P5X-208: Day One, part two

Ok, so it's been... three hours since I sat down here by the fire with my pen light and notebooks and camera. For posterity, maybe because this is my first mission ever, I'll just list everything I know so far.

- there are way too few consonants for as many vowels as this language has.
- like Japanese, it favours CV constructs. Unlike Japanese, this favouritism is exclusive. Like Japanese, it considers L and R allophones?
- there are way too many missing minimal pairs to be any kind of language based off Latin, which is my first choice right now because of the writing samples and pieces of culture we've found.
- common errors and erronial drift due to graphemic representation don't actually coincide with natural language procession; this language doesn't seem to have evolved into writing. The culture was pressed into having a written language?

Annnd, that's about everything I know. I can read most of what I brought back from the library now. Or sound it out, anyway. I'm pretty sure now that the three key words do refer to the places themselves rather than just abstractly standing for them. "Pipiliokeka." Library. There's something so... familiar sounding about that word, but at this point I can't be sure that it's not just that I've said it under my breath so many times now, called it out at the top of my lungs over rushing, murderous water, or created that initial, sort of intimate relationship with it when I first sounded it out and transported myself to a whole other place.

Words have power, which is sorta why I took this job. I just never thought the notion would be so ... literal.

Ok. So. If this language didn't evolve graphemic representation on its own, then... it's possible that the original word didn't actually sound anything like pipliokeka. And it's possible that the CV construction isn't native either. So... if voiced plosives did exist, but didn't get written, much as aspiration doesn't in English, then...

bi bi lio... gega? kega? bibilio--

Ahhh ha. Biblio (/i) = book; bibliotek = library. What kind of language considers k and t to be...? OH.

So... borrowed words. Oh oh oh. Obviously if the native language didn't have a written counterpart, then it wouldn't have had a word for library. It's gotta be a borrowed word, transliterated according to rules. (Refer to mission book 1-A, page 13.) I'll spend some time looking through the scrolls we brought back to try to pick out likely suspects. Bibliotek is Latin, so... I'll look for mysteriously Latin sounding words.

Oh. Atriolum. For akaliolum. Has to be. Which means it's definite, the CV thing. No compound consonant clusters. Still don't know what ke e na means. Even with all of the options for K... Must be a native word.

And I still haven't answered the question about k and t.

The language isn't without historical representation, though. I found what appear to be instructions for hand signs, like a sign language. It looks pretty structured, although it involves more than just hand movement and placement. I moved through a couple of the smaller motions earlier when Austin'd moved out of sight a little, and ... it's sort of like dancing. Formalized, linguistic dancing. Amazing. Course, I have no idea what it means until I can translate the little definitions under each movement. And as fascinating as it is, unless I can find a way to connect it to the symbols around this place, some culture-based influence that can help me figure out who was here or where the other words on the RSP go, it's not that helpful.

I'm going to look through the reference stuff I brought with me, just to try to jog the whole intuitive leap process. I know now that it's not Greek and only sometimes Latin, so really, I'm just going to give myself a 15 minute break to look through books before I start in on the serious code-breaking.