Re: oh no, not Tech phonology again

>From: Roger Mills <Rfmilly@...>
>  This system exhibits what our friend Borges, in another context, called
>"furor simétrico"....... It's nice. I played around with something similar,
>tho less massive, and managed to have just 1 vowel, schwa /@/ -- after
>plain
>C, > [a] or maybe just [@], after palatalized, > [i], after labialized >
>[u].
>  With 2 vowels /@/ and /a/, you got more allophones:  /a/:/@/ contrast
>after
>plain, /a/ > [AE] or [e] after palatals, [O] or [o] after labials.
Hey, that sounds like Abkhaz-Adyghe!  Two phonemic vowels /a/ and /@/, with
allophones /e/ and /i/ after "soft" (palatized) consonants, and /o/ and /u/
after labiovelarized.  (And Cyrillic actually worked out well for both
languages despite their ample consonant phonologies, thanks to hard and soft
signs.  In fact, Circassian adds but one letter to the Russian alphabet: I
(_paloc^ka_), an aspiration mark same in both lower and upper case.

Ubykh is (or *was*, I think it's extinct as a mother tongue now) the most
extreme example, but I don't know in which script it was written; I guess it
was Turko-Latin, maybe a highly extended Arabic along the lines of Sindhi...

Danny
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