K E Y   A S P E C T S

CONTENTS

Okay so this is where the major/common shared aspects of Sovskovan culture will go. naturally (that's like, what the heading says). something something Sovskova is big and has several different major cultural groups and different peoples and etc etc (excuse for me to do what i want etc etc) but these are aspects that either are very very commonly shared throughout all regions of Sovskova (to the point theyre seen as pretty core parts of the shared identity).

Another thing to note is that culture is not static--every aspect here is the result of years of living, changing people and may not exist in same detail a thousand years ago. in other words, these aspects specifically pertain to present-day Sovskova unless specified.

GENDER, SEX, & SEXUALITY

okay so normally this is like 4D gender chess but im still figuring some things out so here's the really brief basics

ignoring the cosmology of their genders n stuff (i said im still figuring it okay sowwy) they essentially have 7 main genders. yeah theyre all based on woman/man but to them these are each their own gender category so therefore 7 genders (7 minimum, that is. can change depending on the local culture naturally)

6 of the 7 genders can be found on the cosmological wheel. half are considered "women" and the other half are considered "men," and each half has their own transitional, stagnant, and changed genders. these three terms are mainly related to spiritual and ritual stuff so uhhhh just ignore those for now. the basic thing you want to know is that Sovskovan culture has a belief in traditional gender roles that assign gender (both like the culture concept and the spiritual energy) to tasks n stuff. for example, open-water fishing is masculine and weaving is feminine, or protecting is masculine and teaching is feminine. everything sorta has as assigned fem/masc alignment which is important because the world is spiritual and gender is a spiritual energy and keeping one's spiritual energies in balance is important for one's health--which means if youre feeling bad, then your gender might be out of wack! from these beliefs, when then have this fuckass chart (BRING IN THE GENDER CHART!!!)

	WOMAN	MAN
TRANSITION	masculine woman	feminine man
STAGNANCY	feminine woman	masculine man
CHANGE	changed woman	changed man
SECRET 7TH THING	secret 7th thing

transitional genders - genders that fulfill the traditional roles of the "opposite" gender; so women who take up traditionally masculine roles/appearances/traits/etc and men who take up traditionally feminine roles/appearances/traits/etc. Ksunya, for example, is a woman but she sports a masculine facial tattoo and prefers traditionally masculine things such as... pants... and uhhhh open-water fishing.

stagnant genders - genders that fulfill the traditional roles of their gender; women who take up traditionally feminine roles/appearances/traits/etc and men who take up traditionally masculine roles/appearances/traits/etc. Yelenovna, for example, is a woman who prefers traditionally feminine things such like. um. (computer quick what do women like) pretty dresses and (quick gimme another) economy (yeah that's good).

changed genders - genders that are "opposite" of what the person was born as; women who were born as men and decided to take up the role of a woman, and men who were born as women and decided to take up the role of a man. technically these genders can also be fem or masc but the fact that you straight up changed your whole ass gender is just so epic it's its own category. maybe. look i know it's kinda a weird setup but i had to make 6 genders that were symmetrical and that's the best i got so far okay

secret 7th thing - thinking about... "both-gender" as a translation... chat what do we think? this category is for people who take up the feminine, masculine, woman, and man all at the same time. maybe theyre 50/50, maybe theyre 100% but they only choose one at a time. i dont know!!!!!!! i call it secret 7th thing cause it's funny. i also like to call it "seventh gender" in the way people say "third gender." i think intersex people can also fall under here unless they specifically are sticking with one gender and then theyd get categorized into the above ones

now you may have read this and were like. what. what do you mean boys go to jupiter to go open-water fishing and girls go to college for pretty dresses and econ degrees??? well you see, every society has these funny unconscious gender roles as well as people who unconsciously cross them everyday. gardening is totally a woman thing. everyone in the village knows this. women garden and the men hunt. but what about the guy who's gardening? oh he's just helping his wife. people loooove categories but real life is a lot more fluid.

