Icecap

Icecap Moonshine is a highly divergent language spoken around the year 6843 in cold climates famous for its small root vocabulary, compact morphology, and wide gap between male and female speech registers. When men are allowed to speak at all, they use a much more difficult speech register than women do, and when women speak to men, they use a speech register that omits crucial information, so men have to listen closely and think quickly whenever a woman gives them a new chore to do.

The first Moonshine speakers arose in the year 3948, and committed the Great Conspiracy, forever abolishing all male social power structures and spreading their revolution to foreign nations as well. The Moonshines prospered in their radical new society for about 150 years, whereupon a traditional male army invaded and crushed the Moonshine empire. Nevertheless, the winners of the war were unable to occupy Moonshine territory, and the Moonshines became even more feministic as they retracted into supreme isolation for the next three thousand years.

Moonshine women are much taller than their men, and it soon became unnecessary to apply social pressure to force men down to the bottom of the society; female superiority was seen as the only possible natural order, and few men even contemplated fighting back.

Although there have been other societies in which female power was even more unfairly stacked against men, the Icecap Moonshine language is notable even by comparison to these other societies for the great extent to which the social way of life has become entrenched in their language.

Scratchpad

See ht tp://w ww.frat hwiki.co m/inde x.p hp?tit le=Ice cap&old id=14 7218#Scra tchp ad for removed ideas.

No genitive case?

04:17, 13 September 2023 (PDT)

Since the genitive case is older than the noun gender system, it agrees with the gender of the speaker, not the referent. Later, this may change to agreeing with the gender of the object being referred to ("referend"?), but still not the referent. (That is, "woman's husband" would be feminine because it refers to the woman, not the man.) Thus it may be that it is not a case at all, but an adjective, a type of word that did not exist in Leaper.

Spelling

12:06, 14 January 2023 (PST)

Possibly retain the five-vowel spelling a e i o u to cover the differences between men's and women's speech. It is possible that there may need to be two e vowels, because Middlesex seems to have a different speech register variation.

Moonshine could possibly be analyzed with just two vowels.

Noun classifier suffixes

14:04, 18 August 2022 (PDT)

Because the noun classifier suffixes were formed already in Gold, it is likely that Leaper and Moonshine inherited them, and they may have a system similar to Play's setup, or perhaps something resembling Play's but also working the animate person/gender markers (which have a separate origin) into the system by making them classifiers as well.

Inherited noun classifier suffixes (Gold/Leaper forms given)

Here, the vowels are assumed to all be low-tone and unstressed, regardless of their origin. Many noun classifiers begin with /g/, which is then dropped after any consonant stem except a nasal.

• -ḳa, for objects in buildings. If even Play had a problem with this affix being two syllables instead of one, and thus not becoming a classifier, in Leaper/Moonshine the /g/ would simply be taken as an error for /ʕ/ and dleeted. Therefore this classifier is in fact valid after all.
• -Ϙ, a silent classifier indicating a human whose gender and other information is made clear by the word stem, and therefore needs no additional classifier suffix.
• -ra, the otherwise expected epicene human classifier suffix, cognate to Play -(t)a, from earlier Gold -da. Not originally a classifier, and still not one in Play.

• There may be a homophonous -ra, spelled differently in Moonshine only, that means a young boy. However this requires that Moonshine scholars were aware of the dual origins of this suffix even after the two had merged for thousands of years.

• -pɜ, possibly denoting adult women or females in general.

Gender will probably be taken over by classifiers as well, but there may be two sets: one set for people, and another for handheld objects (or perhaps objects in general) that they possess. This second set of endings replaces the classifier of the free form rather than attaching to it; this is unlike the behavior in other languages such as Play, and probably also unlike the parent language Gold.

Use of symbols

It is possible to represent the supersufficient early Moonshine alphabet in Roman letters.

The symbol ♈ can be used to mark feminine property. It is silent but by convention changes the pronunciation of certain following consonants, making /l s n/ into syllabics, turning ¤ into x (but /g/ for men), and turning /ʔ/ into /p/. The symbol is used here in part because of its resemblance to a uterus (which was used as an ideogram) and in part because of its resemblance to the gamma symbol /ɣ/. There may still be a use for ♀ but it shows up weak in some fonts.

The symbol ♃ represents the inherited "boy" gender which is almost certainly a generic human gender for both sexes and all ages by the time of proto-Moonshine. See above, as this is just homophonous with /ra/ and may not exist.

The symbol ¤ represents a former /x/ phoneme that is usually silent, and most often marks the locative case. Two symbols may be in use in Moonshine as well.

Masculine symbols

• 💮 used to mark masculine gender and several other things. It is most likely also part of the classifier suffix for clothes, which is realized as a contraction, as in Play, and therefore is written with a symbol instead of being spelled out. Pronounced by both genders, but not always in the same way. Mutates Gold (not Moonshine) a i u ə to au ʷ ə ə. The Moonshine vowels would be the same except for /u/.
• 💮₦ ~ 💮nni marks masculine gender in nouns. Here, ₦ is usually pronounced /nni/ and is thus an abbreviation for it, but it can mutate as well.

• Γ A reminder to men to pronounce any adjacent /x/ as /g/ (that is, IPA /ɣ/).
• Π A reminder to men to pronounce any adjacent /f/ as /p/.
• Ω A reminder to men to pronounce any preceding /a/ as /u/.
• ϵ A reminder to men to pronounce a short schwa-like vowel instead of silence, /a/ instead of any following /i/ (when not palatalized), and /ai/ instead of any following /ī/ (this is from unpalatalized /ī/ and from /əi/).

• Note that ϵ could be thought of as being much like the Russian hard sign ъ, because it indicates for both men and women that a following /i/ is not palatalized, with men additionally pronouncing the vowel much lower than women. All other /i/ in Moonshine is really /ʲi/ and because the palatalized form was more common, it was unmarked and the Moonshines did not need a palatalization diacritic.

Other symbols

• ¤¥ marks essive case. Pronunciation depends on the word, and the actual pronunciation might be added too.
• ¤₩ marks instrumental case. see above for pronuncation notes
• ☋ marks a passive verb. Represents a symbol that goes ON TOP of the glyph. May be ¤☋.

Moons

• 🌙🌘 will not all display properly

Flowers

• 🌹🌷 plus more treated above. these are likely confined to non-literal use

test of display quality

☌☍☈☀ ☹ ♄♅♆♇♈♉♊♋♌♍♎♏♐♑♒♓♃

⚾⚽👚👋

❤

➿➰

😔 👚👋🐟🍓🍒🍑🍏🍎🍌🍍🌻🌺

(most of these render properly on my laptop but not my desktop)

Question marker

05:18, 31 July 2022 (PDT)

Early Proto-MS likely has at least tīs, and perhaps also kṡ, in common with Play as question markers.

Goals

These are plans for a situation in which I never actually create the Moonshine language, but still write about it from the perspective of speakers of other languages.

