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'''Icecap Moonshine''' is a highly divergent language spoken around the year 6843  in cold climates<ref>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'''.  </ref> famous for its [[oligosynthetic language|oligosynthetic]] vocabulary,  compact morphology, and grammaticalized hostility towards male speakers.  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.
'''Icecap Moonshine''' is a highly divergent language spoken around the year 6843  in cold climates<ref>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'''.  </ref> famous for its small root vocabulary,<ref>I no longer consider Moonshine oligosynthetic because it makes use of a very large set of prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, postbases, and so on, and the meanings of these are not visibly related to roots with similar sounds.</ref> 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.
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.
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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.
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==
=Scratchpad=
===Saying ''please'' and ''thank you''===
:''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.''
;June 13, 2020
==No genitive case?==
IMS retains the PMS/Leaper dual imperative setup, where '''ṅ'''  means "please" and '''ṅt''' indicates the standard imperative.  Thus in Leaper and PMS (and possibly even in Gold) the polite imperative was actually shorter than the standard imperative.  IMS inherits this system, in the sense that its standard imperative is probably a simple suffix '''-d''' in all environments, and although it has a highly complex system of polite imperatives, these build on a suffix '''-n''', not ''*-d''.  (These may both lengthen any preceding vowel.)
:04:17, 13 September 2023 (PDT)


===Children's speech===
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.
;June 13, 2020
Some Moonshine scholars may consider  the entire [[Poswa]] language to be part of Icecap Moonshine's fifth register, spoken by children to other children. Since children at this stage cannot read, and almost never hear the proper Poswa language spoken to or around them, adults are required to bring Poswa words into Moonshine, and the body of children's slang changes constantly as it draws from its very large but finite pool of Poswa words.


Because of the way Poswa's grammar works, making every clause a word and every word a clause, IMS only needs to borrow the vocabulary to effectively borrow the whole language, at least according to the scholars.  Children on the ground do not see the patterns in the Poswa words and merely think of them as ordinary words that for whatever reason are never used by adults.
==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.


It is possible that the children's words are deliberately spelled wrong in order  to emphasize their nonstandard nature, or that they are spelled in Poswa's letters, or that they are represented with symbols.  Or they may be spelled properly after all, if speakers rely on their sound to set them apart from the rest of the language.  As children who speak the childish register in its pure form are too young to read, this choice matters only to adults representing the speech of the children they hear.
Moonshine could possibly be analyzed with just two vowels.


Words from the childish register are ''not'' used in adult speech to denote children's things.  For example, '''pižupa''' is Poswa for school (in general), and small children will use this word for the schools they attend beginning at the age of five, but adults do not say ''*pižupa'' for "children's school" or "elementary school".  Instead, the use of the childish register denotes one's age and social status, rather    than describing the objects one sees around them. An adult saying ''pižupa'' in any context other than quoting a child would in fact be signalling that they felt overwhelmed, naive, helpless, or in some other manner unfit for the adult world.
==Noun classifier suffixes==
:14:04, 18 August 2022 (PDT)
Because the noun classifier suffixes were formed already in [[gDX|Gold]], it is likely that Leaper and Moonshine inherited them, and they may have  a system similar to [[Play_language#Only_eight_noun_classes|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.


====Cultural aspects====
===Inherited noun classifier suffixes (Gold/Leaper forms given)===
The Poswob people are somewhat smaller than Moonshines, particularly those of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, though not so much that they seem childlike.    It is the speech and culture of the Poswobs that seems most childish by comparison to Moonshine, and Moonshines see the Poswobs not so much as a socviety of children, but as a society of adult babies. When a Moonshine speaker above the age of five uses the childish register in any situation where a more mature speech register is available, it is   taken as a conscious decision on the speaker's part.
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.


====Vocabulary====
*'''-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.
The childish register encompasses Poswa but is not confined to it.  Many childish words are native Moonshine vocabulary items that have come to be seen as unfit for adults for various reasonsMany are compounds for which adults prefer to use atomic roots. For example a small child might describe a swamp as a "wet forest".
*'''-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.


As above, adults using the childish register are describing themselves, not the objects they are namingThe word '''blila''' "bottle" does not mean a small bottle, a cute bottle, or a baby's milk bottle, but may sometimes be used to describe a very ''big'' bottle, something so heavy that an adult has difficulty carrying it in their hands and feels unnaturally small by comparison.  Because childish words are nearly always longer than their standard Moonshine  equivalents, they feel heavy and tend to dominate any sentence in which they occur.  
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 possessThis 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 [[gDX|Gold]].


When only a single word in an adult's speech is from the childish register, the intent is to mark out that word specifically and draw attention to it.  When an adult uses more words, or even an entire sentence, in the childish register, they are consciously imitating a child, and this often expresses their emotions, whether positive or negative.  Adults in a playful mood may produce many sentences like this, but adults who are frightened by the world around them will do so even more. Even here, subtle differences exist: adults in a happy mood tend to use the childish register in its most pure form, whereas those under stress will not struggle to remember all of the words and grammatical constructs they had used when they were young.
===Use of symbols===
It is possible to represent the supersufficient early Moonshine alphabet in  Roman letters.


Like every other language, Poswa has words for adult concepts that children cannot understand. Most Moonshine women, even well-educated ones, do not know the Poswa words for obscene concepts, and men have their own obscene vocabulary with little need for PoswaBut Poswobs are famously  forthright in their manners, and therefore such words exist and are not euphemisms. Thus, Poswa words like ''pipwap'' "to masturbate in public" circulate in Moonshine alongside incorrect coinages that merely *sound* as if they were from Poswa.
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.


====Verbs====
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.
If IMS has first person ''-o'' (present) and ''-i'' (past) in any of its many conjugations, this conjugation will be the first one taught to children and children will be expected to use it even when it is incorrect so that they can use the Poswa loanwords that require these endings. The other person markers may or may not match up, but this is of little importance, as it is expected that small children will talk almost entirely about themselves and their needs, mentioning other people only in regards to their ability to please the child.  This is because children in Moonshine culture are allowed and expected to be very selfish.


===Honorifics===
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.
;June 11, 2020
In a radical departure from the grammar of other Gold languages, perhaps IMS's honorifics could be prefixes. This would require them to have formed early on as PMS free words.


;June 7, 2020
====Masculine symbols====
From a dream I had on June 6, I figured Moonshine could use honorifics "to show how great something is".  These would pattern like the expressives of Poswa, showing the speaker's love and admiration for something, meaning that they are in theory all optional, but some speakers .... probably men .... are expected to use them in every single instance when referring to certain nouns .... probably their wives and any other females close to themThey would not become *truly* universal, however, since that would mean they'd lose their meaning ... if this does happen, a second layer of honorifics will need to be generated to replace  the first.
*'''💮''' 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 [[babakiam|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.


Unlike the Japanese, Moonshine speakers are not particularly humble, so there is no prohibition against a speaker using an honorific to denote themselves, although since Moonshine's feminine register lacks pronouns, it might be restricted to formulations such as "we great council members" where the speaker is part of a larger group.
*'''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.


The choice of how to structure the honorifics depends on what is chosen below in the [[#Early changes]] section.
====Other symbols====
====Speech registers====
*'''¤¥''' marks essive case. Pronunciation depends on the word, and the actual pronunciation might be added too.  
All four adult speech registers use honorifics. Even men using the typically vulgar male/male speech register use honorifics for women, but they use them freely instead of obligatorily, and also have some pejorative gradationsEssentially they use the honorifics to express their emotions and opinions of the women around them.  
*'''¤₩''' marks instrumental casesee above for pronuncation notes
*'''☋''' marks a passive verb. Represents a symbol that goes ON TOP of the glyph.  May be '''¤☋'''.


Women also use honorifics, because, as above, the Moonshines are far from humble and their women see no  problem describing themselves as "great", "beautiful", "powerful", and so on.  Women also use honorifics of a different type to describe their husbands and other males among their friends and family.  It could  even be that IMS has no word for husband, simply using the word for "man" with a diminutive suffix on.  Pejorative suffixes for men also exist, but are rarely encountered, as women see all words for males as being pejorative by nature  unless padded with a hypocoristic sufgfix.
;Moons


===Early changes===
*'''🌙🌘''' will not all display properly
;June 6, 2020
Between [[gold language|Gold]] and [[babakiam|Play]], the original three options for how person markers attach to roots were likely lost and then rebuilt.  Play has a three-way distinction between "I have an ___", "I am an ____" and "I use an ___", all without using any of its noun cases ... it instead uses different stems of each root, which in Poswa evolved into the B-, C-, and D- stems.  If Gold similarly had a three-way distinction, it must have been formed in a different manner, because the C and D stems did not exist in Gold and its B stem could not perform all three functions.  Neither could the bare root be used here because it often ends in a consonant and the Gold person markers were also  consonants.


It's worth noting, however, that the Play formulas are ''built'' on noun cases .... "I have a" comes from the locative (sic, not circumstantial); "I am a" comes from the genitive with an additional Play-specific padding morpheme; and "I use a" comes from the bare root but with another Play-specific padding morpheme.
;Flowers
*''' 🌹🌷''' plus more treated above. these are likely confined to non-literal use


Note that PMS has an "I have a" form that is built on the locative case; this may need to change to circumstantial.  The locative case could have been chosen due to reanalysis of the accented /g/ as being the produce of /gg/, though, so perhaps it is valid after all. If this is chosen, then "have" would need to have been originallt an intransitive verbm, since it has no accusative marker, merely the oblique.
====test of display quality====
'''☌☍☈☀ ☹    ♄♅♆♇♈♉♊♋♌♍♎♏♐♑♒♓♃  '''


===Weak verb conjugations===
'''⚾⚽👚👋 '''
Strong verbs in Icecap Moonshine each have their own declension, and therefore the name of each declension is simply the name of the verb.  There are only at most a few dozen strong verbs in the language, and probably less than that. The weak verb conjugations are just as difficult and unpredictable as the strong ones, but it is much easier to tell which weak conjugation a given verb belongs to.


====Womb====
''''''
The ''womb'' conjugation contains verbs whose stems end in '''-š''', which can mean "womb" or a wide variety of other things.  Nonetheless, the womb meaning predominates, and therefore this conjugation can only take a feminine agent.  Even in a passive conjugation, there cannot be a masculine or neuter agent.<ref>tentative, only if the grammar works itself out that way .... it wont be simply declared true by convention</ref>  This is however a syncretic conjugation, combining elements of the word that originally meant ''womb'' with other morphemes that also collapsed into the single consonant '''š'''.


The womb elements provide the 1p present and past tense morphemes, which are '''p''' and '''f''' respectively when occurring after a vowel.  That is, the stem /š/ becomes one of /p f/.  When occurring after a consonant, however, both merge into /w₂/ ... that is, the sound is not pronounced, it merely mutates the preceding consonant, and in some cases it has no effect even on that.  Unlike the more common /w₁/, this sound does not bleed onto the preceding vowel either. 
'''➿➰'''


Womb verbs include verbs for childbirth, menstruation, and so on .... actions that require an agent with a womb. They also include all other inalienable feminine nouns, however, so a woman who uses her hands, legs, and so on to perform an action still uses a womb verb. Notably, even though it refers mostly to inalienably possessed objects such as body parts, this inflection paradigm ''does not'' include a reflexive marker, so the literal semantic meaning of the affix is "with a womb", not "with her womb", and so on. 
'''😔 👚👋🐟🍓🍒🍑🍏🍎🍌🍍🌻🌺'''


This group also include some alienable feminine nouns, mostly for words in which an earlier feminine /-ž/ suffix came into contact with a voiceless consonant and became voiceless itself.  The proper /ž/ conjugation is nonetheless quite similar to this one.
(most of these render properly on my laptop but not my desktop)


Womb words also include all verbs derived straightforwardly from nouns ending in /-š/, regardless of the meaning of that /š/.  As it happens, most such words describe feminine verbs such as "give birth", and so on.  But there is also the subtype including verbs such as '''leš''' "set on fire" and '''liš''' "bite into", which have been reanalyzed as feminine verbs as though they involved the use of the agent's womb just like childbirth.  Because these words have a vowel before the /š/, they conjugate in the simple pattern. Thus "I (a woman) did set it on fire" translates as '''lef'''.
==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.


