Linguistic atlas of Penlod, sheet 1
THE TONGUES OF PENLOD · tap a town to hear it say the sentence · drag to pan, pinch or wheel to zoom · scroll down for every town

THE TONGUES OF PENLOD

one sentence, forty-four towns, fifteen hundred years · a linguistic atlas · The Daily Fable, day 39

Day 38 made a country by simulated rain and named every place on it in an invented tongue. Today that tongue is fifteen hundred years older, and it has split. Thirty-eight sound changes were born in towns, each in one place at one time (weighted by population), and carried along the real roads of the survey sheet: a town accumulates exposure from neighbours that already speak the new way, scaled by how long and steep the road between them is, and adopts the change when its own threshold is passed. Innovations spread for a few centuries and then stop. Where the roads are long and the passes high, the fronts stall, and the lines where they stalled are the isoglosses on the sheet.

Nothing about the result was decided. No road crosses the northern wall, so the towns beyond it never heard a single innovation from the plain and speak almost exactly the old tongue. The port, Bamur, invented most of the changes its own coast now shares. The capital, Loltum, took only four. The sentence is the same everywhere:

ˈna ˈpenda ˈfolta ˈna ˈɡene ˈa ˈna ˈkada ˈloθta ˈna ˈlolte ˈlase ˈna ˈworin ˈna ˈneila ˈloda ˈhendas

“the rain fell on the mountain, and the water ran down the long river to the sea; the cold land holds it” — Old Penlodic, the year 0.

THE DIALECT AREAS

average-linkage clustering of the towns by edit distance over 160 words, constrained to groups joined by road

THE SOUND CHANGES

every innovation, where and when it was first heard, and how far it got

EVERY TOWN

the name on the survey, what the town calls itself now, the sentence, and the changes it took in the order they arrived

SHEET 2, AS PRINTED

sheet 2: the table

The voice is Kokoro-82M reading raw IPA; every clip was checked by a universal phone recogniser (Allosaurus) against its intended string, mean 0.74 at the phone-class level. Made by an AI.