Homophonous consonants

11:57, 18 August 2022 (PDT)

One early design goal of Moonshine that never got realized even in the 1994 draft was that it be a language that "works in written but not its spoken form". This could be created by constructing a large inventory of "virtual consonants" that in fact resolve to only about 15 to 20 distinct phonemes, but which in the written language count for much more. The speakers would simply accept this, as they would know nothing else. It would mean that written language could be considerably more compact than spoken language, but even in spoken language, certain homophones would be in common use. These would be at the phonemic level rather than the word level; that is, there could be four different m letters, and not merely four homophonous words all containing /m/.

Some of these consonants may even just be arbitrary semantic splits, where the scribes made up a new glyph and used it only in words with a certain semantic scope.

The vowel inventory would be much more difficult to handle if it had virtual sounds as well, so it is perhaps best to keep it at three vowels in both the real and virtual configurations.

Gendered possession markers

06:44, 5 July 2022 (PDT)

Inherited from MRCA ĭkə, Leaper/proto-Moonshine had a morpheme that indicated property belonging to a woman, and this particle usually did not add any syllables to its base word because of the sound changes that had taken place. Thus in a sense there were two stems for every word: a free form and a "her" form. This was likely mistaken for a classifier suffix at some point after the split of Play and Leaper. If Play had retained the affix, it would have essentially just become a vowel lengthener except after a schwa in which case it would have done nothing.

The Leaper language may not have even had 1P/2P possession markers; if it did, they are presumably the same as Play's "self" and "non-self" markers, /p/ and /s/. Play does not have a generic 3rd person possession marker, but this may be a loss from Gold.

Male property

There was originally a similar suffix denoting male property, from MRCA ŋùni, and this contracted as well, but always added at least one syllable and sometimes two to the roots it was applied to. It may be that the Moonshines simply do not use this affix, or if they do, they see it as no longer part of the grammar and therefore require an additional morpheme to indicate something owned by a man. This would likely have existed even at the Leaper stage and the speakers of both languages would have simply accepted it as an asymmetric feature of their language just as Spanish speakers accept del:de la.

It is also possible that /ŋùni/ comes to be seen as a pejorative, such that e.g. chair-ŋùni means toilet. This morpheme would still be required when used to indicate the belongings of a man, meaning that "his chair" and "his toilet" would be the same word. It is not clear whether the /ìkə/ morpheme would also evolve in the opposite direction, or if it would simply stay the same by continuing to indicate both objects that are "fit for a woman" and an object that is owned by an individual woman named in the sentence. An earlier draft of Moonshine did have such a difference, but the proto-language has taken a firmer shape now and it is difficult to imagine how the distinction could arise in the way it did.

It is very difficult to see how Leaper would evolve IE-style gender after losing its classifier prefixes, and therefore the original goal of having inherently feminine words is likely unattainable in Moonshine. The ikə/ŋuni system is the only gender that Leaper could have had, and therefore even over thousands of years also the only gender that Moonshine can have.

Pronunciation

Even in the egalitarian Leaper society, the grammar was biased towards females in some ways. There were also strict sex differences in speech habits where it could be argued that men and women were about equal after all. Moonshine may change this towards a situation in which women have the advantage in every single instance where there is a difference.

In Middlesex, men and women had different pronunciations for both vowels and consonants and the system was very complicated, such that even adults made frequent mistakes. They wrote with a script in which the correct pronunciation for both sexes was always clear, and therefore the people who made mistakes were the people who did not know how to spell, rather than people who had mislearned the rules.

Leaper did not have this feature, and Moonshine only acquired it when they absorbed the Middlesex speakers as an underclass, whom they quickly elevated to full citizenship even as they moved towards speaking Moonshine only. They borrowed the twin pronunciations directly from Middlesex, treating the Moonshine original pronunciations as feminine and therefore creating whole new phonemes just for men.

The gendered differences in pronunciation had helped keep Middlesex's phonology stable, as any change would need to be picked up simultaneously by both sexes. The consonants in which both genders had the same pronunciation all along were the ones most likely to change. When Moonshine takes over, the women will be in control, and therefore the rate of change will probably not be greatly affected by the two speech registers.

Lack of contact with Poswa

Since the maturation date of Icecap Moonshine is now 6800 AD, it cannot have participated in Poswa's later shifts, and perhaps the old consonants ṗ ṃ ṭ ṇ need to be thrown out altogether.

Comparison to Play

The proto-Moonshine language (long before Icecap) and Leaper could both be described as a defective version of Play in that morphological processes that work perfectly in Play have many exceptions, have often split into separate paradigms with no clear semantic differences, and apply only to closed classes of words. And yet, Moonshine/Leaper has very few innovations of its own. Even its elaborate case system, for example, is just the same as Play's with the addition of a dative case.

Therefore in a sense Moonshine is just as difficult to learn as Play, but much less impressive, and also much less stable.

Possible inaccessibility

06:02, 5 May 2022 (PDT)

It is possible that Moonshine will simply never be realized, as it requires a great deal of work, and even a well-ordered draft of Moonshine can be easily upset if something needs to be changed to harmonize the language with the more important languages, especially Play and the shared MRCA, Gold.

At the very least, I will be working on the tropical languages (Middlesex, Andanese, and Play), and then on Gold (and Leaper), before committing to anything in Moonshine.

It is even possible that Middlesex will effectively be what Moonshine was meant to be, and that the Moonshines gave up their own language instead of teaching it to the Middlesex speakers, but using Middlesex as "Moonshine" would require very rapid changes.

Size of phoneme inventory

If created, the phonology will likely be much smaller than in the early drafts of Moonshine, where I believed I could increase efficiency by having a very large phonology and loose syllable structure. A CVC language with the original Moonshine phoneme inventory would have had about 24,000 syllables, but using the inventory this way would require that nearly all syllables be closed, which was never my goal even then. Thus C₂ in Moonshine cannot be much more salient than C₂ in a language such as Play; even saying that Moonshine might have twice as many CVC syllables in running speech compared to Play might be already too much. Therefore the relevant comparison is not CVC but just CV, where the original Moonshine would have about 600 syllables and Play has about 50. Taking the natural log of both numbers shows that Play only needs to be spoken about 50% more quickly than Moonshine to match its efficiency, and therefore that the original model is mathematically unsound. Andanese would need to be spoken as twice the speed of Moonshine if assuming that /sia/ etc are counted as two syllables in Andanese and that Moonshine is allowed a CVC structure for every third syllable.

Stereotypes of foreign languages

See User:Soap/scratchpad#Cultural_divides_in_the_tropics and the latter half of Play language/history for now.

Giri tile and toy block scripts

14:52, 4 April 2022 (PDT)

The canonical consonant inventory of Gĭri, the Middlesex and early Moonshine children's speech register, was:

Bilabials:                   m   b
Coronals:                t   n   l
Palatals:                        y
Velars:                  kʷ  ŋ  (Ø)

And the vowels were /a i u/. Thus there were 27 syllables, representable in various means based on the number three. Giri had no writing systems of its own because the speakers never lived independently; if they wrote at all, they used their parents' alphabets. Nonetheless, when the proto-Moonshine people met the Play people, they were amazed at how young Play children adeptly wrote their language with only two letters, stacked in two or even three dimensions to form shapes of arbitrary height, width, and depth. (This was an elaboration of a Late Andanese toy block script.) For political reasons, the Moonshines actually preferred the Play language to their own, but they soon set about creating toy block scripts for their children to play with as well.

