The dark past of the Faithful Ones

Well, the ancestors of the Faithful Ones.  After they got the Faith,
they *never* did anything wrong, of course!  ;-)

Yes, I realize that cross-posting is a no-no, but since this is also
describes the origin of a conlang I'm about to describe on conlang, I
felt I should post this there too.

Anyhoo, on to their dark past.  Throw out that timeline I gave you.
They weren't the first inhabitants of their homeland.  They were
invadors.  Long ago, a different people lived there, the Qla'e-sa, a
literate, sophisticated people.  Then, invadors (all female) from the
north came in.  They overwhelmed the unprepared Qla'e-sa.  Most of the
females were killed or scattered.  Those who remained were enslaved.  As
was their practice for Life-Slaves, their sixth digit was cut off.
Their captors planned to sterilize every one of them (as is also the
practice for Life-Slaves) with OD's of the Root of Life (a
contraceptive).  Not enough existed to overdose all of them, so they had
to trade for more.  While they were gathering enough, some escaped, and
their descendants proudly bore the mark of Five Fingers as a show of
defiance (these are the ancestors of the mysterious Five-Fingered Ones I
described earlier).

Now, the males were spared.  After all, males were needed for them to
survive long term!  The males spoke Qla'e-ni.  Qla'e-ni was an isolating
language with a fairly large number of phonemes.  The males who joined
them from the ancestors of the Faithful Ones, acquired their language.
However, over the generations, the language was increasingly affected by
Watya'i'sa in all but phonology and vocabulary, which they have proudly
preserved.  It is now essentially a relexification of Watya'i'sa.
There's a few differences, like the use of case-PREFIXES instead of
SUFFIXES (altho some dialects have moved the prefixes to the end).
--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
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