Icecap

Moonshine is a language spoken mostly in cold climates north of Poswob territory. Throughout its history, it has been a very rapidly changing language, in both grammar and phonology, such that speakers at one time could not understand texts written 200 years earlier. For example, Diʕìləs tĭniku "doll" becomes Poswa tinik, Pabappa timpi, Sakhi tiniu, and Moonshine č. Another example is Diʕìləs luməs "sunshine" becomes Poswa rumus, Sakhi lump, and Moonshine lut, though not all preserve the meaning. (This word disappeared in Pabappa.)

Note that PMS cannot have the Khulls /ēC/ > /eØ/ declension, because only in mainline Khulls does the /e/ vowel have two origins. For example, where Khulls has mēl "chalk", genitive meṡ, PMS can only have mēl ~ malis.

Proto-Moonshine to Late Moonshine (6800)

The proto-Moonshine language began with a consonant inventory of:

Rounded bilabials:      pʷ  mʷ          w
Plain bilabials:        p   m               b
Alveolars:              t   n   s   z   l   r
Palataloids:            č   ň   š   ž   y   ǯ
Velars:                 k   ŋ   h   g
Labiovelars:            kʷ  ŋʷ  hʷ  gʷ

The vowel /e/ had a limited distribution, and could be analyzed as /ai/. This is why it does not contract the way /o/ does.

Prenasals may have existed in word-initial position, unlike Khulls. e.g. /mpʷà/ "house" vs Khulls pà.

1. The clusters mm nn ŋŋ shifted to m n ŋ and lengthened the preceding vowel.

   this may lead to unstressed longs, unknown in Khulls, which could survive vowel deletion.

2. Syllabic consonants bordered by vowels became normal.
3. Unstressed syllable-final s shifted to h.
4. All remaining syllabic consonants (bounded by consonants) became normal.
5. The short vowels o ò shifted to a à.
6. Unaccented a (including earlier /o/) became ʕ, the vowel separator. Then ʕh shifted to h (often spelled /ʔ/). Unaccented u, which occurred only after labialized consonants, disappeared.
7. Unaccented e i shifted to ʲ . Thus, all words became monosyllabic.

   this was originally split aeo vs i

8. r>ř.
9. w>r.
10. The rising tone vowels á é í ó ú shifted to ā ē ī ō ū.

    This was originally further down and more destructive.

11. Doubled consonants simplified to singles and caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high (à or á).
12. Any consonant before a nasal disappeared and lengthened the preceding vowel. If the sound had been voiceless, it caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high rising (á). If it had been voiced, it caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high falling (ā).
13. Nonpalatalized alveolar consonants became velarized (not shown in the orthography).
14. The long vowel ō changed to o.
15. Before a palatalized consonant in a closed syllable, the short vowels a e i o u became e e i e i respectively.

    originally had /ē i ī i ī/

16. Before a labialized consonant in a closed syllable, the short vowels a e i o u became o o u o u respectively.

    originally had /ō u ū u ū/

17. The consonant clusters řp řt became lp lt in all positions.
18. Before front vowels, k g ŋ shifted to č ǯ ň.
19. A labial following any posttonic consonant disappeared to Ø. That is, /ātp/ > /āt/. (This assumes that any labialization had already bled into the preceding consonant. If not, rounded bilabials generated /ʷ/ and then disappeared.)
20. Before a vowel, unaccented a e i shifted to the glide ʲ. Unaccented o u became ʷ.
21. as a coda, řl>l.
22. The palatalized labials pʲ bʲ mʲ became the labiodental affricates ṗ ḅ ṃ (pronounced /pf bv mv/) in all positions. Meanwhile the dentals fʲ vʲ changed to f v.
23. The labialized alveolars tʷ dʷ sʷ zʷ nʷ became the dentals ṭ ḍ ṣ ẓ ṇ in all positions.
24. The alveolars tʲ dʲ sʲ zʲ nʲ became the postalveolars č ǯ š ž ň in all positions.

    This shift originally had the palatals shifting to dentals and the labialized ones remaining in place. Note, however, that the palatals mostly shift back even so.