====Bite====
==Goals==
The ''bite'' conjugation consists of verbs whose stems end in ''-z''.  They typically take neuter agents, and typically describe actions that only animals can do, such as biting through solid objects, swimming deep underwater, and flying through the sky.  Moonshine does not assign human agents to actions like these even metaphorically, although the feminizing palatal morpheme '''ž''' can be suffixed to the verb stem (and /zž/ > /ž/) to create derived forms which can take feminine agents.  These are not grammatically considered to be the same verb because the stem has changed from ending in /z/ to ending in /ž/, but the meanings are typically closely related. 


====Pine====
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.
This category describes verbs involving feminine property that is not part of the ''womb'' conjugation.  It is typically inalienable property.  Stems end in /-ž/.  This /ž/ can either occur alone or be suffixed to a preceding consonant.  It is the oldest specifically feminine category in the language, preceding even the womb verbs.


The canonical name for this verb class is actually "vagina", but Moonshine teachers introduce it with a different name when teaching overseas so as not to alarm students who have not yet learned of the Moonshine women's plainspoken manners.   
===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/.   


====Sap====
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.
Used for verbs derived from male property; largely the masculine counterpart of the Pine conjugation.  Stems usually end in '''-en''', and always end in '''-n'''.  First person, which is always masculine, is perhaps marked by a shift of /n/ > /ġ/.  (This is due to nni > nəči > ŋʷši > nkʷi > ʲnġʷ > ʲġ.  The ʲ is already part of the /e/.)


''BUT NOTE THAT PMS MAY NOT HAVE SHIFTED /čʷ/ > /kʷ/ AS DID LEAPER. THAT WOULD MAKE THIS INTO ʒ.'''
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.


===Noun declensions===
===Gendered possession markers===
Icecap Moonshine likely uses declensions, similar to [[Future Poswa]] but unlike classical [[Poswa]]The declensions may cut across gender lines, though perhaps masculine nouns will need to take a suffix that unites them into a single declension of their ownEven if this is true, it is possible that some very common irregular nouns remain outside this declension.
:06:44, 5 July 2022 (PDT)
Inherited from MRCA '''ĭkə''',<ref>Elsewhere on this page it says ìkə  but in Gold the two would have merged so it makes no difference whatsoever.</ref> 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" formThis was likely mistaken for a classifier suffix at some point after the split of Play and LeaperIf 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.


Many nouns form their accusative by adding /č/.  These can perhaps be all grouped together into a "trivial" declension regardless of what their root-final consonant is, though it would be best to see if they also have similar ways of forming their other stems.
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''.


For example, '''sùsa''' "female farmer" adds /-č-/ for its accusative and /-ň-/ for its circumstantial.
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.  


====Declension 1====
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.
'''š''' "feminine property".  Used for female inalienables, women's clothes, and certain other objects considered to be inherently feminine.  Accusative '''k-''', circumstantial '''ġ-'''.  There is also a dative, either /h-/ or /f-/, which could serve as the genitive.  The inherited genitive would probably merge with this in EITHER case(The question is whether pre-PMS /xʷ/ or /hʷ/ dominates in a cluster comprised of both.)  A second accusative form in /-p/ may be used for when the agent and patient are both third person feminine.


If agent is male, the accusative remains /-š/, because it is not etymologically an accusative at all.   
===Pronunciation===
Even in the egalitarian [[khulls|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.


====Declension 2A====
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 mistakesThey 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.  
'''-ž''' "feminine property".  Often follows a noun that already ends in a consonant, and therefore changes that noun's declension classExpands to /-g-/ when a vowel follows.  It is likely that when a padding consonant precedes, the accusative of this is '''-k-''', circumstantial is '''-ŋ-''', and there is also a commonly used instrumental and a commonly used /s/ genitive.  The instrumental is probably just /g/ again, therefore indistinguishable from the nominative.  The genitive is probably /h/. Thus all four are velars.


====Declension 2B====
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.
'''-Ø''' "feminine property".  Used in only a few inherited nouns; etymologically identical to 2A but found in words where the final consonant was eliminated by sound change.


====Declension 2C====
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.
It's possible that a third pattern exists: ž/č/ň, which would make it almost identical to the zero suffix. This is more likely to be the third person feminine "named possessor" form, however, and it is never used with inalienables.


====Declension 3====
==Lack of contact with Poswa==
'''noh''' "man", alternates with '''nó'''.  Accusative '''nok-''', circumstantial '''noh-'''.  Thus, this could be patternized as h/k/h.  This particular noun is masculine, but there is no masculine suffix on this word, so it shares the declension with neuter and likely also feminine nouns.
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.


As with declension 1, the accusative is /-p/ if the agent is 3rd person feminine, and possibly also for 3rd person in generalIt may be /d~ʒ/ for the circumstantial.
==Comparison to Play==
The proto-Moonshine language (long before Icecap) and Leaper could both be described as a defective version of [[babakiam|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 wordsAnd 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.


====Declension 4====
Therefore in a sense Moonshine is just as difficult to learn as Play, but much less impressive, and also much less stable.
'''lař''' "boy".  Accusative '''řak-''', circumstantial '''řaŋ-'''.  Stem contracts as lař > lř > ř.  Possibly grouped as a subset of Declension 2.  Gender-neutral but possibly most used for masculine nouns.


====Declension 5====
==Possible inaccessibility==
'''ṛòt''' "boy".  Accusative '''ṛòč-''', circumstantial '''ṛóň-'''.  Possibly part of the trivial declension as tč > č in all environments and /ň/ may come to be seen as the generic circumstantial ending.
: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 language|Play]] and the shared MRCA, [[Gold language|Gold]].


====Declension 6====
At the very least, I will be working on the tropical languages ([[Middlesex]], [[Andanese]], and [[babakiam|Play]]), and then on [[GDX|Gold]] (and Leaper), before committing to anything in Moonshine.
'''-en''' "male property; made for men".  May need to be broken into three subtypes.  Primary form has accusative '''-eʒ''' and circumstantial '''-en'''. Note the lack of palatalization.


Because of Moonshine's gender asymmetry, this has a feminine version, likely marked by palatalizing each form so that they appear as -eň, -eǯ, -eň, etc. The -en affix does not mean "belonging to a male" but merely "made for a male", meaning that a woman can also own such an object.  By contrast the feminine inalienable affix -š is restricted to feminine possessors, meaning it has no masculine or neuter (or free) forms.
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.


===New vocabulary===
===Size of phoneme inventory===
;May 31, 2020
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 structureA 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.
Leaper '''gṅĭ''' "penis" is likely just a masculine inalienable possession marker in PMSLeaper's feminine version of this, '''gʷî''', could mean clitoris, urethra, or even breast in Leaper, or it could be unused, but in PMS it would likely appear at least somewhere as an inalienable feminine marker. It seems that it would merge to /ž/ or even /z/. Both of these are derived from '''ṗ''' "eye" and thus are euphemisms in Leaper, which is why their meanings are so broad in PMS.


The Icecap reflexes of these morphemes would likely depend on environment .... /gṅĭ/ might be just the familiar "high rising n" or it might need to retain its final vowel, while the feminine version might be /g/ or /r̄/ or it might retain its final vowel as well.
==Stereotypes of foreign languages==
See [[User:Soap/scratchpad#Cultural_divides_in_the_tropics]]  and  the latter half of [[Play language/history]] for now.


;May 30, 2020
Leaper's word for moon could be '''kʷô''' (tone??) instead of having /ġʷ/, by adding /hʷ/ "sleep" to the onset.  This could happen in PMS too, leading to IMS having just a '''k''' for this root.


===Romanization===
==Giri tile and toy block scripts==
;May 29, 2020
:14:52, 4 April 2022 (PDT)
Try to learn to use one of '''r̂ ṛ r̄ ṙ''' to represent the uvular fricative so that the plain '''r''' can be freed up for the much more common alveolar trill (currently using ''ř'').  Another possibility is one of '''ħ ḥ''', since it is voiceless as often as it is voiced.
The canonical consonant inventory of Gĭri, the Middlesex and early Moonshine children's speech register, was:


===Pronouns===
Bilabials:                  m  b
;May 24, 2020
Coronals:                t  n  l
The [[Poswa]] strategy of attaching person markers directly to the genitive case of a noun to indicate "I, a ..." is due to Play's unique sound change /sb/ > /s/, the presence of three evidential morphemes that began with /b/, and a later sound change of /sb/ > /b/ that grammaticalized the first one. None of these were present in Gold and therefore none of them are likely present in Moonshine either, unless an [[wikipedia:Glottalic_theory#Objections|astonishing coincidence]] took place.  
Palatals:                        y
  Velars:                 kʷ  ŋ (Ø)


It is possible that Gold and its non-Play descendants will have to use the essive case for this function even though the original intent all along was to use the genitive. ("The genitive and member endings are the same.") Try to find a way to use the genitive so that the later use of /-l/ instead of /-s/ for genitives can be more easily justified.
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 [[Players|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.


Note that if the essive case were used, the 1st and 2nd person forms (that is, "one of my ..." and "one of your ...") would have been /-ča-/ and /-hia-/ in Gold, and thus still distinct, but would have merged into /-ša-/  before the proto-Moonshine stage. (NOTE: But they were still distinct in Leaper!!) Only the 2nd person form is productive in Moonshine, but if the two had merged before the breakoff of Moonshine, Moonshine must have gotten its 2nd person form from somewhere else.
==Pronouns==
All pronouns in early Moonshine are    derived from  [[User:Soap/scratchpad#Verbal_embedding|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.


;May 23, 2020
Female speech in IMS lacks pronouns entirely, just as its parent language did.  Only men use pronouns, and there are quite a lot of them to memorize, each tuned to a specific social situation. 


Men's pronouns for themselves are often grammatically 2nd person, e.g. "your listener", when addressing a woman.  Then, the obedience markers stack on top of this, and determine whether the verb in the sentence will use 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person agreement.  (It may even be that men cannot use 1st person at all.)
==Volition and obedience==
:05:50, 2 April 2022 (PDT)  


This explains the confusing statement below that male speakers say /oḍ/ for /as/ "whenever the /as/ is 2nd person" ... because sometimes for men it can be 1st person.
Volition should probably be folded into the obedience morphemes, rather than using the [http://www.frathwiki.com/index.php?title=Icecap&oldid=147218#Scratchpad old system]  where obedience morphemes were for males only and were marked  by suffixes, while volition applied to all situations.


*'''ṭu-š-as''' ~ '''ṭuš(a)-''' "your husband", from Gold /tuhʷuʕ gahas/.<ref>Surface pronunciation was /tuhʷuʕahas/, with three unstressed syllables before the final stressed one.</ref>  This form is identical to its own genitive, unless analogy takes placeThis is also the case with ordinary 2p feminine nouns.
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 possessionThus Moonshine is not like Poswa, which allows involuntary obedience markers associated with forcing agents of all three persons.


Note that according to writeups below, men cannot ever actually use this pronoun in bare form because it implies [[#Involuntary obedience]], and therefore its existence is just a construct of the grammar.
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.


'''TO DO''': Need to figure out how to say things like "your admirer", "your listener", etc in Gold.  The Poswa formula cannot be used exactly, but something similar may work.
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.
:Possibly just "I listen to you" with a genitive marker on?  That or essive?


===Categorization of nouns by gender is not the same as nominal possession===
==Doctorate Moonshine==
;May 23, 2020
:05:50, 2 April 2022 (PDT)
The feminine marker /-ž/ (from /gə/) is not a 3rd person feminine possessive marker, it merely means "of women".  Thus a new 3rd person form must be found.  This /ž/ also appears as palatalization of a noun whose stem ends in /s/.  There is a masculine form, descended from Gold /ŋùni/, which became B-ʷ-nni at some early stage of the language and thus could appear as -ʷ-n (although apparently the /ʷ/ is suppressed too, therefore /en ~ oni-/) in IMS, through it would be "volatile" because of the suppressed syllableIf there is still a masculine possessive marker /-t/, it goes on the outside of this morpheme, and therefore the suppressed vowel reappears.  This means that, contrary to below, there may be more than one masculine stem in the language after all ... though there may be still only  two masculine ''morphemes''.  Females can still take possession of objects with the masculine category marker on, but men cannot take possession of categorically feminine objects (and indeed there would be no place to put the masculine marker /-t/).
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 naturallyThis would require a number of [[wikipedia:Glottalic_theory#Objections|astonishing coincidences]], however, even if assuming that some of Doctorate's IAL-like features were not actually very useful.


