Re: Quantity shift (was: Re: Native grammatical terms)

At 04:40 PM 11/20/03 -0500, you wrote:
>On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 15:50:56 -0500, Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
>wrote:
>
>>I'm curious about something.  Is there precedent for having geminate
>>vowels
>>in a language without having geminate consonants as well?  In this case,
>>I
>>am thinking about the parent language of Trehelish.  I assume that there
>>would be no question about having geminate vowels and no geminate
>>consonants in a language such as Nidirino, which allows only open
>>syllables?
>
>How do you distinguish geminate vowels from mere long vowels?
I suppose I used the wrong technical term.  I meant long vowels.  Sorry
about that - ignorance on my part.

>PIE had e, e:, o, o: and no obviously geminate consonants, unless you
>subscribe to some variants of the Glottalic Theory.
Thanks.  That's helpful to know.  I don't want any geminate consonants or
long vowels in the modern language, but having both long and short vowels
in the parent language would help make modern Trehelish behave the way I
want it to, *if* there is a way to entirely get rid of the long/short vowel
contrast after first performing a few phonological tricks.

Isidora