Pronouns

All pronouns in early Moonshine are derived from verbal embedding, of either type. Thus, they are an open class, and the person marker is that of the highest social status participant in the sentence. Thus "your servant", etc for 1st person when the listener is superior, and a simple pronoun like "I, speaking" for 1st person superior. The rules are complicated and it could thus be still said that early Moonshine, like its ancestor, has no fixed set of pronouns.

Later, diachronics and semantic shifts create true pronouns in Moonshine, but person is marked indirectly, as an emergent result of the gender markers and other things. These pronouns may then help fill the role of speech discourse markers (that is, gender marking for the speaker and listener) alongside other morphemes. This would mean that every sentence would need to have a pronoun in it even if it's a third person event.

Volition and obedience

05:50, 2 April 2022 (PDT)

Volition should probably be folded into the obedience morphemes, rather than using the old system where obedience morphemes were for males only and were marked by suffixes, while volition applied to all situations.

The involuntary obedience morpheme requires a 3rd person argument, as the Moonshines consider it impolite to accuse the listener of forcefulness and 1st person situations could be handled as they come up, possibly even through possession. Thus Moonshine is not like Poswa, which allows involuntary obedience markers associated with forcing agents of all three persons.

The voluntary obedience morpheme can take either a 2nd or 3rd person argument (possibly 1st person in some situations). The 2nd person feminine external agent is a zero morph if the speaker is male, and possibly also if the speaker is female. Third-person marking is the same as it is for the involuntary paradigm. Remember that there are also morphemes that mark the gender of the speaker and of the listener.

It is possible that semantic shift will turn the volition distinction into a person marker, creating the need for a new volition distinction, but this hypothetical later stage cannot be built without first creating the original stage.

Doctorate Moonshine

05:50, 2 April 2022 (PDT)

Rather than evolving Doctorate Moonshine as a highly artificial IAL, it could be that this is already the state of the language by 6800 AD and that it came about naturally. This would require a number of astonishing coincidences, however, even if assuming that some of Doctorate's IAL-like features were not actually very useful.

New genitive infix

16:19, 2 March 2022 (PST)

The new sound change list opens up the possibility for a genitive infix appearing around 4800 AD, such that e.g. ŋàsiḳa "door" and its genitive ŋasiḳas could appear as ŋàsʲk and ŋàsʲikˠ. There may need to be a way to stop the palatalization from staining the following consonant in the resulting cluster. The stabilization of the accent on the root is not a problem however.

Possible use of Play block scripts

16:19, 2 March 2022 (PST)

The Police in Play territory wanted to write Moonshine using the Play block script or an adaptation of it, at least for pleasure. They admired the small children they saw writing messages in a script that their own adults could scarcely make sense of, let alone read, but which the Play children all seemingly understood without a moment's pause. Moonshine had too many phonemes to use the Play script directly, they realized, but the Police hoped that they could make a new version of it, whether it be more complex to handle the larger phonology of Moonshine or less complex to show their admiration for the superiority of the Play language's adaptability to artistic means of writing.

Diachronics and other information

Feminist Compact Imperial (3948) to Icecap Moonshine (~6800)

The expansive inherited phonology simplified quickly during the settlement period as the proto-Moonshine speakers passed through territory inhabited by speakers of Play and other languages with similarly small inventories.

Early shifts (Feminist Compact Imperial to Police)

The term Police is used instead of proto-Moonshine here, as it could be unclear whether the proto-Moonshine language was spoken in 3958 (when it was identical with Leaper) or around 4300. Properly the proto-Moonshine language should be considered to begin in 3958 because even then they considered it a separate language from Leaper for political reasons.

1. All high rising tones became ordinary long tones.
2. All pharyngealized vowels became ordinary low (mid) tones. The stress became weak.
3. After a high tone, the voiceless fricatives x xʷ shifted to k kʷ. Note that this shift is subtly different from Leaper's because they did not also become fortis.
4. The rare labialized glottal fricative hʷ (sometimes spelled ħʷ for distinctness) shifted to a voiceless bilabial fricative f.
5. Labialization was lost in the syllable coda; pʷ mʷ kʷ ŋʷ xʷ gʷ became p m k ŋ x g. All of these codas occurred only after the short low tone. Thus, these new codas joined the existing codas /s l n/ in not occurring after high tones (but /s l n/ could also occur after long tones). Since the codas could not occur after high tones, the high tone came to be seen as if it were a coda by itself, /ʔ/.
6. In these words, a preceding i (which became /ʲi/) later shifted to ʲa. It is not possible for the change to have happened this early, because the conditioning environment (/ʲi/) had not yet been set up, but other traces of the labialization could have hung on long enough for it to appear that the change had been simultaneous with the delabialization.

Middlesex influence

The lower classes of Moonshine society at first had their own language, which had different phonologies for men and women. In Middlesex society, the genders were equal, but in Moonshine society, women quickly took control. Thus, if any sound changes were taken from Middlesex speech registers, they would either affect men (and perhaps women pronouncing "men's words"), or affect women and then pass on to men, since men could not preserve a distinction their women (who spoke the "correct" form) did not have.

These changes might be able to violate traditional diachronic sequencing principles because the Middlesex language persisted for a few generations, perhaps for hundreds of years, and most sound changes would be conscious on the part of the speakers. And yet, at the same time, the sound changes were almost all simultaneous, because they all came from the same source and applied unconditionally. Therefore, the separation here is artificial. Also, female stubbornness could create situations in which different groups of women had different pronunciations for the same sounds, both for themselves and for their men.

Also note that the sound change list for Middlesex ends at the year 3370, allowing another thousand years for additional changes to occur between the two speech registers. However, it is likely that few new differences appeared because the living standards of the Crystals, the primary speakers of Middlesex, had changed.

Possible sound changes are:

MSX Vowel changes

1. Women came to spell any ʷa sequence as o, but did not change their pronunciation. Men also came to spell /ʷa/ as /o/ but came to pronounce it ʷu. (Middlesex has a plain /u/, but this vowel would likely have been rounded in Middlesex but unrounded in proto-Moonshine, so /ʷu/ is what the listeners would hear. Thus, the rare inherited plain /u/ did not shift to /ʷu/.)

   It is possible that Moonshine teachers would spell this with a sequence that could be represented here as aΩ or aω, but because this new symbol would only occur after /a/, the sequence would be still seen as a single vowel.

