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, Diʕìləs 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.)

Proto-Moonshine to Late Moonshine (6800)

The proto-Moonshine language began with a consonant inventory of:

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

The vowel /e/ had a limited distribution, and could be analyzed as /ai/. This is why it does not contract the way /o/ does.

The clusters mm nn ŋŋ shifted to m n ŋ and lengthened the preceding vowel.
Syllabic consonants bordered by vowels became normal.
Unstressed syllable-final s shifted to h.
All remaining syllabic consonants (bounded by consonants) became normal.
The short vowels o ò shifted to a à.
Unaccented a (including earlier /o/) became ʕ, the vowel separator. Then ʕh shifted to h (often spelled /ʔ/).
Unaccented e i shifted to ʲ . Thus, all words became monosyllabic. (There was never any unaccented /u/.)
this was originally split aeo vs i
The rising tone vowels á é í ó ú shifted to ā ē ī ō ū.
This was originally further down and more destructive.
Doubled consonants simplified to singles and caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become high.
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. If it had been voiced, it caused the tone of the preceding vowel to become low.
Nonpalatalized alveolar consonants became velarized (not shown in the orthography).
The long vowel ō changed to o .
This creates a gap of *ò. Also, there is still a gap of *è, as in Khulls.
Before a palatalized consonant in a closed syllable, the short vowels a e i o u became ē i ī i ī respectively.
Before a labialized consonant in a closed syllable, the short vowels a e i o u became ō u ū u ū respectively.
The consonant cluster řp became lp in all positions.
Following an accented syllable in a word of two syllables or less, the consonant sequences ts ns ss changed to `ts z s respectively.
All consonant clusters except those beginning with /s/ became homorganic; the /s-/ clusters did not retain any distinction based on point of articulation but instead shifted the s to š except before another /s/.
The cluster sw became a bilabial ṿ in all positions.
The cluster sb shifted to žb.
Before front vowels, k g ŋ shifted to č ǯ ň.
Between two unstressed vowels, all labial consonants except rounded bilabials disappeared unless a string of three vowels would be created.
Before a vowel, unaccented a e i shifted to the glide ʲ. Unaccented o u became ʷ.
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.
The alveolars tʲ dʲ sʲ zʲ nʲ became the dentals ṭ ḍ ṣ ẓ ṇ in all positions.
It would ordinarily be far far more likely that the plain alveolars would shift instead, but this would leave a gap at /t/.
Then lʲ řʲ became j ř.
The dorsals kʲ hʲ rʲ became the palatals č š j in all positions.
The labialized postalveolar consonants čʷ ǯʷ šʷ žʷ ňʷ became delabialized.
The palatal consonants č ǯ š ž ň became c ʒ s z n in all positions.
The labialized alveolars tʷ dʷ sʷ zʷ nʷ řʷ became plain alveolars t d s z n ř in all positions. But lʷ shifted to w.
The dorsals kʷ hʷ rʷ became w before a consonant, while also lengthening the preceding vowel.
The labiodentals ṗ ḅ ṃʰ ṃ and the dentals ṭ ḍ ṇʰ ṇ became c ʒ ns nz in word-final position.
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.
Nasals disappeared before a fricative.
The affricates mbʷ mb mḅ nḍ nd nǯ ŋg shifted to bʷ b ḅ ẓ ʒ ǯ g in all positions. If the preceding vowel had been long, it became short.
The affricates mpʷ mp mṗ nṭ nt nč ŋk shifted to pʷ p ṗ ẓ ʒ ǯ g in all positions. If the preceding vowel had been long, it became short.
Unstressed r between consonants shifted to o.
Any š before a nasal changed to ž and the nasal changed into a voiced stop.
The velar stops k g were fronted to č ǯ unless they occurred in a cluster after another consonant and before a o u.
Labialization was lost on all consonants.
The clusters šb and bš were devoiced to šp and pš respectively.
The clusters žp and pž became žb and bž respectively.
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.
Alveolar stops in accented syllables before another syllable beginning in an alveolar became postalveolar affricates.
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.
Sonority hierarchy shifts: word-initial /hp/ > /kw/, etc.
After a vowel, the consonant clusters ṿt ṿd merged as d. If after /u/ or /o/, that vowel became long.
After a vowel, the consonant clusters gč gǯ changed to ġ.

