So, it's been a few months hasn't it? We had to put Veranda on hold for a bit as we had this work become a priority, so we redirected all our efforts to it.
Requiem from Rebellion is an original doujin by author Jam Ouji. It's been completed since 2018 and available on the author's Pixiv since 2018 (can't link it because... reasons).
As our esteemed translator mentions below, TFO originally worked on chapter 1 of this saga. However we decided to redo it for consistency and also do the remaining 3 chapters so this can finally be available online. Now Requiem for Rebellion is complete!
TRIGGER WANING: This work contains scenes of GORE
I leave you with a few words from our translator for this one, please enjoy both.
Hello again, buenos días a todos, it's your boy una estrella una luz tenue back at it again and worse than ever before, here with another release for you all. A few months ago it was revealed to me in a vision, in a dream, the existence of a most peculiar book, John Asher Dunn's A Tsimshian Proto-Indo-European Comparative Lexicon. The history of macrofamilies proposed for the indigenous languages of the Americas based on the most tenuous of evidence is a rich one indeed, but this one was on a completely different level. I immediately knew I needed to possess this book. Amazingly it was even for sale on amazon (only the second strangest amazon find I've come across in recent years, the first being both volumes of the Simoun novelization). It's apparently printed on demand by amazon based on the print date on my copy, so perhaps not that strange after all. In any case, my copy arrived and unfortunately friends, I don't think our boy John has convinced me we'll need to update the Indo-European family tree any time soon.
As one might expect from these kinds of proposals, no reconstruction of a proto-language is attempted, no systematic sound correspondences are given, the semantic links between proposed cognates are basically on the level of folk etymologies, and no attempt at explaining the vast grammatical difference between Tsimshianic and IE is given. Even the Altaic mandem at least had some kind of vague typological similarities to lend plausibility to their proposal. There are some "sound correspondences" given, which consist of a kind of many to many mapping between PIE phonemes and some sort of proposed pan-Tsimshianic phonological inventory? This brings us to our first problem: Dunn's comparative Tsimshian(ic) forms consist entirely of words from modern day Tsimshianic languages, mostly Coast Tsimshian, the language with which he is most familiar, and no attempt is made to reconstruct a proto-Tsimshianic or even proto-Maritime-Tsimshianic etymon with which to compare to the PIE etymons (Marie-Lucie Tarpent would cry if she saw this book). Although Dunn acknowledge the other Tsimshianic languages and sometimes provides forms in his comparative entries for comparison from them, the headwords and the forms used to compare with PIE are invariably from Coast Tsimshianic, and many entries lack forms in any other Tsimshianic languages. This is especially problematic as Coast Tsimshian in particular is known to be somewhat more innovative than the Interior languages (Nisgha'a and Gitxsan) especially with respect to its consonants, a fact which Dunn seems to acknowledge as well given the wide array of "Tsimshian" consonants which can apparently correspond to a given PIE consonant.
Dunn is also noncommittal about the exact reconstruction of PIE he bases his comparisons off of, citing reconstructed etymons from both Julius Pokorny and Calvert Watkins, which is kinda disappointing considering he could have gone with some version of the glottalic theory involving ejectives which would if nothing else provide neat, phonologically plausible correspondences with the Tsimshianic glottalized obstruent series. Instead, the glottalized series including resonants are seemingly not even acknowledged as phonemic by Dunn, with the Tsimshianic side of the many to many correspondence containing only the plain series. The glottalized series seem to be considered either non-phonemic or entirely transparently derivable from sequences of plain consonants and the glottal stop. While glottalization in Tsimshianic languages is in many cases somewhat "mobile" and transparently derived from a sequence of a plain consonant and glottal stop, and plain consonants do regularly alternate with their glottalized counterparts in parts of the morphology (e.g. deglottalization of C2 in Nisgha'a full reduplicative plural formation) the glottalized series are clearly synchronically phonemic in all modern Tsimshianic languages and can likely be reconstructed for proto-Tsimshianic (Tarpent, 1977). Worse yet and in typical fashion, Dunn doesn't even follow through with this non-phonemic analysis of the glottal series, and in most cases of headwords containing glottalized consonants, the requisite glottal stop from which the glottal feature is supposed to be derived seems to simply appear out of thin air.
There's also no real systematic attempt at linking the PIE and Tsimshianic vowel inventories at all, although Dunn does vaguely propose that the PIE laryngeal series colors surrounding vowels and directs the reader to a paper published only 2 years before his passing in which he purports to outline the correspondences in more detail. Why he chose to leave this information out of a literal book length attempt to prove his theory baffles me.
Anyway, that's all for the main update of this post. Honestly a huge travesty that this book is so easily available on the internet and not so much more serious scholarship like Paul Kroeber's certified hood classic The Salish Language Family: Reconstructing Syntax which remains out of print to this day (if anyone reading this happens to have a copy (what are you doing here?), please hit me up in the comments, I will pay good money for this book). With the serious business out of the way, we also have a new release for you: Jam Ouji's Requiem for Rebellion. This release includes all four chapters. While the first chapter has already been translated, we decided to retranslate it from scratch both for consistency and because the first translation by our friends over at TFO was a retranslation of a Chinese translatiion.
Hope you enjoy it!
See you next time!
