Future Moonshine

Future Moonshine is a term for the post-classical dialects of Moonshine that began to arise after 6843 AD. Though Moonshine had been the most rapidly changing branch of its family for its first 3,000 years, the centralized school system slowed down the rate of change as it spread the Cartwheel dialect throughout the empire, and nearly all citizens attended school.

Scratchpad

Aspiration

May 18, 2021

Aspiration becomes phonemic, arising at first from transparent clusters /ph th/ and possibly others. But since there is no /kh/ cluster in Classical Moonshine, the regular /k/ becomes aspirated to fill the gap. Then /ġ/ shifts at least conditionally to become the new plain /k/. Then, new aspirates arise from /h/-hopping.

Minimal phoneme inventory

Labials:         p   m   f       w
Dentals:                 ṣ       ḷ
Alveolars:       t   n   s   z   l   r    
Palataloids:         ň   š   ž   y        
Velars:          k   ŋ   h   g   r̄

The analysis above takes every possible opportunity to analyze phonemes as clusters, even though some, such as analyzing /ṃ/ as /mf/, do not resemble the surface pronunciation very well.

NOTE: So far, there are no words with /ḷ/ or /w/ in the vocabulary. /w/ will almost certainly appear eventually, but /ḷ/ can only come from PMS /lu/, which can only occur over morpheme boundaries, since the parent language provided only /lū/, no short forms.

Unconditional consonants shifts in the daughter languages

Jun 25, 2021

Possible splits among the daughters:

pʷ tʷ kw

1. pʷ tʷ kw > pʷ kʷ kʷ.
2. pʷ tʷ kw > pʷ pʷ kʷ.
3. pʷ tʷ kw > p.
4. pʷ tʷ kw > pʷ.
5. pʷ tʷ kw > b p p. (with regular /p/ also > /b/)

z

• z > Ø very common conditionally, and in some languages unconditionally after vowel coloring

velarized consonants

there could be shifts of all sorts. only some of them are treated below.

1. ṇ ṭ > nn tt common only in languages that grow geminates from tones, as there would otherwise be very few other geminates
2. ṇ ṭ > m p
3. ṇ ṭ > ŋ k
4. ṇ ṭ > m k possible split shift as seen thousands of years earlier in the tropics
5. ṇ ṭ > m f variant of /m p/ that passes through a fricative stage, repeating Moonshine's own earlier history
6. ṇ ṭ > mm pp combination of labialization and gemination

voicing distinctions

1. p > b occurs because of the distribution of /p/ and /b/ in Icecap Moonshine; with /b/ occurring freely but /p/ tied to stress
2. b > p rare except in daughters that devoice other stops as well
3. f > v but does not include voicing of ṗ

Conditional consonants shifts in the daughter languages

vociing

1. p t k > b d ġ except after a high tone

elision

1. z > Ø, but only after vowel shifts. one set of related shifts could be a az iz i agʷ > Ø a e i o.

Other information about the descendants

Aug 13, 2020

Although it would be extremely difficult to sketch out properly, perhaps IMS could be seen as like Latin, and over 2,000 years it evolves into a family of languages that behave like Romance, with one dialect in particular being so conservative that its speakers consider it to be identical with the original IMS. They would call IMS as spoken in 6843 AD "Classical" and their own dialect "Modern". Since the school system is based in Cartwheel territory, this is probably the dialect that will be the most conservative, but note that there was a population migration beginning in the far north that might have wiped out Cartwheel.

Doctorate Moonshine

A scientific language that works like the 1990s Moonshine to the greatest possible extent, even if requiring shifts made unlikely by the mechanisms of standard diachronics. For example, àpaz "soap" could be reanalyzed as containing a root àp- (incorrect but plausible) and a suffix derived from the freestanding word àz "block; bar; brick" (which is both wrong and diachronically impossible). Alternatively, or perhaps simultaneously, this language could delete both all unstressed -z and all unstressed vowels, making the language monosyllabic at the word level. Then, new words would be created from compounds of the monosyllables, but this time there would be no new vowel or tone reduction, and the language would behave as though it had a multiplied inventory of 12 vowels instead of 3 (or however many arise after all of the shifts).