ksunya who is very comfortable in her masculine woman identity loves helping her mother with weaving and cooking. yelenovna calls upon masculine energy for leadership and governing and the thought never occurs to anyone that she's anything but a feminine woman. now of course not everyone is always clocked as what their gender actually is (maybe the guy gardening is called less of a man or assumed to simply be a woman) but like that's a whole ass other conversation. the main takeaway here is that, although their genders are describing the traditional roles they take up, neither their daily lives nor me personally are putting them into boxes. this is just me doing shit really (whatever that means)

another thing to note is that, because everything has an assigned gender and gender is a natural spiritual energy, people are expected to do whatever is best for whatever theyre doing (vague i know. sowwy). ksunya is a masc woman so she does the masc things that fit with her sense of self/spiritual wellbeing, but she also does the non-masc things since that doesnt make her any less of a masculine woman. if yelenovna asks for spiritual help on leadership, she'll get some advice in line with calling upon masculine energy, but embodying that energy doesnt make her any more masculine or feminine, it just makes her a good leader. the tl;dr is mainly: everything has an assigned gender, but that doesnt affect people's own gender (or at least, that's what it's supposed to be; naturally real life is messier but i said that's a whole other conversation so just etc etc)

LANGUAGE

oral; writing is fairly new and was only invented out of necessity; distaste for writing comes from being an outsider idea/material; writing based on wheel to lessen fears of it being material; most vodjmir are still illiterate, but Vonyova takes care of that i think

bc sovskova is so big, there are countless varieties of speech that include different sounds, letters, phonotactics, and etc etc so here's just "standard sovskovan"

ALPHABET AND TRANSLITERATION

in the grand scheme of things, writing is a fairly recent invention for Sovskova and its creation dates to around the establishment of the tsardom (so about 1000 years before the main story). in fact, many societies in Sovskova are still nonliterate (although whether that is by choice or from lack of accessible education depends on the area). the rather recent invention comes from both not needing a written language for most of the region's history (traditionally there has been lots of emphasis on oral tradition or other physical ways of recording and communication) as well as a cultural aversion to written word. to many Sovskovans, written language risks grounding their being in the physical world and dampening their connection with the spiritual; this belief is why many shamans (including vodjmir) are illiterate and wish to keep it that way (although then you run into the question of should one learn to read/write to help fight oppression; this is an ongoing debate within many communities). Writing has also been associated with Fabaster so naturally a some people are like euuughh grody (although this view has diminished overtime and is mostly just the spiritual argument now).

The invention of writing came about when the first rulers of Sovskova believed it would be necessary (or at least very beneficial) for the long-term survival of the young tsardom. Knowing the aversion to it, they employed monks and gave them instructions to create a writing system based on some aspect of pan-Sovskovan spiritual beliefs in hopes that such a characteristic would make more people open to adopting it. The monks decided to create an alphabet where all letters could fit along the lines of the cosmological wheel—hence the very angular font style used within religious texts (i dont have any images atm but if you look in the header you can see "Sovskova" written in a rounded, present-day font). In the present day, the alphabet is used all across Sovskova (albeit with a few letter changes here and there for different language varieties). Like mentioned, many places still don't use it as they are nonliterate, but the alphabet it still very widespread and is the main (if not the only) alphabet used and/or seen in literate places.

okay so i don't have the actual Sovskovan letters in here but i needed a placeholder so i just put in some Cyrillic <3 also included letters are subject to change whenever i actually sit down and really think about exactly which sounds i want. although i will say that in lore the monks who created the alphabet tried to set it up so that more sounds could be added easily, so maybe this is a simple "standard" alphabet and there's an acknowledgement that there are more letters/sounds not included

LETTER	SOUND	TRANSLITERATION
(А)	/a/	a
(У)	/u/	u
(И)	/i/	i
(О)	/o/	o
(Э)	/ɛ/	e
(Й, Ь, и т.д.)	/j/, /◌ʲ/	y, j^[1]
(П)	/p/	p
(Б)	/b/	b
(Ф)	/f/	f
(В)	/v/	v
(Т)	/t/	t
(Д)	/d/	d
(С)	/s/	s
(З)	/z/	z
(Ш)	/ʃ/	sh
(Ж)	/ʒ/	zh
(К)	/k/	k
(Г)	/g/	g
(Х)	/x/	kh
(Ҕ)	/ɣ/	gh
(Ӄ)	/q/	q
(fark)	/ɢ/	qh
(Ц)	/t͡s/	ts
(М)	/m/	m
(Н)	/n/	n
(Р)	/r/	r
(Л)	/l/	l

