Icecap

Moonshine is a language spoken mostly in cold climates north of Poswob territory. Throughout its history, it has been a very rapidly changing language, in both grammar and phonology, such that speakers at one time could not understand texts written 200 years earlier. For example, Diʕìləs tĭniku "doll" becomes Poswa tinik, Pabappa timpi, Sakhi tiniu, and Moonshine č. Another example is Diʕìləs luməs "sunshine" becomes Poswa rumus, Sakhi lump, and Moonshine lut, though not all preserve the meaning. (This word disappeared in Pabappa.)

snd

Proto-Moonshine to Late Moonshine (6800)

Alternat enames: Classical Moonshine

1.   Clusters of any consonant plus a nasal simplified to single consonants: n disappeared and lengthened the previous vowel; s made the nasal voiceless, disappeared and lengthened the previous vowel; ʔ disappeared and raised the tone of the previous vowel.
2.   Syllable-final ʔ n s were grammatically analogized to the consonants k ŋ h between two of the same vowel, which then became ʔ n s and deleted the final vowel.
3.   A schwa following another vowel disappeared and made that vowel a long vowel.
4.   Unaccented short schwas were lost. Because the language had a very active compounding system, this shift led to a steep increase in the number of types of allowable consonant clusters, as well as new consonants allowed in final position.
5.   Syllable-final s after a vowel disappeared and made the preceding consonant voiceless and aspirated.
6.   Syllable-final s after a consonant disappeared and made that consonant into an alveolar.
7.   Unaccented e and o became a, often spelled as schwa or as ʕ, the vowel separator. If high tone, this was replaced by ʔ, the glottal stop. However, in neither case was this sound actually pronounced; it merely affected surrounding consonants for a short period of time after the shift.
8.   Unaccented i and u came to spelled as palatalized/labialized consonants followed by a schwa, which had merged in with these. Thus the old glyphs for coarticulated consonants were revived, and stress was no longer fixed on the first syllable of the word even when the first vowel in the word wasn't a schwa. There was now only one orthographic unaccented vowel in the language: the schwa, which was now often unwritten. Unaccented i and u were written as part of the preceding consonant (the syllable was always open). Consonant clusters simplified according to the following rules:
9.   Labialized consonants (kʷ ŋʷ hʷ) in final position (or at the beginning of a cluster) became plain and added a w glide to the preceding vowel.
10.   Palatalized consonants (pʲ mʲ tʲ nʲ sʲ č ñ š ž) in final position or at the beginning of a cluster became plain and added a j glide to the preceding vowel.
11.   Doubled consonants simplified to singles and caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high.
12.   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. If it had been voiced, it caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become low.
13.   Any remaining ʷ trapped between consonants became u.
14.   Any remaining ʲ trapped between consonants became i.
15.   φ and β changed to w.
16.   Aspirated consonants became voiceless.
17.   In unaccented syllables, all vowels became short.
18.   Nonpalatalized alveolar consonants became velarized (not shown in the orthography).
    
19.   An old method of deriving verbs from nouns by truncating the word after the first vowel, and lengthening that vowel if there was any missing info began to take over now. Although this was not a true sound change, it affected the general language more than any of the sound changes on the list.
    
