Papers in New Guinea Linguistics No. 25
Alan Rumsey1986
A careful study of the permissible consonant clusters and vowel clusters facilitates the interpretation of ambiguous segments [w ] and [u ], [y] and [i ], as we ll as [n Y] and [sY]. Interpretation of these segments wi ll be discussed in Section 5. 4.1 Consonant clusters YAWA PHONOLOGY 15 '3 sg mas' , Imol '3 sg fern'. None of the ergative pronouns begins with a non-suspect vv. Granting , then , Iyl and Iwl word initially , we must expect them word medially. We suggest that all non-syllabic vocoids [i ] and [u ] be interpreted as consonants when they occur intervocalically , e.g. , [v i v] is Ivyvl and [V U v] is Ivwv/. This re sults in many more ev syllables , which fits the prevalence of this syllable type in Yawa and indeed its universal prevalence in languages .
