /t͡ʃwɔ́/ and Foriab cwų /t͡ʃwṹ/)

younger brother = ćųot /t͡ʃʊ̃́t/ ← Chëldrë /t͡ʃʊ́ntɛ/ (cf Moicha cwo /t͡ʃwɔ́/ and Foriab cwu /t͡ʃwú/)

younger sister = kųst /kə̃́st/ ← Chëldrë /kə́nstɛ/ (cf Moicha ce /t͡ʃɛ́/ and Foriab kla /klá/)

older sister = kudō /kə́ðòː/ ← Chëldrë /kə́dnɔ/ (cf Moicha ce /t͡ʃɛ́/ and Foriab klą /klã́/)

uncle (that is older than the parent) = nuokuidō /nʊ́gɨ̞̀ðoː/ ← Chëldrë /nʊ̀kɨ̞́drɔ/ (cf Moicha nocri /nɔ́t͡ʃrì/ and Foriab nųklur /nṹklər/)

uncle (that is younger than the parent) = nuokųot /nʊ́gʊ̃̀t/ ← Chëldrë /nʊ̀kʊ́ntɛ/ (cf Moicha nokku /nɔ́kːə̀/ and Foriab nuq /núkʷ/)

aunt (that is older than the parent) = nįjudò /nɪ̃́jə̀ðoː/ ← Chëldrë /nɪ̀njə́dlɔ/ (cf Moicha nejo /nɛ́jɔ̀/ and Foriab nąjull /nã́jəl/

aunt ( that is younger than the parent) = nįjuòt /nɪ̃́jə̀ot/ ← Chëldrë /nɪ̀njə́ltɛ/ (cf Moicha nej /nɛ́ɪ̯/ and Foriab nąi /nã́ĩ̯/)

son = nỹg /nɜ̃́g/ ← Chëldrë /nɜ́mgə/ (cf Moicha ñakk /ɲákː/ and Foriab ngog /ngɔ́g/)

daughter = nįg /nɜ̃́g/ ← Chëldrë /nɪ́mgə/(cf Moicha ñekk /ɲɛ́kː/ and Foriab ngag /ngág/)

You may have noticed by now that the words Kionć, Kyuidȳįbaòtizỹ, Keodō and Kuiòduct look vaguely similar. This is because they all come from the same Old Sumrë zero-grade root chłd “sickness, disease, ailment”:

chłd + –či “derives names for groups of people” → Chilnči “The Kionć people”

chłd → chyldáu “the sickness” + finbal– “trap” + –ti “passive suffix” + –sûn “there” = Chyldûfinbaltisûn “Kyuidȳįbaòtizỹ”

chłd + –rë “language” → chëldrë “The Keodō language”

chłd + –uhte “river name suffix → Chuilduhte “Kuiòduct River”

Compare this with the Kionć descendant of chłd which is kod /kɔ́d/ “curse”

Over time these names were changes by sound changes to become their modern variants.

As well as having a distinct dialect, the Kionć are distinguished in their beliefs. Rather than having a whole pantheon of gods, the Kionć only worship one god, Urugaz /ə́rə̀ɣæz/ (the same “Orages” mentioned in the myth). Originally Urugaz/Orages was a disease god as he is in the wider Sumric pantheon, but after the plague the Kionć placed extra devotion to him in their desperation, so much that over time he became a protective deity and other gods were demoted to sprites and house spirits. In contrast with the rather lax attitude that the sumric peoples have with their gods, the Kionć are incredibly devoted to Urugaz. Every year a pilgrimage is made to visit the ancient warning statues which have become regarded as shrines to the god. During this pilgrimage a sacrifice of livestock is made before the statues and the people’s promise to Urugaz is renewed in the form of a mass prayer in the long abandoned settlement where the plague originally spread. Although millennia have passed, one can still spot some scattered bones from the infected corpses left behind. These are considered relics and are often collected to make into ritualistic ornaments.

So for all of the assimilation and influence that the Kionć have endured, they still remain a people with a stark and proudly held identity and sense of themselves.