Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

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

From:Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
Date:Thursday, November 20, 2003, 22:27
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