171

verb root amuya.fia 'to think, consider’ and the cognate
verb root p"aya.fia 'to cook' occurring in most dialects.
That this vowel length is morphophonemically like a con-
sonant plus vowel is shown by the fact that the length
persists even before consonant-requiring suffixes.

:- + - t'a- '‘momentaneous' + -si- reflexive
pa ck a eous e
+ -fia nominalizer >

p'a:.t'a.si.na ‘to cook for oneself at once'

On a verb root ending in plain vowel, the suffix -t'a-
would cause the final root vowel to drop, e. g. chura-
‘give’ plus -t'a- is chur.t'a-. When a stem ending in
long vowel is followed by a suffix requiring a preceding
consonant, the vowel length drops leaving a plain vowel,
as in warmi.t.wa 'I am a woman', in which the 1+3 Simple
tense suffix ~-ta, reduces verbalizing vowel length to
simple vowel. If length were not there in the underlying
representation, the form would be *warm.t.wa.

Thus, when -t'a- occurs on the verb p"a:-,
*p"a.t'a- would be expected, the vowel length reducing
to plain vowel. However, in p"a:.t'a.si.fia length is
clearly present, showing that verb root vowel length can
block the operation of a consonant-requiring rule or to
put it another way, that verb root vowel length is in

fact a sequence of glide plus vowel (3-5.3).