Nouns categorized as masculine include male body parts (Gold /ḳaunni/ "penis"   > ''' cen'''; /halaunni/ "testicles" > '''hen''' <ref>or something similar depending on when /lh/ > /h/ occurred</ref>).    Possibly, non-distinctive body parts also change form, so that e.g. the word for thigh could derive from Gold /dă/ in bare form, from /dă gə/ for a woman, and from /dă ŋùni/ for a man.  The proper Gold forms of these would be ''dă dāʕ daunni'', and in Icecap Moonshine they would evolve to '''l(a) l(a) len'''.  Probably, the feminine form merges with the unmarked form in a great many forms, perhaps the majorityHowever, because it requires an accent shift in Gold in order to hold the superheavy syllable, CVCV forms will typically not merge.
==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 clusterThe stabilization of the accent on the root is not a problem however.


This development implies that the words for body parts that derive from CVCV roots will come to begin with consonant clusters in IMS much of the timeFor example, kidney will become    '''psi''' for a female (the male form in Gold would have been /patənni/, which would thus develop a syllabic /ṅ/, and would thus turn into an irregular such as /pén ~ páni-/ in IMS if it is not repaired with a dummy morpheme).
==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 pauseMoonshine 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.


The Leaper word for eye is simply ''ṗ''; this would be preserved into PMS and IMS alike as '''p''' and could appear in both its literal usage and metaphorically, similar to the /-v-/ evidentials of Poswa.
=Diachronics and other information=
 
==Feminist Compact Imperial (3948) to Icecap Moonshine (~6800)==
It is possible that the body part suffix /-m/ will be needed here to prevent collapse of the many single-consonant body part words; this would allow an additional vowel to be inserted.  This is likely at least for words used in their bare form.  However, as below, body part words are sometimes used after verbs to indicate the means by which an action was performed ,either literally or metaphorically.
The expansive inherited phonology simplified quickly during the settlement period as the [[Proto-Moonshine language|proto-Moonshine]] speakers passed through territory inhabited by speakers of [[Bābākiam|Play]] and other languages with similarly small inventories.
 
The sequence '''-en-t-''' will probably always resolve to '''-ed-''' regardless of whether the vowel rotates to /o/ or not in the unappended forms.
 
===Possible gender-neutral instrumental verb markers===
Gold /gakū/ > '''-čo-''' "using my"
Gold /gahʷū/ > '''-h(ū)-''' "using your"
 
The 1st person might contract to /k/ before a vowel just as the 2nd person contracts to /h/.  Thus, in a roundabout way, the pre-Gold person markers /k h/ reappeared.
 
These can only "reliably" be used with nouns whose stems end in a vowel.  But it is likely that analogy will lead to many nouns being used as if they had zero-morph suffixes.  For example, body parts.  There was probably a dummy noun such as /gà/ that contracted to /Ø/ before the suffixes so that they can be used in IMS without having to think up what the historical oblique forms of each noun would be.  Thus for example, /tā/ or even just /ta/ can serve for "telepathy" instead of having to work back to the Gold oblique form /taha-/. The word for telepathy is basic, and the word for brain is not, so the word for telepathy may end up being the word used to refer to actions that came about because of detailed planning. 
 
Masculines might need to insert ''-ʷni-'' here, on the basis that the feminine marker collapses to Ø but the masculine marker must retain at least a consonant (/n/) and possibly also a vowel.  It may even cause vowel lengthening of the preceding stem unless this is analogized out.
 
Remember that these person markers do not need to match the person markers of the verb itself.  These are  equivalent to Poswa's ''-ibo/-ube/-oba'' instrumentals.  On the other hand if they become  integrated into the stem, then they will match and the alternation will be seen as part of the stem-changing properties of the person markers rather than as part of the person markers themselves.   
 
====Feminine after all====
Body parts are likely to appear commonly here in metaphorical meanings.  For example, though they may seem vulgar, /gì/ "vagina" and /xʷ/ "womb" are likely to be common verbal suffixes which create feminine verbs.  They are highly polysemic; e.g. /gì/ also means "flask; canteen" and this is not a euphemism.


These may pattern like the /z/-stem neuters, but at least womb already contracts to just a /Ø/ in the 1st and 2nd person (3rd would collide with 2nd unless it is restructured).  And vagina is just a /ʲ/.
===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 4300Properly 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.


If there are three feminine types, they may be called breast/belly/womb, and will encompass mergers of many more morphemes, perhaps one for every consonant in the language, into three patterns.  "vagina" is ʲk/ʲh for 1p&2p, but perhaps even the ʲ is to be reanalyzed as part of the stem and    this thus merges with womb in at least 1p&2p.
If there are at least two patterns, they could be m/ġ/f̣ "breast" and š/k/h "womb". Note that these are free/1p/2p, and 3p is not listed here.  The so-called breast verbs might be described as the "forward conjugation", because the root morpheme for breast appears in words for frontward motion.  Following this pattern the womb verbs might be thus described as the "central" or "interior" conjugation.
Other body parts can be used like this, but most do not have three distinct forms.  For example, the word for eye appears as /p/ always, and cannot be used to distinguish between different persons.
===Neuter verb markers===
;May 22, 2020
The neuter verb marker '''-z-''' mentioned below is probably still valid, but it may not really belong to a separate conjugation.... it depends on analysis.  Such verbs are rarely used with human agents, but it may not be so far evolved as to be ungrammatical.  This means that neuters  can only be the agents of verbs that end in vowels and perhaps a few consonants, to which the /-z-/ is added.  This puts them in the same category as men, though perhaps a bit higher. 
===Masculine verb markers===
;May 22, 2020
Gold /dagə/ > IMS '''-řg-''' (-rž when final) "to use a man"; likely also the masculine verb marker.  Must come before a vowel, but not necessarily after one.  Note that we already have '''ṭ''' for this exact function and they may be suppletive.
If all male agents must use this morpheme, this means that males can only be the agents of verbs that end in vowels, and are potentially even lower on the animacy hierarchy than neuters.
The feminine verb marker is Ø, but there may be some suffixes anyway for formulas such as "she uses her ____ to ____".    In other words, from IMS's perspective a man is just one more piece of feminine property. 
Another possible feminine property marker is Gold /gʷū/ > IMS '''-gū-''', which apparently turns into just a /g/ by some kind of analogy.  ( Perhaps gʷū ~ gʷuʕ- ~ gʷug- ?)  This would mean that effectively  the masculine verb marker can be analyzed as /-ř-g-/, consisting of a unique suffix before the feminine property marker, again implying that adult males are merely one particular type of feminine property.
An alternative analysis, saying that all of the suffixes  belong to the stem, is that males can only use verbs that happen to end in /-rž/.
===Feminization===
Nouns can palatalize or go under other mutations to specifically mark out that they are feminine.  Neuters ending in /s/, for example, might shift of /š/ to become feminines. The masculine formation would likely just add -t.
Note that the fact that it is palatalization is essentially just down to the fact that most of the stems end with alveolars ... there was never a /ʲ/ in the feminizing morpheme, and in fact it was originally a morpheme that alternated between velar and labiovelar.  Put another way, stem final /-s/ is to /-š/ as /-Ø/ is to /-g ~ -ž/.
Think of this as a ''derivational'' morpheme, not an inflectional one, even though inflections attach to it.
==Attempt to sketch up a "neat" ordered verb structure==
There will need to be one of these for nouns too.  Noun morphology may be even more complex than verb morphology.
===Derivational morphology===
VERB STEM + (GENDER 1) + POSITION + inflections
Verb stem is malleable.
The GENDER 1 marker is '''ř''' for a masculine agent, possibly '''z''' for a neuter (unless this marker appears somewhere else), and '''Ø''' for a feminine agent. 
The POSITION marker determines which conjugation the verb belongs to.  "Forward" verbs are marked with /ġ/ in the 1st person and /f̣/ in the 2nd person; "interior" verbs are marked with /k/ in the first person and /h/ in the 2nd person.  It is possible that this marker is restricted to appearing only whrn the GENDER 1 marker does not, since they both occupy the same place in the word, and could be considered to be a single morpheme after all.  However, the /ř/ is present in constructions like /-řg-/ and appears transparent.  In either analysis, female agents are the only ones with full access to the POSITION markers and thus to the wide array of conjugations. 
Note that in the analysis below, the /z/ of neuters determines the conjugation, which is why it is unclear.
===Inflectional morphonology===
derivations + OBEDIENCE + PERSON/TENSE + MOOD + EXTERNAL AGENT + DISCOURSE MARKERS
The derivational morphology is covered above. 
The OBEDIENCE marker, if it exists, probably goes here, as it does in Poswa.  However, there is no cognacy between the two obedience systems.  And therefore they may appear in different places.  Obedience is already marked on the noun, and most of the semantic load would be there, but the verb would at least agree with the noun.  This could also help distinguish between two different third persons as it does in Poswa, but note that IMS distinguishes three genders in its third person verb markers, and may also distinguish number. 
The PERSON/TENSE marker has been fused for thousands of years and has never been pulled apart by analogy.  Only a few of the paradigms have separate markers for all of the possibly conjugations.  The tense distinction is between past and present; ther may or may not be also marking frog aspect.  It is not clear where number is marked on the verb, if it is at all.  It is possible that IMS retains the original lack of number distinction in 3rd person and that the person markers are sufficient on their own to clarify the category of number for 1st & 2nd person. 
Imperative is probably retained as a distinct tense.
The MOOD marker can be indicative, subjunctive, resultative, and probably others.  Resultative is a mood, not an aspect, just like in Poswa.  This is inherited from the original language; the resultative is the inverse of the subjunctive.  Likewise, imperative is probably a tense, not a mood, because it has separate forms for all three persons and is formed analogously to the present and past tenses.   
The EXTERNAL AGENT marker may be vestigial, but it serves to prevent phonetic álly impossibly cvlusters. 
The DISCOURSE markers are only used by males and by women talking to men; see below.
==Pre-Proto-Moonshine (3948) to Icecap Moonshine (~6800)==
The expansive inherited phonology simplified quickly during the settlement period as the [[Proto-Moonshine language|proto-Moonshine]] speakers passed through territory inhabited by speakers of [[Bābākiam|Play]] and other languages with similarly small inventories.
#The coarticulated labial-velar stops ''kp ḳṗ'' shifted to '''p ṗ''', as in Leaper.  This shift occurred separately, however, leaving the two  languages with different distributions of /p/.
#The ejective stops ''ṗʷ ṗ ṭ ḳ ḳʷ'' shifted to the voiceless aspirates '''pʷ p t k kʷ'''. Thus aspiration became nondistinctive.
#:Note that PMS did not have voiced stops either.
#All high rising tones became ordinary long tones.
#All high rising tones became ordinary long tones.
#All pharyngealized vowels became ordinary low (mid) tones.  The stress became weak.
#All pharyngealized vowels became ordinary low (mid) tones.  The stress became weak.
#The labialized glottal fricative '''' shifted to a voiceless bilabial fricative '''f'''.
#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.  
#The velar fricatives ''x xʷ'' came to be spelled '''h hʷ'''. Note that /hʷ/ contrasts with /f/. 
#The rare labialized glottal fricative '''' (sometimes spelled ħʷ for distinctness) shifted to a voiceless bilabial fricative '''f'''.
#Labialization was lost in the syllable coda; ''pʷ mʷ kʷ ŋʷ gʷ'' became '''p m k ŋ h g'''.
#Labialization was lost in the syllable coda; ''pʷ mʷ kʷ ŋʷ 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/.
 
#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.
At this stage, reached by about 4300 AD, the proto-Moonshine language  had a consonant inventory of:
 
Rounded bilabials:      pʷ  mʷ          w
Plain bilabials:        p   m  f           
Alveolars:              t  n   s       l   r
Palataloids:            č  ň  š  ž  y   
Velars:                k  ŋ  h  g
Labiovelars:            kʷ  ŋʷ  hʷ  gʷ
 
Vowels were
 
High tone    à  ì  ù  ə̀ 
Low tone      a  i  u  ə
Long          ā  ī  ū  ə̄
 
The PMS /ə/ vowel corresponds to Khulls /o/ and the two were written with the same symbol rather than PMS reviving the early Gold schwa glyph. The script also had a row of symbols for  /e/, but this /e/  could be analyzed as /ai/. It just happened that there were no other falling diphthongs in the language.  Unlike Khulls, the palatal glide /y/ could occur after labialized consonants, and it did not stain a following vowel.  Thus all four vowels could occur after the /y/.


