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 by climate change -- how would climate change 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 for obvious reasons.) They speak using their highly developed syrinxes.

Anatomy

Their wings are brightly colored and are colored differently for males and females.

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.

Corvin-specific grammaticalization paths

• feet/beak/tongue: manipulate, handy, dextrous; agent
• wing: display
  • "wingflapper": someone who toots their own horn, is arrogant
• throat: language, speaking

Society

Gender

Corvin males and females (we'll usually use the terms "men" and "women") don't differ as much as human men and women. This extends to common occupational roles as well, as mothers aren't as bound to their offspring as much as in humans. Patriarchy historically wasn't as much of a thing either, as most factors that made human women vulnerable (such as pregnancy) are non-existent.

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.

Other animals

• [Unnamed mammal species] live in the tropical rainforests of ___ and are the only mammals in Ravenverse whose females lactate as a form of sexual gift-giving and display (this trait evolved through sexual selection).