Early Moonshine languages

The Proto-Moonshine people broke away from their parent empire, the Crystals, in the year 3958.

Background

The Crystals originated in the tropics of Amade, tracing their roots to the 1500s, before the rise of true party politics. They had no distinct language, speaking the languages of their home nations within the Star Empire.

The Crystals conquered the dark-skinned aboriginals of Baeba Swamp in the year 3370, introducing them to the Crystal homeland language, Trunkwater. These aboriginals had originally been favorable towards nearby Dreamland, but when those aboriginals who supported Dreamland fled into Dreamland for safety, they were turned back by the Dreamers, and so the aboriginals submitted to Crystal rule with little bloodshed.

Eventually the Crystals ruled an empire stretching for thousands of miles, and including both Baeba Swamp and their original homeland in Amade. They spread their language throughout this entire territory and even to a few areas outside their territory. The proto-Moonshine people thus spoke the same language as the Crystals in Baeba Swamp.

In the 4100s, the Leapers defeated the Crystals and an alliance of third parties which had come to rule areas in and around Baeba Swamp. The Leaper language became the official language of Baeba Swamp. The Leapers briefly controlled much of the Crystals' remaining territory as well, but were pushed out by the various other armies fighting for control; by this time, an entirely new power called the Thunder Empire had come and gone, and because the climate had warmed, the Thunder territory was the most important prize for these many armies.

The proto-Moonshine culture broke away from the Crystals in 3958, and though their language was Crystal (Trunkwater), many Moonshines also spoke the Leaper language for diplomatic purposes. The Moonshines migrated through Thunder territory and reached the polar regions as a fully bilingual population.

Education and diplomacy

The founding Crystals had opposed the very idea of education on principle, preferring to put children to work as soon as they could get around on two feet. Although the Crystals continued to practice child labor throughout their existence, in later generations the concept of children's work incorporated more and more educational concepts. For example, children would be paid modest a sum of money for studying and passing an academic test. Though not all Crystals studied linguistics, it soon became common for Crystals to study and achieve fluency in the rival Leaper language, spoken in the rival nation of AlphaLeap, which was officially part of the Crystal Empire but had for hundreds of years wielded sufficient economic power to disobey the Crystals' laws.

Star Empire Crystal (1900) to Middlesex Baeba Crystal (3370)

Men and women spoke separate idiolects, and the rate of change was very slow, as the men's and women's speech registers held each other back. The shared language can be called Middlesex in the literal sense of a language intermediate between men's and women's speech, but no adults actually spoke in such a manner; this was an abstract form of the language used for written communication.

1. The voiceless fricatives h hʷ shifted to x h.
2. The fricatives d dʷ ž shifted to r w y.
3. Then the postalveolar fricative š (including underlying /sʲ/) shifted to s. This change operated on the surface level, meaning that, for example, men's realization of /si/ was still [si], not [sʲi] as one would expect from the pattern set by the stops.
4. The consonant clusters ll nn, which occurred primarily in loanwords, shifted to ḷ ṇ.
5. The labialized coronals nʷ lʷ shifted to ṇ ḷ.
6. The nasals mʷ ŋʷ shifted to m̄ ŋ̄.

Both men and women had a three-vowel surface inventory of /a i u/, but because they had shifted the inherited /a e i o u/ to three vowels in different ways, none of the vowel changes were part of the shared language, and thus none were represented in the orthography. And because the consonant changes were all unconditional, the parent language spellings were all still understandable to the Crystals, and all changes in the preceding 1500 years could be attributed to spelling. Thus Crystal scholars sometimes considered their language to have been unchanged for the preceding 1900 years.