1. In Sovskovan script, /j/ and /◌ʲ/ are represented by the same letter. In Latin script, /j/ is ⟨y⟩ and /◌ʲ/ is ⟨j⟩ to try and prevent ⟨y⟩ being read as a vowel. In other words, ⟨y⟩ is always attached to the following vowel as /j/ and ⟨j⟩ is denoting the palatalization of the consonant before it. For example, Igyotska is pronounced ih-gYOts-ka and not ih-gee-ots-ka (the latter assuming that ⟨y⟩ is being pronounced as /i/). Another example is vodjmir; the ⟨j⟩ is denoting the palatalization of /d/. Now you may ask, "Okay well why didn't you just make them both ⟨j⟩?" Well you see uhhhhhhhhh i didnt wanna

PRONUNCIATION & PHONOTACTICS

not gonna lie a lot of this is just russian since im studying it. you cant blame me. please dont blame me.

the stress can be anywhere because sovskovan hates you. to denote stress in the latin alphabet, i use an accent mark. unstressed vowels are "halved". but also sometimes i just say whatever im ngl. phonotactics are also whatever. sometimes a word looks like the language needs a syllabary. othertimes it's polish. whatever idk

Quick crash course for the "halved" thing (YES i stole it from Russian i said dont blame me): unstressed vowels (aka vowels that aren't part of the primary stressed syllable of a word) become "halved" or reduced in speech. If you look up the actual Russian IPA for this, it's a bit messy, so this will be a very very very simplified version just for the sake of some basic understanding.

When stressed, pronounce vowels fully; /a/ is still /a/, /i/ is still /i/, /u/ is still /u/ etc etc. When NOT stressed...

/a/ — "ah" becomes more like "uh" (or sometimes "ih" if /ja/)
/ɛ/ — "eh" either stays "eh" or becomes more like "ih"
/i/ — "ee" becomes more like "ih"
/o/ — oh" may stay like "oh" or become more like "uh"
/u/ — "oo" also sorta becomes more like "uh"

Some quick examples (and for some reasons when I add the accent marks they end up to the right of the letter so there are none sowwy; just refer to the capital letters in the pronunciation for where the stress is):

спасибо — transliterated "spasibo" but pronounced spah-SEE-buh and NOT spah-see-boh
vodjmir is pronounced VODJ-mihr and not vodj-meer
Yuka is pronounced YOO-kuh and not yoo-ka

WAIT one more thing: I also like to use voiced and unvoiced consonant pairs like Russian does too. 1) if a voiced consonant is follow by an unvoiced consonant, it becomes unvoiced; if an unvoiced consonant if followed by a voiced consonant, it becomes voiced. 2) if a voiced consonant is at the end of a word, it becomes unvoiced

четверг — transliterated "chetverg" but pronounced cheht-VEHRK and NOT cheht-vehrg (the ⟨g⟩ becomes /k/)
Sovskova is pronounced sahf-SKOH-vuh and not sohv-skoh-vah (the ⟨v⟩ becomes /f/)

RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

"religion" hehe

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway. Because bees don't care what humans think is impossible. According to all known laws of

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

i have NO idea how to tackle this section so um. let's just provide some context for stuff i bring up a bunch

vodjmir - the ultimate religious authority of Sovskova; a special type of shaman who is appointed by the Great White Hawk Spirit himself and whose guiding spirit is his daughter, Vonyova; only one person can hold the title of vodjmir at a time; more info here

tsaritsa/tsar - the supreme ruler of Sovskova; the spouse is referred to as the tsaritsa consort/tsar consort unless they have a specific title for something else

tsesarevna/tsesarevich - the heir apparent of Sovskova; typically the eldest child of tsaritsa/tsar

tsarevna/tsarevich - a child of the tsaritsa/tsar who is not the heir apparent; can be multiple as it applies to each of their children

high queen/high king - title right below tsaritsa/tsar; no specific set of duties other than ruling over others while still answering to the tsaritsa/tsar; honestly this might just be a placeholder cause i didnt know what title to give Vadim so idk <3

note for future ideas to cover/add: sociopolitical? triangle of tsaritsa/tsar and so on, but vodjmir off to the side. defs of each. ties with gender roles?