Re: alien xeno-anthropologists (was: Abkhaz)

Philip Newton said:
> On Wed, 4 Aug 2004 17:01:04 -0500, Mark P. Line <mark@...>
> wrote:
>> 9. There are 37 grammatical cases in English, but there are only three
>> different surface forms for them.
>
> Ooh, lovely.
>
> There are also lots of grammatical tenses, though for many of them the
> standard orthographic representation uses multiple so-called "words".
>
>> 6. All English syllables are either V or CV, but svarabhakti vowels are
>> common and they're all realized as zero.
>
> What's 'svarabhakti'?
I use the term to describe vowels that are present in an allomorph due to
phonotactic constraints. I've seen Russian "ot'ec" and "okon" described
that way, and Hibernian English "film" /fIl@m/.

Somebody knowledgeable in Sanksrit philology can probably say whether or
not that's the originally intended meaning of the term. BP?


-- Mark