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.

Scratchpad

General ideas

Aug 1, 2020

It is likely that the Moonshine Empire is so centralized that there is only one language for the vast area even 2,000 years after the standardization of Cartwheel Moonshine. (This is why it is also known as Icecap Moonshine.) Any dialects would have to be spoken in areas that broke free of the Moonshine Empire, which happened only once, and even those people were in close contact with the Empire, so they may not have had a separate language either.

Old ideas

Phonological developments

Sound changes involving 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

As the language developed into dialects, and these dialects developed into languages, shared innovations spread throughout the territory, while other changes were unique to each daughter language.

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.

Sound changes involving vowels

The classical vowel inventory was /a e i o u/, with no diphthongs. This remained stable in most of the daughter languages.

Sound changes involving tones

The four tones of Icecap Moonshine were a à ā á, and these showed various developments in the daughter languages. Words borrowed between languages were often borrowed orthographically, and therefore the tones did not match acoustically.

In Icecap Moonshine tone was inseparable from its vowel, meaning that for all practical purposes there were 20 vowels (18 if segmenting /ō ó/ as /āʷ áʷ/). In the daughter languages, it is possible that stress interacts with tone and causes tones to migrate across long words.