20.   o ò changed to schwa in unaccented position and a in accented position.
21.   ō ó changed to o ò.
22.   The vowel sequences aj ej ij oj uj became ē i ī i ī respectively.
23.   The vowel sequences aw ew iw ow uw became ō u ū u ū respectively.
24.   The consonant cluster řp became lp in all positions.
25.   Following an accented syllable in a word of three or more syllables, all vowels became schwa.
26.   Following an accented syllable in a word of two syllables or less, the consonant sequences ts ns ss changed to `ts z s respectively.
27.   Following an accented syllable in word-final position, the syllables ka ke ki ko ku became ʔ ʔč ʔč ʔt ʔt. Before another consonant, they all became ʔ.
28.   All consonant clusters except those beginning with s became homorganic; the s- clusters did not retain any distinction based on point of articulation but instead shifted the s- to š except before another s.
29.   The cluster sw (spelled sbʷ) became a bilabial v in all positions.
30.   sb shifted to žb.
31.   Before front vowels, k g ŋ shifted to č ǯ ñ.
32.   Between two unstressed vowels, all labial consonants except rounded bilabials disappeared unless a string of three vowels would be created.
33.   Before a vowel, unaccented ə changed to u, which then shifted to the labial glide w in syllable-initial position and otherwise created a labialized consonant. (year 5800; same as 26 in Izda Mir)
34.   Before a vowel, unaccented a changed to i ("the karaoke shift"), which then shifted to the palatal glide j in syllable-initial position and otherwise created a palatalized consonant. Like the new labialized consonants, palatalized consonants could occur only before a vowel, but in orthography they could occur before other consonants because they were used to denote whole unstressed syllables. However, the only vowel allowed in these unstressed syllables was the epenthetic schwa, and during the following sound changes this schwa often disappeared.
35.   The labials pʲ bʲ mʲ became the labiodentals ṗ ḅ ṃ in all positions.
36.   The dentals fʲ vʲ changed to f v before vowels, but to fĭ vĭ elsewhere.
37.   The alveolars tʲ dʲ sʲ zʲ nʲ became the dentals ṭ ḍ ṣ ẓ ṇ in all positions. lʲ became j and řʲ became ř.
38.   The dorsals kʲ hʲ rʲ became the palatals č š j in all positions.
39.   The labialized postalveolar consonants čʷ ǯʷ šʷ žʷ ñʷ became delabialized.
40.   The palatal consonants č ǯ š ž ñ became c ʒ s z n in all positions.
41.   The rounded labials pʷ bʷ mʷ fʷ vʷ became the plain labials pŭ bŭ mŭ fŭ vŭ before a consonant.
42.   The labialized alveolars tʷ dʷ sʷ zʷ nʷ řʷ became plain alveolars t d s z n ř in all positions.
43.   Before a vowel, lʷ became w, but elsewhere it changed to lŭ.
     
44.   The dorsals kʷ hʷ rʷ became w before a consonant, while also lengthening the preceding vowel.
    
45.   The labiodentals ṗ ḅ ṃʰ ṃ and the dentals ṭ ḍ ṇʰ ṇ became c ʒ ns nz in word-final position.
46.   The dentals ṗ ḅ ṃʰ ṃ ṭ ḍ ṇʰ ṇ became the affricates pf bv mf mv tṣ dẓ nṣ nẓ, but there was no change in spelling.
47.   The affricates pf bv mf mv tṣ dẓ nṣ nẓ became f v f v ṣ ẓ ṣ ẓ in initial position and after a consonant.
48.   Epenthetic schwas after previously labialized and palatalized consonants disappeared.
49.   Nasals disappeared before a fricative.
50.   The affricates mbʷ mb mḅ nḍ nd nǯ ŋg shifted to bʷ b ḅ ẓ ʒ ǯ g in all positions. If the preceding vowel had been long, it became short.
51.   The affricates mpʷ mp mṗ nṭ nt nč ŋk shifted to pʷ p ṗ ẓ ʒ ǯ g in all positions. If the preceding vowel had been long, it became short.
52.   Unstressed ər shifted to o.
53.   š before a nasal changed to ž and the nasal changed into a voiced stop.
54.   The velar stops k g were fronted to č ǯ unless they occurred in a cluster after another consonant and before a o u.
55.   Labialization was lost on all consonants.
56.   The clusters šb and bš were devoiced to šp and pš respectively.
57.   The clusters žp and pž became žb and bž respectively.
58.   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.
59.   Alveolar stops in accented syllables before another syllable beginning in an alveolar became postalveolar affricates.
60.   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.
61.  
62.  
63.   Sonority hierarchy shifts: #hp ---> #kf̥ etc
64.  
65.  
66.   After a vowel, the consonant clusters ṿt ṿd merged as d. If after /u/ or /o/, that vowel became long.
67.  
68.   After a vowel, the consonant clusters gč gǯ (g is ɣ) changed to ġ (a voiced velar stop).
69.  
70.  
71.  
72.  

