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#Coronals followed by the labial glide /w/, including those generated above, became dental.  Thus for example the verb ending ''nw'' became '''ṇw'''.
#Coronals followed by the labial glide /w/, including those generated above, became dental.  Thus for example the verb ending ''nw'' became '''ṇw'''.


==Icecap Moonshine  phoneme inventory==
===Three-vowel analysis ("Kick Jam")===
If the vowels are just /a i u/, then every other acoustic distinction between the vowels must be analyzed with the consonants.  The resulting consonant inventory thus has pairs distinguished by palatalization for any consonant that can occur before (or sometimes after) a surface-level vowel pair of [a]~[e].  Likewise any [o] must be analyzed as either /a/ (when before a velar or velarized consonant) or as /u/ (in freestanding position or before any other consonant). 
                    PLAIN                                  PALATALIZED
Bilabials:      p  b  m  ḟ  w                      pʲ  bʲ  mʲ
Labiodentals:  (ṗ      ṃ)  f 
Dentals:        (ṭ      ṇ)  ṣ      ḷ
Alveolars:      t  d  n  s  z  l  r  c  ʒ      č  ǯ  ň  š  ž  ʎ  ř
Velars:          k  ġ  ŋ  h  g  r̄                  kʲ  ġʲ  ń  ś  y
If the labiodentals ''ṗ ṃ'', which are indifferent to palatalization, are analyzed as clusters ending in '''f''' (which is also indifferent to palatalization), the consonant table can be rearranged into a traditional shape:
Rounded labials:        p  b  m  ḟ  w
Spread labials:        pʲ  bʲ  mʲ  f              (ṗ  ṁ)
Dentals:                            ṣ      ḷ      (ṭ  ṇ)
Alveolars:              t  d  n  s  z  l  r  (c  ʒ)
Postalveolars:          č  ǯ  ň  š  ž  ʎ  ř
Palatals:              kʲ  ġʲ  ń  ś  y
Velars:                k  ġ  ŋ  h  g  r̄
But note that this analysis groups the labiodental '''f''' with the bilabials '''pʲ bʲ mʲ''', which have little in common and do not have the same effects on surrounding vowels.
===Five-vowel analysis===
The final consonant inventory was
Bilabials:          p  b  m  ḟ  w
Labiodentals:      (ṗ      ṃ)  f   
Dentals:          (ṭ      ṇ)  ṣ      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
And vowels were /a e i o u/ on all four tones, though the long /o/ tones only occurred over morpheme boundaries and were not represented in the native script.
====Minimalist consonant inventory====
The fish shaped inventory includes affricates as single consonants.  The first four listed, '''ṗ ṃ ṭ ṇ''', are taught as single consonants in Moonshine classrooms because they can occur in positions where other clusters cannot, and because they sometimes appear as the reflexes of PMS single consonants.  (Note that this sound shift is directly related to Poswa's shift of /pʲ mʲ tʲ nʲ/ > /f v f v/, but Moonshine's shift had both a different starting point and different results.)  However, these affricates cannot ''contrast with'' clusters, and therefore under a strict analysis they can be analyzed as the sequences /pf mf tṣ nṣ/.
Likewise, the voiced stops '''b d ʒ ǯ ġ''' can be removed  from the inventory because they only appear as the reflex of earlier clusters /mp nt nč ŋk ŋkʷ/, or in a very small number of words from other clusters involving nasals.  The voiceless fricatives '''f̣ ś''' can also be ignored, because although they contrast with the more common /f š/, they do so only in positions where clusters can occur, and can thus be analyzed as clusters with /h/. 
Even in a minimalist analysis, the voiceless affricate /c/ remains, as do the postalveolar consonants / ň  š  ž          č/.  This is because they can contrast with clusters over syllable boundaries; that is, /tš/ will always be split when it straddles a syllable boundary, whereas /č/ will always go with the second syllable.  This  affects the pronunciation of the preceding vowel, as well. 
The consonants /w y/ cannot be considered vowels because they cannot take tones. Thus an absolute minimum consonant inventory for Icecap Moonshine would have 23 consonants:
Labials:        p  m  f      w
Dentals:                ṣ      ḷ
Alveolars:      t  n  s  z  l  ř  c
Palataloids:        ň  š  ž  y      č
Velars:          k  ŋ  h  g  r
In theory a minimalist approach could analyze the four tones as sequences of a vowel followed by a silent consonant, but the Moonshine grammar behaves such that it is far more convenient to treat each tone as inseparable from its vowel, meaning that even in a minimalist analysis there are five vowels and four tones, for a total of 20 syllabic nuclei.
Note that if there are no voiced stops, then the initial clusters like /mp nt nč ŋk/ are like /pf tṣ/ in that they can violate the sonority h
ierarchy.
====Maximalist consonant inventory====
A maximalist analysis would accept all 34 of the consonants in the first table above as phonemic, and also add new phonemes for historical coarticulations such as /pʷ kʷ sʲ/ and the like, which no longer contrast audibly with their corresponding plain forms, but affect the pronunciation of any preceding vowel.  Note that, for example, the only occurrences of long /o/ in Icecap Moonshine are from long /a/ followed by a historically labialized consonant.  These cannot be analyzed as sequences such as /aw/ either because they occur on all four tones whereas sequences like /aw/ are always long.  The Moonshine script follows this maximalist approach, but because there is no acoustic distinction between these pairs of consonants, it is not taught as such in advanced classrooms.
A glottal stop is inserted after a high tone followed by another vowel or any of a certain set of consonants, and could thus be added to the consonant inventory as well, but it cannot contrast with silence because the tone would also change.
A maximalist approach might also expand the vowel inventory by not only considering tones as inseparable from their vowels, but also certain sonorant consonants such as /l ř r w y/.
==Overview==
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]].
==Gender and cultural interactions==
:NOTE, this section is currently undergoing upheaval.
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 habitats.  There 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:
