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

See Moonshine 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.

Females are also taller than males in the ancient Moonshine homeland, the "Crown" at about 30N, which is not geographically connected to teh rest of the Empire.

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.

History

The speakers of Moonshine separated from their parent culture around 3700, and moved east into Poswob territory. However, the Poswobs themselves were only just beginning to settle this land, so the two tribes were able to share their land and blend with each other. Moonshine took about 30% of its vocabulary from the early Poswob language (then called Bābākiam), a hugely out of proportion with the amount of sharing that had happened in the past.

Moonshine was an early branch of Khulls that missed the last few sound changes that had occurred in the mainline dialects while still remaining intelligible with them. THus Moonshine still had only a few words with /b/ and none with a bare /d/ or /ġ/; contact with Babakiam greatly increased the presence of /b/, but did not add any other voiced stops. Also the other labial consonants /p m f w/ were greatly increased (Babakiam's /f/ was seen as identical to paleo-Moonshine /hʷ/, although /xʷ/ remained distinct).

Babakiam words usually ended with vowels, but could end in the consonants /p m s/, which coincidentally were among the ten consonants that Khulls (and early Moonshine) words could also end with. Thus Babakiam words did not need to be modified to fit Moonshine phonotactics or inflection requirements. Babakiam had no tones, but it did have vowel sequences which were borrowed as tones. The simple vowels /a i u ə/ were borrowed as simple low tones, already the commonest in Moonshine. (Note that Babakiam /ə/ is generally Romanized as "e".) Long vowels were borrowed as the "ā" tone, with which they were usually historically cognate. /ā/ was traditionally a falling tone but had come to be a simple long high tone both in Moonshine and the other Khulls dialects by this time. Babakiam had the unusual trait of distinguishing a long vowel from a sequence of two short vowels, and these sequences (when not diphthongs) were borrowed in as the "á" tone, which was pronounced identically to the "ā" tone but had different sandhi effects on surrounding syllables. However, in monosyllabic words, there was no distinction at all, since the sandhi would not spread across word boundaries.

The "à" (short, high) and "â" (long, low, pharyngealized) tones were generally not used. In early Moonshine, the /â/ tone disappeared even from native words, merging with the plain low tone. "à" was used sometimes to represent a Babakiam syllable ending in /p/ before another consonant, where borrowing it as a true /p/ would result in a word shape foreign to the Moonshines. For example Babakiam pepbaim (/pəpbaim/) "translucent, see-through" was borrowed as pàbēm.

The only sound Babakiam had that Moonshine did not was the schwa vowel /ə/. It is usually cognate to Moonshine labialized consonants, and coincidentally the same shift happened a few thousand years later in Poswa and Pabappa. But Moonshine did not borrow it as labialization, nor as /ŭ/ (the closest native sound), but as /ă/. Thus words loaned from Babakiam tended to have only three vowels. However, the diphthongs /əi əu/ were sometimes loaned as /ē ō/, as were /ai au/. They were perceived as "falling" because the stress was on the first vowel.