Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

> In Sanskrit, there's a letter for vocalic "r", so you can
> tell when it's a vowel. And yet there are words like
> "'satrva.h" where the r between the t and v is
> specifically a consonant. I'm not quite sure how they do
> that without it sounding like at least a very short syllable.

AFAIK, <v> is just conventional transcription for [w], so that consonant
cluster looks much less scary (at least to Italians, as we have the words
such as <vuoto> ['vwOto] 'empty', <pruova> ['prwOva] 'proof', <truono>
['trwOno] 'thunder', etc.).

_ Marco