Re: VMs: Strange or not?

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Eric wrote:
> > Koontz John E wrote:
> >
> > > have rather similar distributions, or many vowels, or r and l, and
> > > so on.
> >
> > John, I am not proposing that ch and sh are the same. EVA-k & EVA-t
> > are
>
> Nah, that was me. And it was just off the top of my head - incorrectly
> in fact, I was thinking k and t the whole time I was saying ch and sh.

Just to reassure you both, I had realized it wasn't Knox who was
suggesting the forms were allo... alloglyphs?  My poor editing of the
citation misled Knox.  I had looked ahead and was just responding to you
via his extract from you, since he had shed some further light on the
subject.

I think most of the comments on equivalences I had in mind are from Stolfi
in his various summary papers, though I confess to a certain tendency to
confuse sources that take a similar approach.  Some deficiency in my
mental filing system.

> Seeing many phrases (two or more words) which are identical except for a
> ch<->sh or k<->t (or whatever) interchange would seem to me a good
> indicator. That's what got me thinking with what Knox reported and from
> what Marke has seen with fuzzy matches.

I think overdifferentiation is safer as long as there's no secure way to
determine if forms like shol and chol actually contrast.  Lowercase bit :
pit, bet : pet, rib : rip, brick, prick, etc., might be tempting to
conflate if we didn't have glosses.  There are distributional differences
for b and p, too, e.g., spit, but *sbit.

The difference between EVA c and s is a lot more graphically deliberate
than that between t and k, as I think everyone would agree, but the
general character of the VMs script is such that it seems likely that
subtleties count.

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