The Moonshine language at this point had the consonants




<pable> <pbody><pr><pd width="50"> </pd><pd width="50"> </pd><pd width="50"> </pd><pd width="50"> </pd><pd width="50"> </pd><pd width="50">

    </pd><pd width="50">     </pd><pd width="50">    </pd></pr>

<pr><pd> p </pd><pd> b </pd><pd> fʷ </pd><pd> vʷ </pd><pd> m </pd><pd> mʰ </pd><pd> w </pd><pd> </pd></pr> <pr><pd> ṗ </pd><pd> ḅ </pd><pd> f </pd><pd> v </pd><pd> ṃ </pd><pd> ṃʰ </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd></pr> <pr><pd> t </pd><pd> d </pd><pd> s </pd><pd> z </pd><pd> n </pd><pd> nʰ </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd></pr> <pr><pd> ṭ </pd><pd> ḍ </pd><pd> ṣ </pd><pd> ẓ </pd><pd> ṇ </pd><pd> ṇʰ </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd></pr> <pr><pd> č </pd><pd> ǯ </pd><pd> š </pd><pd> ž </pd><pd> ñ </pd><pd> ñʰ </pd><pd> j </pd><pd> </pd></pr> <pr><pd> k </pd><pd> g </pd><pd> h </pd><pd> ɣ </pd><pd> ŋ </pd><pd> ŋʰ </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd></pr> <pr><pd> ʔ </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd><pd> </pd></pr>

</pbody></pable>


and the vowels /a ā e ē i ī o ō u ū ə/.




The alphabet now consisted of the consonants /p b ṗ ḅ f v m mʰ w t ṭ d ḍ s z ṣ ẓ n nʰ š ž k g ŋ ŋʰ h x l ř j r/ and the vowels /a e i o u ə ā ē ī ō ū ə̄ à è ì ò ù ə̀ á é í ó ú ə́/.


This is considered to be the state of classical Moonshine, also known as Rúló.

<pable><pbody><pr><pd width="50"></pd><pd>

Rúló to Xykhasl (year 12850 AD)

1.   Intervocalically, the dental consonants ṗ ḅ ṭ ḍ came to be written as pf bv tṣ dẓ, and to be treated as consonant clusters.
2.   In word-initial position and after another consonant they became the plain fricatives f v ṣ ẓ.
3.   The vowel /u/ came to be spelled /ū/; this was a spelling change rather than a phonetic one.
4.   In bisyllabic roots, if the vowel in the second syllable was rounded, the vowels in the first syllable changed from /a e i o ū ə/ to /â ū y ô y u/, where â spells the SAMPA sound Q, ū spells u:, ô spells u:, and y spells y.
5.   If the vowel in the second syllable was /i/, then /o ū/ in the first syllable changed to /oj ūj/.
6.   High tone vowels came to be distinguished primarily by being lax rather than by being of high pitch. Allophonic pitch distinctions began to arise, and soon tone had been completely replaced by laxness.
7.   Consonant clusters and final consonants, aside from c ʒ č ǯ were simplified: any /p/ or /š/ at the end of a syllable disappeared and made the preceding vowel into a lax vowel.
8.   (although in the case of žb and šp, the ž and š survived and the labials didn't). Double consonants and affricates simplified to singles and also laxed the preceding vowel. Final /m/ disappeared with no effect, although it began to spread as an allophone to places in which it had never been before. Voiceless nasals also laxed the preceding vowel.
9.   The dental fricatives f v changed to ṣ ẓ at the beginning of a word and between vowels.
10.   The postalveolar affricates č ǯ became the fricatives š ž in all positions.
11.   The alveolar stops t d and the affricates c ʒ merged as č ǯ before front vowels. In other positions they remained the same.
12.   In clusters the dental fricatives ṣ ẓ became the alveolar stops t d.
13.   All unstressed short vowels were reduced to the set /ă ĭ u ə/. If they had been lax, they also laxed the preceding vowel.
14.   After a vowel, wĭ changed to j,
15.   sĭ changed to š,
16.   and kĭ and tĭ coalesced as tš.
17.   Unaccented long vowels and diphthongs were reduced to the monophthongs a e i o u y.
18.   The remaining long vowels ā ē ī ō ū ȳ ə̄ changed to a aj i aw ū y ə. The letter ū was not a true long vowel any longer, but only a higher and clearer version of u.
19.   All final vowels in bisyllabic roots were deleted. If the vowel deleted was ĭ, the vowels in the first syllable changed from /a à è ì ə/ to /aj àj e i ĭ/. In compound words and certain inflected forms, the second vowel in the word was deleted if the resulting consonant cluster was acceppable ("the Debra shift"). If the second vowel occurred between two labial consonants, the first labial consonant was deleted and the second was metathesized so that it took the place of the first. Then the place of articulation of that consonant changed to match the vowel it occurred next to, as the vowel was deleted.
20.   u ù became fronted to mid vowels but there was no change in spelling. All roots that came from Rúló had been either one or two syllables. With this sound shift they nearly all came to be one syllable, although due to changes in grammar they were almost always used with a suffix containing a vowel and thus adding a syllable. That is to say, the suffixes from the old monosyllables were applied to these new monosyllables, making the old suffixes and infixes for bisyllables obsolete.
21.   The dental fricatives ṣ ẓ changed back to f v in all positions.
22.   The labiodental fricatives f v became h x in word-initial position before a back vowel and between a back vowel and another vowel of any type;
23.   In clusters the labiodental fricatives f v became p b.
24.   Before the front vowels e è i ì û ú, the velar stops k and g were fronted to the postalveolar affricates č and ǯ, which were considered single phonemes rather than clusters.
25.   At the end of a closed syllable the bilabial stop b came to be pronounced as /ə/, with a common allophone of [w]; however there was no change in the native spelling.
26.   At the end of a closed syllable the bilabial stop p came to be pronounced as [ʔ], however there was no change in the native spelling. That is, the ligatures of vowel + p, which are transliterated with grave accents, continued to be used.
27.   The labiodental fricatives f v became the bilabial stops p b in all positions, although at the end of a few words they disappeared completely. They were spelled with the letters for the "hard" p b because in some writings the letters for the ordinary p b were used for /? ə/.
28.   Voiced stops became prenasalized after a tense vowel; lax vowels before voiced stops became allophonically tense but did not gain prenasalization.
29.   The lax/tense distinction in vowels disappeared, leaving vowel quality alone to distinguish them and meaning that glottal stops after certain vowels were no longer pronounced. However, the changes that the earlier system had inflicted on the consonants still remained.
30.   A chain shift occurred: the old vowel ì came to be pronounced as e, meaning that the old vowel e came to be pronounced as ɛ, which caused the old vowel è to become pronounced as a, which caused the old vowel a to become pronounced as a back ɑ. Meanwhile a similar shift occurred in the back vowels: o became ɔ, which caused ò to become a low back ɒ. Now, only roundedness and frontness distinguished the two forms of o and a; the heights were the same.
    
