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

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 tend to have a high birthrate, even though their disproportionately large wombs are no more likely to conceive multiple births, because the female-led culture sees a large family as the primary measure of power, rather than accumulating wealth or weapons. This same ideal of high-birthrate feminism has led the tall-female parts of the Poswob Empire to outgrow the tall-male ones and essentially turn Pusapom into another feminist empire led from its North.

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.

Because women are taller than men, they are generally stronger than men even though they have less muscle. This leads to the fact that men attacking women is considered "fair", even though it is discouraged the way all violence is disourcaged. Basically they dont have a "fairer sex" because men and women are weak in different ways. They are like young children, or like video game people where all women are magical and can entrap men with Womb Magic, etc, even though they are weak to physical attacks that men are not weak to.

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.

States

Safiz

Sàfiz is the most powerful and most populated state in the Empire. It is also in the unusual situation of being a subject state of two different empires: the Moonshine Empire and the Ogili Empire. Officially, Ogili speakers pay taxes to the Ogili capital and Moonshine speakers pay taxes to the Moonshine imperial capital (which is also the capital of Safiz), honoring a treaty that is over 2000 years old. In practice, though, taxation is paid at the municipal level, and each city either goes 100% Moonshine or 100% Ogili, with most going Moonshine. This is a recent phenomenon. Historically, although the Moonshines reached Safiz first, they were conquered and demographically overwhelmed by invading Ogili speakers, and the Ogili capital was in central Safiz. However, as the center of economic power moved south, Ogili speakers began to leave Safiz, and those who stayed had a much lower birthrate than the rural Moonshine aboriginals.

Mixed marriages tended to side with Moonshine as well, though these were rare because of the tall female/tall male mismatch along with geographical and economic separation. (Although Moonshine men were shorter than the women of both nations, Ogili women could choose between tall Ogili men and short Moonshine men. Thus Ogili women nearly always chose Ogili men. Meanwhile, Moonshine women did sometimes pair with tall Ogili men, but such mixed marriages tended to also identify as Moonshine if they remained poor, which most did.) Today Safiz is over 95% Moonshine and the Ogili imperial capital is on the warm west coast. Note that most mixed marriages in Safiz happened either during the early or the late periods of cohabitation, not during the middle when there were few Moonshines left in the area. However, one exception to the pattern is that mixed marriages where the sons tended to be taller than the daughters would often switch sides even if they had previously identified as Moonshine, due to the Moonshine culture's inability to accept tall men as natives. Even so, these families would not have the high birth rates of the other Moonshines and tended to slowly die off if they did not assimilate into Ogili culture.

Thus Safiz is a de facto Moonshine territory, though it still swears loyalty to the Ogili Empire and has fought in Ogili's wars where the rest of the Moonshines have not. In fact, both sides realize that Safiz's army could probably conquer all of Ogili if it wanted to, but has chosen not to do so because Ogili is an ally that supplies Safiz and the rest of the Moonshine Empire with wealth and tropical foods that could not easily otherwise reach them. In turn, Ogili wants Safiz to stay because of their military power and the fact that the rest of the Moonshine Empire tends to follow along with them. Thus both sides prefer geographical and political unity.

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

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

Thus there are 36 consonants in classical Moonshine. 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. In the native Moonshine alphabet, both of these are spelled with apostrophe-like symbols or with letter modifiers, but in Romanization this would lead to diacritical overload.

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.