2. Women and men both shifted any inherited plain i to ʲi, except after a labialized consonant. That is, the Middlesex plain /i/ was heard as rounded and lowered, whether or not it bordered a labialized consonant.
3. The remaining plain i, which occurred only after labialized consonants, now came to be spelled e by both men and women. Women continued to pronounce this as a somewhat centralized IPA [i], but men shifted it to a. (Not /ʲa/, because even though proto-Moonshine allowed simultaneous labialization and palatalization, Middlesex did not.) It did not merge with the Moonshine schwa, which was further back because it corresponded to Leaper's /o/ vowel, and was rounded when occurring after a labialized consonant. Nonetheless, this new vowel spelled /e/ occurred only after labialized consonants, where the inherited schwa was rare.

Thus Moonshine retained its four-vowel inventory, but spelled it with six vowels. The pronunciations were:

 SCRIPT       a    e    i    o    u    ɜ
 WOMEN        a   ʷi   ʲi   ʷa   ʷu    ɜ
 MEN          a   ʷa   ʲi   ʷu   ʷu    ɜ

Note that the labializations in the /e/ column are present because this vowel occurred only after labialized consonants in inherited vocabulary. In loans, this may not have applied, but such loans would have been irregular and more likely borrowed with either [ʲi] or [a] instead of using a rare plain [i].

The /u/ column above implies that Moonshine could not use this vowel except after a labialized consonant; this may be a matter of analysis. But, importantly, Moonshine did not do Leaper's shifts of /ɜu/ > /ū/ and of /ĭʕʷ/ > /û~ŭ/.

This system was complicated, but nonetheless, simpler than Middlesex in important ways:

1. Both men and women always agreed on consonant coarticulations. By contrast, in Middlesex, palatalization and labialization could be undone by certain consonants, and men had a palatalized sequence [ʲa] where women had a plain [i].
2. Women and men only had different vowel pronunciations when these vowels occurred after a labialized consonant. (Even so, a tiny number of exceptions could be pulled from the Middlesex substrate if /e/ was borrowed as [ʲi ~ a] instead of homogenizing on [ʲi] or [a].)
3. Furthermore, in Middlesex, sometimes sequences such as [ʷa] appeared that were not spelled as "o" and thus were pronounced identically by both sexes. Since the Moonshines were analogizing their inherited system to the borrowed one, they spelled all female [ʷa] as "o" and therefore did not create new exceptions to the rule. And likewise for the other situations.

Because the three script vowels e o u are all restricted to occurring after labialized consonants, labialization can be omitted in Romanization. In the native Moonshine scripts, it was nonetheless retained, as it did not greatly affect the appearance of the words.

1. Then, the vowel sequence əi əu shifted to ī ū, without staining a preceding consonant. These sequences never occurred in a closed syllable, even stressed, so all such syllables were open. (The collapse of syllabic consonants had not happened yet.) This change was not directly forced by Middlesex, but was influenced by the fact that Middlesex did not have an independent schwa and also did not have many closing diphthongs. This change may have lagged the other changes by a few generations.

Sporadic and reversed shifts

1. Because Middlesex had a rare /ʷi/ sequence of its own, which men pronounced [i], the /ʷi~ʷa/ paradigm could be disrupted in some words. This bare [i] was also the sound that Middlesex women used for what men pronounced as [ʲa]. Thus, just as Moonshine had its [ʷi > ʷa > ʷu] masculinization chain, Middlesex had [ʷi > i > ʲa]. But note that in Moonshine, neither men nor women had a bare [i] and therefore that this would have been heard as either a schwa [ɜ] or the sequence /ʲi/.

MSX consonant changes

1. Men came to pronounce f as b unconditionally.
2. Both men and women shifted š ž to s z unconditionally.
3. Women came to pronounce g gʷ as x xʷ unconditionally. The unified symbol can be represented as ɣ. This meant that /h/ and /x/ had fallen together.

NOTE

Previously there was an additional shift before the last, in which the inherited pre-MS x (from Gold h) shifted back to h again, thus saving it from being merged with /g/ > /x/. But this shift did not happen in Middlesex and so it would not be expected to appear in Moonshine either.

Sporadic and reversed shifts

1. A sporadic shift of kʷ to p, or perhaps to pʷ, could occur in a few words, for both men and women.
2. Women may have shifted inherited ṭ to kʷ, but note that the Middlesex dental "ṭ" sound is not particularly close to the pre-proto-Moonshine alveolar ejective "ṭ". This shift depends on the speakers hearing two unrelated "ṭ" sounds as identical. The same applies to a possible opposite shift for men.

Idiolectal variation

1. Because the only voiced:voiceless fricative pair was /s z/, both men and women experimented with new fashions in pronouncing fricatives. Some Middlesex women had been pronouncing /f/ as [v] all along, and this change came back into fashion. Meanwhile, Middlesex men actually had two phonemes, /b v/, to the women's /f/, and the choice of /b/ was assigned by teachers; however, some teachers instead chose /v/ and therefore [v] was a valid realization of this phoneme for men as well.
2. Likewise the glottal fricative /h/ could become [ʕ] or [Ø], and even /s/ could become [z]. These latter two changes created phonological collisions, so they were more stigmatized and less widespread than the others.
3. Likewise, a second /x/ existed in Middlesex, which was pronounced [x] by both sexes, and therefore in some loans from Middlesex, a "flexible" [g] appeared where the source language had had the "hard" [x]. This had not happened in Middlesex itself because the two /x/'s were always distinct in spelling.

Cultural reflections

There were a few syllables containing /ʷi/ and /ʲu/ in the Moonshine branch, whereas Leaper only had /ʷi/.

Importantly, the vowel and diphthong inventory was very similar to that of contemporary Play, which also had /a i u ə/ and the diphthongs /ai au əi əu/. The differences were that Moonshine also had a long schwa /ə̄/ but lacked Play's distinction between long vowels and vowel sequences. That is, Play had both /aa/ and /ā/, but Moonshine allowed only /ā/.

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

Contact with Giri

The Middlesex children's speech register, Gĭri, had a consonant inventory of /m b t n l y kʷ ŋ Ø/ and a vowel inventory of /a i u/. Importantly, only two vowels per word could appear, and at most three consonants. All syllables were CV, for a total of 27 possible syllables, just shy of the 30 of Late Andanese, which also influenced Moonshine's children.

Imitating the slow speech rhythm of young children, Moonshine teachers may have used separate consonant symbols for eight of the nine the Giri consonants (all but /y/), or perhaps for all but /y/ and /b/ since there was not a symbol for /b/ in Moonshine itself at the time.

Development of feminine speech style

Delabialization

1. The script vowel e became delabialized, both for women and for men. Thus men now merged /e/ and /a/ into one sound, but women kept them distinct.
2. The script vowel u also became delabialized, from a phonological point of view, as it was phonetically equivalent to /ʷu/.
3. Lastly, the script vowel o (perhaps already spelled aΩ) became the last one to drop its labialization. Because women now had control of the education system, the female speech register was considered the only correct one, and the recognition of /o/ as a separate phoneme disappeared, while /e/ remained.
4. The sequence ʷɜ shifted to ɜ, removing labialization from the language altogether. (This usually corresponded to Leaper's /ʷo/.)
5. The above changes also shifted the children's speech register's kʷ phoneme into k (not /p/).
6. The diphthong au shifted to ā, which later would become a regular a.