    

    Classical-Era Changes:

    
    

31.   In some idiolects, a religious taboo forbade the pronunciation of the phonemes k g except when used for the names of the forces of good and evil; in other contexts they shifted to /q G/.
32.   Most speakers began to merge the new q G phonemes with h x.
33.   Roundedness disappeared on o ò, thus leaving only frontness to distinguish them from a à.
34.   Unstressed u became a true schwa. The script was now written with u as the inherent vowel (previously it was schwa).
35.   o ò merged with a à.
36.   The low vowel a rounded and moved to the back position and à became low to replace it.
    
    The alphabet now consisted of the consonants /p b š ž m w t d s z n j c ʒ č ǯ k g h x ŋ r l ř/ and the vowels /@ i e E a A O o u y/.
    The spelling of the vowels was as such:
    
    <pable class="body"> <pbody><pr><pd>ə</pd><pd>i</pd><pd>e</pd><pd>ɛ</pd><pd>a</pd><pd>ɑ</pd><pd>ɔ</pd><pd>o</pd><pd>u</pd><pd>y</pd><pd> </pd></pr> <pr><pd>u</pd><pd>i</pd><pd>ì</pd><pd>e</pd><pd>è</pd><pd>o</pd><pd>a</pd><pd>â</pd><pd>ô</pd><pd>û</pd><pd> </pd></pr> </pbody></pable> o could also be spelled à, and a could also be spelled ò. This is considered to be the state of classical Laveti Moonshine.
    
    

    Post-Classical Changes:

37.   Letters with inherent vowels sometimes appeared as the onset of a stressed syllable (mostly in Bloppabop loans, but in a few native words also). Previously the u ones were pronounced with /w/, but that disappeared, and as it did so the ones with a became velarised and in some cases (especially velars) also labialized.

</pd></pr></pbody></pable>

</pd></pr></pbody></pable>

<pable><pbody><pr><pd width="65"></pd><pd>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./pabappa28_files/europe.htm">

Culture

See Moonshine culture.