Thus the final consonant inventory was

Bilabials:          p   b   m   ḟ   ṿ  (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   ź  (y)
Velars:             k   ġ   ŋ   h   g  (Ø)

previously had " #An old method of deriving verbs from nouns by truncating the word after the first vowel, and lengthening that vowel if there was any missing info began to take over now. Although this was not a true sound change, it affected the general language more than any of the sound changes on the list. "

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 foreign, 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. All Repilians today consider themselves Poswobs, regardless of where they live.

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. In its symmetry, it can also be described as similar in setup to Mandarin, although Moonshine is far more permissive than Mandarin with regards to consonant clusters and syllable-final consonants.

Moonshine is analogous to German and English in that, even though it is related to languages with long polysyllabic roots like polaputa "cat", sound changes have squished nearly all of Moonshine's word roots into monosyllables. Like English "water", there are a small number of bisyllabic roots remaining, but monosyllables and even some zero-syllable roots like č "doll" predominate.

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 _ j 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 palatal approximant is placed with the postalveolar row by tradition, but is a true palatal.

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 37 consonants in classical Moonshine.

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. For example, ʕd "sun" is pronounced /d/, but when it takes inflections, they go before the /d/ instead of after it. 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.

Because the /ʕ/ and /ʔ/ symbols originally represented vowels, and because these vowels changed into schwas before becoming silent, it could be argued that the symbols are actually vowels rather than consonants, and should have the values of /ə/ and /ə̀/ respectively; that is, a low and a high tone schwa. But Moonshine by tradition insists that its vowels must be able to occur on any of the four tones, and therefore any sound which cannot appear with all four tones is considered a consonant. This is why /j/ and the borrowed /w/ are not considered allophones of the vowels /i/ and /u/.

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.

NOTE: /w/ might occur in native words after all, as a reflex of an earlier /lʷ/. But this would be extremely rare since mainline Khulls did /lʷ/ > /ʕʷ/ before the split, so any words with that sequence would need to have come from /lŭ/ + vowel.

The palatal approximant [j] is, similarly, spelled with letters for /ś ź/ rather than with a symbol of its own. To signify a bare /j/, which occurs in a few native words, the spelling ʕź is used.

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.

Gender

Moonshine marks gender on both its nouns and its verbs, although many nouns do not have an overt gender marker. Animate nouns usually do. The gender markers are descended from free morphemes that were clamped onto the end of nouns and became shorteneed through sound change. Some were already very short nouns even in the parent language. For example, Khulls ô "woman, female" and û "man, male"^[1] became Moonshine a and u.

There are four genders in Moonshine: three animate genders and one inanimate.

Primary feminine gender

The most common gender in Moonshine for animate nouns is the primary feminine gender. It contains words for adult women and many words for abstract objects and other things that are seen as feminine only metaphorically. Nouns in this class include words for food, celestial objects, sleep, water, fire, snakes, worms, abstract concepts such as love and beauty, rivers, soft objects, women's clothing and feminine hygiene products, fish, objects found in or near the ocean, words for inhabitable places, and nations.

The primary feminine gender additionally functions as an epicene; a group comprsed of men and women will take feminine verb agreement.

Secondary feminine gender

The secondary feminine gender contains words for young girls of pre-marriageable age, as well as words for fruit, buildings, feminine hygiene products, and sharp objects. It is an epicene for children; a group composed of boys and girls will take secondary feminine verb agreement. It also functions as the epicene for birds and certain other animals that are seen as metaphorically childlike.

Masculine gender

The masculine gender contains words for men, boys, grass, flowers, small plants, and certain fruits (those historically linked to oranges).

Inanimate gender

The inanimate gender is descended from the Khulls neuter, which could be described as an absence of gender rather than a gender of its own, since neuter objects took on the gender of their possessor when there was one. In Moonshine though the inanimate gender behaves like the animate genders.

Marking gender on direct objects

The gender of a direct object is determined by the animacy hierarchy of the language.

GENDER SYSTEM
Gender	Fem+ ♀	Fem- ☿	Masc ♂	Neuter ⚲
SUBJECT	OBJECT
4 Greater Feminine ♀	♀	♀	♀	♀
Lesser Feminine ☿	♀	☿	☿	☿
Masculine ♂	♀	☿	♂	♂
0 Neuter ⚲	♀	☿	♂	⚲

Body parts and inanimate objects take on the gender of their possessor. However, words that belong to one of the animate genders do not change this way, even if they refer to syntactically inanimate objects.

