Proto-Moonshine language

The Proto-Moonshine language was spoken in various territories between the period from 3948 AD, the birth of the Moonshine people, until about 4700 AD, when texts in the original language were no longer possible to understand.

The first Moonshines were a Khulls-speaking tribe who abandoned their possessions and entered the wilderness in August 3948 in order to live only among their own kind. They had their own religion, which they felt made life in their original homeland, Lobexon, unsafe for them.

The Moonshines were a strongly feministic society from their very beginnings. They taught their children about the Great Conspiracy, an event in their history in which the women in their society had conspired together and stolen power from the ruling class of males, and promised to never give it back. Thus the Moonshine nation was ruled entirely by women, and men had very few rights. Boys and girls were taught from an early age that females deserved to have all of the power in society and that boys were made to be slaves for girls. They promised that even the richest and most powerful man in their society would be forever inferior in social status to the most lowly and criminal among their nation's women.

Phonology

Proto-Moonshine's phonology was similar to that of standard Khulls, but simpler. Khulls' ejective stops had merged with the voiceless aspirates, meaning that there was only one series of voiceless stops in the language. Furthermore, there was only one voiced stop, /b/, and that occurred mostly in loanwords from Babakiam, although it did appear in a few native words.

The vowel system was the same as that of Khulls: /a e i o u/, although unlike standard Khulls, /a/ was often weakened to a schwa-like sound when unstressed.

The tone setup was similar to Khulls except that the pharyngealized tone had become short and lost its pharyngealization, and thus had merged into the plain low tone.

Contrast with Khulls

Retention of distinctions dropped in central Khulls

Moonshine was an early branch of Khulls that missed the last few sound changes that had occurred in the mainline dialects while still remaining intelligible with them. THus Proto-Moonshine still had only a few words with /b/ and none with a bare /d/ or /ġ/; contact with Babakiam greatly increased the presence of /b/, but did not add any other voiced stops. Also the other labial consonants /p m f w/ were greatly increased (Babakiam's /f/ was seen as identical to paleo-Moonshine /hʷ/, although /xʷ/ remained distinct). A few examples of Moonshine dialectal traits are such as blyêl rather than standard bêl "of a beaver"; and myê for standard bê "in a bottle". Labialization was considered a property of the consonants, but the palatal /j/ was an independent consonant, even though it could only occur before a vowel. The number of words with labialized consonants followefd by /j/ was very small, consisting msotly of /hʷj/ in Bābā loans such as hʷyăhʷa "powder" and a few native words like kʷyàma "insect exoskeleton". Note that unlike mainstream Khulls, /j/ can occur before all vowels, not just /i/ and /u/. Note that, despite the spelling, the cluster /kʷy/ is pronounced /čʷy/, so the word for exoskeleton could be seen as čʷàma or čʷyàma (y is redundant after č).

Moonshine retained the labialized nasals /mʷ nʷ ŋʷ/. (NOTE: nʷ GOES TO ŋʷ IN KHULLS, BUT IS IT BEFORE OR AFTER THE SPLIT?)

Labial-velar coarticulated stops

At the time the two languages split, there were three phonemic labial-velar coarticulated stops in the language: /k͡p ḳ͡ṗ g͡b/. The ejective stop was distinguished primarily by its lack of aspiration as contrasted with the true aspirate k͡p. Both standard Khulls and Moonshine simplified these coarticulated consonants into pure bilabials independently.

Since most early Moonshines were not literate, those who were used an unnecessarily complex orthography, and held on to 4 symbols for /p/ even after they had merged together.

Innovations not shared by central Khulls

Moonshine also dropped some phonemic distinctions that were retained in mainline Khulls. The distinction between ejectives and aspirated voiceless stops was removed in favor of making all such stops aspirated (though they soon began to weaken). Voiced stops were retained as such, even though they were even more rare in Moonshine than in central Khulls, except for /b/ in loans from Babakiam.

Moonshine also got rid of the distinction between velar and glottal fricatives: /x g xʷ gʷ/ merged with /h ʕ hʷ ʕʷ/ and their pronunciation became variable depending on stress and position with in a word. The new merged phonemes were generally considered continuations of the velars, as they had been more common in the parent language. However, in Romanization, h is used for the velar.

Thus proto-Moonshine had lost nine consonant phonemes retained in Khulls: /ṗ ṗʷ ṭ ḳ ḳʷ h ʕ hʷ ʕʷ/, and the voiced stops /b bʷ d ġ ġʷ/ were very rare apart from /b/ in loanwords.

Moonshine also early on lost its pharyngeal tone (â), merging it with the plain low tone ă (not *ā, even though the pharyngeal tone had been long).

