Talk:’Aṣækikk language/@comment-200.29.147.34-20111128154921/@comment-4622157-20111128210915

'S all right, I wasn't really clear about it in the article. You don't need to worry about those so-called "controlled vowels" unless you want to do something similar; they were the result of phonological shifts from PVQ.

u-controlled vowels came about because there were forms during the transition from PVQ to ’Aṣækikk wherein two vowels were in hiatus and one of them was /u/; these hiatused vowels simplified into the u-controlled forms (see the Vowel Transformations section above).

In the case of the ɒ-controlled vowels, there was a point at which the perfective marker */ɒ/—a postpositive particle in PVQ, or at least the Proto-’Aṣækikk dialect—became reänalyzed as a suffix. In the ordinary case it caused metathesis of the previous vowel in the word one slot to the right and then deleted (so, e.g., C₁V₁C₂V₂C₃ ɒ → C₁V₁C₂V₂C₃ɒ → C₁V₁C₂C₃V₂). However, there were forms in which the final phoneme was already a vowel. Metathesis could not occur here so instead the vowel became ɒ-controlled (again, see the Vowel Transformations section above).

I'll write up an article on PVQ today.