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> I like this, except not h as a weak. It can only appear between vowels if > we're to adhere to English limits on its appearance. So we can't have hV. > In short, a not very productive weak. > > And, we can deal with the vowel problem without the apostrophe this way: > > tia /tja/ > tiia /ti a/ > tua /twa/ > tuua /tu a/ > > The second i and second u becoming semivowels. Well, I think that with "h" as a weak and "j" and "w" separated from the full vowels, the possible number of roots gets highly increased: - 1-syllable roots: paj - pej... paw - pew... - 2-syllable roots: paha - pahe - pahi - paho - pahu - pahy... paja - paje - paji - pajo - paju - pajy... pawa - pawe - pawi - pawo - pawu - pawy... paa -- pae -- pai -- pao -- pau -- pay... Being the ones in the last row pronounced with a glottal stop in between: [pa?a], [pa?e], [pa?i]... Note: final a's should be pronounced strong, in the same way as the vowel of "palm", never reduced to a schwa as in "sofa". If we allow for the weak h to be placed between the consonant and the vowel, we could have now an opposition which could be used to imitate the aspiration of Chinese: pa/pha, ta/tha... and so Chinese words could be borrowed more accurately according to their pronounciation rather that their pinyin spelling (de --> ty; ta --> tha...). And Hindi (and Quechua) borrowings would benefit from this too. In a similar way, the use of j and w in that position can be used to imitate the pronounciation of several non-Ceqli vowels, such as English "can", which could be borrowed as "kjan"--adapting /ae/ as /ja/, as they do in Japanese; French "u" and "eu" and German "ü" and "ö" would become "ju" and "jo", while Russian "bI" could be adapted as "wi" (MbI --> mwi). Best regards, Javier