#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.
#:My plan is to add this function to the language without deciding whether it is optional or mandatory. At the very least, it will be grammatically possible for men to speak normally, rather than, for example, requiring male speakers to produce one of three possible forms for each word with none of them being identifiable as the default.
#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.
#:This is probably no longer true, as I am no longer assigning gender to words based on the Gold principle of "rightmost gendered morpheme". Instead, gender is simply determined by the gender marker, if present.
#Some men's words are the same as women's words but with an additional honorific morpheme expressing power, beauty, and other feminine traits. 
#:For example, the circumfix ''ho-...-i''.
#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. 
#:This is probably no longer true.
#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.
#:This is still true in the formal register (when women are present), but likely not true when men speak amongst themselves.
#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.
#:This is still true.  This arises from the conflation of the masculine noun class with that of handheld tools, which is likely the only group that can be used to derive instrumental verbs.
#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. There is not just one discourse marker however; they are different for different nouns and verbs. This requires the man to keep track of such things as  whether an object is visible or invisible, tangible or intangible, and so on, whereas women speaking to women (and likely also to men) use the words freely.
#:If this is still true, the discourse marker is conflated with other morphemes wherever possible, so that even men in the most formal situations will not need to stack two so-called "humiliation morphemes" together.
#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.
#:Any instances of this will be due to stress shifts and the masculine stem will be also available to feminine agents.  Thus it could rather be said that there is a group of defective verbs which can only take feminine agents.
#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. 
#:This is probably no longer true, as it is not clear that verb conjugations really even exist.  The morphemes that I had planned to develop into conjugation markers are separated from the gender markers now. 
#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.
#:Something like this will still be true, but it is more likely to be marked on the verb after all.
===Outside perspectives===
====Poswa====
''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.  ''
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 Moonshine.  Male 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.
For example,  a Poswob woman asking a man to choose one of two flowers could ask
:'''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 Poswa.  The man's reply, even if he were a scholar, would simply be
:'''Fabumbopo.'''
::I want the tulip.
Or
:'''Tammavapo.'''
::I want the rose.
Both of which are simply vowel-rotated forms of the two content words in the original question.
But in a Poswa play, a Moonshine woman asking a Moonshine man to pick between a rose and a tulip would say
:'''Fi pu waba?'''
::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
:'''Paefimpose, nubevwope,    mapembe  twuppupopo wembabofafo fupie    wataežos.              '''
::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.
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.
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 accurate.  The  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. 
Some Moonshine women instruct their husbands to ignore some of the politeness rules above so they can speak more rapidly.  These men thus have separate speech registers for talking to different women, and must remember which rules apply in each given situation.  Other Moonshine women would avoid the situation up above by instructing their husbands to point to the flower they want.
==Other unusual characteristics==
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.
#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. 
#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 phoneme.  Though 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==
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===
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.
Voiced stops are prenasalized when preceded by vowels.  But  fricatives are not.
====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.
====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. 
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.
:''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.''
===Clusters===
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.
===Vowels===
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.
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.
===Syllable structure===
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 consonants.  All 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 consonants.  This 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.
==Gender==
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. 
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'''.
===Nominal possession markers===
NOUN CLASS            GENDER          FREE  1F    2F    3F  3M
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.
**Reorients to feminine when free.
All neuter nouns inherit the gender of their possessor.  Forms in parentheses are present only for a subset of the nouns in the category.
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 on.  When 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.
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.
===Neuter nouns===
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 genders.  Gender 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. 
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. 
===Feminine nouns===
