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Re: Allophony

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Saturday, November 6, 1999, 17:32
Eric Christopherson wrote:
> Speaking of Japanese, does anyone know how /tu/ became [tsM] ([M] is an > unrounded [u])? I had thought maybe the /M/ was originally a front vowel, > but then how does one account for the presence of /i/?
Also speaking of Japanese, I read on a web page about Japanese that it's believed that Japanese once had eight vowels, but the other three were listed as /i"/, /o"/, and /e"/. I would suppose that /o"/ would be fronted /o/, but what would the other two represent? Centralized vowels, maybe? -- "It has been postulated that, given an infinite number of monkeys bashing away at an infinite number of keyboards, we could eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this to be incorrect." - Anonymous http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTailor