Re: [OT?] Seeking for sample words in Yi, Cree, Lao, Sinhala, Tam i

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > Any language that disallows initial clusters will have a way of dealing
> > with them; Catalan, for instance, prefixes e- to any English word
> > starting with sC-.
>
> Yes, I am familiar with that in Spanish.
> >
> > Tamil disallows inital (high front?) vowels, and Tamil-speakers prefix
> > y- to any English word starting with e-.
>
> I have never noticed that Tamil disallows initial vowels of any
> kind - they seem to be quite common, maybe we are thinking of two
> different phenomena.

I am thinking of K. Paramasivan (he made us call him K.P., and even in
his publications he never spelled out his first name), who called my
language "Yinglish" and was a friend to "yeveryone." He was the first
Tamil-speaker I knew (we started at Chicago at the same time), and I
subsequently heard the same phenomenon in other Tamil-speakers.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...