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 womb.  Round objects are mostly feminine because they resemble breasts. This includes objects that are round in only one view, such as tubes and rings. 
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.
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.
===Masculine nouns===
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".
If the stem of the word ends in a primordial /n/, this merges with the /t/ to become /d/.
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.
==Compound gender stacking==
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===
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 neuter.  But any word with a feminine morpheme in it is feminine itself unless it ends in ''t''.
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.
===Possessor gender===
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.
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. 
===Agent gender===
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.
A padding morpheme occurs after the agent marker in many words to separate it from the following markers.  In most cases, this derives from an earlier evidential marker, but some padding morphemes were copied from other verb forms and have no etymological meaning.
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.
===Speaker and listener gender===
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.
A further complication is that the speaker-listener morphemes are not static, but take separate forms depending on the preceding morphemes.  For 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.
====Surface analysis====
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.
==Speech registers==
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.
===Direct register===
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.
====Direct register vocabulary====
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===
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.
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 ''-í'' to the vulgar register form because this is the only other source of 1st person masculine verbs.
====Limits on vocabulary====
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 ''bà'', 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.
There is no imperative mood.
:''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.''
::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====
Males add one of several morphemes to all nouns and most verbs.
;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.
;Second person
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 meaning.  This was caused by /nʷs/ > /nʷh/ > /ʷṇṭh/ > /ʷṇṭ/ > /wḍ/.  This can also be used for the third person.
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.
:''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. ''
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 form.  This often causes an epenthetic /e/ to arise, from the normally suppressed /a/ followed by the /ʲ/.
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.
;Third person
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 markers.  When 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 situation.  Note that /:ʔ/ indicates an acute tone, and is equivalent to '''´''' but is morphologically distinct.
*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.
====Context====
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.
===Terse register===
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 imperative.  There are some defective verbs; for example, there is no 1st person form of the verb "to apologize".
====Grammar====
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.
====Context====
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.
===Vulgar register===
The vulgar register is used between males when the absence of females makes it safe to do so. 
====Grammar====
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 them.  Although 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==
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==
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 act.  Information here applies to masculine nouns only, which reliably end in ''-t'' and are thus much easier to describe than neuters.
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.
===Person markers ===
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.)
:''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.            ''
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.
:''Note, check tjhis paragraph, it doesnt make sense  unless it applies only to the 1st person pronoun ''
===Degrees of obedience===
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 morphemes.  Thus, the morphemes are fused and not transparently segmentable.  The  four morphemes thus are:
====Involuntary obedience====
*Ø, 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.
Male speakers replace the 3rd person suffix /a/ with forms such as ''-ékwé'' when talking to women.
====Primary obedience====
*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.
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 /hū/.
===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==
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. 
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 only.  It 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. 
The classifier is always a consonant, though it can sometimes affect the final consonant of the root if there is one. 
The owner marker is always a vowel, but can trigger changes in the consonant of the classifier.
The case inflection can be any shape, though case markers are a closed class.
The agent marker is always a vowel, but can merge with the case inflection.
The discourse marker interplays with the preceding syllable, whatever it is.
==Dialects and variation==
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.
===Scholarly language===
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====
:''See [[Future Moonshine]].''
===Interaction with Poswa===
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 common.  IMS 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.


