Draconis

I would normally close this as a duplicate, but you've linked to the question it's a duplicate of. What are you looking for that's not found there?

All right

What is the question?

I'm still not sure what you're asking

I'm not sure what you're asking

Well, Modern English, but yeah

@thesmartwaterbear Sure, whether it's a letter or not is kind of an arbitrary categorization but English considered "&" a letter until about a century ago.

@thesmartwaterbear Sure, but that doesn't make it a phoneme.

@thesmartwaterbear It's a letter, not a phoneme, and this is a question about a phoneme inventory. I'm not sure what else there is to say.

@thesmartwaterbear [kai] is not a phoneme.

@thesmartwaterbear Still not a phoneme I'm afraid.

@thesmartwaterbear Those aren't phonemes, they're letters.

And this is why bears keep attacking Lord of the Rings fans.

Nice! I'm a grad student currently teaching phonetics, so I always appreciate seeing language questions here.

Ty! Later tonight I'll extrapolate a bit from these and see what I can come up with for the asker's list.

Oh hey, nice, linguistics?

The ability to link to videos is very useful for teaching pronunciation these days

I don't know if that would be especially helpful to someone who didn't already know how clicks worked, but I don't know if I could come up with a better explanation in text either

Oh, fascinating, I didn't expect them to actually try to explain click consonants

@Exempt-Medic Excellent! I'm very curious what it says.

@Commenter Evidence from grammarians (and from Romance evolution) suggests that the Latin R was trilled, or at least was "supposed" to be, in Classical times; in Old Latin, linguistic evidence suggests that it was closer to the English R. I'm afraid you won't find many native speakers around to make recordings of, so this evidence is what we have to work with.

Glad I could help! If you have further questions, feel free to ask on the main site.

But this has diverged quite far from the original question at this point

It's an /r/ that's treated as a vowel phonologically

That's reconstructed as going back to PIE

Ah, the syllabic /r/

The /t/ and the /r/ were both there in PIE so I'm not sure what you're talking about here

Are you talking about the /r/ or the /a/?

It's generally considered to go back to PIE

It also appears in Latin mater, Greek mētēr, etc

The /r/?

Reducing short vowels to schwa is very common; it happens in English and Russian, for example

I would just call it a sound change: PIE short vowels all became /a/ (phonetically something like [ə]) in Sanskrit

You could call it that, yes

The fact that it doesn't show /e/ or /o/ in those words?

What do you mean by irregularity?

But in general, when Sanskrit /a/ corresponds to Latin /e/, it also corresponds to an /e/ across other Indo-European families, and the same for /o/

It's a bit more complicated than that because of later sound changes; for example nox corresponds to nyx in Greek because of a sound change o > u > y in some dialects

Pretty much!

So, the easier explanation is that there was a distinction in PIE which they all inherited, and then some of them lost it

Mhm

If you want to claim PIE didn't have the distinction there, you have to explain how all the Slavic-speakers, Greek-speakers, Celtic-speakers, Italic-speakers, etc somehow coordinated after the breakup of PIE to decide which words should have /e/ and which words should have /o/

When it corresponds to Latin /e/, it also generally corresponds to Slavic /e/, Greek /e/, Celtic /e/, etc

And when Sanskrit /a/ corresponds to Latin /o/, it also generally corresponds to Slavic /o/, Greek /o/, Celtic /o/, etc

Right. But in Latin, that's not what happens: we sometimes see Sanskrit /a/ corresponding to Latin /e/ (nex), and sometimes see Sanskrit /a/ corresponding to Latin /o/ (nox).

Whereas if you want to claim that PIE did have a distinction between *e and *o, then there's no explanation needed for that: the daughter languages inherited the distinction, then Sanskrit lost it

If you want to claim that PIE didn't have a distinction between *e and *o, then you have to explain how many different daughter languages apart from Sanskrit all made the same decision about when to turn *a into /e/ and when to turn *a into /o/

For example, look at Latin neks "murder" ~ Greek nekys ~ Sanskrit náś-, opposed to Latin noks "night" ~ Polish noc ~ Sanskrit nákti

Which means PIE must have had a distinction between *e and *o

It's more plausible to say that certain words having /e/ and certain words having /o/ was inherited from PIE