Vadi: Difference between revisions

The entire corpus of the Scriptum is written in the indigenous Minhast [[Minhast#Orthography|''Širkattarnaft'']] script.  While the ''Širkattarnaft'', an abugida, works quite well for the Minhast language, it has presented a major challenge to Vadists in determining the phonology and phonotactics of Vadi.  There are several spelling variants or inconsistencies, and numerous occurrences of digraphs appear in both litigants' texts.  Many of the digraphs combine one of the few surviving ideographs in the ''Širkattarnaft'' with an ordinary character.  These and other unusual usage of the ''Širkattarnaft'' characters in the texts, while not completely regular, do follow recurrent patterns, an indication of phonological differences between Vadi and Minhast, and as demonstrated by Iyyaħmi, evidence of sandhi processes occurring between syllable and word boundaries.  Schumann has argued the texts indicate dialectal differences between the litigants; Iyyaħmi does agree that some of the spelling anomalies in the texts do indicate dialectal differences, but that this argument alone is too simplistic: there are other anomalies that are highly indicative that the writers were trying to indicate sandhi processes not reflected by the standard ''Širkattarnaft'' characters.  He statistically backs up this argument by presenting frequency distributions of certain types of spelling anomalies found in ''both'' litigants' texts, differences which can only be explained by morphophonotactics.¹

Gemination² occurs among a restricted set of consonants, particularly /k/ and /l/.  Consonantal mutations occur, with evidence of both lenition and fortition.  Metathesis also occurs with certain consonantal combinations, traceable to Minhast influence.