==Notes==
==Notes==

Revision as of 08:06, 16 March 2022

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 [1] for removed ideas.

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. The ejective stops ṭ ḳ ḳʷ ḳṗ shifted to the voiceless fortis stops tˠ kˠ kʷˠ kp. Thus aspiration became nondistinctive. Moonshine probably did not have /ṗ ṗʷ/.
  2. All high rising tones became ordinary long tones.
  3. All pharyngealized vowels became ordinary low (mid) tones. The stress became weak.
  4. After a high tone, the voiceless stops pʷ p t k kʷ kp shifted to fortis stops pʷˠ pˠ tˠ kˠ kʷˠ pˠ.
  5. 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. However it is possible that /kʷ/ will become fortis in time for the shifts that affect it.
  6. The rare labialized glottal fricative hʷ (sometimes spelled ħʷ for distinctness) shifted to a voiceless bilabial fricative f.
  7. The common velar fricatives x xʷ came to be spelled h hʷ. Note that /hʷ/ contrasts with /f/.
  8. Labialization was lost in the syllable coda; pʷ mʷ kʷ ŋʷ hʷ gʷ became p m k ŋ h 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/.
    It thus became possible to analyze labialized consonants as clusters, so long as those consonants which were both palatalized and labialized were still analyzed as /čw/ etc rather than /kyw/. The words that consisted of just these consonsnts (e.g. Leaper /xʷ/ "womb") likely continued to be labialized, but there was no distinction at this point.


VOWEL SHIFTS

The changes below are not assigned to any particular time, and may have occurred before the breakup of the parent language, but because the words in the lexicon are written with the Leaper vowels, some changes neeed t be reversed.
  1. All instances of the vowels i u, on all tones, shifted to ʲi ʷu of the same tone. At least the /u/'s were probably already all pre-labialized because the Moonshine branch never did /əu/ > /ū/ as did Leaper.
  2. 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.) There were a few syllables containing /ʷi/ and /ʲu/ in the Moonshine branch, whereas Leaper only had /ʷi/.


At this stage, reached by about 4300 AD, the Police language had a consonant inventory of: 

Labials:                p   m   f       w     
Alveolars:              t   n   s   r   l    
Palataloids:            č   ň   š   ž   y    
Velars:                 k   ŋ   h   g  (Ø)

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 Leaper /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/.

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.

Police (c. 4300) to Ice Cream in a Bowl (c. 5547)

  1. The clusters mm nn ŋŋ shifted to mˠ nˠ ŋˠ and lengthened the preceding vowel. Since there were as of yet no other fortis nasals, this was nondistinctive but still contrasted at least in some contexts with simple nasals after a long vowel (bcase of ān, etc).
  2. The syllabic consonants ṁ ṅ ŋ̇ ḷ , when bordered by vowels in either direction, became fortis mˠ nˠ ŋˠ lˠ as well. THIS IMPLIES A DIFFERENCE FROM LEAPER. The syllabic ṡ then became a normal s, not fortis.
    This means that the vowel + g + consonant declension simply becomes vowel + consonant.,
  3. Unstressed syllable-final s shifted to h. This has repercussions later on because it leads some vowels to disappear before /s/ and not when in an open syllable.
  4. All remaining syllabic consonants (bounded by consonants) became normal.
  5. The consonant w in the coda (corresponding to Leaper /ʕʷ/) here became an ordinary u, forming a diphthong. Note that this consonant could occur after diphthongs itself, but only in newly formed compounds, and these words may have been "rescued" by changing the preceding diphthong elements from /j w/ to /žʲ gʷ/.


Loss of unstressed vowels

All four vowels /a i u ɜ/ disappeared in unstressed position, except when propped up by certain conditions explained below. The list speaks of two (perhaps three) dummy vowels.

