User:IlL/Spare pages 1/77

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

Background

  • Humans wiped out by climate change -- how would this change the ravens? Would they not have black feathers anymore?
  • An asteroid wipes out the remaining great apes
  • When do the corvins evolve?

About the corvins

Corvins are a species of giant flightless ravens who use language and manipulate tools with their beaks, tongues, and feet. (Though calling a corvin a "raven" is often an insult.) They speak using their highly developed syrinxes. Their wings are brightly colored.

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

Tools

Corvin tools often have handles so they can be picked up and carried with corvin beaks or tongues. As they can't carry heavier loads by themselves, they rely on carts, vehicles, pockets or bags for carrying cargo. Corvins invented wheels shortly after they evolved and then spread all over the world in just a few millennia.

Since corvin feet are almost as dextrous as human hands, computer technology often uses input devices and touchscreens placed on the ground.

Corvins don't have to rely as much on central vision; from using beaks and tongues their proprioception (for example sensing and predicting their own position in space) is better than humans.

Psychology

Corvins are hardwired to fear large land predators and certain poisonous animals that live on land, and species that prey on corvin 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)

Language

Vocal language

Corvin 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 approximate simple JI ratios as suprasegmental phonemes

Sign language

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

Common cognitive metaphors

  • feet/beak/tongue: manipulate, handy, dextrous
  • throat: language

Music

Like human music, corvin 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 corvin hearing is about an octave higher.

Many corvin 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.

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