Prenasals  existed in word-initial position, also unlike Khulls. e.g. /mpʷà/ "house" vs Khulls pà. 
===Middlesex influence===
The lower classes of Moonshine society at first had their own language, which [[Middlesex#Phonology|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.
#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.
#Syllabic consonants bordered by vowels became normal.
#:This means that the vowel + g + consonant declension simply becomes vowel + consonant.,
#Unstressed syllable-final ''s'' shifted to '''h'''.
#:This may be omissible because it behaves the same later on whether it is /s/ or /h/. 
#All remaining syllabic consonants (bounded by consonants) became normal.
#The short vowels ''o ò'' shifted to '''a à'''.
#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.
#Probably clusters like /nh nf/ shifted to voiceless nasals rather than having the nasal assimilate by place.  /f/ was still arguably behaving as /hʷ/; the spelling change is to keep it distinct from the inherited /xʷ/.
#Unaccented ''e i '' shifted to ''' ʲ  '''.  Thus, all non-compound words, and even some compounds, became monosyllabic. 
#The alveolar flap ''r'' came to be spelled '''ř'''.
#The labial approximant ''w'' shifted to a uvular approximant '''r'''.
#The rising tone vowels ''á é í ó ú'' shifted to '''ā ē ī ō ū'''.
#:This was originally further down and more destructive.
#Doubled consonants simplified to singles and caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high (à or á).
#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). 
#:Note that this causes all stem-final /t/ to disappear from all feminine and neuter nouns, because the feminine forms of such would have contained /tm/, but the masculines would not.
#Nonpalatalized alveolar consonants became velarized (not shown in the orthography)
#The clusters ''nlh nlk'' shifted to '''ŋh ŋk'''.
#The long vowel  ''ō  '' changed to '''o'''.
#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/
#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/
#The consonant clusters ''řp řt'' became '''lp lt''' in all positions.
#Before front vowels, ''k h g ŋ'' shifted to '''č š ž ň'''.
#A labial following any posttonic consonant  generated /ʷ/ and then disappeared. 
#:  e.g. /sp/ > /sʷ/ > /ṣ/.
#Before a vowel, unaccented ''a e i''  shifted to the glide '''ʲ'''.  Unaccented ''o u'' became '''ʷ'''.
#as a coda, ''řl''>'''l'''.
#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'''. 
#The labialized alveolars ''tʷ dʷ sʷ zʷ nʷ'' became the dentals '''ṭ ḍ ṣ ẓ ṇ''' in all positions. 
#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.
#Then ''lʲ řʲ'' became '''j ř'''.
#The sequences ''ej ij èj ìj'' shifed to '''ē ī é í''', though they may not have changed spelling.
#The dorsals ''kʲ hʲ rʲ'' became the palatals '''č š j''' in all positions.
#The labialized postalveolar consonants ''čʷ ǯʷ šʷ žʷ ňʷ'' became delabialized.
#The palatal consonants ''č ǯ š ž ň'' became '''c ʒ s z n''' in all positions. 
#The labialized alveolar approximant ''lʷ'' shifted to '''w'''.
#The dorsals ''kʷ hʷ rʷ'' became '''w''' before a consonant, while also lengthening the preceding vowel.
#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.
#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.
#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. 
#Nasals disappeared before a fricative.
#The velar stops ''k ġ'' became labialized to '''kʷ ġʷ''' before any labial consonant. 
#:This is why /kp/>/kw/ rather than /čw/.
#Any ''š'' before a nasal changed to '''ž''' and the nasal changed into a voiced stop.
#The velar stops ''k ġ'' were fronted to '''č ǯ''' unless they occurred in a cluster after another consonant and before '''<font color="#000000">a o u</font>'''.
#Labialization was lost on all consonants.
#The clusters ''šb'' and ''bš'' were devoiced to '''šp''' and '''pš''' respectively.
#The clusters ''žp'' and ''pž'' became '''žb''' and '''bž''' respectively.
#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.
#Alveolar stops in accented syllables before another syllable beginning in an alveolar became postalveolar affricates.
#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.
#Sonority hierarchy shifts took place.
#:Initial fricative+stop clusters reversed, so that, for example ''fk'' became '''ṗh''' and ''hp'' became '''kw'''.
#After a vowel, the consonant clusters ''wt wd'' merged as '''d'''.  If after /u/ or /o/, that vowel became long.
#After a vowel, the consonant clusters ''gč gǯ''  changed to '''ġ'''.
Thus the final consonant inventory was


  Bilabials:          p   b  m  ḟ  w
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.
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


==Overview==
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.  
Icecap Moonshine is highly derived, in the sense that it scarcely resembles the [[proto-Moonshine language]] spoken 3,000 years earlier.  It is one of the few fusional languages in which morphemes can delete preceding morphemes or trigger other phonemic shifts such as /a/ shifting to /e/ or /o/.


The rapid turnover of vocabulary and grammar led Moonshine scholars to place the language in a category of its own even as they knew that it had evolved from the same branch of the family that had led to [[Khulls|Leaper]].  These scholars were more interested in shared traits than in genetics, and saw that Moonshine was so unlike all other languages that it could not be linked to either closely related languages such as Khulls or distantly related but superficially more familiar languages such as [[Poswa]].
Possible sound  changes are:


==Gender and cultural interactions==
====MSX Vowel changes====
All of the traits that made Moonshine famous arose during the period of political isolation after the Feminist Compact lost their war against the all-male [[Matrix|Matrix]] army and retreated into the world's coldest habitatsThere were some influences from [[Repilian languages]], but by the time of the creation of the Moonshine state, Repilian languages had been in decline for thousands of years, and Moonshine quickly drove out the languages that had earlier driven out the Repilian languages. Some distinct characteristics of the language are:
#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.
#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. 
#The remaining plain ''i'', which occurred only after labialized consonants, now came to  be spelled '''e''' by both men and womenWomen 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.


#When men address women, they must add evidential morphemes to most nouns and verbs (all except those of the 1st person)<ref>unless neuter nouns are exempt</ref> explaining how sure they are of what they're describing, and if they are sure, which woman is the one who pointed it out to them.  There are three sets of evidentials, and each set is itself a table of forms that vary depending on the gender of the noun (or verb) and in some cases other things.
Thus Moonshine retained its four-vowel inventory, but spelled it with six vowels.  The pronunciations were:
#Men are not allowed to use the everyday words for female body parts and many other feminine nouns, even those only distantly related to gender, such as the words for certain flowers.  A separate word acceptable for men to say must therefore be learned for every such object in the lexicon, and many concepts have four such words: one each for female and male speakers and listeners.
#Some men's words are the same as women's words but with an additional honorific morpheme expressing power, beauty, and other feminine traits. 
#When men quote women's  speech they do so exactly, even though men are ordinarily not allowed to say certain words out loud.
#The semantic scope of the register for male speakers and male listeners is very limited, and makes communication difficult.  This register is called the vulgar register.  Thus even when men speak to men their vocabulary is limited by the rules women push on them.  This is in part because women ensure that men will not come to prefer conversations with men to those with women.
#There is only one inherently masculine noun in the entire language, '''t''' "son; boy; man", although neuter nouns become masculine when they are possessed by males. 
#The common word  for "man" as an agent, however, is not '''t''', but rather '''lem''', ending in a suffix indicating feminine property.  Thus males may act as agents and possessors on neuter nouns such as inanimate objects, but not on their own selves.  Any male agent requires an implicit female external agent considered to be the true subject of the sentence.
#Furthermore, male agents cannot be the owners of grammatically feminine objects, because one piece of property cannot own or act upon another piece of property.
#A separate verbal inflection paradigm exists for actions in which a woman forces an inanimate object or a  man to perform the action, but there is no matching counterpart for other gender matchups.
#Every content word in the sentence takes yet another marker, the '''discourse marker''', which agrees with the gender of the speaker and listener of the sentence, except that when both are female, the discourse marker is a null morpheme.
#Male and female agents often have entirely separate verbs for common actions; in most cases, a verb that is not derived from a noun will be inherently either masculine or feminine, and cannot be used with the opposite gender.
#The feminine verb conjugations are mostly strong verbs with generally more compact morphology, while the masculine verb conjugations are weak.  However, there is also one feminine weak conjugation. 
#A male or inanimate agent acting on any patient other than themselves or another inanimate object requires a set of '''obedience morphemes''' marking out which external female agent gave them permission to act.  These are marked on the noun, not the verb, and changes the verb to the feminine conjugation corresponding to the external forcing agent.  The obedience morphemes are built from possession markers compounded with one of four morphemes indicating the degree to which the obedience is voluntary.


===Outside perspectives===
  SCRIPT      a    e    i    o    u    ɜ
====Poswa====
  WOMEN        a  ʷi  ʲi  ʷa  ʷu    ɜ
''NOTE: Because the Moonshine language is far from finished, I can only write about this indirectly.  I am using Poswa because it is my best developed language.  If I ever get far enough, I will use actual Moonshine instead of an intermediary language.  ''
  MEN          a  ʷa  ʲi  ʷu  ʷu    ɜ


The difficulties encountered by men trying to make themselves understood in Moonshine were frequently mocked even by Poswob scholars, who typically considered their own scholarly accomplishments inferior to the Moonshines', but were just as proud of Poswa as the Moonshines were of MoonshineMale Moonshine characters in Poswob stories needed no parody, because any literal translation of the speech of a man addressing a woman in Moonshine was so long-winded that further exaggeration actually weakened the comedic effect.
Note that the labializations in the /e/ column  are present because this vowel occurred only after labialized consonants in inherited vocabularyIn 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].


For example, a Poswob woman asking a man to choose one of two flowers could ask
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/.
:'''Fabumbope, pipop tammavape?'''
::Do you (want) a tulip, or do you (want) a rose?


This sentence is grammatical, easy to understand, and makes use of the common four-syllable speech tempo that dominates PoswaThe man's reply, even if he were a scholar, would simply be
This system was complicated, but nonetheless, simpler than Middlesex in  important ways:
:'''Fabumbopo.'''
#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].
::I want the tulip.
#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].)
#Furthermore, in Middlesex, sometimes sequences such as [ʷa] appeared that were not spelled as "o" and  thus were pronounced identically by both sexesSince 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.


Or
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.
:'''Tammavapo.'''
::I want the rose.


Both of which are simply vowel-rotated forms of the two content words in the original question.
#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.


But in a Poswa play, a Moonshine woman asking a Moonshine man to pick between a rose and a tulip would say
;Sporadic and reversed shifts
:'''Fi pu waba?'''
#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/.
::Tulip or rose?


Using obscure onomastic words with ambiguous meanings and thus requiring the man to do the work of figuring out the question on his own, and an incorrect word for ''or''.   The man would then reply with something such as
====MSX consonant changes====
:'''Paefimpose, nubevwope,    mapembe  twuppupopo wembabofafo fupie    wataežos.             '''
#Men came to pronounce ''f '' as '''b  ''' unconditionally.
::You, guardian over me, I see what you show. Your heart allows me  a beautiful apple petal flower  to carry    and I happily follow you by accepting the choice you offer me.  
#Both men and women shifted ''š ž'' to '''s z''' unconditionally.
#Women came to pronounce ''g gʷ'' as '''x xʷ''' unconditionally. The unified symbol can be represented      as      <span style="font-weight: bold; color: #ff00ff">ɣ</span>. This meant that /h/ and /x/ had fallen together.


This reply requires the man to recognize the woman's superior status, to specifically call out that he indeed sees the flowers in front of him, that he needs her permission to choose one of the flowers, that it will not become his property, that  the flowers are  beautiful, that he is accepting the gift of the flower willingly, and yet that he is also obeying her by doing so, all while avoiding actually saying the names of the flowers because the names of many flowers are derived from grammatically feminine words considered too beautiful to come from the speech of a man.
;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.


The actual Moonshine words involved here are not nearly as long as the Poswa words or the English gloss because such structures are and have been part of Moonshine for thousands of years, but the literal translations are accurateThe word for tulip occurs in the middle of the Poswa sentence, surrounded by three sequences of important politeness morphemes on each side, just as it does in the original Moonshine.  
;Sporadic and reversed shifts
#A sporadic shift of ''kʷ'' to '''p''', or perhaps to '''pʷ''', could occur in a few words, for both men and women.
#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.


