User:IlL/Spare pages 1/77

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A placeholder for a future Earth setting where humans have gone extinct and crows 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
  • The corvins evolve 3-4 million years after our extinction

About the corvins

Corvins (Corvus sapiens) are a species of giant flightless descendants of New Caledonian crows who use language and manipulate tools with their beaks, tongues, and feet. (Though calling a corvin a "crow" is often an insult like calling a human a monkey or a Neanderthal.) They speak using their highly developed syrinxes.

Birds similar to our modern crows and ravens still exist.

Anatomy

They lost flight and arms with 2/3-fingered "crab-claw" hands reevolved from wings

They don't see UV that well (VS not UVS). Their hearing range is similar to ours.

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 (such as owls and eagle descendants) are regarded with much more disgust and are associated with evil. Like in human culture some apex predators are commonly used as symbols of power.

Storytelling

Common tropes:

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

Language

Corvins tend to use base-6 numerals, since they have three toes on their feet.

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, or rounded vowels. However, they can produce vowel front/backness and height and make creaky, harsh, modal, breathy and nasal, and high frequency colored voices. They can do a lot with their syrinxes and even produce two vocal tones simultaneously.1

  • non-tonal languages
  • monotonal languages
  • bitonal languages
    • one language uses the harmonic series intervals 4/4 ... 7/4 as suprasegmental phonemes

What's their equivalent to mama and papa? (kąką/'ą'ą)

How harmonic are their vocal tracts?

Sign language

Corvin sign languages mainly use tongue, wings, beaks, and feet.

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).

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 corvin 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), in addition to the usual purpose of feeding their young.
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