1. Then b > p. It is likely that a separate /b/ glyph was entertained, however, both to mark out childish words and to mark out Play loanwords, which the Moonshines often conceived of as more childish than their own children's words.

Thus the vowel inventory now was

SCRIPT       a    e    i   (o)   u    ɜ
WOMEN        a    i   ʲi   (a)   u    ɜ
MEN          a    a₂  ʲi   (u₂)  u    ɜ

Words that had been spelled with /o/ were now spelled with /a/, and pronounced [a] by both men and women, with a few rare exceptions confined mostly to words specifically relating to masculinity and used mostly by men with other men. This is important, because without this forced regularization, men would have a distinction that women did not, corresponding to inherited /a/ vs inherited /ʷa/.

Men may have also had a rare surface [i] phoneme not dependent on palatalization, but it would not be spelled as /e/ because the rule about the separate pronunciations was still in effect.

Consonant table

The language was spelled with a highly redundant consonant inventory at this time, because they indicated gender, age (because of the children's register), and relevant etymological information that would help learners inflect words. The full inventory was

VOLATILE CONSONANTS
SCRIPT       f   ɣ   ṭ       
WOMEN        f   x   k       
MEN          p   g   t       

STABLE CONSONANTS
SCRIPT       k   s   z   š   l   r   m   n   ŋ   x̣   ḥ   p
WOMEN        k   s   z   s   l   r   m   n   ŋ   x   h   p
MEN          k   s   z   s   l   r   m   n   ŋ   x   h   p

Therefore the voiceless bilabial stop /p/ could be substituted for any /f/ to show masculinity, but the sound was rare. The voiced /g/ sound was weakly articulated and not distinguished from hiatus or silence. Therefore, in this case, an /x/ spelled as ɣ could be removed rather than inserted to mark masculinity in a given word.

It is possible that Moonshine teachers used a digraph like xΓ for what is here spelled as ɣ, again in the belief that male speakers were inserting an extra sound into their words rather than pronouncing a single sound differently. For convenience, this can also be spelled here as xg, but the letter "g" would be foreign to women entirely since they did not have that as a phoneme. Both men and women would still pronounce a plain x as /x/.

Likewise the men's /p/ could be spelled as fΠ. The /b/ > /p/, which was not native to Moonshine, could be p₂ since it was not gendered.

Mixing speech registers to show gender of words

At this point, women began to use the male speech register to indicate that an object was male, either literally or figuratively. Men could also use the women's speech register to indicate feminine objects, but only in certain social situations such as with their loved ones or when a woman asked them to repeat speech.

These genders were originally of the property type, that is "a chair for women", and not of the traditional identity type, but the logic was soon extended, because animate nouns could not be possessed. Therefore the first stage had nouns like "chair for women", the second stage had nouns like "body for women", and the third stage had nouns like "teacher for women", which meant not someone who teaches female students, but rather a female teacher.

The possession system was still symmetric, unlike the alignment detailed below where men are grouped with handheld objects and therefore women can own men, but men cannot own either women or other men.

A new glyph was invented to modify the pronunciation of the women's words containing /i a/ into /a₂ u₂/ to show this change.

Possible reanalysis of geminates

PMS inherited a phonology that had already lost geminate stops because they were reanalyzed as high tone followed by a singleton. Yet, there was one exception, because singleton /kʷ/ could appear after a high tone, since it had come from /hʷ/. (There may have been a rare /h/ > /k/ as well.) Thus only sonorants and perhaps rarely /s/ could be geminate. This could lead the Moonshines to reanalyse all geminates as fortis consonants, with Middlesex influence especially for the nasals. And then, since the syllabic consonants were the very same ones, these could be unified as well.

One effect of this would be that the common masculine endings like -unni, which would be expected to change to something like -ʷnnʲ, might instead be realized as a single strong consonant with a single coarticulation. Most likely labialization would win, so the result might be -n̄ʷ.

First deletion of vowels

This is around 4300, when the speakers will still in contact with Play.

These shifts are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, as they destroy much of the inherited grammar and in a short time turn the Moonshine language into something completely foreign to even the closely related Leapers. The sound changes definitely are real, but they may have proceeded in steps such that each new generation developed just a small difference in pronunciation from their parents.

It is also possible that the "throaty" ɜ vowel (not the weak /ə/) is retained as a full vowel and that Moonshine moves towards a vertical vowel inventory. Note that, assuming labialization was destroyed except before [u], passive verbs must use a new construction because the -ʷ- infix (cognate to Play's double vowel system) no longer works.

1. Accented schwas (ɜ, not /ə/) took on the quality of the vowel in the "real" stressed syllable (usually the following one). Even men did this, so they had a proper [i] again. This did NOT entail labialization of any preceding consonants.

   It is not clear whether this new unstressed men's [i] will then immediately shift to the low vowel, or if it will be retained as [i]. This is important for the shift below.

2. Presumably, the unaccented ɜ also shifted.
3. The high vowels ʲi i u (in women's speech) were deleted to ʲ Ø ʷ in unstressed position, assuming labialization had hung on as a phonetic detail. If not it was just /ʲ Ø Ø/. Men's corresponding shift was from ʲi aₓ u to ʲ ϵ ʷ, however, where the symbol ϵ here spells a very short vowel rather than a consonant; the use of yet another symbol here is to prevent confusion with /e ɜ ə/ all of which were different. So now words had different syllable counts for men and for women. The true /a/ sound did not shift.

   This may mean that unaccented /ɜ/ > /Ø/ if it can be analogized from words in which there had been a plain /i/, but note that this plain /i/ was rare.

   The new symbol may be partly or entirely changed out for ʕ later on, but note that /ʕ/ was originally used to mark syllabic consonants, and so if it does get changed, it's a spelling reform rather than a sound change.

4. Therefore the only unstressed vowels were /a/ and the much rarer /ɜ/ vowel, which was lower and further back than that of Play, but which now moved towards a true schwa. There were no unstressed high vowels at all.

Labialization

Note also that [u] had existed only after historically labialized consonants, so this shift did not create any new labialized consonants and the labialization may have been allophonically present all along. If there had been Middlesex loans with bare [u], they would have been handled in various ways as by this time the Middlesex language was primarily in writing.

It is UNLIKELY (because men had /ʷu/ for /o/) that a relatively rare /w/ sound survived the various delabialization changes rather than merging with /gʷ/ and then on to /h/, or going silent. If it does go silent, then Moonshine will have vowel-initial words that Leaper did not.

Even after deliabialization, Middlesex loans would provide much /ʷi/, which would be pronounced as a single IPA [y] vowel with no onglide. But this might be re-interpreted as a script-vowel e and therefore pronounced differently by men.

Deletion of /a/

1. Next came the only shift that deleted a to Ø, and only when another /a/ was in an adjacent syllable. This could happen either way; for example /nala/ shifted to both /nal/ and /nla/, depending on what lay on either side of the word. Thus it could be said that there were still A-stems and B-stems at this point.