Some Moonshine women instruct their husbands to ignore some of the politeness rules above so they can speak more rapidlyThese men thus have separate speech registers for talking to different women, and must remember which rules apply in each given situationOther Moonshine women would avoid the situation up above by instructing their husbands to point to the flower they want.
;Idiolectal variation
#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. 
#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.
#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.


==Other unusual characteristics==
;Cultural reflections
Though Icecap Moonshine is primarily known for its gender system, it also stands out from neighboring languages in many other ways, and Moonshine linguistic scholars have much more to talk about than how gender shapes their discourse.  For example, Icecap Moonshine is at once the only [[Cosmopolitan Age|Cosmopolitan]] language with circumfixes, the only one with a fusionally overlapping inflection system (that is, the borders between morphemes are impossible to define), and the language with the highest number of permitted syllables.
There were a few syllables  containing  /ʷi/ and /ʲu/ in the Moonshine branch, whereas Leaper only had /ʷi/.


#Most basic content words in Moonshine are monosyllabic, and even these monosyllabic roots are often segmentable into a vowel padded by a consonantal circumfix.  There are many homophones, and scholars take pride in writing long paragraphs in which many of the words can be interpreted in more than one way on their own but make sense in only one way when the piece is parsed as a whole.   
Importantly, the vowel and diphthong inventory was very similar to that of contemporary [[babakiam|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 sequencesThat is, Play had both /aa/ and /ā/, but Moonshine allowed only /ā/.
#Icecap Moonshine has a large phoneme inventory, but is written with an alphabet that makes it seem larger still by marking silent letters and having several ways of writing each phonemeThough the writing system is alphabetic in nature, with each glyph standing for a single phoneme, scholars have introduced many logograms over time, which are also pronounced as single phonemes (mostly consonants) and serve to indicate  the precise meaning of the word they occur in without the writer needing to use a longer word.  All of the logograms are graphically simple, similar to the inherited alphabetic glyphs.
#Morphemes can delete or merge with preceding morphemes, and sometimes a single phoneme can represent two or three morphemes.  Since the boundaries between these morphemes are no longer segmentable, Moonshine teachers usually do not speak of them as separate morphemes, and instead teach students to memorize tables of fused morphemes.


==Phonology==
Prenasals  existed in word-initial position, also unlike Khulls. e.g. /mpʷà/ "house" vs Khulls pà.
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. Counting tones as a feature of syllables, Icecap Moonshine has the largest permissible syllable inventory in the world.


===Consonants===
===Contact with Giri===
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 Middlesex children's speech register, [[Middlesex#Children.27s_speech|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 consonantsAll syllables were CV, for a total of 27 possible syllables, just shy of the 30 of [[Late Andanese]], which also influenced Moonshine's children.


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


Voiced stops are prenasalized when preceded by vowelsBut fricatives are not.
===Development of feminine speech style===
====Delabialization====
#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.
#The script vowel ''u'' also became delabialized, from a phonological point of view, as it was phonetically equivalent to /ʷu/.
#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.
#The sequence ''ʷɜ '' shifted to '''ɜ''', removing labialization from the language altogether. (This usually corresponded to Leaper's /ʷo/.)
#The above changes also shifted the children's speech register's ''kʷ'' phoneme into '''k''' (not /p/).
#The diphthong ''au'' shifted to '''ā''', which later would become a regular '''a'''.


====Romanization of consonants====
#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.
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====
Thus the vowel inventory now was
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.


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


Teachers use two additional letters, '''ʲ''' and '''ʷ''', which are not found in the traditional alphabet because they primarily surface as grammatical alternations in which preceding vowels are brought further frontward or backward.  In the rare case where one of these phonemes appears between two consonants, they are pronounced /e/ and /o/ respectively, and spelled as such in ordinary writing.
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/.'''


:''NOTE, these could be spelled with fullsize '''j''' and '''w''' so long as the other /w/ is spelled as ṿ.  However, this would lead to writing clusters like /kw/ as kṿ, etc.''
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.


===Clusters===
====Consonant table====
There are many clusters found in no other language, such as /th/ (IPA [tx]), /fl/, etc., but the sonority hierarchy is strictly observed. This is why the affricates are considered single consonants. That is, /ts/ can occur at the end of a word because it behaves as a single consonant '''c''', but /ps/ cannot occur at the end of a word.  Stems ending in clusters like /-ps/ are always followed by vowels.
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


===Vowels===
VOLATILE CONSONANTS
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. This even applies to cases in which a vowel immediately follows the grave-tone vowel.
SCRIPT      f  ɣ  ṭ     
  WOMEN        f  x  k     
  MEN          p  g  t     


There are no diphthongs or vowel sequences; written sequences like ''ài'' are separated by a glottal stop because the first vowel is a grave tone.
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


===Syllable structure===
Therefore the voiceless bilabial stop /p/ could be substituted for any /f/  to show masculinity, but the     sound was rareThe 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.
Teachers analyze Icecap Moonshine's syllable structure as CCVC, with CCVCC roots permissible only because they belong to a category of words which can only appear when followed by a suffix beginning in a vowel or with one of the consonants that can follow other consonantsAll syllables obey a strict sonority hierarchy.


However, the silent letters '''ʕ ʔ ʲ ʷ''' complicate the syllable structure considerably.  Though descended etymologically from vowels, teachers analyze these as consonants because they can affect the pronunciation of adjacent consonants. For example, any /dʔ/ is pronounced [t].  These silent letters do not count as consonants in determining the syllable structure, as, for example, /pʔlàt/ is a valid word even though it begins with three written consonantsThis is because there is no situation where the silent letters have a consonantal realization; in the rare cases where a silent letter (usually one of /ʲ ʷ/) is trapped between consonants at a syllable edge, it is pronounced as a weak short vowel instead.
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 phonemeBoth men and women would still pronounce  a plain '''x''' as /x/.


==Gender==
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.
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. It is often necessary to introduce a feminine subject simply to complete a sentence. The Moonshine people have lived in an extremely feministic society for 5,000 years and this has shaped the language to a degree found nowhere else.  Many of the traits today found in Moonshine were part of  [[Repilia]]n languages such as the [[Repilian languages/Owl|Owl family]] for thousands of years, but Moonshine expresses these traits to a  greater extent than any Repilian language ever did, and Moonshine has also evolved similar traits of its own not shared by any Repilian language.


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.   
===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.   


It is common to list the possession markers in the order 1f 2f 3f 3m, because 1m & 2m can be derived from the rest. E.g. the clothes ending in '' ň '' are ''' ǯā ǯas ǯ nen'''.
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.


===Nominal possession markers===
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. 


NOUN CLASS            GENDER          FREE  1F    2F    3F  3M
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'''.
Clothes                neuter        -ň    -ǯā  -ǯas  -ǯ  -nen
Furniture              neuter        -č    -čā  -čas  -č*  -cen
Places/Female Body    feminine      -m    -žā  -š    -ž  (-šten)
Males                  masculine**    -t    -tā  -tas  -ta  -ten


*Dialectal.
===First deletion of vowels===
**Reorients to feminine when free.
This is around 4300, when the speakers will still in contact with Play.


All neuter nouns inherit the gender of their possessorForms in parentheses are present only for a subset of the nouns in the category.
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 LeapersThe 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.


Masculine 1st and 2nd possessive forms are not recognized because all nouns inflect for the gender of the speaker and listener, and therefore the masculines are derived from underlying feminine forms with these discourse markers added onWhen a case marker occurs between the possession marker and the discourse marker, the underlying feminine form is inflected, because the discourse marker must be the outermost morpheme on any noun.
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 inventoryNote 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.


Nouns outside the class system often end in vowels, and these must take a linking consonant, usually ''-č-'' or ''-m-'', whereupon they come to behave identically to the other nouns ending in those consonants.
#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.
#Presumably, the unaccented ''ɜ'' also shifted. 
#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.
#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.


===Neuter nouns===
====Labialization====
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 gendersGender in IMS is more closely tied to semantics than in most related languages, and there are very few nouns  semantically excluded from the neuter gender because they are the category that encompasses all nouns not in the other two categories.
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 alongIf 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.


Neuter nouns acquire the gender of their possessor, however, so while the word for seashell is neuter in isolation, it becomes masculine or feminine if it refers to the personal property of a man or a woman.
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.


===Feminine nouns===
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.
Most feminine nouns in IMS are semantically related to the female anatomy, although the chain of relation can be very long, as any newly derived feminine noun behaves the same as the original, and many new words have been coined during the 5,000 years since the split of Moonshine from its relatives. For example, tulips are feminine because they resemble skirts, and skirts are feminine because they loop around the wearer's womb.    But daisies are neuter because there is no such connection.


Triangular objects are mostly feminine because they resemble  the shape of an empty wombRound objects are mostly feminine because they resemble breasts. This includes objects that are round in only one view, such as tubes and rings.  
====Deletion of /a/====
#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 wordThus it could be said that there were still A-stems and B-stems at this point.


Because of its extreme rate of sound change, most Moonshine nouns are historically compounds.  IMS follows the inherited rule that the rightmost gendered (that is, non-neuter) 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.  
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.


A second category of feminine nouns contains words for objects  that have no semantic relation, even a remote one, to female anatomy, but have come to be feminine because their stems originally ended in low-tone vowels and therefore they acquired a final ''-m''  during the rapid overturn and reform of the inflection system. This includes words like '''lim''' "clock".  There is no semantic pattern to which nouns became feminine and which did not.
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):


===Masculine nouns===
    INIT          REFLEX
By contrast, masculine nouns obey a simple rule: they end in the grammatical masculine marker ''-t''. Most masculine nouns are dynamically constructed by adding this suffix to a neuter or feminine noun.   The most common word for man, '''le''', is in fact grammatically feminine, because men are considered to be female property. Thus, merely to be the agent of a verb, a man must use the suffix indicating a borrowed noun. Other masculine nouns follow similar patterns: the word for king, used to describe foreign monarchs, is '''pó''' "queen",<ref>this can either be /pò/ or /pó/ depending on whether the feminine suffix being analogized away was /-s/ or /-m/ at the time.</ref> plus a suffix indicating semantic similarity, plus the masculine suffix. Thus the word for king means "a man that is like a queen".
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


If the stem of the word ends in a primordial /n/, this merges with the /t/ to become /d/.
The last three rows form a single conjugation paradigm just like row 1, but are shown separately for ease of understanding.


There is no shape-based analogy creating masculine nouns because men are not seen as having any distinct anatomy apart from the penis, which is considered to be feminine.
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.


==Compound gender stacking==
Possibly make more paradigms "with K" instead of just adding /k/ to some monoliterals.
Icecap Moonshine requires nouns, and some verbs, to be marked for not only their inherent gender, but also the gender of their possessor, the agent of the sentence, and the speaker and listener.  Thus it is common to see five gender affixes on a single word, though these are in all cases fused.


===Inherent gender===
====Labialization of /ʷa/ ~ /ʷu/====
Each Moonshine root, whether it be a single consonant or a sequence, has an inherent gender. In compound words, the rightmost gendered morpheme determines the gender of the word. The only masculine root in the language is ''t'' "son"; there are dozens of feminine roots, but the vast majority of roots are neuterBut any word with a feminine morpheme in it is feminine itself unless it ends in ''t''.
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.)


Because of  the many single-phoneme roots, whether the gender is analyzed as an ending or as a separate root is a matter of principle.  Note that ''t'' means "son" and can occur elsewhere within a word, and also can mean "man, boy" when not used with a possession marker, since all men are sons.
Also, there were words like ''wan'' "sleepn" whose obliques ended up with /ŋ/ in women's speeech and men's had /ŋʷ/.,


===Possessor gender===
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).   
All neuter nouns can be possessed by neuters, males, and females.  All masculine nouns can be possessed by males and females.  All feminine nouns can be possessed by females. All three genders of nouns can also be unpossessed.  These markers always fuse to the final morpheme in the word, and therefore there are many forms for the fused inherent+possessor gender marker ('''IP'''). The IP marker also indicates the person of the possessor, if there is one. The total number of forms is eight for neuter nouns (free, neuter, and 3 each for masculine and feminine possessors), seven for masculine nouns (one free and six gendered possessors), and three for feminine nouns.  There are thus 18 total forms for the IP-marked form of each phoneme at the end of a word.   


