Talk:Proto-Moonshine language

gendcer stem

In Romanization, additional astronomical symbols can be repurposed to mark the non-binary genders of the Proto-Moonshine language. The pattern used here is:

♀ GREATER FEMININE
⚳ LESSER FEMININE
☿ YOUNG FEMININE 
♂ MASCULINE
♁ EPICENE
☼ UNISEX
⚲ NEUTER
⚙ BABY

The three feminine genders

The difference between the three feminine genders is a matter of apposition.

The greater feminine gender, marked by /m/, is the commonest of the three. It mostly contains words for adult human females, but many edible objects are also part of this gender.

The lesser feminine gender is marked by /s/. Its name refers to the smaller number of words in its class, and the fact that it occupies a lower position on the animacy hierarchy. Many nouns in the lesser feminine gender lack a distinct accusative form; exceptions are words that originate from compounds in which the rightmost element belongs to a different gender but is overruled by an earlier morpheme belonging to the lesser feminine gender. The lesser feminine is a closed class when applied to humans, so newly created words for adult females will always use the /m/ gender.

However, a great many nouns that are not syntactically feminine use this gender. Some examples of nouns that are included in the lesser feminine gender are words for celestial objects, 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, and nations. The only commonality uniting all of these objects is that all of them began with a noun classifier prefix beginning with the letter f in the ancient Tapilula language, and they kept their gender identity even after the noun classifier system fell out of use and sound changes delivered the sound into /s/. For example, the word for fish in general in Mumba was ṇuaiput, of which the first syllable followed the diachronic path ṇuai > ṇʷe > me > fe > fa > sa, yielding proto-Moonshine săpo "fish". Note that classifier prefixes were never deleted from their "titular" words; i.e. the classifier for fish was not deleted in the word for fish in general, only from words for fish species, other ocean creatures, buoys, docks, etc.

Because the lesser feminine gender is animate, all objects within it are grammatically animate even if they refer to nonliving objects such as planets or pillows. Because it shares its verbal conjugation with the greater feminine, there are few differences between the two that need to be cared for by learners of the language.

NOTE THEY BOTH USE [S] SO THAT IT DOESN'T MESS WITH [P].

The young feminine gender refers mostly to young girls and women of pre-marriageable age. However it also contains words for fruit, buildings, birds, sharp objects, and most placenames. Words for feminine anatomy that begin with ŋ- are mostly part of this gender, even when describing adults.

Traces of a fourth gender are found. This gender was previously marked by /j/, usually Romanized as y, and it was called the lesser young feminine gender. It disappeared early in history, when Moonshine and Khulls were still the same language, because the sound /j/ had come to behave as a vowel rather than as a consonant, and words could begin with a cluster consisting of a consonant followed by /j/, which was never true of any of the other gender-marking consonants. Previously, words for clothing had often been in this gender, but they came to adopt the gender of their wearer. Note that proto-Moonshine, unlike mainline Khulls, was able to create words such as myàm "women's clothes", corresponding to standard Khulls bèbʷ, where neither of the original /m/ sounds survives. (The first is a gender marker and the second is part of the root of the word).

The masculine gender

The masculine gender refers to men and boys. Many words for males, especially young boys, are actually part of the unisex gender (see below), but take masculine verb agreement. By contrast to the feminine genders above, relatively few syntactically inappropriate objects are found in this class. Some words for fruits are masculine, however, including any that end with -è (originally the word for orange).

Epicene, neuter, and unisex genders

The difference between the epicene, neuter, and unisex genders is very firm.

The epicene gender, marked by /p/, refers to groups of mixed genders and takes feminine verbal agreement. Very few inanimate nouns belong to this class; it is mostly used to talk about people in general. Pregnant women are automatically considered epicene, even if the gender of the baby is known.

The unisex gender, marked primarily by /r/, refers to humans whose gender is unknown or ambiguous and takes masculine verbal agreement. For example, a young baby who cannot be reliably distinguished as a boy or a girl will be given a unisex word. Many animals are unisex. The unisex gender also includes some syntactically inanimate objects, such as words for grass, flowers, and other small plants, which are therefore considered animate nouns in proto-Moonshine. Apples (from the Gold standalone word də̀) are also in this gender.

Although proto-Moonshine does not have a true diminutive, the standalone word ĭ "small, little" belongs to the unisex gender, and turns any word that is compounded before it into a unisex. Thus one can speak of "the diminutive gender". But diminutive words are only a small part of this gender, as it includes words for large objects such as làto "man; adult human male".

