Re: Uber newbie-conlanger conlang

Tristan McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> And plenty of Germanic langs, at least, distinguish /I/ and /i/, don't
> they? (Dutch, I'm told, doesn't even have a residual length
> distinction, with [I] vs [i]!) And I've seen Latin's /i/~/i:/ described
> as [I]~[i:] (quite specifically stated that it shouldn't be [i]~[i:],
> though of course we have no ancient Romans left to tell us so I don't
> know where it came from).
Possibly from how in Western Romance short /i/ and long /e:/ merged, which
IMO seems much more likely with an [I]-like /i/.  Also, orthographic
hesitation between /i/ and /u/ suggests that in some contexts this vowel
was not a canonically-recognizable [i] (cf. the letter Claudius invented
for the obscure sound).


	*Muke!
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