User:IlL/Spare pages 1/77

A placeholder for a future Earth setting where humans have gone extinct and ravens have taken our place.

Background

• Humans wiped out
• An asteroid wipes out the remaining great apes
• When do the corvans evolve?

About the corvans

Corvans are a species of giant flightless birds (descended from present-day ravens) who use language and manipulate tools with their beaks and tongues, dextrous feet and adapted wings. They speak using their highly developed syrinxes.

They're just small enough to glide and fly short distances while carrying objects. Their leg muscles thickened because of a need to carry light cargo.

Corvans invented wheels shortly after they evolved and then spread all over the world in just a few millennia.

Vocal language

Corvan spoken language uses both the syrinx and the tongue. Since they have no lips and no teeth they cannot make labial or dental sounds. However, they can do a lot with their syrinxes and even produce two vocal tones simultaneously.

• non-tonal languages
• monotonal languages
• bitonal languages
  • some languages use simple JI ratios as suprasegmental phonemes

Sign language

Corvan sign languages mainly use tongue, wings, beaks, and feet. Deaf corvans are almost always congenitally deaf; it is very rare for a corvan to become deaf later in life, as avian cochleae are self-repairing.

Music

Like human music, corvan music displays enormous diversity. One difference is that they favor higher registers than humans, because the corvan hearing range is higher). Many corvan cultures do not consider simple dyadic harmony or JI-based harmony to be musical per se, any more than speakers of human tonal languages consider their language to be musical. Particularly, speakers of the bitonal language [????] have evolved an impressive Zheanism-like musical tradition utilizing extended high-overtone harmony, various JI colorings of the intervals used in speech, and extremely precise vocal control.