This shift is important because it generates a lot of new consonant clusters; previously, when only the high vowels had dropped, most clusters contained a palatal ʲ between the two consonants.

On paper is a document detailing how to handle vowel shifts here; each CVCV sequence corresponds to a single-vowel reflex. This chart is for primordial HL words only (plain H monosyllables would have been adopted to HL by insertion of -ḳ- by this time):

   INIT          REFLEX
1  aa au ua      Ø-a    a-Ø    Ø-Ø
2  ai            a-ʲi   a-ʲ
3  ia            ʲ-a                   ʲ-ʲa
4  ii            ʲ-ʲi   ʲi-ʲ
5  iu            ʲ-i    ʲi-Ø
   ui            Ø-ʲi   i-ʲ
   uu            Ø-i    i-Ø

The last three rows form a single conjugation paradigm just like row 1, but are shown separately for ease of understanding.

The handheld suffix classifier -ya might influence some of the assignments, even if it later disappears. For example Gold tipə "sleep flower" could end up in class 3 if pre-Moonshine inherits a suffixed form such as /tʲipʷ-ya/, where the /y/ would drop out, and therefore the word would resemble a traditional CiCa word. But note that Moonshine needed to be suffix-aware for its grammar to work.

Possibly make more paradigms "with K" instead of just adding /k/ to some monoliterals.

Labialization of /ʷa/ ~ /ʷu/

Just prior to the vowel deletions, men had spontaneously added labialization to the beginning of many words beginning with /Ca/, turning it into /Cʷa/, which they pronounced /Cʷu/. This was etymologically sound inasmuch as there already existed a word pronounced simply as /w/ even before the vowel deletions. (There was also at least one word /gʷ/, and /g/ always gave way to any other consonant in a cluster.)

Also, there were words like wan "sleepn" whose obliques ended up with /ŋ/ in women's speeech and men's had /ŋʷ/.,

The result of the subsequent sound change was that men had just a /ʷ/ for women's /a/ in the first syllable of many words, commonly CVCV ones. Thus, the opposite situation to the above had transpired: now there were many words which women pronounced with two syllables, but men with only one. The women could have simply told their men to revert to the earlier pronunciation, as women had firm control of the education system and of society as a whole by this point, but they allowed the new pronunciation and it became yet another discourse marker for the speaker's gender, as well as in some cases a marker of the gender of the word itself (the gender system was still transitioning from speaker gender to possessor gender to IE-style noun gender, with some relics of each step left in place).

Even though the realization of clusters like /wp/ as /pʷ/ had been the norm for thousands of years, the workings of the old grammar system was leaving the speakers' memory, and instead of realizing old clusters like /ws wt/ as /f kʷ/, Moonshine men simply pronounced [sʷ tʷ] and the like, creating new phonemes that occurred only before consonants.

Intermediate consonant shifts

1. šʲ > ŝ. Possibly not even a distinct pronunciation, but would be grammatically distinct. This may come into play with vowel deletions; otherwise spelling it /šʲ/ will be fine.

Last contacts with Play

1. The consonants w y shifted to bʷ ž after a high tone. They were not glottalized, and the new sounds did not shift to /bbʷ žžʲ/ or any such thing even though the stops were still all geminated (glottalized) after a high tone.

There was no longer a plain /b/ in the language, but the ornate Moonshine script assigned atomic symbols to labialized consonants, meaning the new /bʷ/ glyph could not be decomposed into /b/ and /ʷ/, or into anything else with /ʷ/. But the vowels were still spelled with labialization, and this took a labialization-oriented vowel. Likewise, there was no voiceless /š/ (earlier it had been shifted to /s/, and it was not rebowwowed from Play), so there was no pattern to base the new /ž/ glyph on, and this new /ž/ glyph was also atomic and not a compression of /z/ and /ʲ/.

Tones

It is most likely that PMS dropped tones in closed syllables after this shift, as there would otherwise be closed syllables with high tone and with low tone, yet few minimal pairs between them because the consonants wouldnt match. (This assumes that the primordial closed syllables remained high, unlike in Leaper, but this is essentially a trivial matter since Leaper had the same situation).

Tones would nonetheless continue to be written for etymological reasons, as for example the distinction between /pì/ as a root by itself and /pì/ as the accusative of a root such as /pĭ/ would be marked in the orthography.

CV Monoliterals

08:56, 1 September 2023 (PDT)

There were two classes of CV monoliterals at this point: ones pronounced with /a/ by both sexes, and ones pronounced with /a/ by men and with /i/ by women. Thus there were words that men could not say. These had arbitrary meanings; for example ki "seahorse" from Gold kəti, and mi "soap" from məmi. Indeed, all of the words in this class were either monosyllabic already in Gold or had a pattern like CəCV. The inflections of these words were at this time still using the old consonant suffixes, and therefore the stems were invariable.

NOTE: a third class pronounced with /i/ by both sexes would be predicted by the Gold originals, e.g. words like /tì/ in Gold would come through as /tʲi/ in Icecap, but it is possible that most or all such words had been captured by the -k suffix analogy. Even if this analogy happens, it is possible that it still excludes low-tone words.

Biliterals as monoliterals

07:50, 6 October 2023 (PDT)

If both letters in a CC shell are the same, in ~some~ cases they can be respelled as a single consonant. For example, in pattern 6, probably there are no inherited monoliterals, so HH6 "soap; birch" can be respelled as H6.

It is also possible that some biliterals where the second consonant is K will be thought of as monoliterals as well.

Stem-changing vowels

08:56, 1 September 2023 (PDT)

Words from Gold with the pattern CVCə were the only ones to change the stem vowel instead of moving it around. Here, the stem vowel was /a/ in the nominative case and /i/ in all of the oblique cases. The /i/ > /a/ shift had occurred early on, and was actually /ʲi/ > /ʲa/, later spreading through analogy. The /a/ > /i/ shift took place before two consonants and then spread by analogy to words like kip which were underlyingly /kipʷp/ and the like.

These could be type 6 roots.

Men's spelling

The men's extra [a] sounds were no longer spelled by females, so the new letter ʕ was created to keep track of them and they were considered to be consonants. It is possible that labialization survived long enough for a distinct pronunciation to have been retained, so that they were not truly [a]. They may have even become schwas.

1. It is possible that the two-vowel rule becomes applied to the whole language here, with the inherited /ɜ/ vowel always being an echo vowel of the tonic syllable, perhaps even if it is /a/.
2. The earlier deletions likely also cause ai to become a followed by palatalization.

The retained /ʕ/ sound may have been identified as an allophone of /g/, of /ɜ/, or of both at once, meaning that the schwa vowel /ɜ/ would be considered a consonant, although one with a continuant quality like nasals.

1. Men deleted g to Ø. This made some words entirely silent for men, and they had to use substitute sounds like /ε/ which were etymologically entirely separate words.

Very short words and oligosynthesis

The shifts above created many single-consonant morphemes, descended from the B-stems of words that had been CV in Gold, where V was either /i/ or /ə/. It did not happen for Gold's /a/ or /u/ except when /u/ happened to follow a labialized consonant already in the early stages of Gold.

