A minor discovery in Uatakassi

Uatakassi had a change where /g/ was lost before /i/.  I just realized a
while back that this means that words with -ngi- in them would go thru a
change of [Ngi] -> [Ni], creating a phoneme /N/ with very low phonetic
load.  In fact, the only word I know of so far that has it is
_uafting'i_ ([wAf'tSiNi]), the plural of _uatinga_ ([wA'tSeNga]),
"crowd".  I'd played around with the idea of simply changing that [N] to
[n], but decided to keep it around.

I'm not sure how it would be written in the native script.  Probably the
same as [Ng], thus causing written -ngi- to be ambiguous between
[Ngi]/[Ngj] and [Ni]/[Nj].  Since /gi/ is so rare anyways (since /gi/ ->
/i/ happened in every case of /gi/, except for geminated /ggi/ - other
examples of /gi/ in the Classical language being borrowings, generally
from other languages), the ambiguity is not very important.  Much less
of a problem than the failure to distinguish /C(i)/ from /ki/ or
/tS/-/ts/, /dZ/-/dz/, other rare ambiguities in the native script are
/tSiw/-/tSw/, /dZiw/-/dZw/ and /Ciw/-/Cw/.  I do, however, distinguish
those in my romanization as, respectively, ki/k'i, ti/t'i, di/d'i,
tiu/tiü, diu/diü, kiu/kiü

--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'.  Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
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