Thus, all inanimate objects come with a morpheme indicating the gender of their possessor.

Verbs

Verb roots always end in vowels, but may have extra information inserted as a postfix between the root and its inflection.

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 in August 3948 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.

Moonshines were pacifists. They said:

Powerfully evil people should be killed, not tortured. But those evildoers who are able to be stripped of power should be treated as kindly as gooddoers. Sinfulness is no basis for punishment; only chance of repentance is. And this works only for those who will repent.

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.

The Moonshines identified themselves with women, and considered the Poswobs to be like children. They considered all of the other cultures to be like men. Thus, they said, like a mother protecting her children from an abusive father, the Moonshines wanted to adopt the Poswobs in order to protect them from the aggressive nations all around them.

However, 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. This was actually due to cultural assimilation rather than migration; the native Repilian people were so extremely female-dominated that they made natural allies for the aggressively feministic Moonshines.

The Moonshines 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.

Phonological characteristics of the early Moonshine language

See Proto-Moonshine language.

Retention of distinctions dropped in central Khulls

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". Labialization was considered a property of the consonants, but the palatal /j/ was an independent consonant, even though it could only occur before a vowel. The number of words with labialized consonants followefd by /j/ was very small, consisting msotly of /hʷj/ in Bābā loans such as hʷyăhʷa "powder" and a few native words like kʷyàma "insect exoskeleton". Note that unlike mainstream Khulls, /j/ can occur before all vowels, not just /i/ and /u/. Note that, despite the spelling, the cluster /kʷy/ is pronounced /čʷy/, so the word for exoskeleton could be seen as čʷàma or čʷyàma (y is redundant after č).

Moonshine retained the labialized nasals /mʷ nʷ ŋʷ/. (NOTE: nʷ GOES TO ŋʷ IN KHULLS, BUT IS IT BEFORE OR AFTER THE SPLIT?)

Innovations not shared by central Khulls

Moonshine also dropped some phonemic distinctions that were retained in mainline Khulls. The distinction between ejectives and aspirated voiceless stops was removed in favor of making all such stops aspirated (though they soon began to weaken). Voiced stops were retained as such, even though they were even more rare in Moonshine than in central Khulls, except for /b/ in loans from Babakiam.

Moonshine also got rid of the distinction between velar and glottal fricatives: /x g xʷ gʷ/ merged with /h ʕ hʷ ʕʷ/ and their pronunciation became variable depending on stress and position with in a word. The new merged phonemes were generally considered continuations of the velars, as they had been more common in the parent language. However, in Romanization, h is used for the velar.

Thus proto-Moonshine had lost nine consonant phonemes retained in Khulls: /ṗ ṗʷ ṭ ḳ ḳʷ h ʕ hʷ ʕʷ/, and the voiced stops /b bʷ d ġ ġʷ/ were very rare apart from /b/ in loanwords.

Moonshine also early on lost its pharyngeal tone (â), merging it with the plain low tone ă (not *ā, even though the pharyngeal tone had been long).

Loans

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.

Laons to other lanbguages

Moonshine loans words to Poswa and a few Sakhi languages. Other languages, even those in close contact with Moonshine, do not borrow much because the phonology of Moonshine is so vastly different than its neighbors. The Poswa loans merge many words into one, for example, but this is okay because Poswa's Moonshine loans are generally for specific things and contexts where it is appropriate. e.g. čāc, čap, čàt all merge in Poswa as tšap. Poswa generally loans c as /p/ at the edges of words (e.g. cē > pe "wheel") but as /ts/ in the middle of words unless an unacceptable consonant cluster would form. One might expect it to be /t/ at least word-initially, but in an earlier version of Poswa /ps/ was acceptable in word-initial position and it became /p/ in the later language.

These words are not used in Poswa as everyday words. e.g. pobby is still the unchallenged word for wheel, not pe. Rather they used in Japanese-like compounds and abbreviations, such as petužu "wheel axle", mežom "soap dispenser".

Early Moonshine sound changes

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

Notes

↑ Possibly ʕʷû.

[1] Possibly ʕʷû.

[1]