Re: CHAT: Which world? Which culture?

Amanda Babcock wrote:
> Actually, one of the stranger things it seems to me is that I even *have*
> images of the speakers of my brief language sketches.  I didn't set out
> to imagine the speakers.  If I were to try to flesh out the cultures, I'm
> sure it would all go wrong and become forced and unnatural.
>
> I suppose the cultural images spontaneously generate when I write sentences
> in the language and get a mental picture of the event the sentence is
> describing.
It took me a while to get a really clear idea of the Kassi, but lately
I've been picturing a specific city, known officially in the Kassi
Empire as Kusiaft'in, and in the local dialect of the early period of
Kassi ownership as Shatsen.  The city is key to trade between the
northern and central parts of the continent, located on the southern
shore of the Kalpanian Sea, located near a key pass in the Fantasta
Mountains, and thus has traded hands several times.  In "modern" times,
it's still a major trade center with a population in the millions,
sprawling out along the coastline of the Kalpanian Sea, and up the
foothills of the Fantasta Mountains.  Its near-equatorial location also
caused it to become important as a center of space exploration.  The
population is a mixture of northern and southern ethnic types, speaking
a language of their own, descended from Classical Uatakassi, but heavily
influenced by other languages, with simplified morphology.

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