  1. In unstressed position, the vowels a ɜ disappeared to Ø when bordering one of /g h gʷ hʷ/ in either direction. This created clusters.
    This shift may have happened simultaneously on both sides of the consonant, so that for example, /-taga/ > /tg/, or it may have preserved the final vowel, which nonetheless disappears later. The distinction will only be meaningful if words appear in which there is in fact a difference in final outcome.
  2. Where the voiced velar fricative g collided with any consonant from either side, it made that consonant into a fortis consonant, marked by Cˠ (perhaps /Cʰ/ for easier typing and display). At the immediately following stage, the entire inventory of consonants could be fortified this way, and thus they were not considered new phonemes but still as clusters. The same thing happened with gʷ except that the consonant was labialized in addition.
    Note that this shift even applies to sequences like /ng/, which became /nˠ/.
  3. Where the voiceless velar fricative h collided, it made the preceding consonant voiceless and aspirated. This meant nothing for stops; other consonants are dealt with below. These consonants also became fortis, and can be spelled Cˠ or as Cʰ.
  4. All LABIALIZED consonants became FORTIS in addition, while retaining labialization.
  5. Any unaccented ɜ shifted to Ø .
  6. The diphthongs ai au (of any origin) now became āʲ āʷ, with the coarticulations cleaving onto a following consonant, if any. In open syllables they continued to be spelled with the symbols for inherited /ai au/.
    This may be a problem, however, as it suggests that even the plain vowels /i u/ should stain following consonants.
    It is possible that proto-Moonshine retains a distinction between Leaper's /ē/ and /é/, and likewise, instead of merging both into the same long tone. It would need to be that PMS allowed superheavy syllables like /paiʔ/ or that it allowed tone contrasts with semivowel coda.
  7. In stressed position, due to Play influence, the vowels ɜ̆ ɜ̀ ɜ̄ shifted to the color of the vowel in the next syllable, and to ă à ā in monosyllables. They did NOT acquire preceding glides /ʲ ʷ/.
    This shift began under Play influence around 4100 AD but did not become phonemic right away. It is likely that the shift didn't take place all at once, and that allophones of /ɜ/ that can here be spelled as ɪ ʊ existed. It is also possible that this shift can be discarded entirely if it comes about that the coarticulations of a following consonant account for it.
  8. The diphthongs ɜi ɜu became āʲ āʷ when an /a/ followed in the next syllable, and ī ū otherwise (even in monosyllables). Any iu (that is, /i/ + /ʕʷ/) also became ū.
  9. Unaccented WORD-FINAL a ʲi ʷu (not just unstressed) shifted to Ø ʲ ʷ unconditionally, creating more clusters. This happened even after fortis consonants.
    Now, every word ended with a consonant unless the final syllable was stressed. These shifts meant that for example, /-kas -ka/ had become /-kˠ -k/.
  10. Unstressed ʲi u (and /i/ if it existed) now shifted to ʲ ʷ unless they occurred in one of Cˠ_ _Cˠ C_Cʲ where clusters and immediately posttonic consonants also count as fortis consonants. (But they are not actually fortis, so they don't behave as part of the fortis class later on.)
  11. Then, unaccented a (and any other vowels) became Ø (sometimes spelled ʕ), unless it occurred in one of the following environments: Cˠ_ _Cˠ C_Cʲ where clusters & IPC's also count as fortis consonants. The dummy vowels ɛ ɔ can be used here to spell /aCʲ aCʷ/, and ɐ to spell /CʷaC/ and /CCa/. These were mere allophones of /a/, however.

At this stage the language had a problem with unstressed closed syllables, and deletion of /ž žʲ/ (which were distinct) would not solve this problem because Play requires a distinction that would have forced Leaper and Moonshine to have the same sound for the instances in which it would be most distinct. That is, Moonshine *-az is a mistake, as Moonshine only ever had /žʲ/ in that position (a separate, much rarer plain /ž/ existed in other morphemes). Nonetheless, deletion of /ž žʲ/ could happen for its own sake, without solving the closed syllable problem.

The only word-final open syllables are those that are stressed, and it is most likely that even here, only the grave and long tones survived, since the others would have been indistinct from unstressed syllables. Tone may need to be taken into account in the rules above. Even if stress shifts back to the root in these vowel-final words, it would still mean that all such words would have low tones on the stressed syllable. Also note that the grave tone is effectively vowel + /ʔ/ and can be considered to end in a consonant, and even the long tone is a heavy syllable.

Monosyllabic stage

Now, the Moonshine language had only three vowels, but an abundance of consonants, including a lenis:fortis distinction and consonants that were palatalized, labialized, or both. All labialized consonants were fortis, but not all fortis consonants were labialized, so there were five possible modes of consonant: plain, palatalized, fortis, fortis labialized, and palatalized labialized. The fortis articulation was velarization for the frontal consonants but not for the velars.