The first thing outsiders notice about the Moonshine people is that their women are consistently taller than their men. This is a biological trait, not due to high heels or any other type of clothing the speakers wear. In fact, despite most of their people living in very cold climates, they don't tend to wear thick boots that would give them extra height. Despite the fact that Moonshines are a blend of various peoples from around the world, the tall-female trait is consistent throughout the empire and has even bled out into the neighboring Poswob Empire (Pusapom) which largely encircles the southern rim of the Moonshine Empire. The Moonshines know that being tall-femaled is unusual on this planet, but their societies are almost perfectly homogeneous and they do not think about it very often, because to anyone in any part of the Moonshine Empire, women being taller than men is unquestionably normal. And because this trait has pushed its way well beyond their borders, Moonshines are not in contact with tall-male populations even at the edges of their Empire.

Females are also taller than males in the ancient Moonshine homeland, the "Crown" at about 30N, which is not geographically connected to teh rest of the Empire. In fact, near the Crown are the descendants of the nearly extinct Repilian people, whose females exceed their males in height to an even greater degree, which even the Moonshines find foreign, although males of the Repilian people are not often seen in public and the remaining Repilian settlements are for all practical purposes female-only societies, at least among adults. All Repilians today consider themselves Poswobs, regardless of where they live.

Phonology

Like its parent language Khulls, 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. However, hundreds of sound changes separate the two languages, so Moonshine does not actually resemble Khulls much at all. Moonshine's phonology is "clean" where Khulls was messy in that it has nearly perfect symmetry amongst its vowels, consonants, and tones; and that there are no coarticulated consonants such as kʷ. In its symmetry, it can also be described as similar in setup to Mandarin, although Moonshine is far more permissive than Mandarin with regards to consonant clusters and syllable-final consonants.

Moonshine is analogous to German and English in that, even though it is related to languages with long polysyllabic roots like polaputa "cat", sound changes have squished nearly all of Moonshine's word roots into monosyllables. Like English "water", there are a small number of bisyllabic roots remaining, but monosyllables and even some zero-syllable roots like č "doll" predominate.

Consonants

 p b ḟ ṿ m
 ṗ ḅ f v ṃ
 ṭ ḍ ṣ ẓ ṇ ḷ
 t d s z n l ř c ʒ
 _ _ š ž ñ _ j č ǯ
 k ġ h g ŋ r

Underscores are used only to keep spacing intact. 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 palatal approximant is placed with the postalveolar row by tradition, but is a true palatal.

The huge consonant inventory is largely due to recent sound changes that mirrored consonants from one part of the phonology into another where previously there had been gaps. e.g. for every voiceless stop, there had to be a voiced stop, a voiceless fricative, and a voiced fricative. Thus /p/ split into /p b f̥ v̥/, where the last two vary between a simple /w/ and a true labialized fricative depending on environment. Similarly the inherited /f/ sound changed to a labiodental stop /ṗ/ or /ḅ/ in some environments, and the ḅ mirrored back a /v/ in a later sound change.

These sound changes eliminated words like hpem "bathtub", which violated the sonority hierarchy, by exchanging the stop and fricative qualities between the two consonants to generate kf̥em (pronounced /kwem/).

Thus there are 37 consonants in classical Moonshine.

Romanization of consonants

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

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. For example, ʕd "sun" is pronounced /d/, but when it takes inflections, they go before the /d/ instead of after it. In the native Moonshine alphabet, both of these are spelled with apostrophe-like symbols or with letter modifiers, but in Romanization this would lead to diacritical overload.

Because the /ʕ/ and /ʔ/ symbols originally represented vowels, and because these vowels changed into schwas before becoming silent, it could be argued that the symbols are actually vowels rather than consonants, and should have the values of /ə/ and /ə̀/ respectively; that is, a low and a high tone schwa. But Moonshine by tradition insists that its vowels must be able to occur on any of the four tones, and therefore any sound which cannot appear with all four tones is considered a consonant. This is why /j/ and the borrowed /w/ are not considered allophones of the vowels /i/ and /u/.

Approximants

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.

NOTE: /w/ might occur in native words after all, as a reflex of an earlier /lʷ/. But this would be extremely rare since mainline Khulls did /lʷ/ > /ʕʷ/ before the split, so any words with that sequence would need to have come from /lŭ/ + vowel.

