On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> And you could have got rid of the retroflex stops and sibilant as
> well! There's just one unpredictable retroflex nasal in your sample.
>
> > And I have not used signs for /a:/ or <e> or <i> or
> > <u> or syllabic <r.> at all. They all occur in the original, but
> > they are expendable, at least for this piece of the language. You
> > couldn't do that with English or Latin.
>
> Would you say Latin was well-nigh a 3-vowel (/a/, /e/, /o/) language?
I suppose I would. The Romans did fine in their own writing using I and V
as both consonants and vowels. Vowel length would have to be handled by
doubling which would be unproblematic since there are no hiatuses between
identical vowels. It won't work for Greek for precisely that reason. I
even believe some tough ones would work in Latin, as VIIVVM (vi:vum),
VVVIDVS (u:vidus), IIENS (iens) vs. IECVR (jecur). Have I missed some?
I thought about reducing the Sanskrit analysis further, but then you get
into trouble at some point, and all of a sudden you find yourself
assigning some unwanted opposition to the asyllabic status of y or v.
However, that will also be facts belonging to an adequate description of
the language. I have been under very heavy fire here, and I needed to keep
clear of the criticism that I change the rules as I go. In fact I go to
great lengths to avoid just that. I even figured out that vra- would be
just that, while ura- could be /vrra-/ without causing conflict.
So indeed, if there are three vowels in Latin, and they merge into one in
Sanskrit, how many would there be in Sanskrit? Seems awfly hard to figure
out for some. How nice to be understood!
Jens