The nominal '''case marker''' occurs after the IP marker, and these fuse somewhat to the IP marker as well, though most combinations are still transparently segmentable.  The most commonly used forms are often the most compressed: for example, '''-ṭ-''' signifies a female agent acting on a male patient with no possessor in the instrumental case; that is, a woman using a man.
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.


Thus one can say
: ''' ''Ṭač '' néʒa<ref>the other two words here are just guesses.</ref>  šāḍù.'''
:: ''I had a man'' clean the house.


It is also possible to put the ''ṭač'' word at the end, treating it as if it were a verb ending, and omitting the ''ḍù''.  This requires also changing the word for  house, however.
===Intermediate consonant shifts===
#''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.


===Agent gender===
====Last contacts with Play====
After the case marker comes an agent marker which can be either feminine or masculine. This, too, also marks person, and therefore there are six possible forms.
#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.


A padding morpheme occurs after the agent marker in many words to separate it from the following markersIn most cases, this derives from an earlier evidential marker, but some padding morphemes were copied from other verb forms and have no etymological meaning.
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/.


The practice of marking the agent of the sentence on a noun is inherited from Gold, where it was necessary due to Gold not having pronouns.  Moonshine developed new pronouns, and thus the agent markers are no longer necessary and some have coalesced with others.
====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).


===Speaker and listener gender===
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.
The speaker and listener gender markers, known as '''discourse markers''', are completely fused with no transparent segments.  These lists are full of gaps, because there are many words that males cannot say, and some words that women omit when speaking to men.  Additionally, there are gaps corresponding to other gender markers; for example, a verb conjugated with a 1st person masculine agent marker cannot have a    feminine speaker.


The maximal possible list of forms is four, as neuters are by definition not involved in either speaking or being spoken to, and because  the speaker is by definition 1st person and the listener is by definition 2nd person, so person is not marked.
====CV Monoliterals====
:08:56, 1 September 2023 (PDT)


A further complication is that the speaker-listener morphemes are not static, but take separate forms depending on the preceding morphemesFor example, the  <code>♂→♀</code>  marker has a different form for describing feminine objects vs others, and separate for describing 2nd person feminine objects (that is, the listener's belongings) vs 3rd person feminine objects.
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.


====Surface analysis====
====Biliterals as monoliterals====
Note that the nominal case marker is squeezed between two sets of gender markers. Thus, the outermost morpheme on any noun is not its case marking, but the morphemes indicating who is speaking and who is listening.  However, for the situation with a female speaking to another female, these two outer morphemes are both null ('''Ø'''), and so the original structure of the word is preserved.  When women speak to men, the  forms  of the outer gender markers vary. It is only when men speak that the words all have the same ending.
:07:50, 6 October 2023 (PDT)


==Speech registers==
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.
There are four speech registers: the speaker can be female or male, as can the listener. Children in the nursery do not acquire these speech registers until they start school.  In school, boys learning proper grammar are humiliated as they realize that the grammar requires them to use separate, longer forms for nearly every word, while by contrast women's speech leaves out various details whenever the listener is a man.


Thus, not only are the words for men and men's items longer than those of women, but even these lengthened forms are further extended whenever the speaker is a man, and if the listener is a woman, the man must also use evidentiality morphemes to indicate that he is uncertain of what he is seeing, unless a female speaker has mentioned that noun earlier in the conversation, in which case the man must use a different morpheme indicating that he recognizes that she has done so.  Speaking the language is so difficult for men that men in the presence of women typically stay silent until they are spoken to.
It is also possible that some biliterals where the second consonant is K will be thought of as monoliterals as well.


===Direct register===
====Stem-changing vowels====
The direct register is used between females, and by females addressing mixed groups.  It does not entail any additional marking for the speaker and listener.  It is the only register used in writing and is considered the only true descendant of the parent language.
:08:56, 1 September 2023 (PDT)


====Direct register vocabulary====
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.
There are no obscene words in the direct register, and the only word taboos are situational, and dependent on religious and superstitious beliefs. For example, it is taboo to use words for abortion in the presence of a pregnant woman, even for other women.


===Deferential register===
These could be type '''6''' roots.
The deferential register is used by men addressing women and mixed groups, and also whenever a female is present even if the speaker is addressing another male.  The character of the register changes depending on the listener, but certain rules must be followed at all times.


When addressing a female, content words of the 2nd and 3rd person must take evidential morphemes explaining why the man thinks he knows what he is talking about. These evidentials are suffixed to the otherwise obsolete interior person markers '''-č -š -Ø'''. When addressing a male, the structure reverts to the form used in the vulgar register.
====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.


Inflections are of mixed origins: some are suffixed forms of morphemes in the direct register, others are from the vulgar register, and others are unique to the deferential register. For example, endings for 1st person verbs are derived by adding '''' to the vulgar register form because this is the only other source of 1st person masculine verbs.
#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/.
#The earlier deletions likely also cause ''ai'' to become '''a''' followed by palatalization.


====Limits on vocabulary====
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.
Polite words are required at all times, whether addressing a male or a female audience. Males must avoid words referring to the female anatomy, even as elements of compounds. The forbidden words include not just terms for sex organs but also any distinctive female body part, such as the womb, breasts,   and even long hair.  Some words for female body parts consist of just a single vowel, and therefore appear within a large number of other words.  For example, the most common word for shield is '''čáň''', but because this word contains the letter ''á'', which means "womb", men avoid it in favor of '''čàpoň''', which has no transparent internal morpheme structure. This situation came about even though the original word for womb was not etymologically involved in the creation of the word for shield.    Thus, all words in the standard language containing the letter ''á'' are forbidden for men, and men must learn special forms of each of these many words to use while also learning the standard forms so they can understand the speech of women.  These special forms are not predictable from the structure of the original word.  For example, ''hád'' is the standard word for rose, but men cannot use a word such as *hàpod to refer to roses because /àpo/ has no meaning of its own and cannot merely substitute for any /á/.


And this same situation repeats for other forbidden terms such as ''m'' "milk",<ref>Unless men are able to lactate.</ref> ''n'' "moon" (due to the association with menstruation), ''ū'' "wide hips", ''l'' "egg; vagina" and for CV sequences such as ''zà'' and '''', both meaning "breast", and ''zì'', meaning "vagina". Thus, all words in the standard language containing any of /m n á ū/, plus certain other words, are unusable for men, and must be replaced with alternate forms. However, the phonemes themselves are not forbidden, because a few of the men's replacement words happen to use the same sounds just by chance; because women do not use these replacement words, they are not considered to be in violation of the prohibition against mentioning female anatomy.
#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.


There is no imperative mood.
====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.


:''NOTE, the word for moon is actually /ʕn/, so this might not apply to most /n/. Note that /n/ is very common in the grammar.''
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.
::On the other hand, true feminine /n/ arises from other sources.  It is possible that the prohibitions could exclude stem-final instances of the sounds, because, for example, while a word for shield could plausibly incorporate a word for womb, it would not be the final morpheme in that word, since then the word would refer to a type of womb rather than an object which protects the wearers' wombs.
::Also note that '''all voiced stops''' originate from nasal+stop clusters, and so the entire voiced stop inventory would also be forbidden except possibly /ġ/.


====Deferential grammar====
====Common patterns====
Males add one of several morphemes to all nouns and most verbs.
Additionally, there were many words consisting of /CʲCi/, from earlier CiCɜ (from even earlier CiCu).
;First person
Any verb with either a first person patient or a first person agent — that is, any  verb involving the man speaking — takes a suffix that varies among ''-Vʲs ~ -v́ʲ ~ -ʲs ~ ́-ʲ ''.  That is, there are three elements, /V/ + /ʲ/ + /s/, and at least two of the three must appear.  If the /s/ does not appear, the preceding vowel (whatever its origin) must switch to the acute tone.  Which of the four forms is chosen depends on the shape of the word and on context.  Forms involving a second-person agent tend to use the /s/.  Forms construed as first person tend not to; thus the first person masculine present tense verb ending is etymologically /óʲ/ but is pronounced and spelled /é/.


First person nouns sometimes use this and sometimes use ''-V:lé''.  This is a vowel lengthener (from earlier /n/), plus /l/, plus the 1st person verb suffix ''-o'', which is run through the gradation /o/ > /é/ as above.  This obviates the need for the 1st person inner possessive marker, so men addressing women simply say the equivalent of "collar, thigh, tray", and so on, rather than specifying "my collar, my thigh, my tray".  But these nouns are no longer first person nouns when acted upon by an outside agent, so for example the word for thigh in a sentence meaning "the fly bit my thigh" is quite different from the word for thigh in "with my thigh i pushed open the door".  Thus, for example, a man speaking to a woman would say '''sonālé''' for "my tray" in the nominative case, but      '''  soǯ    + .... + las      ''' <ref>son + č (poss) + à + other morphemes. note that the interior 1p snd 2p masc posessive forms are the same as the fems because they are disambiguated with other morphemes.  there are two /k/'s in this word </ref>  for the accusative, with no individual phoneme corresponding to the accusative case.  This is because it is no longer a 1st person nouns.
===New consonants from clusters===
;Second person
:10:43, 1 September 2023 (PDT)
Any verb with a second person agent or patient but not a first-person one will take a suffix that varies between ''-Vlas ~ -las''.  (This ending is sometimes also used  for third person.)
:These might be using different person markers.


There is also ''-(V)ʷḍ'', which is semantically equivalent to the above but has a different meaningThis was caused by /nʷs/ > /nʷh/ > /ʷṇṭh/ > /ʷṇṭ/ > /wḍ/.  This can also be used for the third person.
At this point there were just two vowels (maybe three), and new consonants appeared from clusters.   


When adding this suffix to a word endin g in the 2nd person final /-s/, it disappears if the preceding sounds are /ta/ (that is, /tas + ʷḍ/ > /''toḍ''/), and if it is /ǯa/, ift becomes /ǯo/, so that, e.g. /ǯas/ + /ʷḍ/ > /''ǯoḍ''/. If it is /ča/, it becomes /čo/, so that /ča/ + /ʷḍ/ > /''čoḍ''/.<ref>ŋugak > ǯā, ḳagak > čā.</ref> Thus, the consonants never change.
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.


:''THEREFORE, the rule /as/ > /oḍ/ generates the deferential form of any 2nd person /-as/ if that /-as/ means a 2nd person feminine noun or verb. ''
#In word initia position, ''hp ht hk'' > '''ph th kh'''. These were still pronounced like clusters, but did not allow vowel insertion.
#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.


Second person nouns also use this suffix if the object is visible. Note that this includes nouns with second person agents, even if the possessor is first or third person.  If the object is invisible, the suffix is ''-(V)ʲs''.  If the object is invisible and has a second-person possessor and no agent, this suffix is attached directly  to the root, with no oblique formThis often causes an epenthetic /e/ to arise, from the normally suppressed /a/ followed by the /ʲ/.
===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 maleIts 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 kindOn 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.


Because the speaker and listener are encoded in the outermost morpheme of a word, the verb markers are bipersonal for this situation, if the verbs are transitive.  That is, any ''-é'', if transitive, means "I, a man, act on you, a woman".  Any ''-(V)ses'' means "you, a woman, act on me, a man".  However, these same forms would also indicate intransitives and verbs of other subjects so cannot disambiguate between situations involving more than one person.  For example, the same ''é'' ending would be used if the patient was a man, if it was a 3rd person patient.
It is  possible, perhaps with influence from [[Lava Bed]] languages and perhaps [[babakiam|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).


;Third person
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.   
For verbs where both the agent and the patient (if present) are third-person, and likewise for nouns, males add one of three suffixes when addressing a woman.  Two of these three incorporate the /o/ > /é/ shift as described above in the first person section.  As above, these markers all appear ''outside'' the nominal case markersWhen describing free objects, they are attached directly to the root with no intervening vowel, except for the shift of /ʲ/ > /e/ in some environments.


*The suffix ''-(V):ʔʲmé'' indicates an object or action the man is aware of but feels that his female listener may have a better view of the situationNote that /:ʔ/ indicates an acute tone, and is equivalent to '''´''' but is morphologically distinct.
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 grammarBut in common with Lava Beds is that the inserted morpheme can appear anywhere within a word, and can appear within any type of word.
*The suffix ''-(V)hū'' indicates a situation the man is unsure of.
:*This entails /n/ > /hū/ because of the shift /nlh/ > /nh/ > /ŋh/ > /h/. 
*The suffix ''-(V)tàlé'' (analysed as tà + lé) indicates a situation the man believes is true because of prior thought but typically refers to invisible objects.