  1. Before a vowel, the labial approximant w shifted to a uvular approximant r̄.
  2. Doubled consonants (and fortis) simplified to singles and caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high (à or á).
  3. 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).
    Possibly /ntn/ > /nn/. Or ʔnn.
  4. The clusters nlh nlk shifted to ŋh ŋk.
  5. The palatalized labials pʲ mʲ fʲ became the labiodentals fˠ ṃˠ f in all positions. Then, a shift from ṃˠ to a plain bilabial mˠ spread throughout the territory, slowly driving out the new phoneme.
  6. The alveolar flap r became l before any stop.

Ice Cream in a Bowl (c. 5547) to Classical Cartwheel (~6800)

  1. The palatalized velars kʲ hʲ ŋʲ merged with the palatalized coronals tʲ sʲ nʲ into č š ň. This also includes all such consonants before front vowels, since these were always preceded by /ʲ/. If /gʲ/ existed, it became /ž/.
  2. A single, non-fortis labial, when following any posttonic consonant and before a vowel, generated /ʷ/ and then disappeared.
  3. The labialized alveolars tʷ sʷ nʷ became the dentals ṭ ṣ ṇ in all positions. This shift is distinct from a similar one that happens later when new labialized alveolars are created.
  4. All high rising tones (á etc) merged into either ā or à when not before a nasal.
  5. Then lʲ rʲ became y r.
    This may mean that rž and rʲ have distinct reflexes. Consider whether the cluster /rž/ would behave uniquely here or whether it would simply behave like its constituent parts.
    Consider also that there will briefly exist a /lʲʷ/.
  6. Unstressed a in a closed syllable became ʲi (or possibly just /i/) before a palatal consonant. That is, /ɛ/ > /ʲi/. There was no corresponding change before a labialized coda.
  7. All coda palatalization was lost (and they became alveolars, not velars.)

New palatalization

  1. The labialized postalveolar consonants čʷ ǯʷ šʷ žʷ ňʷ delabialized.
  2. The palatal consonants č ǯ š ž ň became c ʒ s z n in all positions.
  3. The labialized alveolar approximant lʷ shifted to w. Possibly /rʷ/ (the "dark" one) also shifted.
  4. Nasals disappeared before a fricative.
  5. All nasal+stop combinations become voiced; prenasals mp nt nc ňč ŋk shifted to plain voiced stops b d ʒ ǯ ġ. Here, the coarticulations are omitted for conciseness. ALL VOICED STOPS WERE FORTIS.
  6. Posttonic low short a became Ø if an adjacent syllable had a long vowel (even if that long vowel was not the tonic vowel).
  7. The velar stops k ġ became labialized to kʷ ġʷ before any labial consonant. Possibly a few other clusters like /ks/ also survived. It is possible also that kl > kʷl > kw, distinct from kʷ.
  8. The velars k ġ h g ŋ were fronted to postalveolars č ǯ š ž ň. These behaved as palatalized consonants, cʲ ʒʲ sʲ zʲ nʲ, and any remaining fortification was lost. It is possible that the fortis velars had all become labiovelars by this point.

Second unstressed vowel deletion

Assuming the distinction of lenis/fortis in absolute final position holds on from the beginning, it becomes important here as it determines whether an unstressed vowel is lost or not. Thus for example /nk/ could alternate with /nak/ in some noun to form the genitive.

Also note that new prenasal sequences are created here, e.g. /map/ > /mp/, and these do not become voiced stops or even voiced prenasals. It is possible that the prenasals in the earlier shift never lost their nasal element, and thus there would be /mb mp/ but no free /b/, but this would be unusual.

  1. All unstressed vowels weakened: a i u all disappeared to Ø, unless protected by a fortis consonant. Unlike the similar shift about 2,000 years earlier, there was no protection afforded by bordering another collapsing vowel. As before, most unstressed /i/ was really /ʲi/ and thus this created new palatalized consonants. For the most part, the consonants did not stain each other.
  2. Nevertheless, palatalization sometimes skipped across a syllable boundary. For example, /hip/ > /hʲp/ > /pʲ/ is possible. It may be that /h/ was the only consonant in the entire language that violated the rule against consonants staining each other.
  3. All unstressed syllables with "tone" now became plain. These had arisen from secondary stress in compounds. Thus unstressed ā ī ū à ì ù became a i i a i i.
  4. Any remaining fortis consonants not touching the tonic syllable became plain.

Sequence changes

  1. The sequences ph th shifted to pw tw.
  2. Coronals followed by the labial glide /w/, including those generated above, became dental. Thus for example the verb ending nw became ṇw.


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.
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