The neuter gender is the only truly inanimate gender in proto-Moonshine, although many words in its class are for syntactically animate things such as small insects. They cannot be the subject of a sentence and therefore always take passive verbs. There was never a classifier prefix for neuters, and it has no associated thematic consonant. Nouns in the neuter gender take on the thematic consonant of their possessor, if there is one.

A fourth gender is sometimes described; this is a variety of the epicene gender used specifically to talk about babies. It is marked by /w/. The baby gender was a Khulls innovation, not found even in closely related languages. However, very few nouns belong to this gender, and its verb marking is the same as the epicene, which in turn is the same as the feminine. It is mostly seen used with proper nouns; that is, when a baby is mentioned by name, that word will use the baby gender.

Gender of loanwords

Like most related languages, proto-Moonshine assigned gender to loanwords according to a specific set of rules:

1. If the donor language had a noun gender system compatible with proto-Moonshine's, the gender of the noun in the donor language, if known, was used.
2. If the donor language did not have gender or the gender was unknown, but the noun in question was semantically assignable to a given proto-Moonshine gender, the most semantically appropriate gender was chosen. Thus, for example, a word for a type of snake would go to the lesser feminine gender, since all of the native words for snakes were found there.
3. If neither of the above criteria apply, the word was assigned a gender specific to the donor language. This unusual feature is a retention of the early Gold language noun class system, whereby each language that loaned words into Gold had its own noun class, which later became subsumed into the gender system. Specifically, all Babakiam words not covered by one of the other two criteria were loaned into the greater feminine gender, marked by /m/, as this sound in some words had changed to /b/. Loanwords from Thaoa, on the other hand, are generally masculine, because the masculine gender is marked by /t/.

Interaction of genders and animacy

The gender of a compound noun is determined by the morpheme that ranks highest on the animacy hierarchy; if two morphemes are of equal rank but different genders, the rightmost morpheme dominates. In many words, morpheme boundaries have become blurred or invisible, producing new words that are thought of as single morphemes. For example, the word kʷō "bed" is historically a compound of ṡ "sleep" and kō "bed" (mainline Khulls ḳō, with an ejective stop). Because ṡ is feminine, kʷō is also feminine, because the feminine gender outranks the neuter.

Different behaviors of feminine and masculine genders

Famously, Proto-Moonshine assigns masculine nouns to a lower position on the animacy hierarchy than most feminine nouns. This trait is inherited from the Gold language and was not originally due to the Moonshine people's feministic culture, but unlike Khulls, Moonshine's distinctive treatment of the two genders has become enhanced over time rather than moving closer to parity.

The Gold language had been characterized by very different behavior of the masculine and feminine; in some ways the masculine gender seemed to be "superior" (agreement with epicenes; pairing with zero-morphs of some verbs where feminines needed a special infix) and in other ways the feminine did (higher position on the animacy hierarchy for most words; greater number of words in the gender, thus allowing verbs that only females could be the agent of). Proto-Moonshine lost the ways in which the masculine was advantaged and enhanced the ways in which the feminine was.

Marking gender on animate objects

The choice of which gender marker to use on an animate object is far more complex. The animacy hierarchy comes into play here, with genders high up on the animacy hierarchy dominating those below. However, the pattern is not that simple, and there are different solutions appointed when two different genders that occupy the same rank on the animacy hierarchy are brought together.

Although the epicene is at the highest level of the animacy hierarchy, it is a compound gender, which means it can contain elements of lower animacy levels, and therefore it obeys some of the patterns for lower genders such as the unisex.

GENDER SYSTEM

Gender	Epicene ♁	Fem+ ♀	Fem- ⚳	Young Fem ☿	Unisex ☼	Neuter ⚲	Masc ♂
SUBJECT	OBJECT
4 Greater Feminine ♀	♁	♀	♀	♀	♀	♀	♁
3 Lesser Feminine ⚳	♁	♀	⚳	⚳	⚳	⚳	♂
3 Young Feminine ☿	♁	♀	⚳	☿	☿	☿	♂
1 Unisex ☼	♁	♀	⚳	☿	☼	☼	♂
0 Neuter ⚲	♁	♀	⚳	☿	☼	⚲	♂
4 Epicene ♁	♁	♀	⚳	☿	♁	♁	♂
4 Masculine ♂	♁	♁	♁	♁	♂	♂	♂

Thus, when serving as objects, nouns lower on the animacy hierarchy are affected more than animate nouns by what gender the agent is.

⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑NOTE⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑⁑

This chart is the same as that of Khulls; the separate "hyperfeminist" gender system was originally meant to be something that evolved only after ~5000 yrs of separate living. But now I am constructing it for <1000 yrs of separation. However, the chart itself is probably still valid; there is no reason even a hyperfeminist culture would suddenly switch inflectional endings around other than phonetic coalescence (which was impossible).