Icecap

Icecap Moonshine is a highly divergent language spoken in cold climates famous for its oligosynthetic vocabulary, compact morphology, and extremely biased gender system.

Proto-Moonshine (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.

1. The ejective stops ṗʷ ṗ ṭ ḳ ḳʷ shifted to the voiceless aspirates pʷ p t k kʷ. Thus aspiration became nondistinctive.

   Note that PMS did not have voiced stops either.

2. All high rising tones became ordinary long tones.
3. All pharyngealized vowels became ordinary low (mid) tones. The stress became weak.
4. The labialized glottal fricative hʷ shifted to a voiceless bilabial fricative f.
5. The velar fricatives x xʷ came to be spelled h hʷ. Note that /hʷ/ contrasts with /f/.
6. Labialization was lost in the syllable coda; pʷ mʷ kʷ ŋʷ hʷ gʷ became p m k ŋ h g.

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

Rounded bilabials:      pʷ  mʷ          w
Plain bilabials:        p   m   f             
Alveolars:              t   n   s       l   r
Palataloids:            č   ň   š   ž   y    
Velars:                 k   ŋ   h   g
Labiovelars:            kʷ  ŋʷ  hʷ  gʷ

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 Khulls /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/.

Prenasals existed in word-initial position, also unlike Khulls. e.g. /mpʷà/ "house" vs Khulls pà.

1. The clusters mm nn ŋŋ shifted to m n ŋ and lengthened the preceding vowel.

   this may lead to unstressed longs, unknown in Khulls, which could survive vowel deletion.

2. Syllabic consonants bordered by vowels became normal.
3. Unstressed syllable-final s shifted to h.
4. All remaining syllabic consonants (bounded by consonants) became normal.
5. The short vowels o ò shifted to a à.
6. Unaccented a (including earlier /o/) became ʕ, the vowel separator. Then ʕh shifted to h (often spelled /ʔ/). Unaccented u, which occurred only after labialized consonants, disappeared.
7. Unaccented e i shifted to ʲ . Thus, all non-compound words became monosyllabic.
8. The alveolar flap r came to be spelled ř.
9. The labial approximant w shifted to a uvular approximant r.
10. The rising tone vowels á é í ó ú shifted to ā ē ī ō ū.

    This was originally further down and more destructive.

11. Doubled consonants simplified to singles and caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high (à or á).
12. Any consonant before a nasal disappeared and lengthened the preceding vowel. If the sound had been voiceless, it caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high rising (á). If it had been voiced, it caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high falling (ā).

    Note that this causes all stem-final /t/ to disappear from all feminine and neuter nouns, because the feminine forms of such would have contained /tm/, but the masculines would not.

13. Nonpalatalized alveolar consonants became velarized (not shown in the orthography).
14. The long vowel ō changed to o.
15. Before a palatalized consonant in a closed syllable, the short vowels a e i o u became e e i e i respectively.

    originally had /ē i ī i ī/

16. Before a labialized consonant in a closed syllable, the short vowels a e i o u became o o u o u respectively.

    originally had /ō u ū u ū/

17. The consonant clusters řp řt became lp lt in all positions.
18. Before front vowels, k h g ŋ shifted to č š ž ň.
19. A labial following any posttonic consonant disappeared to Ø. That is, /ātp/ > /āt/. (This assumes that any labialization had already bled into the preceding consonant. If not, rounded bilabials generated /ʷ/ and then disappeared.)
20. Before a vowel, unaccented a e i shifted to the glide ʲ. Unaccented o u became ʷ.
21. as a coda, řl>l.
22. The palatalized labials pʲ bʲ mʲ became the labiodental affricates ṗ ḅ ṃ (pronounced /pf bv mv/) in all positions. Meanwhile the dentals fʲ vʲ changed to f v.
23. The labialized alveolars tʷ dʷ sʷ zʷ nʷ became the dentals ṭ ḍ ṣ ẓ ṇ in all positions.
24. The alveolars tʲ dʲ sʲ zʲ nʲ became the postalveolars č ǯ š ž ň in all positions.

    This shift originally had the palatals shifting to dentals and the labialized ones remaining in place. Note, however, that the palatals mostly shift back even so.

25. Then lʲ řʲ became j ř.
26. The dorsals kʲ hʲ rʲ became the palatals č š j in all positions.
27. The labialized postalveolar consonants čʷ ǯʷ šʷ žʷ ňʷ became delabialized.
28. The palatal consonants č ǯ š ž ň became c ʒ s z n in all positions.
29. The labialized alveolar approximant lʷ shifted to w.
30. The dorsals kʷ hʷ rʷ became w before a consonant, while also lengthening the preceding vowel.
31. The labiodentals ṗ ḅ ṃʰ ṃ and the dentals ṭ ḍ ṇʰ ṇ became c ʒ ns nz in word-final position.

    POSSIBLY SKIP THIS, since other "new" consonants will be just as common in final position.

32. The affricates ṗ ḅ ṃʰ ṃ ṭ ḍ ṇʰ ṇ became f v f v ṣ ẓ ṣ ẓ in initial position and after a consonant.
33. The prenasals mpʷ mp mṗ nṭ nt nč ŋk, and their voiced counterparts, shifted to bʷ b ḅ ḍ ʒ ǯ g in all positions.
34. Nasals disappeared before a fricative.
35. The velar stops k ġ became labialized to kʷ ġʷ before any labial consonant.

    This is why /kp/>/kw/ rather than /čw/.