The palatal approximant [j] is, similarly, spelled with letters for /ś ź/ rather than with a symbol of its own. To signify a bare /j/, which occurs in a few native words, the spelling ʕź is used.

Grammar

Moonshine has been moving towards oligosynthesis for a long time. Even Khulls had many one-letter words, including one-consonant words, but only certain consonants could do this, primarily syllabic ones. In Moonshine there are no restrictions at all and in a few rare cases there may even be more morphemes than phonemes in a word. (i.e. two morphemes each consisting of a single vowel combine into one vowel.) Due to massive homophony, Moonshine has been adding single-consonant morphemes to both ends of its words, especially nouns, throughout its history. For example many words for fruits begin with /p/ because p is the Moonshine word for water or juice. This word can be used alone, so it is not merely a classifier or enclitic.

Likewise, a noun can become a compound simply by adding a nonsyllabic consonant to the end, even though such consonants cannot carry stress and are difficult to hear. Since the sound changes press so hard, reanalysis is common: púd "diaper" is not simply p "water" + úd "clothing", but is analyzed as such.

Gender

Moonshine marks gender on both its nouns and its verbs, although many nouns do not have an overt gender marker. Animate nouns usually do. The gender markers are descended from free morphemes that were clamped onto the end of nouns and became shorteneed through sound change. Some were already very short nouns even in the parent language. For example, Khulls ô "woman, female" and û "man, male" became Moonshine a and u.

There are four genders in Moonshine: three animate genders and one inanimate.

Primary feminine gender

The most common gender in Moonshine for animate nouns is the primary feminine gender. It contains words for adult women and many words for abstract objects and other things that are seen as feminine only metaphorically. Nouns in this class include words for food, celestial objects, sleep, water, 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, words for inhabitable places, and nations.

The primary feminine gender additionally functions as an epicene; a group comprsed of men and women will take feminine verb agreement.

Secondary feminine gender

The secondary feminine gender contains words for young girls of pre-marriageable age, as well as words for fruit, buildings, feminine hygiene products, and sharp objects. It is an epicene for children; a group composed of boys and girls will take secondary feminine verb agreement. It also functions as the epicene for birds and certain other animals that are seen as metaphorically childlike.

Masculine gender

The masculine gender contains words for men, boys, grass, flowers, small plants, and certain fruits (those historically linked to oranges).

Inanimate gender

The inanimate gender is descended from the Khulls neuter, which could be described as an absence of gender rather than a gender of its own, since neuter objects took on the gender of their possessor when there was one. In Moonshine though the inanimate gender behaves like the animate genders.

Marking gender on direct objects

The gender of a direct object is determined by the animacy hierarchy of the language.

GENDER SYSTEM

Gender	Fem+ ♀	Fem- ☿	Masc ♂	Neuter ⚲
SUBJECT	OBJECT
4 Greater Feminine ♀	♀	♀	♀	♀
Lesser Feminine ☿	♀	☿	☿	☿
Masculine ♂	♀	☿	♂	♂
0 Neuter ⚲	♀	☿	♂	⚲

Body parts and inanimate objects take on the gender of their possessor. However, words that belong to one of the animate genders do not change this way, even if they refer to syntactically inanimate objects.

Thus, all inanimate objects come with a morpheme indicating the gender of their possessor.

Verbs

Verb roots always end in vowels, but may have extra information inserted as a postfix between the root and its inflection.

History and contact

Cultural traits

The speakers of Moonshine separated from their parent culture around 3700 for political reasons. For their own safety, they abandoned their homes and possessions in August 3948 and moved eastward into Poswob territory. However, the Poswobs themselves were only just beginning to settle this land, so the two tribes were able to share their land and blend with each other.

Moonshines were pacifists. They said:

Powerfully evil people should be killed, not tortured. But those evildoers who are able to be stripped of power should be treated as kindly as gooddoers. Sinfulness is no basis for punishment; only chance of repentance is. And this works only for those who will repent.

Moonshine took about 30% of its vocabulary from the early Poswob language (then called Bābākiam), hugely out of proportion with the amount of sharing that had happened in the past. Although the Poswobs were not yet the peaceful, helpful, and easily abused people that they came to be known as thousands of years later, they were already militarily weak, and could not stop the Moonshines from settling in their homeland. However, the Moonshines themselves were very weak, and wanted to become allies of the Poswobs rather than enemies of them.

