Cosmopolitan Gold languages

Common sound changes in languages descended from Khulls:

Vowels

• Change to a vertical vowel inventory. The parent language vowel setup was /a e i o u/, but with /e/ and /u/ rarer than the others. Thus must words can be spelled with just the three vowels /a i o/. In many unrelated child languages, the vowel inventory compresses itself to a vertical one: /a ɜ ɨ/. Sometimes, the five vowels are changed using the rule /a e i o u/ > /a jɜ ɨ ɜ ʷɨ/, usually unconditionally. This is then padded out by the preexisting labialized consonants, thus meaning that all vowels can be pre-labialized, and the preexisting /j/+vowel sequences. However this leaves a gap at */ja/. Most daughter languages lose the /j/+vowel sequences entirely and leave labialization as the only contrast.

• Moonshine takes the unusual initiative of compressing downwards instead, leaving stressed vowels mostly alone but changing unstressed ones (and some stressed ones) according to the rule /a e i o u/ > /a a i a u/. This is partly due to the influence of Bābākiam loanwords and their much greater use of /u/, making the early Moonshine vowel system somewhat more symmetrical. Even so, a huge number of words had /o/ and were merged with /a/ even, in most cases, in stressed syllables.

Consonants

• Loss of /g/ (a voiced velar fricative, IPA is /ɣ/). This change is very common even in unrelated branches of the family. Usuaully, the change is /g/ > /ʕ/ > /0/, meaning that it takes any preexisting /ʕ/ with it. However, [ʕ] can be retained allophonically as an inter-syllabic separator, and even go on to become a phoneme again later on, whereas [g] never is.

• Loss of /p/ and its relatives, often paired with loss of /g/ above wherein the /g/ > /0/ shift happens first and creates diphthongs, and the /p/ > /0/ shift happens later and creates vowel sequences. Often, /p/ survives as the glottal stop [ʔ], but is not considered a phoneme because it can only occur intervocalically. This shift is commonest in northern dialects which were always deficient in /ṗ/, meaning that the shift was of /p/ > /ṗ/ > /ʔ/. Here, /ṗ/ is a plain unaspirated bilabial stop which was identified as glottalized due to lack of a contrast. This shift often also changes /b/ > /ʕ/ > /0/.

• Shift of /p/ and its relatives to /f/. Often the shift is /p pʷ ṗ ṗʷ b bʷ/ > /f fʷ f fʷ v vʷ/, where the /fʷ vʷ/ are identified with the rare preexisting /hʷ ʕʷ/ phonemes. This shift is often found in "P-Khulls" languages which restore /p/ by shifts from /kʷ ḳʷ/.

• Shift of labialized consonants to true bilabials and labiodentals. This shift is found even in languages that have a pure intact labial series inherited from Khulls. Thus, for example, in Ogili, /b bʷ ṗ ṗʷ ḳʷ ġʷ gʷ/ all merge as /b/.

• Shift of ejective consonants to voiced stops, along the path of them first changing to plain voiceless stops. Thus /ḳ/ > /kʕ/ > /ġ/. Here the "ʕ" is a makeshift symbol that shows blocking of aspiration, since in all languages voiceless stops are assumed aspirated by default.

• Palatalization of plain velar consonants, usually quickly followed by a shift of labiovelars to plain velars. In Moonshine, there were two palatalizations of velars, one which took place early and occurred in only a few environments, and a much later one which was unconditional. At first, the labiovelars remained in place, meaning Moonshine had /kʲ kʷ/ without /k/. However, even then, [k] occurred as an allophone of /h/ because the second palatalization did not affect fricatives.