SV: Iti & ti

<I still don't understand how anything we have seen so far implies that
there ever was a prakritic form _itti_ of the word _iti_. There could have
been an /-i tti/, equivalent to /-a tii/, /-e tti/, /-u tti/ and so forth.

From the discussion so far and what I've found in Woolner and Pischel it
appears that the prakritic /tti/ arose from a situation where the initial
/i/ in iti is elided because the preceding word ends in a vowel. If initial
unaccented vowels are elided after the final vowel of a preceding word two
things typically happen to preserve metrical length. Either the final vowel
of the preceding word is lengthened (as with Pali /ti/), or the vowel
remains short but the following consonant is doubled (as in Prakrit /tti/).
These are just basically equivalent accomadations, and they don't require
the previous existence of a full form /itti/ in order to occur. Please
correct me if this is mistaken.>

I agree. The distinctions are really no more than two ways of representing
in writing the same prosodical rule: vowel + tti is prosodically long becaue
of the doubling of /tt/ as is long vowel + ti.


OP