The suffix /-(V):ʔʲmé/ is impermissible for males in most public situations, and so is replaced with ''-(V)ʔʲkwé''.<ref>origina uncleasr</ref>  However, the /tàlé/ word is permissible, even though it contains the forbidden phoneme /l/, because it arose as a substitute for the first 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.


====Context====
===One more gender change===
Men continue to use the deferential register even to address their wives and other female relatives. However, women often instruct their men to use vocabulary from the direct register even while using the grammar of the deferential register, as some women find the vocabulary substitutions offensive, as if implying that Moonshine women are little more than menstruation machines.
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.


===Terse register===
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 uncommonIt would still behave as /lʷ/ grammatically.
The terse register is used by women addressing trained animals and men.  Many grammatical categories merge, and the information is simplified to minimize the length of the sentence. There is a polite imperative and a direct imperativeThere are some defective verbs; for example, there is no 1st person form of the verb "to apologize".


====Grammar====
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.
Many noun cases merge in the terse register.  This is a continuation of a process that has affected the entire language, even in the most formal contexts, but women merge noun cases much more often when talking to men.


Because sentences in the terse register often omit information, men sometimes have difficulty understanding women who speak to them, but Moonshine boys learn early on that they need to listen closely and think hard whenever a woman speaks to them so that they can confidently understand what is required of them.
===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.


====Context====
===Consonant shifts===
Women continue to address their husbands and other male relatives in the terse register, as the direct register lacks terms of address for males.  Because all verbs and many nouns in Moonshine inflect for the gender of the speaker and listener, any woman wishing to speak to a man in the direct register would need to instead direct her sentence to an imaginary woman.
:06:43, 30 December 2022 (PST)


===Vulgar register===
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/.
The vulgar register is used between males when the absence of females makes it safe to do so.   


====Vulgar vocabulary====
==Reform of gender system==
:''UPDATE, probably we will NOT do this section.  Some words may be obscene in origin but they are not homophonous with the obscene words of the other registers and thus have no significant "bite".''
:06:25, 19 January 2023 (PST)
The vulgar register uses many impolite and obscene words for everyday objects; often these are compounds.  For example, a morpheme meaning urine appears in many words for clear liquids and a morpheme meaning  breast milk  appears in many words for opaque liquids.  Most of the obscene words are terms for the female anatomy, and are considered obscene  because men  are not allowed to use terms for female anatomy when women are present, and this explains the presence of words for abortion, menstruation, and other concepts that are impolite but not obscene in other cultures.      Conversely,  the word for urine, ''ē'', is not considered obscene in Moonshine culture, and thus its use as a replacement for ''o'' "water" is a masculine innovation independent of men's desire to violate the speech rules.
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.  


Some vocabulary substitutions are the polar opposites of those used in the deferential register.  For example, men cannot use any word for breast when in mixed company, and can only use phrases with meanings like "in front of the heart". Therefore, men in the vulgar register avoid the standard word for heart and instead refer to it as the organ behind the breastOthers are unique creations, such as deriving the word for art from the word for pornography.
====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.


Verbs are mostly the same as in the standard language; even though Moonshine culture considers the womb and other female anatomy obscene, the terms for sex and sexual activities are mostly derived from independent morphemes and thus not covered by the prohibition.
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.


====Grammar====
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.
The grammar is simpler than that of the direct register and shows many resemblances with that of the terse register, as men learn to imitate the speech of women that address themAlthough many men dislike the imprecise vocabulary and grammar, Moonshine teachers keep the vulgar register the way it is because they do not want men to prefer conversations with men over conversations with women.


==Nominal case marking==
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).
Scholars analyze Icecap Moonshine as preserving eight noun cases: nominative, locative, genitive, accusative, circumstantial, dative, essive, and instrumental.  Very few words have distinct forms for all eight cases, and many have only two cases, but because different classes of nouns merge the cases in different ways, the eight-case analysis is convenient.


==Obedience==
====Doubled vowel shifts====
All masculine and most neuter nouns are conjugated for '''obedience''', meaning that their nominative forms are padded by person-marked feminine morphemes indicating which woman give them permission to actInformation here applies to masculine nouns only, which reliably end in ''-t'' and are thus much easier to describe than neuters.
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.


There are four degrees of obedience; three of these result in a verb with feminine agreement, while the fourth offers a choice between masculine/neuter ("inferior") and feminine ("superior") verb endings.  The obedience morphemes always imply a feminine external forcing agent.  If third person, this behaves like an ordinary person marker and thus refers to the most recently mentioned third-person female agent in the conversation.
:''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.''


===Person markers ===
These vowel shifts could also appear occasionally in unstressed position, where they were [Ø > a > ʷ] and > ʲ > ʲa] respectively, though with the /a/'s sometimes also realized as zero if a neighboring syllable also contains /a/.
The inner  part of the obedience marker is simply a possession morpheme.  The three markers are ''-ā -as -a'' for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person feminine external actors<ref>previously wrote "agents" but they are not necessarily agents</ref> respectively.  The type of possession here does not refer to physical ownership, but simply to a general semantic relationship.  Thus, for example, if a man talks to a woman, he becomes *her* man from the viewpoint of the grammar.


The possession morphemes are partly homophonous with the agent markers, but their internal structure is different and it is possible to mark both. Thus there are three situations: Ø-P, P-Ø, and P-P. (The agent markers are ''-o -as -à'' for most verbs, but not all.)
====Semantics of gender====
:''It is possible that the agent & poss markers will in fact merge, because they were only ever distinguished by presence or absence of an /h/ that disappeared after all masculine nouns since /th/>/t/. This would then have been analogized to neuters. The distinction between /o as à/ and /ā as a/ is actually secondary.           ''
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.


Male speakers make frequent use of the 2nd person form of the inner morpheme when addressing women, but it is not merely a fossil morpheme because they still will use the 3rd person form to indicate that they have done something without the permission of the woman they are addressing. When speaking to males, by definition the 3rd person is the only form available.
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.
:''Note, check tjhis paragraph, it doesnt make sense  unless it applies only to the 1st person pronoun ''


===Degrees of obedience===
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.  
The outer part of the obedience marker may be one of four morphemes.  It may be ''Ø'' (absent), or it may be one of three morphemes that delete the final /t/ of the verb stem and then replace the possession markers with other morphemesThus, the morphemes are fused and not transparently segmentable. The  four morphemes thus are:


====Involuntary obedience====
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.
, which retains the possession markers ''-ā -as -a''.


Male speakers do not use either the 1st or 2nd person form here ''for their pornouns'', and female speakers use the 2nd person form only when speaking to other women.
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.


Male speakers replace the 3rd person suffix /a/ with forms such as ''-ékwé'' when talking to women.
====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.


====Primary obedience====
===Reduplicative roots===
*S₁, which deletes the final /t/ and changes the possession markers into /-čas -tas -taš/.  This can also be analyzed as retention of /t/ and suffixation of ''-čas -as -aš'', because    any /tč/ collapses to /č/. This is the preferred analysis by Moonshine teachers anr scholars.  Note that the second person form is identical to the one above.
: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/.
This series of endings implies that the obedience was voluntary but still dependent on the female actor's permission. 
 
*S₂, which does the same as S₁ but must be followed  by   a repetition of the final syllable of the verb of the sentence. This syllable cannot be predicted by the form of the noun because there are several sets of verb endings.  It may be either masculine or feminine depending on the degree of obedience.
:*This is directly cognate to Poswa's <span style="font-weight:bold">B-s-Ø-V</span> verb inflection, and has a similar meaning. It signifies that the man is acting under his own power, without coercion, even while obeying another agent.
 
====Secondary obedience====
*J, which deletes the final /t/ and changes the possession markers into /-ča<ref>Dialectal</ref>  -tī -ʒī/.  As above, this can also be analyzed as retention of /t/ and suffixation of ''-ča -ī -⚲ʒī'', where the neuter symbol '''' indicates that the masculine marker /t/ must be removed after all.
 
In most social situations, males are not permitted to use the obedience markers implying that the listener coerced him to do the action mentioned in the sentence.  Since the Ø and S₁ forms are merged in the second person, neither form is permissible, and males must use either S₂ or J.
 
There is no male speaker form of /ča/.
 
The male speaker form for a female listener of /tī/ is  ''coḍ'', from /tianus/.
 
The male speaker form for a female listener of /ʒī/ is  ''???''.  The unusual /ʒ/ here is evidently from PMS /ta-g-V/ collapsing to /tž-V/ and then on to /ǯ/ which shifted to /ʒ/ when before front vowels.  This suggests that the masculine speakers' form might be '''ǯoḍ'''.  However, even this is uncertain as it implies that men would be able to use the same marker for 2nd and 3rd person instead of using //.
 
===Other aspects===
Female agents can also take the obedience morphemes, as can all other animate agents.  Inanimate agents of active verbs are construed as acting obediently by default, and though the morphemes were historically present, they have fused to the other inflections and are no longer analyzable as such.


==Verbs==
==Verbs==
Most strong verbs have two stems, deriving from the mobile stress of [[diʕì|Gold]].  Weak verbs are historically compounds whose final element was monosyllabic in Gold and therefore had a fixed stress. 
'''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".
 
Many strong verb stems end in ''č'' or ''c''; these are the reflexes of consonants that had already become silent by the time of proto-Moonshine, but reappeared in inflected forms and later came to be analyzed as part of the stem.  Even so, some inflections delete these consonants.
 
Of the nine conjugations, four are restricted to occurring with female agents, three can only occur with males, and one occurs predominantly with neuter agents. The remaining conjugation, the '''sixth conjugation''', is only available for feminine and neuter subjects, and thus there is no verb conjugation that can appear with all three genders.  There is no one-to-one correspondence between a given feminine verb and its semantic counterpart in the masculine or neuter classes.  Many masculine verbs use a derivational morpheme attached to the basic feminine verb, but the choice of which morpheme to use must be learned with each verb.
 
===Gender marking on verbs===
For some classes of verbs, male subjects must take a  '''translation marker''', ''-aḍu-'' or ''-es(l)-''.  These verbs include any verb whose stem contains a feminine morpheme, and most strong verbs regardless of their etymology.  For example, the verb '''ná''' "to envelop"<ref>Placeholder, because i mistakenly thought /ná/ was the word for pocket, when it is in fact /nā/.</ref> ends in the morpheme ''á'' "womb" and is therefore feminine.    (It is also a strong verb.)  There is no way to attach the masculine verb endings ''-č -š -Ø'' to this stem, because all three would simply disappear after the ''-č-'' that links most strong verbs to their person markers.  Instead, the feminine oblique stem is used, followed by either ''-aḍu-'' or ''-es(l)-'' depending on circumstance, followed by a second set of  verb endings, which each have special forms for each of the two translation morphemes.
 
Etymologically, these two morphemes are from the third person feminine present  tense marker ''-a-'' plus the previously existing morphemes /ḍu/ and /ʲs(l)/.
 
:''NOTE, it is possible that ḍu just attaches directly to the verb stem with no /a/, and so this is a bed example. The other one,  however, indeed requires a sequence of oblique + č + /es(l)/. ''
 
===Strong verbs===
Strong verbs are very complicated and many individual strong verbs are in a class of their own. In the modern language they are restricted to occurring with feminine agents, though one of the masculine agent infixes arose historically from the second conjugation.
 
====First conjugation====
The first conjugation contains verbs for female agents only.  It is the source of the familiar ''-o -as -à'' person endings that appear on weak verbs.  The corresponding past tense forms are ''-ač -aš -ī''.  Verbs in the first conjugation are those whose stems in Proto-Moonshine originally ended in a short /o/ (either high or low tone).
 
Male speakers replace the 2nd and 3rd person '' -as -à'' endings with '' -oḍ -??'' when speaking to women, and sometimes use ''-oḍ'' for both forms, disambiguating the two by adding pronouns or repeating the word denoting the agent.
 
The verbs in this class are listed as ending in consonants because any final vowels came to be considered part of the stem.  Some are single consonants, such as '''l''' "nurture, care for", '''ž''' "to smile, love, befriend", and '''š''' which means both "to count, study, stare at" and "to mimic, mock".  There are also '''h''' "to see beauty, to cuddle, admire", '''č''' "to cover, stand over, jump over" and many others.  There is no way to use these verbs with either a masculine or neuter agent, and they are considered inherently feminine verbs despite mostly lacking grammatically feminine morphemes.
:''If the first conjugation has an equivalent of the 8th conjugation's "verbs of influence", the linking consonant is /g/.''
 