Additionally, noun cases would probably disappear altogether, though they could later be replaced by new ones.

The above shifts mean that Doctorate would be able to make great use of noun-noun compounds, one feature missing from Classical Moonshine and likely also missing from some of the daughter languages.

It is possible that high vowels are lowered when a dleeting syllable was /a/.

Italian Ice

The most conservative dialect is probably Cartwheel, the place where it all began. This is similar to how Italian is (arguably) the most conservative Romance language. The conservatism will be exaggerated by scholars, and with the help of the morphophonemic spelling system, many words will not visibly change at all over the 2000 years. There will be very few sound changes .... unlike Icelandic where á > au, k > hk, etc the sounds really do stay the same, and the glyphs of the alphabet continue to represent the same sounds. Thus, those few true sound changes are in fact respelled.

Crown dialect

Spoken deep in Poswob territory, far from the Moonshine Empire proper.

Wawiabi dialect

Spoken in the state of Balaš, also within Poswob territory. Contact with the Empire is continuous, however, and so this language may be very similar to the Cartwheel standard.

General ideas

Aug 13, 2020

Possibly merge all of /z ž g/ into one sound, since they contrast only incompletely. The same is true of the voiceless versions, but they will not be merged.

One dialect might do a conditional shift of /ṗ ṭ/ > /f þ/ after voicing the fricatives.

Try to make /w/ more prominent. Remember /wiwi/ "time", etc. "/w/ was the original /p/" (1994)

The clusters /px tx/ are common in IMS, but there is no /kx/. This is why they did not evolve into an aspiration contrast. But it is possible that some daughter languages manage to shift /px tx/ > /pʰ tʰ/ and somehow also evolve a distinction between /k/ and /kʰ/. It is not likely to involve losing /ġ/ since there was almost no bare /ġ/ to begin with (only /ŋġ/).

Aug 2, 2020

Since voiced stops occur in restricted environments, they could lose.

Aug 1, 2020

It is likely that the Moonshine Empire is so centralized that there is only one language for the vast area even 2,000 years after the standardization of Cartwheel Moonshine. (This is why it is also known as Icecap Moonshine.) Any dialects would have to be spoken in areas that broke free of the Moonshine Empire, which happened only once, and even those people were in close contact with the Empire, so they may not have had a separate language either.

Old ideas

Phonological developments

Sound changes involving consonants

Sound changes had already begun to slow in the centuries leading up to Classical Moonshine because the grammar had become tied to consonant and vowel gradations in ways that discouraged change. For example, one word might alternate its final consonants between /d~t~z~s/, discouraging merging of those sounds. The classical consonant inventory was

Bilabials:          p   b   m   ḟ   w
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

As the language developed into dialects, and these dialects developed into languages, shared innovations spread throughout the territory, while other changes were unique to each daughter language.

The labiodental stops /ṗ ḅ/ held strong in many dialects because of their grammatical alternations with /f v/. The same was true of the dental stops /ṭ ḍ/ and their alternation with /ṣ ẓ/. However, the nasals ṃ ṇ had no such grammatical associations, and in many dialects they shifted to simple m n, or less commonly, shifted to voiced fricatives v ẓ.

In some dialects, the voiced stops became prenasalized; this is actually a retention of a pre-Classical trait. In the daughter languages that descended from these dialects, the voiced stops were thus taught as clusters and eliminated from the basic inventory. In some of these languages, the voiced fricatives hardened in some positions into voiced stops, reintroducing the contrast.

Sound changes involving vowels

The classical vowel inventory was /a e i o u/, with no diphthongs. This remained stable in most of the daughter languages.

Sound changes involving tones

The four tones of Icecap Moonshine were a à ā á, and these showed various developments in the daughter languages. Words borrowed between languages were often borrowed orthographically, and therefore the tones did not match acoustically.

In Icecap Moonshine tone was inseparable from its vowel, meaning that for all practical purposes there were 20 vowels (18 if segmenting /ō ó/ as /āʷ áʷ/). In the daughter languages, it is possible that stress interacts with tone and causes tones to migrate across long words.