36. Any š before a nasal changed to ž and the nasal changed into a voiced stop.
37. The velar stops k ġ were fronted to č ǯ unless they occurred in a cluster after another consonant and before a o u.
38. Labialization was lost on all consonants.
39. The clusters šb and bš were devoiced to šp and pš respectively.
40. The clusters žp and pž became žb and bž respectively.
41. Velar stops in accented syllables before another syllable beginning in a velar were fronted to postalveolar affricates before front vowels, and otherwise to alveolar stops.
42. Alveolar stops in accented syllables before another syllable beginning in an alveolar became postalveolar affricates.
43. A bilabial sound in an accented syllable before a syllable beginning in a labiodental sound became labiodental. A labiodental sound in an accented syllable before a syllable beginning in a bilabial became bilabial.
44. Sonority hierarchy shifts took place.

    Initial fricative+stop clusters reversed, so that, for example fk became ṗh and hp became kw.

45. After a vowel, the consonant clusters wt wd merged as d. If after /u/ or /o/, that vowel became long.
46. After a vowel, the consonant clusters gč gǯ changed to ġ.

Thus the final consonant inventory was

Bilabials:          p   b   m   ḟ   w
Labiodentals:       ṗ   ḅ   ṃ   f   v
Dentals:            ṭ   ḍ   ṇ   ṣ   ẓ   ḷ
Alveolars:          t   d   n   s   z   l   ř   c   ʒ
Postalveolars:              ň   š   ž           č   ǯ
Palatals:                       ś   y
Velars:             k   ġ   ŋ   h   g   r

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/.

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.

Clusters

There are many clusters not found elsewhere, 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.

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.

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 a 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.

Despite all of this, the semantic scope of feminine nouns in IMS is actually much smaller than in related languages like Khulls because IMS underwent much less analogy. For example, the word for vine in Khulls is feminine because it begins with ma-, but in Moonshine, this word and its derivatives have remained neuter. However, IMS feminine words like ním "house" correspond to terms which in most other Gold languages are in the neuter noun class containing words for buildings.

Masculine ownership

Males are grammatically excluded from being the owner of certain feminine objects, and for others they must take an additional morpheme that corresponds to the females' morpheme for involuntary temporary ownership. This difference is defined by the structure of the word rather than semantics: stems ending in consonants cannot take a further two-consonant suffix to show temporary ownership, either for males or for females, and therefore there is no means to indicate that a man is the owner of such an object.

Even so, there is noticeable semantic correlation because the final consonant of a stem often derives from an earlier independent syllable. For example, the final -ň appearing on many items of women's clothing cannot be followed by the temporary ownership suffix, and therefore, neither men nor women can be said to temporarily own such clothes. (There is a separate verb meaning "to wear"; that is, unlike some related languages, one cannot express the concept of wearing clothes by merely inflecting the words for the clothes.) The difference is that men cannot be said to own such clothes at all. Note that the same -ň can also appear at the end of words for men's clothing, or for blankets, but that these items are often neuter and therefore it is possible to mark masculine ownership (but still not temporary ownership).

Masculine nouns

By contrast, masculine nouns obey a simple rule: they end in -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", plus a suffix indicating semantic similarity, plus the masculine suffix. Thus the word for king means "a man that is like a queen".

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 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.

Speaker and listener gender

The speaker and listener gender 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 ♂→♀ 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.

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.

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.

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", 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 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.

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.
• The suffix -(V)hū indicates a situation the man is unsure of.
• 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. 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.

Vulgar vocabulary

The vulgar register uses many impolite and obscene words for everyday objects; often these are compounds. For example, a morpheme meaning urine appears in many words for clear liquids and a morpheme meaning breast milk appears in many words for opaque liquids. Most of the obscene words are terms for the female anatomy, and are considered obscene because men are not allowed to use terms for female anatomy when women are present, and this explains the presence of words for abortion, menstruation, and other concepts that are impolite but not obscene in other cultures. Conversely, the word for urine, ē, is not considered obscene in Moonshine culture, and thus its use as a replacement for o "water" is a masculine innovation independent of men's desire to violate the speech rules.

Some vocabulary substitutions are the polar opposites of those used in the deferential register. For example, men cannot use any word for breast when in mixed company, and can only use phrases with meanings like "in front of the heart". Therefore, men in the vulgar register avoid the standard word for heart and instead refer to it as the organ behind the breast. Others are unique creations, such as deriving the word for art from the word for pornography.

Verbs are mostly the same as in the standard language; even though Moonshine culture considers the womb and other female anatomy obscene, the terms for sex and sexual activities are mostly derived from independent morphemes and thus not covered by the prohibition.

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.

Other grammatical aspects of nouns

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

Masculine 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. There are four degrees of obedience; three of these result in a verb with feminine agreement, while the fourth offers a choice between masculine and feminine 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 agents 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.

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:

• Ø, which retains the possession markers -ā -as -a.
• S₁, which deletes the final /t/ and changes the possession markers into -čas -tas -taš. (Though note that any /tč/ collapses to /č/, so whether the final /t/ is deleted or not is a matter of analysis.) Note that the second person form is identical to the one above.
• 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 B-s-Ø-V 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.

• J, which deletes the final /t/ and changes the pessession akers into -ča -tī -ʒī.

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.

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 Gold. Weak verbs are historically compounds whose final element was monosyllabic in Gold and therefore had a fixed stress.

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" 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).

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.

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 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 because of passive verbs.

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. 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. The linking /z/ has become a part of the stem of some verbs that are typically used only with neuter agents.

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 *nèṣ nèc 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 přiz.

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.

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. 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.

More common than single consonants are 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.

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.