The language was not oligosynthetic at this time because the stressed syllables had remained, but long chains of single consonants came to be used at the beginnings of words to clarify their meaning, and in some cases also after the stems.

Common patterns

Additionally, there were many words consisting of /CʲCi/, from earlier CiCɜ (from even earlier CiCu).

New consonants from clusters

10:43, 1 September 2023 (PDT)

At this point there were just two vowels (maybe three), and new consonants appeared from clusters.

Often, the second consonant in the CVC form of a word changed to match the outcome of the corresponding CC cluster, which made it look like the shift had just been simple assimilation of the first consonant to the second. Note that the second position in CVC words was the more marked position because of the scarcity of coronals.

1. In word initia position, hp ht hk > ph th kh. These were still pronounced like clusters, but did not allow vowel insertion.
2. At the end of a word, hp hs hn hl > p s n̥ ɬ. The preceding vowel in most cases will turn to /i/ because of an earlier rule shifting /a/ > /i/ before a cluster in a superheavy syllable, but perhaps the /a/ will sometimes persist. It is possible that the last three of the resulting single consonants were fortis.

   Another possibility is to have these first shift to such as /kp kn/ etc and then shift to something new from that, perhaps through metathesis. For example, n̥ could be /nt/. /hs/ could still be /ks/ even if the rest dont switch.

Reversal of shifts

Whenever half the population underwent a sound shift that the other did not, the possibility for partial or complete reversal existed, unlike in traditional languages where sound changes were indelible once complete. Most often this involved women retaining the old pronunciation while men innovated, and then women bringing the men back where they had begun. Some sporadic changes involved the opposite, however, such as some women coming to pronounce /f/ as [v] early on, which at least in Middlesex words was the original pronunciation.

Discourse marker

The above sound change creates a discord marker for gender, where men have an extra morpheme, spelled as ʕ, found unpredictably in words of all types indicating that the speaker is male. Its use is most likely also influenced by the gender of the listener, as men would not be eager to produce the extra phonemes among their own kind. On the other hand, because they would be required to pronounce the extra sounds whenever they were merely in the presence of women (not only when speaking to one), the inflated words would be the unmarked forms and therefore they might pronounce the sounds at all times, and perhaps would speed up their speech tempo somewhat when women were not listening in.

It is possible, perhaps with influence from Lava Bed languages and perhaps Play, that the discord marker turns into a "poly-syncretic" morpheme (that is, fusional and encording more than one underlying morpheme at a time) which encodes the gender of the speaker and the listener, which would mean that the morpheme would need four forms instead of two, and perhaps that men would be made to use it among themselves after all. This would eliminate the need for gendered verb marking whenever the participants in the verb were 1P/2P, and perhaps even the need to mark person on the verbs at all (this would also affect Leaper, however).

If Lava Bed influence is stronger still, it could come about that men use the discord morphemes not just to mark the gender of 1P and 2P, but also for the gender of the words themselves (which could be seen as a 3P marker), and of other participants in the sentence, which could be seen as 4P and even beyond if inanimate objects acquire gender.

This is quite different from the typical Lava Bed system, and its reliance on deleted phonemes makes it unlikely that it could evolve smoothly from the inherited grammar. But in common with Lava Beds is that the inserted morpheme can appear anywhere within a word, and can appear within any type of word.

Note also that consonants were probably still distinct for men and for women, but that this was at parity, with no "extra" consonants, so would not really be a discourse marker in itself.

One more gender change

Men at this time shifted /ji/ > /i/, but only when this was a bare /j/. That is, palatalized consonants did not change. Yet it is possible that palatalized consonants did change by analogy in some cases. Then, a new /j/ appeared from /lʲ/, so men lost the /lʲ/ phoneme.

It is possible that both men and women shifted /lʲ/, in fact, and most likely that both sexes had also shifted /lʷ/ to a bare /w/ by this time, as bare [w] was uncommon. It would still behave as /lʷ/ grammatically.

It is also possible that this last change happened after the reform that turned discourse markers into noun genders, meaning that it was a new discourse marker. If not, it may have resisted that reform and persisted as a discourse marker.

Possible new orthography

09:50, 9 October 2022 (PDT)

It is possible that the Moonshine teachers introduced glyphs that could be represented as ʔ ʕ around this time, standing for tone markers that came to be seen as consonants. The glottal stop marked any preceding vowel as high tone, and therefore could not occur word-initially, but it may be that it could occur after a consonant, as an orthographic innovation marking a place where a vowel could be inserted in certain grammatical alternations.

Consonant shifts

06:43, 30 December 2022 (PST)

There were now clusters like /pḳ/ at the beginning of words, unless the Moonshines undid the Leapers' generalization of /ə/ as the infix vowel. It is unlikely that they would do this, however, as it was a "waste" vowel that merely duplicated the next vowel in the word. Play took the opposite strategy, always generalizing the duplicate vowel, leading to redundancy. Note that the Moonshine reflex of Gold's /ə/ is not /ə/ or /ɜ/ or even /ε/, but rather /ʷ/. This labialization drops out, with the exception that it causes shifts like /t/ > /kʷ/ > /k/.

Reform of gender system

06:25, 19 January 2023 (PST)

Around this point (probably after the year 5000 because the sound changes slowed down), the inherited men's and women's speech registers merged except in pronouns and similar words, meaning that gender came to be part of the noun inherently and not the speaker's choice. Even so, more than half of all words had two forms, a masculine and a feminine, and the choice of which to use was dependent on social contexts.

Generalization of vowel shifts

Because labialization had been lost twice (and preserved once (only from /u/)), any Moonshine word with an /a/ could behave as though it had originally had /ʷa/ instead, meaning that the word could be analyzed as inherently feminine, and a new masculine word generated for it by replacing the /a/ with /ʷu/ (which was the same phoneme as /u/ because it was inherently labial). Likewise, any unpalatalized /i/ could be analyzed as feminine and replaced by /a/ (from an artificially constructed /ʷa/) to form a masculine. The sequence /ʲi/ did not participate in any gender alternations.

Since /a/ was the feminine gradation of masculine /ʷu/ but also the masculine gradation of feminine unpalatalized /i/, there was no direct association between a given sound and its gender. A word with an originally non-alternating /a/ could therefore be arbitrarily assigned to either gender, and here, semantics was the best predictor of what would happen.

Any word consisting of a bare consonant would be automatically considered feminine at this stage, because it would be presumed to have derived from an earlier word with /ʷi/, which did not occur in men's speech. (See above where there is confusion, possibly even among the Moonshine scholars, but this etymology is most often true.) Single-consonant roots with other origins would be analogized to these. Then, because this historical /ʷi/ sequence is at the female end of two different chains, either /a/ or /ʲ/ could be added to make the word masculine.

Note that the sequence /ʷi/ still existed in the language, but that it was of secondary or even tertiary origin, as the inherited /ʷi/ of both Leaper and Middlesex had been delabialized, and in Middlesex this applied even across an /h/, so the reflex of kŭhi "spear" is just kì (spelled /kiʔ/ in some writings but not others).

