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Re: many and varied questions

From:Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Date:Thursday, April 8, 2004, 9:19
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.