The voiced stop /b/

As above, Moonshine retained the voiced stop /b/ from Khulls, but it occurred primarily in loanwords from Babakiam. Thus proto-Moonshine belonged to the regional sprachbund around 4700 AD consisting of distantly related languages sharing in common the property of having /b/ as their only voiced stop. These languages included Proto-Moonshine, Babakiam, Thaoa, and Ihhai.

The other languages in this sprachbund also shared in common the trait of having /ž/ as their only voiced fricatives, but Moonshine differed here by retaining the voiced velar fricative /g/ and the somewhat rarer voiced alveolar fricative /z/. The rounded bilabial approximant also had [gʷ] as a common allophone.

Conditional split between plain and labialized consonants

Proto-Moonshine delabialized all consonants when not before a vowel. This included single-consonant words that mostly occurred as classifier suffixes on other roots. Thus Khulls hʷ "human, soldier" corresponds to proto-Moonshine h "human". However, single-consonant words retained their labialization when they occurred in isolation. Thus, importantly, Khulls ḳʷ "God" became proto-Moonshine kʷ, but Khulls kʷ "insect", which occurred primarily at the end of a syllable as a classifier, became proto-Moonshine k.

Development of phonemic /j/

In standard Khulls, /j/ (spelled y) had a very limited distribution: it could only occur after /p ṗ l 0/ and before /i/ or /u/, and could thus be argued to not be truly phonemic. In Moonshine, /j/ could occur before all five vowels. Like standard Khulls, Moonshine had flattened out all diphthongs inherited from the Gold language into monophthongs. However, loanwords from Babakiam reintroduced a contrast between the full vowel /i/ and the palatal glide /j/ after a vowel. /j/ could also occur between vowels; e.g. čăya "certification school". Thus /j/ was independently phonemic in proto-Moonshine, having a distribution similar to /w/ (which varies between [w] and [gʷ]).

Loans from Babakiam

Babakiam words usually ended with vowels, but could end in the consonants /p m s/, which coincidentally were among the ten consonants that Khulls (and early Moonshine) words could also end with. (It is a coincidence because of the three, only /s/ has the same origin in both languages. Bābākiam /p/-final words usually end in vowels in Khulls, and /m/-final words usually end in /n/.) Thus Babakiam words did not need to be modified to fit Moonshine phonotactics or inflection requirements. Babakiam had no tones, but it did have vowel sequences which were borrowed as tones. The simple vowels /a i u ə/ were borrowed as simple low tones, already the commonest in Moonshine. (Note that Babakiam /ə/ is generally Romanized as "e".) Long vowels were borrowed as the "ā" tone, with which they were usually historically cognate. /ā/ was traditionally a falling tone but had come to be a simple long high tone both in Moonshine and the other Khulls dialects by this time. Babakiam had the unusual trait of distinguishing a long vowel from a sequence of two short vowels, and these sequences (when not diphthongs) were borrowed in as the "á" tone, which was pronounced identically to the "ā" tone but had different sandhi effects on surrounding syllables. However, in monosyllabic words, there was no distinction at all, since the sandhi would not spread across word boundaries.

The "à" (short, high) and "â" (long, low, pharyngealized) tones were generally not used. In early Moonshine, the /â/ tone disappeared even from native words, merging with the plain low tone. "à" was used sometimes to represent a Babakiam syllable ending in /p/ before another consonant, where borrowing it as a true /p/ would result in a word shape foreign to the Moonshines. For example Babakiam pepbaim (/pəpbaim/) "translucent, see-through" was borrowed as pàbēm. Likewise, a sequence of a long vowel plus a /p/ and another consonant could be taken as a high tone: Babakiam kūpka "hammer" became Proto-Moonshine kúka, modern Moonshine čūč. Note that the á tone disappeared from Moonshine, only to be revived again later from various sequences.

The only sound Babakiam had that Moonshine did not was the schwa vowel /ə/. It is usually cognate to Moonshine labialized consonants, and coincidentally the same shift happened a few thousand years later in Poswa and Pabappa. But Moonshine did not borrow it as labialization, nor as /ŭ/ (the closest native sound), but as /ă/. Thus words loaned from Babakiam tended to have only three vowels. However, the diphthongs /əi əu/ were sometimes loaned as /ē ō/, as were /ai au/. They were perceived as "falling" because the stress was on the first vowel. Also, words that had been loaned from Babakiam into mainstream Khulls usually did loan the schwa as labialization. Thus the same word could have one or three syllables depending on when it was loaned.

Babakiam always had word-initial stress, and Moonshine copied this. Thus Bābā napane "pumpkin" became Old Moonshine năpana. However, long vowels and other stressed vowels would overwhelm this, as in finišau "secret" ---> finišō, with word-final stress. Also this did not extend to stressing the "wrong" part of a diphthong: Babakiam vowel sequences were common, and were borrowed into Moonshine intact; rather than for example turning Bābā kiantia into /čanča/, it remained as kiăntia in early Moonshine, but the /i/'s were pronounced /j/.