====Second conjugation====
The second conjugation contains very few verbs.  It is the source of the /ʲs(l)/ infix that appears on some verbs with masculine agents, but has no independent use in the modern language because its vowels came to be the same as those of the first conjugation. 
 
====Third conjugation====
The third conjugation is another class with very few verbs.  Like the second conjugation, its verbs came to rhyme with those of the first conjugation, and therefore nearly all verbs in the third conjugation were transferred to the first conjugation. 
 
====Fourth conjugation====
This is the first "Class II" conjugation of strong verbs.  It is conjugated with CV suffixes rather than just vowels.  These suffixes are ''-bi -mis -mì'' for the present tense and ''-be -fe -me'' for the past tense.  These suffixes delete any final /-m/ in the verb stem, and that is why the fourth conjugation is considered strong.
 
===Weak verbs===
 
====Fifth conjugation====
The  fifth conjugation is mostly used for verbs with neuter agents.  For neuter agents, the present tense forms are ''-i -is -i'' (for 1st 2nd & 3rd person) and the past tense forms are all ''-e''. There is also a linking ''-z-'' if the stem of the verb ends in a vowel. Note that 1st and 2nd person neuter exist only because of passive verbs; unlike related languages, IMS does not group small children into the neuter gender. The linking /z/ has become a part of the stem of some verbs that are typically used only with neuter agents.
 
The fifth conjugation also contains two sets of rarely used endings for feminine agents and one for masculine.  The first set of feminine endings are ''-vi -ʲv -ʲṃ~-ʲv'' for the present, while the second set are ''-ṣi -ʲṣ -ʲṣ''.  The past tense forms are defective.<ref>not filled in yet, but quite possibly defective indeed</ref>  For masculine agents, the present  tense forms are ''-ṭi -cē -ʲc'' and the past tense forms are again defective. 
 
With a gendered agent, any verb stem ending in a consonant loses that consonant and lengthens its final vowel.  Thus, the fifth conjugation destroys the integrity of the verb, unlike other weak classes, and has become rare over time.
 
;Neuter-exclusive verbs
For example, the verb '''nàz''' "to pierce with the claws" is in the fifth conjugation, and is only used with a neuter agent, typically an animal.  The third person gendered forms would be <strong>*nèṣ nèc</strong> for feminine and masculine, and while not ungrammatical, would not be understood in ordinary connected speech.
 
Another neuter-exclusive verb is '''tàc''' "to fly", typically used of insects.<ref>the -c is from /ḳ/</ref>  In this case, adding feminine or masculine endings would result in the verb stem /té/, which few listeners would connect with the root.  Humans who fly (metaphorically or physically) use different verbs.
 
====Sixth conjugation====
The sixth conjugation is a weak verb class that rhymes with the strong verbs of the first declension, but inserts an ''-ř-'' after the verb stem for female agents and ''-l-'' for neuter.  Masculine agents do not use this class.  It is the most common weak verb class for female agents.  Some verbs in the sixth conjugation were transferred from the fifth conjugation; in such cases, any final /z/ or /c/ is dropped.
 
====Seventh conjugation====
The seventh conjugation contains verbs for male agents only.  They are added directly to the verb stem because they are weak verbs.
 
In the direct register (female speaker, female listener), the present tense is ''-žřì'' and the past tense is ''-žře''.  The /ž/'s disappear after most stems ending in stops.  There are never any epenthetic vowels; verbs in this class thus cannot end in clusters.
 
====Eighth conjugation====
The eighth conjugation contains verbs for male agents only.  The 1st person present ending is ''bí'' if addressing a woman and ''ḍup'' if addressing a man.  The corresponding past tense forms are ''ġí'' and ''ḍuk''. The 2nd person ending is ''ḍus'' if the speaker is male.  The third person imperative ("let him ...") is ''ḍo'' if the speaker and listener are both female. (Note that the /b/ and /ġ/ here are diachronically derived from contractions of /ḍup/ and /ḍuk/.)
 
In the direct register, the present tense is ''ḍù'' and the past tense is ''naš'', but this /naš/ contracts to just /d/ when followed by a vowel of any origin. (These are found in the third person only because  the direct register excludes men from being 1st or 2nd person.)
 
The eighth conjugation is derived from the /-aḍu-/ translation marker above, but it outgrew its original context and came to be used on weak verbs and verbs that did not contain feminine morphemes.  These verbs thus have no feminine equivalents.  It is the largest of the three men-only verb classes.  Most verbs are rough semantic equivalents of verbs used elsewhere in the language but suggest a man doing something in a masculine manner, which in Moonshine culture has a variety of associations.  For example, '''žal''' "dig" is an 8th conjugation verb and suggests the act of digging into the earth vigorously, with all attention focused on the task at hand.  Women who dig simply use other words to describe it, because  there is no grammatical way to force a masculine verb to have a feminine agent.
 
Words in this class mostly entered the language through the vulgar register, and although some words do contain the masculine phoneme /t/, most became eighth conjugation through semantic specialization.
 
:''NOTE, 8th conjugation verbs can have female "second-order" agents using -ṭ-, so e.g. "I/you/she influenced him to dig", and lesser-used paradigms for the 1st and 2nd person masculines. However, these constructions should probably also exist for 1st conjugation feminine verbs.''
 
====Ninth conjugation====
The ninth conjugation contains verbs for male agents onlyIt is sometimes considered the masculine form of the sixth conjugation, and its verb endings are '' -lap -lač -lačā'' in the present tense and '' -lakī -lakī -laf'' in the past.
 
==Pronouns==
Icecap Moonshine is one of few cold-climate languages to have pronouns.  The use of pronouns varies by speech register.
 
 
 
===Pronouns used by women===
====Feminine pronouns used by women====
The female pronouns were originally a tenth verb conjugation.  Their basic forms are '''bū bus bas''' for first, second, and third person feminine.  Women also
 
====Masculine pronouns used by women====
The masculine pronouns are similarly derived from a verb.  Their basic forms are '''  sis zis''' for 2nd and 3rd person.  Note that these are not the pronouns men use for themselves or for other men.
 
===Pronouns used by men===
====First person masculine pronouns====
When addressing women and mixed groups, the commonest 1st person masculine pronoun has the basic forms '''ǯā ~ das ''', from the  root ''ʔdà''.  However, these must put    obedience and politeness suffixes on.  The obedience suffixes will turn /das/ into '''  das ~ das ~ das-V ~ dī'''.
 
When addressing men, different words are used.  One is '''pšā'''.<ref>earlier wrote přiz.  if the etymology of    přiz were valid, the word would have been analogized to psé. </ref> The stem of this word is /peř/. The instrumental form is '''pàs'''.<ref>assumes ǯš survives during early vowel syncope shift</ref>
 
 
====Second person feminine pronouns====
The common root '''ges''' appears here, used for women in general, including intimate relations.  It alternates to '''his ~ ʷsis  ''', etc.
 
====Second person masculine pronouns====
Men tend to address other males with words that are transparently derived from the  word for "listener".  This is because there is no way to put masculine suffixes onto the words for "man" and "boy" without mentioning a female third party.
 
===Plural pronouns===
 
==Vocabulary==
Moonshine's sound changes are so extreme that many morphemes are a single letter long, and many of these are consonants.  Thus Moonshine can be described as an [[Oligosynthetic_language|oligosynthetic]] language.  The majority of words in the vocabulary are longer than this, with the commonest form being CVC, but even these CVC roots have often been reanalyzed by the speakers as compounds of the type C + VC, CV + C, or C + V + C.  Thus, the number of true oligosynthetic roots is small, but the pattern is common enough that longer words have been adapted to the oligosynthetic grammar and can participate in sound substitutions that are not etymologically justified.  An example of this is the root '''čāl''' "frame, box, surroundings", which is etymologically a single morpheme, but has been reanalyzed as ''č-ā-l'' "building hip rectangle" (hips being the widest part of one's body), and thus generated new variant forms.
 
====Circumfixes====
Another type of compounds involve C-C morphemes in which a gap must be filled by inserting a vowel.  Sometimes, a consonant can precede this vowel, resulting in a root with the structure CCVC.  These are typically analyzed as circumfixes surrounding an atomic morpheme because the circumfixes cannot appear independently or even with a null morpheme.
 
==GENERAL WORD STRUCTURE==
This section is not well placed and there is no convenient place to put it.
 
 
All words in IMS have a familiar structure, but the morphemes fuse differently in different word classes, and sometimes even within word classes, so it is difficult to summarize with a chart of affixes.
 
There are probably no true prefixes in the language, but some word roots can be analyzed as circumfixes in which two consonants surround a vowel, and although both have transparent meanings, neither can be used alone because a CC syllable with no vowel is illegal and a vowel-only syllable would not be able to attach to its inflections.
 
===Of Nouns===
 
'''ROOT + classifier +  owner marker + CASE INFLECTION + agent marker + DISCOURSE MARKER '''
 
It is very difficult to draw boundaries between these morphemes, but the order is reliable. For example, the root and classifier are often fused, the classifier may fuse with the owner, the owner may fuse with the case marker, the case marker may fuse with the agent marker, and the discourse marker can fuse with the entire preceding syllable.
 
The most common grouping is
 
ROOT + [classifier + owner marker] + [case inflection + agent marker] + discourse marker
 
But some combinations trigger
 
ROOT + classifier + [owner marker + case inflection + agent marker] + discourse marker
 
Note that in both cases the discourse marker is depicted as
being alone but properly it fuses with the entire syllable.
 
DUSION WORKS LIKE THIS:


The root can be any shape.   
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).


The classifier is always a consonant, though it can sometimes affect the final consonant of the root if there is one.
==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.)


The owner marker is always a vowel, but can trigger changes in the consonant of the classifier.
===Possible remnants of classifiers===
The classifier system broke down as the language became monosyllabic. Note that most classifiers had ended in /a/.


The case inflection can be any shape, though case markers are a closed class.
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.  


The agent marker is always a vowel, but can merge with the case inflection.
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.


The discourse marker interplays with the preceding syllable, whatever it is.
==New gender discord markers==


==Dialects and variation==
===Male insertions===
The standard language as of 6843 AD was based on the dialect of '''Enapded''', historically home to the Cartwheel party. This was the scholarly capital of the empire, but had no significance politically. The political and military capital of the empire was '''Safiz''', and the cultural capital was sometimes considered to be '''Todʔrom'''. Neither of these two other states contributed much to the standard language. But higher living standards led the relatively small state of Enapded to dominate the empire's centralized education system, and thus the language spread from there.
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.


===Scholarly language===
==Later shifts==
The centralized school system based in Enapded drove out the other dialects.  Even scholars showed little interest in preserving the old languages, and they continued to teach what they called '''Classical Moonshine''', the state of the language as it had been in 6843 AD, even as the vernacular continued to change rapidly.


====Later dialects====
===Possession markers===
:''See [[Future Moonshine]].''
:[[User:Poswob Rare|Poswob Rare]] ([[User talk: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


===Interaction with Poswa===
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 grammarPut 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.
Because of the speakers' isolation, the only language which had a major influence on IMS was [[Poswa]], and likewise, Moonshine was the only language that had a major influence on Poswa. Yet, the two have little in commonIMS actually cut through the Poswob homeland, but the speakers separated themselves by habitat and neither considered the other to be in violation of any territorial rights.  Poswobs lived by rivers and lakes found on plains whereas Moonshines lived on mountains and cold windward retreats.


It is said that even the speech register that Moonshine women use to speak to their men is more polite than the common speech used by all speakers of Poswa.
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.


==Notes==
==Notes==

Latest revision as of 07:18, 6 October 2023

Icecap Moonshine is a highly divergent language spoken around the year 6843 in cold climates[1] famous for its small root vocabulary,[2] 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.
  • , 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,[3] 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 (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 or , 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 to p, or perhaps to , could occur in a few words, for both men and women.
  2. Women may have shifted inherited to , 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 ) 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 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 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 . 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 (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.

Notes

  1. 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.
  2. I no longer consider Moonshine oligosynthetic because it makes use of a very large set of prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, postbases, and so on, and the meanings of these are not visibly related to roots with similar sounds.
  3. Elsewhere on this page it says ìkə but in Gold the two would have merged so it makes no difference whatsoever.