Re: Digraphic letters (was: Dutch "ij")

of course the vowel harmony system in turkish confuses
matters.

i and I are both high unrounded vowels distinguished
only in that one appears in words with front harmony
and one in words with back harmony.

thus the only minimal pairs will happen when i or I
occurs in the first syllable of a word ( i seem to
remember that even when foreign words seem to
contravene this rule the pronunciation tends to fall
into line ).

the treatment of u and u: also fits in here, i think.

so turkish _could_, theoretically be written with an
alphabet that only explicitly marks the first vowel of
a word, and then only distiguished which harmony group
each subsequent vowel is a member of ( {e,a} or
[i,I,u,U:}, o and o: not harmonising ).

i think i've just muddied the waters. sorry. anyway,
that's my haporth.

bn


 --- John Cowan <jcowan@...> wrote: >
> Thus the question of whether the dot on the "i" in
> Turkish is a separate
> grapheme is resolved by Occam's Razor: we gain
> nothing by abstracting
> it away, since either there are two graphemes "i"
> and dotless-i, or
> two graphemes dotless-i and dot.  Better then to
> stick to the overt
> level and recognize i and dotless-i.

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