Icecap

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

Culture

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

Thus Moonshine is a strongly feminist society, and this is a stable trait, not reliant on police or weapons any other artificial structure to keep women in power. They are also very pacifistic, although they were pacifist even before they developed the trait of tall women, and there are other societies on this planet that are far, far more pacifistic than Moonshines, to the point of dying by the hundreds whenever a wild animal such as a pig or wolf gets into a town. Moonshines live in very cold climates, such that life for any other human culture except for some of the Poswobs would be essentially impossible, and therefore they rely almost entirely on eating animals for food. Although the Moonshines are settled thinly enough that they could likely survive entirely on animals such as penguins who vastly outnumber humans and die frequently of natural causes, Moonshine society relies on a stable food supply and that means making hunting animals a regular part of daily life.

The Moonshine Empire consists mostly of territories that were never claimed by other peoples. Although they have been unified as a single empire for thousands of years and wielded immense military power, very rarely have they started wars to take over new lands to add to the Empire. However they have absorbed aboriginal peoples through slow-paced conflicts where the Moonshines overwhelmed the aboriginals by birth power rather than weapons. Even then, however, the remaining aboriginals blended into the Moonshine society rather than being killed. This is why even today there are very few ethnic minorities anywhere within the Moonshine Empire.

All of the constituent states within the Empire are defined by water boundaries: either they are islands, groups of islands, coastal land areas, or in one case a state separated by a powerful river from another state.

Most Moonshine territory is very cold, with an average temperature below freezing, and in many areas it is well below freezing. They do have some warmer lands, with the warmest parts of the territory consisting of inland semiarid valleys with average temperatures of around 51°F ... similar to Vancouver or Toronto. Thus Moonshine territory could be compared to Russia or to Canada plus Greenland in terms of climate. However, unlike these countries, the warm areas of the Moonshine Empire which would be good for farming are still as sparsely settled as the frigid icecapped areas because Moonshines can actually survive quite well with just the animal food sources.

Phonology

Like its parent language Khulls, Moonshine has a large phonology with with about 40 consonants, 5 vowels, and a strong tone system with contrasts on every syllable and weak tonal sandhi. However, hundreds of sound changes separate the two languages, so Moonshine does not actually resemble Khulls much at all. Moonshine's phonology is "clean" where Khulls was messy in that it has nearly perfect symmetry amongst its vowels, consonants, and tones; and that there are no coarticulated consonants such as kʷ.

Consonants

p b ḟ ṿ m

ṗ ḅ f v ṃ

ṭ ḍ ṣ ẓ ṇ ḷ

t d s z n l ř c ʒ

_ _ š ž ñ _ _ č ǯ

k ġ h g ŋ r

Underscores are used only to keep spacing intact. The consonants /c ʒ/ are in IPA /ts dz/, and are considered phonemic only because they would otherwise violate the sonority hierarchy because they can occur at the ends of words where one would otherwise expect just /t d/. The labiodental stops ṗ ḅ are not distinguished from affricates either, and could be considered affricates as well.

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

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

Grammar

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

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