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 Moonshine soon also merged its ejective series with its voiceless aspirated series, Moonshine had early on performed a four-way merger of /k͡p ḳ͡ṗ ṗ p/ as /p/. Since most early Moonshines were not literate, those who were used an unnecessarily complex orthography, and held on to the 4 symbols for /p/ even after they had merged together.

The two formerly labial-velar phonemes were both usable as independent words; k͡p meant "teacher" and ḳ͡ṗ meant "eye". Moonshine merged these both as a new word p and retained both meanings.

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]).

Vocabulary

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/.

Grammar

Consonant-based gender system

Proto-Moonshine inherited the Khulls gender system intact, with no differences at all between the two languages. This is because none of the consonants that went missing from proto-Moonshine's phonology were involved in the gender system. There were three feminine genders, one masculine gender, as well as a unisex, a neuter, and an epicene. This bias in favor of females was not due to Moonshine's strongly feministic culture; the system in mainline Khulls was exactly the same.

Because gender is inflected on both nouns and verbs, it is important to learn the gender of every word, even those that do not have overt gender marking.

Artistic Moonshine speakers created new glyphs in their alphabet to mark the gender of words, even when it was already obvious from the word's phonetic shape. This would be analogous to English speakers writing "teacher♀" and "teacher♂". However, Moonshine marked all of its genders, not just the standard male and female.

The three feminine genders

The difference between the three feminine genders is a matter of apposition.

The greater feminine gender, marked by /m/, is the commonest of the three. It mostly contains words for adult human females, but edible objects are also part of this gender.

The lesser feminine gender is marked by /s/. Its name refers to the smaller number of words in its class, and not to a lower position on the animacy hierarchy or any other measure of superiority. The lesser feminine is a closed class when applied to humans, so newly created words for adult females will always use the /m/ gender.

However, a great many nouns that are not syntactically feminine use this gender. Some examples of nouns that are included in the lesser feminine gender are words for celestial objects, fire, snakes, worms, abstract concepts such as love and beauty, rivers, soft objects, women's clothing and feminine hygiene products, fish, objects found in or near the ocean, and nations. The only commonality uniting all of these objects is that all of them began with a noun classifier prefix beginning with the letter f in the ancient Tapilula language, and they kept their gender identity even after the noun classifier system fell out of use and sound changes delivered the sound into /s/.

Because the lesser feminine gender is animate, all objects within it are grammatically animate even if they refer to nonliving objects such as planets or pillows. Because it shares its verbal conjugation with the greater feminine, there are few differences between the two that need to be cared for by learners of the language.

The young feminine gender refers mostly to young girls and women of pre-marriageable age. However it also contains words for fruit, buildings, sharp objects, and most placenames. Additionally, a small family of words for humans is grammatically part of this gender regardless of meaning. These words began with n- far back in the past, but came to begin with l- due to a sound change. Words for feminine anatomy that begin with ŋ- are mostly part of this gender, even when describing adults.

Traces of a fourth gender are found. This gender was previously marked by /j/, usually Romanized as y, and it was called the lesser young feminine gender. It disappeared early in history, when Moonshine and Khulls were still the same language, because the sound /j/ had come to behave as a vowel rather than as a consonant, and words could begin with a cluster consisting of a consonant followed by /j/.

The masculine gender

The masculine gender refers to men and boys. Many words for males, especially young boys, are actually part of the unisex gender (see below), but take masculine verb agreement.

Epicene, neuter, and unisex genders

The difference between the epicene, neuter, and unisex genders is very firm. The epicene, marked by /p/, refers to groups of mixed genders and takes feminine verbal agreement. The unisex refers to humans whose gender is unknown or ambiguous and takes masculine verbal agreement. For example, a young baby who cannot be reliably distinguished as a boy or a girl will be given a unisex word. The unisex gender also includes some syntactically inanimate objects, such as words for grass and small plants, which are therefore considered animate nouns in proto-Moonshine.

The neuter is the only truly inanimate gender in proto-Moonshine, although many words in its class are for syntactically animate things such as small insects. They cannot be the subject of a sentence and therefore always take passive verbs.

A fourth gender is sometimes described; this is a variety of the epicene gender used specifically to talk about babies. It is marked by /w/. The baby gender was a Khulls innovation, not found even in closely related languages. However, very few nouns belong to this gender, and its verb marking is the same as the epicene, which in turn is the same as the feminine. It is mostly seen used with proper nouns; that is, when a baby is mentioned by name, that word will use the baby gender.

Orthography

Early Moonshine had a constantly changing script, with no standard body to govern it. It was a fork of the Khulls script which had branched off in the midst of a series of sound changes that nearly eliminated the palatal glide /y/ (IPA [j]). Moonshine shared the first of these shifts, but not the rest. Moonshine also allowed palatalization to bleed through labialization, so that, for example, the sequence /kʷy/ was pronounced /čʷ/.

Initial consonant inventory

The letter order of the consonants of the alphabet at the time Moonshine branched off was

k͡p ḳ͡ṗ gb h ʔ ʕ ḷ ṡ ṣ̣̌ z ŋ̇ ṁ ṅ l j x ḳ k ġ ŋ p m t ṭ d ʕʷ n xʷ g s r š ž č ǯ ň ḳʷ kʷ ġʷ ŋʷ pʷ ṗʷ mʷ gʷ hʷ  

The three letters at the beginning were pronounced [p ṗ b] by almost all speakers, but had not yet merged in the script.

Early consonant changes

However, they soon merged completely, as Khulls did independently. Several other changes that affected only Moonshine followed, which reduced the consonant inventory quickly:

p b ʔ ʕ l s š z ŋ m n j h k t w hʷ g r ž č ǯ ň kʷ ŋʷ pʷ mʷ gʷ

In this alphabet, syllabic consonants were spelled by prefixing either ʕ or h to the consonant, depending on its voicing. Note that the r in this alphabet corresponds to later Moonshine ř, whereas the w in this alphabet is the primary source of later Moonshine r.

The early Moonshine alphabet thus showed very little evidence of its having derived from the Gold alphabet, even though the two were separated by only 3000 years of evolution in a fairly conservative branch of the family. Nowhere in the two alphabets was there a streak of more than two letters in a row that were the same, although the pair j h k vs j h ḳ k comes close.

Because of its position in the alphabet and its historical use as a marker of the feminine gender, the palatal approximant j was considered a nasal by the Moonshine speakers, and some teachers moved the other nasals, ň and ŋʷ, frontwards to the position immediately after j. However this practice was never standardized and it fell out of use when later sound changes caused Moonshine's alphabet to swell again.

Vowel letter order

The Proto-Moonshine vowels were presented as a square, with five rows of vowels and four columns of tones. The order for vowels was a i o u e (the same as mainline Khulls) and the order of tones was a ă à ā. Of these, the first tone indicates an unstressed vowel and the others indicate the three possible tones that can occur in stressed syllables. This is a reduction from the six tones of mainline Khulls (though classical Khulls wrote as if there were only five early on, and later reduced it to four even though the tone setup had not changed).

Moonshine speakers retained knowledge of the letters for the Khulls á tone, and used them to write sequences of two of the same vowel, which was common in loanwords. Over time, this led to the reappearance of the á tone in Moonshine, which made it falsely appear to be the only Khulls daughter language which had preserved it.