25. Then lʲ řʲ became j ř.
26. The dorsals kʲ hʲ rʲ became the palatals č š j in all positions.
27. The labialized postalveolar consonants čʷ ǯʷ šʷ žʷ ňʷ became delabialized.
28. The palatal consonants č ǯ š ž ň became c ʒ s z n in all positions.
29. The labialized alveolar approximant lʷ shifted to w.
30. The dorsals kʷ hʷ rʷ became w before a consonant, while also lengthening the preceding vowel.
31. The labiodentals ṗ ḅ ṃʰ ṃ and the dentals ṭ ḍ ṇʰ ṇ became c ʒ ns nz in word-final position.

    POSSIBLY SKIP THIS, since other "new" consonants will be just as common in final position.

32. The affricates ṗ ḅ ṃʰ ṃ ṭ ḍ ṇʰ ṇ became f v f v ṣ ẓ ṣ ẓ in initial position and after a consonant.
33. The prenasals mpʷ mp mṗ nṭ nt nč ŋk, and their voiced counterparts, shifted to bʷ b ḅ ḍ ʒ ǯ g in all positions.
34. Nasals disappeared before a fricative.
35. Any š before a nasal changed to ž and the nasal changed into a voiced stop.
36. The velar stops k g were fronted to č ǯ unless they occurred in a cluster after another consonant and before a o u.
37. Labialization was lost on all consonants.
38. The clusters šb and bš were devoiced to šp and pš respectively.
39. The clusters žp and pž became žb and bž respectively.
40. Velar stops in accented syllables before another syllable beginning in a velar were fronted to postalveolar affricates before front vowels, and otherwise to alveolar stops.
41. Alveolar stops in accented syllables before another syllable beginning in an alveolar became postalveolar affricates.
42. A bilabial sound in an accented syllable before a syllable beginning in a labiodental sound became labiodental. A labiodental sound in an accented syllable before a syllable beginning in a bilabial became bilabial.
43. Sonority hierarchy shifts: word-initial /hp/ > /kw/, etc.
44. After a vowel, the consonant clusters wt wd merged as d. If after /u/ or /o/, that vowel became long.
45. After a vowel, the consonant clusters gč gǯ changed to ġ.

Thus the final consonant inventory was

Bilabials:          p   b   m   ḟ   w
Labiodentals:       ṗ   ḅ   ṃ   f   v
Dentals:            ṭ   ḍ   ṇ   ṣ   ẓ   ḷ
Alveolars:          t   d   n   s   z   l   ř   c   ʒ
Postalveolars:              ň   š   ž           č   ǯ
Palatals:                       ś   y
Velars:             k   ġ   ŋ   h   g   r

previously had " #An old method of deriving verbs from nouns by truncating the word after the first vowel, and lengthening that vowel if there was any missing info began to take over now. Although this was not a true sound change, it affected the general language more than any of the sound changes on the list. "

Phonology

Moonshine has a large phonology with with about 40 consonants, 5 vowels, and a strong tone system with contrasts on every syllable and weak tonal sandhi.

Consonants

The consonants /c ʒ/ are in IPA /ts dz/, and are considered phonemic only because they would otherwise violate the sonority hierarchy because they can occur at the ends of words where one would otherwise expect just /t d/. The stops /ṗ ḅ ṭ ḍ k ġ/ are not distinguished from affricates /ṗf ḅv ṭṣ ḍẓ kh ġg/ at all, however, so given that /č ǯ/ exist without homorganic stops it could be said that /c ʒ/ are just as basic to the phonology as /t d/ are. (The true bilabial stops are indeed distinguished from affricates, but only because the bilabial fricatives have [w] as an allophone after a stop.)

The palatal approximant is placed with the postalveolar row by tradition, but is a true palatal.

Romanization of consonants

Note that the dot diacritic has several unrelated meanings: it can indicate a (labio)dental pronunciation, as with ṗ ḅ ṭ ḍ ṣ ẓ ṇ ḷ; a bilabial one, as with ḟ ṿ, or a simple stop as opposed to a fricative, as with ġ. Additionally, although the caron marks a postalveolar pronunciation on š ž č ǯ (and ň if this spelling is substituted for ñ), it marks an alveolar trill when used on ř.