The Moonshines identified themselves with women, and considered the Poswobs to be like children. They considered all of the other cultures to be like men. Thus, they said, like a mother protecting her children from an abusive father, the Moonshines wanted to adopt the Poswobs in order to protect them from the aggressive nations all around them.

However, although many Moonshines stayed in Poswob territory, many more moved on. Moonshines became a majority in what would later come to be known as "The Crown", a projection of the Popoppos Mountains further north than elsewhere, leading to a cold climate and a barrier for anyone trying to cross in any direction. This was actually due to cultural assimilation rather than migration; the native Repilian people were so extremely female-dominated that they made natural allies for the aggressively feministic Moonshines.

The Moonshines figured they would be safe from any intruders, whether from nearby or far away, if they built their main settlements in the mountains. They became majorities in the flat lands to the north only much later, because they preferred to live in a cold climate and rely on hunting in order to eliminate the need to compete with other humans and even other animals for living space.

In an odd way the Moonshines actually chose the Poswobs and idealized them to such an extent that the Moonshine peoples actually started to want to become Poswobs themselves, even though this would be a step down both literally (Poswob people were much, much smaller than Moonshine people, among the greatest height and body mass difference in the world at this time) and figuratively (even with all their built-up cities and thousands of years of safety, the Poswob standard of living was still very poor). Moonshine was originally a political movement, after all, which had broken away from its parent culture because they had come to believe the parent culture was too violent. They chose the Poswobs, a pleasantly peaceful people, not only because they figured that they would be safer if they surrounded themslves with soft "helping hand" types, but because the Moonshines themslves wanted to become such themselves.

The world-famous trait of women being reliably much taller than men did not come from the Poswobs, however, but rather from aboriginals living further north who later also blended with and came to be seen as one with the Poswobs. But Moonshines moved into that territory even before Poswobs did, which is why the Moonshines have the trait throughout their entire territory, whereas Poswobs have it in most of their territory but incompletely or not at all in ancient settlements near or within the tropics, or in areas where the preexisting aboriginal tribe did not have this trait. This also greatly reduced the difference in average height between the two races, with Poswobs getting taller the more they blended with aboriginals, and Moonshines getting shorter. Further, the two tribes began to blend with each other fairly early on such that the difference was far more a matter of religion and language than of skin color and body mass.

Phonological characteristics of the early Moonshine language

See Proto-Moonshine language.

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?)

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).

Loans

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/.

Vocabulary

The Poswobs have for thousands of years had a difficult time getting other people, particularly Khulls people, to take them seriously as a nation. Early Moonshine speakers saw that the Poswobs were a physically frail, short-statured people who lived in a city named Bābā and spoke a language closely related to their own but which seemingly took four times as many syllables as their own to express any complex thought. Despite long histories of contact, mainstream Khulls had borrowed almost nothing from the Poswob languages other than words for local wildlife and a few childish things. Even the Andanese, who were smaller and weaker even than the Poswobs, considered Bābā a society of babies and refused to assimilate even as the Andanese cities were destroyed one by one while Poswob cities survived. Only Moonshine considered Bābākiam a language worth adopting as their own, to the point that loans from Bābā made up 30% of the proto-Moonshine lexicon despite those loans being longer and more clumsy than the native synonyms which they already had.

Laons to other lanbguages

Moonshine loans words to Poswa and a few Sakhi languages. Other languages, even those in close contact with Moonshine, do not borrow much because the phonology of Moonshine is so vastly different than its neighbors. The Poswa loans merge many words into one, for example, but this is okay because Poswa's Moonshine loans are generally for specific things and contexts where it is appropriate. e.g. čāc, čap, čàt all merge in Poswa as tšap. Poswa generally loans c as /p/ at the edges of words (e.g. cē > pe "wheel") but as /ts/ in the middle of words unless an unacceptable consonant cluster would form. One might expect it to be /t/ at least word-initially, but in an earlier version of Poswa /ps/ was acceptable in word-initial position and it became /p/ in the later language.

These words are not used in Poswa as everyday words. e.g. pobby is still the unchallenged word for wheel, not pe. Rather they used in Japanese-like compounds and abbreviations, such as petužu "wheel axle", mežom "soap dispenser".

Early Moonshine sound changes

At first Moonshine was a fairly conservative langiuage, even leaving recently loaned words such as papipipá "to slap" alone.