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. In fact, near the Crown are the descendants of the nearly extinct Repilian people, whose females exceed their males in height to an even greater degree, which even the Moonshines find difficult to adapt to, although males of the Repilian people are not often seen in public and the remaining Repilian settlements are for all practical purposes female-only societies, at least among adults.

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 and contact

Cultural traits

The speakers of Moonshine separated from their parent culture around 3700 for political reasons. For their own safety, they abandoned their homes and possessions and moved eastward 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), hugely out of proportion with the amount of sharing that had happened in the past. Although the Poswobs were not yet the peaceful, helpful, and easily abused people that they came to be known as thousands of years later, they were already militarily weak, and could not stop the Moonshines from settling in their homeland. However, the Moonshines themselves were very weak, and wanted to become allies of the Poswobs rather than enemies of them. So for the most part, although many Moonshines stayed in Poswob territory, many more moved on. Moonshines became a majority in what would later come to be known as "The Crown", a projection of the Popoppos Mountains further north than elsewhere, leading to a cold climate and a barrier for anyone trying to cross in any direction. Thus they figured they would be safe from any intruders, whether from nearby or far away, if they built their main settlements in the mountains. They became majorities in the flat lands to the north only much later, because they preferred to live in a cold climate and rely on hunting in order to eliminate the need to compete with other humans and even other animals for living space.

In an odd way the Moonshines actually chose the Poswobs and idealized them to such an extent that the Moonshine peoples actually started to want to become Poswobs themselves, even though this would be a step down both literally (Poswob people were much, much smaller than Moonshine people, among the greatest height and body mass difference in the world at this time) and figuratively (even with all their built-up cities and thousands of years of safety, the Poswob standard of living was still very poor). Moonshine was originally a political movement, after all, which had broken away from its parent culture because they had come to believe the parent culture was too violent. They chose the Poswobs, a pleasantly peaceful people, not only because they figured that they would be safer if they surrounded themslves with soft "helping hand" types, but because the Moonshines themslves wanted to become such themselves.

The world-famous trait of women being reliably much taller than men did not come from the Poswobs, however, but rather from aboriginals living further north who later also blended with and came to be seen as one with the Poswobs. But Moonshines moved into that territory even before Poswobs did, which is why the Moonshines have the trait throughout their entire territory, whereas Poswobs have it in most of their territory but incompletely or not at all in ancient settlements near or within the tropics, or in areas where the preexisting aboriginal tribe did not have this trait. This also greatly reduced the difference in average height between the two races, with Poswobs getting taller the more they blended with aboriginals, and Moonshines getting shorter. Further, the two tribes began to blend with each other fairly early on such that the difference was far more a matter of religion and language than of skin color and body mass.

Language

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 Proto-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). A few examples of Moonshine dialectal traits are such as blyêl rather than standard bêl "of a beaver"; and myê for standard bê "in a bottle".

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. (It is a coincidence because of the three, only /s/ has the same origin in both languages. Bābākiam /p/-final words usually end in vowels in Khulls, and /m/-final words usually end in /n/.) 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. Likewise, a sequence of a long vowel plus a /p/ and another consonant could be taken as a high tone: Babakiam kūpka "hammer" became Proto-Moonshine kúka, modern Moonshine čūč. Note that the á tone disappeared from Moonshine, only to be revived again later from various sequences.

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. Also, words that had been loaned from Babakiam into mainstream Khulls usually did loan the schwa as labialization. Thus the same word could have one or three syllables depending on when it was loaned.

Babakiam always had word-initial stress, and Moonshine copied this. Thus Bābā napane "pumpkin" became Old Moonshine năpana. However, long vowels and other stressed vowels would overwhelm this, as in finišau "secret" ---> finišō, with word-final stress. Also this did not extend to stressing the "wrong" part of a diphthong: Babakiam vowel sequences were common, and were borrowed into Moonshine intact; rather than for example turning Bābā kiantia into /čanča/, it remained as kiăntia in early Moonshine, but the /i/'s were pronounced /j/.

Vocabulary

The Poswobs have for thousands of years had a difficult time getting other people, particularly Khulls people, to take them seriously as a nation. Early Moonshine speakers saw that the Poswobs were a physically frail, short-statured people who lived in a city named Bābā and spoke a language closely related to their own but which seemingly took four times as many syllables as their own to express any complex thought. Despite long histories of contact, mainstream Khulls had borrowed almost nothing from the Poswob languages other than words for local wildlife and a few childish things. Even the Andanese, who were smaller and weaker even than the Poswobs, considered Bābā a society of babies and refused to assimilate even as the Andanese cities were destroyed one by one while Poswob cities survived. Only Moonshine considered Bābākiam a language worth adopting as their own, to the point that loans from Bābā made up 30% of the proto-Moonshine lexicon despite those loans being longer and more clumsy than the native synonyms which they already had.

Early Moonshine sound changes

At first Moonshine was a fairly conservative langiuage, even leaving recently loaned words such as papipipá "to slap" alone.