Re: many and varied questions

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> That was kind of my point - if the later had been pronounced the same as the
> first, it hadn't been a digraph. It's as if we in English would use a small
> version 'h' in "shape", but not in "mishap".
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood you.  I thought you were suggesting those
were a similar use of small letters.

Uatakassi shows complex onsets by the use of different characters.  :-)
_pili_ would be written _pili_, while _pli_ would be written _pi*li_,
where _*li_ means a special character used to, in effect, cancel out the
previous vowel.  The old language had a phonemic distinction between /r/
and /l/.  The characters *li, *la, and *lu are derived from the /l/
characters while free li, la, lu are from /r/ (thus, in the old
language, /pili/ and /pli/ were ambiguous, as were /piri/ and /pri/ -
intervocalic /l/ was quite rare, existing only when the following vowel
was stressed, so that, as a general rule, _pili_ could be safely taken
for /pli/; but _piri_ was ambiguous between /pri/ and /piri/, which is
why the /l/-derived characters were pressed into service to denote
lateralization, leaving the /r/-derived ones for the plain l-syllables)

> (I didn't know it was so recent tho - was it left ambiguous pre-'46?
Yep.  See my response to Tristan.