Grant Hutchison wrote:
(... on `Kiribati' pronounced /-bas/ ...)

> But the British missionary who first wrote down the local language
> had a typewriter with a broken "S" key. So he substituted the
> digraph "TI" for "S", allegedly because of its sibilant sound in
> words like "naTIon" and "poTIon".
> This seems a bit implausible to me, unless the terminal sound
> in "Kiribati" is nearer "sh" than "s".

Knowing nothing of the Gilbertese language, let alone the true story in
this case, I'll speculate from what I do know about other Polynesian
languages:

The natives heard `Gilbert' as /kirbat/, but consonants must come before
vowels, so they inserted /i/ to make it /kiribati/. (Parallels for this
in many languages.)

But in Gilbertese the /t/ has an affricate allophone [ts] before /i/, as
in late Latin; just as in Japanese /tu/ becomes [tsu]. Perhaps in some
dialects, /ti/ becomes [si]. (Perhaps pronunciation has drifted a bit:
recent studies in places like Philadelphia have found that considerable
drift can happen even in one lifetime.)

And perhaps a final /i/ after an unvoiced consonant is whispered (as in
Japanese).

--
Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0@... -- http://ogre.nu/
............ unemployment 2002, here i come! ............