Laryngeal consonants

The Moonshine alphabet contains two more consonant symbols: /ʔ/ and /ʕ/, which are both silent. However, /ʔ/ makes the previous consonant voiceless; thus Tòdʔřóm (the name of a state) is pronounced as if spelled Tòtřóm. The /ʕ/ is silent and has no effect at all on surrounding consonants, but both symbols mark places where vowels used to be and sometimes reappear in conjugations. For example, ʕd "sun" is pronounced /d/, but when it takes inflections, they go before the /d/ instead of after it. In the native Moonshine alphabet, both of these are spelled with apostrophe-like symbols or with letter modifiers, but in Romanization this would lead to diacritical overload.

Because the /ʕ/ and /ʔ/ symbols originally represented vowels, and because these vowels changed into schwas before becoming silent, it could be argued that the symbols are actually vowels rather than consonants, and should have the values of /ə/ and /ə̀/ respectively; that is, a low and a high tone schwa. But Moonshine by tradition insists that its vowels must be able to occur on any of the four tones, and therefore any sound which cannot appear with all four tones is considered a consonant. This is why /j/ and the borrowed /w/ are not considered allophones of the vowels /i/ and /u/.

Approximants

The sound [w] is an allophone of the voiceless bilabial fricatives /f̣ ṿ/ after another consonant. A bare /w/ does not occur in native words but can be spelled ʕṿ, where the silent /ʕ/ shows that the following ṿ is using its post-consonantal allophone.

NOTE: /w/ might occur in native words after all, as a reflex of an earlier /lʷ/. But this would be extremely rare since mainline Khulls did /lʷ/ > /ʕʷ/ before the split, so any words with that sequence would need to have come from /lŭ/ + vowel.

The palatal approximant [j] is, similarly, spelled with letters for /ś ź/ rather than with a symbol of its own. To signify a bare /j/, which occurs in a few native words, the spelling ʕź is used.

Vowels

The vowels are cardinal IPA /a e i o u/. They become more centralized ("lax") when in a closed syllable, and because the ` tone adds a glottal stop after the vowel, all ` vowels are closed syllables and therefore lax.

Gender

IMS is notable for its extreme feminine bias, in that women and feminine objects are associated with power and success whereas males are ranked lower than some inanimate objects.

Gender can be marked up to five times on a single word: for the word itself (even if it is a verb), for the owner, for the agent (even if it is a noun), for the speaker, and for the listener.

Males are grammatically excluded from being the owner of certain feminine objects, and for others they must take an additional morpheme that corresponds to the females' morpheme for involuntary temporary ownership. However, the semantic scope of feminine nouns in IMS is actually much smaller than in related languages like Khulls because IMS underwent much less analogy.

Gender in nouns

Neuter nouns

Most nouns in IMS are neuter. IMS retains most of the neuter nouns inherited from the Gold language, whereas in the other descendants a large number of neuter nouns were shifted into the feminine and masculine genders.

There is no semantic definition of the neuter nouns because they are the category that encompasses all nouns not in the other two categories.

Feminine nouns

Most feminine nouns in IMS are semantically related to the female anatomy, although the chain of relation can be long, as any newly derived feminine noun behaves the same as the original. For example, flower blossoms are feminine because they resemble skirts, and skirts are feminine because they cover the wearer's womb.

Because of its extreme rate of sound change, most Moonshine nouns are historically compounds. IMS follows the inherited rule that the rightmost gendered morpheme in a noun determines the gender of the noun. However, the etymology of most nouns is opaque and in many cases reanalysis has taken over.

Masculine nouns

By contrast, masculine nouns have a simple rule: they end in -t. Most masculine nouns are dynamically constructed by adding this suffix to a neuter or feminine noun. The only freestanding masculine nouns in the language are terms for the male anatomy.

Speech registers

There are four speech registers: the speaker can be female or male, as can the listener. The two male speakers' registers require separate, longer forms for nearly every word, while women's speech leaves out important details when the listener is a man. There are some defective verbs; for example, there is no feminine-speaker, masculine-listener conjugation of the verb "to apologize".