Future Moonshine

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

Classical phonology

Consonants

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

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

Sound changes involving consonants

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

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