> > > Would you say Latin was well-nigh a 3-vowel (/a/, /e/, /o/)
> language?
> > I suppose I would.
I wouldn't.
(a) Although the Romans had only one grapheme for /i/ and /j/, and another
for /u/ and /w/, that does not mean there was only one phoneme.
(b) Although poets often make /i/ slither into /j/, and /u/ into /w/, this
is somewhat artificial, and is not phonetically conditioned, but dependent
on the verse scansion.
(c) In sanskrit the realisation of the single phoneme /r/ or /y/ etc as a
vowel or consonant is almost entirely mechanical and phonetic. You could
write a simple algorithm for it. In Latin you can't. It is partly
unpredictable.
(d) There are minimal pairs such as volvit ~ voluit.
>Vowel length would have to be
> handled by
> > doubling ...
The Romans tried this at one time. But they had trouble with doubl I and
double V, becasue they were ambiguous. In particular, double I was
avoided. They tried writing it larger instead. In the standard orthography
we use for Latin today, double i is still extremely rare, so that the
sequence /ji/ is written with a single letter, as in inicio, etc.
Peter