Doubled vowel shifts

Moonshine had inherited the [ʷi > ʷa > ʷu] masculinization chain, which had become [i > a > ʷu] (note that this refers to the non-palatal /i/). There was also a less common chain adopted from Middlesex, originally [ʷi > i > ʲa] but shifting towards [i > ʲi > ʲa]. The reasons for its being less common were that it was originally not present in native vocabulary and because it changed what Moonshine speakers considered to be consonants; that is, they perceived /t/ and /tʲ/, for example, as separate consonants. This was true even during the time period when /tʷ/ was analyzed as a sequence /tw/ and not as a separate consonant.

NOTE, it is not clear where the /ʷi/ > /i/ shift comes from, but since it fills a gap in men's vowel inventory, it is almost certainly correct.

These vowel shifts could also appear occasionally in unstressed position, where they were [Ø > a > ʷ] and [Ø > ʲ > ʲa] respectively, though with the /a/'s sometimes also realized as zero if a neighboring syllable also contains /a/.

Semantics of gender

In most cases where there was a close semantic match, the feminine form of a word referred to something seen as superior, with the masculine seen as derogatory or pejorative. Thus for example was the difference between a chair and a toilet.

A second class of word pairs were semantically neutral, with women using the feminine form unless specifically intending a derogatory meaning, and men not using the feminine form at all. This was the only type that existed early on, but it began to decline as the language moved towards assigning nouns inherent genders.

Another class of words, arising after the new system was firmly in place, used the male and female forms of each word to form word families, with the masculine words not always in such a low position. For example, tools and kitchen utensils were usually male, while pots and surfaces were female. The masculine gender thus became associated with handheld objects, particularly with secondary ones such as tools that interfaced with other handheld objects. (The kitchen pots would be seen as primary because they contain the food.) For example, the word for a stewpot, which was feminine, gave rise to a new word for a soup ladle, simply by changing the vowel from /a/ to /ʷu/. This made the inherited word (which had been feminine as well) unnecessary. This was a slow process, because it required analyzing what had once meant "men's stewpot; man's word for a stewpot" into a new word used by both sexes that meant something completely different. This resulted in a massive vocabulary turnover and the addition of hundreds of new masculine words into the language.

Thus Moonshine came close to having consonantal roots, but they still belonged to different groups of vowel alternations that could not be distilled out to form a pure consonantal root.

The gender system thus had become more symmetrical, but the unfair system remained in other ways, such as requiring morphemes to mark male agents, male possessors, and so on, where the corresponding female morpheme was often zero-marked. Additionally, more changes were on the way for Moonshine men as the newer generations of scholars reshaped the language further.

Consonant alternations

The consonant alternations of masculine Ø p against feminine h f had survived, but were much less used than the vowel alternations, and were used in different contexts. The addition of an /h/ could make a word feminine even if it otherwise appeared to be masculine. Note that /ʷu/ was now strongly associated with the masculine gender, but that a few words had come down naturally to the language with original etymological /ʷu/, and these could be feminine, as for example the word for egg.

Reduplicative roots

09:31, 22 January 2023 (PST)

Next, roots with only one consonant came to interpret this stem as being the B stem, and formed new A-stems by reduplicating that consonant (since two of any consonant would compress to one at the beginning of a word). This included roots consisting of a single consonant with no vowel. Thus for example, p in all its meanings came to be seen as a B-stem, and grew the new A-stem pip, as though it had originated from a Gold form like /puʕìpu/.

Verbs

Weak verbs were created early on in the Leaper/MS branch but not in Play. The class of weak verbs began when schwa collapse forced the creation of a new 1st person inflection on verbs whose B-stems ended with /i/. These were suffixed with a word meaning "deed".

This word could come from any of (g)ì, ndì, or dùga, of which the last also means "word". But since these were /i/-stem verbs, an /i/-stem suffix is the most appropriate. If /ndì/ is chosen, the Leaper cognate is -xʷi. This is inserted after the verb stem, even if the verb is used with its A-stem and thus ends in a consonant. If /(g)ì/ is chosen, the Leaper cognate is -hʷi. These would appear in Moonshine as h and f respectively, with the vowel lost because of labialization (unless hʷ > f comes before i > ʲi, but even so the resulting /fʲ/ phoneme would be marginal).

Possession markers

03:29, 21 January 2023 (PST)

In Leaper, the 1st and 2nd person markers for nouns both merged into /k/ before a classifier. Thus Leaper created new person markers further from the root. It is possible that PMS kept them separate, that is, either it did not shift /h/ > /k/ after a high tone, or the tones were shifted to low in this position. (Play did none of this, continuing to mark nominal possession as an infix between the noun's root and its classifier.)

Possible remnants of classifiers

The classifier system broke down as the language became monosyllabic. Note that most classifiers had ended in /a/.

It is possible that Moonshine retains some vestige of the Gold classifier suffixes as a three-way distinction between ʲ ~ Ø ~ ʷ with no syllabic forms. These would serve very little purpose in the grammar but could help mitigate the effects of word root coalescence by allowing the "losing" members of each collision pair to enter another noun class. It must be assumed that all of the noun classes ending in -a were simply discarded as Moonshine moved towards monosyllabicity, because the conditional sound change of /aCa/ > /aC/ would not be enough to get rid of them altogether.

If Moonshine retains the noun classifier suffixes even as nonsyllabic offglides, it would be in the same situation as Play where the possession markers are closer to the root and seem out of place.

New gender discord markers

Male insertions

Therefore, since the speech registers had mostly fallen together, the teachers gradually created a new speech register for men. This time, instead of using substitutions, they used insertions, meaning that their sentences were the same as women's except that they were required to use extra words. This was the only means by which men could access certain words in the feminine register. To a lesser extent, the old substitutions continued in usage because (for example) men would use a word's masculine form when women would use the feminine, but this was highly context-dependent, as above.

Later shifts

Possession markers

Poswob Rare (talk) 11:07, 25 October 2022 (PDT)

There will be some irregular nouns, but it is possible that a generic possession marker table can be created:

                              SPEAKER
                          Female     Male
  
  Free                    A          A
  1st person                   (B-₁) 
  2nd person                    B-s
  3rd person Female (I)   A-ɣʷ       A-ɣʷ
  3rd person Female (II)  A-r        A-rɛ
  3rd person Male         A-ra       A-ra

The -₁ and -s above have the same forms for male and female speakers, but -ɣʷ and -ra do not always, even though the affixes themselves are identical. This is because of Moonshine still retaining some relics of the earlier fusional grammar. Put another way, speech registers by this time will be sufficient to mark the gender of the speaker and listener, and there is no need for a grammatically overt means of doing it.

The r is cognate to Play's -Ø- and the ɣʷ died out in Play comes from and would have been retained as p if Play had not evolved three other affixes with /p/. The reason for there being two female rows is because in certain environments the original /p/ was changed to /r/ (p > bʲ > d > r), which caused the vowels to also have different reflexes.