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 ravens who use language and manipulate tools with their beaks, tongues, and feet. (Though calling a corvan a "raven" is often an insult.) They speak using their highly developed syrinxes.

They're just small enough to glide and lift objects for a short distance with their legs. 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.

Psychology

Corvans are hardwired to fear large land predators and certain poisonous animals that live on land, and species that prey on corvan eggs are regarded with much more disgust. Like in human culture some apex predators are commonly used as symbols of power.

Storytelling

Common tropes:

• Giant ape-like or humanoid villains (after their archaeology discovers human civilization)

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 and their instruments have similar basic mechanisms (strings, winds, membranophones and idiophones). One difference is that they place more emphasis on timbre than humans, since the upper limit of corvan hearing range is about an octave higher.

Many corvan cultures do not consider simple dyadic harmony or low-complexity-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.

In other musical cultures, counterpoint is a staple; in one culture, street singers show off their 2-part counterpoint skills.