[tied] Re: Nominative: A hybrid view

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...>
wrote:

>
> I'm refering to the number of distinct (ie: contrastive) vocalic
> phonemes exist in a language. There is no language I know of
> where there is one distinct vowel, not even Sanskrit. People
> had tried with Kabardian too but this failed.
>
> Sanskrit is not monovocalic in this sense because there
> ARE contrasts and we can see quite clearly that the language
> has five short vowels "a", "e", "i", "o" and "u" with long
> counterparts.

Sanskrit has no short "e" or "o".

> A single minimal pair like "Shivah/Shivaah" suffices to
> prove that your statement is false and that Sanskrit is
> _not_ monovocalic.

But this is better understood as "Shivah/ShivaHah". The
best phonemic analysis, as you insist upon above, of Vedic
_must_ use the "shadow consonant" described by Jens.

David